Bok Jinpa 3

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

Vocab:

Bhavana krama  (Sk)       gompay rimpa (Tib)

Master Kamalashila   700’s ad India

Shamata     vipasyana

Do de gondrel = Buddha’s sutra What I Really Meant

Lam Rim Chenmo

Trange Lekshe Nyingpo = Je Tsongkapa’s What the Buddha Really Meant

Ngulchu Dharma Bhadra

Ngun par shenpa = deep rooted beliefs that i am me and you are you    ngun-shen = shortened version

Taney takpay tak dun tseway tselwa minye 

Okay, welcome back. We are Bok Jinpa, Bhavanakrama, Master Kamalashila part three out of four. This is January 14th, 2026.

Let's do our usual opening prayers and then I'll talk to you a little bit and then we'll do our first meditation. So let's gather our minds here as we usually do. 

Please bring your attention to your breath until you hear from me again.

 Now bring to mind that being before 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 radiating from them, their beautiful golden glow encompassing you in its light. And then we hear them say, Bring to mind someone you know who's hurting in some way. Feel how much you would like to be able to help them and recognize how the worldly ways we try fall short. How wonderful it would be, how wonderful it will be, when we can also help them in some deep and ultimate way, a way through which they will go on to stop their distress forever. Deep down we know this is possible. Working with emptiness and karma we glimpse how it's possible. And so I invite you to grow that wish into a longing, and that longing into an intention, and that intention 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, please help me, teach me, show me, guide me, help me become like you. And they 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 the 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 our 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 in 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 in 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 in sharing this class and the rest, may all beings totally awaken for the benefit of every single other. 

Introduction to course

Alright, so technically we are starting the third course of an 18 course series called Setting Our Practice on Fire that was offered as a course in meditation, which it is. And for me at least, it turned out to be an exquisite series that pushed my understanding of the marriage of karma and emptiness further than even the Diamond Way series could have pushed me, in my opinion.

The requirement to be in this course from one to the next was to already have an hour long meditation practice daily and to be keeping a meditation journal by this time, the course three. And then Lama said, and I really, really want people teaching these courses. But in order to teach them properly, karmically speaking, she said, you need to have done the assignments. So the assignments are the meditations, daily, and the homeworks. There weren't quizzes. Sometimes there was a final exam, but I don't have any of them.

So I'm going to reiterate that if you come across someone who says, well, you're taking those Bok Jinpa courses, would you teach me what you've learned? Please don't be shy to be willing to share. But in order to be prepared for that, do the homework, mostly do the meditation, and keep a meditation journal on yourself. So I'm sorry we're not set up to where you can turn your meditation journal in and have it looked at. That's how we did it. It's not really possible here together. And I'm sorry that I also don't have a system of collecting your homeworks, grading them and getting them back. But neither did we during the Bok Jinpa. I turned mine all in and I have very few of them that I ever got back. So it's not really that there's assignments like we're used to in the ACI courses and a system. It's a matter of looking at the material, reviewing it, seeing from the homeworks that I have shared what Lama Christie felt was most important to think about. And spend a little extra time rather than just listening to the class each week, if you want to get the most out of it. So I'm not tracking you in any way. Okay.

So if you are in this class— so I'm mostly talking to anybody who hears the recording who's not here. Yes, the recordings of these classes are available. Lama Christie's original ones are not, they've disappeared into the ethers. But I would really, really encourage you to ask Coco. May I do that, Coco? That's been the plan all along, is for Coco wishes to become the lineage passer-on-er of this Bok Jinpa. And she has done her homeworks and assignments from 1 and 2, right? So please speak with her if you wish to get caught up in this course, and I encourage it. And the time frame is up to you, right? No rush. But recognize that the group that has done 1 and 2 has already been working on this material and that's the main folks that I'm talking to then in this course. 

Meditation - How much do you want to meditate?

All right. So that said, let's do our first sit together for this class.

So set your body. I know you already know how to do that, that you have your own system. Do it. Go through the steps. 

When your body is set, parked, leave it still and bring your focus of your attention to your breath. 

Now check, are you really on your breath and nothing but your breath? Get back on it.

Check again. There can be all kinds of distractions. Big ones and little ones.

How badly do you want to keep your mind on that object, your breath? How quickly do you pull your mind back when it goes away? Even starts to go away. 

The breath is always happening. There's no reason to lose that as an object of focus. Don't be lazy. Make your mind get on that object and stay there. Just try again and again.

We are building a habit. There will come a day when you can sit quietly, effortlessly, enjoyably with your mind single-pointed on the object of your choice no matter what is going on around you.

But why do we want to cultivate that skill? Because that person I love is in pain. So shift your object of focus to that person. Let yourself recognize the distress you see them in. Let yourself recognize how limited we are in what we can do to help them. Recognize how as our wisdom grows, the things that we choose to do to help them are different than before. And the same things that we do to help them are done with a different state of mind, a different state of heart.

How much effort are you willing to make to change yourself so that you can help them in that deep and ultimate way? Will you be able to do what it takes to get your mind to stay on an object of focus? That is the beginning of the ability to help that loved one in that deep and ultimate way. It's a necessary step. 

Now make a mental note of any resistance you might have felt or obstacle. And make a mental note of any eagerness and confidence you might have felt. 

