Bok Jinpa 2

PLEASE ONLY READ THESE NOTES OR LISTEN TO THESE RECORDINGS IF YOU HAVE ASKED PERMISSION FROM LAMA SARAHNI TO ATTEND THIS COURSE OR OTHERWISE LISTEN TO THIS COURSE

Bhavanakrama    Master Kamalashila    700s AD

Chegom      jokgom

Samadhi raja sutra        tingendzin gyi gyalpo do

    Arya sarva dharma samatha vipanscitta samadhi raja sutra

   Pakpa chu tamche ki rangshin nyampa nyi nampar drupey tingendzin gyi gyalpo do

Nyampanyi

Shildendra bodhi = master Sanskrit translator

Lotsawa banda dharma shila = master Tibetan translator

Chandraprabha

Madyamika prasangika

Nyur len gyi gyu

Welcome back. We are Bok Jinpa Course 2, class 1. Still studying Master Kamalashila's Bhavanakrama Stages of Meditation or Steps to Meditation. This is September 24th, 2025.

Let's gather our minds here. Bring your attention to your breath until you hear from me again.

Class Opening

Now bring to mind that being who for you is a manifestation of ultimate love, ultimate compassion, ultimate wisdom, and see them there with you just by way of your thinking of them.

They are gazing at you with their unconditional love for you, smiling at you with their holy great compassion. Their wisdom radiates from them, that beautiful golden glow encompassing you in its light. 

And then we hear them say,

Bring to mind someone you know who is hurting in some way.

Feel how much you would like to be able to help them. 

Recognize how the worldly ways we try to help fall short. Maybe they help. Maybe they don't. But either way, that person seems to go on to have some other kinds of distress, or that one again. It's unsatisfactory. 

Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could also help them in some deep and ultimate way. A way through which they will go on to stop their distresses forever. 

Deep down, we know this is possible. 

Deep down, we know this is what we're meant to become. 

Learning about karma and emptiness, we glimpse how it's possible.

I invite you to grow that wish into a longing, and that longing into an intention, and that intention even into a determination, if you feel ready.

Then turn your mind back to that precious holy being. 

We know that they know what we need to know, what we need to learn yet, what we need to do yet, to become one who can help this other in this deep and ultimate way. 

And so we ask them, please, please teach us that. Please teach me that. Please. 

Tthey are so happy that we've asked, of course they agree. 

Our gratitude arises. 

We want to offer them something exquisite. 

And so we think of the perfect world they are teaching us how to create. 

We imagine we can hold it in our hands and we offer it to them, following it with our promise to practice what they teach us, using our refuge prayer to make our promise. 

Here is the great earth

Filled with fragrant incense and covered with a blanket of flowers.

The great mountain, four lands, wearing the jewel of the sun and the moon. 

In my mind, I make them the paradise of a Buddha and offer it all to you. 

By this deed, may every living being experience the pure world.

Idam guru ratna mandalakam niryatayami.

I go for refuge until I am enlightened

To the Buddha, the Dharma, and the highest community.

Through the merit that I do and sharing this class and the rest

May we reach Buddhahood for the sake of every living being. 

I go for refuge until I am enlightened

To the Buddha, the Dharma, and the highest community.

Through the merit that I do and sharing this class and the rest

May we reach Buddhahood for the sake of every living being.

I go for refuge until I am enlightened

To the Buddha, the Dharma, and the highest community.

Through the merit that I do and sharing this class and the rest

May all beings reach their total awakening for the benefit of every single other.

Single-Pointed Focus Meditation

(7:44) Let's settle in and do a short single-pointed focus session. 

So go through your sequence of settling your body. 

Then let's remind ourselves of why we are coming to a class on how to meditate.

What's our deeper goal?

What is our deeper goal for our life that makes this class important to you?

Describe it to yourself.

Think about your meditative career so far.

How much effort you've put in. How much progress.

Think of the things that we let interfere, or things that interfere regardless of whether we agree to let them interfere.

Life happens. It's hard to make our meditation practice the priority.

Then think of that person who's hurting. You've chosen them because you care.

You see in them some kind of pain, some kind of distress that they can't apparently take care of or resolve. And maybe you even see them as someone who really doesn't understand where that pain and suffering actually comes from. And we see them as someone not really even interested in exploring that philosophical stuff.

Because of our study, we get some amount of glimpse into understanding their pain, their suffering is truly unnecessary, born of a big mistake.

Just knowing that doesn't fix it, but knowing that gives us the tools to be able to help in a deeper way. Maybe we see them not the least bit open or aware of that possibility of a different way of resolving their situation. It makes their pain that we see all that more unbearable to us.

Now make a promise to them.

I will deepen my meditation practice for your benefit on your behalf, in your own mind to them. You don't ever have to say it to them unless you want to.

They need us to understand deeply where their pain comes from.

Feel any resistances within you.

Let them flow away and make your personal commitment to reach stillness so that you can reach emptiness directly, so that you can take this other one by the hand and lead them out of pain someday.

Now, with that motivation, bring your focus of attention to the object called breath at the nostrils and park your mind on that object because that other person's pain depends upon it. The end of their pain depends upon your focus on your breath at the nostrils.

We'll stay three minutes. That's all you need to do.

Sink in, find the object, park your mind on it. 

***3min***

Nice. Now release the object but don't come out yet.

Assess what just happened.

Were you single-pointed on that breath sensation 100% of the time?

Were you on it for quite a long period of time and then bounced out and got right back on?

Was the mind on it for a little bit and then off it for a little bit and on it for a little bit? Or was the mind touching it and gone, remembering and touching it and then gone off on something else?

Make an honest assessment.

Did my body move other than breathing?

If so, I was off my object.

Did I notice the urge to jump off the object but stayed on?

Or did I notice when my object was fading, and I was able to correct?

Just recall your three minutes.

Now recall any moments that you were clearly on the object. Recall what it felt like and be happy. You got those.

Dedicate it all to becoming one who can help that other stop their pain forever and then become aware of yourself on your seat, in your room and open your eyes. Take a stretch. 

Essential Points from Course 1

(25:34) Last course was Master Kamalashila inspiring us and setting the foundation for us to reach stillness, that level called shamatha, the platform from which the direct perception of ultimate reality can be triggered.

We know how hugely powerful that is, the impact that it will have on our mind, and yet it's not something that we can achieve by sheer willpower, or we would have done it long ago, having heard of it.

He was making the case for compassion being the antidote to the blockers to our ability to just sit down and willpower ourselves into shamatha and then into the direct perception. But it's only because of the effect that compassion, as this tradition teaches it, the effect that that will have over time on the aspects of our misperceiving our world, that is the obstacle to gaining the realizations that we hear about and are attracted to, but they don't just pop up.

Reaching the direct perception of emptiness is so difficult because even when our motivation is so strong, our habit of misperceiving ourselves and our world and even our meditation efforts are so stained by our misperception that even as we make effort in our career, meditation career for an hour or two hours, or let's even say four hours a day, there's still 20 hours or 19 or 23 where we are still steeped in the misperception and so perpetuating it. When we think of it that way, it seems impossible to make the shift necessary to ever get ahead of the stained with ignorance seeds sufficiently to get on that upwards cycle to shamatha and vipasyana.

The mistake that we're talking about of course is that belief that things, self, any existence has their own natures, their own identities and qualities in them. Highest School says the belief that things are not my projections and nothing but. But that only makes sense once we know the punchline.

I know everybody here in this class does know the punchline. Yet, every time we apply the punchline, it's important for us to recognize whether we're just saying the party line, or whether we're reinforcing some understanding that we've taken our mind through over and over and over again. That's our words that we use for its conclusion.

In our meditation career, Master Kamalashila is setting us up to meditate regularly in such a way that we go through that analysis of where things come from, where they don't come from, what their apparent nature is, what that can't be, what their true nature is, and how that's an absence. So that we can go through it with greater and greater clarity, come to a conclusion that's beyond words, and park our minds single pointedly on that aha. Which if it stays long enough can trigger the shift to vipasyana. Likely, it doesn't stay long enough, it stays and then something shifts and we start misunderstanding again. We go back, reanalyze, get the conclusion back. So, we know the party line conclusion. Any time I experience anything, the subject, the object, and the interaction between are all ripening results of past behaviors forced on me, by the moral content of that past behavior.

The thing is, in daily life, we push that little silver handle on the toilet and the toilet flushes, and it reinforces our belief that toilets flush when you push that handle thing.

We push the button on the teapot, and we get hot water. It reinforces the fact that having electricity pushing the button makes hot water.

We're going two baby steps forward in our meditation and then giant leaps backwards in daily life because we're confirming the misperception every time something works. Which is crazy. The only time we might question would be when what we expect something to cause something else it doesn't work.

But what happens when suddenly your teapot switch doesn't turn on the teapot?

Do we go, oh my gosh, it doesn't come from what I thought it did?

No, we go, Argh, the darn thing's broken. I'll buy a new one.

So even when things don't work the way we expect, they don't reveal, we don't react with wisdom, we blame something. So, we're still reinforcing our misunderstanding even when things don't work.

When they work, it's kind of a bad thing because it's perpetuating our misunderstanding. When they don't work, it's an opportunity to get a glimpse.

So how do we ever get past that? We're locked in this loop of the mistake.

Master Kamalashila says compassion is the key. We could do this long debate. I'm not prepared to do a debate, but it's like, well, if their pain and suffering is triggering my compassion and that's mistaken, then how is compassion even going to help me? Because I'm mistaking my compassion as well.

Janet's smiling because she's in Nagarjuna investigator class. She's all over this. Don't go too fast for me, Miss Janet.

Master Kamalashila says compassion.

We need compassion, we need to open our hearts in order to override this difficult thing which is the perpetuating the misunderstanding when everything goes as they seem to, when cause and effect seem to work. It's compassion that helps us override that.

Like who applies compassion when they're making hot water for their tea?

It is not compassion in that way. It's compassion for somebody else's suffering. Somebody is distressed. In a somebody who's not interested in the existential, where it all comes from. They're just so steeped in their suffering and the mistake that they're frozen in it.

Our tendency with pain, our own and others is like, Okay, I notice it. But we avoid it. We avoid letting it sink in. We let it bounce off. To open our hearts up to somebody's suffering, for whom we really can't do anything, it's painful. It's heart opening and it's powerful. It puts a powerful crack in the belief.

It's hard to understand. It's one of those things that you take into meditation and cogitate it and find that connection. Why is it that caring about somebody else's suffering is the tool for overcoming this spiral of the stain, the mistake? ‘Believing the lie’, they say.

He says, first reason, compassion gets our focus of attention off of ourself and onto somebody else. So that alone is going to do something to how the seeds are being planted.

(37:35) Second reason he said, was because we need a really radical method to jumpstart our mind, jumpstart our thinking in a different way to make ourselves be keenly aware of someone else's pain and determined to become something for them that will help them. Is so out of character than usual selfish me that even though there is no, we're not working on wisdom, where did it really come from yet? It's just so out of character that our seeds are not reinforcing the old ones that were ignorant and selfishness grown big. Now we've got ignorance with a bit less selfishness. It's radical and it's radical enough to put a crack in our misbelief.

He says it's a method of Bok Jinpa, lighting a fire underneath our practice. Because it's so radical.

Then another reason has to do with our subtle body. When we're using compassion to open our heart, we're not thinking about our channels and chakras and drops and wins. But it's affecting, it has a mirror effect on our subtle body to help the winds of self-existent me, self-existent them, to get less strong. When those two are less strong, the ability to hold some idea of me, other, not self-existent, gets stronger.

Lama Christie said, you get the winds out of your two side channels, they'll be in the central channel. It's not as easy as that. But it's the window of opportunity to grow our compassion.

Then in last course, he was talking about meditation, reaching this balance between method and wisdom. He was saying, compassion is our method side. And we use our method side to get wisdom. And we use our wisdom to get grow our method side, we learned that from First Panchen Lama as well. Then we use both of them, it seems like we're toggling back and forth, compassion on our cushion, and then use it to increase our focus, so our wisdom can grow. Then compassion off the cushion, so that we choose our behaviors such that we make more goodness that can ripen as positive effects on our cushion.

Not today, more compassion tomorrow, great meditation. But over time, the seeds will accumulate.

He gave us various ways of thinking of method and wisdom, and how those two always come as a pair, this, that, this, that, this, that, this, that. Then in the end, towards the last couple of classes, he was saying, you know, another way to consider method and wisdom is that your methods’ practice in meditation is your analytical meditation. And your wisdom effort in meditation is your fixation meditation on the aha that you get from your analysis.

So, we're using method and wisdom, even in any given meditation practice, at least when we are doing review meditation and fixation meditation, in this intendedly joined sequence. Which is what Lama Christie is teaching us through the course of the Kamalashila courses.

Then we learn other ways of meditating as we go through Bok Jinpa, but always with the idea that whatever we learn, we still use this method: Review, analysis, and fixation.

He had said, the review is your preliminaries. But you can also review the prayer you're studying, the list you're memorizing, that can be your review meditation, then analysis and fixation.

The King of Concentration Sutra

(44:05) We're studying Kamalashila's Bhavanakrama by Master Kamalashila in the 700s AD. Remember, he was an Indian master who went to Tibet to do the debate about meditation, and then he stayed for a while. If I'm understanding correctly, he gave these teachings–whether he wrote them first or after, I don't know–while he was there in Tibet teaching the method that he had just defended in debate, that now all of Tibet has said, okay, that's the kind of meditation we'll use, you better teach us. And so he did so.

There's the Chegom = method side, analytical meditation

Jokgom = wisdom side, meaning the fixation meditation 

Don't misunderstand, Chegom does not mean method, Jokgom does not mean wisdom.

Last course, we also used the Hatha Yoga Pradipika text to draw this parallel between the Tibetan teachings and the yoga tradition teachings on meditation.

In this course, Lama Christie has chosen to use the Samadhi Raja Sutra as this other text that we'll learn from, because Master Kamalashila refers to it often. Je Tsongkapa in his Lam Rim Drang, which we also will be referring to, also refers to it quite a bit.

We don't get the actual sutra, the Samadhi Raja Sutra, but we get lots of quotes from it.

Samadhi Raja Sutra is the Sanskrit. In Tibetan, it's tingendzin gyi gyalpo do. It means the King of Concentration.

Samadhi has various ways it's translated. Here it's being used as the concentration, meaning the single-pointed focus kind of concentration, not just concentrating when you tie your shoes.

Raja = king, so single-pointed concentration, tingendzin gyi, of the king, gyalpo. 

Sutra = teaching of the Buddha.

This teaching of the Buddha came to us when one of Shakyamuni Buddha's disciples, whose name was Chandra Prabha, made this formal request. Please, Master Buddha Shakyamuni, teach us how to meditate on emptiness. The answer became this Samadhi Raja Sutra. It has a long title, The King of Concentration Sutra. I'm not sure about the spelling of this word. It looks funny to me, but I don't have any way to check it.

The long title of the Samadhi Raja Sutra in Sanskrit is Arya Sarva Dharma Samatha Vipanscitta Samadhi Raja Sutra. They shorten it to King of Concentration.

That translated into Tibetan = Pakpa chu tamche ki rangshin nyampa nyi nampar drupey tingendzin gyi gyalpo do

Arya = a realized being

But when they use the word as a title of a sutra or a text, it means Exalted. Like the Heart Sutra is called the Exalted Sutra on the Heart of the Perfection of Wisdom or something like that. 

So here it's The Exalted Dharma of Concentration.

In the Shamatha, that Shama = the same, Tha = the sameness.

Shamatha = stillness or balanced meditation.

It comes out of this connotation that its quality is equalness. In Tibetan the word that was used to translate it is nyampanyi which means equalness.

So this movement of the mind, it's not movement of the mind, it's stillness that we're talking about, the single pointed concentration on how all things are equal, is what this Samadhi Raja Sutra is all about. 

When we first hear those words, ‘All things are equal’, it has some connotation, oh, everybody's the same, everything's the same. It's like, it's not true, everything's not the same. Nobody's the same, nothing's the same. But there is a quality of everything that is 100% identical. 

What is that quality?

Their emptiness, the fact that there is no existing thing that's not a projected result of the experiencer's past behavior. There's nothing that's not–we need those two negatives to get it right.

This sutra is all about the way in which all existing things, everything we could ever experience, ourselves included, are equal to every other thing. If we're thinking of it as the three spheres–subject, object, interaction between–the emptiness of each one of those parts, the emptiness of the two with the third, with this two and that third… All the combinations that we could consider, all of them equally lacking their identities in them.

We understand, and we're trying to experience it directly so that we can really understand.

Nyampanyi is this word for equalness. It's a way to tell us that we're talking about the empty nature of things, the not self-existent nature of things. It's not the word for emptiness, Tompanyi, but we're getting to it by way of this other term.

(53:29) When this, in the ninth century, this sutra was translated from Sanskrit into Tibetan, and in that time frame, they would take someone who's fluent in Sanskrit and someone who's fluent in Tibetan, and they would get together as a team, and they would figure out, what does the Sanskrit term mean? How am I going to say it in Tibetan to get the real meaning of it? They would work together to get these translations created for posterity. They understood the importance of what they were doing.

The Sanskrit translator's name is Shildendra Bodhi. We come across a text that at the bottom of them, it says, this text was translated by the Master Translator Shildendra Bodhi, we'll see it again and again. The Tibetan one is Lotsawa Banda Dharma Shila. That's all the title. Dharma Shila was his name. I don't know anything more about those guys, except that I see their names as the translators. They must have known a thing or two, because they did more than one translation.

Lama Christie made a plug for becoming a translator. This is back in 2006, maybe 2005. She was already translating with Geshe-la's help, and he was trying to train others.

She said, when your meditation gets deeper and deeper, you'll surprise yourself with your sudden understanding of words and phrases, and maybe even your sudden inclination to translate stuff. She said, even if you really don't have any interest in being a translator, keep your mind open, that as your practice deepens, all of a sudden some seed triggers and, Oh my gosh… You're interested or even seeming like you're able to do it. 

I know my own habit is, I can barely speak English well, I can't possibly learn to do Tibetan, and every time I think that or say that, right, it puts a big block for it to happen. So shut up in there and be open. Who knows? And we see what's happened in our Sangha. We've got people really learning fast. Yes, Janet.

[student: Subtle dullness, or dullness. When I see something, and it's spelled wrong, and I get the dictionary, I just wake up.]

See? There you go. Your seeds are going to crack open, Janet, any one of these days. I appreciate your help. Check out this one for me. Vipanscitta. What's wrong with that spelling?

[student: I know, it's Sanskrit. I'll try. I'll see them tomorrow. So, I can ask them.]

Ask them.

[student: I don't have a lot of support with Sanskrit. I have a lot with Tibetan.] 

Okay. All right. Thank you.

Lama Christie pointed out that this particular sutra is used in teachings by Master Kamalashila, Master Shantideva, Master Chandrakirti, Je Tsongkapa. She says, if you just look at who quotes from this sutra often, that tells you that this sutra is Madyamika Prasangika. It is highest worldview, because the people who are using it to make their points are highest worldview. Because sometimes we wonder, they're quoting from a text that's lower worldview. It's like, wait a minute, how am I supposed to take this? Am I considering it from lower worldview to prove how I believe it so to show myself that I'm still mistaken, or… What's really going on here?

But this one Lama Christie is pointing out, Master Kamalashila is using a text that's highest worldview. It's written in poetry. Again, I can't just pick it up and read it. Like, oh, yeah, I get it. Some days, maybe. But most of the time, it's like I can't get the word right. So many levels of meaning in there.

All right, let's take our break.

We've got our background. I'm actually going to let the recording go. Sorry to have a big blank spot. Okay, get refreshed, please.

Working Things

(60:01) Master Kamalashila is helping us use our meditation skills to get to the deceptive nature and true nature of all existing things, meaning everything around us, everything we can experience.

He calls those existing things working things. In order to better understand where he's trying to take us, Lama Christie said, let's recall what's meant by a working thing, like all the different things that are synonyms with the term working thing.

First, the definition of a working thing is that which performs a function. We learned that. 

A synonym for that which performs a function is a caused thing and a result. A caused thing and a result is a synonym for that which performs a function.

A working thing always has both a cause and a result aspect. Something had to cause it to work and the result that comes out of its work is result. It takes both to be a working thing.

A working thing is also a produced thing. But then they define a produced thing as something which comes about through its own causes and conditions. In Madyamika Prasangika, to say ‘its own’ seems like a bad word. You're not allowed to say ‘its own’, you're not allowed to say ‘really’. But we do all the time.

So it seems a little funny that here's this great wisdom master, reminding us that a produced thing is that which comes about through its own causes and conditions.

These definitions, explanations come to us from the Lower Schools. Not meaning they're all incorrect, because they're Lower Schools. But meaning there are some implications that the words might mean that aren't exactly accurate until we understand the nuances.

Then another synonym for working thing is changing thing.

We know that a changing thing is that which lasts only an instant.

Now we have a working thing as being something which is both, a cause and a result, and which lasts only an instant, which brings about something else, and which comes about through its own causes and conditions. Like all of that rolled into ‘working thing’, different aspects of what's meant by working things.

Master Kamalashila is using this as a description for just about everything that we can experience. There are only a few exceptions to working things in our experience, which is empty space, the emptiness of all those things and those sensations that we reach, as we progress through our path. Everything else about existence falls in this category of working thing.

But as we relate to our all-existing things, our day to day existence, we don't relate to those things as being cause-results happening in an instant, this instant, this instant, next instant, next instant. It's hard to even wrap our minds about imagining life like that.

How could there be any consistency?

How could anything actually work, if it's going in and out of existence that fast?

It's like, well, nothing can work in any other way than that, say the masters. As if it's so obvious. But that's where we're trying to go, is to understand the ramification of what he's pointing out, so that we can analyze it and fixate on our conclusion in our meditation, so that we get to, we reach a point eventually, where we actually can relate with our experiences of being this moment by moment cause-result happening, without falling back into ‘No, in it from it’, that we do so automatically. Like the car, as long as it's got gas or electricity in its battery, and you have the key or the fob, you can do what you do with the key or the fob and the engine will start and the car will get you to the grocery store. Even when we're understanding, yeah, this is all karmic seeds, we're still holding the car as a car that lasts. It's still my same car by the time I get home from the grocery store. Even though intellectually we know, no, no, it's two hours older than it was before. It's not my same car. We relate to it as the same car. We don't relate to it as this flopping in and out of existence moment by moment.

When we do, it's like, wow, there's the car. There it is again, there it is again. I do this, wow, it starts. Wow, it got me to the grocery store. Wow. 

We can actually be, they say, we can actually be in that space of this miraculous moment by moment manifesting happening. And then, the experience will be very different.

We haven't gotten to it in this group, but we do this class where we're checking out how is it that we actually walk across a room to go through a door. We’ve figured out that we really can't do that. That we're really not moving or going anywhere. It's just these mental images changing of this thing that looks little, and now it's getting bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. And now it's behind me. And there's something else in front of me that's little, getting bigger and bigger. It's like, you never go anywhere or do anything. It's our mental images that are happening, that are shape-shifting the scene into me walking across the door.

If we are living in that, you're aware of the infinite possibility between those moments. Theoretically, you could reach into one of those infinite possibilities and tweak it into what would be the best for everybody at this moment, like pulling strings or something. 

We can't get there until we touch that ultimate reality directly and then work with what we now know for a long time, of course.

Master Kamalashila will go on to describe to us that when we first are learning about how things do and don't exist, the logic courses help us understand that when we experience something, there's the first moment of our experience of it, which serves as the material cause, the Nyur len gyi gyu. Here's that word, so fun to say, as the material cause of the second moment of the awareness of the pen.

No pen, first moment of the pen, second moment of the pen, third moment of the pen, fourth moment of the pen.

The first pen is the material cause.

Second pen is the material cause of the third moment.

Fourth moment, fifth moment, fifth moment. That's how we experience things, they say.

Maybe when we first realized that, it was like, wow, you know, that blows my mind. But  Higher School says that's helpful. But Buddha also taught that first moment that becomes the material cause for the second moment. That first moment never starts. We're supposed to go, Oh, I get it. But instead we go, What? If it's the first moment, it has to have a start. Because that's what it first means. Then if it has a first moment, it has to have a second moment. And that's how it goes on and allows me to perceive this pen now and now and now and now and now until the last moment and then no more pen to experience.

It has to start and stay and then stop. And starting, staying and stopping is what characterizes a working thing. A thing that affects something else. A thing that produces something else. That thing has to impact the other thing and has to start making a change. It has to keep making the change until the change is made. And then it has to stop making the change. Because if it changes it more, it'll be something else.

So, to be a working thing, you have to start, stay and stop.

But then what happens? When you go investigating, when does the start actually start?

Nagarjuna investigators, we played with that one for a long time.

Is there a start to the start? Is there an end to the start?

How do you establish when the start has happened? After it's done? But then it's gone.

Where do they touch?

How do you establish it?

That's the point, is to go, I can't find a start.

Well, then how does anything happen?

How come a seed can ripen a working thing when even the seed can't start to ripen a working thing?

Kamalashila, he's going to say, Right, you're getting it. There's only the moment. By the time we're aware of the moment, it's past and we're in the next moment. And by the time we're aware of that, it's past too. Yet coming to recognize that, we don't disappear. We recognize that the way we thought things were making things happen is impossible. Can't be working that way. Can't ever have worked that way. 

Thank goodness we have somebody who's explained it to us so easily to understand that we can hear it in more complicated ways and still get a glimpse of where it's trying to take us. We want to use the more complicated ways to deepen our understanding of the more simple explanation. The simple explanation is absolutely correct and the nuances help us negotiate it in the face of places where it's harder to negotiate, like the yelling boss, like the headache pain, like the mental affliction I just can't figure out and so nothing I do shuts it off. We can apply the pen idea to understand the emptiness, but it's like, I need something more. Kamalashila is going to help us with that.

You can’t Find the Moment Anything Starts

(80:28) Master Kamalashila uses the King of Concentration Sutra to make his case for Buddha being the one who taught, ‘You can't find the moment anything starts.’

All these produced things, they don't ever start doing it, which is why they can do it. Because if there was a thing that could start, it couldn't ever do what we need it to do. Our mind goes, no, that's ridiculous. Because they can start, they can function. And wisdom says, no, they can't work if they can start.

He gives us various quotes from various sutras and commentaries about the no starting. It doesn't really explain why things don't start, but rather is using scriptural authority to say, well, Buddha said so. And that's one of the ways we prove something, is to say, Buddha said so. Assuming that our audience is people who have already proven that to say, ‘Buddha said so’ is a valid argument. Which it only is if for the listener they've already decided that Buddha is an omniscient being and cannot hear themselves say anything incorrect. Although they can hear themselves say something with skillful means that will sound incorrect, and they know it and they do it on purpose. But not starting is not one of those.

It seems all semantics, but our suffering is the main thing we're wanting to figure out. How does it exist? What is its cause, so that we can stop the cause, so we can stop the suffering? That's the party line.

But if things don't start, stay or stop, what the heck is this thing suffering that we're in the midst of? That's staying and has stayed since beginningless time.

It's something that we believe in so much that we experience it moment by moment, but in fact has no more inherent identity as suffering than anything else.

In our reading, we have this section from Samadhi Raja Sutra and I'm going to read it to you quickly. It's a couple of verses that are here to help us grasp the emptiness of that existing thing, all existing things, in particular our suffering, such that we can get totally free of it on behalf of that other person who has no interest in any of this stuff. So we're doing it for them.

Thus it is stated in the Sutra King of Concentration, it is at this point that the Victor, the one free of sin who holds the 10 powers, explained this highest meditation.

The movement of the world is like a dream.

There is no one at all who is born here and none who die.

You cannot even find a living being or a person or any creature.

All these things are as a bubble or a hollow reed.

They are like magic or lightning in the sky.

They are the same as the moon reflected in water or a mirage.

It is not the case that there are those who die in this world and who then move on to another and live again.

Nonetheless, once a deed is done, it never fades away.

Black and white results still ripen within the cycle of pain.

The world is neither unchanging nor is it stopped.

There is no collecting of karma, nor does it stay.

Nonetheless, once a deed is done, its touch is unavoidable.

And a deed done by another, we can never feel.

Our tendency is, as we are exploring things for their emptiness, we automatically fall off that cliff of, Oh, then it doesn't really exist. And then it's like, that's correct. It doesn't really exist, if by ‘really’ we mean the pen has its identity in it. That pen doesn't really exist. It doesn't just not really exist, it's totally impossible.

But does that make my pen impossible?

Does it make the pen you are experiencing now impossible?

No. Its emptiness makes it possible.

What makes it the pen, my pen, your pen, this pen, that pen, is your own ripening results and nothing but.

Kamalashila is helping us weave our way from our old wrong view into the Middle Way correct view, helping us recognize when we're grasping onto, No, no, there has to be some nature in this thing as pen. Because I don't care what you say, I can't ripen it as horse, or could I? And falling off the cliff of, well, if it has no nature of its own, it's just a figment of my imagination, and those things can't do anything. I should be able to put my hand right through it, and I wouldn't be able to write with it. Which is not correct.

It not having any nature of its own at all is what makes it available for it to be what I experience, for it to be what you experience. We know that. We want to drill it home until that's so clear that when we put our key in the car the next time, we have no expectation of what's going to happen next, that out of emptiness could appear anything in the next moment, and the next moment, and the next moment, and the next moment. It's disconcerting.  

Lama Christie gave us another meditation. It's not long.

For the week between classes, we then will have the assignment to revisit the power of compassion as the tool for breaking the cycle of the mistake, and then this section on investigating how we interact with certain things. You'll see when we get there.

Meditation on Cause and Result

(90:48) Do what you do to settle your body, please.

Recall your motivation to help that other.

Recall your holy being there with you. Ask them to help.

Now bring to mind some kind of interaction with a pleasant object, something you really like, something you really enjoy. Check out a couple of them and then decide on the one to use.

Now imagine that you are actually interacting with this pleasant object and recognize the feeling that this interaction brings to you.

Get it as strongly as you can.

Now first, let's use this feeling as our object of investigation.

Where exactly is that feeling located?

Is it in your body?

Is it in your mind?

How long does that feeling last?

We base so much of our action decisions on our feelings. It's useful to learn to identify them. Is this feeling from this object truly existing?

What would it mean if it were?

That pleasure in it, from it, that object.

The cause of that pleasure in it, from it.

Is that feeling staying the same?

Can't we experience that object and have a different feeling from it? 

Does the feeling ever change to some other feeling, even as we are still experiencing the object?

What does that say about the feeling and where it's coming from?

Tell yourself, ‘I know this feeling is merely a projection’ and notice your reaction to that statement.

Now, let's shift our object of focus to the cause of that feeling that we enjoy. We say it's the object causing the feeling.

If that's true, what would your experience of that object have to be like every time you experienced it?

It would have to always be the same.

So, if chocolate cake gives me pleasure that makes me happy, even if somebody I loved had just died, if I have a piece of chocolate cake, I will have pleasure and be happy.

Is that likely the case?

Have you ever experienced this object you're thinking of and not experienced the pleasure?

Has it ever triggered some other kind of feeling in you?

So, it's not the object itself that is the cause of that pleasure. It can't be.

Oh, it's the interaction between my sense powers and the object.

The moment we make contact, that contact makes the pleasure, not the object. The interaction between makes the pleasure.

But wait, can you actually find the place, the moment where you contact the object for that pleasure to arise from that contact?

Can we find the first moment of that contact, which we are saying is what triggers the pleasure?

If we can't find the cause of the pleasure, how is it that we are experiencing pleasure?

Yet, there must be a cause because that pleasure is a result, an experience.

Something else is going on here.

Bring your mind back to that person who's suffering.

Hold the same conclusion. Something else is going on here. And make your determination: I'm going to crack the code, crack the secret. 

Dedicate this starting effort to becoming one who can help that other.

And then become aware of yourself on your seat, in your room. And when you're ready, open your eyes, take a stretch.

(106:34) Lama Christie suggested that between classes, we use this meditation after the compassion one and investigate different kinds of objects that bring you pleasure. Not painful ones, just pleasure.

Things that we are attracted to, things that we are attached to, and investigate the pleasure the object seems to create–from the pleasure side, from the object side, from the contact between the two of you side, to find, Where they touch? Where it starts. What is it really?

Do your explanation, your exploration, reach some conclusion, and park on the conclusion. We didn't do that this evening. 

When your mind loses the conclusion, you go back, however far back you need to go through the analysis until you get the aha again. Ah, it can't be. It can't be coming from the object, but it can't not be coming from the object. So, it's not coming from the object the way I thought it was. But it does appear to be coming from the object. Where is it all coming from? It is my current experience. It is a ripening result.

You're welcome to apply the punchline without the logic.

You're also welcome to try to get the logic where you get to the punchline.

In your reading, Lama Christie also gave us a chapter out of Geshe Michael's book, Kadrin, which back at this time he was still writing. It's the chapter about things starting, not starting. You'll see it's the chapter about the little girl's brother who got stomach cancer and died. And investigating, where was the moment that the food he ate touched the stomach lining that made the cancer grow when she ate the same thing and it didn't cause cancer in her. How did that really work to cause such a painful, horrible experience? For her to come to the conclusion that it can't have happened the way she was thinking it happened. But it's not that it didn't happen at all.

That verse about ‘All those existing things are like a moon reflecting in the water’. It looks like there's a moon in the water, but come on, the moon's in the sky. There’s just circumstances and it makes it look like there are moons in the water.

There's water out there in the desert. But it hasn't rained. That can't be water. Oh, it's a mirage. The mirage is there. The water is not.

The object giving pleasure is happening, but the object giving you the pleasure is not. That's how we get to truth.

Make these meditations useful. Real life examples of things that cause pleasure and so we grasp to those things. We cling to those things. If I don't have that thing, I'm not going to be able to get that pleasure, we think wrongly.

All right. That's Bok Jinpa Course Two, Class One.

Vocabulary

Kyewa = a changing thing in the way of changing moment by moment (as opposed to something that just comes into existence or is not in existence, complete in an instant)

Ishvara = creator being

Tirtika = the ones who believe in an Ishvara

Welcome back. We are Bok Jinpa Course 2, Class 2. This is October 1st, 2025.

Meditation on Causes and Results

(8:25) Let's do our first short sit.

Do what you do to settle your body.

Sit bones pushed down. Lower belly pulls in a bit.

Torso comes upright.

Sternum rises, so shoulder blades drop.

Crown rises.

Then scan down the outside, inviting the forehead to relax, face to relax, jaw to relax, tongue to relax, neck and shoulders, arms and hands, upper torso, lower torso, thighs, legs, feet, toes.

Come up with your mind more inside, rising up to bring your focus of attention to your breath.

Zero in on that location at your nostrils, the tip of the nostrils.

Find the sensation, out-breath, in-breath.

Make it your focus, your object of focus. Use it to adjust your clarity.

And then turn on the fascination, the NGAR-ME.

Maybe call it curiosity, like what's she going to say next? Eager alert.

Are you on the object? Is your mind clear? Is it eager? Make the adjustments.

Now shift your object of focus to what I say.

Focus, clarity, eagerness.

We are learning about the causes of things.

So think of your last two or three hours of what you had to do to get to this class.

Recognize how there is a part of our mind that believes all of those different things we did are the causes of having gotten to class.

Each one sequentially, and so here we are.

However, we are learning that all of those causes aren't the real causes.

The real cause for getting to a class on meditation, on wisdom, is some kind of virtue that we have done before. Individual virtue and virtue we have done as a group.

The real cause of being here together for this class is those virtues that we created sometime long ago.

Now think about how real that feels to say, ‘Long ago I did some kindness and that kindness got me here to class’ versus ‘Two hours ago I got in my car, I drove home, I started my computer up, I found the Zoom link, I turned it on’.

Which cause feels more real?

Could you be in class right now if you had not started your computer?

And why did the computer work?

If the computer is not what causes us to be able to be in class, why do we even need it?

If past virtue is the real cause of this class, why do we need something else?

Isn't the computer working part of the result of the virtue?

What really caused you to get to this class?

What really will be the cause of you getting to class next week?

Doesn't it seem like the real cause is too vague, too nonspecific to bring about something as detailed as me getting to class, turning on my computer, finding the Zoom link.

Those I can confirm, but they're not actually causes.

So now come to some conclusion. Even if your conclusion is, ‘I don't get what she's talking about.’ 

Clarify the question or clarify the answer.

Then establish your intention to hear something in class that will help you sort it out in the future and dedicate what we've done just so far to becoming one who can help that other in that deep and ultimate way.

And then again, become aware of yourself in your room in this class.

When you're ready, open your eyes, take a stretch.

So maybe make a note of that conclusion so that at the end of class you can say, Oh, I did get a clue or I didn't. We'll see.

Outline of Master Kamalashila’s Guiding Us

(29:37) Master Kamalashila is teaching us about meditation as much as he's teaching us how to do it. We know the story. There was that debate about whether the best meditation was to learn to blank your mind and that when you reach that blank state, you've reached the empty nature of your mind. And his premise was, first of all, you can't blank your mind. And second of all, even if you could, that would not reveal the mind's true nature, its empty nature. Third of all, it would plant seeds for having a blank mind, which is not what a human mind is. So it would plant seeds for future lifetimes as not human.

Then he goes on to describe these different attitudes that help us even want to grow our meditation. He taught us about the compassion, not just compassion, but great compassion. And then he's into this section of explaining slowly why it is that a meditation on just blanking our mind out is not helpful. By implication, he's showing us what meditations are necessary for us to be able to get to the depth of meditation from which we can experience directly the appearing nature of our mind, ourself, our world, and their true nature, their empty nature, and how those two things are two sides of a coin, two sides of existence. How morality, behavior, is woven into those two sides, like the ramification of understanding the two sides of the coin is automatically compassion and love. It's like, it doesn't feel so automatic yet, to me. Even though I've been studying and sharing, when I feel my mind go through that explanation, it doesn't go, oh, yeah, love, compassion. But it does go, oh, then my behavior, my behavior choices.

We're in this section where he's talking about causes and results.

What are the causes that we think make things happen? I mean, the idea would be, what do we think are the causes for a deep meditation? Versus learning what the actual cause effect event is happening. So that we could set about to create the causes that will actually function for the result we want to get.

He's pointing out this difference between the worldly things that we hold as causes for things and the actual causes for things. To do that, he uses both those methods, the scriptural authority and then logical analysis.

Your reading from class one was these different scriptural authority references about emptiness. Therefore, understanding the true nature of causes and effects because of understanding the emptiness of all those factors more clearly, more accurately.

In this class, we start this section where he's offering the logical investigation into those worldly causes of things so that we ourselves have the ability to sort out whether or not we will continue to believe in worldly causes for things or not.

He's not saying, Just believe that worldly causes don't work.

He's saying, Here's the reasoning behind it. Sort it out. Sort it out yourself.

We'll see how he goes through that systematically to help us do it as well in our contemplations and in our meditations.

Lama Christie, very skillfully just helped us tiptoe into this. It sets the scene for the rest of her Bok Jinpa Courses, where we went from tiptoe to march right in to stampede to like really going deeper and deeper as we went through our different courses of Bok Jinpa. Helping us really understand emptiness better and better all under the guise of doing what we need to do to become effective meditators. These courses for me really helped my emptiness understanding. Even more than my meditation, to be honest with you. So, I hope to be able to do that for you.

When she offered us this first meditation for this class, she was talking to a group of people who were sitting in the temple at Diamond Mountain after having driven a long way, some people, to get there. She was using the example of the cause of getting to class, getting in your car and driving to Diamond Mountain. That's not pertinent to us.

However, I'm going to go back to that example of ‘getting in our car to go somewhere.’

I'm going to use ‘getting in our car to go to the grocery’ because it's a little more direct for me than opening your computer, finding the Zoom link. It's just like get in the car, turn the key, drive to the grocery store.

Let's use that as our analogy or our scene for us exploring this idea of what causes us to get to the grocery store.

Worldly, we would say my car, my functioning car, and me turning the key and the car starting and then me driving safely to the grocery store.

Me, my car and grocery store.

Getting to the grocery store is the result.

Getting in the car is the first piece of the cause.

Although, you know, stop and think about it. And it's like, no, I had to think I need to go to the grocery store to set the whole thing in motion. So, when we go looking even for the worldly cause, we can't actually find the first cause that set all the other causes in motion.  That's not his argument, though.

Did getting in the car, starting the car and driving to the grocery store get me to the grocery store?

Not a trick question. Yes.

Could I have gotten to the grocery store without my car?

Possible.

What's the explanation? Call your neighbor. Call a lift. Doesn't have to be my car.

But come on. It has to be some mode of transportation. I can't think myself to the grocery store yet. Worldly causes. We have worldly circumstances that have to happen for me to get from here to the grocery store.

Master Kamalashila is not saying, You don't need worldly causes. He's just saying those worldly things are not actually the causes.

Well, then what are they?

Answer that question yourself just for an instant.

Maybe we'd say, okay, so they're contributing factors. My key, the car, all the parts of the car, gas in the car. All of those are contributing factors in the ripening result ‘me getting to the grocery store’.

I'm interacting, however, from a mind that still believes driving my car to the grocery store is the cause for getting to the grocery store. Even intellectually, I understand there are so many factors involved in this, even worldly causes, that I really can't pinpoint one or two or three things that caused me to get to the grocery store.

Technically, every time I get in my car, drive anywhere, drive to the grocery store and get there, I am reinforcing my misunderstanding that driving my car is the cause for getting to the grocery store. I'm reinforcing the lie. They call it the lie. Reinforcing the misunderstanding.

(41:47) Lama Christie suggested that we can have enough background in karma and emptiness that we might then decide, well, I'm just going to stop participating in that way. Like, I understand that every time I let myself use a worldly cause to get a worldly result and it works, that I'm just hurting myself, I'm going to quit doing it. As if we could. I'm going to avoid contributing to the lie.

Well, then what's your alternative? It means we're not going to do anything. Does that actually help stop the misperception to just try to not interact at all?

No, because it's not helping us stop the misunderstanding, stop the misperception.

So we're kind of stuck. Like, if we do usual worldly causes to get usual worldly results, we're just perpetuating the mistake that's causing our suffering, being in a suffering world. And if we say, well, then none of that stuff works, I'm going to quit doing any of it, we're still perpetuating it because we're not doing anything for anybody to grow the goodness that would allow us to understand that it doesn't work in the way that we think.

We can't come to the conclusion, I'm just going to not do it. I mean, technically, we can do that. Anyway, because you can't just not. We're interacting, subject-object interaction, even as we say we're not doing anything.

We know the punchline. The car gets me to the grocery store because my past helping people get somewhere is ripening so that I get to the grocery store, whether I get there through my car or a neighbor's car, or I fly there, or I just wake up there. However, I get to where I want to go. When it happens, it's a ripening of some past kindness.