And then become aware of yourself and your body and your body in your room.

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

Do we really believe our meditation will help others?

So presumably we are doing this class together because we want to learn to be better meditators. And in our tradition, the reason we want to be better meditators is because of that necessity to have the direct perception of ultimate reality, emptiness, which is the doorway to the end of the suffering that put us on this path to begin with. Our own suffering, but maybe even more so the suffering that we see in others that don't even seem to have an interest in figuring out where it comes from and whether it's stoppable. So I think we understand that we need to cultivate this ability for a deep single-pointed concentration as the platform for that direct perception of emptiness. Which becomes the platform for changing ourselves and our behavior enough to transform ourselves and the world that we see.

So probably we're saying, yes, I'm dedicated to my path. I spend lots of time studying and trying and keeping my book and trying to change myself. But then when we're sitting in meditation on any given day, do we still hear the traffic? Do we still shift and wiggle when our knee hurts? Does our mind touch the object and pop off, touch and pop up, or even stay on the object but mmmmm about all this other background stuff going on? Or does it get on the object and then [nod off]? Mentally, you don't physically do that, but mentally lose interest. It happens to all of us. How quickly does our meditator go, fix it, fix it. My meditator gets sloppy. Yeah, sit down, do the meditation, planting good seeds, feels good at the end, done. And it's like wrong. Those aren't the seeds that will keep my practice going like this [quickly upwards]. They're seeds that'll keep it going like this [very slowly upwards], which is better than this [down]. But all the time I'm horsing around with my sloppy meditations, somebody I love is dying. They look vibrant, they look fine, but ultimately the end of anything or other in samsara is the end of it. And if I don't take that seriously enough, then my meditations get complacent or sloppy. And Master Kamalashila is outlining this sequence of what it takes to build a good, strong meditation career. But just learning about it won't make our meditation career be good and strong without trying it.

And we will try and fail and try and fail and try and fail. And it's the trying that is the most important piece - to keep pulling that puppy dog mind back onto the object with that sense of not authority and force and you have to do this because I say so, but in the sense of creating, training that puppy dog into the perfect service dog. I think we talked about that metaphor before.

And so then our mind, if our mind catches on that what we're trying to mold it into is something that will be like amazing, we’ll be less resistant. So it feels a little schizophrenic because it's like, who do we identify as - our mind, or our me, and those of us that are working with Mahamudra, it's like, which one trumps, right? Which one's more important? But at where we are now, your me is in charge of where your mind goes during meditation. And if it's lazy and sloppy, then the mind's going to go, thank you very much, let's go anywhere we want, even if your body's sitting on the cushion. And then we are not progressing towards becoming the one who can help that other in that deep and ultimate way.

So do we really believe that our meditation time on our cushion is a key factor in being able to become one who can help that other in that deep and ultimate way? If we really 100% believed this is how it's going to happen and then their pain gone forever, like I posit, Lama Christie posited, that by course three Bok Jinpa, we would all be at shamatha and on the edge of emptiness directly already. Because when your hair's on fire, you do something. So, you know, if we're not meditating like our hair's on fire, which I admit, I'm not, there's something blocking. There's something, there's something not quite buying into the picture. Does that make sense? And that's where Master Kamalashila is going to go, is to help us try to sort out what is that, what is that that's keeping us from enthusiastically reaching shamatha and then vipasyana, emptiness directly, just by sitting on our cushion and deciding we're going to do it. Yeah, I mean, we know nothing works like that or else we would have done it. But what keeps us from planting the seeds all day long that would propel our cushion time smoothly and beautifully along the way to ripening those results? We know - habit, ignorance, selfishness (I want this, I don't want that). And we're going to talk about it more. We did talk about it in course two. So I'm getting past my notes, I don't want to get ahead of myself.

[40:06]

Do we doubt karma?

Master Kamalashila uses an odd word, I think. He says the reason we can't keep our mind on our object is because we have doubt. And the reason we can't choose the wisest or highest interactions with others is because we have doubt.

So we're going to talk about it. He wants us to find our doubt and look it in the face in order to, I guess, know what to do with it, or in order to recognize that it actually has no power over us. Because it's not a real thing either. We talked about real in this morning's [Arya Nagarjuna Investigators] class. So in Master Kamalashila's first part of his book, he talked about why we need to meditate - that we want to open our heart so that we can understand emptiness more and more deeply intellectually. So he was pointing out in his first part of his book that there's all the suffering that there is in the world. Like everything is suffering. And when we say that, we mean both the verb and the noun, like both the cause and the result. Everything in samsara is a suffering result of something we did before, and it will cause more suffering in the future. And in that suffering, a big part of that suffering is the end of things. It's like, no, the end of my headache was the best thing. But it wasn't the end of the headaches, it was just a shift in that one. So it's true that the ends of things isn't all bad. And it's also true that in samsara, everything comes to an end. Our friend the pen comes to an end, our friend my neighbor comes to an end, my friend Sumati will come to an end, this one [Lama Sarahni] will come to an end. And what if that come-to-an-end happens before I've transformed the way I perceive this thing or those other things? We don't know for sure we're going to get the same circumstances. I mean, we can never get the same circumstances two times in a row. We talked about that somewhere recently too. But even are we so very sure that we have enough goodness that we're assured of getting another human life? Have you ever gotten pissed off enough to blame somebody for something? ‘How could dare they do that to me?’ That seed, if it's the one that ripens at the moment of death, that's not another human life seed. So I don't know about you, I don't know your minds, I just know mine. And from that, if you're sitting in a class that I found useful, and that you've asked me to share with you, I guess I'm going to assume that maybe you're in a similar place of wanting to make this transformation and trying and trying and trying and not being able to see much happening, when in fact there's a lot happening. So I don't want to get distracted there. There is a lot happening in all of you. But is it enough? Am I working hard enough? Now, we are all overachievers so don't hear that I'm putting more and more pressure on. I am, but I'm trying to do it in a way that is inspiring and not, ‘oh my gosh, I can't do this.’ It does take the effort to make the change we want to make. And we'll say at the end of this class, it takes effort— understanding that the change we make in ourselves will not necessarily be reflected in what we see in our outer world right away, which makes it difficult to sustain those changes in ourselves when the other ones that you're changing for seem to stay the same. But just because we're in that karmic gap.

So we're looking for the doubt of our belief in ‘things are my seeds ripening and nothing but’ that prevents me from always acting with kindness, no matter what. And it's difficult to recognize that in ourselves, which is why he brings it up. 

So first course, he said, look, the reason we're meditating is because they're suffering. I suffer, you suffer, everybody in my world suffers, and I want to do something about it. This all presumes that we are already Mahayana level Buddhist practitioners. He would not be having this conversation with somebody off the street who's just saying, what's wrong with this picture? You're not going to lay on them - ‘Look, everything's suffering, you're ignorant, you see things the wrong way. You have to meditate an hour a day.’ Somebody would go, ‘thank you very much. Goodbye’. But to those of us who've heard the pen and worked on the pen and logically concluded to ourselves, yeah, that makes sense about my behavior, he says, every time we act in a way that's our old habit, that's proof that we doubt the belief that we thought we believed in. So first, recognize that there's suffering, recognize in your heart that you want to be able to stop it and recognize that we've been given a glimpse of how it is stoppable in order to motivate our cushion time, our meditation.

But you know what? We also motivate our getting used to it time. Meditation, the word gompa, it means get used to. And I like that definition of the word even better than cushion time, ‘getting used to’, because it means to me getting used to living according to karmic seeds off cushion. That means choosing my behaviors really, really carefully, watching my reactions to others and things so that I stop reacting from blaming them for having done what they just did. It's difficult. One hour of on-the-cushion time trying to understand or describe and experience what's meant by emptiness. If the other 23 hours of our day is spent still blaming others for it without any effort to undo that habit, our meditation is just going to cycle around. It's not going to grow because we're not making the seeds in our off-cushion time to push our own cushion time, even though the seeds we make today are not going to affect my cushion time tomorrow. The more of them I make intending to affect my cushion time next week are going to affect my cushion time next month or so. We know that, but in the midst of somebody cutting you off in traffic, ‘I'm in a hurry too, how dare you do that’. Right? I've just exercised my doubt in the fact that how I react is planting seeds for my future. See what he means by doubt. So number one, why to meditate? ‘Because they're suffering. Suffering hurts everybody. It's my seeds ripening. Oh, my gosh, I want to change it for everybody. I need to meditate deeply. I'm going to do it.’ We need to open our hearts, he says, to be able to meditate and to be able to meditate on emptiness more and more keenly, clearly. Opening our heart means recognize somebody else is suffering and care about it. Care about that. Care about them enough to do something to help. Maybe the doing something to help is actually to take yourself on a deep retreat. But you're still acting in order to stop ignorance, ignorant liking, ignorant disliking in everyone. Part one. 

Analyzing emptiness

Part two was analyze emptiness. So second step in this career of meditation is learning how to analyze emptiness. And in that part two, I have to admit, I don't really remember so thank goodness for Lama Christie’ notes. He reminded us of how it seems that things that function and things that happen to us are happening from the qualities and identities of those others, impacting me in a certain way that I either like or I don't like. And then my reaction being, I do this to get more of it and that to push it away. And how to analyze those different aspects of our experience. One way was to analyze where is it that those two existing objects, me and the yelling boss, actually meet up. Like, seems like we're there in the same moment of time. It seems like their words impact me in a certain way. It seems like if I yell back louder, it will stop them. But where does that actually come together? Which boss is it actually that I interact with? Is it the one that their wife knows? Is it the one that their dog knows? Is it the one that my coworker knows? No, it's the one unique to me. Well, then how can their qualities be in-them from-them if this experience I'm having of them is unique to me? I have to bring something to the party. And when that's true, the full-on blaming them for what I'm experiencing has to get cut in some way.