Then why does it need all that other stuff if I have the goodness to get to the grocery store? 

Why can't I just sit in my living room, ripen that goodness, be in the grocery store, ripen the goodness to be back in my kitchen?

Do you think it's possible? (No)

Likely? Not in the human world, but possible, right? I mean, technically, anything's possible with emptiness and karma. If the seeds planted were such that when they ripen, they ripen as me able to think myself to the grocery store and think myself back, I'd be able. I mean, that would be my reality.

As it is, my seeds ripen getting to the grocery store requires having a vehicle that has gas and air in its tires. Like all the different pieces that we would use to describe the process of getting to the grocery store, it's like we hyphenate all of that into one big, long identity and that's what's ripening.

Within that ripening, I need a car, I need the keys, I need all that stuff, but none of it is outside of those karmic seeds ripening.

Can anything we experience be outside of our karmic seeds ripening? No.

But come on, don't you think that Mars in the sky, zipping around the sun is outside of our karmic seeds ripening? Yeah, of course we do.

There is all kinds of stuff we don't believe is part of our karmic seeds ripening, but how can they be? And us be aware of them at any level.

This is what we're going to try to explore, is sorting out how worldly causes could possibly bring about worldly results, and we experience those causes and results in the way that we do. We think, I do experience the car getting me to the grocery store. I experience it correctly. I am experiencing it validly. But I am not experiencing it correctly. As I'm experiencing it validly and believing the valid is correct, I am perpetuating the misunderstanding. 

All right, that's the setup.

(48:23) When we learn to investigate, we will come to see that the worldly sequence of causes leading to the worldly result, in fact, they have no relationship one to the next to the result. We're going to go about that a little bit at a time. But what I mean by that is, you pick up the keys, you go to the car, you put the key in the ignition, you turn it, the car starts, you drive.

We think the picking up the keys is what leads to putting it in the ignition. That leads to turning it, that leads to starting the car, that leads…

We think they are sequential happenings. Which means each one has to be able to touch the next one. Remember Nagarjuna's investigators? We're going to go into that as well.

Imagine being a being who's directly aware that the picking up the keys and putting the key in the ignition are unrelated events, and starting the car by turning the key are unrelated events. It's hard to even conceive, right? Like why would I get in the car and start it if I knew that those were unrelated events?

They can't be unrelated. They have to be unrelated.

How is it helpful to recognize that those are unrelated events?

Because we want to figure out what the real cause is for there appears to be a relationship between picking up my keys, putting them in the ignition, starting the car, getting to the grocery store.

Why does it appear to work?

How do we know it's only appearing to work? Because sometimes it doesn't work. Like once every five years, you put your key in the ignition, turn it, and the car does not start. Because batteries in the Arizona desert only last five years, and then the car is dead and we go, oh yeah, it's just the battery's dead.

We don't go, what's wrong with this picture? If my key turning is the cause of the car starting, it has to do it every single time. Do we even believe that? Probably not, because in real life, nothing works every single time. Right, guess why? Because they don't cause that in the first place.

It's a little bit lousy that things work as well as they do because it leaves us complacent in our belief that turning keys does start cars. And it's good when it doesn't work. But we don't see it that way. We see it as, oh my gosh, I'm going to be late. This dumb car, the battery's dead. Instead of going, duh. Yeah, we call it bad luck. But it's good luck when things don't work. Because if they don't work often enough or big enough, we'll finally question, what's wrong with this picture? My own personal that had to be horrible for me to wake up. And I realized after the fact, it's like, well, I could have recognized this during that experience or during that experience and during that experience. Then maybe, my parents wouldn't have had to do what happened to them for my benefit. But too late now. Here I am.

Causes and Contributing Factors

(53:00) The idea is, if we're willing to explore our old beliefs carefully enough to show ourselves that they're mistaken, we can finally penetrate into some awareness of what the real causes for things are. Then the idea is, we'd be able to set about to create those causes.

The promise of the teachings are, we could reach the point where we are living so clearly in the process of seeds ripening, seeds planting, and nothing existing any other way than that, such that we'd be like moving through the emptiness of the three spheres, and as things are shape-shifting, our own behavior is affecting it, in real time. We can be manipulating our experience, says Geshe Michael.

I'm a long way from that. But we can get an idea of it if we can identify with this all potential of anything at any moment and realize that if we have this deep awareness of seed planting and seed ripening, we would be knowing exactly how to plant the seed we want for the future as we're experiencing the ripening of something that we created in the past, and the gap would shorten. Instead of dealing with the gap that's so huge, we can't really recognize it. We'd be in this like using the gap to create ourselves in our world moment by moment. Won't that be fun? As we get there.

In our worldly cause and effect relationships, we would say there's a primary cause and there are contributing factors.

The primary cause is the car. The contributing factors are the key, the gas, the air and the tires, me knowing how to drive, traffic, all those other things, contributing factors.

Then we have a tendency to think, well, the main cause of getting to the grocery store I know is helping people get places. So I have that main cause, but I still need all those contributing factors to realize, to bring that main cause to its result. But our tendency is to think that those contributing factors are things that are actually outside the karmic ripening.

The karmic ripening is the being able to get to the grocery store because I've helped others in the past. But in order for that to work, I have to have those contributing factors, keys, ignition, car. As we explain it that way to ourselves, ignorance is hearing ourselves go, yeah, yeah, those contributing factors are outside of my actual karma because the actual karma is just to get to the grocery store safely and back. Do you see the difference?

But we've already said there can't be anything outside of our karmic ripening.

Both the main cause, the goodness of getting people places, and the needing to have contributing factors in order for that to ripen into its result are all part of the karmic seed cause of getting to the grocery store.

There's really no worldly cause for getting to the grocery store, which we're getting to. Why we will show ourselves that there can't be a worldly cause? But it feels weird, doesn't it? It's like, no, no, I have worldly causes because I have the karmic causes to have worldly causes. And that's true.

But we're thinking wrongly about the worldly causes we're explaining in that way.

What we're calling the misperception or the lie, they often call it the lie, is the believing in the worldly events that lead up to the result as being the actual causes. They say, Recognize that all as the illusion.

The illusion that I need the keys to turn the ignition on to get in the car to get to the grocery store. It doesn't feel so much like an illusion when we're doing it. But remember what illusion means, discrepancy between what we're experiencing and what really is.

I'm using this four-letter word “REAL” that I'm not allowed to use in my Madhyamika Prasangika. I'm using it an awful lot.

(59:50) The illusion arises with every instant of experience.

The misperception of my experience of me, object interaction between is happening with every experience of me, object interaction between.

How fast are those going by? 65 per instant seed ripening.

When we're interacting with somebody, I'm not aware of things going by 65 per instant, but I am aware of interacting with those other people engaged actively in a sequence, in a stream, and that's going on so swiftly and fully that I don't have the capacity to be thinking, whoa, all of this out of emptiness, my seeds ripening. I can't think of it until after the meeting's done. And then it's like, oh man, I missed that opportunity. I was kind. I planted my seeds well, but I wasn't negating the illusion. I wasn't negating the misunderstanding by actively trying to remind myself about the empty nature.

(61:27) It's really difficult to do that out in our world, in our worldly life because we're on such automatic habit patterns of reacting, acting and reacting so swiftly that to try to build the ability to paint the emptiness awareness into there, it's just tremendously difficult.

Maybe even would come across as kind of dysfunctional if we were trying to do it.

We're interacting with somebody and we're pausing in between our interaction with them to stop and think, no, this is empty. How is it empty?

We would not be very effective.

Lama Christie was explaining how, as we're working with our meditation practice deeply, seriously, strongly motivated, don't be surprised if somewhere along the way you're starting to get this sense of, I need to withdraw from this world. This in-my-face constancy of my life. I really need to get some space, back up, slow down so that I can better apply what I'm learning. I can better work with my own mind. She, already in Bok Jinpa course, whatever we're in, I'm calling it Bok Jinpa two, but it's technically four or five, something like that, in terms of our training, she's already got three-year retreat in mind. She's not talking to us all about it yet. But I know she's thinking she's going to get back into three-year retreat sometime in the next 10 years. So she's like planting these seeds in our minds: What would it be like to simplify life enough? Even if it's just for a long weekend, once a quarter in the year, where you just be by yourself, take some practice in with you and slow down. Then, as we see the benefits of that, where can I find 10 days?

And as we see the benefits of that, where can I find two weeks?

No need to jump in too fast, too soon. But at some point, our goodness will ripen this urge to start to back off. And then it can be frustrating if that goodness is ripening, but we don't yet have the goodness of actually being able to simplify life for whatever reason, valid reasons. We need to pay rent, we've got families, et cetera.

But don't sell yourself short. It may very well be that your seeds shift and suddenly it's like, wow, I really do have the urge, the capacity and the situation to be able to go into a long, deep retreat. It's in that kind of staying for some period of time that things slow down. Fewer decisions, fewer reactivities, greater awareness of what's happening that allows us to glimpse these patterns of ripenings and their contributing factors such that we can become more and more keenly aware of how things don't work and how they do. Which helps us then when we're back out of retreat to guide our own behavior with greater clarity.

All right, let's take a break.

[student: Lama, may I ask something?

Okay.

[student: It felt like this meditation was... It felt like this meditation was almost the same as Mahamudra yesterday meditation.]

Funny how that works.

[student: Yeah. And then my conclusion of it was, this is the emptiness of the item, slash the emptiness of the process that I'm creating. I guess that would be perceiving, would be the direction that I went through?]

OK

[student: And then, so this is already like something that in the last two, three weeks, I've been outside of class already, like recognizing it. And then I get there and I get kicked out. Like, it knows like, hey, this is too much.]

What are you, let's get out of here.

[student: Well, it's like, it's like, I logically understand, I logically agreed upon with myself. And then it's like, and what do you do with this? And then it's like, boom. And then like, my physical body becomes just more irritated. And then it's like, okay, it's time to come back. So, I don't know what to like, do I need to push through it? Like, what am I supposed to do in those moments?]

No, just keep exploring, keep exploring, keep exploring. And, you know, don't judge. I know the initial reaction is, oh, this has gone wrong. Try to drop that. And ease back in or go a different direction. Just use it all. Use it all to keep exploring, keep exploring.

[student: Okay. Thank you.]

Yeah.

How do things start?

(70:20) These are the only three words I have for vocabulary.

KYEWA It's Tibetan for growing, meaning a changing thing. It's the word for how when we say something is a changing thing. It means it's changing in terms of moment by moment, getting more, more, more, more, and then moment by moment, getting less, less, less, less. A changing thing in that way, versus how the emptiness of that thing is there complete or not there at all, if the thing is not there.

We're making this distinction between a changing thing in terms of growing and passing versus something that just comes into existence or goes, or is not in existence, complete in an instant. The only things that come into existence and go out in this way are unchanging things.

It's a little bit different than the way the English would say changing and unchanging as being opposites, because that would mean that to be unchanging would mean you would be there and be there forever. Whereas with emptiness as an unchanging thing, it's either they're complete or it's not there at all. 

As long as there's the pen, it's there. But as soon as the pen is destroyed, it's not. So if it were an unchanging thing, the way we ordinarily think unchanging, the emptiness would still be there even if the pen is gone.

But then we think of the pen as an unchanging thing, because here it is, here it is, here it is. But in fact, this pen is slowly getting more pen-ish. And now that it's full on pen-ish, it's slowly getting less pen, and it will eventually be no pen at all. That's this idea of KYEWA.

Ishvara is Sanskrit term for this creator being.

Tirtika is Sanskrit for the ones who believe in an Ishvara.

We're going to get to it later.

Master Kamalashila has given us the scriptural authority for causes for things being empty of self-nature, in your last reading. Then he goes through the logical exploration of whether or not causes for things can actually be the causes for things. He does it with those four permutations. Janet's favorite, the MU SHI MU SUM.

The four permutations, what he uses is, he says,

Consider something that starts.

If something starts, it must either start by way of a cause, 

start by way of without a cause, 

start by way of both with a cause or without a cause,

or start by way of neither with a cause nor without a cause. 

He's going to go through all four.

But Lama Christie says, look, those last two, can something start with both a cause and not a cause? That's ridiculous. Throw it out.

Can something start with neither a cause nor not a cause? That's just as ridiculous. Throw that one out.

What we really need to look at is can something start by way of a cause and can something start by way of no cause? What does our misunderstanding mind think?

Anything that starts needs the cause for it to start. Something has to trigger it because things don't start themselves.

He starts through this logical sequence. How would we sort out whether or not we could establish a thing that starts, relies upon a cause to start, or doesn't rely upon a cause to start?

He'll look at it from something that has already started, so it's happening already, to look at how that might have come about. And if it had a cause, what would be the ramification? And if it didn't have a cause, what would be the ramification? 

He has this look at: If something has not started yet, what's the ramification of needing to have a cause to trigger it, or not needing to have a cause to trigger it?

So there are these four different ways we're going to look at this exploration of how things cause other things.

Can things start without a cause?

Let's start with no cause. Can something start to do something, or start growing, or start becoming something through not having any cause at all? I don't think so.

Let's see what he says.

He says, if things started without any cause at all, then there's no reason why they wouldn't have popped up everywhere.

It's like, what? If we have a dandelion growing in your yard. It's already there, and we're saying that there was nothing that caused it to be there, and yet it's there, so it relied on no cause to be there. Well, then right next door to it, there's also no cause for a dandelion. So, there ought to be another dandelion. Because there was one that didn't rely on any cause, they should be everywhere.

It's like, No, no, no. One dandelion can be there randomly for no good reason. That doesn't mean it's going to be everywhere.

But if you think the logic through, if that dandelion happened with no cause, and there's no cause for a dandelion everywhere else, why aren't there dandelions everywhere? If it's true that the first dandelion could happen with no cause.

We're supposed to go, that's ridiculous. There aren't dandelions everywhere because there's one. It can't happen that way. We already knew that somehow from just growing up amongst dandelion. But it's important to do that logical piece.

It'll come back later, this idea that if something happens with no cause, the ramification is it has to be happening everywhere. Because the next time we blame something happening to me that is random, no cause, guess what? I'm wrong. Because otherwise it'd be happening everywhere, not just in this moment.

Okay, his reasoning number one for why something that's already started can't have started without a cause.

(81:05) Then he says, In fact, that first dandelion could not have come up at all, because there was nothing to trigger it. If there's no dandelion, and then there is a dandelion, something had to trigger it from going from no dandelion into bigger, bigger, bigger, full-on dandelion. Because dandelions don't happen all by themselves, because they're not everywhere.

Do you see? The two go together. Because they're not everywhere, the one that is there had to have been triggered by something. And if there's no dandelions anywhere, the only way to get one is, it has to be triggered by something.

That sounds like regular worldly belief. What triggers a dandelion?

The puffball puffs, the little seed lodges someplace, gets enough moisture, up it comes. Nobody eats it before it gets to be a flower. And we have the dandelion there, relying on all kinds of triggers to bring it on.

Then, things must rely upon a cause, the cause of the trigger that set it into motion. Then that cause that triggers the dandelion, we need to investigate, is it a changing thing or an unchanging thing? The trigger for the dandelion, the trigger for the start of the dandelion, is it an unchanging thing or a changing thing?

It seems silly to even bother with an unchanging cause, but the reason it comes up is that there are beings who believe that an unchanging cause creates everything in terms of a creator being.

We'll get back to it.

(84:08) In order to investigate whether a changing thing can serve as a cause for the start of something, we need to understand clearly the meaning of changing thing, and the meaning of being a cause for something to trigger something else.

So we get these definitions. The definition of a working thing is that which performs a function. Remember?

So then we switch our analogy here back to our friend, the pen. Like what's the definition of a pen?

What defines a pen versus a banana? That which writes versus that which is edible. That which writes.

So if this thing that writes is what establishes this object as the pen, but it's not writing right now, is it the pen right now?

It's like, just because it's not writing doesn't mean it's not a pen, says our mind. But technically, if it's true that what defines this thing as a pen is that it writes, it's not a pen unless it's writing. And until it's writing, it's something, but it's not a pen yet. So let's leave it at that right now.

That which performs a function is a working thing.

What function it performs gives it the identity of what kind of working thing it is.

(126:30) Then she said, okay, everybody have a look at this pen.

Do you see it? That's about as big as I can get it. There it is. See it? Now see it? Now see it? See it? Is it the same pen?

Is it the same experience? Let me ask you that.

But is it the same pen?

Is it even a pen?

Is it a changing thing or not a changing thing?

Is it a functioning thing or not a functioning thing?

What's determining? Our mental image.

The difference between this and that is a mental image. The difference between this and this, it's all mental image. But we see information, oh, pen in vertical position. Information, oh, pen in horizontal position.

And if we put it that way, it's like, come on, it's the same pen, just in different positions. Silly. Same pen. How can an unchanging thing be changing at the same time?

It's like, it's not an unchanging thing. It is a changing thing. But you just said it's a pen no matter what I do with it. Is it still a pen?

Is it still a pen?

See what our mind is doing? Insisting that the identity is in it, but then that we can use it in any way we want. That's inconsistent. It's consistent with experience, but it's inconsistent with our belief in how the thing actually exists. If our belief in how the thing actually exists were, This is nothing specific until I interact with it in a certain way. And then it becomes the specific thing I'm interacting with. And then when I stop interacting with it, it stops being that specific thing, and it's available to be the specific thing for somebody else.

That's getting closer to what we're trying to establish. Which is the same for me. Like, I'm not a specific thing until I interact with some other. Then I become specific, either me and the pen or from you and me, different ways. But that's how. We'll get there later.

(90:30) If we hold to our definition of this object as ‘that which writes’, then it would have to be writing all the time. And the fact that it doesn't mean that our definition of it as ‘that which writes’ can't be accurate. So what?

Well, if what we believe is the cause for a thing that writes, is the cause for this thing, and we just established that it's not actually a thing that writes, then the cause that we thought caused it, can't be its cause. Because we just showed the thing that we thought was there with the old cause is not actually there. So that old cause can't have done what we thought it did, because the thing we thought it made happened, isn't.

I know, it's like so semantics. But, no, it's significant.

So last week's meditation that we were working on during the week, if we did it, was about the pleasurable feeling that we get from some object. We were recognizing that there seems to be this connection between experiencing the object and then experiencing that sensation that we like.

Recognizing that therefore I act in such a way to keep that thing, to hold that thing. Which is actually the very thing that will make us lose it in the end anyway.

In that same way that we're feeling so sure that that object causes this feeling, we have that same kind of deep connection that our interaction with this object is accurate and correct, believing that the pen's ability to write is in it, coming from it, coming from the pen factory that made it into a functioning pen. Yet we just showed ourselves that it isn't that, because logically, when it changes and is used in these other ways, it can't be the pen that we thought was there.

So, if this pen does not exist in the way that we think, does it mean it does not exist at all?

No, we can't say that, because here it is. We're having a valid perception of this object as a pen that has the potential to write because that's what pens do. But that means we have not pinned down its actual cause, worldly cause. What we have pinned down is, I'm bringing something to the party here, because it's my determination to say there's something pen-ish in this object.

And when I actually use it to write, I believe I've proven to myself that I was right, that there was something pen-ish in this object. It might prove me wrong if every time I try to write with it, it shines a light on the paper instead of writing. I may go, oh, I was mistaken. It's not a pen at all. It's a flashlight.

But then I'm making the same mistake. I'm thinking, oh, it's a flashlight that some factory made. 

I just misunderstood it. I misunderstood it. But at least we've recognized that we made a mistake thinking it was a pen when it was a flashlight.

We've put this overlay of our mental image onto information and come to a wrong conclusion.

I am trying to find where he shifts to that other kind of cause. Let me read you this paragraph because it'll just go quicker.

Things aren't existing in the way we think they are.

That does not mean that the things we perceive are invalid.

We are seeing the pen. There's a difference between what we call the illusion and what we call the lie.

There's always going to be the illusion going on, and the illusion works. The illusion of this being a pen that writes works. There's never going to be any more reality behind that delusion. There's never going to be any more reality behind it than when we go look deeply into the moment by moment nature of this thing and find that's not there. Find that the nature we think that's there, it's pen in it, isn't there, which allows it to be the pen that is here validly.

When we go looking for the true nature pen and we find that's impossible, we back ourselves back up with, oh, that explains why the pen is here for me, unique to me. Because it has no nature, what I perceive is what I perceive. If it had its own nature, it would force me to see it the way its nature is. And my ignorant mind says, right, and this is what it would look like.

But then if that's true, everybody would have to see it the same way. And we don't, do we? Do any of us perceive the same object in the same way? No, never.

Does me perceive this same pen in the same way two moments in a row? No, never.

So the object can't have its identity in it, or else I could perceive it the same way two moments in a row.

Do I think I perceive it the same way two moments in a row? Yes, I believe I do. Same pen. I've had the same pen for months now. No, I haven't. It's never been the same pen. 

This is what we're dancing with. It seems silly. What's the use of that?

It's the difference between life and death. It's the difference between suffering and happiness to be able to catch this ‘What I think is there, can't be there. So what's there, is there coming from me.’ 

We're trying to find the cause of things. That's why we're going there.

If the pen has its own cause to be its own pen, then what I just said about me perceiving it unique to me would be impossible.

Where's the actual cause for the pen? And does it really have anything to do with the pen at all? Except as the landing pad, right? For the cause that is generated in me for this thing to be whatever I experience.

The cause of my experience of this object has to be coming from me.

Ok, so there is a cause and that cause either has to be a changing thing or an unchanging thing.

Seems absurd to even investigate whether the cause for me seeing this pen to be an unchanging thing, because it's got to ripen and change me to see the object as a pen and force something to trigger a change in me. That thing has to change because it has had an impact on me. And it means the me has to be a changing thing because the cause ripening has impacted me.

A changing thing, what is it to be a changing thing? That which exists only a moment. A changing thing, a produced thing and result, those are all synonyms.

To be a changing thing is to be a result. Changing thing, cause, produced thing, result. Those are all synonyms. 

(101:59) There will always be the illusion. Meaning there will always be the ripening appearance that has within it subject-object-interaction between. There will always be the appearance. That's what's meant by the illusion.

There won't always be the lie. The mistaken belief that that appearance has something in it that is making me perceive it that way.

We cannot avoid the illusion even if we try, because our me is also (an) illusion. It's part of the illusion. Even if we say I'm going to not interact with anything in order to stop perpetuating the lie, we would still be perpetuating the illusion and with the lie if we're misunderstanding because to experience ourself is to experience the illusion. Any appearance is this illusion because it appears to have their own nature.

Does it stop being the illusion when even it’s no longer even appearing to have its own nature?

Does an Arhat experience the illusion? It would make a great investigation.

Do they experience appearing natures? Yes.

Do they misunderstand them? No.

So is it still an illusion? Would they see a mirage in the desert? Would they first see water in the desert and then realize it's a mirage? They might still, but they're going to understand at either level, Ah, this is my seeds ripening, making me see water, making me see, oh, not water, mirage, making me see mirage. We will still be perceiving appearing side as Arhat, even as Buddha. They perceive appearing things. They perceive illusions as illusions, but they know them directly plus the emptiness.

So, we're not trying to unillusion our experiences. We're wanting to be able to be in and amongst the illusion because that means everything is not as real as we take it to be, which means everything's available to be anything. When we're in that space, that's when we can apparently tweak our own behavior such that we can create. We can be creators with that narrowing time gap between when we do a deed and when we get the result of the deed.

What if that time gap was minutes instead of lifetimes? And you're moving through your being, identifying with your empty nature, and there's a circumstance where somebody needs help and you just are able to morph yourself and whatever you're holding into exactly what they need. Oh, glass of water. And then you move on and somebody else…, and you morph what's in your hands into, oh, a sandwich.

Theoretically, if we have the seeds to be in that space, we should be able to reach into the matrix and tweak. Geshe Michael's saying that all the time. I think he demonstrates it. I've never seen direct that, but I certainly see not a very long-time gap for him. I also see how whatever is coming up, he will use so skillfully, to send it in the next direction. Even when things go wrong, it was never like, ah, something's going wrong, what are we going to do? It was just like, use it like this.

From that awareness of the infinite potentiality at any given moment is how we step into that capacity.

Even Master Kamalashila is alluding to that here early on in his commentary.

(107:17) So if our friend the pen is a changing thing, and we said what it means to be a changing thing is changing moment by moment. If I am a changing thing, it means I'm changing moment by moment. It means my interaction with other is changing moment by moment. That's actually closer to our actual existence than this one interacting with this one is.

But can you feel how it feels so ungrounded, and slippery and dangerous to be identifying with this changing, changing, changing. We want something solid. We want something reliable. We want something that we can hold on to get something done.

Because of that need, we built in the karmic seed planting that ability, that apparent ability to control things and hold things and try to manipulate things. Of course, it's all mistaken and leads us to choosing the kinds of behaviors that increase our control and power, that actually decreases our control and power in the long run.

It leaves us in this unsettled, painful, samsaric perpetuation, because we're trying to avoid that, What am I if I'm this constantly changing thing? Like, will the real me please stand up? And we want to get to that point where we can go, Ah, thank you.

No me. But before we're quite ready for that, it's scary to get to that kind of non solidness. And so we tend to relate to things or beliefs that have some kind of solidity, some kind of tangibility, or some kind of expectability, something we can rely on.

For humanity, over time, that ‘something to rely upon’ has been a creator being who's responsible for everything, and who, if we are in the right place at the right time, we can benefit from their blessings, and they can take away all the bad deeds that we've done.

This tradition argues without or negates that only in the sense that in those traditions, but that believe in a creator being such as that, they also believe that this creator being has always been that creator being. Although they don't say they're unchanging, the ramification of that creator being having always been the creator being means that they are not changing. And if they are an unchanging being, how can they have created anything?

If they are an unchanging being, how can they give me this blessing of taking away my sins?

You can't have it both ways.

You can have a being who can bless people, who can teach people, who can guide people, who can love people. But you can't have one that's unchanging creator.

If you have an unchanging creator, how did they create anything?

If they could create something, that means they changed, which means something had to trigger them to change to make the creation. It doesn't make sense.

However, it's not that they aren't amazing, divine, highly spiritual, made of love, made of wisdom, made of compassion. They're just not creators of the world. They are everything else that God is, just not the original creator.

We have our own beings who have this capacity to teach us, to guide us, to love us, even to bless us. Can they take our karma away? No.

Can we receive blessings from them? Yes.

Because of them? No. Because of us. Our goodness can ripen.

Oh, please bless me to be free of my anger. Bonk. Anger goes away.

It isn't what they did. It's our karmic seed ripening the belief that they could bless me in that way. And so it can work. That's not so different than saying there's God. So, there is God, there are all kinds of enlightened being angels, just not unchanging, not the ultimate creator. Because if they were, then we are stuck.

We need that ultimate responsibility for our own behavior planting. We can't rely on somebody else to do it for us because that won't take away our misunderstanding.

An unchanging cause is impossible. That's really about the only kind of unchanging cause is an unchanging creator being. In the reading, that's where he goes. That's the Ishvara and the Tirthikas, is in the old tradition before Buddha. Then, through Buddha's time were beings who believed in Ishvara as the unchanging creator of the world. And the people who believe that there were called the Tirthikas and Kamalashila mentions them, just why I'm bringing it up.

(114:51) One more thing, which is to recognize that this thing we call emptiness, the no self-nature of any existing thing, or being, or experience, or thought, or moment of mind, that is also an unchanging thing. We just said an unchanging thing can't cause anything, and neither can emptiness.

Wait, perceiving emptiness directly causes us to be on the conveyor belt to the end of all suffering. How can emptiness, not able to affect anything, but perceiving emptiness directly changes everything? It's something to cook.

Emptiness is an absence of something that we thought was there that isn't there.

It doesn't grow into being an absence of something.

As soon as there's something, the emptiness of that something is also present.

As soon as there's no something, there's nothing there to lack its self existence.

So, you wouldn't really even say it's emptiness goes out of existence if there's just none. When there's no object, there's no emptiness of the object.

When there's an object, there's 100% no self nature. Not changing, changing, changing, becoming 100%, losing 100%. There or not there. Which is why emptiness is said to be unchanging. It's complete or not at all.

It's an important piece because it can't cause anything. It can't be the result of anything.

It just is or isn't.

It's significant, importantly significant to recognize that as long as there's some part of our me exists, it is 100% lacking its identity in it.

What's the part of me that actually is always existing? My awareness, my mindstream.

Sarahni won't always exist. This body won't always exist. In fact, those are moment by moment by moment-ing. So is my mindstream moment by moment by moment-ing, and somewhere within that is the subject side, the me awareness.

That me awareness is also moment by moment by moment changing, but it's always present.

Dead, still, you're me. Your subject side is still present.

Knocked unconscious, still me, subject side is still present.

Will your emptiness ever go out of existence? Your me's emptiness ever go out of existence?

No, because your me would have to go out of existence for your emptiness to go out of existence. That's your Dharmakaya, the fact that our mind is empty now is identical to the fact that our mind as our Buddha me will also be empty. Which will allow us to become Buddha me. Buddha's mind is empty, identical to our emptiness, not one in the same because my mind's emptiness is related to it, and their emptiness is related to them. There's not one great big emptiness that we all come out of.

If I'm doing this, this, this, and this, so is my emptiness doing this, this, this, and this.

I was supposed to give you another meditation. I should have set my timer. Next time I'll set a timer. We'll do it next class. 

What it's about is watching for the mental image that comes from us. The conclusion is going to be, the real cause for things is the mental image ripening. It's not that the mental image ripening triggers the key to turn the car. It's the key turning the car on is the mental image.

The driving to the grocery store is the mental image.

Nothing but mental image is happening. And they work so well, you got to pay $3,50 a gallon to fill it with gas, right? That's part of the mental image. There isn't anything outside of the mental images. That's karma.

So that meditation was going to be what's the mental image ripening.

The way you can do that yourself: Have somebody put a little object in a bag so you don't know what it is. Stick your hand in the bag. Investigate the object without looking at it and watch your mind go hard, long, fat, rough.

And then all of a sudden, bing. Egg timer, and the whole thing pops into your mind. Catch it.

We were going to do that in meditation.

So, you can play with that.

Dedication

So remember that person we wanted to be able to help. 

We've learned a lot that we will use sooner or later to help them in that deep and ultimate way. And that's a great, great goodness. 

So please be happy with yourself. 

And think of this goodness like a beautiful glowing gemstone that you can hold in your hands. Recall your own precious holy being, see how happy they are with you. 

Feel your gratitude to them, your reliance upon them. 

Ask them to please, please stay close, to continue to guide you and help you and inspire you. 

And then offer them this gemstone of goodness. 

See them accept it and bless it. 

And they carry it with them right back into your heart. 

See them there, feel them there. 

Their love, their compassion, their wisdom. 

It feels so good, we want to keep it forever. And so we know to share it.

By the power of the goodness that we've just done, may all beings complete the collection of merit and wisdom and thus gain the two ultimate bodies that merit and wisdom make. 

So use those three long exhales to share this goodness with that one being, to share it with everyone you love, to share it with every existing being everywhere. 

See them filled with happiness, filled with loving kindness, filled with wisdom. 

And may it be so. 

Thank you again everyone for the opportunity.

All right, welcome back. We are Bok Jinpa Course 2 Class 3 on November 5th, 2025. Let's gather our minds here as we usually do. Please bring your attention to your breath until you hear from me again. 

[Class Opening]

(7:30) It feels like I've been away a long, long time. So, forgive me. I'm going to review because I need to. So, we're on the second Bok Jinpa course. In the first Bok Jinpa course, we're studying Master Kamalashila's Bhavanakrama stages of meditation or steps in meditation. In that course, he said, look, we need to grow our compassion strong enough to have sufficient motivation to change our behavior enough so that we can meditate deeply enough to change our beliefs accurately enough to be able to stop perpetuating the suffering we see in others.

He's pointing out the marriage of method and wisdom. He's saying method side is all those things we do to grow and live by compassion. And wisdom side is the understanding of emptiness, which the goodness we do from growing our compassion grows our wisdom.

He also said, and this method and wisdom marriage, it's also the marriage of our CHEGOM and JOKGOM meditations. The analytical meditation where we're really, CHE means cut, like cut, get used to.

Get used to cutting what? Our ignorance, our belief in the thing in it from it, and so we blame, we blame the boss for our upset. We blame the triple berry pie for the pleasure. Either way, we're blaming something.

CHEGOM is a method of meditation, whereby we are getting used to cutting that off. 

The JOKGOM is the fixation on the conclusion, what's left when you cut away the self-existent thing. It's kind of a long, long story. What's left is the projected thing that you started with. But we're supposed to be able to go into the emptiness when we cut something away. It's a little confusing for me.

Although analytical meditation and fixation meditation on the conclusion is what he's teaching us about, we're also seeing that we can use those two practices off our cushion as well when we have enough mindfulness to remind ourselves to do it. 

Not meaning you suddenly go into meditation, but applying our understanding, the thing looks like it's in it from it, but I know it's not. And so the way it's appearing to me is forced by my past deeds. And so how I behave is going to plant new.

How I behave is planting new. But when I have it more in mind, I'm going to choose my interaction maybe more carefully than my automatic pilot.

So he was using that text Samadhi Raja Sutra, which curiously it's like every class I've taught in the last week has talked about Samadhi Raja Sutra. I thought maybe I should go read the thing, but it's pretty long. So it's on my list to do. I've read it before, but I don't remember anything about it.

This Samadhi Raja Sutra is relied upon by the masters of Madhyamika Prasangika,  so highest worldview guys use this Sutra often.

In that first course, we went into exploring, exploring functioning things from the point of view of can we function to stop somebody suffering? Because that's really what this is all about, isn't it? I mean, we're Mahayana means our renunciation has been turned on to others. We understand our suffering and it's awful. But then we see others suffering and it's awful-er. When we turn our renunciation on to others, that's our Bodhichitta, and that's what really puts the prong under our seat to get us motivated, because there's so much more suffering in others than there is in me. Of course, my suffering is going to go away as I become the one that helps them. But without helping them, my suffering is not going to go away. 

When we're talking about a functioning thing, it's hard to learn how to analyze functioning things when you're applying it to one's own self, because we so naturally resist the conclusion, which is there is no self-nature me. Which when we get it, we're like, yay. But until we get it, we're like, what? No, there can't be a not me there, which isn't what it's saying.

Can we function to stop somebody else's suffering? Can somebody else function to stop our suffering?

We know the punchline, not in the way we think. Not in the way we believe things happen. That doesn't work. But we understand that, yes, we can ripen seeds to help somebody in that deep and ultimate way. We can ripen seeds for somebody to help us. But only if we've got the seeds and only if they have the power to ripen.

We go through that part that teaches us about the illusion, which also is a long story. We'll come back to it again and again. But once we're keenly aware of this process of deceptive reality, we can learn how to function within the illusion, maybe from within the illusion, from within that possibility moment by moment. And then theoretically, we will quickly, quickly go to the level of using that skill for higher goals instead of for our own emotional material wants and needs satisfaction.

When our renunciation is truly turned on others, when we gain this skill to be living in that all potential all the time, where you can literally reach into it and get your seeds to ripen. I can't do it, but I understand that it can be done. It would never even occur to you to do it to get your own needs met unless those needs were necessary for helping somebody else. You wouldn't focus on your needs first. It would always be focused on the other, which protects us from abusing that ability.

Now, can you get the ability without that protection? Yes, of course, but it's a whole lot less likely for most of us.

We're coming to understand that we are always projections happening and we are always creating what will be future projections happening. And those new ones are always colored by wanting to help all beings be happy because it's possible by way of seeds. So it becomes all we really care about.

They say as Buddhas, we are bliss helping others. Like I love helping others perpetually, perpetuating yourself by doing so. So on our way to this, they tell us our goodness can ripen in the form of holy beings coming to help us, guide us, drag us, push us to paradise. Of course, that happening will still be seeds ripening from goodness having been planted by way of using our wisdom and method, our compassion and our understanding of emptiness.

So we've now reached our second course of Bok Jinpa, still studying Bhavanakrama by Master Kamalashila, but into his section about what we use our meditation for. So it becomes not so much a manual in how to meditate, how to get to Samatha. It's a study in different analyses of emptiness and dependent origination. Different proofs, not like logical proofs, but different explanations. The idea is you find one of those that you relate to and you use your meditation skill to penetrate into it, reach the aha and do your fixation meditation on that aha.

So again, thank you, Coco, for asking for these classes, because I would not have ever made myself go back and dig into this material to the extent that I need to, to be able to deliver it to you. I realize there's so much in there that I didn't get. I mean, if I got it, I forgot it. I probably didn't get it the first time through. So thank you.

Meditation: Asking Your Lama for Blessings

(19:46) Let's do our class three meditation.

Get yourself settled in, set your posture. You know how to do it.

Get still and get quiet. Physically quiet, mentally quiet. And bring your attention to your breath at the tip of your nostrils.

Watch that breath, recognizing when the breath becomes inside you and when the breath becomes outside you.

Adjust your clarity, adjust your intensity as needed.

Now recognize that breath you are watching is seeds ripening mental images.

Breath outside of you, seed ripening mental images.

Breath inside, seed ripening mental images.

Person watching, seed ripening mental images happening.

Now intentionally shift from that object to that precious holy being there with you.

That one we believe can help us on this path because they know.

See them clearly. Or at least feel them there clearly.

Think of what it is they know. What it is they have done to become a being who knows. Think of their good qualities.

They are there with you in a steady stream. Moment by moment still there.

Now recognize that this holy being with you is seed ripening projections just like the breath. Their good qualities, seed ripening projections. Our seeds projecting.

Their power to help us is our seeds projecting that.

And so we grant them the power to help us.

And so in your mind's eye throw yourself before them at their feet.

Ask them for blessings to understand emptiness and karma.

Ask them sincerely three times.

See them smile and grant you those blessings.

Let yourself receive those blessings.

Let those blessings flow into every nook and cranny of yourself.

And we see this being smile extra big.

They begin to rise up, shrink down. Turn to face the same direction as ourselves. And comes to sit on the crown of our head. They're about the size of a pea.

And then they descend going straight down that central channel, coming to rest in the holy of holies in the middle of your chest.

That beautiful room that you have there for them.

Leave them settled comfortably.

From inside they are full size. From outside they are a tiny speck of light. Their love, their compassion, their wisdom–your seeds ripening projections.

And let that go.

Become aware of your body and your room. You're you in this class.

When you're ready, open your eyes, move your body, take a stretch. 

(34:58) That seems like a perfect meditation for coming back after a break, and it was the meditation for the class. I didn't slip it in there. Geshe-la would say, that's the magic. That's Tantra happening. Because he's been given those kind of clues to people. So thank you for making that for me to share with you.

Lama said, whenever you find yourself blocked in some way in your practice, in your meditation, in your emptiness understanding, when you find like you can only get to this certain level and can't break through. One of the things to do is to do this meditation. You just call forth that Lama who's got all the qualities that we're aspiring to. Recognize that they have no nature of their own. They are ripening of our good seeds, and that's what makes them real. That's what makes them able to help us and just beg for their blessings. Then see them, grant them. Even if while we're there getting blessings, there's a part of us that's going, this is just in my imagination. It's still planting seeds, and those seeds grow.

It's such a simple meditation to do. It feels so nice, generally. Sometimes we hit up with, I'm not worthy. I'm not going to receive the blessings. I'm just pretending they're not really going into me. That becomes the practice. Send the blessings into that, wherever that is, those thoughts. Any place there's resistance, send the blessings in.

However it comes to you, whether you visualize something pouring in or feel it, that's not specified. But receive, open up to receive. 

Then, in the end, we're going to dedicate class, but even dedicate just this meditation. And then you just open up to see the result, see what comes. We may say, well, they didn't really give me blessings because I didn't go into the direct perception of emptiness, and that's what I was asking for. But, you know, you don't plant a tomato seed in the earth and expect tomatoes 10 minutes later. Come on, this is no different. 

Introduction to Class 3

(38:18) In this course, Master Kamalashila is going through establishing cause and effect, which if we want to be a person who can help somebody else stop their suffering, that sounds like a cause and effect relationship. I need to be able to do something for them to stop their suffering. Me, what I do. Me, the one doing it. Me, what I do. And the end of their suffering, the result.

It's like if we're thinking of how cause and result relationships work wrongly, then there's nothing we'll ever do that will really work to stop their suffering, even if it looks like it does. It can look like we give the child some, oh, my gosh, Tylenol, and their fever goes down. But we know it wasn't really the Tylenol that did it. And they just go on to get a sore throat two weeks later, so we really didn't stop the cycle.

He wants us to look at how things cause other things. We already apparently explored how things’ causes can't be unchanging.

There is this sequence:

Can an unchanging thing function to make something else happen?

Can a changing thing function to make something else happen?

If it's a changing thing, is it a different thing or is it the same thing?

There are all these different ramifications.

I've got Nagarjuna investigators in class with us, and that's what we've been doing for the last three years, is looking at, do things cause themselves? Are they caused by other? Are they caused by both or are they caused by neither?

Kamalashila is doing the same thing but with nuances, different nuances.

An Unchanging Thing Can’t Cause Things to Happen

Is it clear that an unchanging thing can't cause something else to happen so we don't have to go back over that?

If something cannot change, then it cannot affect something else to change, Because in doing so, it itself would change because it had never affected that thing before and now it has. So it's different. So an unchanging thing can't affect another thing.

It's still significant because of the way we automatically hold to things as unchanging even as we say, no, no, I know it's changing. No, no, I know it depends on something else. But every time I leave my pen on the desk and I come back and that pen is still there, there's a part of my mind that says, see, it's an unchanging thing.

Even as I use it and the ink goes away, it's still the same pen. It hasn't changed because to me, for something to change would mean it would have to become this (showing another object) and it doesn't, or it would have to become this (showing yet another object) and it doesn't. It's always this or not at all.

So there's a part of us that believes unchanging things do stuff.

When we logically ask ourselves, is that possible? We go, oh, no, that's silly. Yet we're interacting with them all the time, which means we're planting our seeds for that mistake also–so subtly that we're not even aware of ourselves doing it.

How are we going to stop doing it unless we're aware that we're doing it?

That's what our mindfulness is trying to help us grow.

So we did that one already. Unchanging things can't cause anything to change.

Then I think we went into those two of, I can't remember the words, where we think something more exists than actually does. And if we show ourselves that things don't exist in that way, we go, oh, well, then they can't exist at all–where we negate more than should be negated, the two cliffs where we're trying to find the Middle Way.

One of those is KERN DEP that going to the extreme of denying that things exist. If they don't exist with their identities in them, then they can't exist at all. Which for function means, if things don't have their ability to function the way they do in them, well, then they can't function at all.