So now if we're talking about an object functioning, and we wonder, you know, when is it that the pen actually starts to write? Is it the first moment the little inky ball thing sits on the paper? Or is it the second moment when it starts to move? And does the inky ball thing ever actually touch the paper? Wait a minute. We can divide the space and divide the space again and divide the space again, and in fact, show ourselves that an inky ball thing never touches the paper. And yet, we write with the pen and show the result to somebody else. In terms of form, things never touch each other. In terms of time, they never touch each other. Well, how does anything work then if nothing touches each other? If nothing can even exist as the thing we think it is, doesn't it leave us like, what, how does anything work? And right, that's a doorway to piecing back together how things do work. Because they do seem to work, right? My car keys turn the ignition and the car starts, most of the time. And then I misunderstand and believe that there's something in the car keys that because it fits that car and I turn them, the car will start. And it seems crazy to say there's nothing about that thing I call ‘car key’ and that thing I call ‘ignition’ and that thing I call’ car starting’ that has anything to do with each other. Well, then why can't I just think’ start car’? Right, it's getting close to that - all you have to do is push a button. Mike's car does that - push a button, the car starts. You don't even have to be in the car. Be careful with that. But like all these different ways, thousands of different ways, to analyze for emptiness, we learn them and learn them and learn them because we're good tsennyipas [definition people]. But then you find the one you like the best and that's the one you chew on and work on and play with and explore. Because that's the one your mind will like, oh, yeah, I like this one. You don't have to force yourself to do the thousand emptiness meditations on your meditation cushion. Find the one you love and use that one because we'll stay on it.

So then Master Kamalashila says all our intellectual thinkings about emptiness will only get us so far in our understanding of emptiness because it is the absence of something that we believe is there that isn't even there. That makes it so hard to grasp intellectually what it is and what it isn't. And to get it right, we apparently need to experience directly - this absence of self-nature of an apparently existing thing. The first thing we will experience will be the absence of self-nature of our me, and then very swiftly, my parts included. So in order for our intellectual logic to reach the conclusion and hold that conclusion in such a way that can open the door to its direct experience, we need to do that analysis and reach the conclusion with a state of mind called shamatha, called stillness, he taught us. Stillness, not meaning dot, no movement, but stillness meaning on my object effortlessly, no agitation, no dullness, with the Shin Jangs as I'm analyzing. Deep single-pointed concentration. The mind is moving, but it's never moving off its object. That's stillness. We have to be at that shamatha level, he said, we talked about it last course. He said the reason we need shamatha is we're trying to get to vipasyana. Vipasyana means that superior vision, or ultimate vision, higher vision, different ways people translate it. ‘Special vision’ is what Geshehla used to use. And we can't reach special vision except through the doorway of shamatha. And we won't reach shamatha unless we go through this— oh, that's not fair, we can reach doorway— we can reach shamatha without the heart opening doorway. We want to reach shamatha with the heart opening doorway of compassion so that our emptiness understanding will be imbued with our bodhicitta so that when we have it and come out of it, we are on the bodhisattva bhumi path rather than the path to nirvana. 

When does vipasyana happen?

Okay, so curious thing Lama Christie brought up, and I'll finish for our break. She said this idea of vipasyana, special vision, is what's needed to reach the perfection of wisdom. Direct perception of emptiness is perfection of wisdom. We need the vipasyana— state of mind? I don't know what to call it really. And she says, well, when exactly does this vipasyana happen? Do you slide into vipasyana and then have the direct perception of emptiness? Or when you come out of direct perception of emptiness, you go, ‘oh, I had vipasyana there’, in which case you never actually knew you were experiencing it so you still don't really know what it's like. It's like, when is it? What is it? What is it really? And Lama Christie didn't answer that question. It's something to think about. It's this concept about what's going to happen to our mind, but do we ever actually reach it? Is it different than the perfection of wisdom? And then once we have our perfection of wisdom, does that mean we have vipasyana all the time? Is our special vision happening when we're off our cushion because now we have perfection of wisdom and that's happening all the time? No, it only happens in meditation. But exactly when? And do we really care? I mean, I don't know that you have to go, okay, ‘I'm in vipasyana, now I can go for emptiness directly’, I don't think it's going to be like that, but I don't know, right? And Lama Christie didn't actually answer that question. So it's something you get to think about.

[break]

Okay. So the text we're studying is Bhavanakrama in Sanskrit, Gombe Rampa in Tibetan stages of meditation, written by Master Kamalashila, 780 India. We've learned that before.

He's talking to us amongst other things about shamatha, reaching shamatha, that state of single pointed concentration with the four shinjongs and using that quality of meditative concentration to reach Vipashyana, special vision. Vipashyana, the S is the one that sounds like a S-H. And then you'll see this word, V-I-P-A-S-S-A-N-A, that's the Pali version.

Vipashyana, it's often called. But this is the Sanskrit, Vipashyana, special vision. Lama Kristi also has given us some little snippets of other texts that she's using to help us understand Master Kamalashila a little bit better.

So she's drawing from Dode Gondro, which is the Buddha Sutra, what I really meant. And Lama Tsongkhapa in his Lamrim Chenmo quotes from Dode Gondro a lot. So that's where she's getting her Dode Gondro is from Lama Tsongkhapa's Lamrim Chenmo.

And then also he pulls from, or also she's pulling from Dode Gondro's What the Buddha Really Meant text. So you'll see in your reading, she clearly identifies the different parts. Then she also uses a Lama named Nilcha Dharmabhadra.

And I don't remember in our first two courses if we've come across him or not. But he's a big Lama in our Vajragini tradition. So he's very, very familiar to some of us.

And for those who he's not, welcome, meet Nilcha Dharmabhadra. We'll learn more about him as the time comes. He wrote a commentary on the Dalam by my hero Lobsang Chukyageltsen, which some of you are familiar with.

And so Lama Kristi is using parts of that commentary to talk to us or to point out to us the significance of the six preliminaries that Master Kamalashila teaches about. Not the seven limbs, but the six preliminaries that we learned before. Clean your room, set out offerings.

I'm not remembering all of them. Make your prostrations. I can't remember all six.

So we'll be looking at those as well from this commentary by Nilcha Dharmabhadra to plant seeds. So in this third section, it's not that the book is separated into three sections. It's that our study of the book, we're on our third part.

So in this part, Master Kamalashila is talking about what this thing Vipashyana is all about. And he says, use the eye of wisdom to not see anything at all. So it's starting to get like riddles.

Vipashyana, special vision, highest vision is when you see nothing at all. Well, wait a minute. Then I can just close my eyes and I'm in special vision.

He says, no, not like that. Wait a minute. What if I go blind? Then am I in special vision? He says, no, not like that either.

Well, wait a minute. What if I just look the other way? The firetruck and ambulance drove by during class. In my mind, my heart was going, who's it going to? I want to know which neighbor is needing help right now.

And it's like, no, I'm in class. Don't go look. Don't even start.

Is that special vision? No, of course not. Special vision is when we look and don't see. But vision is to see.

Special vision must be to see something really special. He goes, right. It is really special to look at something and not see it.

We had it in Diamond Cutter Sutra too, remember? There's this beautiful verse. I can't quote it. I should have pulled it out.

Something about for a bodhisattva who doesn't see things. For ordinary person, you're like, no, I can't do it. But something about a blind man sitting amongst all kinds of things, they can't see anything at all.

And you would think that that's the wisdom being, but it's not. It's the ignorant being who's like a blind person who sees nothing at all. And the bodhisattva is like the person sitting in the dark who sees nothing at all.

And then the sun comes up and you see everything. And it's like, wait, what? Because at the same time they're saying, when you see things with your wisdom eye, you see nothing. You are seeing everything.

And then our mind goes, that's not possible. And it's right. It's not possible when we're thinking ignorantly, wrongly about things.

And it must be not just possible, but is when we have that special vision. And so again, it's like, okay, we hear when you see emptiness directly while you're in it, there's nothing. You're in an absence, you're experiencing an absence.

And so you can't say, oh, I'm seeing it. Or you're not aware of yourself doing or seeing anything. There's just, you're directly immersed in an absence.

And my cognitive mind goes, oh, then it must just like be like nothing. It must like be nothing that's really, really pleasurable. But I think that's just completely inaccurate to say in the direct perception of emptiness being the absence is like nothing.

And I don't, I can't, I'm just going by my own cogitations and experiences because words fail trying to describe what I'm trying to touch on. That the emptiness of something is not, it's nothingness. It's, it's no specific thingness, right? Which means it's anythingness, but nothing yet ness.

It's so hard. Like we did many, many book gym book courses using this word ness at the end because it changes things completely. So anyway, ah, Master Kamalashilai, he's saying, if you are trying to do a meditation in which you are trying to stop your mind from moving, it's called the non-conceptual thought meditation.

And it's a meditative level that will throw us into a form realm if we spend much time there. And it was apparently the meditation that, that Huasheng was teaching and people were gaining experience with it and finding that sitting in that meditative concentration called no conceptual thought, it was pleasurable. And there were no mental afflictions happening while they were in it because mental afflictions are conceptual thought happening.

So they were thinking, wow, this must be the true nature of things to be free of those mental afflictions. This must be nirvana and the way I can reach, reaching Buddhahood. So I want to stay in this no conceptual thought level.

And Master Kamalashila's argument was, yeah, while you're doing that, the seeds that you're planting in your mind are for the experience of no conceptual thought when you want one. And you're not going to end up as a Buddha. You're going to end up probably as a cow or a rabbit or some creature that can't pull up a conceptual thought when they want one.

And furthermore, he says, and when you come out of it and you go to town and somebody cuts you off in traffic, you will get just as mad as you did before you spent three years in your no conceptual thought meditation because you didn't do anything to cut the root of the misperception. A no conceptual thought meditation isn't anything about where things come from or don't. So unless we cut the root of the misperception, our meditation, no matter how deep isn't going to be effective at changing our behavior off the cushion.

And the reason we can't do that, the reason we can't get to that deep of meditation is because of our doubt, he says. Our doubt in the fact that nothing is anything but ripening seeds planted by my past behavior. So Lama Christi is making the point that to be in a class like that, this, we are good practicing Buddhists.

We know the party line. We've bought the party line. We believe we live according to the party line and until we don't.

And that if we are really, really careful with how our mind is moving in response to our experiences moment by moment, maybe when the big one comes and the boss is yelling, we can go, wow, I get it. This is my seeds ripening, but opening the door and pulling it, I still believed happened by turning the doorknob because I still believe functioning things have to have in them their ability to function. And that's planting and replanting the seeds of the doubt and things are nothing but seeds ripening because I turn the door and open it without being wowed.

It means I believe the opposite of what I say I'm believing, which means I doubt my new belief. Do you see? It's like, oh my gosh, then it seems really impossible to get over that doubt because every instant I'm replanting it, except for those few moments when I think, oh no, this is my seeds ripening. You know, which happens maybe 10 times a day on a good day, maybe more.

It's better than none at all. Hooray. But what about all the other movements of mind? Oh man, is this impossible or what? No, not impossible.