It seems like a silly argument because if we show ourselves or prove to ourselves that a thing can't function in the way that we think from it, it's not like at the moment we realize that, our car just shuts off. Because, it was never functioning like that. So to come to realize how it wasn't functioning the way we thought it was, doesn't actually make anything change. So it's a little bit confusing. How do I know I really got it right if everything still works the same way, only now I'm not thinking of it wrongly.

Because it never worked in the wrong way. I just thought it did.

It really is slippery, like we can't quite get it without being in a deep enough meditation to get that conundrum and be able to slide into the middle of it and sit there for a while. Then, when we come out, it's a little bit more clear. Although, I keep finding it still just as hard to verbalize to get it right, and then it slips away anyway.

We know, again, the punchline. Oh, the way things function is by way of projections. 

When it's a mental image of something functioning, anything can be anything. Things work because they're mental functions.

But when my own mind hears that, I have to admit that my own mind goes, Oh, projections, not real. ‘They're just projection’ is always the term. It means ‘projection and nothing but’ versus just meaning ‘lesser than’. When we get it and we say, oh they are projections, we'll be like, Oh, that's how it works, right? That's real. Projections are real. Like to use that dirty word, the four letter R word in Highest School is ‘real’.

Are things real?

The illusion is real. When we understand that by illusion, we mean projected versus in it from it, right? Is everybody with me? I'm not seeing too many nods, but this is not new stuff. We know all this. So I'm going kind of fast.

We're trying to get to the place where when we remind ourselves, Oh, this is projections our like automatic reaction is, Oh, and so it's real, and so my action next is how I create. And so I want to be kind, even though that person is really pissing me off right now.

We understand how to work with our projections because they are seed ripening reality and nothing but. Which because of the nothing but, how we respond to them recreates, right? Create something entirely different. All right.

(48:05) So unchanging things can't cause things. Things don't come from no cause at all. Kamalashila just mentions that, but he doesn't go into proving it because it seems so obvious.

Changing Things Can’t Function to Produce Other Things

Then next, he says, Can changing things function to produce other things?

It's like, yes, right? This is the hard one because, yes, it does seem like changing things make other things happen. That's what it is to be a changing thing. It's to influence other things and to be influenced by that, and to be influenced by other things that's how the world goes around.

Right and wrong. Because what we think the one changing thing is influencing another changing thing to get a third thing changing thing. He wants us to investigate that to see if that can really be happening.

What we've always done in the past is, let's look at the pen and the pen that writes, and does the pen write in the paper? And we've done the key starting the car or the gasoline running the car.

We want to take it a little bit further and look at, well, what about the me as a changing thing able to affect a change for somebody else in order to stop their suffering?

If we think that there's something about us, our nature in us that has the ability to help somebody else stop their suffering, if we're thinking of it in the wrong way, we will die in the effort of trying to stop their suffering. They will die in our effort of trying to stop their suffering, because we won't be able to get it right.

When we understand it's like almost anything we do will be the seeds that will lead us to becoming the one that can help them stop their suffering.

So it's kind of important, this one, to show ourselves how it is that changing things cause things to change to get it accurate, not inaccurate. Because in fact, changing things are not the cause of things changing.

How do we go about showing ourselves that?

One of the ways is to look to see if they, whether the cause and the result, whether they occur at the same moment to have a relationship, or whether they occur one after the other, or whether they don't occur at all, right? Obviously not. Or what's the third one? Together, one then the other, the other then the one. Sequential going forward or sequential going backwards or not at all. Those are the options.

First he talks about, is it necessary for the cause and the result to be simultaneous in order for the cause to cause the result? Is it happening simultaneously?

Can you have the seed for the tomato plant, the seed that makes the tomato plant and the tomato plant there at the same moment?

No, right? If you did, they'd be the same thing.

But apparently the scripture says, look, if you have a.. Like we have this pen in this moment and then you have this pen in this moment, and then the pen in this moment, we have different moments of the existence of this pen. The first moment is the cause for the second moment, which is the cause for the third moment, et cetera.

The first moment has to already be there of course. But then in order for the first moment to go to the second moment, the second moment has to be there too, right? Or the first moment hasn't caused anything.

So it's like, maybe they do both have to be there at the same time to say that there's a cause and effect relationship, which when we get to the conclusion that it seeds ripening, , my premise is seeds ripening as them being there at the same moment, but I think I'd get slaughtered on the debate ground.

A cause and a result, they can't arise simultaneously together and be called cause and effect, can they?

Just by thinking it logically.

Who cares? Because we don't think that anyway.

We think things happen sequentially and mostly we think the cause is there first, the pen, and then the result is there, the smiley face on my hand.

We think cause first, result second.

Arya Nagarjuna helped us to recognize there's no this (the pen) as the cause of that (the smiley face on her palm) until that exists (the smiley face on her palm). So this (the smiley face on her palm) is the cause of this (the pen) being the cause of this (the smiley face on her palm), right? So this (the pen) is not the cause at all.

This (the smiley face on her palm) is the cause, but no, it's the result. Wait, it can't be both cause and result at the same time.

So changing in sequence, what has to be there first?

Can the cause be there halfway and then bring about its whole result?

The cause has to be complete in order to function in a way to bring about its result. Doesn't it? So it has to have a first moment of being the thing that's going to be the cause. Let's say that.

Then the second moment of the thing that's not the cause yet, but it's going to be the cause. Wait a minute. Is that in it?

Then the third moment, fourth moment. And then all of a sudden something happens, and the object causes something else.

What happens to make the object that's the cause go from just being the object to suddenly being the cause of something else. If it's sequential, it means it wasn't doing it, and then it does it. And then it stops doing it, and now you have the result.

And with the cause, the cause is itself. Then it changes to influence the thing, and then what you had before is gone. The pen that had never made a smiley face is now gone because now we have a pen that's made a smiley face. Which is not the cause of the smiley face because it was the one before that did the actual action that is the cause. 

Are you with me?

At what moment and by way of what influence does the thing that's going along minding its own business suddenly become the cause of a result?

What makes that happen? When does it happen?

Does something come out of the pen that makes my hand go like this?

Or does it not happen until the first ink goes on my hand?

Or does it not happen until the final ink of the smiley face goes on my hand?

When does it actually happen, the cause making the result?

If this (the pen) is the cause of that (the smiley face on her palm), we should be able to find the moment it happens, shouldn't we?

If we can't, then we would have to agree something else is going on here.

And that's the conclusion. Not, oh, so I'm just, I don't know, I'm watching a movie. If I shut the movie off, this whole world disappears into nothing. That's not the right conclusion. That's the KERN DEP, if it doesn't exist the way I believe it doesn't exist at all. Right?

Theoretically, we don't actually drop into that unless we get a bad understanding of emptiness. But I think I'm pretty well trained in emptiness and every time I get close to my conclusion, I feel my mind go, oh, so nothing's real. Instead of feeling my mind go, ohhhhh. I'm waiting for that day where projection goes, Oh, wow, exactly.

Intellectually, I can get it, but not until after I've gone to the, oh, not real.

I grew up in Culver City where they make movies. So we saw movies being made all over the place, and maybe I'm like so ingrained that movies are not real, but that's what happens to my mind. It's like movies are not real. But, ow, right?

Can we find the instant where one thing touches another?

Geshe-la has done this for us so many times. Take your own fingers. Really slowly, watch (bringing 2 fingers together). Right there. Right there. I feel it.

Pull them apart. Oh, man, I still feel it. I still feel it. I still feel it. I don't feel it.

Put them back together. There it is again.

Pull them apart. Put them together.

Can you get it really, really, really teeny?

But no, they're not really touching.

Why? Because for this edge to touch this edge, it has to have a width.

Otherwise, if there was no width, I mean, I can't even do it. If there's no width and one touches the other, they do that (fingers overlapping and looking like one). If there's no width and one touches the other, they do that. Okay?

They go completely one into the other. There'd be no differentiation. There'd just be one. But that's not what happens when one thing touches another. Look, there's still two.

But we can't actually find the moment, can we?

We can't actually find the place.

But what does our mind say? Yes, I can. I can feel it.

Why does that make it true? Trick question. It doesn't make it true.

It's really slippery.

Why are we saying so? Because if a Me that wants to help you stop suffering has to be able to physically touch you or mentally, emotionally touch you, and it has to be able to happen in a space or in a time, then I cannot help you.

It can look like I'm helping you, but it won't actually be the kind of help that will help you stop your suffering.

Until I understand that any moment of interaction is my seeds ripening and your seeds ripening, can I have any kind of ultimate effect? Who is on whom? On whom am I having the ultimate effect?

That's selfish. There's no other way to do it, but change our own seeds. Everybody’s suffering is waiting for me to change my pool of seeds.

Sorry it's taken me so long.And it's a heavy responsibility, right? That's why we don't talk about that in a beginner's class. It's too much to say it's my personal responsibility. But if it wasn't, we couldn't do it at all. So it's like, oh, thank goodness. It's up to me.

(68:05) We talked about whether things could physically touch.

Then Lama Christie wanted us to look at also the moment that they touch. And the way she did it was, you can just have us like, imagine aseed, a tiny little seed of your choice. And just like mentally get this picture. You have this little seed, let's call it a pumpkin seed because it's not so small. There's the pumpkin seed. There it is again. There it is again. There it is again. Looking the same. We know it's not exactly the same because it's this moment, and then that moment.

Then something happens and now there's a  teeny little thing coming out of it. We look at it and we go, Oh, it's sprouting. So like in your mind's eye you see the seed. It's the same. It's the same. It's the same. It's the same. And then suddenly it's different and it's this little sprout.

Now she said, Look, is the seed still there now that it has a sprout coming out of it?

Our mind goes, Yeah, the seed's still there, only now it's not the same seed. Well, wait, it is the same seed, but it's not the same as it was because now it's got this it's changed in this way. So then take the size of that sprout and shrink it down moment by moment until it's the teeniest little fraction of what could be identified as a sprout. Where is it?

We probably say it's inside the seed.

Well, was it inside the seat all along? Or was there a moment that it went from not being inside the seat to being inside the seed? And then was there a moment when the sprout inside the seed got big enough to push outside the seed?

If something outside affected the seed to make that sprout suddenly start to grow, we should be able to find the moment it happens. Shouldn't we?

So can we?

No, because each moment we say, oh, that's the first start, you can always divide it into a beginning of the moment, middle of the moment, end of the moment. Can we?

So you can't find a first moment of the sprout even when you have the sprout there. What's going on? How can the seed with the cofactors of water, moisture, whatever else we think made it, trigger into the sprout? How can that all be happening the way we think if we can't find the moment it actually goes from not happening to happening if they're happening sequentially, the way that we think?

They don't happen from nothing. They don't happen at the same time. We say they happen sequentially, but we can't actually find the moment they touch or the moment in time it happens, and yet it happens. Magic.

Well, everybody sees a sprout come out of a pumpkin seed, don't they?

If it was in it from it, everybody would see it the same way. Because it would say, I'm a pumpkin seed with a sprout that's a quarter of an inch long. But, not everybody sees it that way.

That's like such a simple argument that we actually miss how important it is.

So again, the point we were starting with is, how can me affect you to stop your suffering? 

Lama Christie did another, just imagine. She said, suppose our Me, our this Me, this life Me, comes into being the moment the egg and sperm touch. If my this Me relies upon that moment, we need to be able to find that moment that that happens, in order for me to explain how me is here now.

It seems a little funny, but even in physiology, the human egg has a relative negative charge, the whole thing, inside. And sperm have a relative positive charge. So, they're like (moving her hands together), and when the first sperm touches, like barely touches the membrane of the egg, the whole egg's electrical charge changes to relatively positive. And so, all the other sperms that are positive go (hands moving apart), they turn and run away. So, you don't get more than one, right?

So, there has to be a moment that that touch happens, because it triggers the whole thing, and conception happens at that moment. 

Lama Christie said, okay, imagine you're looking in the microscope, and there's the egg. And you see the sperm is being attracted to it, multiples. It's getting closer and closer and closer and closer and closer and closer and closer and closer and closer, and it can't ever touch. We just proved that it can't ever touch.

But wait, it does touch, because here we are.

Again, is your conclusion, nah, none of this is true, because here I am, the egg did touch the sperm? Or is our conclusion, wow, something else is going on here. Even for science to prove to us that the sperm has to touch the egg is coming from where?

That's really hard, isn't it?

Yeah. Investigator Roxanna tells us which chapter in root text (referring to Arya Nagarjuna’s text “Wisdom” Chapter 8). We've been having so much fun with that text. 

Past events cannot touch future events.

Now events, can a now event touch a past event?

No, because a past event is past, it doesn't even exist, right?

The seed that had no sprout, now that there's a sprout, is non-existent.

So, how can the sprout have a relationship with the seed if the seed is now non-existent? It's in the past.

Then the sprout, that's going to become a seedling, and then the plant and then fruit. But how can that sprout have the relationship of being the cause for a result when the result is in the future, so it's a non-existing thing?

All we have is the present moment. And in the present moment is, oh, I didn't say that right. The present moment is seeds ripening.

Seeds ripening memories of past moments, anticipations of future moments. The only one that's actually happening is the present moment. And it's not actually happening, but it's the one we are experiencing. It is what we are experiencing because the other two don't exist.

So, how can we have any cause and effect relationship if all we have is the now and this now and this now? No such thing as a worldly cause and effect relationship.

Does that mean nothing happens? No, stuff happens all day long, have we noticed?

To come to this conclusion doesn't make everything screech to a halt.

But can we see where it all comes from a little better?

If we already know the punchline, right? We have to already know the punchline here. 

Seeds ripening past, present, future. Because when we planted them, they were planted with past, present, future. They were planted with me, other, interaction between. So, they'll always ripen with me, other, interaction between.

Can't plant seeds any other way than that, than me, other, interaction between.

Even as Buddha us in Buddha paradises we will still be ripening subject-object-interaction between.

I posit that we won't relate to the subject side as the me anymore. We'll be relating to the whole thing, but that's not this class.

So, where do things come from? What makes things happen?

How come our behavior towards another that can't really do what we think it's doing be the cause of some future result that doesn't exist yet because the future never gets here? And by the time we've done it, it's a past result.

The only explanation is these imprints in consciousness, influences in consciousness that is this constant shape-shifting. I like that word. It's not a scripture word, but this constant shape-shifting of influence happening that we misperceive and call me and me, you and you, you're suffering, I want to try to help it, I'll do what I can.

Am I wrong to do that? No. Even worldly helpfulness is a kindness. It's a good seed, but it's a dirty good seed, a seed that will come back to us as something pleasant that will wear out and fine. Pleasantness, at least more pleasantness.

But how do we stop the pleasantness that wears out? 

Is we plant our seeds with some amount of understanding of the fact that we're planting and the fact that we're planting because nothing has any nature of its own, that there is no worldly cause and effect. There's only karma cause and effect.

There's only collecting karma that we're learning, training ourselves to collect merit instead. Which is the same idea–imprinting and ripening, but imbued with those two Bodhichittas instead of ignorance.

(82:06) Lama Christie said this beautiful thing, scary. I remember hearing it and it rocked my... She said, when we have our memories of our childhood and we're thinking of them, those are current moment ripenings of something we call memory of when I was seven years old. But there's no way that we can ever confirm that what we're remembering actually ever happened because it's gone.

It's a non-existent thing. It's not an existing thing that's gone. It's a non-existent thing. 

So we could theoretically wake up one morning and when somebody says, what'd you do when you were seven years old? The story that comes out of your mouth is completely different than the story that came would have come out of your mouth or did come out of your mouth a week ago.

And you wouldn't know. You wouldn't go, whoa, what am I saying? That's not true. Because that would be your reality at that moment.

So really our memories, they're current moment ripenings. See how we can do that spiritual revisionism? See how it's valuable to do spiritual revisionism? Because those things we call memories are current moment things, not recalling something that is still existing in the past in some way.

It's scary and it's liberating because it means you could also wake up in the morning and whoa, complete transformation because it's only seeds ripening. 

We're used to seeds ripening little bit, little change, little change, little change, little change. We like that consistency. But we're begging to become Buddhas for the sake of all sentient beings before this body dies. That's going to take some brutal reshift, I think, not this little, little, little, little thing. And if we don't believe that we can shift to that extent, or if we're not willing to do it, then it ain't likely to happen in this life.

What keeps us from being able to make that leap?

Self-existent me, clinging to the me in me. Because if there's not a me in me, what the heck am I? Right? That's the fear that if I really reach the no self nature me, I will disappear. We know logically that's not possible, but deep in our heart, there's a wall of fear that when we're getting close to that last knot in the heart, it's like it does not let us through because we're afraid. 

(85:32) Lama Christie gave us another meditation. Let's do it. Perfect timing. So get refreshed. Have something to drink, stretch, do something.

(student: I do not know what is spiritual revisionism.)

Geshe-la says, when you think back at the memories of this past life, and we've had experiences that maybe we didn't like, or we resisted, or we're blaming for suffering, and we realize, oh my gosh, maybe that person was really helping me in some way, whether they knew it or not. Maybe they were really the angel coming to help me.

And then our whole relationship with our past shifts from these series of sufferings to these series of things that helped me, even though they were unpleasant.

You've already done it, I know.

Meditation: Watching Mental Images

(87:28) Okay, settle in, bring your attention to your breath.

Try to get your focus, your clarity, your intensity, eagerness for what's coming next.

So this will be an exercise in watching mental images.

First, turn your focus of attention to your right shoulder.

Focus in on it.

Maybe you can feel its curve, its shape, its location.

If you have an actual picture of it, make it be the whole visual field of your mind, focusing solely on that right shoulder. Stay on it.

Now leave your right shoulder and go to your left knee.

Take your mind down there to the left knee, so that left knee is all that's in your focus of attention. Left knee.

Now leave that and go down to your right big toe.

Zoom up close to your right big toe. Right big toe. Clear image, sensation, place.

Now keep your focus on your toe and watch your mind when you ask yourself, while I focus on my toe, where is my right shoulder?

Go back to your toe.

When I focus on my toe, do I have a left knee?

When you have a left knee, do you have a right big toe?

What happened to your shoulder?

Our mind is so sure we have a whole body.

But we can only focus on one part at a time.

And when we do, we believe all those other parts are still there, but without them arising to our awareness in some way, we can't know whether they're there or not, can we?

Shift around at your own pace, different parts of what you call your body, and be aware of the mental image that makes it a whole thing, and then makes it a part of another whole thing.

This whole complete body is put together by a mental image.

We can't actually experience it through our sensory perceptions.

We only take in information.

Now think of you through the course of this life, when you were a little school kid, teen, whatever came next.

All these experiences that make you up, they are all current moment ripenings.

They exist only in this present moment, present moment experiences called memories and no reality other than that.

And so they are real.

And they are changeable and changing.

So think of something you've recognized in this short session, whatever tiny thing, and dedicate that to becoming one who can help that other in that deep and ultimate way and then become aware of your body in your room again.

When you're ready, open your eyes, take a stretch.

(103:26) Those who are studying Mahamudra recognize that this course came long before we were learning Mahamudra. So this was like our first early efforts anyway, to be working with the recognition of how, when we focus on something that we call my left shoulder, what's showing up isn't enough actual information to make a left shoulder, but bing, there it is. And that when you're focusing on your toe, you can't also focus on your shoulder. So it's as if your shoulder is gone when you're focusing on your toe. And yet, as soon as you think ‘shoulder’, woosh, it's back there because you thought it, and you can't really establish that it's there without thinking of it. Which helps to show us that these things are mental images, and this is how well they function.

They seem really solid. Projections are solid. If I could get that through my head, it would help me.

So Lama Christie also went into some stuff about valid perceptions.

Then she pointed out that in the reading, she put in these different sections of commentaries on Samadhi Raja Sutra, and in those readings, sometimes it's Mr. Kajik talking, and sometimes it's not. If you're not aware of that, it can be confusing. It's like this seems contradictory to what they were saying before. But it's because they're pointing out the mistaken view.

One of those is when you come across in the reading and it says, the other guy says, an Arya sees that nothing exists at all and that there's no starting to things at all.

It does not explain that the mistake whoever is saying this is making is that they're mixing up what's happening to an Arya in their direct perception of emptiness and what they're experiencing once they're out of it.

We're so well-trained. We don't make that mistake. We understand, in the direct perception is when they are experiencing the absence of all existing things, and at that point, you could say there's no starting, stopping, staying, because there's just absence.

But when they come out of that direct perception of emptiness, yeah, they're in this period of time when odd things are happening, but they're still back to perceiving things out there coming at them. They're still perceiving appearing natures of things. And depending on what level Arya they are, they're still perceiving things as coming at them until 8th level Bhumi or Arya, Arhat. It's not until then that we're no longer perceiving things coming at us. We know they're not, but they still look that way.

The reason it's in the reading is so that we're careful to recognize that it might be easy to make the mistake that when we decide, whoa, things can't be happening in the worldly ways, that we won't fall over that cliff of saying, Well, then they don't really happen at all. This is all just like a dream or a movie, in which case it doesn't really matter what I do.

I find it hard for a well-trained Buddhist to fall to the, ‘It doesn't really matter’. But having said what we said about the consistency of karmic seeds ripening, and how we could wake up in the morning and our seeds that are ripening tomorrow are different enough such that our understanding of karma and emptiness is so different that maybe we don't believe it at all. Or maybe we do fall off the cliff of, well, karma and emptiness, if everything's empty, nothing matters. 

In those times, we might still have the seeds ripening and it's like, this is what I've been being taught. Like our seeds are so fragile, that's not the right word–so slippery that we could wake up tomorrow and have a completely different understanding, even after having studied, studied, studied, studied. It's scary.

It's scary to think, out of my control, but it happens. Fortunately, again, right, we're on this path, we're trying to be consistent, we're helping other people as best we can, we're doing our dedication. But watch out for each other. If somebody seems like all of a sudden they're talking crazy in their karma and emptiness, I don't know exactly what to do, right? Try to sit down with them, try to help them go through a good four powers, and see if we can get them back. But it happens. It can happen that we end up just losing the seeds for it altogether. Really, really scary thought.

How do we prevent that?

From the first thing I was talking about in class, Master Kamalashila says, grow our compassion. Grow our compassion so that our behavior changes so that our wisdom grows so that our behavior choices get more subtle so that our compassion grows that beautiful upward spiral. 

Then the major shift in our karmic seeds can be what? Not lose them. Right? Really escalate them.

She suggested that another way that we can work with this watching our mind images is when we're eating. Particularly when we're eating something that we really, really like. 

We're getting great pleasure out of that thing that we're eating, because we're so automatically believing that the object, the delicious food, has the pleasure in it. 

She says, really go slowly, eat slowly that pleasurable thing, and see if you can pinpoint the moment in time, or the moment on your tongue that triggers the pleasure from the object. First, there'll be a sensation, and then there'll be identification of the sensation, and then there'll be the I like, and then there'll be the I want more. We can really break it down in these tangible experiences that we're having, to see those mental images influencing us outside of meditation, which will help our inside meditation as well. Which it might work even better, if you take a friend and coach them through it. Because then we see ourselves helping somebody else become more aware of their mental images ripening into their liking something, and enjoying something. Because then when we try to do it, it might become more clear. It'd be the advantage if we were in person, Dharma center, we could do these fun things together. But find somebody anyway, that you can play with, even if they're not interested, it's a fun thing to do.

Okay, so you have these two meditations:

1. the mental image thing about the parts of the body, and

2. the begging for the blessings of the Lama to spend a little bit of time in both of those for your Bok Jinpa meditation. Not too bad. 

So we have seven minutes yet. Questions, comments, needs? We did finish class. 

[Dedication]

Thank you so much. I will see you next week if not sooner. Thanks again for being here. Bye-bye.

Okay, welcome back. We are Bok Jinpa Course 2 Class 4 on November 12th, 2025. 

Let's gather our minds here as we usually do. We'll do our opening prayers and then go into the first practice session. So settle yourself and bring your attention to your breath until you hear from me again.

[Class Opening]

Meditation: How to Become Able to Help Others

(7:56) Okay, so settle your body, you know how.

When you have your body all aligned, bring your attention to your breath at your nostrils. Clear focus, clear attention, fascinated attention.

Now turn your mind back to that person you want to be able to help.

It could really be anyone you know, couldn't it?

But that person you've chosen, you've chosen for a reason.

It's helpful to single out one person that we really, really care enough about to be aware of their pain, their distress, whether it's obvious or the pain of change or the pervasive. 

It's an act of love to care enough to recognize their distress, to recognize their pain.

Do you feel that the you can really do anything for them?

Many things we try, and some work and some don't.

At some level we recognize how helpless we are.

And that feeling of helplessness is unpleasant. We don't want it, we want to avoid it.

And so we have a tendency to block ourselves off from other people's pain, other beings' distress.

Now think of what you know about karma and emptiness. And think about how we can actually stop their pain.

And we recognize that this requires going through the doorway, the portal, and experiencing ultimate reality directly.

And so our helping that other really boils down to working really hard to experiencing emptiness directly for them, for their benefit, to use our opportunities well.

So think of the effort you've made in your study, contemplation, meditation, and service in the last week.

We are trying. Probably life gets in the way.

And if last week was typical for you, anticipate next week and see where can I strengthen my effort next week?

One small place.

Because that other person is in pain, is in distress, make a determination to do that one small thing dedicated towards growing your perception of ultimate reality.

And intend it to reach the direct perception of it.

And so dedicate this short session that we've done to achieving that goal, and to learning something in this class that will help you do it.

And become aware of yourself in your body, in your room, in this class.

When you're ready, open your eyes. Take a stretch. Get refreshed.

Make a note, please, of what little promise you made.

Understanding Illusion/Perception and Our Seeds Correctly

(22:12) Lama Christie said this thing that seemed really harsh to me at the time. She said, that other's pain, it's our own illusion. Our own pain is our own illusion. And we really are the only one who can stop either one, our own pain or the other's pain. We usually soften that message. It's like, no, that's their karma. I can help them change their karma–and that's accurate on a level. But in order to see them change their karma, that has to come from us. So it doesn't mean, oh, it's all illusory, so it doesn't matter, so it's not real. It's all illusion in the understanding.

The illusion means it looks like their pain comes from the degenerative arthritis in their knees. And because of that limitation, they don't get out, and then they get lonely, and then their loneliness makes them…, right?

We have a whole story that starts from one or two things, and the whole story builds. Then we might say, well, you know, really, that story, yes, they're suffering in all of those ways. But that whole story, it's coming about.

The way they experience themselves is coming from results of their past deeds.

The way I'm experiencing them is results of coming from my past deeds.

And as we say that, if we're not Arya yet, we are still holding to their arthritis in their knees as the cause of the whole business. Even as we say, no, no, it's my karma ripening for them to have arthritis that causes them pain.

There are all these different levels that we're still holding on to something being existing in some way that can be the cause of whatever the situation is. We're trying to either solve, or investigate, or just plain experience.

So when we say, you know, their pain is my illusion. It sounds like I can just say, OK, I'm going to change my illusion. And, blub, they'll be happy and pain free and they'll live forever because I love them so much and I want them to live forever.

I think kids try to do that with their parents and it doesn't work.

Then we meet Diamond Way. It's like because beings are empty, maybe they are the angel, maybe they're not. But I'm going to choose to say that they are and act towards them that way. But when you open your eyes, they still look like they have osteoarthritis in their knees. So it's a little bit distressing, because it's like my Diamond Way practice is all going on in my imagination, but my outer world still seems the same way most of the time. Every now and then some little magic happens and I get like, wow, it's really working. But, theoretically it should be that magic all the time, and nobody in pain and no suffering whatsoever.

When we use the word illusion, if we need to soften it, we can say, it's all my projection. And that's true and it's helpful. Projection means my karmic seeds ripening results of past behavior. So even as we say ‘projections’, if our deep reaction to projection means, oh, then it's like a movie or like a dream, it isn't really happening, then we're not understanding projections. Like we weren't understanding the illusion and we just tried to make it easier to live with, to say it's my projection.

Because we're in this tradition and we have the seeds to hear somebody explain it so clearly by way of the pen thing. We hear it over and over again.

Oh, it's seeds ripening and seeds ripening. In a way, it's like we drink the Kool-Aid. We say the same words, it's seeds ripening, it's seeds ripening. But then when push comes to shove and somebody does something unpleasant to us, it's like seeds ripening stays on a surface level and we're out to do something that will change that person, my reaction to that person, my experience of that person in the moment. Because we still believe that even as we say, things are nothing but projections, we don't really mean what we say there, or we don't maybe know what we were really saying.

What we were doing in previous classes in trying to look at how things that function can't really show ourselves logically that things that one thing there that causes another thing to change in some way is impossible.

Then it's one thing to say, can the pen write on the paper? And we'll go into it in greater detail in a moment.

But it's another thing to say, can I, me, cause a change in something else? Because I want to become one who can stop that other suffering, I have to be able to change something either about myself or about them or about something.

If I can't effect a change, what the heck are we doing? Why bother?

So, of course, the moral to the story is not that, oh, there's no suffering, so there's nothing we need to do. The moral to the story about how things don't function the way we believe they do, the moral to the story of that is, they do function by way of illusion. 

But do you see what our mind does? It's like, well, illusion means they don't function. 

But illusion means by way of the mental image that arises within our mind into this experience of me experiencing that.

So when we understand then that everything we experience is illusory in the sense that it's not in it, from it the way we think, it's not coming from the thing that happened the moment before, or even from the worldly kinds of causes that maybe weren't the moment before, but some other time before, none of those things can be the actual cause of whatever change has just happened–whether we wanted to make it happen or whether it happened to us, either way.

We're looking at that relationship between one thing affecting another thing to bring about a third thing and whether that is possible in the way that we believe.

The two ways we looked at that was could one existing thing affect another existing thing by contacting? Like that's how it would have to happen, wouldn't it?

But then we look to see can you ever actually find the moment they contact and we go, logically they can't, but I see that they do. That's where we hit that wall because we still have this deep belief that seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, I'm going to say even thinking, makes things real.

But wait, that's what we're saying, aren't we? Seeds make things real. But not the sensory perception, right?

We think, seeing is believing, and that gets in the way of understanding projections. Because projections seem more nebulous, more pretend like a movie, like a mirage, like all those illusions that we've studied in Diamond Cutter Sutra and more recently from Samadhi Raja Sutra.

Others’ Distress is Our Seeds, Not Theirs

As our understanding of emptiness and dependent origination goes deeper, we find, we recognize that the more subtle levels that we're still holding on to, things having some kind of nature in their own. All right, not completely it. We've got that one. But there has to be. Because otherwise this thing could be a banana and it can't because it's either a pen there or it's not there, but that logic is incorrect.

So it doesn't matter so much what level we're on yet. Master Kamalashila is teaching us this skill of how to investigate when we're in the position where we find ourselves blaming something or somebody for what's going on because in that moment, we're believing that me is here, independent, they are there, independent, and what they're doing to me is hurtful or unpleasant or whatever. 

So there's that big misunderstanding factor that my unpleasantness is being caused by what they are doing–whether it's a they person or a they the pen? What if the pen (holding up a pen), it's leaking and I know it's going to make a mess and then I'm going to blame the pen for making a mess. So we're not just talking other people, we're talking our own distress here.

Then any distress we can see in another is the same process happening. We just have this third factor going on. Instead of just me, other, the interaction is with me, we've got me, other, and what's happening to them that I'm seeing, that I'm getting distressed about because they've got distress.

Maybe I can see that they're distressed because they're blaming that other. I understand, well, really, it's their seeds for that. But really, it's my seeds for them to see that. And until we change our seeds, there's no real amount of saying to them, look at your seeds, it's your seeds, change, change, you change, you change. Because maybe they try everything to change, but if my seeds don't change, I'm going to see the same thing happening to them.

Whoa, that's like personal responsibility big time. But we're in Mahayana, we're claiming, I want to reach Buddhahood for the sake of all sentient beings. That means reaching this state of deep understanding that it's my seeds.

How do my seeds become my seeds?

They're imprints, they are what happens when this (pointing to herself) perceives its subject side interacting with an object side, and that interaction gets complete, that mind, this mind has been aware of all of that, and it's been influenced by all of that. It's continuing to be influenced, of course, by the next one, and the next one, and the next one. And that awareness of it has shifted this mind stream in such a way that sooner or later, it will experience itself receiving something similar to what it had been aware of itself doing.

So we understand that analogy, what I see myself thinking, doing, saying towards others is going to come back to me. As we're learning about it, we're thinking about it, actually in the wrong way.

We have to, to get to the conclusion. But sooner or later, we need to come back to recognize that actually, that whole system, I'm thinking of it wrongly also, right?

We will come to see that that process of karmic seeds planted and ripened must also lack self-nature, lack its own existence.

It's like, what? How can that be? Because that's the foundation of everything. It has to be solid enough that I can stand on it to live according to it. It'll hold us back to not eventually investigate that as well. So that's down the road.

But our conclusion, I'm still trying to get to that conclusion of recognizing that that other's pain is my projections because our conclusion could be, oh my gosh, I'm so bad. I'm never going to be able to get through this. I give up. And we don't want that.

But rather the conclusion is, oh my gosh, then I want to be as kind as I can be. Don't say perfectly kind, because probably we won't be able to do that. And we don't really even know what perfectly kind is yet, but as kind as we can. Maybe push the bar because we understand that kindness, to receive kindness is pleasant.

So when our own conclusion is be kind, not just because somebody said so, or it's the right thing to do. But because that's how we create a reality in which it's pleasant for everybody, not just us.

We're trying to get to this place where when we say, Oh, that's nothing but a projection–our next domino to fall is, so I love it. I want to be kind. I want to help. I want to give. I'd like to just reach into it.

Who wants to do that when the boss is yelling at us? I'm not saying do that when the boss is yelling. Be like the bump on a log for a little while if you need to.

But as we're growing our wisdom, the way we know it's really going deep enough to affect us is when we see ourselves reacting.

When we intellectually say, yes, I know it's my seeds ripening. That the next impulse is, how can I help? What can I do? As opposed to, oh yeah, it's my seeds ripening, but this is unpleasant. I'm going to act in this way instead of that way. 

You see, it's just shades of reacting with wisdom.

The closer we are getting to when we say illusion, or projection, or seeds ripening, we automatically think, kindness. We know we're getting so much closer to that ability of experiencing that ultimate reality directly.

These Bok Jinpa courses are trying to help us build the foundation of our ability to concentrate and the foundation of the different tools in meditation and out of meditation to apply, to help our reasoning, to grow that domino between ‘it's my seeds ripening’ and kindness. 

(42:18) We're trying to reach a certainty that function can only happen as an illusion.

My own mind already did it. Whip. Illusion is opposite of function. Function can only happen by way of projection. Our task is to watch our mind when it says, no, no, that's not possible. Changing things have to be there to affect other things. The other thing has to be there. We've been through it.

The scripture always says, look, if things existed in them, from them in the way we think, they could never change, which means they could never do anything, which means they could never have an effect on anything else.

In which case we would all be just frozen in non-function. And again, is that when you hear, Oh, something that is self-existent can't change.

It is your automatic, like next domino to fall, Duh.

Or is your next domino to fall? Wait, why? How come if something's self-existent, it can't do anything?

I remember being in that for years. It's like, wait a minute. Of course, a thing that has its own identity can have the ability to affect something else.

If this object (holding up a pen) has no identity at all, how is it that I can pick it up and write with it? Come on. It has to have an identity of being a pen. Otherwise I'd pick it up, peel it and eat it. And I don't, right? I do this with it (simulating writing).

We know all the logic. Well, if this identity is in it, then I couldn't tie my hair up with it. And if I had long enough hair, I could. I couldn't block the door from closing, because that's not what a pen with its writing in it does.

If it was in it, from it, it would–I almost said, it would decide whether it would tie my hair up or stop the door–but even that wouldn't be possible, would it?

Because for it to decide, hey, I'm going to let her use me as a hair tie,something has to affect it. To be a self-existent thing means nothing can affect it.

So if we use that as our definition of a self-existent thing, is there anything that's self-existent in our world?

We already know everything depends on something else. So it's like, we really don't believe in self-existent things that can't change. But every time I pick up this pen, my own mind goes, there's the same pen. Which implies I think it hasn't changed, or I'm holding it in my mind in some way that it hasn't changed, even though intellectually, I know it's older than it was a moment ago. It has a little less ink in it because I used it. I intellectually know that. But my feeling when I go for this object is, oh, that pen, there it is, same pen. This one pen. Even as I know it's going to be destroyed someday.

We do that as ignorant beings. I do that as ignorant being with everything. I believe that everything in my world is out there. And yes, the way I experience it is unique to me, but come on, it's still out there.

As we analyze, looking deeper and deeper, we can come to see that the misunderstanding in that belief, because we can never confirm those things that I think are out there that I'm not directly perceiving now.

I've got this bookcase between me and my bed, but I know my bed is over there.

It's like truly, Highest Middle Way would say you don't actually know. But does it mean like there's a big black hole beyond my peripheral vision?

No, we're not supposed to live in this free fall of nothing exists at all.

But how cool would it be to live in that all potentiality of every moment's emptiness? Anything could be anything at any moment.

I'm getting to the punchline too fast.

So we're trying to not just prove these things that we've been working on for a long time. We're trying to watch how our reaction to the proof is showing us where we're still resistant to the logical conclusion being a conclusion we really buy into.

You remember in debate, it's like you prove to something to somebody, and then they still go, no. I'm not going to. I can't do that. Then you prove it again, and they go, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, no. It's like you finally say, I can't debate with a crazy person.

We do the same thing with ourselves. Yeah, I understand the pen has no nature of its own. And then the dog chews on the pen and destroys that. What'd you do, destroy my pen? It's like the crazy person not accepting the conclusion of the debate.

What's the conclusion of the debate always? Oh, so I want to be more kind. Because the end result is always seeds ripening, seeds being made. And so we reach this point where it's like the only thing that's important is what seeds I plant. The way I plant my seeds is how I interact, that state of heart I have as I'm interacting, what I perceive as other, whether the other is a rock or a bug or a Lama or what. Okay. 

The Emptiness of Things –The Proof of One or Many

(49:51) This class is about shifting from the emptiness of function to the emptiness of things, the emptiness of the thing itself. And it's like, whoa, good. We're familiar with that one, right? It's the pen and the puppy. We get that.

But master Kamalashila says, look, when we're looking at the emptiness of things, we take all things and divide them into two categories, physical things and non-physical things.

Then in non-physical things, he says, mostly let's talk about consciousness because that's the most important non-physical thing to study, to look at.

Then he says, if we're going to logically look at the things’, objects’ natures, true natures, we need to pick some quality of the thing to look for in the thing.

He says, you can pick any quality you want. Then we learn in logic class, that the way you pick a quality is that you pick a quality that clearly has itself and its opposite so that you can look. Then when you establish the thing either exists like this, or it exists like that there, you don't have to go looking for anything in between because it's already established. Either things are all red or they're not all red, is how one might examine for something's quality of redness being in it.

He says, let's investigate anything or all existing things by way of whether they are singular or multiple. 

If we have a physical thing, it either exists as a singular thing or a multiple thing, and there's no in between, right? You can't have singular and a half, that's multiple.

So he says, then you would go through this analysis of whether the thing that you are looking for its’ self nature, whether we can establish it as a singular thing with that self nature or not.

And if we can't find it as a singular thing, do we find it as a multiple thing?

We might start by picking any existing thing. Lama Christie used a book, so I'll pull out a book too. One of my faves.

So here's a book. Is this one book? (holding up a book) Yeah, one book.

Now, can we say it's a singular thing? Can we say it's one thing?

Why not? Look at all of this. It has a front, it has a back, it has a certain number of pages. So can it be a singular thing, if it requires, depends upon all these pages to make it a book.

Even if it was a one page book, the shortest sutra is like a few lines. I forget, I think it was Subhutii. Subhuti asks, what's the fastest way or the quickest way to reach wisdom? And Lord Buddha says something like, Ah.  That's the sutra. It's like, realize Ah.

Even if that were between a front cover and a back cover, you'd have a book. But it's a book depending upon having that one page.

Then if we say, well, okay, so multiple one pages makes up a one book. Because multiple one pages don't make it that we have whatever it is, 200 books here, we only have one book. But it can't be a singular thing if it depends upon having other stuff in it, to make it a singular thing. It can't be a singular thing in it, from it.

Can it be a singular thing depending upon 162 pages?

But then if a book is a singular thing based on 162 pages, every book would have to have 162 pages. More than that, it would be something other than a book. Less than that, it wouldn't be a book yet. If we decide that a book exists because of 162 pages. 

Can there be a book with 162 pages? Of course, here it is. If that's how many there are, I made that up.

We're working with this subtlety of our mind that believes, yes, there's one book here. In it, from it, everybody recognizes it as a book. When technically we would say at a more accurate level, no, no, it appears to be one book, but it's a book dependent upon all its pages.

Then that's not quite enough either, and so we might go looking further.

Like, what is it that establishes a page being a page?

Is it a certain number of lines? Yes, according to the size of the page.

Then what about the sentence itself? Is the sentence, a sentence in it, from it, or does it depend on a certain number of words put together in a certain order?

Then even doesn't that, those words in the sentence depend upon who's reading them to have the meaning that they say?

I could pick up a book that's written in Tibetan and it would be meaningless for me. So there's nothing in the words, in the sentence, or in the squiggles in the ink. There can't be their identities in them and me experience them in the way that I do.

But our mind goes, well, of course they have their identities in them so that I can experience them in the way that we do. That's old worldview, that we're trying to recognize in our logical rundown as we do it either in meditation or contemplation. 

Letting our Kachik mind go, no but, no but, and address every one of those no buts with the ramification of what would happen experientially if the no but was true.

So if the no but, this is a one book, everybody would see this thing as a one book, wouldn't they? No but… Because everybody doesn't see this as one book.

Who doesn't? The fly, the dog, the infant human doesn't even see it as a book until they're some age and then they can.

All different ways that we can show ourselves that our resistance to the logical conclusion that comes up and we can show by our own experience in life that our holding to what we believe is true that the logic is negating. We can show that there's a circumstance in life that disproves our Yeah-but.

That's what puppy pen was teaching us.

If in going looking for a singular thing, we keep going down in the things that must be there to make it a singular thing and we are able to keep dividing that thing that we're looking at as proof that the book is singular and we can divide that in some way, we will eventually reach the conclusion. It's like there's no such thing as a singular thing, because you can never get to a teeniest first atom of physicalness that we can't split into this side, that side, up or down.

Which means, if we can't find one single thing that is a single thing, you can't have a great big thing that is a single thing either.

So the point of the divide it, divide it, divide it, divide it is to come to recognize like there isn't anything in the existing world that's not dividable–either in a physical way or in a time way. When we look at it in terms of a moment of book, there's the first moment, the middle moment, the last moment. Which moment are we actually experiencing?