So we have this deep seeded belief in things having their own nature. Me has my own nature. You have your own nature.

Things have their own nature and the experiences between them all have their own nature, their own qualities. And so we blame things. Scripture doesn't use the word blame.

I find it really effective because it shocks me to blame the water faucet handle for turning on the water. That really is what I'm doing. Blaming my foot hitting the pavement in a certain way to propel me forward when I was walking today.

Like I'm only thinking of it now, four hours later when I could have been thinking about it as I was walking instead of just thinking about who I was going to visit. It's so difficult in our ordinary human world, which is why from time to time you go into retreat, change your daily pattern enough that we can get off automatic pilot and do things differently to help trigger these different thoughts about things. Still very difficult.

All right, so this word, nimpar shampa, is the word for these deep-rooted beliefs. They shorten it to nunshin, although I don't recall hearing this word very often from Geshe Michael or Lama Christy once I learned it. But it's this deep, deep, deep belief that I am me and you are you.

And as long as I still have that deep belief, then I have this doubt that that belief is wrong. I say I believe it's wrong, but I still act from the wrong belief because I don't believe it's wrong enough not to act on it, act from it. That's what he's calling doubt.

Doubt usually means, I don't believe it, so I won't do it. It seems more active, the idea of doubt. But he's pointing it out as like some deep refusal to buy it, refusal to actually put into practice what we say we believe.

And why would that be? Like, that's unique to each of us. What's the block that keeps us from going, whoa, everything is my behavior? Great, great. I am now in charge of me and how I create my world.

We could be creating constantly. We are creating constantly already. Let's just do it more intentionally, shall we? But we need to be convinced.

How convinced? See, emptiness directly convinced apparently. Well, how do we get reached there? By interacting with others as though we're convinced so that our kindness increases, so that our goodness increases, so that our meditation goes deeper as a karmic result, so that our emptiness understanding goes higher as a karmic result, so that we can get over that threshold into direct perception of emptiness as a karmic result of our kindness born of our understanding that our doubt was a blocker and so we overcame it. I wish it were that easy.

It's easier to explain than to do. So, the using the analysis of existing things to come to our repeated intellectual conclusion that they can't exist in the way that we think is that process of doing the deconstruction of things. And I think we did it with, I did it with the computer.

Lemon Christy did it with a table. If you have a table that you're looking at and our deconstruction is, what is it from this information that tells me table? How much of it does it take? All of it, half of it, three legs, four legs, surface, right? When we go looking for the thing that gets the label, we don't find it, we find something more subtle. We find this flat thing with four uprights.

And then when we go looking at one of those uprights as the left leg, we find, oh my gosh, that's just a shape and a location. And when we look at either the shape or location, we find, oh, that's just some other part, smaller, smaller, smaller. We never find a final part that is the part that says, when you put all this together, you will get a table.

You just keep finding something smaller that got a label. And so when you get to the point where you go, oh, this is never going to quit, then you turn and you build it all back again. Okay, I put that together into this and that together into this and this together into that.

And who did it? Me, not the table. I had to do it. And that's what made the table in the first place.

And it's that exercise that we learned in, I don't know what ACI course, Tanye Takpe Takdun Sewet Sowa Minye. Remember that one? When you go looking for the thing that gets the label, we'll never find it. We will always find something, something more subtle.

We will never find nothing because there's no such thing as non-existence. Tanye Takpe Takdun Sewet Sowa Minye. He talks about this in the context of Vipashyana.

This deconstructing is a very cognitively active thing. We can do it at the level of Samatha. We're doing it without any distraction, any dullness, pinning ourselves all the way down to the conclusion of, oh man, this is how it works.

And nothing exists in any other way than that. Now, what's missing in that explanation is, well, why do I take those pieces and come up with that conclusion, that identity? We know the karmic seeds ripening. But so that's another opportunity to apply our analysis.

How do I get from when I go looking for the thing that gets the label, I'll never find it, to my karmic seeds making me see what I see. Those two are related, has to do with results, results and causes. If our friend the pen is a pen because it's a thing that writes, the pen is established by its definition.

And then that means we could only really establish it as a pen when it's writing. But then what is it when it's not writing? And I suspect your mindset, it's a pen that's not writing yet. Because in order to write, it depends on somebody picking up and making it right.

And Master Kamalashila would then say, well then see, you just showed yourself that it's not a pen, a writing thing, in it, from it, because it depends on somebody picking it up and writing with it to make it be a pen. And yet our minds say, no, no, functioning things have their function in them. And they just depend on somebody to trigger it.

And we say that and still conclude the pen is a pen in it, even as it depends on me to make it function as a pen. Do you see, we're the illogical ones. We say, yeah, yeah, I understand about mental seeds, but a pen that depends on me is still a self-existent pen.

Master Kamalashila, right, right. Work it out. So back to what is it to not see? So if we could look at our friend, the pen, the object, and see that it's not a pen, except by way of what this mind is making it, I could be looking at this, I could be having this experience, looking at this object and not see pen.

And we can imagine it. Can you look at this and not see pen? Like maybe I can imagine looking at it and not knowing it's a pen. But you know, if you are up close and personal, it would be really hard to go.