Okay, let's say we're experiencing the middle moment now, because here it still is (the book).

Well, there's a beginning of the middle, the middle of the middle, the end of the middle.

Okay, no, no, no, we're now, we're now, we're now, this moment.

You can keep dividing it such that where we will come to recognize, there's nothing to hold on to, nothing at all.

That's actually a doorway into ultimate reality. But it's also a gate to where we may go, argh, scary–and then it throws us back out.

So as we do this again and again and again, intellectually, it helps us reach that point where scary or eager, scary or eager, and we can work with that feeling as well to help prepare ourselves for when the event gets triggered by seeing the seeds ripen. 

Remember, when you see those seeds ripen, go on and jump on your meditation cushion, wherever you are, and give your mind that opportunity to get pushed, to push itself into that direct experience.

(68:48) Then Master Kamalashila shares, when we can prove to ourself that there's, that it's impossible to have a singular thing in it, in and of itself, then that reveals that there's no such thing as multiple things either, because multiple things by definition are things that are made up of more than one singular thing.

To have four pens means I have to have four different single pens to come together to have a group of four pens. Right?

So if there's no such thing as a singular pen, how can there be such a thing as four pens or a group of pens?

It's such a simple logic that it's almost amusing. Yet, if you investigate, investigate, investigate, it will keep holding up.

We keep looking for the thing that is multiple in it, from it, because there's lots of things there.

What things are there?

Again, we're not saying, nothing exists at all. There are a left sock and a right sock, and together they are my socks. But they are not my socks in them, from them. Which makes their true nature be… It’s hard.

Their true nature is emptiness and dependent origination. 

You can't say, there have to be socks there before I can know the emptiness of the socks, although experientially you kind of have to do it that way.

But there can't be socks there before there's the emptiness of the socks, because to have socks you've got their emptiness. And there can't be an emptiness there that the socks come out of, because then that emptiness would have to be a changing thing and it would have to be influenced by something. There is no lack of self-existence until there's something that we think is self-existent.

Actually, I said that wrong. There's no lack, there's no self, there's no emptiness until there's an appearing thing. But there's no appearing thing without emptiness.

So although our logical minds are logical, our ignorant minds think sequentially. It blocks our ability to understand this concept. Because dependent origination, appearing side, seeds ripening, and emptiness, we can't help but think of them as these two different things that are somehow interacting.

We're trying to get to the place where that's not our interpretation of the words anymore. We're trying to get to where our interpretation of when we think of appearances, we know emptiness. And when we think of emptiness, we know there have to be appearances. You can't have one without the other.

Singular and multiple physical things, we can show to ourselves, cannot exist in the way that we believe they do, which is in them from them. When we take that supposedly existing thing, and show ourselves that it can't exist in that way, we do it by continuing to split it, divide it, trying to find the thing that it's made up of. And we find this conclusion that's like, oh my gosh, there is no foundation of existence, as I just said.

Then we want to reach that recognition that there's no root essence to anything, whether we think they're singular, or we think they're multiple, or we think they're nice, or we think they're not nice. But there's no root existence of it, because as long as we're believing that there is, then we still have something that we can blame for our experience of it.

If there's this shred of something that can be in it that makes the leaky pen the leaky pen, then I'm going to blame the leaky pen for the mess that it makes. It's like big deal, that's not hurting anybody. But it is, it's perpetuating my ignorance, and that's perpetuating the pain of that person, that I'm saying I want to reach emptiness directly fast enough to stop their pain sooner.

You see, so it is worth digging into these things, even though it seems like just semantics, and logic, and words, because as we do, we're chipping away at our belief that no, no, there is something in our material world that makes it the way it is, other than our behavior.

In the reading, they say, the idea of being a singular thing, or multiple things, is compared to viewing an image in the mirror.

When you're looking at yourself in the mirror, is that person in the mirror singular or multiple?

Trick question, there is no person in the mirror, there's just a reflection of a person in the mirror. There's no person there. So they can't be singular or multiple in them, from them, because they're not there at all.

But does that mean, oh, my person who I want to stop their suffering, there's no person there?

No, wrong conclusion.

But why? Why isn't it the same thing?

Is that person whose pain is in them, from them, there?

No, that's like the reflection in the mirror.

Is the one my seed's making me see, person there with pain? Are they there?

Absolutely.

So when they say something nasty to me, all of a sudden, their nastiness is in them, from them, right? Because I care about them. What are they doing being nasty to me? I'm nice to them.

That's coming from them, right? Yeah, they say it. Come on, it is too coming from them. 

No, it's not.

The person in the mirror, are they singular? Are they multiple? Are they nice? Or are they nasty?

Neither one, they're not a person there.

But wait, then what's there?

A person who's hurting, and so they said something nasty.

Whose reflection is it anyway?

(Ourselves) Yeah.

But it's not the conclusion we come to, is it? When we're trying to be so nice, so nice, so nice, and then they blast us with a nasty and it happens, doesn't it?

We can hold there no self existence while they're accepting our niceness and liking us. 

But then even if it's not that person, but we turn to another person and they blast us, all of a sudden all ‘that's my seeds ripening’ kind of falls away for a little while anyway. 

We're learning.

Lama Christie says, the things we think we see around us don't exist in the way that we think we see them. We get that. She says, so they are neither singular nor multiple from their own side. Because they don't have an own side. It's like the person in the reflection.

None of us can have anything from our own side because our own side is no such thing. 

That might be helpful to put that one on. Like we're blaming things when there's no such thing. That's no such thing. The person is there. Even the words they're saying are there, but the in them, from them, no such thing. That might help us.

We learn in this tradition that there's a phrase, it's like a mantra, that if we relate well to, Tibetan as a foreign language, it might help us. It's this sentence that says,

TANYE TAKPE TAKDUN TSELWAY TSENA MINYE

We learned it in some other class. I don't remember which one. So for good measure, repeat after me. 

TANYE TAKPE TAKDUN TSELWAY TSENA MINYE

One more time. 

TANYE TAKPE TAKDUN TSELWAY TSENA MINYE

TANYE TAKPE TAKDUN TSELWAY TSENA MINYE

Oral transmission given. It means when we go looking for the thing that gets the label, we won't find it.

TANYE TAKPE TAKDUN TSELWAY TSENA MINYE

Exactly.

When we go looking for the label.

TSELWAY = to look

TAKDUN = this labeled thing we're looking for

The thing we're looking for.

TANYE MINYE = we'll never find it

MINYE = we won't find

We've done this with multiple things. We look for the pen that's in it, from it. We find this thing with parts.

Then we look at what part makes it depend. Well, not this part, not that part. We keep going down looking for the thing that gets the label.

We don't ever find nothing. We always find something more subtle that our mind is taking information and conceptualizing into a thing.

Here's information. (Holding up a pen) This isn't a good example. It's too shiny. That's a little better. You can kind of see a tip anyway, right?

So for this to be a pen, we take information. It gets the label pen. We've learned that. 

Then, when we go down looking, well, what is it? How much of this did it take for my mind to give it pen?

We go looking and it's like, okay, this is the clip of the pen. Maybe it was the clip. But then to identify this thing as the clip, I need to have all these different aspects of this thing to come up with clip. Then we keep going down, down, down, down. When we keep dividing or not dividing, when we go looking for what's there that my label is going on to, we just find something more subtle that gets the label at that level.

So if we were to go all the way down, you could never stop going all the way down.

But finally you'll go, okay, enough already. I get the picture. There's not nothing. There's just always information that my mind is making something out of. And then that also gets made into something else, and that gets made into something bigger, and that gets made.

That explains me and my life, me and my world.

There's nothing that we can experience that's not information getting the label. But then we're still thinking the information there is first, and then the label goes onto it. And as we're describing how it happens, it still seems to happen that way, right?

Geshe Michael says, there's the pot on the stove. Then you actually see the overlay whole pot going onto the information. But to describe the experience, you have to start somewhere. So we start from the data and then recognize that somehow that information is given, somehow we become aware of that information. But it's not enough information to be something yet, to be an experience yet. And our mind takes the information and gives it some kind of identity. Then we interact with that identity at whatever level we are working at.

In our outer world, off-cushion time, we're interacting with the world from all of our sensory perception information that we mistake for being the label in the thing. We mistake the identity as being the object.

We think the object has declared its identity to us. We don't recognize that all I got was information and it was my mind that declared the identity. That's what we're trying to get to. TANYE TAKPE TAKDUN is this method of checking. When I call it that, what is it when I'm calling that? We're going to do an exercise.

Exercise: How our Mind Labels Things

(86:45) Here it is right now. Lama Christie took us through an exercise, not in meditation, but then later we did it in meditation in this same class. I'm not sure I'll have enough time. 

But we can do this one with our eyes open watching.

We were all there together with her and she had a meditation table, or a scripture table in front of her. It was yellow. She pulled it up over her legs. She had this little low table in front of her.

She told us, imagine you have this low table in front of you, but I'm going to do it this way so you don't have to imagine. You are looking at your computer screen. I'm assuming that your screen looks kind of like my screen. It's this rectangular thing and it's got a lot of rectangular little boxes that's got people's faces inside it. Then above the top, there are a bunch of squiggly things. Along the bottom, there are a bunch of other squiggly things. But as I'm looking at it, I'm seeing my computer screen. In front of it is the, what do you call it? The keyboard. You are probably having a similar experience.

Look at the experience that you're having. Recognize your mind identifying it: I'm looking at my computer screen with the zoom going. I can see the keyboard, although I'm not focusing on the keyboard. Maybe I can also see things in my peripheral vision, but for the purpose of this exercise, I want you to focus on your screen. Got it?

Now what we want to do is see if we can recognize the difference between the information our eyes are getting and the identity of the object we're looking at.

Okay, so I just primed you. You are looking at your computer screen. I gave you the label, right? I didn't need to. You were doing it already. But I did it in such a way that reinforced, I'm so sorry, all of our beliefs that what we're looking at is a computer screen in it. from it. 

Can you set aside that label ‘computer screen’ and try to witness what your eyes are giving you? We need to impose it, right?

Pretend I don't know computer screen, it's really hard, and just watch what your eyes are doing towards that object.

My object's quite big, so I'm feeling my eyeballs doing this, going all around, because they can't see the whole thing at once. If we say, well, I can unfocus and not look at the screen, and then I can kind of see the whole thing at once. But even if I say so, therefore I can see the whole thing at once, and I check, I realize, no, I'm still not seeing the whole thing at once.

So can you show yourself that your eyeballs cannot see a computer screen?

They can see something rectangular with other lines and colors, but without your awareness, without your label going on to that information, the eyeballs can't identify stuff.

It's difficult to do with our eyes open. If we're doing this as a meditation with our eyes closed, then it's hard to do because you don't really have a visual object. If you're a visualizer, you can do it pretty well, maybe. You visualize your screen in front of you and then show yourself that you can't really see it. But it's not as powerful as when you do it with your eyes open to try to show yourself that what we think our eyes are doing is impossible.

We think our eyes show us computer screen. But they can't. It's our mind showing us computer screen. Now experientially, we get the information and then we put on the label. I think ultimately, maybe it's not sequential like that.

She took us down further. I'm not going to do all of it. She said, when you recognize your mind is putting on the label ‘computer screen’, and your eyeballs were only able to take in information, what information were they taking in? She took us through the lines of the table and the color of the table. I would do that with your computer.

What makes a rectangle a rectangle?

Is my eyeball showing me rectangle, or is my eyeball just showing me two lines, equal distance, two lines, equal distance, and my mind says, oh, rectangle?

Then we could zero in on just one of those sides. It's like, well, what makes it a line standing upright that that's long?Can the eyeball see that?

If it could, then I could shut off my mind and still know that's the left side of my computer screen. But I can't. If that's all I were to look at, is that black, narrow strip, and that's all I was getting from my eyeball. Would there be enough in that to come to the conclusion, oh, left side of my computer screen?

No, it's just a strip of black color if color is black.

This example of using what we see shows us, first of all, how quickly we rely on visual information and then automatically fall into the belief that what our eyeballs are showing us actually includes the thing's identity, when we can show ourselves logically that that's impossible. Because without the consciousness of the eye, the eyeball doesn't.

If we keep looking more and more subtly, what is it that the eyeball really gets?

We might say photons. But like, which photon in which moment? And is it the first moment the photon hits my retina? Or is it the second moment that makes the eyeball see the thing that becomes the computer screen?

You can still divide it, divide it, divide it.

Technically our eyeballs aren't doing anything. We don't need eyeballs to see.

Buddhas see from every part of their being, because they're omniscient.

That's what part of what it is to be omniscient. They still have eyeballs, probably so we can relate to them when we as Bodhisattvas go visit.

But eyeballs don't see, ears don't hear. Why do we have them then?

Lama said, you can do this kind of investigation with any of the sensory inputs.

We've done it in Mahamudra, we do it with hearing.

Then she said, you could technically do it with smell. As long as you have a series of odors happening that you could, she said she's never done it that way. I haven't either.

You can do it with taste as we're eating. I like the tactile. I think we've gone through that together in class. When I'm in meditation, what is it that I'm really feeling? I can only go a couple of levels before I run out of mental words to describe and I can go, oh, I get it, I think. And then start talking about it again.

(97:11) So we're in this nebulous place then, where we've just shown ourselves that our eyeballs don't do what we think that they do, so that they can do what we think that they do. But they don't actually do that. Which means, are there really any physical things at all?

If everything depends on our label, which is a mental thing, to be the thing that we interact with, are there any physical things? Yes, as labels.

But are they really physical things? Yes, as labels.

But are they physical things from them the way we thought? No, not at all, impossible.

So there are physical things by way of our label, physical thing, pen, physical thing. We don't have to say the word, it's inherent in the identity of the object. When we say, oh, pen, it has everything about pen, is included in that. Name and term is the way we learn it. It's not in the TANYE TAKPE TAKDUN, it's a different phrase. But pen, pens write, have ink. What else is in pen? A whole string of stories, yeah. 

Then, now included in pen, like you can't look at a pen without some part of your mind going, chew toy, right? Because we've imprinted it that way. So now pen story includes chew toy for us, where maybe it didn't before. Same for other things. But does that mean that this physical reality has a physical reality the way we used to believe it did? No.

So this pen is a mental thing?

No. It's a ripening as a physical thing, but it is not a physical thing. So its ripening can be used as a physical thing. But it's all mental labels. Those are all mental things.

Now, who and what is doing that? And that's where Kamalashila goes next.

He says, we've just investigated physical things. If we prove to ourselves that one physical thing cannot have its identity and qualities in it, it in fact relies upon the qualities and identity given to it by the observer. If we prove that for one thing, and multiple things are made up of lots of one things, then we've proved it for any multiple thing as well. Which means you only have to prove it for one thing, and you don't have to prove it for everything.

We probably have to reprove it to ourselves over and over in order to live by it. But you don't have to personally investigate every existing thing before you can be convinced of the fact that nothing has any nature of its own. We can do it for one thing and then it will apply to everything because everything's made up of multiple one things. Got it?

The Emptiness of Mental Things, like Consciousness

(101:10) Then he says, so let's look at mental things. The most important mental thing to think about is our own consciousness.

So if we think about the five heaps, the fifth heap is all the different kinds of awareness that I possess. Consciousness, awareness, we're using that terms synonymously, I guess. Then we have the eye consciousness, the ear consciousness.

In those consciousnesses, we have the mental consciousness, we have the mind. But all of them are consciousnesses, they are all mind. I guess this term ‘mind’, I find is so imprecise, which is uncharacteristic of our school, which has precise definitions for everything. And then you get this mind, and they use it in all these different weird ways. I haven't figured it out quite yet.

So when we are investigating our consciousness, we want to investigate the emptiness of our consciousness. We have to first recognize the GAKJA of our consciousness.

How is it that we believe our consciousness has a nature of its own? 

Ordinarily, we say to have a nature of its own means it has an identity in it, from it. And it's kind of like, yeah, but my consciousness is in me, from me. So I can't really use those words and get to the right conclusion.

But then they say, I have to find it in my notes, because I need to quote it. So okay, so he says, all right, 

If we're going to investigate consciousness as the example of the mental thing, to find out whether mental things have some nature of their own or not, we would need to divide consciousness somehow so that we can investigate it, and find that if it doesn't work like that, it can't work the other way either, in the same way that we said singular or multiple.

So he said, let's just use that division. Is our consciousness, a singular thing, or multiple things? It seems like a weird thing to apply to our consciousness. Just like in your heart, when you say my consciousness, do you think of it as one thing? Or do you think of it as many things?

Kind of one thing, right? It's my consciousness.

But then, wait a minute, right? Is it ever the same two moments in a row?

No, it kind of implies that we're thinking that there's a consciousness that belongs to me–that's a different story, the me, a consciousness that belongs to me–that's there before anything appears to it.

That would be a consciousness that has its own nature. There could be a time when there's nothing appearing to it, and there's still some kind of consciousness there.

But if nothing is appearing to your consciousness, could you even establish that there was consciousness there?

No. Because if we could, then what would be appearing to our consciousness would be some consciousness. We would have to be aware of consciousness to say, there's consciousness there before anything else is appearing to it.

But guess what? Consciousness appeared to it.

So we can't even conceive of a state of there being consciousness without anything appearing to it. The reason we can't conceive it, because it's impossible. Which is curious, because we can conceive of the person in the mirror, and then, oops, no such thing.

We can conceive of the jerk boss hurting my feelings, even though there's no such thing.

But when it comes to our own mind, it's like really hard to wrap our mind around the impossibility of a consciousness without something appearing to it. Because deep down we want there to be one.

He says, of course, consciousness cannot be singular, because it's showing itself to us in all of these forms around us. Billions and billions of forms. The way that's worded is really precise.

Our consciousness cannot be a singular thing, because it's showing itself to us in all these different forms around us.

This is very Mind Only School, isn't it? Mind Only School says, everything is mind. We cannot experience anything outside of our mind. And we tend to think at first, that means I'm experiencing everything inside here, because I think my mind is limited to inside here. But that's not true. My mind is not stuck inside here as much as it feels like it is.

Every experience I have is movement of the mind and what it motivates. I'm experiencing all of you. That's all my mind looking like you, and that's what makes you real, and that's what makes each of you unique. And each of you unique to me.

So my mind really is not limited. We did that in a recent class. I don't remember where. The qualities of mind, it's infinite. Remember those? What was that? Infinite, pure. I can't remember. There were five of them, six of them? Anyway.

Everything we experience is our own mind. But we hear those words and we understand them incorrectly, because that means there's nothing but me, and that's wrong, because me also is part of all of that ripening.

So he's saying, if you think your mind is a singular thing, it can't be, because everything that you experience is that mind, my word, shapeshifting, seeds ripening.

But don't we think, I think when I hear the word seed ripening, it feels like, okay, I've got this, I don't know, bubble, that's mind, and the seed goes bloop. And then there's subject and there's me object and the interaction between. And I think it's something that's taking place outside of this consciousness that I'm conscious of.

It's like, that takes me way back to, okay, that means a thing that's in it, from it, even if I'm perceiving it unique to me, it's still in it, from it.

That's how illogical we are. We say, I know it's my seeds ripening, all the while we're still saying, ripening into that. Not saying, well, look what's going on now.

The ‘seeds ripening happening’ explanation is getting more accurate, but it doesn't seem very functional when we're out in our real world to just keep ing-ing being the verb.

Just look into your room. Master Kamalashila is saying, my consciousness is the tree, the street, the neighborhood, the temperature, the time. It's all consciousness doing that.

Is it one consciousness or is it multiple consciousnesses?

Kind of trick question, right? It's not the consciousness sitting there and then doing that. It's what's happening. It's so difficult.

Yes, we have consciousness, but is it a consciousness?

Finally, we found the thing that we can rely on, my consciousness. Yeah, and which one is that? The one that looks like the tree right now, me seeing tree right now? The one that looks like me seeing Nancy right now? Which one is it? Will the real me please stand up.

But can you ever find a moment when you're not, when the consciousness is not have a ripening? Is it possible for no ripening to happen?

No, it's impossible. If it happened, how could you know it?

And so the fact that we're here means it can't be the case that our mind could stop appearing.

So mind appearing could be another way of saying movement of the mind and what it motivates, which is another way of saying karma, which is another way of saying dependent origination, which is the appearing nature of every moment of experience that must also have its empty nature to be whatever that experience is by the subject side of the ripening. You with me?

Master Kamalashila is helping us investigate for the GAKJA of our consciousness, the one that's there before anything appears to it, impossible. And so it's true nature, this constant shape-shifting of influences made by what the subject side perceives itself doing towards the object side in every moment, that's part of the projection.

Again, it leads us to that recognition of what really is meant by karma, even to the extent you could end up proving karma when we understand this sequence of consciousness that we think has its own nature, recognizing that that's impossible because it depends upon whatever is arising for the nature at the moment.

And the what's arising is a result of past influence by what it experienced before going, backwards from the moment.

Going forward means in any experience, the influence, the next experience, and I can't say that the now experience influences that consciousness in such a way that a future now experience will be the way it is driven by how I responded before, which means how I respond now is crucial.

It's like the only important thing is how we interact now with technically our own consciousness, because everything is our own movement of the mind and what it motivates.

So as we're interacting with that other person whose suffering is such that we want to help them stop it. Technically, we're interacting with our own consciousness, our own mind appearing to us as them with their suffering and that makes them very real. Our seeds ripening is reality. Projections are reality.

They always have been. There's never been a self-existent reality. We've always believed that there has been and so we act to protect this me, whereas it's always been mistaken.

As we get familiar with this identity, identifying with the process happening–my words, not Lama Christie's–we see more clearly how we are changing moment by moment and that technically this moment of now is our only reality, and we don't really even know who or what we were before we woke up this morning.

Like all of our memory of who I was before, it's all part of this current moment ripening. When we plant a seed, I hand the pen to you. It's not limited to getting a pen back. Included in that is the whole story ‘me’ and included in getting the pen back will be a whole story ‘me’, but it won't be the same story because I've changed, and we understand little by little I change, little by little I change.

Okay, but technically in every moment there's the opportunity or potential to change drastically, and one of the times that happens is a time that we end up calling dying. You've got these moments of consciousness where you're alive and then different ripenings we call bardo and rebirth. But it was just one to the next. Similarly, this (meaning ourselves), we could go one to the next and perceive ourselves as totally enlightened with the same like (snapping fingers) it did as going from this life to dead.

We could go from this life to totally enlightened and we hear it and we go, man, may it be true. And then something inside says, nah, not likely. Right? And maybe that's true. Maybe that's not. Because that result will still be a result of incredible kindness, merit, wisdom planted, and maybe our current moment ripening includes the thought, I haven't made enough merit yet to do that. Even if we're not thinking that clearly in our head, if our moment by moment ripening is, I am a suffering being, then included in that is, I'm suffering too much to be totally enlightened in an instant. But there will be some instant from this one to that one where you shift.

All right. I didn't finish all of class. Yikers. What am I going to do? Okay. I'll see what I have to do. 

Dedication

Remember that person we wanted to be able to help.

Can you think of them a little differently?

How it is that by doing this class, we have started contributed to the end of their suffering. Like, are they more real or less real when you think of them now as your unique experience of them?

Do you feel more able to help? Or less able?

We've created a great goodness. So, please be happy with yourself and think of this goodness like a beautiful glowing gemstone you can hold in your hands.

Recall your own precious holy being. See how happy they are with you.

They see your glimpses. They see your ahas.

Feel your gratitude to them, your reliance upon them.

Ask them to please, please stay close to continue to guide you, help you, inspire you. 

And then offer them this gemstone of goodness.

See them accept it and bless it, and they carry it with them right back into your heart. 

See them there. Feel them there. Their love, their compassion, their wisdom.

It feels so good, we want to keep it forever.

And so, we know to share it

By the power of the goodness that we've just done

May all beings complete the collection of merit and wisdom

And thus gain the two ultimate bodies that merit and wisdom make.

Use those three long exhales to share this goodness with that one person, to share it with everyone you love, to share it with every existing being everywhere.

See them all filled with loving kindness, filled with wisdom.

And may it be so.

We didn't get an actual second meditation. So, I would suggest you spend a little time each day on the why the other person's pain. How it is that we really can end their pain forever and what we have to do it. Do to do it.

Okay. Thank you so much for the opportunity. Have a great week. I'll see you next Wednesday, if not before. I love you all. Bye-bye.

All right, welcome back. We are Bok Jinpa course to class 5, but we're finishing up class 6. Let's gather our minds here as we usually do please bring your attention to your breath until you hear from me again.

[Class opening]

(7:30) Last class, Master Kamalashila was helping us explore non-physical things in the similar way that we had explored physical things. We look for their appearance and then we recognize its apparent nature. Then we show ourselves its true nature, which is the lack of it being what appeared in the first place, as in it, from it.

Then Kamalashila essentially took us to non-physical things. The one that's most important to investigate in this way is our own consciousness as the object, the object of exploration.

He used the eye consciousness as the one to explore. Lama Christie then took us through that. We didn't do it as a meditation. We just did it as the experiment of looking at the screen and seeing if we could deconstruct from my computer screen to pieces of information that my mind was making computer screen out of, and then we backed ourselves out a little bit.

The second meditation that I didn't have time to give you was a meditation on doing this, going through these steps, investigating the non-physical thing, the functioning of our consciousness, and then the consciousness itself, the process.

We're going to do it. First we find the experience of the eye consciousness and we intentionally recognize how we believe that the thing that we are seeing, the thing that our eyeball is telling us is there, how we believe that the thing has its identity in it. Like we're so well trained. We start out, we want to avoid the piece that admits that we're still experiencing things as having their natures in them, from them.

But if I am still, if you're not great, skip this part. But if you do, outside of your meditation, still automatically believe that what you are seeing and the act of seeing is happening in some way, independent of being projections of my own mind, then don't skip this part of this is what's appearing to me and I believe. I can feel how I believe its identity is in it.

Then once we have that, we can apply a little bit of reasoning that says, no, no, I can't be completely in it from it. For whatever reason that you want to apply to show yourself that what's there is this ripening mental image. We rest at that for a little while. When we've got that clear, we add the piece of understanding that in order for it to appear in the way that it does, its own nature cannot be, it can't have that own nature that I thought it did at the beginning. And that's its emptiness, its emptiness of its own nature.

That sequence can get more and subtle from the thing we think our eyeball is seeing, to the awareness of that happening, to the awareness of the awareness of that happening, to the awareness of the awareness of the awareness, right? You can keep getting more subtle about the process happening. At each level of subtlety, we again look at, you know, what's arising and how I how I hold it to have something of its own nature, and then show myself that that's not true, and then rest in the ripening and nothing but conclusion.

It can go all the way down to the consciousness of me. So in the same way that we have the eye consciousness perceiving an object, we have a consciousness arising of which the object of the consciousness is my me. And we can track that through the same sequence when we are familiar with the sequence.

Then as we come out of the meditation practice on this, we try to apply it in our out of meditation time as well, which you know, maybe we can do that when we're all by ourselves. But as soon as we engage with somebody else, at least for me, it's like (whosh) it all goes away, because I can't focus on attending right to to what's going on with them and hold this state of mind of seeds ripening nothing but. But we try. 

Then, when we find ourselves like surprisingly, less mentally afflicted in circumstances that we were expecting to get all triggered and we don't, that's when we can go, Oh, my goodness, like, my practice must be having its effect.

Maybe it happens right away. Maybe it takes 30 years like this one. But it is happening as we make our attempts at our efforts, even if we believe that our efforts are just puny, and they fail, and they can't be good enough, because we're not seeing a change in ourselves when we get up off our cushion later that day. Meditating is still planting seeds. There's nothing magical about Shamatha and Vipashyana. Same process is happening. So it takes time for the seeds planted to ripen.

We know the process of getting them to ripen sooner by rejoicing in them, watering them, adding to them, etc.

But I don't know, we don't want them to ripen too fast, because we want them to grow, right? So maybe don't be in quite so hurry. Let those good seeds gain such strength that they'll just bubble out of us when they're ready.

So now, as long as we still have this tenacious holding to our me as a suffering human being, then this goal that we're trying to get, being on the Bodhisattva bhumis, reaching Arhat, reaching omniscience, it seems really far away.

But as we keep investigating, and we find this self-existent me suffering being, wait a minute, right? It's nothing different than the seeds ripening, seeds ripening, seeds ripening system. The more I can relate to that process of the me part of this ripening, ripening, ripening, ripening, the more I relate to this availability at any moment, which means Buddhahood could be in the next instant. And it's like, Oh, well, not yet. Maybe next moment, right? Oh, maybe tomorrow. It seems foolish to be thinking that. 

But it's more foolish to think, no, no, I'm really a suffering being and so it's going to take all of this time to purify and make merit, because I've got so many yuck seeds in there. Yes, I have lots of yuck seeds. But the me that those yuck seeds are coloring into a yuck me are as empty as everything else. Right? They're all being cleaned, as each one is being cleaned.

Meditation Investigating our Consciousness

Let's do the second meditation from last class.

(18:16) Lama Christie's object, where the object of an investigation is going to be our consciousness, but she works us there, by starting with an object of visual consciousness, that we then take from outer world object to in our minds eye the same object. She had a little yellow meditation table in front of her, so she's talking about this yellow table, and breaking down the information she's actually getting.

So you need to pick some object that you're going to use to do the same thing as I'm describing this yellow table that she was using. Got it? So don't be thinking yellow table. Think whatever you've got in front of you right now, but then do the same thing with it as I'm trying to describe.

So settle your body, you know how.

Ask that holy being to bless you, to help you understand the sequence of this practice that she's giving us.

See them agree, and then bring your attention to your nostrils to the sensation of the breath at the nostrils, using that object to focus, to brighten, and then tune up the clarity.

And intentionally shift objects from breath to that object you've chosen. Lama Christie's using a table. And bring that object to your mind's eye.

But still focus, clarity, intensity, mentally gazing at this object, recognize that although it seems like we are experiencing a whole table, check carefully to see if that's possible. A whole table has a front, a back, four legs, color, shape, hardness, temperature, function.

Can your visual awareness give you that much information?

So back your awareness a little bit away from the whole object and be aware of your mind gathering information.

How much information does it require for the mind to say table, whole object? 

Recognize how at any level we look, what we are experiencing is the mind's label of a whole thing that's applied onto parts, bits of information that alone can't make up the whole.

Be aware of that process, mental images, making the identity.

Now when we have that clear, we intentionally shift our investigation to think about who or what is playing those images, who or what is sending out those images.

We say, oh the projector is projecting and it seems like there's some place where the seeds that open up into those mental images must be before they open up to become the mental image. They have to be there already. They have to be the seed for that mental image, don't they?

There must be a lot of them, this steady stream of seed images from this place that seems so fixed, so real, so having some nature of its own.

Holding that we have some storage of mental seeds waiting to open up is what it is to believe our own mind has its own nature, the mind being the place where all these seeds are stored.

It must then be a thing that stores seeds and ripens seeds and is aware of them.

Now shift your focus to that sense of the mind with a location that's full of seeds, that's doing this process, and check that mind. If it is the thing there that holds the seeds, it must be the same even as it sends forth the seeds that change.

But is that possible for the mind to stay unchanged when seeds ripen?

There can't be a projector doing the projections because it changes with every projection, never the same two moments in a row.

So how can we say that there is a projector projecting if we can't find it because it's changed by the time we do?

Our mind is changing instant by instant, and in each instant arises both the object and your experience of the object.

With each awareness there is you aware of it, arising together.

And in each moment that aware-er is different, that which it is experiencing is different, and there is no other consciousness apart from this process happening. 

Every instant there is a shift, different subject-object interaction between arisings, and no reality other than this.

And this reality will never cease and it is never the same two moments in a row. 

These seeds, ripening moment by moment, they don't even influence each other because a seed ripening in this moment cannot touch the seed that's ready to ripen in the next moment. They cannot have a relationship.

So seeds ripening, begetting seeds ripening—as it feels to us—is also an illusion, appears to be happening, seeds that have their own nature of being the seed for my next experience. But they cannot have that nature and bring about the experience we have.

The conclusion can feel like a free fall, or it can feel like a rising when you go through the sequence and come to your conclusion.

Every moment of every experience, mental images shape-shifting, including me, other, interaction between and nothing but.

Try to sink into the nothing but and hold it with focus, clarity and intensity.

So we'll stay four more minutes.

Put some object in front of your mind's eye, deconstruct to the point that you are aware of its identity being mental image, and then look at your awareness of the mental image, deconstruct that. Reach some conclusion, fixate.

When you lose the fixation, go back and get it again.

I'm starting the four minutes now.

Check your focus, your clarity, your intensity.

One more minute.

Nice. Now release wherever you're at, let your me re-arise, your experience re-arise.

Become aware of being in your body, this body in your room.

Dedicate this effort, these glimpses to reaching that direct perception with Bodhicitta in your heart. Very, very soon.

And then when you're ready, come on out, take a stretch.

(46:01)(Student: Teacher, can I ask a question? You may. Teacher, thanks for leading the meditation. It was a wonderful meditation. So just now I was imaging this up here and I can see clearly that, I mean, I can turn the cup in my mind. I can see inside, you know, like everything. So I have a strong feel of the mental image coming out from my mind. But at the same time, I also doubt, is it my memory? Is it my, yeah, I also like, I was like struggling between, is that mental image or is that memory?)

Right. So what's the ramification of the idea, Oh, it's just my memory? What's the ramification about the object?

(student: I myself think that even the memory is a seed ripening, but then it's like, we have been like training, like in our education, it's like we try to memorize certain things. So, and it's very difficult to, I mean, when, when we open the eyes, I mean, we can say, okay, it's a mental image, but when we close our eyes, it's like in between, like, I mean, how do I link to like the memory, the mental image of the memory of the mental image of the cups?)

Right. So to me, the question, ‚Wait, is this just the memory of the cup or is this me generating a mental image of the cup?‘ implies that deep down, I believe there is a cup there that I'm remembering. Otherwise you wouldn't ask the question, right?

I'm not criticizing. I'm pointing out the implication, right? Because otherwise, if our wisdom was coloring it, it would be, doesn't matter, same stuff. This is a mental image I'm calling memory of a cup. This is a mental image of a cup. What's the difference? The difference is whether we believe there was a cup there in the first place.

But there is a cup there because I asked you to visualize the object, right?

So again, you already know the object and then the mental thinking of the object is all my seeds ripening. But we actually don't want to put ourselves into the conclusion without first checking to see if our automatic relationship with the object is, oh, cup in it from it—before we deconstruct it into, no, that's not possible. Right? At some point we don't have to keep doing that. And when you get there, fine. Don't do it, even if I tell you to do it, because we don't want to keep those seeds going. But mostly it's so inherent in our seed ripening that it's necessary to recognize it because then we know what's not there when we show ourselves the true nature of the object.

If we automatically go to its mental image, we won't be able to show ourselves its lack of itself nature.

(student: I think it's interesting. So it's the struggling between we know the wisdom analytically, but we still cannot see directly. So it's like fighting between is it memory? Is this a mental image?)

So you're right. Mental image of a memory is still mental image. Yeah. And so is mental image real thing? That's the point. Right? There's no such thing as a real thing that gets the mental image. There's mental image-real thing, mental image-memory thing, mental image-future thing, mental image-now thing, mental image, mental image, mental image, and nothing but.

But when we try to imagine living in that, it just feels like unreal. Right?

What if we tried to really live in this constantly changing me? Like it's like, what me am I? What me? What do I do? Oh my gosh. Right? It seems disorienting, but it's freeing, they say, when we're living in that availability, instead of this limitation. Okay. Yeah.

It's a tricky meditation. Those have been doing the Mahamudra, you recognize it, right? So it's hard. Like this is Bok Jinpa 2. Our Mahamudra group is working on Bok Jinpa 16. We're in this context is we're still beginners in the sequence. Although everybody in Bok Jinpa class were seasoned meditators, or in my case, believed I was until I met these teachings and it's like, Oh, I got some stuff to learn.

(52:41) So we went from the object to the awareness of the object to the awareness that the awareness of the object and the object have to both be coming out of mental seeds to show us that there can't be a conscious of my consciousness that is independent of the experience it's having, to show me that my consciousness also lacks being a thing that's independent of a seed ripening moment.

That's like dabbling with this exploration of the empty nature of consciousness as an example of non-physical things, because we are examining all existing things. And we're doing it by way of dividing all existing things in such a way that if we can prove the lack of self existence of one of those category, then it holds for everything in that category. So we divided things into physical and non-physical.

Then Kamalashila said, if you're going to bother with non-physical things, go to the important one, which is consciousness and investigate that for our belief that our consciousness has some nature of its own. Deconstruct to show ourselves that that's impossible. That in fact, it's ripening, ripening, ripening along with everything else, and it has no nature other than that. And then rest in that no nature with our fixation. 

Master Kamalashila says, and when you can do that—meaning reach this conclusion and rest in fixation, then actually you are ready to learn to meditate.

It's like, what? I thought I was meditating. 

He goes, no, actually, you were fine tuning your concentration. You were doing a really good contemplation, but that's not meditation.

It's like, oh man. It's so discouraging and encouraging at the same time. Like I hardly want to teach it, but we need to. Here's the difference.

Lama Christie explained that in order to be in a class like this, there is something along the way in your life, maybe more than one that happened that then gave you some new understanding or new belief, or we could even call it a realization, something that became real that wasn't before that changed you deeply in a way that we probably can't even explain to somebody else.

We could explain the experience and say, this experience changed me in this, in this way. But the actual, what it changed and how different we are is beyond explanation. Yet it's a deep, deep knowing that we have now through which we know we are different than what we were before, but it's so within us that we can hardly even remember what we were like before that. We just know that we were different.

So the difference between concentration or contemplation and meditating is that it's through meditating that we come to these realizations that are this shift in us that's beyond explanation with words. We won't get to that with our contemplation.

We get to it through contemplation, because without the skills of contemplation, it's unlikely that we'll have these experiences in meditation that are these deep shifts in knowing.

Master Kamalashila is making a distinction between our sequence of bringing up the object, getting our clarity, our focus, our clarity, our intensity, and then doing the sequence of the meditation that becomes the analysis in which we are learning to keep on the object, returning to the object when we lose it, keeping the clarity, keeping the intensity. We're learning our skills as we do that.

But he says, until we can reach a conclusion in that analysis and then hold that conclusion with single-pointed focus for as long as we have predetermined we're going to keep it without losing our NGAR or our clarity. Our analysis will bring us to a conclusion, but the conclusion won't go in as a shift in our heart. It will shift our heart. It's not useless. But to build ourselves towards that doorway to wisdom, the direct perception of emptiness, says Master Kamalashila, we need to also have this ability to shift, take our aha from our contemplation and park on it with no further mental words or even watching shifting to get into that non-conceptual experiential state called Shamatha.

So we'll learn more and more about what really qualifies as Shamatha.

At this point, he's saying our meditation starts when we reach the aha and fixate. Interesting.

(60:37)(student) Just for the purpose to see if I kept clear in my mind the meaning of deconstruct. Okay. Let's just imagine that here I have my notebook and I have written in both cursive and script. So if I were to deconstruct, I would start by the last letter deconstructing. If in case it was like script, the lines and the circles, all the way until I finish what I have started reading from the start, I'm deconstructing from the bottom, from the last to the start. Then there's no more ink. I've deconstructed that. Then I would go with the paper, deconstruct how the paper is made.)

Well, can I comment? So it sounds like what you're meaning by deconstruct is to remove what's there.

(student: It's by trying to identify everything that's there. Because my object was this portrait, right? So I was deconstructing. So I know it has borders. So it's like taking the pieces, the lines, the shapes, the colors from the image that I have, from the object that I have.)

But it's not to just take them away. It's to recognize that whole picture, what is it about all that information that makes it picture? There's nothing in it that makes it picture. No, there's this side. Wait, no, that side is also my mind identifying it as that side, not itself telling me that. Well, what about that color? That's my mind identifying color as well, not the thing. So to deconstruct is to take our minds, identify what our mind believes is there and say, wow, that's my mind saying that's there, not it.

So when we deconstruct, we're deconstructing the mental label that's making it a thing. We're not just visualizing the color disappearing.

(student: I didn't see it disappearing. I saw it's like I was pulling away. How would I explain it? It's like I'm pulling away the first thing, a label that I'm seeing, right? And that if I'm seeing like paint, I'm pulling away the color of the paint. And then what I get is like the metal, and then I'm pulling away the metal. Then I have the glass. I'm pulling away the glass.Then I have the image. I see the image. I try to pull away what I remember of the image.)

As long as what you're pulling away is the identity that you think is in there, that's not in there. Not pulling the physical thing away.

(student: Right. And what I'm trying to figure out as I'm pulling those things from my mind, how the three spheres are playing this game for me to identify to the interaction between it, for me to be labeling it.)

Right. Because the object, we believe the object has some existence there so that the me can be experiencing the object. So to do the three spheres, you have to do them one at a time. And do the same deconstruction.

(student: That's what I'm doing part by part. Right. Part by part. That's what I'm doing. So the example applies.)

Yeah. As long as we mean this, right? Yes. I mean the right thing by the words, and I want everybody else to not mishear your words.

(student: Yeah. It's difficult to explain.)

It is.

(student: Very difficult, but I mean, that's why I wanted to ask with a simple example of something written paper.)

I think of it as there's a word. What makes that information that word? Is there anything in it? No. Well, okay. It's got four letters. What about those letters come together to make the word? I just keep going smaller and smaller in the information that my mind is trying to say, this is where the thing's identity comes from. A word's identity comes from the four letters that go into it. Well, wait. What if you move those four letters around? Do you still have the word? No. Well, then it's not the four letters doing it. That's deconstructing.

Reaching Shamatha

(66:50) Master Kamalashila, he says, first learn to contemplate well, then learn to meditate well, reach Shamatha. But he says, but reaching Shamatha is not in and of itself all we need to do. It's the doorway to reaching the special insight, Vipashyana, that this tradition encourages us to be using as our goal—not ultimate goal, but portal to the ultimate goal. Reaching Shamatha alone will not automatically someday push you into either intellectual understanding of emptiness or the direct perception of emptiness. We have to do something to make that happen. But we need the platform of Shamatha for what we do to trigger the wisdom to be able to be sustained by the quality of the meditating mind.

So, he's making his case for Shamatha should not be our goal of meditation. Not that we don't want and need to reach it, but it's not the end. So, he says there are different, many different kinds of meditation of course. Two kinds in particular he mentions that practitioners not on this particular path have used and reached Shamatha levels. It doesn't automatically make them more wise. So, these two meditations, one of them is, a version of it is called the repulsive meditation.