No, I'm not seeing a pen, which is proof that we doubt that it's nothing but my karmic seeds. But it's actually proof that it is nothing but your karmic seeds. Because it's my karmic seeds forcing me to say, no, no, this thing is a pen in it from it.

Because that's how I've always planted my seeds about things like this. They have their identities in them from them. So my seeds have that in it.

So when that seed ripens, it's going to have it in it too. How do we ever get out? Somehow my seeds for that self-existent investigation of it. Give me this window of opportunity to glimpse it in a different way, to not see it as I'm seeing it.

Is what he's talking about. To not see something is to not see it as self-existent. How's it going to look any different? Is it going to look different when we finally see it as not self-existent? Has it ever been a self-existent pen? No, it's never been a self-existent pen.

It's always been my projection pen. So when I finally don't see it as self-existent, how's it going to be different? Like it's an unanswerable, right? How do I stop doing something I've never been doing? I've always understood it to be the wrong way, but I've never actually perceived it the wrong way because it's always been coming from my mind. It's always been ripening seeds and nothing, but I just never knew it.

So how do I stop not knowing it so that I can know it? I still ponder that one. So as long as we are still holding this object as having some identity and quality in it, we automatically are in the clutches of ignorance, ignorant liking, ignorant disliking. And then from there comes jealousy, ill will, anger, irritation, fear, harsh speech, floods all the rest of the 84,000 mental afflictions because we doubt the truth, which is it's nothing but my seeds ripening that we spout, that we understand or that we believe.

Master Kamalashili says, I don't think you really believe it. If you blame your car keys for starting the car, you don't really believe it. He says, but you can come to believe it by opening your heart, taking care of other people, loving other people, working on your Samatha level and doing your analysis of emptiness.

We will come to have that special vision in which we see without seeing, in which we don't see, special vision that doesn't see anything. And some of us spent the last week with Mekmesewe, Terchen Chenrezig, right? That special being who doesn't see, love that doesn't see. Same idea.

She doesn't see the self-existence anymore. All right. So Lama Christi led us in a short meditation about exploring this doubt.

And Kamalashila is saying it's a doubt we want to get rid of. But as I'm working with it, it feels to me like it's a feeling of doubt that I actually want to cultivate as I'm going through my day. As I turn the water faucet on, and it looks like I just made the water flow, to have doubt in that.

Because it would make me think, no, that's seeds. To have doubt that turning the key starts the car. I want to have this doubt.

I want to be aware of my doubt in my reality, not my doubt in the right reality. So I got confused with this doubt thing. He's calling it doubt in our professed belief that nothing is anything but my karmic seeds ripening, highest worldview.

And the instant we blame somebody or something for what it just did, we are exposing that doubt. All right. So let's do this second meditation.

I think I'm done with my screen sharing. So set your body. You do that the same way every time.

It'll trigger your mind to go, okay, onto the breath. Let's stay there. Then get onto the breath and send all that noisy, restless stuff away.

And we're going to try to find our doubt in nothing but seeds ripening and look it in the face. So think about some recent experience you had that upset you in any way. Run the movie through a couple of times just to get it clear.

Who or what was it? What did it trigger? Like pin down some of the steps of what happened. I did this. They said that.

I felt that. I said that. Now freeze frame it at some point and think about what happened according to your highest understanding of the Buddhist party line.

Coming to the conclusion, my upset is my own karmic seeds ripening. Coming from some way, I upset another similarly. And so how I reacted clearly showed me that I was blaming them and not my own past behavior.

So my behavior revealed my doubt in my path. See if you can find it. There were some moments before you actually acted, something compelled you to act that way.

See if you can identify it. Somewhere in there, a part of us refused to know this is my karma and nothing but. It really was them or that making me feel that way.

And so I acted to protect myself or to stop the situation. Now run that circumstance through again with a you that definitely knows it's your karma ripening. And so the seed you plant in response will come back to you next and see yourself respond differently.

Now run the original scene again and then do a little debate with yourself. Come up with three reasons why the object of your upset is coming from it deserved of your reaction. These are our minds justifications of our habitual mentally affected reaction.

See if you can find them. Now come up with three reasons why the object cannot be self-existent. It must be your own projection.

And then check your own mind's reaction to those two groups of reasonings. Which set is it more attracted to? Nice. Now in the interest of time, let that all go.

Come back to the awareness of you in your body in your room. When you're ready, open your eyes. So Lama Christi asked us to do this meditation during this time between classes.

So I'm asking the same. Only you don't have to only do situations that upset you. Do pleasurable situations as well.

In fact, if I probably only did pleasurable situation when I was working on these because they're so much more engaging and fun. No, until I got used to it. Lama Christi wants us to really be honest with ourself to recognize really how much of our heart mind is invested in this belief that we profess like we're 100% that this meditation will show us more clearly how much we're really into living, learning to live by it.

Not as a self-criticism, but as a self-realization, a recognition. And if we find ourselves lacking in motivation, well, then we go back and open our heart further. We work out why we're here in the first place.

I must say this beautiful thing. I just want to read it. She said, we'll come to realize how vast our mind actually is.

That all we tend to be aware of, of our mind is that what's appearing on our surface level of consciousness. And even that seems vast, but there's so much more of it. And she said she had this shocking discovery when she first went into her great retreat, how much of her heart mind, how she thought she was 100% in.