He makes it clear that these are lesser meditations, which sounds kind of judgmental. But what he means is they will bring about a lesser result, not the goal we want, he means by that. So, this repulsive meditation, it's the one we've heard Geshe Michael describe where you imagine that you get some like flesh-eating bacteria and it starts here. And you just decay. Your body decays and you just rot. Then the rot spreads to the place around you and all the people and everything, and you're visualizing this gruesome, disgusting meditation of this rot that started with you taking out everything and everyone in your world. Then fortunately, you turn around and bring it all back again. But the idea is that it's a meditation that through which we lose our desire for this life. That's why they do it. Because they want to be so aware that any pleasant thing that they are wanting to go after is in the end just going to rot in this disgusting way. And they get to where it's like, yeah. It's like, thank you, but no, thank you. That's not our practice. But it's effective.

Sometimes in our tradition, when somebody's having a really difficult time with their desire and craving, and they just can't get a hold of that, the Lama will assign them to this meditation. Rot yourself in your whole world repeatedly. Come back to me when you get some aha. It's like, oof, please don't be any one of those people. Because it's awful. But his point is it's effective, right? You really will become disgusted with life. But that's not our goal.

The other example he gives is that there's a group of meditations that is called consuming concentration. One of them in particular is this sequence. You don't do it all at once, but it's like a practice sequence where you turn this deep Shamatha level meditative concentration on what's called consuming water element, and then earth element, then water element, then fire element, then air element. Kind of sounds familiar in some practices, but it doesn't go there. Then yellow, green, red, blue, and then consciousness, and then mind.

This idea of consuming them means you're focusing on that object such that it can no longer appear to you.

I don't understand it. Lama Christie said she was never taught it. She didn't understand it either. But the text says in doing these meditations, you can reach the result of being able to walk on water, handle fire and not get burnt, walk through solid objects, travel at speed, make yourself invisible—because you've gained the power to manipulate your elements.

Kamalashila's point is, we can learn to concentrate and Shamatha at that level that we can gain all of these miracle powers, but they are not going to automatically push you into the direct perception of emptiness. So the end result of these incredible meditations will be a future life in form or formless realm, which is pleasurable, more pleasurable than a human realm, but it's a dead end for our spiritual practice.

So his point is, yes, we need to get to Shamatha, but not to use Shamatha to gain all these miracle powers or etc. without using that platform to investigate the ultimate nature of self, object and interaction between.

He says, so our fixation meditation, our JOKUM, is the place where Shamatha kicks in. Now, this is a little bit different than we'll hear in later teachings, where we come to recognize we can be doing our analytical stuff at a Shamatha level mind as well. But the fixation meditation is where we're relying upon our ability to hold this quality of concentration called Shamatha, that platform.

Shamatha does mean stillness. It sounds then like when we reach fixation on our object, it sounds like the mind just stops. And that is not what stillness refers to. 

Stillness means we are finally still from any tendency to slip into subtle dullness or gross dullness, any tendency for agitation, subtle or gross, any effort to avoid either of those.

Stillness is this effortlessness, staying in fixation, clarity, NGAR—intensity, without having to adjust anymore. Until we get there, we've got to be constantly checking, constantly adjusting. As we move through those nine stages, the adjustments getting more and more effortless, but it's still happening. It blocks us from that platform where these realizations can happen, even the realizations that happen before direct perception of emptiness realization. They say we need to be on at Shamatha level to get those realizations at this deep, deep level.

We get realizations without Shamatha.

How do we reach it? Like it should be our question. Okay, then how do we do it? 

Teach me how to do it.

Then we learn, set your body, do this, do that. All of those are worldly instructions on how to meditate.

Do they work? Maybe, maybe not. Really, which means they don't work. Do they? 

Does that mean I could meditate one day deeply in Shamatha if I never try?

Could, but not likely, right?

So yes, we try, we do the worldly things. But ultimately, we need to do the karmic things in order to plant the seeds for when those seeds ripen, ripen as our ability to move our minds through those nine stages to reach Shamatha frequently enough that it becomes automatic.

We have the seeds for when we sit down to meditate, boom, we're in Shamatha. You don't even have to work your way there, eventually.

He says, in order to reach stillness, which is not a still dumb, stupid mind. It is focused, clear, alert, fascinated. Lama Christie said it's probably the most awake and sharp your mind has ever been to be at stillness. Really not still in that sense at all.

There are three things that if we gather these three things in no time at all, we will be able to reach a mind at Shamatha level.

Personally, I'm still in the gap between the planting and the ripening, even after all these years, I'm embarrassed to admit. But that doesn't mean you'll have the same experience. So here are the three things.

1. Stop feeding our desire for sense objects

(79:56) First is, we need to stop our desire for outside sense objects, outside pleasures. We feed our eyes, ears, nose, tongues, tactiles, mind. We feed them constantly, believing that those pleasurable things are the source of our happiness. 

Intellectually, we understand they are not, and we still go after them and grasp them because they still seem to be the source of some pleasure, even when they don't give us the pleasure the same way every single time.

We just remember when they did, and we're hoping against hope that this time that cup of tea will taste as good as it did once. And we don't let ourselves recognize, I'm taking refuge in tea.

It does not mean quit eating, drinking, seeing. It doesn't mean that at all.

It means come to understand that we're going to something outside of ourselves as a source of our happiness. And as a result, we're distracted. We're distracted by the effort. We can take care of our needs without it ending up distracting our meditating mind.

If we're constantly, oh, what do I need now? What do I want now?—outside of meditation, we get inside meditation. Why do we expect our mind to go, okay, turn that off? It's not going to turn it off. Sounds, oh, what is that? Oh, I'm hungry. Oh, my knee hurts.

The habit of the mind is to keep going out there to find something that is a solution. He says, we've got to isolate ourselves from that.

He uses the word isolate and on one level, he means literally, isolate. Take the time to get out of regular life and put yourself in a place where you're not going to see anybody. You can make your day to day experience be the same every day. The same food, the same practices, the same schedule. And it's like, how boring. Right? 

That's the point. You know, it isn't boring at all. It's like, what a relief to finally get there. But it seems like, who am I going to be? What am I gonna do?

I remember Earl went into his, I don't know if it was his first solitary retreat, but he went in to do a Yamantaka retreat. I think he went in for four weeks. He took a Sadhana in there. He had himself all set. And I get a note out. And he goes, do I really do this Sadhana four times a day for a month?

And it's like, yeah, and nothing else. Right?

I wrote him back, and I know he stayed in the whole month. He didn't write me again. 

But it just was funny. I had to laugh. It's like, so brave that he went in without knowing what he was going to do. Because maybe if he had realized, I'm going to do the same thing four times a day—it takes two or three hours each time for 30 days in a row, I don't think I can make myself go in there. Because our ordinary mind would be no, no, I have to practice my guitar. Oh, no, I have to do all these things to be me.

Master Kamalashila is saying, you want to really meditate deeply, you got to get off that automatic pilot.

It's hard. We've got lives. How do you get time off?

Well, you start with a few days at a time, and then you build them up and etc. 

It really is makes a significant difference to be meditating multiple times a day in an environment where you are less distracted by things. You start out wanting to be distracted, like Oh, what time of day is it? Oh, what's the weather like? Oh, where are the birds? And you finally just say, shut up. Let's work on this because I only have enough time. I only have some days.

The isolation that we're trying to get to is to recognize that we don't need those things for our happiness or our comfort. We think we do. But we don't. So as we get less and less attached to those things that we think are the source of our comfort and happiness, we have this mind space available to use in a different way.

2. Leading a Pure Life

So the second piece is, we also need to be leading a very pure life. We know that.

A mind that has caused harm is a mind that will be agitated. I don't know directly how to think of that correlation. But it's like if we have a mind that's okay with hurting people, even just hurting their feelings or stepping in front of them because I'm in a hurry, those kind of hurts. They make a world that's not safe.

And if we are in a frame of mind where we don't feel safe, we can't sink our mind in deep because we think there's a part of us that's left there that's exposed, and we won't be able to do it.

So we want these seeds for safety, which come about by way of our ethics, physical safety, mental safety, all of that.

3. Take on Pain for Our Practice

Then third, he says, we need to cultivate this attitude of being willing to take on any pain for the sake of my practice gladly.

There's a there's an old joke, Christian joke. Gladly, gladly, the cross eyed bear. 

Nancy, do you know that joke? Something about a bear? I only know the punchline, that’s the punchline. Gladly the cross eyed bear, something about a bear that's cross eyed. But the phrase is, Gladly I bear my cross. Anyway.

Gladly, I bear the pain that comes to me as a result of my own past behavior, because I get to burn it off and not replant it. Whereas ordinarily, it's like avoid any discomfort at all cost.

If we recognize these three,

• Becoming less and less attached to things that we think bring us happiness, and so we don't need them anymore

• Our ethical life, important, and

• Our willingness to take on pain, not only just willing, but okay, gladly, I will do it.

These are the first four perfections, aren't they?

This comes actually in a discussion by Master Kamalashila about the six perfections.  Because we're trying to get to the perfection of wisdom, so that we can finally stop replanting ignorance seeds so that we can finally get on that conveyor belt to the Buddhahood that we profess to want. So, of course, he's talking about the six perfections, because that six perfection is the key to the others.

He's saying, in order to cultivate the seeds for a progressive meditation practice, contemplation and meditation practice, we need to be doing the activities that will become our first four perfections when we are doing them with wisdom.

We're training in them now. And we can do that in isolation, actual physical isolation. We don't have anybody to give to. But we still have our ability to not need to cling to the things that bring us pleasure, which is the result of our giving practice.

It's like when we don't cling to the things that give us pleasure, we are willing to give them away, willing to share. It's like the result of giving is this less attachment to the things we expect to give us pleasure.

We can still do our ethics. In fact, our ethics when we're in retreat, just like gets really sky high because you're not interacting with anybody. The worst maybe is your mind is still, you know, upset with some things. But you're not even saying anything but your Sadhana, your prayers.

So it's like, phew, you want a big ethics boost, go on retreat and be all by yourself and just take really good care of the bugs.

Then the third one, while you're on that retreat, you'll get too hot, you'll get too cold, you'll get too tired, your knees will hurt, your back will hurt. Take it on, you're burning it off. Of course, it's not going to be perfect in retreat. Until our seeds are perfect, then it will be.

So he's making a case. Just work with the perfectionizers to grow the seeds that will ripen as our ability to meditate deeply and get to the wisdom. Makes sense, right? Cultivate our seeds.

(91:40) Always within our meditation, we want to give ourselves a boost towards the growing wisdom. The way that we do that is to always begin a meditation with some kind of heart opening practice, so that already, the reason we're doing the effort on our cushion or in our retreat is because we see suffering in our world. And I understand well enough that it's my seeds ripening, so I need to change me so that I can help them. And they're waiting for me and I'm trying really hard. Meanwhile, they're hurting and, oh, I really, really want to do it. Right?

To have that feeling within us means we've got some winds going there already. And that will help our effort in understanding the no self nature of things be more clear or deeper. Same words, different effect on our mind, because we've started with undoing it for somebody else—our motivation.

That's why when I start class, instead of just saying the prayers, I walk us through this, here's this holy being before you, they're so amazing. And here's somebody who's hurting and oh my gosh, nothing I do will help. I've got to become… Like I do it for myself and figure it works for me better because I do it for you too.

But we're wanting to really get the feeling, and then we say our prayers and we go on.

So Master Kamala Sheila, he says, somewhere in there, include this great compassion before you start your meditation. But he says, our meditation doesn't even start until after we've done our preliminaries.

We start our preliminaries out of concern for somebody else. We do those seven steps. We dedicate what we've done so far. We again, recall this other person we're wanting to be able to help by the end of our practice, and then we start our meditation timeline. And it's like, what? Like now that one hour a day has just become 85 minutes because it takes 20 minutes to do your preliminaries and five more minutes at the end to do your ending. It's like, wait, they tricked me.

So now when you start with the 10 minutes and add one minute, you know, instead of a year, it's going to take you a year and a half to get to your one hour of meditation. 

Big deal, right? Life will still shift one minute at a time. We don't believe it. So we probably don't do it. But along the way somewhere, you're going to go, man, I wish I'd done that back then. Because now I see the power of the need for doing an hour a day. And then you want to do an hour a day, and it becomes two hours a day. And that's great.

Master Kamalashila says, your meditation time then starts out with a clearly focused analysis. Then you reach an aha of your analysis, and you park in fixation.

The effort to reach Shamatha starts when we reach this fixation. What we're doing in our in our analysis, when we're doing it with fixation, when we're doing it with focus, clarity, and intensity, it's helping us reach the Shamatha at the end. But technically, Shamatha turns on at fixation.

So they're not saying we have to sit in Shamatha for a whole hour. Thank goodness for that.

He goes through a sequence, you'll see it in your reading about going through this, considering all existing things, by dividing them up, and then picking one thing and deconstructing it until we reach some aha, and then resting in the aha, until we lose it. And then go back and pick up the analysis again, till you reach the aha, fixate on the aha. We've learned that process, I think.

Then he says, the process of doing this dividing all things is a way of helping us eliminate the belief in the two extremes.

The one extreme is the belief that whatever it is we're investigating, has their identity and qualities in them the way we believe. By doing this deconstruct, deconstruct, we're showing ourselves repeatedly, that although they appear that way to me again, and again, and again, I've shown myself that they just can't exist in that way, and me experience them in the way that I do. Which is sometimes they work, and sometimes they don't, or somebody see appear and experiences it different than I do. Right? All those reasonings that have become pretty automatic for us by now.

We stop believing in the experience, the things‘ identity is in it.

Then the other extreme is, well, if they don't exist like that, they don't exist at all. But more subtly, it's like, no. So the way they do exist is as projections. And some part of my mind, here's the word projection and goes, Oh, so they're not real. Right? And that's over this cliff of, if they don't exist the way they thought they don't exist at all. When yes, they do exist as projections, and that's the way they've always existed.

It's true that the self existent thing that I thought was there does not exist at all. 

Put that into that category of, If it doesn't exist in the way I think it doesn't exist at all. It doesn't. The self existent thing, but the projected thing is what was there all along. That one does not disappear. When we take away its self existence, because it never had self existence in the first place. Okay?

Can you take away the face in the mirror?

What face in the mirror? Right? There's no face in the mirror. There's the reflection of a face.

Can I take away the reflection of the face? Sure. Leave the mirror.

But there's no face in the mirror, the face is in front of the mirror.

Same with this.

So we're finding ourselves more able to stay in that middle way. Not the way it appears, but not not at all.

Projections, and projections make it real, but not real in the way I used to think it was real.

But real the way it's always been.

Somebody says, well, if our first task is to grow the seeds for Shamatha, what meditative object should we use to help us reach Shamatha like swiftly?

He says, use your body and use your mind.

He didn't actually give an example of how to do that, Master Kamalashila. So Lama Christie went to Ngulchu Dharma Bhadra who, he apparently gave a Q & A teaching once or more than once and the Q & A's got compiled and they got put into a text. And so Geshe Michael has that text and he refers to it from time to time. So Lama Christie used it and she pulled out that Q & A, right? He got that question too. What topics should we use object for Shamatha training?

And to give an example of that meditation, Master Ngulchu Dharma Bhadra went to the Delam text. The Delam is the path to bliss that was written or taught by my hero, Lobsang Chukyi Gyeltsen, first Panchen Lama. In that was a series of teachings and meditations on the Lam Rim.

He gave this beautiful example of a body meditation that we can do to use, to train ourselves in Shamatha. So let's do it. We're going to do it fast because I've yacked my way out of time again.

Meditation Emptiness of Our Body

(102:50) So settle yourself in. So we're going to use the body as the object and if it goes okay, we'll shift to the mind as the object. We'll see.

So settle in, get your body still.

Bring your attention to your breath. Use it to clear out that fatigue as best you can.

Get clarity, get eagerness. What's she going to say? I can't wait.

Now become aware of your body as a whole. It has an outside, it has an inside.

In your mind's eye, look to the inside of your body. Start at the top of your head, look inside, and be surprised to find that inside there is simply hollow, hollow space, some beautiful clear light color, any color you like.

And as you scan down, you look into the inside of your eyeballs and oh my gosh, that beautiful color in there too, inside your nose, your cheeks, your ears, earlobes, jaws, teeth, hollow down your neck, this clear beautiful color, translucent like you can see through it.

Go down your arms into each finger. Look at that.

Back up your arms into your torso, so spacious.

Waistline, lower torso, buttocks, genitals, hips, legs, feet, toes, clear beautiful color. 

Come back up.

Get a sense of this feeling. You're still aware of some outer layer, some outer edge. And inside, this clear beautiful space and so you feel light, as if you could float away, but you're tethered by your love.

Feel this outline like a line of light, just an edge between the clear beautiful color and whatever is outside, like the skin of a balloon.

Then see before you there that exquisite, beautiful, holy being, that being whom you would like to become.

Picture them in detail, this glowing body, beautiful face, smiling, their gaze, that perfect love.

What does their hair look like? Their fingers, their face, their smile.

Feel the light coming from their body. It's their holy great compassion.

Now as you gaze upon them, enjoying them, they begin to rise.

They turn to face the same way as you.

They're hovering above your head now and then they lower down and they come into the inside of you, into that clear hollow space, filling you with their light.

And as their light shines within you, as it moves to the outside of you, your own shape and form takes on this exquisite beauty of that holy being.

Know what your beautiful face looks like, what your smile looks like, what your gaze looks like.

Feel this body made of love, made of compassion, made of wisdom.

See yourself, feel yourself, and now fix this mental image of what you look and feel like into a fixation meditation.

No longer reviewing it, park on the whole experience.

Don't let it slip away. We'll sit two minutes.

If you lose it, get it back.

Now ask yourself, is this mental image of me different from the mental image I normally have of my own body?

How is it different?

Which one is more real?

Now recognize the power of the seeds you've just planted.

Dedicate them to gaining a realization of your own true nature.

Then become aware of the seeds ripening of the you in a body in a room.

And when you're ready, open your eyes, take a stretch, and remind yourself which body is more real.

Of course, the answer is neither, right? Both mental images.

(116:26) So we had the seeds ripen to hear the instruction to imagine yourself, your body, as the body of a holy angel.

And then we had the seeds shift to the mental images of, no, not a holy angel. Which doesn't have to be, right? But there's a part of our mind that says, no, that was imaginary, this one's real. And that's what we're working with.

And so to rest even a few minutes in this imagining, seeing ourselves as this holy being, feeling ourselves as this holy being is planting seeds that are replacing, it's a time in which we are not planting seeds of ordinary me. Or at least less so, right? Because it's like ordinary me imagining I'm a holy angel. Okay, granted.

But it's still damaging ordinary me seeds, of which there are many, and they're all getting damaged a little bit. It's an interesting clue.

Technically, the first meditation of this class would have been somebody who's suffering, let yourself be aware of their suffering, grow your compassion as your reason to do this class.

So for your daily meditation, do some kind of compassion session first, it could even be the Tonglen from our Tonglen group. Will be a heart opening practice too. And then this one about the holy angel. But spend a little more time at the end of it, where you're looking at the mental image, the image that's arising and recognizing, I know for sure, this is not self existent, because I'm making it up. Great.

Recognize it seeds ripening moment by moment. Hooray, these are great seeds.

Stay focused, clear, being aware, ripenings, ripenings, ripenings, and nothing but so it can be real. Get there to where you don't need that in the mental words. And park until your timer goes off as the for this class meditation.

[Dedication]

Thank you again so much for the opportunity to share.

TING NGE DZIN (ting en dzin) 

SHINE Shamata

SHINJANG

SAMTEN DANGPOI NYERDOK MICHOKME

Welcome back, we are Bok Jinpa course 2, class 6. It is November 26th, 2025.

May I please talk schedule before we get started? (…)

We will meet December 3, 10, and 17.

Not 24, not 31, and not January 7.

So January 14.

I've been thinking about it. New people are welcome to join at Bok Jinpa 3, even if they haven't got caught up with Bok Jinpa 1 and 2. It's crazy not to get caught up. But technically, they can still benefit. But once we're into a course, by, into our third class, when people ask me, I'm telling people, you can't maybe pass the third class, fourth class. I'm sorry, you can't get caught up.

Well, but at a new class, so if anybody asks, and they're ready to commit themselves, and particularly if they're already meditators, I think if they're brand new, maybe, I don't know.

(Student: I don't know anybody, but just for, in case anybody asks, do they need to get caught up by Coco, for example, or somebody live? Or if they ask to get caught up by video, is that acceptable or should it be live?)

You know, I would really like to promote Coco starting to teach these also. So they don't technically have to be oral transmission live, like other things need to be. But I think try to encourage people to ask for her to give them live, but not absolutely necessary. I don't know. That's a wishy-washy answer.

(Student: So Lama, someone could come in, on, into Bok Jinpa 3 without having done one or two or getting caught up? Okay. Thank you.)

Yeah, they can.

Now, let's gather our minds here as we usually do. We'll do our opening prayers and go into Lama Christie's first session.

[Class Opening]

Mediation: The Emptiness of Our Understanding of Emptiness

(10:44) Settle your body as you usually do.

Go through the steps every time the same way. 

Settle your mind on your breath at your nostrils. Go through those same steps.

Turn on your focus. Adjust the brightness and add the intensity like a fascination or a curiosity.

Use 10 breaths to make those adjustments that might be needed to find the sweet spot.

Now shift your object of focus from the breath to that precious holy being there before you. Maybe they are your Root Lama, looking like that.

They are gazing at you with that love, so happy with the effort you've been making with these Bok Jimpa meditations, learning to get familiar with your own mind.

Now bring to mind your best realization. Your deepest or highest understanding of what karma and emptiness means, what it conveys.

Get it in mental words as if you're telling that precious being about it.

And come to some kind of conclusion that you can hold without any further mental talk about it.

Now recognize this understanding that we're holding on to.

This too is a ripening mental image, ripening of mental seeds.

What will be the difference between this mental image of your holding to emptiness and the mental image you will have when you experience that emptiness directly? 

This understanding that we have of the mental image that will be direct perception of emptiness.

Imagine you can take that and put it in a pretty box and set it at the feet of that precious being before you, offering it to them.

See that holy being pick up the box with your understanding and experiencing it gives them bliss. And this bliss shines like a light out of their heart, filling your own heart with even greater understanding.

Allow it to shine into you without trying to identify what its result will be like.

Let's keep them there, shining the light of their wisdom into our hearts as we continue class.

And dedicate what we've done just so far to gaining some glimpse that's deeper or higher than what you've glimpsed before about meditation and reaching ultimate reality and why to do it.

So then let all that imagery go.

Become aware of being in this body, in this room, in this class, and when you're ready, open your eyes, take a stretch.

Meditation vs. Contemplation

(23:50) Last class we were talking about how Master Kamalashila has said, technically everything we've been doing so far is about fine tuning our ability to contemplate, meaning to concentrate deeply enough that we can think through, we can do our analysis with a clear enough mind, deep enough concentration to actually come to some new conclusion.

The point of repeated analysis isn't to just say the same thing to ourselves and come to the same conclusion over and over again. We want to go deeper each time if we can.

He says, great. As we learn to do our review meditations and our analytical meditations, the Lamas are being so kind to call them meditations, but they're not, they're contemplations. He's making the distinction that it takes a state of mind, what they mean by meditation is cultivating this state of mind from which the aha that we reach from our review and our analysis, when we take that aha and hold it as our meditation object, when we are at a certain level of meditation on that object, that aha will go from an intellectual aha to a deep personal experiential aha. And that's what's called a realization, making it real.

So they are making the claim that unless we are at a certain level of meditative concentration, any aha that we get will not be a realization. Which means it won't be real enough to our belief system for us to change our behavior enough to make this progress to Buddhahood, which as Mahayanas, we're starting from that premise.

He doesn't mean all our contemplation is useless. Of course he does not mean that. 

And he does not really want us to get discouraged and think, oh, well, I've been meditating for years and now you're telling me I haven't ever actually meditated. It's like, I really came to that realization once a long time ago. And it's like, he gads.

But it's not that we don't learn stuff. It's the, the kicker is this idea of gaining a realization, something that becomes so real for us. It's as if we never misunderstood it.

When the little kid stops believing in Santa Claus, it's just done. And even as they reach adulthood and they have their own kids, and for those kids, Santa Claus is real and you get to play along. In your mind, in your heart it's like, no, there's no such guy. And it's unfortunate, but it's what we mean by realization.

When no Santa Claus becomes a realization, it's like, well, there never was Santa Claus. It wasn't like there used to be, and now there's not.

But if we were to use that as a debate topic, it's like, how can I say there didn't used to be a Santa Claus just because there's not one for me now. And so we won't go there, but for any of these kinds of examples that we try to bring to mind, to try to explain these things, if we really dig into our relationship with those objects in our examples, they all always just end up showing us emptiness and karma as the answer. 

Arya Nagarjuna does that in his wisdom text, somewhere along the line he says, any argument you give me just proves my point. So argue all you want, but in the end, just proves what I've been saying to you. Like get yourself there and life gets easier, they say.

Master Kamala Sheila is saying, please, please, please get to a state of stillness, because then we're actually meditating and we can realize these things directly for ourselves.

What things?

The fact that anything I'm experiencing is a mental image.

The fact that every interaction I experience between self and other is planting, making imprints that will be future mental images.

And the fact that there's nothing that can exist in any other way than that process.

We want those three ideas to become so real for us that that's what we are. That's how we are. That's how we function. There would be no struggle to be constantly in the mode of plant seeds, plant seeds, plant seeds. Because that's where we create from.

Lama Christie pointed out that we tend to reach a mindset where we've heard the teaching so many times, we've heard the pen thing so many times, that as soon as somebody says, let's do the pen thing, something about our mind jumps right to our conclusion and says, yeah, I get it.

Then even as we go through the explanation, we're just using the explanation to come to our same conclusion because we think, I've got it. And it's a mistake, because we can always get it a little more subtly, a little bit more deeper if we don't block ourselves from doing so by saying, I know it's coming from me, and what makes it come from me in the way that it does is what I've seen myself do to others. I get it. Don't tell me that again.

It's like, okay, we get it to this level and then we get complacent. And we do it to ourselves in our meditations. First we get real familiar with the meditation. And then for a little while, we actually use it to maybe get to a new conclusion. And then we repeat it and we repeat it and repeat it, and then something in our mind says, okay, you've got that conclusion. Let's go on to something else—which is fine to go on to something else. But then when we come back to that particular meditative sequence, we'll do the same thing to come to the same conclusion instead of visiting it new, to find new conclusion, higher conclusion.

This is what Master Kamalashila is saying. If we stay at contemplation level, we'll just contemplate in the same way. We won't push ourselves.

Not nobody can push themselves, of course, but the tendency is with familiarity, we stay at the level. I call it complacency. We get complacent.

If we've not seen emptiness directly yet, our complacency will slow us down. It acts as an obstacle. And it could go on to act as an obstacle to even getting more teachings that might challenge us to go deeper, because our mind has blocked something that we thought we got. To just think, oh, yeah, yeah, I get it, blocks getting a teaching that might challenge us further.

We never want to stop challenging ourselves, especially in this exploration of mental images, planting mental images, and the fact that we can't experience anything in any other way than as our mental images.

Where a new understanding of emptiness and dependent origination arises, is in our meditation. It's like, no, no, I can think it through and go, oh, I didn't get that before. I can hear myself give a class and say something in a way that I hear its ramification differently, even than when I had taught the same class before.

But for that new aha to be something that's in there, that I can't forget, I need to sit down and really meditate on it to make it part of me. And we'll see why when we get into what the state of meditation is supposed to be like.

(34:45) We're wanting to, Lama Christie called it ‚new juice‘ for our understanding of emptiness. We can gain that new juice through our meditation efforts.

She said, we can also bring new juice to our practice by serving our holy Lamas.

In my own experience, you can bring new juice by trying to teach a class to someone who's interested because you need to dig in deeper to your own understanding in order to try and convey accurately what the class is trying to convey.

So Lama Christie did not include that one, but I'm adding it from my own personal experience.

Some of the meditations that we've done have been difficult to really quite understand what she's getting at. And then those who are doing the Mahamudra course, we went really slowly stepwise. And it's because the quality of meditative concentration that Master Kamalashila is wanting us to get to, is not something that we can sit down on our cushion and within a matter of days or weeks, willpower our way into. It seems like it should be just, here are the steps, here's the thing. When your mind jumps off, bring it back, give yourself a reward. When it gets too agitated, calm it down, just apply the steps and you'll get good at it.

That's true about the skill, but it's not true about the things that we are holding as our meditative object and our analysis. The analyses can be difficult and reaching a conclusion that we actually go, oh, that's the conclusion, and penetrate into the conclusion is difficult because often at least my own mind reaches the conclusion and then it goes, but is that really it? It doubts my conclusion, and then starts all over again.

The meditations that we're learning here and for sure the ones in Mahamudra course that will come up, they're not meant to master in a week between this meditation and that meditation. They are meant to be like dabbling experiences to find the ones that seem to be the most clear to us—we identify those, and the ones that seem to be the least clear to us—we identify those. And we systematically use these different meditative opportunities to penetrate into these different truths that we're working on. 

It takes time and effort and Geshela has said, you pick one meditation and you work on it for weeks or months until you just seem to go dry, you lose your interest. Then take another one and work on it.

I don't know, it's hard to have that kind of self-discipline when we've got so many different things bombarding us that we could work on to say, here's my core practice, all these others I'll do contemplations on maybe at different times during the day, but here's the one I'm really going to dig into until I get some level of an aha that I can hold.

Traditionally, you would go to your lama, they would say, work on this, you would work on it till you think you've got an aha. You'd go back to them and say, this is my aha and they'd say, keep working on it. Or they'd go, great, now do this one.

We don't really have access to our lamas in that way and we're empowered in our tradition, we put all the stuff in the toolbox and then you decide how you want to direct your own progress.

If you hit a snag, you reach out to your lama, but to be able to self-direct is a really, really useful tool to learn. Yes, we want to rely on our lamas, but if we're relying on them in a physical way to tell us what to do, we're not learning how to figure out a situation and decide what to do.

There is this fine line. We do rely on our lamas even as we are self-directed because they taught us how to be.

How to get from contemplating to meditating

Kamalashila, when he lays this bombshell on us, you're not really meditating yet. He says there are actually karmic causes for being able to reach meditation when we finally figure out we want and need to do that.

He talked about the causes for creating the seeds for meditation was the six perfections, if you saw that in your reading.

Making efforts in the first four perfections is what sharpens our, increases our goodness, our merit, our virtue. They can ripen as deepening concentration. They can allow us the platform for the ripening of a deeper understanding of the wisdom.

Then he says, and in order to have the ability to do our first four perfections to make the merit, we would need to clear out our obstacles and gather the goodness that allows our clearing out the obstacles to be affected.

We just did that in Master Shantideva's course 10. We want to purify and make merit. 

We try to purify and we don't get anywhere. Why? Because we've got obstacles to purification.

What do I do? Make merit so that my purification can work, so that my merit making can go towards wisdom instead of just towards clearing out my obstacles.

How do we do that? We do the meditative preliminaries. That's what they're for.

They aren't really about warming up your mind for that next 15 minutes of meditation. 

They do help with that, but their purpose is built in prepare ourselves to gain the goodness that allows us to apply ourselves to giving, sharing, avoiding harming others, stopping getting angry, having a good time doing all of that so that our meditative concentration can go deep enough that we can actually meditate, so that we can actually get ahas about mental images, behaviors, and emptiness.

Get the system?

He's reassuring us that if we've been doing our preliminaries, we have been preparing ourselves. If we've just been trying to live according to our six perfections, we're already growing some goodness.

Now maybe we would want to crank up the effort of those six perfections. Now that he's saying, look, we need those seeds planted in order for our contemplation to shift to actual meditation.

In any given meditative session, have you noticed that the quality of any given day's meditation is really not related to the amount of willpower that you add to it? Have you noticed that?

You can try really hard and have a lousy meditation.

You can try really hard and then a great one.

You can make no effort at all and have a great meditation, and you can make no effort at all and have a lousy one.

It's like what I do in the moment doesn't affect that session. It's frustrating.

Why do anything in the moment then? It's like because we're relying on our previously planted seeds to help us out. But it also means, if you have a string of lousy meditations, don't beat yourself up. But don't just work harder on your cushion.

Do something different off-cushion.

Do some extra Vajrasattvas, or some extra giving, or depending on what the obstacle is in the meditation, we're going to talk about it more. Make the antidote happen off-cushion, dedicate it to on-cushion, and just doggedly carry on.

How long is it going to take before the effort that I make this week to show up in my meditation session?

Who knows. Maybe the next day, maybe not till next year. But if I know that this deed's going to bring me an improvement in my meditation, I'm going to do it, whether I see the result or not, because I know. I've shown myself that what I do today doesn't show up tomorrow. Even what I do in this moment doesn't show up in the next moment, even though it looks like it.

I grab the doorknob, I turn it, I pull the door open. And it's not from grabbing the doorknob, turning and pulling. Right?

So we're wanting to get to a balance. We've talked about balance in meditation before.

Usually we mean we reach that balance between dullness and agitation. But even before that, we want to find this balance between not making enough effort, which can lead to not even getting on the cushion. Or on the cushion, letting us stay in a dull state of mind, either subtly dull or grossly dull, just not making the effort to fix it.

And that state where we're making so much effort that we stay agitated about that effort. We're trying so hard, we just can't settle down.

Somewhere there's a balance between those two. And no teacher can tell you where to find it. We have to try it ourselves.

There are future meditations where Lama Christie instructed us to push ourselves over the edge to agitation on purpose in order to find that edge, to experience it, so that we can recognize leading up to it and make the adjustment before we go over. 

We wouldn't know what it is if we watch ourselves push, push, push, push and flip over.

Same with dullness. Find what qualifies dullness to subtle dullness, or subtle dullness to gross dullness so that we can recognize it. That comes later.

(48:35) So even this balance between pushing too hard and not pushing enough, what helps us find that balance is this state called NGAR or intensity, a quality of mind that helps us stay fascinated enough with the object or the series of thoughts about the object, that our focus stays laser-tight.

Without that NGAR, our laser focus is this big, in which case it's not laser.

From that can come the dullness. Or from too much laser focus can come that agitation. But we can have the same kind of NGAR factor in our eagerness to get onto the cushion in the first place, and our eagerness to apply ourselves to the steps. 

This same idea of NGAR or intensity that's critical to holding us in that balance between dullness and agitation is also the factor that's critical to our ongoing career as a meditator to help us from doing really well for months at a time, then life gets in the way and it drops off, and then it's as if we have to start over again.

To be able to be the tortoise in the tortoise and the hare, this steady dogged determination. Even if on some days it's just a short session. It's like if you go to work without having meditated, it's like you're going to work naked or without your phone. Like there's just something wrong with this picture if you haven't started your day with your meditation. It takes time for our meditative practice to get that kind of priority in our life.

And we can't do it by just saying, I'm going to prioritize my meditation. We get there through some kind of realizations as our renunciation gets stronger and stronger. And we see that the solution to the suffering is this understanding about our behavior. It becomes so clear to us that a regular meditation practice is where the shift in my own relationship to myself comes where I can really actually change my behavior off the cushion. Then my meditation practice does begin to prioritize over other things.

If we try to go there just because somebody told us to, it won't hold us.

But when we go there because we showed ourselves, this is where the results will come from, then we have our own self-motivation.

Master Kamalashila quoted Sumati Raja Sutra many times.

In this case, he's saying, if we make a habit of things, they will come easy to us. 

That's not some brilliant aha, we know that things that are habitual are easy to do.

But the way we make things habitual, the way we make some new behavior into a habit, they say, is to become obsessed with the new thing.

When we are obsessed with something, we're thinking about it constantly.

Do you remember having that crush on that, whoever it was, and all you could think about was this kid. Then as a result, you got to know them better, and etc. And you know, maybe it went to a nice relationship for a little while, maybe it didn't. But that idea of being so obsessed with something, it's all you think about.

Then before too long, that whatever it was that we were obsessed with becomes so automatic to have it in your mind that everything you do is somehow colored by that and it's not an obsession anymore. It's become habituated. That's really what GOMBA means, to become habituated to something.

The steps in meditation practice is to get obsessed with reaching that state of mind called Shamata, thinking about what it would be like all the time.

Oh my gosh, how much easier life would be if I had a Shamata-quality concentration.

What might it be like? And how can I get there? Like, no matter what else you're doing, you're thinking Shamata, Shamata. And then we might graduate from there to be thinking Bodhichitta, be obsessed with Bodhichitta.

I hope we already are obsessed with Bodhichitta, so that we're just thinking, wow, that heart opening, be able to see the face of every being. How cool would that be? I want to do that. And we're thinking that even while we're doing the dishes, brushing our teeth. It's planting seeds. It's coloring our mind. And it will color our heart as a result, and then surprisingly, we find ourselves before too long, automatically being kinder with maybe really setting out to be kinder in a certain way. Because we've been coloring, making our obsession into a habit.

And then at some point, we're doing the same with emptiness. Emptiness, emptiness, emptiness, everything that's going on around me, it's nothing but emptiness and seeds ripening.

It's kind of fun to be in a group for a period of time together where everybody's talking about emptiness. They may not so much be behaving according to its ramifications, but at least they're talking about it, and trying to figure it out.

It's helpful because then the seeds are coming from everywhere instead of just our own little self who's trying to do it by ourself out in a world that we're nobody else seems to understand.

I'm sorry, we're not a community where we're together a couple of times a week to be able to do this together. But at least we have the ability to get together in this way, so that we can challenge ourselves.

(56:18) Another obsession that we can work on at some point—we can't do them all at once, one at a time—is the obsession of what's it going to be like when I am the angel?

What am I going to look like? What's it going to feel like?

What would it be like to have no limitations like that?

It wouldn't be a bad thing to be obsessed about.

Probably don't do it verbally, right? Do it mentally, or somebody close to you is going to wonder what you're talking about. It will pay off in our meditative concentration, says Master Kamalashila.

If we've not seen emptiness directly, probably at some point we want to become obsessed with thinking of the emptiness of any one of the three of the components of the three spheres, ultimately all three spheres. So that we can grow the aha that at any moment I'm aware of anything, I know it's emptiness. We won't see its emptiness, or experience its emptiness outside of meditation.

But when we've habituated our mind to knowing emptiness has to be with the appearance of anything, then our mind is like already habituated to be able to go there in our meditation.

And so we're trained to do it with outer objects as we go through our day. Oh, there's that, but it's true nature is empty, could be anything at any moment. It's already this, so it's not going to change until the next moment, maybe it could change.

And then at some level we shift to, well, what about my own self, this thing I call me? Oh, that's empty too, available all the time to be something else at any moment.

You get so used to thinking that, knowing that with any experience we have, that when we take ourselves into meditation, it's just there to be able to then go deeper into what does that really mean? What would that really be like to experience that?

Technically we can see then that any meditation we do, we can at some point then shift to, And this is mental seeds ripening and nothing but.

Any meditation will be the jumping off point for that ultimate reality.

Any meditation object will do fine.

However, this tradition says, use a meditation object that's virtuous so that all the time that we're on that object, we are not only on our object, we are on a virtuous object. So we are adding to our virtue. So we could stare at a stick and mentally think of the stick and think of its emptiness and that'd be great. But if we can do it with a stick, why not do it with your root Lama and get the added benefit of intellectually working on the emptiness of a powerful karmic object? The seeds are planted more strongly.

Lama Christie says, if we really are intent on reaching that experience emptiness directly in this lifetime sometime, then we would want to get obsessive about thinking about emptiness and dependent origination, because that's what's going to help grow the habituated mind to the idea that will allow it to penetrate deeply enough in an emptiness meditation to actually get there.

It's not enough to every day for 15-20 minutes cogitate on emptiness and karma, because then we have the other 23 hours of the day where we're just immersed in everything has its own nature.

Our contemplation meditation time will not be strong enough to make the shift. So it takes both.

How do we stay motivated enough to do that?

Master Kamalashila started us out with, be willing to witness other people's pain, grow your compassion.

With compassion, because of compassion, because there's suffering in my world, that is supposed to be for us our motivating factor.

If we're ever finding ourselves losing our motivation, Master Kamalashila says, go back to growing compassion, and gain this connection between understanding where the suffering comes from that is needing my compassion to grow our need to meditate deeply enough to reach the solution to that suffering.

Expect Obstacles and Apply Antidotes

(67:16) Master Kamalashila says, once we commit ourselves to this progress on our meditation cushion, he says, expect to experience obstacles. It doesn't necessarily mean we're all going to get obstacles. But if this master is warning us, you know, then probably it's likely that I will get them and I still get them. And he's not talking about the meditative progress, obstacles of dullness and agitation, we'll get to that later. Here he's talking about the obstacles to getting on the cushion some days. And even once we're on the cushion, those obstacles to staying on the object.

If you remember the nine stages or nine levels of meditation, the first three of those levels, we have an object, but we can't stay on it long enough to even get dullness or agitation. So he's talking about at this point about the obstacles that we can expect, and then he's going give us suggestions for how we develop an antidote for those obstacles.

1. Busy Life

He says that a very likely obstacle that we have is our busy life.

Our busy life means that when we're trying to focus on something, something that's coming up in life imposes itself and, Oh, I've got to think about that. Or I'm worried about this. What am I going to serve for dinner tonight? How am I going to manage that meeting?

In this obstacle of being too busy, they call it, it's really about future events, not far future events, but things we have to deal with immediately. And the thing is, we sit down to meditate, we're focusing our mind, like that mind that needs to plan out something, it gets really clearer. And we'll get it's like, okay, I need to do this, this, this and this. And it's like, it's so tempting to say, okay, timeout, let me write that down, because I won't remember it by the time I do my session. It's really, really tempting. 

But it's an obstacle. We do that, we plant seeds, it's going to happen more in the future. It's a hard one, because they come up.

Yes, it's what we mean by agitation. But here, it just takes us right off our object. Because we want to solve that problem. We want to be prepared.

We need some kind of really strong thing that will pull our mind back from that and back onto the object.

When we're in that obstacle of the busyness, we don't want to stop and figure out, how do I stop that and pull my mind back? We want to have these antidotes prearranged. And that takes some effort on our cushion, to figure out what prearranged thing do I impose on myself when I find myself off on my busyness, distraction, or even starting to go there?

What works to pull my mind back and say, no, sit on this cushion? Right?

What worked for your puppy dog when you were teaching them how to sit, right? Sit, stay, good dog, you know, maybe a treat. Meditatively, what's going to be your sit, stay, good dog for when the mind wants to go off? It's up to each of us to find one.

The suggestion for this one is that because we are all on the Mahayana track and struggling Bodhisattvas, maybe the imagery that would take precedence over your planning for your future would be thinking of someone's pain.