But when she got in there and withdrawing and adjusting, she found surprisingly how much of her mind had not bought in yet. And she said, luckily she was at the point where the part of her mind that had bought in was in charge. Because if it hadn't been, she wouldn't have been able to stay in that retreat.

That rather she was able to take that, what she said was a small part and use it to work with this bigger part to bring it into the fold, I guess is the way we would say. She says, not all of that mind is something that we can see right at the moment. So it's very helpful to get in touch with areas of our mind that we are not really engaging with at any particular point, but they are reflecting in our outside world constantly.

And they are reflecting in our actions. They are actually dictating our actions. So they matter because they are what are preventing us from reaching our goal.

So these aspects of ourselves that we're not even aware of are what are blocking us. This is the doubt in the party line that Master Kamalashila is helping us become more aware of. Not to disappoint us, not to scare us, but to show us where we can still influence ourselves to bring this all about.

We grasp to familiarity. We grasp to safety. We're built to do that.

We grasp to some kind of control. And all of those needs to do that reveal this doubt. And in our whatever efforts we have made to behave differently, believing it would bring a different result and not yet gotten that result, it means we made this leap.

A leap that our belief has colored our behavior in the face of not getting any confirmation yet. And to see ourselves do that is a huge leap forward in our practice. Lama Christi says, Master Kamalashila, that if we are waiting for confirmation that my changing behavior is really going to help me feel better, we will wait a long time probably, because we won't be willing to make the changes in ourselves that are necessary to shift our minds enough to see the result happen soon enough.

So technically going into the diamond way, those that are preparing to do so, if we go into the diamond way with this doubt in the truth of seeds and nothing but, therefore my behavior is key, the diamond way will not be this swift transformation that it's presented to be. There's nothing in it that works any faster than sutra. It's how we use it, how we apply ourselves to it.

And if we have this hesitancy waiting for us to be sure to get the result we want before we'll do the thing we need to do to get the result, tantra does not give us that kind of feedback. And if we aren't prepared, Lama Christi said, our tantra won't work. And so we can prepare ourselves in our sutra effort in these meditations where we keep proving to ourselves over and over and over that the thing I believe is causing that, doing that to me, can't be doing it to me without my seeds ripening, making it happen.

And then using that to inspire my new behavior. It does mean giving up control, control over anything other than my response. Then we need nothing but control because my automatic response is the opposite probably of what my leap response could be to make that transformation be set in motion.

Okay, so how do we start the process? Oh, I have five more minutes of class. May I? Anybody who needs to go, you're welcome to go. It'll be on the recording.

Lama Christi went to Nilchud Dharma Bhadra's commentary where he's talking about the six meditation preliminaries. The reading is just the first two. The first one is clean your room.

The second one is make offerings. And she said this growing ability to make a leap in our practice to do something regardless of not being able to see the result for a long time. The way we plant the seed for that is that we put out offerings on our altar for holy beings that we can't see.

So every time we set out offerings, the only reason to do that is to reinforce in our own mind, I believe there's an omniscient being who is aware of me right now. And I'm showing my mind that I'm going to the trouble and a little bit of expense to put something on my altar for their pleasure. We don't see them.

I don't see them. Part of my mind still has this doubt. I don't really know, but I'm going to do it to tell my mind I believe.

And it doesn't matter what happens to the offerings, whether I see them, partake of them or not. I've said to my mind, I believe I'm doing it anyway. Fire puja is the same.

You go to all that trouble to make all those huge offerings and you've got this fire going and we're supposed to be knowing that what looks like a fire is really this deity. And as we're throwing in those offerings, that deity is going, thank you, gobble, thank you, gobble, thank you, gobble. I can't see it.

I just see a big fire and a lot of stuff. But it's seeds to make this leap in behavior change. So suddenly making offerings has this huge different take to it to help us make the leap when we're ready, when it's time, which is all day long.

Don't yell back at the angry boss. That's a leap. Everybody expects that you should and you will.

And if you don't, you're a milk toast. They're going to walk all over you. Don't yell back, make the leap.

And we'll be able to because we've put out our offerings. Do you see it's like who could figure that out if we didn't have commentaries and lamas to say so. Then the other piece is the be sure that our room is neat and tidy for our meditation because a neat, tidy room reflects a neat, tidy mind and a neat, tidy mind can meditate more deeply, more easily.

So it's like outer and inner factors. She said just sweep everything under the bed before you meditate and then get it back out afterwards if you need to, but make your place neat. And that's weird.

It's like some people make their bed and it's like wrinkle free and beautiful. And I make my bed and it still looks messy. I can't make a neat bed for the life of me.

And fortunately it's not by my altar. So I can't sweep my bed under the bed, but reflect your mind at least at your meditation cushion in order to help us train in reaching Samatha and so Vipashyana is what Master Kamalashila is alluding to. All right.

I did it. Thank you. So remember that person we wanted to be able to help.

We learned a lot that we are using to help them stop their distress forever. And that's a great, great, great, great goodness. So please be happy with yourself and happy that you have the extra six minutes for me.

Thank you very much. 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. Feel your gratitude to them, your devotion to 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.

So 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.

Okay. Thank you again. Everybody okay? Good.

Thank you so much for teaching, Lama. Nice to see you, Bisant. Thanks for coming.

All right. Bye-bye. I love you.

See you when I see you.