Not just suffering in general, but my friend so-and-so who's undergoing treatment for uterine cancer. If I could just change my world, there'd be no such thing as uterine cancer. And I need to do it for her. Maybe now my mind would make that a precedence over the clarity of how am I going to deliver Thousand Angels of Bliss in Mexico in January, right? Because my mind wants to go there and sort that out. So maybe that works for you, maybe it doesn't.

What makes our now on the cushion more important than our planning some future event?

You find it.

2. Low Meditation Priority

Secondly, second problem, he says, is we might get to a point where we are thinking, oh, my meditation is kind of boring, or it's a hassle. It leaves me tired or my body hurts. Well, I just don't want to.

It's not the laziness so much that we were talking about with the classical problems in meditation. But he says it's a common problem.

I just, I don't do it so well. So why bother today? I have other things that are more important. And that's the kicker. Is there anything that's more important than our meditation?

We need to be honest with ourselves. We will probably say, yes, there are more important things. If Sumati fell out of bed, and he's hollering for me, then maybe going to handle what's going on with him is more important than my meditation at that moment. Ultimately, it's not, but we decide—each time.

The thing is, we get our priorities a little bit mixed up. It goes from Sumati having fallen out of bed, and I need to go help to well, maybe I should go prepare that meal for lunch, so I don't have to do it and then I'll meditate. We just get complacent is the thing.

If we're aware of our tendency to do that, we can head it off at the past, especially when we have an antidote already figured out that we when we get into that mood, we think this, and then Oh, no, no, no, let's get on the cushion, even if it's just a shorter time than usual. 

For this one, he says, what will help on those days is if we have already conjured up this clear mental image or clear idea of what I will be like, when I am a Shamata level meditator.

Like my mind will be, I'll be able to turn on this bright, clear focus mind problem solving, no efficient—not efficient me personality necessarily, but mentally efficient. 

None of this waste of time mind stuff going on. You can clearly cut through the issues a problem needs.

How cool would it be to have a mind that you can rely upon to see deeply into an issue, come up with solutions, choose a healthy one, and move forward with it.

They say, a well meditative mind, even off cushion is sharper, clearer and faster. It just it moves faster, but but without scattered around faster, penetratively faster. 

Somehow it's dichotomous. When our mind is faster, we can actually penetrate into the moments of time, and they slow down, because our mind can get in between them, because it's so fast, that we experience them as slower somehow. I haven't gotten there. But it makes sense that a really, really sharp mind will be able to experience the moments of changing consciousness, even when there's 65 of them per instant. Somebody must have done it that they counted the 65. And they say we can get there. Where it's like one and two and three and four, right, they're going off like that. In this much period of time (finger snapping), is the point.

So maybe on those days, This is more important than getting on my cushion. And we think no, no, I'm never going to reach that kind of quality of mind. If I let all these things distract me, okay, I'll get on my cushion and see. But maybe that's not so inspiring for you. Think about what inspires me to get on my cushion.

Not the Lama said I had to. That's not it. Something else.

3. Fogginess

Then, third one, third problem. They call it fogginess. We're just foggy. So we can't stay on the object.

Lama Christie suggests that it's that feeling that when you wake up, you just can't get fully woken up. Like you didn't get a good night's sleep. You have to get up early. You wake up and you can't get fully awake. To have that state of mind, even if we can put that state of mind on a meditation cushion, we just can't hold the object, right?

The dullness will just be too great.

Again, we need some kind of something that we think, say or do that will kick us out of that. I need more sleep stay.

They always say, if that's a repeat repetitive pattern, probably we need more sleep. And sleep is the answer. Isn't it Nancy?

But if it's just one of those days that happens from time to time. Or even you've ever eaten too much and then you just get that like, sinker feeling, and yet you need to go and do something. You got the sinker from a big lunch and you have a meeting you have to got to get bright. And maybe we go to coffee to do it. But we can have some mental image that we call up that makes us go, Whoa, I need to be awake for that one. Classically, they say, bring to mind something bright and shiny.

That doesn't work for me. It's supposed to work for our minds.

They also say, bring up something, a memory or something that makes you happy. Is there something that no matter what kind of foul mood you're in, if you see little kids are here, little kids giggling, does it make you go awe and wake up

Or is it bunny rabbits doing something? Find something that makes you go, that's so fun. That's so neat. That's so cool. And we wake up. We maybe don't stay awake, and it drops back down in, we need to call it up again.

The thing is, we want to add our fingertips, especially in this one, this foggy mindedness. If we go, man, I'm so foggy, I need to wake myself up with something. It's like we won't be able to think of anything to wake ourselves up, because we're too sleepy.

Have them already planned out at your fingertips.

Like in your mind, in your heart, you've got a little box of your antidotes. And it's like, I'm thinking about my future plans. What's the future plan antidote? Pull it out. Turn your mind to that.

Are you going off the object? Yes. But you're already off the object. So you want to go off the off the object onto your antidote. And then from your antidote, you go back onto the object. Whatever one you need.

But you need your little box of your antidotes already planned out.

4. Thinking About the Past

The last big obstacle, he says, is the thing that pulls us off our object is thinking about the past. Lama Christie suggested that that tends to not happen so much until we are in a prolonged retreat. Because in our daily life meditations, our daily life is so focused going forward that unless there's some situation involved having to do with our past that takes us there, trying to solve a problem related to that, we're really mostly focused in future. And so it's not likely that issues from the past are going to come up as the thing that pulls us off our object.

They may pop up, but they're not so important that they'll pull us off.

When we're in a retreat our day is so scheduled that there's no planning necessary. So there is no there's less and less reason as it goes on to send our mind into the future. I need to take care. I need to deal with these things. We're there. We're in the moment, etc.

But then what tends to come up is these memories of the past. We're not doing it intentionally. They just bubble up. I used to get this clear distraction of a particular street intersection, and I would be the passenger in the car. My mom was driving us. I would always be about 10 years old. We'd be sitting at the stoplight of this particular intersection from when I was a kid. It would pop into my mind during my Mahamudra meditation. And it's like, what's up with you? Yeah, mental image, I do the thing, mental image, nothing about. But it would just come up day after day after day.

It's crazy stuff like that. For Mahamudra, you're actually never off your object, but it was a distraction.

So our past will also take us off our meditation object. And in that case, again, we need an antidote in our box for on those occasions, that will pull us back to the importance of the meditation object that we're working on.

Lama Christie suggested that the idea of the impermanence, like this too shall pass, all of that that happened in that past, it's gone now. It shifted, it affected me, it's done, there's no reason to think about it any further—whether it's a happy memory that pulls you off or some disturbing memory. Maybe it's something that does need to be addressed. But not as your meditation object on that day's session. You want to choose it as your meditation object for another day's session and investigate who did what to whom, where did it come from. Then it is your meditation object, and it's not a distraction. But when you have a meditation object that's not it, and up it comes, and off we go, trying to figure it out, that's a distraction in meditation, an obstacle.

The habit of letting us do that is the habit that will prevent us from reaching Shamata, that prevents us from reaching the solution to all of that anyway.

Again, we're going to find, or at least, anyway, we're going to try.

So these are the four conditions we need, prepaid antidotes, the busyness, meaning going to the future solving something. That's how sharp I am, I can't even remember.

One of them was the, I just don't want to do it. So we need something that will motivate us for that, I'm not good enough, I'm not going to do it, something else is more important.

We need the, help me out, fogginess. Yeah, to wake ourselves up.

And then we need the, is the past really so important that it's worth my meditation time now? I don't mean that. The past is trying to distract me. What's more important than the past?

Meditation: Plan Out Antidotes Against Meditation Obstacles

(87:17) She gave us another just quick meditation. So let's do it together.

Settle yourself in.

Do your breath, to tell your mind to go in, and imagine that you just sat down on your meditation cushion to meditate on your own holy angels‘ amazing qualities as your meditation object.

It starts out pretty clear. And then suddenly you recognize that you've been distracted by some activity that you need to do in the near future. And you've been thinking about how that's going to go.

And so you think of something that will bring that distracted mind right back to your object. What might do it for you?

What thought or mental picture would make your meditation more important than feeling prepared for that soon to come event?

Maybe a couple different things come to mind. Make a mental note.

Maybe thinking about some kind of pain in this life might be what instantly pulls you back onto your object, because we know that the results of meditation will lead us to the end of that pain someday.

See how that component compares to the idea that popped into your mind.

Now let's shift the scene. Imagine that it's time for meditation.

You're looking down at your meditation cushion, thinking, I don't really want to do that. I don't have time today. Or even if I do actually have time, I just can't face it.

What antidote thought or imagery would shift your heart that would get you onto that cushion that day?

Could it be a clear picture of what it will be like when we do have this perfect meditative concentration? This picture of what I would be like. Might that help us get on that cushion on that day we really don't want to?

Or maybe doing it on behalf of all those people that don't have the circumstances to ever meditate, even if they wanted to.

Now make a mental note of the ideas that came to you.

And we'll switch the scenes. Imagine it's a day where you are just exhausted. Your mind's really fuzzy, just trying to fall asleep no matter what you do.

What thought or image or even something you do might wake you up, turn on that eagerness, regardless of the not enough sleep?

Is it the face of someone you love?

Is it some memory of something really happy? 

What turns on your eagerness?

Make a mental note of what popped into your mind.

Of this one about the overly tired. 

Or the one about just not wanting to get on the cushion.

Or the one about being too busy. Problems to solve. Places to be.

And dedicate to trying those on for size, to see how they work for you, both on and off the cushion. So that you can identify the antidotes that you can put in your antidote box.

Then turn your mind back to your awareness of being in your body, in your room, in this class.

When you're ready open your eyes. Take a stretch.

Maybe you'll want to do that guided visualization a couple times. If you didn't get a Oh I'll do this or I'll do that. But it's the assignment for not just this class but for the rest of Bok Jinpa 2, is to find your antidotes and use them of course. 

(100:35) Lama Christie also taught in this class Master Kamalashila says, okay once you are determined to actually meditate and we've got ourselves to stay on the meditation object. Now our task is to train ourselves to reach and stay in that balance between dullness and agitation, so that we can reach that quality of meditative mind where we are on our object free of agitation and dullness for as long as we have predetermined to stay there.

That's describing the level nine of the nine levels—TING NGE DZIN—single-pointed concentration.

He makes clear, single-pointed concentration is necessary to reach but it is not the state of stillness. It is not Shamata. Something else has to happen for stage nine level meditation to become the Shamata platform from which we can trigger the direct perception of emptiness. But he doesn't really say much about how to do that in this text.

So Lama Christie went to Pabongka Rinpoche's liberation text for his explanation of moving through the nine stages and then reaching what are called the SHINJANGs that take level nine and transform that quality of mind into SHINE or Shamata.

I have that vocabulary just didn't want to take the time to get it but let's do it.

Reaching Shamata by Fluidity 

TING NGE DZIN, I think it's spelled this way but it's pronounced this way, TING EN DZIN.

SHINE is the Tibetan for stillness, Shamata.

What's missing in the quality of mind at level nine called TING NGE ZIN is this thing called SHINJANG.

SHINJANG means practiced ease or flexibility.

Lama Christie just uses the word fluidity for SHINJANG. Fluidity like the experience of a well-trained gymnast who steps onto the balance beam, does her presentation, the music starts and boom, she goes into her routine and her mind is focused, her body does it and that's fluidity.

Yes, she's concentrating. Yes, she's working hard. But it was turned on and it goes.

This idea of the SHINJANGs, there's four levels of them. And our TING NGE DZIN becomes Shamata, we have all four levels of this fluidity, this ease with which our mind is staying on the object brings it to this quality of mind called Shamata or SHINE, stillness.

The mind is not still like we think of, I mean the word stillness sounds like one point doesn't move, doesn't think about anything else. It is true, it's single pointed on its object with these four states. So I'm just going to read to you the Lama Christie's explanation of Pabongka Rinpoche's description of how these four SHINJANGs come on trying to describe what they're like.

But of course his description of what it was for him isn't going to completely describe what it's going to be like for us. Same with the levels of meditation, we have to get in there and experience them and then it's like, Oh, I get it, that's level seven. Oh, I get it, that's what they mean by level eight.

Until we're there, we have a good idea.

He says, first we get mental fluidity, then we get physical fluidity, then we get the bliss of mental fluidity, and then we get the bliss of physical fluidity.

They're using the term bliss, and it's different than the way we use the term bliss when we reach Diamond Way, higher Diamond Way. They're doing it to plant seeds, of course. And they're also like this whole idea of what's happening to our subtle body when we're reaching fluidity is that those movements of the winds through the knotted channels, the winds are gathering towards the central channel, and that's pleasurable. Even before they get into the central channel, it's pleasurable to have them headed towards it.

When we have a TING NGE DZIN quality of mind, the way the winds and mind are moving and not moving is pleasurable already. So what characterizes TING NGE DZIN is that our mind is on our object, and it is completely free of any inclination to get agitated or lose the intensity.

The object that we're focused upon could be changing, moving all over. No problem, our meditative concentration will go with it. But it will never get agitated. It will never get dull.

The mental fluidity turns on. It's an ease. This mental fluidity becomes this ease with which the mind will not move from its object unless we tell it to.

So yes, that happens at TING NGE DZIN, but this ease with which we can then say, okay, you meditating mind, here's your meditative object. Let's penetrate into something else about that meditative object.

Do you see how we need that to be able to penetrate into the dependent origination or emptiness of the meditative object? Because without it, shifting that from the meditative object would be losing the object, because the object is the holy being. 

When we're at SHINJANG, we can direct it into this other aspect of the object and we've not lost the object.

Mental fluidity.

They say mental fluidity is where you can direct your mind at will.

It's like, wait, I can direct my mind at will now. Actually you can't. You think you are, but you're not because there are times when we try and we can't do it.

But when we are in this quality of mind, we have absolute control over whether the mind stays there or penetrates deeper. The first, the mental fluidity.

Because of that—I'm just going to read—because of that, because you are putting your mind towards any virtuous object you want to, if a mental affliction comes up, you are able to just destroy it right away and completely turn your mind into the opposite direction. And because of that, pure winds start coursing through your body and you get this physical fluidity.

Your physical body is not doing anything, but you get this sensation that's called physical fluidity and it's pleasurable.

Then we have that Bodhisattva vow: I promise not to use the pleasure of meditation as my object to get distracted by the pleasure of meditation. This is why we have that vow, because it could get very like, I just want that. I want to reach the SHINJANGs. Thank you very much. And I'll just sit there in the SHINJANGs because they're so pleasurable.

It's like, no, they are a tool, not the goal, says our Bodhisattva vow.

We get this physical fluidity where we are able to turn our body towards any activity we would want to effortlessly.

So when we are gaining the physical fluidity on our cushion, it actually improves our ability to physically function off our cushion as well. The seeds are going to help. 

Lama Christie said, when this comes on in meditation, it means our body will stay put in that meditative position, even though we might say, problems are arising for it. We're not aware that we're having pain in our knee when we are at these Shamata SHINJANGs. But maybe the body's having pain in its knee, that if we weren't at this level, would make us shift and move out of our meditative posture

And it's funny, it's like, well, if you can't be aware of your knee pain, can you have knee pain? No, actually. And that's the point. That's the physical fluidity.

Then he says, your body gets light as a wisp of cotton. And because of that, you start to feel this great sensation of bliss throughout your body. Sorry, I called the first one bliss. It was not bliss. The fluidity is not bliss yet.

When your body gets this lightness, then you get this sensation throughout your body in terms of physical touch sensations. It's not like somebody's touching you. But the sensation of bliss is, it's not something you see, it's not something you smell, it's not something you hear, it's not something you taste, it's something you feel.

Not emotionally. But not like that.

So the mental fluidity comes before the physical fluidity. The physical fluidity comes before the bliss of the physical fluidity. And then after we get this physical sensation of bliss throughout our body, then when our mind is focusing on the object, first what comes is that there is absolutely no other object besides the object.

We would think that means, well, finally, I've reached single-pointed concentration. But we launched from single-pointed concentration into this SHINJANGs.

So this state of nothing other than the object is that we lose that me, the meditator, focused on that object. We become so immersed in the object, there's no separation between subject and object.

Geshela always says, you don't become the object. But the way we got there was, me aware of that, me aware of that, me aware of that. And we got deeper, deeper, deeper. At this point, it becomes just that. 

In addition to not having any other object, he says, our mind dissolves into the object. But Geshela says, don't misunderstand that. Which means that we no longer have a perception of a subject state of mind when we are meditating. We are just experiencing the object, and that's an incredible bliss of mental fluidity. It gets so strong that we'll almost lose the object itself also. The key is to pull ourselves back just a little bit, and when we are in that, almost ready to lose the object as well, but not, that's Shamata.

Again, until we experience it, we can only imagine what he's trying to explain.

He says at that point, it's exactly the same as being on the preliminary stage of the first concentration level of the form realm. We've heard that before from our ACI classes. To be at the first level of the form realm is the causal meditation level we need to be at to see emptiness directly.

We got that clarified years later. It does not mean we are in the first level of the form realm. We are not. We are in the state of mind that's planting seeds to be reborn there, if one of those seeds goes off at the moment of death.

So we don't stay there, because we don't want to build up those seeds.

We use that platform to turn our minds to the true nature of our object that we are so penetrated into.

Well, how do we do that? If we've absorbed into the object somehow? Somehow we can do so.

So this state is SAMTEN DANGPOI NYERDOK MICHOKME.

MICHOKME means that no lack of time, which is the name for that first level of the form realm.

Lama Christy says, this whole thing means it's the level of meditation—SAMTEN—that is indispensable. The indispensable. It means it's the one we need to be at in order to push ourselves through the doorway into the empty nature of our object, whatever it was.

Penetrating into the empty nature of any object penetrates into the empty nature of all objects, which penetrates into the empty nature of our self subject side, the object. And that's the one that makes the shift that puts us on the conveyor belt to the end of all suffering.

But Lama Christie gave us another meditation. I'm not going to do it. This was all supposed to be an advertisement for reaching Shamata, reaching stillness so that we will be motivated to find the antidotes, the pre prepaid phone, right? Prepaid antidotes that you will pull out that will instantly shift your mind off the thing that's being the obstacle to getting on your meditation object to breach level four.

If we're still losing our object briefly or longly, we're not going to make that progress. So find your antidotes that will work for you.

We learn when you're off, recognize it, pull it back, reward yourself, get back on.

We really do do that first. It's when that doesn't work that we pull out this, stay off the object, pull up this other idea, get motivated again, get back on the object when we use our box of antidotes. But we want them already planned that work. So have fun with that.

[Dedication]

Good work, everybody. Thank you so much. Bye-bye. Happy Thanksgiving to those who partake. 

9 stages of meditation:

Sem jokpa fix your mind (place mind on object)

Gyun-du jokpa place the mind on the object with some steadiness

Lente jokpa fixing our mind on the object (patching)

Nyewar jekpa fixed with continuity (not losing it anymore)

Dulwar jepa tame the mind

Shiwar jepa make the mind peaceful

Nampar shiwar jepa especially peaceful (balancing swiftly + carefully)

Tsechiktu jepa make the mind single pointed (TING NGE DZIN)

Nampar jokpa balanced meditation (Shamata quality of mind)

Hevajra tantra 

All right, welcome back, we are back, Bok Jinpa Course 2, Class 7. This is December 3rd, 2025. Let's gather our minds here as we usually do. We'll do our opening prayers and then a short starting meditation. So let's gather our minds here as we usually do, please.

[Class Opening]

Meditation: Helping Others Ultimately

(7:17) So settle your body in.

Then bring your attention to your breath at your nostrils.

Use that breath as your object of focus to fine-tune the focus, brighten the clarity, and turn on the NGAR, the intensity, the fascination, the curiosity, the eagerness.

Shift your object of focus from your breath to that person who is in some kind of distress. Bring them clearly to mind.

Recognize the distress they're having, its physical component, its emotional component, its intellectual component, to the extent that you can.

Let your heart open up to their pain, to their distress, as far as you are able, as open as you are able.

Can you reach a similar reaction to their pain as you would have if it were your own? That urgency to solve it?

Let yourself feel desperate to help them.

It's uncomfortable to want to help so bad, only to find everything we try falls short. 

Maybe by some miracle what we do in the moment brings them some relief in the next moment. And by the time we meet them again, there's some new distress they're having.

Think of the various worldly ways you might try to help this specific person, with this specific problem, and see how helpless it feels. Because we just don't know whether they will help or not.

Next, bring to mind, how is it that we actually could help? How is it that we actually will help them?

It's through our practices, the practices through which we clean out our own negativities and obstacles, gather goodness, to grow our understanding of where pain comes from in the first place.

All the pain that we see in our world is our own projections forced upon us as ripening results of our own past, similar behaviors, smaller, that have grown.

And all we need to do is to reach that platform of concentrated awareness called stillness, and then focus that concentrated mind on ultimate reality.

It's the most powerful way we help anyone.

Now, whatever resistance, or doubt, or discomfort that that thought brings up, recognize that too as projections ripening. Let them pass.

Reconfirm your belief in emptiness and karma.

And so be here in class to plant seeds in your mind, that when they ripen, will help you on this path to helping that other in that deep and ultimate way.

Then turn your awareness back to your own being in this body, in this room.

When you're ready, open your eyes, take a stretch.

Getting to Shamatha

(20:05) Recall that Master Kamalashila said, Okay, great, our concentration is getting pretty good. Now we actually need to learn to meditate. And it's like, I thought that's what we were doing.

He then went into that description of the quality of a meditating mind, define it as being at Shamatha level. So it's as if he's saying, until we reach Shamatha, we're not actually meditating. It's like, well, what about all those meditations I did taking me through the nine levels? Because I have to get to ninth level in order to reach Shamatha, was that not all meditation?

I think if we had Master Kamalashila here with us, he'd say, I'm so sorry, honey. But no. 

But just like they say, once you take Bodhisattva vows, we'll call you a Bodhisattva. But are we Bodhisattva? Not quite yet. It's kind of like that.

So don't hear this and go, oh, man, I've been meditating for years and it's always been just contemplation, concentration. It's like, no, we're meditators, but in that same way.

The reason it's so extraordinarily necessary to be at that platform called Shamatha is because the object that we are meditating upon, whatever it is, the object that we have in mind is the deceptive version of the object, the appearingness of the object. That's not its true nature. That's its appearing nature.

We can come to experience its appearing nature directly as a projection. But without going to the underlying true nature of the object, we won't make real that thing called emptiness, that quality of the object's no self nature that we want to make real for us, to bring on as a realization.

So we can have very, very high or deep intellectual understandings of dependent origination, awareness, the appearing nature of something, and the fact that it can't have any nature of its own so that it can be what it appears. We can understand that so well that we can sit in meditation, feeling that. But until that experience is direct, we still have not, when we come out of it, we will not be on the conveyor belt to the end of all suffering. We will not have cut the belief in the self nature of things. We will have cut away some of that belief, of course. All of our beliefs in the self natures of things are less now than they used to be.

But to actually know from direct experience that is a seed planted, not just one, that deeply colors all our other seeds. In a way we could say it deeply un-colors all of our other seeds, if we call our belief in self existence a color in all of our seeds. Let's call it a black color in all of our seeds. Once we've experienced emptiness directly and come out of it, which we will, all of the seeds planted with that belief in self existence, the color has gotten a little less. It doesn't go away completely. But your belief in those seeds as something having a nature in them, that's gone.

So our belief in our ignorance is gone after direct perception of emptiness. And that doesn't happen without that direct experience. There's something about this thing they're describing to us as the direct yogic experience of ultimate reality that is uniquely powerful to change, to create this shift from still planting seeds of some level of ignorance to not replanting ignorance. So no more ignorance is feeding all the rest of the ignorance. Which is why we're on the conveyor belt to the end of ignorance, even if we didn't do anything else, which we won't not do with something else, of course.

Master Kamalashila is making his case for needing to be at this platform called Samatha, because it's from that platform that we have the focus fixed, clear, intense with those SHIN JANGS, with the pleasures, the physical pleasure, the mental pleasure, the mental fluidity, the physical fluidity. That means we are so single-pointed, pleasurably on our object that when we then intentionally, cognitively, turn to the no-self nature nature of that object, our concentration will stay there as the shift happens from appearances to the absence of self-nature of those appearances.

Once we get to trying to describe it, it just goes haywire. But when we're in that level called Samatha, technically because of what's happening in our subtle body at the same time, and we turn our mind with familiarity to the no-self nature of that object, we go into an experience that you're not actually aware of until you come out of. We all know that, we've heard that.

When we come out, it's like having ridden the bicycle for the first time. After studying, visualizing, imagining, but never getting on a bicycle, and you finally get on a bicycle one time, you ride it, you get off, now you know what it's like to ride a bicycle. And even if you never do it again, you are forever changed, right? Because now you know. Like that, for direct perception of emptiness.

Without being in that quality of concentration called Samatha, we have obstacles and blockers, things that we are too attached to, that when we try to penetrate into that absence of self-existence, our mind of attachment of these other things and a part of ourself refuses to go along.

It isn't like, wait, I'm not going. It's just that something will kick us out, and we won't be able to lose ourselves into that direct perception. They don't usually use those words, lose ourselves, but that's what it feels like. It's so similar to dying, actually. And we're going to hit a place where there's fear, which if you're at a level of the Shamatha that's so extraordinarily pleasurable, it's a whole lot less likely that that fear will even arise, because we're at such a deep and subtle level of such extraordinary pleasure.

On the other hand, the pleasure itself could block us, because it's going to disappear as well. So as we're gaining our Samatha with these extraordinary pleasures, we want to continually remind ourselves that they are not the goal. They are a tool of our practice through which we reach the goal.

If we call them the goal and want to hang out there because they're so amazing, maybe that even disqualifies it as Samatha. You could take me to the debate ground for that. 

We learned those different qualities of the experience, still focused on the object from which we reach that level of concentration, short version called MICHOKME, no lack of time, but meaning we're at the level of concentration that's planting seeds in our mind that if one of those ripens at the moment of death, we would land in the first level of the form realm. Not that we want to do that, but the quality of concentration that makes those seeds is the quality of concentration from which we can detour and experience ultimate reality. It doesn't just happen reaching Samatha that we do the detour into ultimate reality. We have to impose it, we have to turn it on. So we're not getting to a state of mind in our meditation where we're just zoned out, blanked out. There's still a meditator meditating, doing stuff, running the show. That isn't happening self-existently. It's happening by way of seeds. So we need to plant those seeds because without them, they're not going to ripen. And that's our practice of meditation that we call meditation from the beginning, that Master Shantideva is saying, not until you actually reach Samatha are you really meditating, because until we get there, we can't make this shift from experiencing to direct experience.

(33:42) Lama Christie said, you know, you got to cook the difference between meditating on emptiness directly and with a meditative state of mind experiencing emptiness directly.

There's a difference in experience.

Is it still projections happening? Absolutely. But it's got to be somehow different to be intellectually thinking of emptiness and experiencing it directly. Somehow there's a difference between thinking so clearly about riding a bike that you can almost feel the wind going by and actually being on the bicycle, having the direct experience.

So he says, we have obstacles to even getting on our meditation cushion enough to train ourselves in this way. We talked either last week or the week before about finding our own unique antidotes that we use when we can't get on the cushion, when we get on the cushion, but we're too drowsy, when we get on the cushion and we're too agitated. What works for you? Keep exploring until you have one for each of those different conditions. There is a fourth condition I can't remember right now.

So that they're right there in your meditating apron pocket for when you recognize, oh, I'm having that obstacle. I can just fix it, so you try to just fix it. We'll talk about that tonight. And when the fix doesn't work, then you call upon this other object of meditation, so you have to take a time out from your meditation object and switch to your antidote object until you feel this shift back to, okay, I'm back. I'm back here. I'll try again. And no matter how many times you've got to do that, you keep it up until your mind will stay without that obstacle.

Attachments Blocking Us From Reaching Shamatha

They say that what blocks us from reaching Shamatha and then even from Shamatha from reaching ultimate reality are these things they call our attachments, our attachments. And specifically the attachments that we have through which we identify ourselves, our me.

At some point we'll recognize how our attachments are blocking us from making the changes in our behavior that are needed to be able to change our very identity. According to what we say, we profess we want. I want to become Buddha for the sake of all sentient beings. But then suppose, you're walking down the street and up pops Lord Maitreya and he or she reaches out their hand and says, Nancy, come with me. It's time to go. Are we going to say, wait a minute, I don't have my luggage. Or are we going to say, wait a minute, I have to tell my husband I'm going. Or are we going to say, what about my cat? Because any of those, Maitreya will poof, will be gone.

We have beliefs about me and my nature and me and my world. The reality of those that will hold us back from when it's time to go.

Now that when it's time to go, I hope for you, it's Lord Maitreya, come on, let's go. But one of the ways it's time to go is going into the direct perception of emptiness in meditation. Another way, come on, it's time to go, is dying. Whether you get to do it in a prepared way over weeks and months, or you get to do it flying through the windshield of your car. If we are adequately prepared, free of our attachments, we'll be able to go through that experience in such a way that we can use it to reach what's called the direct perception of emptiness at this other level I'm talking about, it's called clear light, reaching the clear light.

That's the same idea, reaching this direct experience of our own true nature, meaning our emptiness, which is the Dharmakaya, our Dharmakaya, reaching the Dharmakaya, direct experience of Dharmakaya. Let's just not even say mine or yours or Buddha's, just simply Dharmakaya.

Meditation: Peeling Off Attachments to Our Identities

(40:27) Lama Christie, she said, if you meet somebody new and that new person says, oh, nice to meet you, Margie. Tell me, like, who is Margie? Tell me about Margie, who is Margie? What adjectives, nouns, maybe even verbs would you give to say, to tell somebody, who are we?

We would start, well, I was born in so-and-so a place. I have this many brothers, sisters, and we just start listing all these things about ourselves through which we identify with as me. If we keep going, they keep saying, yeah, tell me more. Yeah, tell me more. You can think of all the things, our profession, our education, our clubs, our social habits, our hobbies, all the way down to our beliefs, our belief systems, our things we are attached to.

So she took us through this little exercise, meditation exercise, to first think of these different identities that we have and stick them on, like a whole bunch of sticky notes, photographs, images, sticky notes, and then she's going to have us peel them off and say, okay, who am I now? Peel another one, who am I now?

We're not going to do it long enough to peel away all of them, but we'll get a feel for what Master Kamalashila is talking about as to why it's so important to reach this quality of concentration called Shamatha so that we can reach the answer to who am I when I peel all of those away what's there. Because you've got it already. What's going to be there when we peel them all away? Yeah, what's there when everybody's gone? Not that you'll ever be gone, but you get the idea.

Let's try it on for size just for a little bit, this first identifying different attachments that we have about ourselves through which we identify ourselves, and then we'll peel some of them away and see what happens.

Settle your body in.

Go through the steps to turn your mind inward, go to the breath first.

Then turn deeper inside and identify five or six words through which you identify yourself.

Recognize with each one of these identifiers, you actually get a little bigger.

Now find the you that's in the middle of all that.

I'm the wife. I'm the sister. I'm the neighbor. I'm the shopper. I'm the teacher.

And then choose one of them and remove it.

What happens to you when you don't have that identity anymore?

Are you gone? No.

Are you different? Yes.

What if you had never been that identity?

Identify another one… and take it away.

Who are you now?

Take away another one…

…and another one.

Check honestly. Are you expecting to find a core-you onto which each of these sticky notes has been put?

If so, identify it.

Find that core-me sticky note and remove it.

Put it back.

Remove it.

Put it back.

Remove it again.

Stay there. Stay there.

Put it back.

Choose one of those important identities and decide whether you want to put it back or not.

Choose another one…

…and one more for good measure.

It's more comfortable to have a core me with different identities that I'm familiar with. And it's not the real you. It's not the real me.

It's projected me.

And that works and that's real. That functions.

So dedicate whatever glimpse you got to reaching Shamatha, to reaching your direct perception, so that we really can help this other in this deep and ultimate way.

And then become aware of this projected you, and this projected body, and this projected room, and this projected class.

When you're ready, open your eyes.

(53:52) That's a fun meditation, isn't it? Could you feel the difference between the free fall of pulling it away and then no, core me, right? Then free fall, ahhhh, core me, uff. And recognizing that no, no. I want the free fall me to be as comfortable as getting to the core me because the absence, that free fall me, I call it, that's the real me.

There's nothing real about it, right? But can you get to it? It's just like so imagined, right? Imagined, reaching that, like you're getting on the bicycle for the first time.

Experiencing instead of imagining experiencing.

To get there, we need to be Shamatha meditators.

To get to Shamatha meditators, what do we have to do? That would be what we would next ask, wouldn't we? That's where we're going. 

We've learned, ACI course 3, applied meditation. We learn everything we need, almost everything we need to know about meditating, except… I still find that course is like, yeah, but we don't ever actually do it in that course. We just learn about it.

And so at some point we have to take ourselves and put ourselves into practice. I did it with a retreat. I took a month long retreat and I just worked on the nine levels, because I just didn't understand them. It was one of the most powerful retreats I've ever done.

I just had one meditation object and I did it over and over and over and over and over and over. Trying to say, what would it be like to actually be at level four or five?

Let's take our break and then we'll start into the second section, which is about how do we actually negotiate moving our mind through the nine levels. Because we have to do it to reach Shamatha. So get refreshed, please.

(student: Amazing. And I have a question. When we did the first meditation, I realized that I can deeply feel the pain of my children. And if something to happen to them, I would really want them not to suffer. And then I proceeded to think that it's really because of me not wanting to suffer. So how do I get from there to Bodhisattva? Because empathy is real, but it feels like discomfort is mine.)

Right, and so that inspires us to act in the highest way we can because we know what it is to have that suffering. And so by acting to clear my suffering, I'm acting to clear their suffering as well. And so it can awaken the depth of your Bodhicitta, not close it down by recognizing, I want to stop this pain because I'm feeling it. It's like, right. Exactly. And their pain triggered it for you. And our seeds triggered theirs. It's ours anyway. So, yeah, let it trigger your determination to stop planting it.

(student: Okay, thank you. Yeah, and the second meditation was just brilliant. Thank you so much.)

The 9 Stages of Meditation

(61:30) Apparently, Master Kamalashila does not go into so much detail about actually how to move ourselves through these nine stages. So Lama Christie went to another text, the text called the Hevajra Tantra.

It's a teaching given by Lord Buddha in his Vajradhara form. In it, there is this section about the nine stages of meditation and how to move through them. 

That's in greater detail, and Lama Christie says, I'll bet this is what Master Kamalashila was using as his root text, too. But she's not quoting from Kamalashila here.

She went to the Hevajra Tantra. The reading that you have, there's nothing tantric about it, although it is from a tantric text. You'll see it in your reading.

In this Hevajra Tantra, Lord Buddha says there are four things to train ourselves in, in order to move our level of concentration through the nine stages, in order to reach the level where those SHIN JANGs, the fluidities can come on.

That means we are now actually meditating at the level where we could penetrate to ultimate reality if we were to turn our mind to doing so.

Does that mean the day we reach Samatha, we can put our mind into the direct perception of emptiness?

Theoretically, practically, I'm not so sure, because that, too, needs to be seeds ripening, of course. But without the seeds ripening, being at Samatha, no amount of turning our mind to the ultimate reality will be the direct experience of ultimate reality, because something about our mind will kick us out before we get direct. That is the point. Because of the karmic goodness of reaching the karmic projection of my mind at Samatha. Not that you stop and say, OK, I'm there. But you know it when you get there.

So just for completion's sake, here's the Tibetan for the nine stages. Lama Christie gave us the Sanskrit words, but when I wrote them all out for you, I realized that the spelling from the transcripts were incorrect. I tried to find their correct spelling, and I couldn't find it, so sorry. If you can read the Sanskrit squiggles, you'll be able to see it in your reading. But she didn't translate that for us.

(from the screen share + meaning)

1. SEM JOKPA fix your mind (place mind on object)

2. GYUN-DU JOKPA place the mind on the object with some steadiness

3. LENTE JOKPA fixing our mind on the object (patching)

4. NYEWAR JEKPA fixed with continuity (not losing it anymore)

5. DULWARJEPA tame the mind

6. SHIWAR JEPA make the mind peaceful

7. NAMPAR SHIWAR JEPA especially peaceful (balancing swiftly + carefully)

8. TSECHIKTU JEPA make the mind single pointed (TING NGE DZIN)

9. NAMPAR JOKPA balanced meditation (Shamata quality of mind)

So recall the nine stages of meditation.

1. The first stage, SEM JOKPA, we place our mind on the object. It's called Fix your mind. JOKPA means to fix your mind. Fix your mind on the object. We're on it, but we're off it most of the time at this level.

2. GYUN-DU JOKPA, place the mind on the object. Fix it with some steadiness, Geshela called it in a stream.

3. LENTE JOKPA, third stage, in patch-like fashion, fixing our mind on the object. When we lose it, we fix it. So the fix is fast in third stage.

4. Finally, we get to fourth stage, NYEWAR JEKPA. NYEWAR JEKPA is finally we're on the object. We are fixed with continuity. NYEWAR JEKPA.

5. Then we tame the mind. So we learned that until we're at level four, we are not on the object for long enough to worry about whether we have dullness or agitation. Once we reach level four, NYEWAR JEKPA, we are on the object and we are not losing it anymore. And now our ‘on the object’ quality of mind will vacillate between agitation and dullness. And so the effort to catch either one of those and fix it sooner, sooner, sooner, is what's moving us through these stages of taming the mind, NYEWAR JEKPA, which usually means agitation.
   Mostly our first problem once we're on the object without losing it is that we get too much and we have to bring it down, tame it. But then we over tame it and then we have to bring it back up again. DULWAR JEPA is taming the mind. 

6. SHIWAR JEPA is making it peaceful. So we're swinging between these two. In practice, it's not like you reach DULWAR JEPA and you no longer have any agitation. It's this one, level six, level five, level six, level five, back and forth in any given session and through the course of our career. Then we keep working on it.

7. NAMPAR SHIWAR JEPA, we reach really, especially peaceful. We're at that level, our ability to correct for subtle agitation, subtle dullness is happening really swiftly. Like you're riding the bicycle down the center line and you're trying to stay on that four-inch line. You’re really carefully. It's still taking effort to do that. 

8. TSECHIKTU JEPA is making the mind single-pointed. It's reaching TING NGE DZIN, single-pointed concentration. It's level eight, where it takes effort at the beginning and then you get everything all cleaned out and you go, without the little effort of level seven.

9. Then we reach stage nine NAMPAR JOKPA, which is balanced meditation, which means the quality of our meditating arising seeds is, time to meditate, got your object, sit down, trigger it with whatever you do for your sit, your body, whatever you do for your mind, breath, turn on your meditating object and boom, you're in the zone. You don't have to adjust and fix at the beginning, Level nine, just in the zone. That allows stay in the zone during that session. Over time, over practice time, the physical pleasure, the mental pleasure, the physical fluidity, the mental fluidity will come on. And then at that point, when you sit down, you don't just trigger your level nine, you trigger your Shamatha. Once your Shamatha meditator, I understand, every time you sit down with that intention to go back into it, you will go back into it.

They give the implication that even when you're not meditating anymore, you can turn on and off your Shamatha quality of mind. I don't know about that. I don't know how to relate to that. Because they say one of the beauties of Shamatha level meditation is that you cannot have a mental affliction when your mind is in Shamatha. It's like, well, anytime we're in meditation and we're on our object, particularly our virtuous object, we cannot make negative seeds because we're focused on a virtuous object. We are aware of being focused on a virtuous object. We're not going to have nasty thoughts. We're not going to lie to them. We're not going to kill them. We're in mind on a virtuous object.

So it's like meditating on just your virtuous object is such a goodness as long as we stay on the object. When we lose the object, we're planting the negative seeds for losing the object, losing a virtuous object, egads, right? Powerful karmic seeds. Not to scare us. It's meant to enthuse us. It's like, wow, I can stop making negative karma for the length of time I'm sitting on my cushion if I just work hard to keep my virtuous object in mind. Thank you very much.

In Shamatha, there will be no mental affliction until you come out of Shamatha. Master Kamalashila apparently does talk about people misunderstanding Shamatha as being reaching Nirvana, because you have no mental afflictions while you are in a Shamatha level meditation.

They say, well, that's the definition of Nirvana. You have no mental afflictions.

What's the problem with that? We still have latent seeds for mental afflictions, and until those are damaged sufficiently that they can't ever ripen, we are not free of mental afflictions. We know the definition of Nirvana is the permanent cessation of mental afflictions and seeds for more due to our individual analysis.

Just reaching Shamatha is not becoming free of mental afflictions. But we are not having any while we are there. Thank goodness.

4 Steps to Train Ourselves Through the 9 Stages (from the Hevajra Tantra)

(74:56) When we learned the stages of meditation, we then learned about the obstacles to meditation and we learned the antidotes to the obstacles. But even still, it wasn't like, so how do we really apply them? What happens? And that's what the Hevajra Tantra gave to us, and that's why Lama Christie shared it. 

There are four steps, four things to train in, in order to move our minds through the nine stages. These four skills, they have gross level applications. And then as we use them, our ability to use them, happen on more and more subtle levels. So these four, they give them to us in a certain order. When we look at them, we'll see, I think we actually train in them in a different order. But let's see.

These four things that we use to move our minds through that, the nine stages.

1. We fix our mind on the meditation object.
   We just have to practice doing that again and again and again.

2. We stop the mind from flying off the object to other objects.
   We practice that again and again and again.

3. We hold the mind steadily on the object.

4. We bring it back whenever the mind wanders away.

So we could make the case for these talking about how we learn to negotiate ourselves through stages one to four. We do these things to get, to be able to have our mind on the object without losing it at all. And then what does it mean to not lose it at all?

When we first have our meditation object, look at the third eye of your holy Lama, and that's your meditation object. You bring it to mind and you're staring at it. And next thing you know, you're thinking about that meeting you have later and the third eye of the Lama has just gone to your mind. That's being off the object.

Were you halfway through the meeting before you realized, oh my gosh, I'm thinking about the meeting and not my Lama's third eye? Or did the first person say the first two words in the meeting and you're going, oh, wait, no, right. Come back.

Then we get to the point where we've got the object. The mind just starts to think meeting later, and we go, no, no.

Then we get to the point where there's this like little sense of agitation that we're wanting to go and no.

And finally we get to the point where that third eye on the screen won't go away. We won't go away from it.

But then what happens is as we're on it, It's like thinking about it, and that thinking about it. If we let it go on, it's going to eventually (woosh) think about their ear. And then think about the meeting, right? So our ability to catch it and return seems to me to be one of the first things we need to learn.

He has it as the third thing. We get our object and hold it and then notice when we're off, when it's wandered away. In these transcripts, the word that's written down for wander away is spelled W O N D E R. Wonder, right? I thought, wow, maybe that's really what it should be, right? Because my mind goes wondering about other stuff. Maybe that's more accurate to what's happening in meditation than wondering. But anyway, I just thought it was funny.

As our ability to catch and return gets faster, more subtle, we get to the point where it can't go anywhere. It won't go anywhere. It doesn't even want to go anywhere anymore, because of the seeds we've worked on by repeatedly: Here's my object, powerful karmic object, no mental afflictions, making good karma as all I have to do is stare at that third eye. We want to stay on it, so we're quicker to bring it back.

Then, we tune in steadily, we're on the object. Then the stopping it from flying off turns on. We've gotten good at bringing it back, more and more subtle. And now we work on not even letting it go. Sheerly by the power of effort, and when our effort won't do it, it won't bring it back or it won't hold it, that's when we say timeout, here's my antidote for when I'm all agitated. Oh, you know, the people I love are just going to go on hurting as long as I let my mind do this, I've got to get busy. Or my Lama is going to die. I've got to get busy, right? Whatever works for you.

You don't want to take the time to figure it out, when you're in your timeout. Have it figured out already.

Or maybe the reason the mind keeps wandering off is just I'm too dull, too drowsy. And so it takes me two weeks before I figure out I'm thinking about the meeting. Wake up. My Lama is going to die. Wake up. Maybe that one works for both. I don't know. Find your own. Apply it.

If you don't need to apply it, don't apply it.

If all you have to do is go, oh, meeting, that's stupid. Lama's third eye, I'm back. Look how beautiful that thing is. Wow. Just to focus on it. I'm making goodness. It's going to stop suffering. I want to focus on it. Then get in there and stop the mental blah, blah, blah about it. Just focus. Enjoy. Focus. Clarity. Intensity. Fascination. Curiosity. Eager. Find a word. To me, intensity doesn't do it. Intensity makes me feel like (Noises as if from overexertion). But eagerness. Oh, right. That helps me. And watch for when we lose it, it'll get sooner and sooner.

So these four steps, you find what order. You need to use for your own mind. 

1. Get your mind on the object.

2. Keep it there.

3. For me, pull it back when it falls, when it goes away. And it's just like going back and forth between keep it there and pull it back. Until finally. Oh, now this the story comes on. Or it's like something clicks in, and now I'm on.

4. And now when I'm on the task is to watch agitation, dullness, agitation, dullness. But I've already been doing that. See?

These same four trainings, as they get more and more subtly applied, we're not looking for, have I wandered off to the meeting? We're looking for, have I wandered into agitation or dullness? But the same watcher watching what they're doing is doing the same thing. Recognizing it on more subtle levels.

Lama Christie says, it's as if time slows down, and that you're able to be aware of what's bubbling up out of your mind. Like as it bubbles. Because then you'd go, yeah, third eye, yeah, third eye, yeah, third eye. Not in so many words, but knowing you're there. And then up comes one about the traffic noise, and your automatic response is to bring it right back to the third eye image. That's correcting agitation.

Same for dullness. Our immediate response to recognizing we have that ripening, that obstacle, is to fix it. In which case we don't need to reach into our pocket for that other antidote. But when we try to fix it and it drops off again, it just won't fix, it won't stay fixed. That's when you say, okay, I need to change my object of meditation shortly to get me back on and then get rid of it and go back to your original.

We want to learn how to do this ourselves. We want to be able to meditate with our own mind and not always be listening to a guided meditation.

We're not going to reach, we're not likely to reach Shamatha and the ability to move our mind into ultimate reality if we're always relying on guided meditation recordings. Because they keep blah, blah, blahing on. And we're listening for the instruction so we don't ever get deeper into our own being. So we learn them and then do them without the recording.

(87:32) Level nine is called finding balance, getting balanced meditation, because we've got this effortless balance of eager alertness and relaxed peacefulness, quality of mind on the object. And that combination of bright, eager, but relaxed is what allows us for those SHIN JANGS to turn on.

So really we don't turn the SHIN JANGS on, we wait for them to arise. And then we use that quality to then penetrate more deeply into the appearing nature of our object and its emptiness. So from there, if we were still using our third eye of our holy Lama, we've been using just focusing on it. Now we would focus on what's appearing to me as my seeds ripening, and what's its nature independent of that? None. Words are simple, but getting it right is more complicated.

Well, so do we have to wait until we are at Shamatha before we do those? No, please don't. Spend some amount of time of each session practicing your fixation on your object. Just the object. None of the other, What is this thing? Etc.

Just get a holy object, get a picture of it in your mind or a feeling of it there with you and work on your fixation. Catching your mind running away.

What do you have to do to bring it back? How do I keep it on there?

Like, how do we stop something from going off?

It hasn't gone off yet, but we want to stop it from going off.

How do you stop something that you're not doing?

Doesn't it have to go off and then you stop it?

It's a slippery thing. How do we stop doing something we're not doing?

It's pertinent to how do we stop not seeing projections, not seeing our world as projections.

We don't see things as projections even though they are. We need to stop seeing things as not projections.

How do we stop doing something that we're not doing so that we can do it right?

I don't know. I really don't know.

(student: Plant seeds.)

Plant seeds. You're right. Teach a class about how to stop doing something you're not doing. Stop your mind from leaving the object before it leaves the object. Maybe that's the seed.

So every time you've been on the object, we could rejoice about being on the object because you must have stopped your mind from running off the object. Hooray. We've got the seeds, because at least we've been on the object a little bit, haven't we? I hope so.

(91:55) As we are working on this focus, clarity, intensity, watching our mind on our object and keenly, alertly correcting when things go wrong and preventing it from going wrong again, we are improving our ability off the cushion to catch our minds off the object–the object being the level of our morality–and hold our mind more keenly on that ethical way of life, which gives us greater power over the reaction that we have to any given circumstance, that gives us the power to decide if we're going to act from that reaction or choose not to act from that reaction and in fact, choose some other action in response.

Our effort on our cushion helps, like ripens increased ability for our mindfulness off the cushion. Not just ‘I'm so mindful of every bite of oatmeal’, but my ethical mindfulness, my behavior choices.

As our level of ethical way of life is operating on a more and more subtle level, our cushion time will be able to reach that peaceful state of mind better and better. As our cushion time is more effective, our off cushion time is growing our goodness, and our growing goodness is growing our meditation time.

We've heard that before, meditative concentration ripens as a result of our previously worked on four other perfections, deepening our meditative concentration from which our understanding of emptiness and karma can deepen from which our ethical morality can get more subtle. It's this beautiful upward spiral where the two feed each other.

In my experience, it takes a little while to get there to see that connection actually happening in life, and that also it may be that it's happening and we're just not noticing because we expect it to be on some big obvious level that it's affecting us on, and it's having its effect more subtly. But if we were able to really objectively look at my behavior now compared to 10 years ago, yeah, I think it is true that those two have fed each other and now I'm more intentionally ethical than I was before.

But each of us, we'll see over time.

Hevajra Tantra, he says, train our minds in meditation in this way and the mind will automatically move through those nine levels and become totally free of problems, and will reach Samatha level effortlessly. It's like, it is not effortless. It's effortful, because we need to apply ourselves.

But when we've got the seeds planted and the seeds are ripening, it will be effortless. It's something we can look forward to. If it's not already effortless for you, it's not yet for me. So thank you for the opportunity for planting the seeds.

Meditation: Fixation Practice

Let's do one more meditation. It's an interesting fixation practice.

But first, in this meditation, Lama Christie had us focus on our breath, and then she gave us a spot to focus on in a particular location deep within our head. She described how to find that spot during the meditation, but I want you to find it first so that when we shift to it, I can just say, go there. So here's how she describes, and it's curious, I've never heard to use this spot for any other reason than just this fixation practice.

On the roof of your mouth, if you run your tongue from your teeth backwards, first you feel the little rough spots, rough area. And then you reach like a kind of a hump inside that's smoother. Then, if you keep going back, you'll find out like a little hill. Find the hill.

Try to find the top of the hill.

Put your tip of your tongue on it, and get a sense of its location inside you. Can you get it? All right.

Now take your finger and put it on the very top of your head. If you're sitting up straight, if you're sitting like this (slouching), it's not. Sit up straight. Got the top of your head. You've got your tongue on the top of that bump.

Now draw a line between where the tip of your tongue is and your finger. Got a mental idea of that line?

Now think of where your eyebrows would go if they went straight across. Put your finger right in the middle above the bridge of your nose and take that line, which would be parallel to the ground, that line in and have it intersect the line that's from the top of your head to that bump in your mouth.

Try to locate where those two lines intersect in your head. It's not Ajna Chakra. It's not Crown Chakra. It's something else.

And at that spot, we're going to envision a tiny little speck of light when we get there, okay? So don't do it yet, but have in your mind's eye or your body awareness where it's going to be when I say, look for that little shining diamond.

Okay, got it?

Okay, I've got mine too. All right.

(101:00) So set your body.

Bring your attention to your breath at your nostrils. Telling your meditating mind time to focus, time to clarify, time to intensity.

That was using our breath to turn our meditating mind on.

Now let's use our breath as the object for practicing fixation.

Find a sensation in your nose that you will use as your object of fixation.

Focus your concentration on it, holding that concentration on it with some amount of fascination–keenly aware of whether you're on it or off it.

We'll stay for four minutes. Every now and then I will say, check. And you check to see, Was I on it? If so, great. Was I dull? Was I agitated?

If you are off it, say great, now I know. Bring it back.

Give yourself some reward. Good job. And stay there.

Okay, four minutes.

Check.

Check.

Check.

Nice. Now make a mental note. Was I on that breath object more than off of it?

Did I not become aware of being off it until I was already off of it? Or could I feel it starting?

Did it come right back?

Did it stay there when it came back?

Now let's use that spot as our meditative object. Zero in on that location we identified. 

And now what you find there is this tiny star-like white light. It is the source of your breath.

So you focus your focus, clarity, and fascination on that tiny little speck of light, white light, shining in that location. Become aware of it sending what we call breath down and out your nostrils. And it withdraws that breath back up into itself.

You can see that breath going out of the bright star like a little wisp of light, if you like.

And then the star draws it back into itself.

Focusing on the star, exhaling and inhaling.

We'll do four minutes here.

Focus, clarity, fascination, relaxed and enjoyable.

Check.

Check.

Check.

Nice. Now make a mental note. How was your on the object, off the object?

How swift was the catching it off and bringing it back?

Is using a new object harder for fixation or easier because of the newness?

Just check your own experience, and then dedicate every moment of being on that object to reaching movement through the nine stages into Shamatha, into the direct perception of emptiness so that you can really help that other stop their pain someday.

And then bring your attention back to being inside this body, this body in your room, this you in class. And when you're ready, open your eyes, take a stretch.

Again, in our courses, we were keeping meditation journals that we turned in to Lama Christie twice a week. In it, we were supposed to give some assessment of our on versus off the object, some assessment of our quality control, and then just some comment about whatever occurred to us in that particular meditation. It was so helpful to have built a system for tracking the quality of my meditation. I don't do it so much anymore. But to be able to sharpen our awareness of being aware that we are making effort, aware that we are training helps the process be more effective. Just like if you were training some new skill. We wouldn't know if we were getting any better or not if we didn't have some way to track it.

Beings are hurting in our world. Their hurting is our seed. Our seeds are born out of our own past misunderstanding and selfishness. To fix it, we fix ourselves.

Motivated by their pain, by seeing them suffering, we're the only ones that can help. And that's why we're learning to meditate. That's why we're trying. Even as we fail, just get on the cushion and try. And it's making progress.

[Dedication]

So on that little diamond star breathing, don't spend more than four or five minutes on it as a fixation meditation. We can build up too much prana in our head. And that's not the point of this meditation. The point was that experience of something as familiar as breath to something less familiar and more precise as this point of energy doing the breathing. So you can experiment with that as a fixation. But don't spend a lot of time, please.

All right. Thank you very much for the opportunity.

Four qualities of interaction with an object that make the seeds for a rebirth in the From Realm:

1. Vitarka

2. Vicara

3. Ananda

4. Asmita

Gawa physical bliss

Dewa mental bliss

Michokme namkya taye

Namshe tanye

Chi ong me

Si tse 

All right, welcome back. We are Bok Jinpa Course 2, Class 8. It's December 10th, 2025. Let's gather our minds here as we usually do and we'll do our opening prayers and then go into our first sit together. So let's gather our minds here.

[Class Opening]

Meditation: Hollow Body

(7:25) So settle your body in.

When you have your body set, settle your mind in by bringing your focus to the breath at your nostrils, using that object to trigger your focus, your clarity, your intensity.

When you have your mind tuned just right, you intentionally shift your object of focus to that precious holy being, your own personal guide, there before you, feeling their love, their compassion, the wisdom through which they guide us.

While you're still focusing on them, think of all the effort you've done through this study and practice of these two Bok Jinpa courses. It's been several months.

Offer this effort to them. Offer any progress you notice you've made.

Offer them especially any efforts made to come to a higher understanding of emptiness.

See how incredibly happy they are with you.

They're always happy with us. And they especially like it when they see us see ourselves offer our practice efforts to them.

Then see them rise up in the air before you and turn to face the same direction as you, shrink down to a tiny precious holy being about the size of an olive, and come to sit upon the crown of your head. Feel them there, a little tiny pressure or warmth.

Then watch as they melt into light and melt down into you, becoming a part of you. 

Then notice as a result, the inside of your body has become totally hollow.

And so focus on the inside at the top of your head as if you can see the inside of your skull. And then scan down where you thought there was a brain is now this open space, a clear, beautiful skylight blue color.

Scan down. See the inside of your eyeballs is clear and hollow.

Your ears, teeth and tongue, neck, shoulders, can do one at a time or both at once. 

Looking down the inside of your arms, expecting to see flesh and bone and stuff, but it's all clear, beautiful light, all the way to your fingers.

Then turn and scan back up to go down your torso, this clear space down into the abdomen, hips, buttocks, genitals, thighs, knees, lower legs, ankles, feet, all the way to the toes clear, open space, beautiful color blue.

Then move your mind back up your legs, and as you reach your torso, you see there in the middle side to side, where your spine used to be is now this glistening tube of light, just enough different a color than your clear hollow space that you can perceive it.

This tube about the diameter of a milkshake straw, running straight up where your spine used to be, going on to the crown of your head and going on beyond the crown of your head, all the way up to reach the North Star.

And then from the North Star down into that middle place within our body, down to the bottom.

Inside that tube is very subtle movement. And that subtle movement is the physical manifestation of thoughts.

Focus on that location inside this hollow body, and notice what you feel inside there. 

When you find any kind of sensation, move your mind closer to it, and closer to it, and closer to it, until it feels as if your mind, your focus of attention is inside that too, so close to that sensation.

Imagine you are doing it.

Then you recognize that this tube is your body, you, your mind inside this tube. 

Everything else is just outside.

Let's hold it two more minutes.

Go back in when you need to.

Now with this awareness, me, my mind, inside my body, this hollow tube of light, become aware of that vast space outside it.

Then move your mind from inside that body of tube of light to inside that vast space that surrounds it.

Become aware of that outline of that vast space.

And then become aware of that outline as looking like the body that's sitting in this room.

So become aware of that, and aware of the room you're sitting in, and being in class.

Dedicate this glimpse of a different you to reaching your own direct experience of your own true nature, so that we can really help that other in that deep and ultimate way someday.

When you're ready, wiggle your hands and feet, open your eyes, take a stretch.

(27:52) If that's the first time you've done a hollow body central channel meditation, make a special note of what came up what it felt like. Because when it's like brand new and fresh, sometimes we get glimpses that we then forget because we think, oh, it was my first time and so it probably wasn't important. But sometimes it's more clear glimpse, because it's new and fresh. And then, as we get more and more familiar, we lose that intensity of it.

But also if it's the first time or early in our career with this meditation, there's often many questions. How do I know if I was really in there? How do I know I had it in the right place? What if it's in the wrong place?

Not to worry with all of those, it will come in time, the precision that's useful.

When we're using our subtle body, as the object to help us get to stillness, like there's not much better an object than getting into the central channel in order to reach stillness for a whole lot of reasons. But it doesn't mean just by thinking, ‚oh, now I'm in my central channel‘ that we actually are. And yet still it's planting seeds to be able to both reach the stillness we're working towards, and have the seeds to work with our subtle body in the future.

(30:07) Last class, we were talking about Master Kamalashila said, now, put yourself through the nine levels of meditation that are actually contemplation so that you can reach the platform of SHINEY, which is the platform from which you actually start meditating. And then it goes on to something else.

So Lama Christi went to other texts and chose to use the Hevajra Tantra common section, that's about the stages of meditation. But in there, it talks about seven of them and that text gave four things we need to achieve to move ourselves through the first four levels of its seven, that end up at the same place, reaching single pointed concentration, from which Shamatha can grow.

So, those four we learned… Well, let me get there in a minute.

So, Lama Christi said that hopefully by now, we've managed to develop some kind of system through which we are tracking our progress through those nine levels. I'm going to call them nine because that's what I'm familiar with.

If we are keeping a meditation journal, that's where the tracking is being tracked. So, now we can track without writing it down. But if we don't write it down, how are we going to remember what my level of meditation was mostly three months ago or six months ago, if I can't go back and look, or at least if I haven't imprinted it in my memory enough by writing it down, even if we don't go back and look, we realize, man, I was barely on level three most of the time when we first started in Bok Jinpa class. And now, son of a gun, 50% of my meditations I'm on level four. I haven't found five yet, but I've gotten to four.

If we don't continue to track, how will we know that we're making progress?

So, some method for being able to assess that day's meditation of my 20 minutes, what level was I at? What was the main problem that's coming up? What antidote worked? Just tracking that so that you have a tool for making progress.

You don't need to share it with anybody, unless it's helpful to share it with somebody, but use it intentionally.

How to do it? I'm sorry, I'm not omniscient. I can't get into your mind and say, this is how you do it, right? We figure it out on our own. I personally rely on muscle testing and I just ask myself the question, what was the highest level I reached? Check it out. Then was I on that level 80% of the time or more? No. 60% of the time or more? Yes. Okay. Good enough.

Is it accurate? If an omniscient being is watching my mind, they might say, no, you're fooling yourself. You were only on level whatever for 30% of the time, but that doesn't matter so much. It's the tracking that triggers the progress to do better and it shows us when things are going awry, when we're getting sloppy, when we're getting complacent, when something that we're doing in our outer life is interfering, it'll show up if we consistently do this tracking method.

So hopefully you're working on that already. If not, I hope this puts a little prod for us to do it, to do it better.

(34:45) The steps that we are training ourselves in are these abilities to hold our mind on the object, be aware when it is off the object, how to pull it back onto the object, how to keep it balanced on the object, meaning not agitated, not dull, and how to recognize when it's wandering away, when it's starting to wander away so that we don't let it do it. 

I love the analogy of training your dog. Training it into a service dog, not just a pet dog. First we teach it to sit and stay, and then we teach it how to heal, and then we teach it how to…, all these other things. We use this method of reinforcement, positive reinforcement, because the dog really just wants to please us. And it's our ability to communicate with that dog, what it is that pleases us, that is the key to training the dog. It does take discipline on the human side, but it isn't really disciplined from the dog's side because they just want to do what makes you happy. 

So by the time we've got the dog well-trained, they want to please us, and we tell them, stay by my side until I release you. And they're so happy to do so. No squirrel, no nothing will make them break from your side because they know that to stay there at your side is how they please you. So it's effortless for the dog, but it took a whole lot of discipline for the human to get that dog to know that that's what we need it to do. That's what we're happy with it doing. Then you don't need a leash or anything. 

So we've got our me, the meditator, and we've got our mind trying to meditate. The mind is the dog. The me is the trainer. The me needs the discipline. The mind is this unruly puppy. If we think, oh, my mind, the unruly puppy, that's what's got to be disciplined because it doesn't want to please me, then we've got an obstacle to work with, even to get on our meditation cushion.

So assuming you're all meditators already, let's assume that our meditating mind really does want to make progress. And that if we're not making progress, it's because we're not given that mind the right communication, so it doesn't know what to do to please us. And so it does its own thing, just like the dog would do.

The more clear we understand the instructions to give the mind, the smoother should be our ability to train our mind to sit, stay, walk by my side, stay on the object, free of distraction, free of dullness until I release you, which we would have already pre-planned. We are going to meditate for 52 minutes today. And then that puppy dog mind will say, all right, let's do it. And at level nine, followed by Shamatha, all you do is sit down on your cushion and boom, you're there. Dog is walking by your side, like healing. No leash, no nothing, happy to stay there, is where we're trying to go.

Heivajra Tantra says, 

1. we learn to fix our mind on the object. We talked about these last week.

2. we work on stopping it from flying off. It does fly off, we pull it back. It does fly off, we pull it back. Finally, our ability to hold it on the object keeps it there.

3. Then we work on holding the mind steadily. That's recognizing this swing between agitation while you're still on the object and dullness while you're still on the object and learning how to recognize them and correct, before they get so strong that they take us off the object completely.

4. Then at this level of increased subtlety, even as it's wandering towards either one of those agitation or dullness, we can pull it back. We can hold it there.

It's these four levels of getting ourselves to the place where we can sink into the single-pointed concentration that still requires effort, which in our nine stages would be level seven. Then moving to single-pointed concentration that just requires effort at the beginning. And then once you get it turned on, it stays there for the rest of the 48 minutes and 30 seconds. Then reaching the level nine where we're sitting for 52 minutes, sit down near in, from which the Shamatha can happen.

We also talked about when we learned those first four things to train in, we learned that in order to work with those, we need to have the antidotes prepared that serve to fix the problem once we recognize it. Because if once we recognize a problem, we don't have a pre-prepared fix to it, then trying to find the fix takes us further away from the object.

We were exploring the traditional antidotes to dullness, antidotes to flying off the object, antidotes to dullness, antidotes to agitation, antidotes to just not wanting to get on the cushion at all.

The instruction was, find what to turn your mind to that so automatically serves to get our mind back to the correction for the problem. What do we need to think about on those days where I'm just too busy or I'm too tired or it's sky's too blue, it's too windy, I can't meditate today.

What do you turn on that says, oh no, no. If I do this other thing without meditating first, it'll be like I'm out there naked. I can't do that. Get on my cushion.

Something, find yours.

When the mind goes dull, what is it that is so important for your meditation that wakes you back up?

Agitation. Dullness and agitation, it might be the same thing you turn on to correct it. For most of us it's different, something different.

Hopefully you've been exploring that as well and you've landed on some antidotes that you have in your pocket that you can bring forth.

In my own experience, over time, I needed different ones and new ones. I don't know, it's like the old ones got too familiar and they weren't shocking anymore. So anytime you feel you need to change yours, feel free. You don't need permission from anybody to do so.

Lama Christie says again and again that if we don't track our meditation sessions, we won't notice that we're getting better at it. I don't know, if you're like me, I'm an overachiever. So I have this high expectation of what my meditation session should be like, and so every meditation session was, no, that wasn't it. So I always felt a little discouraged by my meditations.

Then when I went and looked back, it was like, oh no, I have made progress. Give myself some credit here.

I hope that you won't waste your time with that kind of an attitude of thinking if my meditation is not perfect today, if I'm not at Shamatha level today and seeing emptiness directly, there's something wrong with me. But rather know that any effort, no matter how strong or weak, is better than no effort at all, and cut ourselves some slack, even give us some rejoicables that we're trying. It will help our progress go better in the same way that when you're learning a new skill. It's like, yeah, when we did all those skills to learn to play volleyball, most of the time the skill was done inaccurately, not very well. But then over time, oh my gosh, I could serve the ball to the back left corner repetitively because I decided to. But that took thousands of serves in the wrong place to get it there. So we know that it takes repetition. Karma and emptiness, karma and emptiness. So cut ourselves some slack with our meditation as well so that we'll want to do it, so that we can make that steady progress, so that we can get good at it. So that we can reach the platform from which those realizations can actually happen.

Can we just sit down and go into a perfect meditation and see emptiness directly having never sat before? Yes, anything's possible. May you do it tomorrow.

But it hasn't happened for me. It didn't happen like that. Requires work, effort, and karmic effort as well. So mostly karmic effort.

Please encourage yourself.

(47:23) Then Lama said, and of course most especially, we also need to be tracking our vows, our moral behavior, keeping our book. Whether you're actually writing it down or tracking your own morality in your head, ss long as we're doing it, choosing our interaction with others, from the highest understanding we can at a given moment. That's where the progress in our practice is going to come from. 

We won't make progress if we don't sit.

We can sit till the cows come home. If we get off our cushion and go be mean to people, the progress on our cushion is not likely to go very fast.

But we put the two together and we have a system that we can use to develop ourselves.

Then in the Hevajra Tantra text, it apparently says, look, concentration itself is going to lead us to enlightenment. Just concentration gives all the benefits that will carry us to our goal. Remember when we heard from Kamalashila, look, up until now, we've only been contemplating. You need to meditate, really. We felt like oh man.

Hevajra says, yeah, and all of that concentration time, it's what you need. It's going to take you to your goal.

Again, it means concentration on our cushion and it means concentration off the cushion, whereas the concentration off the cushion is our ethical mindfulness. Our effort to choose our response for the highest and best rather than letting ourselves react. Because our reaction is from ordinary me in an ordinary world, all of it self-existent mode. For the highest and best is some level of understanding on planting seeds that are going to help me and everyone in that ultimate way someday. However, we keep that in mind, whether it's through the word Bodhichitta, or Buddhahood, or wisdom, or color yellow, whatever you want to do. We want to remind ourselves constantly.

(50:20) Now, these four that Hevajra Tantra is teaching about fixing the mind, those four, when we first start, we go, wow, I've mastered these four. I'm on my object. But then those four get more subtle. So it's not that we ever stop using the skill of fixing the mind, pulling it back, keeping it balanced and pulling it back again. The wandering at a more subtle level, what we call those experiences get more and more subtle.

It doesn't mean we didn't learn them in the first place. It means we've reached a different level of understanding them. That's true, we could say that's true of the all nine levels. And then we could also say that's true of Samatha, that its experience is going to get subtler and subtler and subtler, the more we go in and out of it.

(52:02) In Master Kamalashila's short rendition of the nine stages, he says when we get up to what are called stages eight and nine, we're on these last levels where we're making effort at level eight and no more effort at level nine. So they're actually sometimes called that, making effort and then no more effort. But in the, I'm sorry, I misspoke.

In our teachings of the nine levels, we call level eight, still making effort and level nine, no more effort. But Master Kamalashila, he calls them using conscious thought and letting go of conscious thought for levels eight and levels nine. It gives it a totally different connotation, but it's not a different meaning is the thing.

When tradition has interpreted that as saying at level eight, we need to make this effort to get ourselves adjusted and on the object and finally free of the agitation dullness swing, and then once we get there, we stay there. Master Kamalashila is saying that period of time of making all the adjustments, there's still conscious thought going on. It's not like you're saying in words, oh, now I'm dull. I need to adjust my dullness. It's subtler than that. But it's an intentional discriminating between the experience that's being had and the experience that is intended. That has to be cognitively recognized, so they call it conscious thought at the beginning of level eight. There's this consciousness of making the adjustment and then the adjustment happens and that can all be let go of, and you're doing it or you're being it. Then there's no more conscious thought of being on your object.

Well, wait, how can you be on your object without being conscious of it?

To not have conscious thought does not mean you're not conscious. And we need to explore it to be able to tell what's the difference between conscious thought as in, I think it's too hot in here, versus this really subtle conscious thought of fixing myself on my object and then being aware of the object without any conscious thought.

Seems more like conscious effort, but he didn't use that word. He could have. He used conscious thought.

Then level nine, the conscious thought, is done getting on the cushion. And as soon as we hit the cushion, we're on the object, single pointed.

Now, all of that, can't think of the right verb to use. All of it means that our attraction to what's going on around us, even within us, off the object around us, it's getting less and less, our minds getting less and less interested in all that stuff. They call it withdrawing from the desire realm. But it's not like you're going to disappear from your world because you've withdrawn your mind from the desire realm. Technically, karmically speaking, you're not projecting a desire realm anymore. But until we are really keenly aware that my outer world is nothing but projections. And so when I'm not projecting it, it's not there. We're not going to have that conclusion. We're going to be thinking there's outer world out there. And my mind has always been so attracted to it, that it couldn't even imagine focusing on an object and not being aware of where I am the time of day, what's going on around me—just to keep myself safe. But for this deepening meditation, especially the one that will be the platform for reaching Samatha, that will be the platform for reaching the platform where we can see emptiness directly. This tug to what's going on in our outer needs to be let go of. And that happens by way of losing interest in it. And that happens by way of the puppy dog wanting to please the master versus you can't go there. You can't do that. You can't chase the squirrel. You can't, you can't, you can't. As opposed to, look, I'm so happy when you sit here with me. Then puppy dog wants to do that. 

So when we're going through these levels, four to nine, we've already reached the place where there's nothing in our outer experience that is more important than keeping my mind on my object. That's what it is to stay at level four.

Then agitation and dullness sits in. And then it's like, whoa, wait, no, there's nothing more important than being on my object with that NGAR. Eventually our mind will do that, and then we reach that place where we don't need the conscious effort to stay there and we're at level nine. But level nine is only single pointed concentration.

When we can consistently reach that on our meditation cushion, they say we can also consistently reach it off our meditation cushion when we intentionally turn it on. 

Imagine being that able to focus on your task at hand, so that like 100%, well, 99% of your mind is involved in what you're doing. You would solve problems, you would be effective, you would make things would go amazingly well, if we had that kind of concentration that we could turn on or turn off. As opposed to this scattered, I'm concentrated here, but I'm aware of doing other things as well.

There's an advantage to reaching level nine, even for our off cushion time. And there's the advantage of working on our off cushion time to hold our concentration on whatever is in front of us in order to plant the seeds to be able to do it better on our cushion too.

Again, if we're doing this scattered mind thing all day long, and then we try to single point and focus for 20 minutes in the morning, it's going to be an effort. It's like saying to the dog, do anything you want. But for the next 20 minutes, you just sit here, stay no matter what's going on around you. Right? Poor dog. We're giving it such mixed messages. I know I'm doing it to my own mind.

(61:20) Master Kamalashila, for some reason, takes some time to explain to us the different qualities of our meditating concentration that are the levels of meditation that plant the seeds that if one of those seeds opens at the moment of death would put us into one of the four levels of the form realm.

We heard from ACI 3, all we need to reach is the first level of the first level of the form realm. Because there's multiple levels in that first level, there's multiple levels and all four levels. But the level of concentration that we need to be able to trigger the direct perception of emptiness is only the first level of the first level of the form realm.

All the rest of it is deeper, deeper, deeper meditative concentration that would ripen as a higher rebirth in the form realm, which would be pleasurable on the level, right, that that seed ripened us in. But we've learned that that just means we're going to have a long, long time of a pleasurable life using up our goodness seeds, not just our meditative ones, but all of our goodness seeds, leaving us with only our unkindness seeds that haven't been ripening because we're in the form realm. But that's all we have left.

So they say inevitably, after however long your goodness seeds of any kind will sustain you in your form realm, you end up in a hell realm. Because that's what we've got left. And it's like, so we don't want to do those meditations.

So why would they spend time explaining what those meditations are like, even practicing them on some level? The lion's dance meditation was taking us through levels of concentration that would theoretically be the levels that would ripen as our form or even formless realm rebirth. If we didn't, when we got to what was it, floor eight or nine or whatever it is, step off and turn our mind to the emptiness of the lama. So it just seems curious. 

Yet, when we investigate these different levels, understanding the quality of mind at those different levels, actually gives us tools to better move us to the MICHOK ME, the first level of the form realm, and then to understand what we don't have to do further, to better understand what we do have to do further.

Did that come across right?

Okay, so let's take our break, and then we're going to do a little experiment.

(67:35) (student: Can I ask a quick question, Sarahni? On the last class, when we were focusing inside our brain, the problem I was having was my eyes would start to hurt because it's like when I focus, I think my eyes are trying to actually point themselves there, which is a little straining. And I find myself battling with how do I relax my eyeballs and not have them to try to look at wherever it is I'm focusing.)

Yeah, you know, I worked with that for years, because it seems to me that the only way to know I'm focusing is for my eyeballs to look there. It's difficult. So I would have to intentionally relax my eyeballs and try to forget them. And rather than look at the spot, try to sense the spot, feel the spot instead of look at it. And then once I got an idea that, oh my gosh, when I turned my mind to that place, I actually feel something, I don't have to look at it.

(student: Okay. Although that is like about where the pineal gland is?)

Anatomically, I think so. Not the pituitary, but the pineal. But again, we just worked with that spot just for those few days, and then never revisited it, curiously. We have other places that we work with in Diamond Way. But not that one.)

(student: That's interesting, because I sometimes have before just been meditating, and I just kind of okay, so where are these thoughts coming from? I try to pinpoint where the thoughts are coming from. And I seem to be right around the middle of my brain and there for some whatever reason that that was. So I have focused on it before, but you say we shouldn't do that for more than four or five minutes.)

Right. It'll build up too much prana in that area. And we don't want a lot of prana there. Good.

Audio Experience Experiment

(70:55) Our experiment is going to be I'm going to play this piece of music. It's four minutes long. And we'll listen to it once. Our task is, as we're listening, pay attention to your experience of listening. And then we're going to talk about these four different levels that relate to the four different form realms and then we'll listen to it again, knowing a little bit more about how we're going to use it.

I'm going to start it and then let me know about the volume. Then just close your eyes and enjoy.

(Music playing „Now we are free“ from the movie „Gladiator“)

I need to share that that piece is a piece of music that David purchased, and I'm sharing in an educational situation. But you may not cut it out of the recording and use it. It's proprietary. So if you want it, you need to go get it yourself. So that's on the recording so nobody gets in trouble. It's from the Gladiator soundtrack.

We're using it as an example, like nothing special about that piece. But as an example of these four different qualities of our interaction with an object of experience, that would be making the seeds, that if that seed ripened, would put us into one of the levels of a form realm rebirth. These four are a quality of experience called Vitarka. These are Sanskrit words. I don't have Tibetan. Vikara. 

So first level is Vitarka.

Second level, Vikara.

Third level, Ananda.

Fourth level, Asmita.

We want to explore these a little bit. The punchline is going to be that all we need for reaching the first level of the form realm is this quality of attention called Vitarka and Vikara. The other stuff that happens that makes that quality of mind into Shamatha quality of mind is that the blisses come on—the physical pliancy and bliss and the mental pliancy and bliss, the Gewa and Dewa.

But these other two, Ananda and Asmita, they're going to come on as well. But we're not going to spend time cultivating them because once we reach this level of the Vitarka and the Vikara, we're going to use that platform to turn on our analysis that will push us into a higher and higher intellectual understanding of emptiness, and then sooner or later into the direct perception of emptiness.

So this Vitarka quality of experience of our object is the quality where we are noting, it's the conceptual thought that takes note of the object.

When I turned on the music and you're listening to the music, your mind was saying, oh, that's music. As long as we were continuing to hold that awareness, that's music, we had Vitarka level of concentration on our object.

Now, I have to admit, I was watching my mind as I did this, and it became aware, music's playing. And then it was, oh, is the volume all right? Which during the time it was, is the volume all right?, I was not aware of the music. Was it still playing? Was I still hearing it? Yes. But my focus of attention was, is the volume all right?

And then I was back taking note, and then it was, oh my gosh, I didn't tell them the caveat that they can't take this to keep David protected of the copyright. So then I was off it again. Do you see?

So Vitarka was this ability to be listening to music and staying on it, just at the level of, I know music is playing.#

Next level, Vikara, is when our mind shifts from just this generalized noting to the finer details of the object. So from music playing to however your mind was engaging with that specific music. Maybe you'd heard it before, and then you had a familiarity and an enjoyment or not or whatever. Or maybe you'd never heard it before, and you weren't sure you liked it. All of that stuff that's identifying the specifics of that experience is this Vikara, but it's all directly related to the music. We're not Vikara, and we're not Vitara if that mind was going, gosh, I wonder whose that is, or gosh, I wonder about the volume, or I wonder how long this is going to go on? We've lost both. In our meditation, we would have lost the object at that point, because listening to the music is being on our object. Just Vitarka is being on the object.

But we've been on the object a long time in order to be talking about being on the object at the level of concentration that would plant a seed in my mind for becoming first level of the form realm. So we're talking a much more subtle level of general noting of our object at this level. Until we're at that level, we really can't figure out what it means, why Vitarka will bring the first level of the form realm, as opposed to just staying on our object at level four.

Staying at meditation level four is not planting seeds for a form realm rebirth, but reaching this quality of mind Vitarka would be. So much more subtle. But to learn about it, we need to learn the gross level.

So Vikara is focusing on the details that's keeping us on the object.

When we have that kind of focus and attention to detail, over time, the next stage that comes on is Ananda. Some of us recently learned that word if we didn't know it before, and it has to do with chocolate. Who learned that?

Ananda, it means bliss, right? And I don't know, about 20 years ago, maybe, I read an article about the scientist who discovered the active ingredient in chocolate that triggers the pleasure, and he called it ananda amide. Amide is a kind of chemical, and so you put the name of the chemical before amide, and that identifies the chemical. He calls it ananda amide. Like, what's up with that? That's an angel sign. So your meditation reaches this level that's as delicious as chocolate.

Ananda, at that level where you're being on the object, being immersed in the details of the object, but not like di-di-di-di-di-di, but just really immersed in the whole thing, brings on this pleasure, this quality of mental concentration called Ananda. The seeds planted while we are in that level of meditative concentration on our object, if any one of them ripens at the moment of death, would ripen us into that third level of the form realm. Where we don't want to go but it doesn't mean we resist when the pleasure of meditation comes on. That's not it. But we don't use it to stay focused on our meditation object in order to sustain that Ananda. We're later on going to use bliss as the path to reach the clear light, but we won't be able to do that if we've trained our mind to use this Ananda to reach this level of meditative concentration. And it seems contradictive. But even at those later levels, the only level of concentration we need are these two, which sounds like it's like, ah, no sweat. I can get there tomorrow. Try it.

So we're talking about these and the Ananda level at much more subtle levels than what we might be thinking.

From the added Ananda quality of experience, the pleasure, the bliss comes the fourth level called Asmita. Asmita, the word itself means self-ness. Self-ness, which is crazy because what we're trying to get to is self-less, right? No self, not even self-less, no self, no self-existent self. But what they mean here by self-ness is that when we slide into this quality of meditative concentration on the object, the experience is as if one's self and the self of the object, the existence of the object become indistinguishable. You don't merge with the object, but it's as if you are this clear thing and the object is coloring you.

They say this term of self-ness, Asmita, has this connotation of being clear, transparent and pure, in the way that a pure diamond is clear. You can't see it. 

To be pure is to be clear somehow.

They're trying to describe an experience with our meditative object, that Vitarka, we're very clearly holding it in mind as the object of our experience, Vitarka.

Vikara, we are experiencing it in greater detail than just the object as a whole. Ananda is reaching this balanced state where it's effortless to be so engaged with this object that it's pleasurable to stay there—physically pleasurable, mentally pleasurable. And then from that, we get so immersed in the object that it's as if it's indistinguishable me from it, or it from me. We don't become one. They make that clear also. But we're fully present in it. It's fully present in us. You'll have to find your own way of describing it when you experience it.

(90:54) So these pleasures, the physical pleasure and the mental pleasure, the Gawa and the Dewa, they actually start to arise as we are working at this level of staying on the object as a whole and being aware of its greater details. As we stay on that at this deepening level, the SHIN JANGs come on, which is what make our first level of our concentration be the platform from which direct perception of emptiness can happen. The MICHOKME level of the first level of the form realm.

So with this exploration of these four qualities of experiencing our object, let's listen to the music again and intentionally feel what it's like to just be aware, music playing. And then let yourself feel the greater details of it, checking to see if that's getting you distracted or dull. And then see what happens in terms of the experience you're having. Does any pleasure come on? And be aware. Do you become one with the music or dissolve into the music or however that might be. You could even play with it if you want to, to explore these different states of mind, however you want to use it, next four minutes, we'll see what we get.

You're ready? Enjoy. I hope you enjoy.

(Music playing again)

Could you recognize different qualities of interaction with that as an object?

Imagine similarly, being aware of the different qualities of interaction with your meditative object, whatever it is, to the point of, I don't know, feeling it coming from within you, or you coming from within it, or however you might describe. If you got that sense with the music. It's pleasurable, I think, to have that feeling that it's like inside somehow.

The point isn't that music does that or a particular piece of music does it or doesn't do it for someone. It's just using something to focus on, to explore these different ways in which we engage our object. It helps, of course, when the object, we already have the seeds to perceive the object as pleasurable. If that music was not pleasurable to you, then you had a whole different experience of it, still moving our mind through those four levels, but probably not being Ananda when we got there from the music, but maybe in another way.

That's not meant to be part of your meditation assignment to get a piece of music and do that. It's just to understand, to explore these different qualities of meditative concentration and recognize that when we're talking about planting the seeds for form realm rebirth, we're talking very, very, very much more subtle levels of what we just tried to explore. And that only level that we need to get to is this MICHOKME, the first level of the form realm. Usually Geshehla calls it the no lack of time, which is what MICHOKME apparently literally means. But Pabongka Rinpoche says the indispensable, the indispensable level of meditative concentration. Because it's indispensable to reaching the realizations that we need to progress along our path, the realization of emptiness, of course.

But then also we could make the case that in order to have the goodness and concentration level off of our cushion, to be aware of the dependent origination, seeing dependent origination happening—the pot on the stove experience that Geshehla describes. A certain level of ability to hold that experience in mind without freaking out or without losing it would be required to be able to interpret that experience in the way that would be, oh my gosh, I just saw dependent origination. I know to run and jump on my meditation cushion because I've got the momentum to see emptiness directly, if what Geshehla tells us is correct.

Our effort to reach level nine and thus Samatha is going to benefit us off the cushion as well as on the cushion through our powers of meditative concentration.

In order to reach these levels, even level nine, we are losing our attraction to the objects of the senses, which is losing our attraction to the objects of our desire realm. Our renunciation is kicking in on subtler and subtler levels, even to the point where we get to where when we're meditating and the garbage truck goes by with its squeaky brakes, we don't even hear it anymore. Because our interest in what's going on in that outer world has gotten so disinterested that we can turn it off. 

Will our ears hear the sound? Probably so. But if our ear consciousness is turned off, like I'm not interested in any outer sound, then it doesn't matter how much sound the eardrum is bouncing around. We're not going to be aware of it.

But that won't happen without losing our attachment for it. Like if there's something in us that thinks we need to hear what's going on around us, then we're going to keep hearing what goes on around us. And we're hardwired to be aware of what's going on around us because that's what keeps us sane.

So we're bucking against our humanness and our belief that our humanness is what we really are, which isn't true, is it? So we don't have to buy into the story, I'm hardwired to be aware of what's safe and what's not safe, and so I cannot turn off my sensory awareness or I won't stay safe.

But do you see why our meditative preliminaries to the preliminaries is, find yourself a safe place to meditate? Because until we're good meditators, you can't go meditate in a burial ground with the wild animals around. Because our mind won't turn off enough to keep ourselves safe.

The progress through the first nine levels is also progress through the decreasing attachment to our outer life, our outer world. Which does not mean give up everything, go live under a bridge. It might mean, give up everything, go live in a monastery for a while in order to cut the ties to our regular life. But it doesn't have to mean that. And it doesn't necessarily mean that by doing so, when you come out of the monastery or out from under the bridge, we're not going to go right back to the old attachments.

Our mental afflictions that drive the attachments don't just go away by avoiding them, do they? No. Even when we're in meditation and we're not having them, they're not going away. And when we come out of meditation, they can come back again, sometimes with a vengeance.

Hopefully, our awareness is growing bigger and bigger that when they are coming up, we're aware of them. Oh, anger ripening. I don't have to respond in the old way. And in that way, we are burning it off and not reacting to it.

Apparently, everybody who's teaches this is always supposed to tell the same story from the Samadhi Raja Sutra, which is about that yogi named Udraka, who goes into meditation in a cave and he reaches Shamatha level and he stays there.

Let me make sure. No, I'm sorry. He goes into the fourth level concentration.

He goes into Asmita and he stays there for years. And then his seeds take him out one day. He comes to and he notices that some rat has chewed off his dreadlocks and he gets totally pissed off. And the story is about just because you spend years in Asmita level, fourth level, form realm concentration meditation for years in which you are having no mental afflictions, it does not mean that when you come out of that meditation, you are not going to have mental afflictions. Because guess what? If the rat eats your hair, you'll be mad. He got mad.

So, you know, what does that mean for me who doesn't get close to fourth level meditative concentration? Couldn't even if I wanted to. If I'm starting to think, wow, I'm a good meditator, and I'm a good moral discipliner off my cushion. I must be burning off my mental afflictions. I must be having less of them. Be careful, once I say that to myself, because you know what's going to come next. Something's going to happen, and up comes my worst one. Might be a way to figure out what one's worst mental affliction is.

The point is, just meditating doesn't destroy our mental afflictions from the root. We are spending a lot of time not planting new ones as long as we're using a virtuous karmic object. Because otherwise, if we're meditating on a not virtuous karmic object, then we're holding to an object of self existence. So although we're not manifesting any of those other mental afflictions, the main one, which is our belief in self existence, is still being perpetuated. Which is why just meditating won't do the job in the end. We have to use our meditation time to cut away at our belief in self existent me, self existent other.

And so without that piece, the meditation will give us all the good side effects of meditation, peacefulness, maybe happiness on some level, but it won't stop our perpetuation of Samsara. You have to add the piece about the no self nature of our meditative object at some point in any meditation.

Meditation: Hollow Body

(111:11) We need to do another meditation.

Settle in quickly, please.

Bring your attention to your breath. First, simply aware of the breath, meditative concentration level Vitarka.

Now fine tune that focus on some details of the breath. What it feels like going out, maybe it's temperature, describing the sensation, something, the details.

Go back to just the general awareness of the breath.

Then go to the interest in the finer details.

Can you feel the difference in the quality of your mind?

Even at the details level, the mind will settle into its object.

If it's dull, use your antidote to wake it up.

If it's too busy, use your antidote to bring it down.

Next, get that mental image of this body as hollow inside, clear, light color, with that tube of bright light running up the middle, side to side, where your spine used to be, front to back.

Then notice along that vertical tube of light, the location that would be at the level of your navel, your waistline.

Try to find it in this hollow space, inside that tube of light.

See if you can find a little sensation there.

And then zoom your focus into that little spot, as if a tiny little you is down inside there.

Looking up, you see that hollow tube going up ahead of you, above you.

Looking down, you see that hollow tube going down below you, sitting there at that tiny little location.

You are aware that outside of this hollow tube of your outer body is simply that clear, beautiful space.

Now recognize your you at this location, inside this body of that hollow tube. It's a mental image ripening right now—this me and my body.

Watch if your mind struggles with that idea.

If there's a part of you that insists, no, no, this is make-believe, my real body is that solid one around me, recognize that real body is a mental image of real body in the same way that me and this tiny tube body is a mental image.

Toggle back and forth between the two.

We'll stay one minute.

Maybe come to the conclusion that you'd rather identify yourself as this tiny little spot inside this beautiful glowing tube of light.

Being this source of love that flows within this hollow tube, that shines out from that hollow tube, showing the form as an apparently human body.

But that light of love still shining from it, touching other beings and blessing them with blissful concentration.

Now bring your mind up and out from that area in that hollow tube.

Become aware of this mental image of a physical body.

Become aware of the goodness that we've done, exploring these levels of mental concentration, all intended to be able to help that other in some ultimate way someday.

And think of this goodness like a beautiful glowing gemstone you can hold in your hand.

Recall your own precious holy being. See how happy they are with you.

Feel your gratitude to them, your reliance upon them.

Ask them to please, please stay close to continue to guide you, inspire you, and then offer them this gemstone of goodness.

See them accept it and bless it, and then carry it with them right back into your heart. 

Their love, their compassion, their wisdom, it feels so good we want to keep it forever. And so we know to share it.

By the power of the goodness that we've just done

May all beings complete the collection of merit and wisdom

And thus gain the two ultimate bodies that merit and wisdom make.

So use those three long exhales to share this goodness with that one person, to share it with everyone you love, and share it with every existing being everywhere.

See them all filled with loving kindness, filled with wisdom, filled with the ability to meditate deeply. And may it be so.

Okay, thank you so much. Everybody okay? Are you back? Are you grounded? Okay. Thank you. Thank you for the opportunity. I really learned.

All right, for the recording, welcome back. We are Course Bok Jinpa, Course 2, Class 9, its final class in this course, September 17th, 2025.

Happy birthday Geshe Michael. We offer this class to you, being in this class to you. So may our wisdom grow bigger.

We'll do our usual opening prayers, then go into the first meditation for this class that Lama Christie gave. Then I'm going to follow it with the last meditation that she gave in this previous class for a variety of reasons. So it'll be a little bit longer than our usual opening. All right.

So let's gather our minds here as we usually do. Please bring your attention to your breath until you hear from me again.

[Class Opening]

Meditation

Part 1 - Recommit to our Motivation

(8:06) Set your body into your meditation posture if you haven't already. Go through your usual sequence.

When you have your body set, bring your focus of attention to your breath, there at that place, at your edge of your nostrils, start with getting the general awareness of the breath.

Then sharpen the focus and the clarity by noticing details of that breath, adjusting for clarity, turning on the intensity, the fascination.

Now take this focused, clear, intense quality of attention and turn it on recalling why you are bothering to come to a class like this, specifically on learning to meditate.

What motivates us to get here each day?

What if something more fun comes up?

What if something more important comes up?

What would be more important?

Now think again of that person in some kind of distress.

Is their pain less important than whatever that thing that would be more important than class? Is their pain less important than that?

Are we trying to learn to meditate for our own benefit or for theirs?

Do we really believe that sitting in this class is helping them stop their suffering forever someday? Better question, to what extent do we believe that? Ask yourself. 

Think again of them and whatever their distress that you are aware of them having and let your heart open up to them. Open up to that pain, that frustration. Describe it to yourself.

If there is a pain that we can be aware of, it's part of our pain. We are the ones that can stop it.  Their pain is because my own heart, my own mind is still stained with my selfishness. Terrible selfishness from before I knew any better. Remnants of that still there now that I do know better.

There's nothing we can do in our outer world activities that can help them.

Temporarily, yes, maybe. But to help ultimately, we know we want to change our own mind, our own being.

So reinforce your personal commitment to your personal path to freedom.

Open to receiving whatever is offered in this class, motivated by learning something to use to help that other in that deep and ultimate way someday soon. Recommit to your effort to understanding emptiness and dependent origination for them, for their benefit.

And make this act of truth that by the power of the effort I make in this class and my other studies to understand this process of transformation to holiest enlightenment, that I will use that to free them from their pain. By doing so, we free them.

Part 2 - Hollow Body

Now shift your focus of attention to your own physical body right now and decide that it is in fact hollow inside.

You use your meditating mind's eye to check, and you look inside starting from inside the upper part of your skull and scan down, checking. Oh my gosh, just clear, beautiful color. Any color that comes to you, check it all out.

That thing you call your tongue, what's inside there? Clear, beautiful light.

Scan down, scan down arms, hands, fingers, torso, hips, buttocks, thighs, lower legs, ankles, feet, toes. You feel almost weightless like a balloon.

Then bring your awareness up and you find that beautiful, luminous, central channel coming up like a spine.

And take your mind inside that hollow tube. You can go up from the bottom or down from the top or just in from the side, whatever you'd like. And find yourself in that tube at its location that would be behind your belly button in front of that part of your lower back, your waistline.

You've pulled your mind in to this tiny little spot. If your mind's eye looks up, you see that beautiful tube going above. If your mind's eye looks down, you see that beautiful tube going down.

And there you are.

Add to this the sense of this tube above me and below me, this is my body, me in this location with my body, this tube.

You inside this body that's a tube, look outside that body and see if there's any other body.

If there is, and suddenly you find your mind in that body, say okay, and pull your mind back into the hollow tube body.

Which body is more real? Trick question.

Mental images ripening me and my body.

Solid body of flesh, mental images. Hollow body, mental images. Tube body, mental images.

And imagine that the one that is the most comfortable, the one that is most pleasurable, the one that is most powerful is that tiny you inside that tube.

And as we stay there still, it becomes more and more pleasurable.

And we understand that that too is constantly shifting mental images arising from the goodness of our past deeds. The deeds that were moved by love, and so this pleasure gains the identity of love. And so our tiny little mind inside that tube bursts forth with the light of love, shining in every direction, touching any existing being wherever they are and triggering in them this same bliss of love.

Where is the edge of your body now?

Where is the limit of your mind?

Now draw it all back into the beings who were touched, the light rays that did the touching. Whatever got passed along the way, put it all back into the tiny little you in that tiny little spot inside that beautiful tube of light that is the spine of your hollow angel's body, that then takes on the picture of a human being me so that I can serve others and love others more deeply than I could before.

So dedicate the seeds we've just planted to moving you along your path swiftly to becoming one who can help that other in that deep and ultimate way.

Then shift your mental seeds to have your physical body in a physical room, this one that you're in. And then when you're ready, open your eyes. Take a stretch.

The Purpose of the Hollow Body Meditation

(35:45) Lama Christie's purpose in that meditation was to plant seeds in our minds for things that were coming in the future of our training. Some of you here are already there, and some, as far as I know, aren't yet. And some I have no idea. Are they quite where you are? I mean, technically, I don't really know where any of you are because I'm not omniscient. But anyway, you get it.

So part of the seed planting about that, though, had to do with demonstrating to ourselves that we have this ability to take our mind and our body in whatever way we're thinking of those realities now, and we can manipulate them. And we say, yeah, I'm just doing it in my imagination—which is true and not true. Because we're doing it by way of our mental seeds, and there isn't anything that happens that's not mental seeds. So whether we call it I'm doing it by my imagination, or it's you spontaneously went through what I said, followed the instructions and it happened. Like there's no difference. Essentially, it's seeds ripening and seeds planting.

Science even says—as if it makes it more real, the more complete is our imagined experience, the less able the brain is able to tell the difference between imagined and real. You know, to me, that doesn't make, Oh, it's right because science says so. It's like, no, it's right and it is revealed in the consistency of this method that we have arrived at that says makes things real.

It does say, though, that the more imaginarily we are engaged with our senses, the more the imprints that are made while we're doing it will come out as, can I call them es-prints, that are more complete. So we could think, if I can make my imagination imprints, but I just can't hear things. I can see them and I can smell them, but I can't hear them and taste them. Then the seeds that have been planted, when they ripen, they're going to lack the hearing component. Now, big deal, maybe.

But my my point is that imagining or having an actual experience, yes, they're different ripenings and yes, they're different plantings. But in the end, they are mental images ripening from seeds having been planted.

So we can imagine our bodies hollow. And then we think, yeah, but really, it's got brains and inside of the eyeball, really, it's got that stuff. And then I imagine it to be hollow. You see the mistake there?

It's like really. It's not got brains inside. And really, it's not hollow. Really, it's none of those. It is what seeds ripening me makes me believe it is.

Yeah, but… the doctor agrees. Everybody agrees. I have lungs inside there. Does it make it any more self-existent? Does it or does it? How many people have to agree that I have a brain inside this head to prove that I have one?

I've never seen it. I don't think I'll ever get to see it. Because by the time somebody else can see it, I'm dead. I'm gone. So even if I look at it, it won't be my brain because the me will be gone by then.

So, you know, I'm getting off on a tangent.

The point is. We can do a meditation where we visualize ourselves as hollow. And we can think, oh, I'm just imagining it. Or we can say, OK, now my mental image of my body is that it is hollow. Same experience, just a little different take on it, which changes the way the mental seeds are planted.

Then this hollow tube going up the middle, and then we pull our mind inside there and try to experience being this teeny little, teeny little space of our mind. We don't tend to think of what size is my mind when we're in our usual understanding of what we think is me and my body. And then we're asked to imagine what it's like to have your mind be this teeny little thing. Does it come to you?

And then, for this particular practice, she had it go from teeny, teeny, teeny to blast your love out to the world, like beyond the world. How big is your mind now?

It's not the teeny little thing anymore. It's like beyond huge. And we could do it. At least we could get a glimpse of something in this vastness, whether we could hold it or not. And then, because I instructed you to do so, we sucked it all back in, back in. Just by a shifting mental image, your shifting mental image that made me say, pull it all back into that tiny little spot and then rebuild the functioning body. What are we going to call this thing? We don't want to go back to saying go back to your regular body, or go back to your old body, or go back to your real body, because those are all mistaken. Go back to the one that you were using before. For whatever reason.

And I don't know, I always feel so resistant. I don't want to go back into that one. No, I finally had to make up, make up something that would allow me to do it. And it's like I tease, like I zip up my human suit. So I'm willing to be in it. But then I forget, you know, 10 minutes later, I'm moaning about this thing and I forget that it's just my human suit that I put it on for people to help people, you know. So anyway, planting seeds for future things.

It will become more and more real for us because they become more and more empty and dependently originated. So that's where we're trying to go, is to get this idea of existence by emptiness and dependent origination to feel more real than the existence of me and my mind, me and my body and mind, me and my five heaps. We have the default mode if you are suffering human being like me of believing that my me with my mind and my body are the real thing. And this other stuff I'm trying to create is not real, and I'm trying to make it real. That's sort of an obstacle to have that viewpoint. Because if my starting point, me and my suffering body and mind are something that are real with their own identity, I'm not ever going to change them. So part of the practice is learning to de-identify with this me that has a suffering body and mind and be able to better identify with, No, this is nothing but that process.

I like the term profound dependence, in Tibetan SNANG STONG.

The profound means the emptiness and the dependence means the appearance and profound dependence is one thing that is two. One thing that can only be there because it has two… Ah, what do I say, two parts? No, two aspects? No, to profound dependence happening is how I come up with it. Scripture doesn't say it that way but it helps me wrap my mind around what I'm trying to experience as me and my world in a more accurate way to how it actually exists and always has existed in that way. 

Not newly existing as profound dependence, but coming to the experience of what's always been accurate because I've always been mistaken.

So we know, like I get confused because we're working on Mahamudra with mostly the same faces. And then I'm doing this class as well and I get like, what have we talked about and what haven't we talked about yet? So I don't want to cross the line. 

(47:05) In last class Master Kamalashila was talking about the meditations called the causal form realm meditations. We should have been saying, why are we studying the form realms? We don't want to go there. We don't want to do the meditations that will take us there. Don't teach me about that stuff. 

Yet Kamalashila, in your reading, you saw it. He went into some detail about those different levels. But then does say, and guess what? You don't need to get to those levels like, phew. But it showed us what levels a human mind is capable of getting to in terms of its level of withdrawal from the sensory input that we are compelled to live influenced by in our desire realm human experience.

It's so difficult to be able to shut off our automatic attention moving, mind moving to the information that's coming to us from our sensory apparatus. Even when we close our eyes, there's still stuff happening, even for not visualizers. It's like we can't close our ears. And even if we put in earplugs, then you get the whooshing, right?

So it's like it's extraordinarily difficult to turn our habit of the mind going to those sensory inputs before we even know it's happening. What characterizes this movement to the platform of the ability to see emptiness directly, is this getting to the place where our awareness, consciousness, is so uninterested in any of that input, that it's as if none of it's happening.

It is still happening. Not in your experience, so you can't really say.

Geshela says when you're in the direct perception of emptiness, a bomb could go off and you wouldn't know it. I don't know if that wouldn't shake me out. But the idea is that your sensories, they call them shut down. But it's because there's no movement of the mind to them that makes the experience happen.

Maybe we hear how to do that and we have the karmic seeds that allow us to just turn inside everything, all that outer stuff stops and we can really direct our mind according to the meditation that we choose to do. And then even as we're doing that, there's still the heap of consciousness happening that we are calling upon to help us decide when to trigger the movement of this meditation object to this next one. And even that needs to shut down. Which is that level called fixation that takes us to stillness.

And yet when we get to that level of stillness and fixation, the instruction then is turn your mind to the no self nature of your object of meditation. That requires some kind of willful shift, and it needs to happen in this level of meditative concentration called Shamatha at the level of withdrawal that's called the causal level of the first level of the form realm.

The first level, of which I think there are 17, that would cause the first level of the form realm, all we need is the first one. That one called SAMTEN DANGPOI NYERDOK MICHOKME.

MICHOKME being the key word, meaning indispensable. The indispensable state of attention that is so withdrawn from our desire realm world, it's as if we are in the first level of the causal realm, but we're not. But we're so withdrawn that then when we turn our mind to investigate the no self nature of our object, we are not distracted by anything, not even some extraneous movement of our mind that wants us to go off. Because all that's been undone by way of getting to the quality of meditation called Shamatha that included those appliances, the pleasures—the physical pleasure and the mental pleasure, that keeps you still on your object.

It's not bliss for those who know about bliss void wisdom. But it's attractive enough that it will keep us withdrawn deep enough that we can investigate the empty nature of our object without the agitation and dullness coming back because they are long gone. Because we're at Shamatha. You see it's this beautiful upward spiral.

He taught us about the deeper levels of meditation. Lama Christie suggests, in order to show us that our mind's capacity to go deeper still than even first level of the form realm causal meditation level, our capacity is there. The human capacity. My personal capacity I'm not so sure. But human capacity is to go to these much deeper levels of withdrawal of the mind to the extent that it could go on for years like Master Udraka and have the rat eat your hair and you wouldn't even know it. You're still in this deep level of meditation. But it's not useful in terms of helping us learn the true nature of our me and my world. Because then you come out and you get mad that your hair's been chopped off. And it's like, (making unsatisfied noise). So like yay relief. We don't have to get to that deeper meditation. Just Shamatha at the level of MICHOKME.

How do we know when we get there? I don't know. Get to Shamatha first, and then we'll figure out what's the difference between Shamatha and MICHOKME. I'm going to guess not much.

So the pleasure that comes in during Shamatha is an important piece. Because we are naturally attracted to pleasure. And it's not something that we should negate or try to stop. Because we want to draw on that attraction. Then the danger is that we just meditate to get to that pleasure.

We have a Bodhisattva vow that says, I will avoid doing that.

It doesn't mean I will avoid feeling the pleasure of meditation. It means, I will avoid using that as my reason for meditating. And it must happen or we wouldn't have a vow to remind us not to do it. It must be very compelling to sit in meditation because it's so pleasurable. When meditation is not pleasurable, it's really hard to get on our cushion.

I remember the days when I used to run regularly. My trail, the first equivalent of a city block was uphill. And then all the rest of it was down, and up a little down, and down and down and down. So if I got that hill out of the way, the rest of it was easy. I had a body that was stiff and sore. And so, you know, every step was painful and it was hard. And I hated it. Until I got around that bend and then like everything shifted. As the endorphins kicked in, and then it was just like, wow, this is the nicest thing. But that first hill was torture.

Kind of like that in meditation. The getting to the point where we can reach the pleasure part is hard. It's hard work. It does take willpower to stick with it. And that's where we use the motivation of somebody else's pain. Because our own distress, as selfish as we are, it won't be enough to keep us at it. Our own distress is terrible, but adding to it by the distress of an immediate unpleasant thing to get rid of something unpleasant later, it doesn't hold it up for ourselves. But doing it for somebody else motivates us.

Master Kamalashila, in this part of his discussion, he's already said how to go through the nine levels. But then he said, but actually, until we get to Samatha, we're actually not even meditating, we're just contemplating. It's like, oh man.

Then once we've gotten to Samatha, where we're actually meditating, he says, now let's go through those nine levels. So it's like, wait, but we already did that. That's how we got to Samatha. And he goes, yes, sort of you did. And now we do it again. 

Not meaning you stop Samatha and go back. But in order to actually take that Samatha and build the seeds for its perpetuation, it's coming again and again and again. We look at our DRENPA, our recollection, our SHESHIN, our checker, our dullness, our agitation, and we're experiencing it in a different way when we're doing that from a meditating mind than when we were doing it from a contemplating mind. 

Exactly how it feels different, I can't really explain. I'm not sure. I'm not sure I've ever gotten past contemplation. Like I'm a really good contemplator. Really good contemplator. But I'm not sure it's ever shifted. Because I can't really tell the difference. But anyway, there is a difference.

Then, once Master Kamalashila has taught us this meditative power of the DRENPA, the SHESHIN, the recollection mind, awareness mind, SHESHIN, the single point in concentration with the blisses that come on, then he's willing to help us investigate the empty nature, what we need to do to shift from Shamatha to Vipashyana, to go from fixed stillness to special insight.

Just getting to stillness does not automatically trigger the emptiness of the object. 

Wouldn't it be nice if it would?

It takes the platform of stillness to penetrate that. We penetrate it intellectually every time we think through the emptiness thing. To penetrate it from a contemplating mind, we get it a little deeper than what you do when we're just sitting over a cup of tea.

But to penetrate it with a meditative state of mind, different, right? Deeper impact somehow.

So let's take a break.

(student: Lama, when you told us to check if we're made out of a vase, my mind goes into a glass vase, clear vase. And I thought to myself, internally, whatever parts would be going, knock, knock, and looking in more.)

Looking in or looking out?

(student: Looking in. Like through the glass.)

Ooh, who's in there?

(student: And I could hear the clink on the glass, my internal glass.)

That's good. Don't drop yourself, you'll shatter. Or maybe drop yourself so you can shatter.

(student: Which is also funny because forever, for a long time, I've realized I'm having those practices without realizing what it was, is that I always have this right here, through the center. It's always doing this outward. It's trying to push, break outside, but there is this boundary. There's no physical boundaries. That's just like my limitation. But I realized that in Mahamudra and in this class, when we're doing meditation, I'm catching myself laughing continuously. Something is very liberating about those meditations, even though I don't know if I'm reaching always the right place. But I'm catching myself laughing at myself because it's so true, so silly, it's so there.)

Yeah, good. One step at a time, however. Yeah. Keep building.

(66:50) In your reading, Master Kamalashila quotes a poem from a sutra called the Journey to Lanka, which this is a Lord Buddha teaching sutra. I don't know the whole sutra, Journey to Lanka. We we touch it from time to time. But there's a poem in there and its first line says,

Come to rest in the mind alone, then stop imagining objects outside

like we had it in Mahamudra course also. 

Master Kamalashila was starting to talk to us about from stillness turning our mind to the emptiness of our object, and he's going to explain what's meant by that, and give us various ways that we can do it.

So this one, Come to rest in the mind alone, means reach this platform of stillness, because at that level, we really are like in mind aware... Words fail.

We are so deeply immersed in our own mind, and it's effortless to stay there, which is why we can use it to investigate so clearly. So the investigation is going to require thoughts coming up. That doesn't mean we've lost our meditation object.

Like Master Kamalashila is saying, this is how to do it. Stop imagining objects outside. On the surface level, it's like, when I'm in that deep state, there is no awareness of anything outside. So then if something comes to mind of something outside, it has to be it has just bubbled up into your mind. Although that can't even happen when you're in Shamatha, is the curious thing.

So even as we're getting to shamatha as we're pretending we're in Shamatha, stuff like this is happening, so I'm not exactly sure the context. But he's using it to help us understand how to negotiate this investigation of whatever our meditation object is to investigate its true nature, to find its empty nature.

So this is saying any object outside is an imagined thing. And there is no such thing.

But that, it's like, wait, anything outside. Do you mean outside of me? Does it mean something outside my house. Does it mean something outside my body? Or does it mean something outside of my own mind?

Can we experience something that is outside of our minds‘ experience?

Do we think there are things that exist outside of our minds‘ experience? I sure do.

Can there be anything that exists outside of our minds‘ experience?

Is our mind experience limited to what I'm seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching?

No. Because in order for those to have any identity at all, there has to also be the consciousness that gives them their identity, right? So even if it's just the flowers in the grocery store six miles away that I'm thinking of right now. Thinking of them, but I don't know that I think that until I think of them. And then, oh, of course they were there before I was thinking of them. But were they? Those were imagined.

Now the ones that I'm thinking are there, wait, they're imagined also. Meaning an image of my mind. Made up by my mind. Not made up like a fairy tale. But made by the movement of my mind creating an identity out of something. Something not yet identified. Is this familiar? This is not new stuff for any of us. I hope.

We reach deep stages of meditation, call it Shamatha, and then we want to turn our mind to this investigation of any object that's outside our mind.

That's a really easy one. Your meditation object that we are focused on with Shamatha, is it existing outside of your mind? So it is your mind. It's a manifestation of our mind.

Is there anything that we can experience without experiencing it? No. We have to be aware of something to be aware of something. Right?

So where's the thing? The object of your meditation, your sweet holy Lama that you are so focused on that you're then going to investigate the emptiness of. Like where's the one that's there independent of the one I'm experiencing right now?

My ignorant mind goes, Well, he's in Sedona, celebrating his birthday. And it's like, No, he's not. The one that's in Sedona celebrating his birthday is also not outside my mind. Because I can think of him. That's coming out of my mind.

Do we think our seeds ripen and they go out of our mind? Like my mind stops here, and the seed ripens onto the pot and makes pot on stove and suddenly it's outside my mind? It can't be, can it?

So where does your mind end? Just past the pot? Wait, past the pot there's a wall. There's the stove and then there's a wall. Oh, so my mind stops at the wall. Hmm. No. The neighbor's house is behind the wall.

Okay. So my mind stops at the neighbor's house? No. Wait, where does our mind stop?

That's one way to investigate the self nature of the object. If your object has its own nature would it need your mind to show itself to you? It seems really absurd to even say it, doesn't it? If there was a self-existent object, you could see it without your eyes. Because it would make you see it. That's what it is to be existing independent of my own projection.

Is it would make me see it. It would make me hear it. It would make me... But then I'd have to be seeing it all the time because it wouldn't depend on me seeing it or not seeing it if it existed from its own side, independent of my projection. And it's there in one moment. It can never not be there, because to not be there has to change. Like we've heard all of these logics before. And it's like, okay, okay, okay.

But until we really get down in there and work with them, they don't become like absurd to even think of them. But now when we're thinking of a thing that could exist independent of my projection. It's just nuts. Like it's impossible, so impossible, that if we really had it imbued in us, we would not blame the dead battery for the car that didn't start when I turned the key last week. We just go darn, karma is real. Which I did, but then I called the mechanic. Because I knew that inside my real karma was a dead battery karma also. Thank goodness is only that.

So this idea of stop imagining outside things, take that deeper and deeper. It's not what the English sounds like. Stop believing in anything that could exist outside of your personal projection of it. Like just decide to stop? Yeah, if I could, I would. But we're going to reach the place where that stops when we do our investigations again and again and again. Especially from the level of Shamatha, because then we can really penetrate into the direct experience of it and get a glimpse, hopefully.

Master Kamalashila talks about deconstructing our experience. And Lama Christie all through Bok Jimpa, she uses this word deconstruct, to take an experience that we're having and recognize the whole identity that we've put onto it and then check to see what part of the object has conveyed that identity to us. And of course we check smaller and smaller pieces, looking for, where did that identity come from? Until we get down to the place where we can't go any further and we hit this wall of our own mind that says, There isn't anything in the object, no matter how tiny, no matter how big that's giving me enough information to come up with my mental image of the thing. Because my mental image of the thing is so complete. It has more information than the object itself can have. So we've got a table. Your computer is on a table or something. And if we look at that table, even out of meditation we can deconstruct. I see a table.

Do you really see a table? We think we do.

But can you say for sure that your table has a backside? We know it does. 

But can we confirm it? How do we confirm something? I see it with my own eyes. I can't see the front of the table and the back of the table at the same time. I can't see the top, I can't see the bottom at the same time. I see the top. My mind says, whole table. Whole tables have top, bottom, front, back, up, down, legs. And my table is, assume I'm on my kitchen table. I'm not, but I assume I am. And included in my table would be my table that David and I bought in 1980 when we finally had enough money to spend on a nice dining room set. That's all tagged to the table, my table. There's nothing in that table that says Teak table David and Sarahni bought in 1980 as the first expensive thing they ever bought in their life. So somebody else comes and uses that table. You know, and they write on it and they scratch it all up because it's not their favorite table. Because there's no favorite table in it. And then we had parrots. The parrots would walk on the table, and it wasn't even table for them. I don't know what it was for them. So how much information do we have to get from the thing before we can say it's it? Where does that happen?

Keep taking that's the deconstruction.

How much of that table do I have to see for it to be the whole table?

How much of it do you have to see for it to be a whole table?

But for you, it's never going to be the whole table that Susan and David bought. Except now, you know, so maybe it'll be. But... And that's true for every experience we have. We bring our own unique fullness to the object's identity. So there must be something in the object that triggers table versus bicycle. And that takes us through the different schools of how much identity is in the object that we're picking up that gives us the clues that it has to be a table versus a bicycle.

We'll go through those levels on our own way. If we were diligent enough, we would identify our own levels of which school we're operating from. And if we keep investigating, we will end up with there's nothing at any level other than information at that level that my mind takes and puts together into an identity.

So break down the table to thing made of wood. Wait, no, my eyeball can't see wood.

Rectangle. No, my eyeball can't see rectangle.

This edge, this edge. Yeah, but my I can't put those two together and come up with table. My mind has to be doing it. My mind has to recognize the corners as corners and put it together.

You can keep going down until you can't label the little particles any further. You know, corks or whatever it is, I don't know. And we finally go, nothing there.

Not so hard to do with tables. A little harder to do with yelling bosses or husbands. A lot harder to do with our own me and our mind.

Master Kamalashila says, let's go to an in-between and look at what about our knowledge? How do we think about the knowledge that we are growing about profound dependence like any knowledge?

Do you remember in whatever was, ACI course 2 we're learning the debate structure. Consider the three knowledges. They are not one thing. They are not three things because they are not one thing. Something like that. And it was like, what? Why are we doing that?

Because it comes back later, this one or many thing. And it comes back later what we think is the knowledge we're trying to grow in our mind. We must not have knowledge, a knowledge if we're trying to get a new knowledge, right? We don't believe we have it, otherwise, we wouldn't have to do anything to get it.

So if we're in search of new knowledge, we must think we don't have it. Number one.

And number two, we must think that there is a knowledge to be found, to be learned, that once I've learned it, I will have it.

We're so inconsistent in our thinking, because we're thinking I don't have knowledge, but there is a knowledge that I could get. And once I get it, then I will have it. Like done. And I can't lose it.

When we're thinking of the knowledge of profound dependence, like the ultimate knowledge we're trying to get, if we're thinking of it as a thing that exists somewhere, then we have to go find it. So where is it going to be?

Is it in a book? If it's in a book, of all the books, it ought to be in Diamond Cutter Sutra book, amongst others, which if it's there, then all we have to do is read that book and we can get the knowledge, right?

Or even like the little kid in the video, you know, he's got the page up and he turns the page and he goes (gesture of pouring the wisdom from the book in her head), turns the page, turns the page. It's like, I'm going to try that a whole lot faster than reading it. It ought to work, but maybe only if we have the seeds from the knowledge that's in that book in there already. Then seeing it again will might, right? Comes from me, might awaken something. But if we think the knowledge is in the book and if we were true, if it were true, then we would only need to hold the book or see the book or read it once or everybody who read the book would get the knowledge. And some people do and some people don't. Like this one (pointing to herself), have to do it again and again. So the knowledge can't be in the book.

Oh, it's in the teacher. Well, wait, do you have to just see the teacher or do you have to hear the teacher say something? And do you have to go to 95 out of 100 of their teachings or is 50 of them enough? Or do you have to go to all 100? Like, what does it really take to get that knowledge from the teacher?

Is the knowledge in the teacher? No. Well, then what the heck do you need a teacher for? Because there is knowledge in the teacher.

So then, where does it come from? We know the punchline, but we're trying to really pull away the misunderstanding. Because when we pull away the misunderstanding, we really can use the teacher or the scriptures or the teachings to grow the wisdom that we are wanting to color our minds so that it chooses the kind of responses to the others that help perpetuate it. Because even as we grow the wisdom in our mind, it's not a wisdom that suddenly becomes self-existent, suddenly something that we have. It's something that we grow and then cultivate and continue to cultivate as do you will, as Buddha you and Buddha paradise emanating. We don't finally become Buddhas and then we're done. It's like that's the start of our career.

So how do we do this deconstruct of our own mind, our own being?

The journey to Lanka goes on to say,

Fix yourself on the object of thusness and apply that even to the mind itself.

So the object of thusness means that empty nature of the object, whatever the object is. And so at the beginning level of this instruction is whatever our object is, we're fixing our mind on that object's thusness to get used to that. And then we'll do that with the object of our own mind. We'll use the same reasoning to find the thusness of our own mind and try to fix on that. Eventually we also will look at the object thusness of whatever our original object was and look at the thusness of the thusness. The emptiness of our own mind must also be empty of self nature. And so the emptiness of emptiness is a subtlety that we also need to get to.

So that we are not thinking that there is an emptiness that everything comes out of. Well, we're so well educated, we know that's not true. But it seems like we get to a level where it seems like it is true. And a lot of the scriptures when they're describing emptiness, they say things come out of emptiness. Or out of emptiness appears such and such, and it implies that there's this vast emptiness and then comes bridge and it comes this or me seeing bridge and then me crossing bridge. But it's not like that. It can't be like that. Because otherwise there's an emptiness that's there first and something comes out of it. And that there can't be an emptiness without an appearance. And any appearance has to be empty. And how do our linear cognitive thinking processes work with appearances that are not this and then that, in a lifetime where everything is this and then that? Or everything appears to be one thing after the other? And yet it's really crucial to be able to crack that nut. Because every time we stick the key in the doorknob or put our hand on the doorknob and turn and pull and the door opens, it's reinforcing that this goes to that, goes to that, goes to that. And that's all happening by way of seeds ripening. It's not happening by way of what I'm doing. And every time we let ourselves believe that it is, we're reinforcing our misunderstanding. And that allows us to blame somebody or something for anything either pleasant or unpleasant. In which case we are perpetuating our misunderstanding.

Yet, if we didn't have some idea that I grab the knob, turn it and pull, that's what opens doors. I would come to a door and just stand there and not know what to do. It's not necessarily going to open. Although technically if I have the seeds it will.

And you know what? It happens sometimes. There are places you walk to the door and it opens and you walk through and you never had to turn the knob. So, magic? No seeds.

When we can reach Samatha level meditation on our own mind, which is Mahamudra practice, which we haven't gotten to in Bok Jinpa class yet, although some of us here have. But if you didn't know about Mahamudra, Master Kamalashila is talking about it, but not using that word. Saying to apply our analysis to our own mind, we go through the same kind of deconstruction that we did for the table.

What experience am I having now that gets the identity? The identity come of the experience I'm having now.

So when I start with this one, I like to start with just turning my attention to some aspect of my physical experience, because I'm not a visualizer. So I take whatever is appearing. For example, if I'm sitting on something, there's a sensation that on the outer level, I would say my bottom and thighs on my cushion. And so what I do is I just focus in on those sensations and I ask myself, do I have enough information from this direct experience to come up with my bottom on a cushion? And I really look. It's like, if I didn't know I was sitting on my meditation cushion, well, the information I'm getting right now, tell me my meditation cushion? Absolutely not. There's just sensation pressure. Is that sensation pressure, is there enough information there to tell me it's my bottom and thighs? And it's like, well, it's a location where bottom and thighs are. But if I didn't know bottom and thighs, there's nothing about that sensation that says bottom and thighs. It's just sensation. All right, let's check this thing called sensation. I lose words because I can't describe it anymore. It's like, like…

And I keep going down until I can recognize that my own mind is making those identities. It's something in my mind, my awareness. I don't even call it mind. It's just like, whoa, identity is not from it. It has to be from me. And then I look at that awaring happening? And I try to find where's the one that's doing that? And if there is a projector pushing out that identity, that sensation into that experience, then I should be able to find the projector separate from the experience. Shouldn't I?

And when I go looking for the projector independent of the experience of projecting, what do I find? I have to project looking at the projector in order to find the projector projecting that that sensation is my bottom on my cushion. Don't I?

Well, wait, where's that projector? And it keeps going back and back and back until I go, well, this is useless. I can't find the distinction between subject and object. Like there's no object from its side telling me what it is that's coming from my mind.

But if I call the object my mind, then there's no difference between the object and the subject. Like it has to all be coming out of this shifting aware-ing happening. We can't even say my mind doing that because we can't find the my mind separate from the thing that's happening for it to be doing.

But when we get into the watching and the experiencing and the exploring, it's like, what's really going on here? Like there really aren't subjects and objects and interactions between.

There's all of it happening all the time in this constant shape-shifting that looks like subjects, objects, interactions between. And that's what we mean by profound dependence happening. And it's never not happening. And it never hasn't happened. And it always will be happening. And there's nothing that exists in any other way than that.

And if we're there, whom, through the doorway to it, directly, theoretically, is the hope. So we pretend at first, and then pretend again and again and again. And then when we get into the pretend, oh, the emptiness, we try to fixate on it. Which if we're doing all of this from the level of Shamatha, which is so pleasurable that we'll stay there through all of it, and we get to that even high intellectual understanding of the no self nature of me, other, all, we'll be able to stay fixated even at that high level of intellectual emptiness understanding. And that's significant.

It's not like nothing but direct perception is useful. But we'll only be able to hold it for a short period of time because it's such a high voltage thing. And then something will kick us out. And then if we still have time in our meditation, we just go through it again, try to glimpse it again, and repeat and repeat, repeat.

So how is it that we gain this knowledge, both the intellectual knowledge and then the final ultimate knowledge, if we can't get it from the books and we can't get it from the teacher and we can't get it from the teachings, how do we get it?

We get it by planting seeds and then the seeds ripen.

Who do we plant the seeds with? The teacher, the teachings. We use those things that can't just give it to us to plant our seeds in order to grow it in us. And that's what they're for. That's what they're there for.

So when we do a class like this, you are planting seeds. We are ripening seeds, amazing ones. Thank you very much. And we are planting seeds, a little different mine from yours. And we're all growing wisdom by way of the seeds that we're planting. We dedicate them well, which is built into the end of my classes at least, so that they're going to ripen sooner or later. And we've been doing it for a long time, some of us. So they're growing. So could be tomorrow or the next day or the next day. Don't be discouraged. We're adding to them, adding to them, adding to them. 

And in the process, we are being kinder and kinder, like more and more wisely loving in our outer experience because the seeds color our minds in that way. Helping us to see that the power of seeds is to grow our kindness, and the kindness helps us grow our wisdom, and the wisdom helps us grow our kindness.

So we started out motivating ourselves by the power of someone else's suffering that we know is a ripening of our own seeds. So we need to change our own mind to see them change. And the way we do that is to come to see that nothing exists in any other way than as ripening seeds having been planted by how we interacted with others in the past.

So our motivation to learn, motivated to help somebody else in that high way is included in all the seeds that you planted during this class, which colors them in such a way that as they ripen, ripen as a growing ability to help others in deeper and deeper ways.

So it's not that we stop trying in worldly ways to help people. We do them and we do them with greater wisdom so that we can have the seed, the goodness to see them actually work. So every time we hold the door open for someone and they actually walk through it, we've ripened a seed of having helped, actually helped somebody. And we've planted a seed to be able to actually help somebody in the future.

We can help in ultimate ways, even as we do worldly ways, as our karmic goodness gets stronger and stronger. All right.

Meditation

(107:51) We have another short meditation to just quickly go through this investigating the deconstruction of our own me. And then we finish course 2, which is a big rejoicable. Yeah.

So get yourself woken up enough so that you can go into meditation. Otherwise we'll sleep through this. I don't want you to do that.

Sink your body. Bring your attention to your breath at your nostrils. Fine tune the focus. Do your best to turn on the clarity and the fascination.

Now tap into the feeling or experience of your mind inside this body and get a sense of the outline of this body. If it's visual, see where it is, what it looks like. If it's more tactile, get a sense like there's the edge. Can you find it?

I can kind of trace. There's my head. There's my shoulders, my legs, my feet.

Now sit in this awareness and just turn on the recognition that this is a mental image, whether it's a mental picture or the idea or the sensation. It's a mental thing. It's a thought about something physical.

So we have it in general, my whole body. But now check, can you actually be experiencing your whole body all at once? Check your actual experience.

Is your mind jumping around from sensation to sensation or place to place?

What's the connection of your direct experience and this thing called my body? 

Recognize the parts and the whole and the mind holding the whole.

What would happen if the mind quit holding the whole?

Can we remove our mental image, my body?

Theoretically, yes. Experientially, probably not.

Can we become more clearly aware of the consciousness making that whole identity?

Then is that consciousness a thing independent of making that whole identity that then makes the whole identity out of those various sensations?

What mind would that be?

What body is there without your mind ripening my body?

What mind ripening my body could be there if there was nobody?

The experience and our mind's experience of the experience are both happening, ripening, shapeshifting moment by moment.

Zero in on whatever experiencing happening.

Now, try to fix on that and recognize it as seed ripening, shifting, happening and nothing but.

Now, whatever glimpse you got, make a sweet imprint.

Recall that we will use that glimpse to help that other in that deep and ultimate way someday. 

[Dedication]

Thank you so much, my dears, for the opportunity.