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]

Special vision where we don’t see

Okay. So the text we're studying is Bhavana krama in Sanskrit, Gompay rimpa, in Tibetan, Stages of Meditation, written by Master Kamalashila, 700 ADs, 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 Shin Jangs and using that quality of meditative concentration to reach vipasyana, special vision. Vipasyana, the S is the one that sounds like a S-H. And then you'll see this word, vipassana, that's the Pali version. Vipassana [no H sound], it's often called, but this is the Sanskrit, vipasyana, special vision. 

Lama Christie 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 Do de gondrel, which is the Buddha’s Sutra What I Really Meant. And Lama Tsongkapa in his Lamrim Chenmo quotes from Do de gondrel a lot so that's where she's getting her Do de gondrel, is from Lama Tsongkapa's Lamrim Chenmo. And then also she's pulling from Je Tsongkapa’s Trange Lekshe Nyingpo, Je Tsongkapa’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 Ngulchu Dharma Bhadra. 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 Vajrayogini tradition. So he's very, very familiar to some of us. And for those who he's not, welcome, meet Ngulchu Dharma Bhadra, we'll learn more about him as the time comes. He wrote a commentary on the De Lam by my hero Lobsang Chukyi Gyeltsen, which some of you are familiar with. And so Lama Christie 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 Ngulchu Dharma Bhadra 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 vipasyana 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. Vipasyana, 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, ‘oh, 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, do you 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 an 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, [and] 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 its nothingness. It's its no specific thingness, right? Which means it's anythingness, but nothing-yet-ness. It's so hard. Like we did many, many book Bok Jinpa courses using this word ‘ness’ at the end because it changes things completely. 

So anyway, Master Kamalashila, 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 Hua Shang 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 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.

How does our doubt show?

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 Christie 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, 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 in ‘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, Ngun par shenpa, is the word for these deep-rooted beliefs. They shorten it to ngun-shen, although I don't recall hearing this word very often from Geshe Michael or Lama Christie 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, Lama Christie 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?’ 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 TSELWAY TSENA 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 TSELWAY TSENA MINYE. He talks about this in the context of vipasyana. This deconstructing is a very cognitively active thing. We can do it at the level of shamatha. 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 punchline - 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 mind said it's a pen that's not writing yet, because in order to write, it depends on somebody picking it up and making it write. 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 [facepalm], 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 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 Kamalashila 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 shamatha 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 Mikme tseway terchen Chenresik, right? That special being who doesn't see, love that doesn't see. Same idea. Doesn't see the self-existence anymore. 

All right. So Lama Christie 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. 

Meditation - Exposing doubt

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. 

Checking ourselves for doubt and making the leap

So Lama Christie 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, I probably only did pleasurable situations when I was working on these because they're so much more engaging and fun, until I got used to it. Lama Christie 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 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.

Lama said 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, says Lama Christie, 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 Christie 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? Lama Christie went to Ngulchu 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 it’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 shamatha and so vipassana, 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.

Vocabulary:

Sherab = conceptual understanding of emptiness and dependent origination

Yeshe  = the direct experience of dependent origination and then emptiness

All right, welcome back. We are Bok Jinpa Course 3, Class 2. This is January 21st, 2026. 

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 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 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. Recognize that the worldly ways we try fall short, and 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 with that strong intention, turn your mind back to this 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 teach me that. Show me that, 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 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 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.

[8:06]

Meditation - What if this is our last chance to meditate?

So settle your body in. Use your sequence. It triggers that body to park itself and then has no need to do anything else.

Then you draw the focus of your mind's attention to your breath at the tip of your nostrils, focusing clearly, keenly, in on that vision or sensation, however it is for you. 

How much struggle is it to keep that focus on your breath at your nostrils? 

Is my mind happy to just sit there?

Or does it keep popping off? 

If it keeps popping off, is your attitude about it frustrated or disappointed or needing to work harder or what's the reaction? 

If our minds won't happily, enjoyably stay parked on the object that we offer it, there is some doubt in us as to the benefit of having our mind parked on a given object on purpose. Some resistance.

Now let your focus on the breath fall away and focus instead on your reason for being here in a class about meditation.

There is a part of us that wants to reach that state of stillness in order to have the experience of ultimate reality directly. There is a part of us that understands, that knows the incredible importance of that experience.

Every opportunity to meditate is an opportunity to train our restless mind to focus when we want it to focus on the thing we want it to focus on. 

So grow that intention stronger, that deep desire, deep need, to get closer and closer to ultimate reality, and our understanding of the quality of our mind's attention to be able to do that.

And with that clearly in mind, again, park your mind on your breath at your nostrils. Keep it there. 

Check, are you on or off? If you're on, is the mind bright, clear, eager? Or getting dull? Make your adjustments.

Notice again, is that mind happy to be on this simple object? Or is it struggling with you? 

Or are you struggling with it? 

Now intentionally shift your mind's focus from the breath to another kind of intention that we might bring to our practice. Think about the truth of the fact that we could be dead tomorrow and be thrown into a completely different place, completely different identity with no opportunity to practice, no inclination, no knowing of meditation at all. What if this session were our last opportunity? 

Feel even the resistance to using that as a motivation and coax yourself to lean into it.

“This is my last chance.” 

Now turn your mind's focus again to your breath, those sensations at your nostrils, as if your life depends upon it. 

Check, does your mind feel the same now as it did the first instant we turned back to the breath, knowing this was our last chance? Has it faded? Tune it back up.

Check again, on or off? Quality? Make your adjustment, get back on that breath. One more minute.

Nice. Now intentionally release your focus on your breath. Become aware of being here in your body, in your room.

Dedicate to making progress in your focus, clarity, and intensity. When you're ready, open your eyes, take a breath. 

Thank you.

[29:16]

I admit that one minute was longer than a minute. I was looking at the wrong number on my computer screen, waiting for it to change. And it was the date, not the time. I've done that before. 

Tools to increase our meditation focus

So I hope that in that exploration, you could get a little glimpse at the quality of our mind on the object and recognizing whether it's like, ‘yeah, yeah, let me on it’ versus ‘okay, I'll get on it, but as soon as I have something else to think about, it'll go there. And then I'll come back’. That's the struggle Lama Christie was pointing out. Which, you know, if we're having the struggle, can we reinterpret that whole pattern as a game? You know, how quickly can I catch it before it pops off, before I coax it back again? Or how far off does it go? We could make it into our own personal video game, right? And you're running the controls and it starts to go, no, bring it back. You know, whatever is going to work. 

And then one tool is… the tool she used was recall the importance of reaching stillness so that we can see emptiness directly. And she didn't even go to ‘and we want to see emptiness directly because there's so much suffering in the world’, but that would be another tool to help motivate our mind to stay on the object. And then she used the, well, this could be my last opportunity. And that's like one way of using our own impermanence to increase our motivation. You could also take that one and say to yourself, when I'm on my object, like that's when I'm… that's when I'm… I don't know how to answer that, finish that. But where I'm going is that we can say to ourselves, if I lose my object, something is going to kill me. Like if that would motivate you to say, “I've got to be on that object, in the instant I lose it, I could be dead”, like that term “meditate like your hair's on fire” it's meant to be this, like, wake us up and charge us up. For some of it's like, whoa, no, that's over the top, that makes me so agitated, I can't stay on my object at all. So we find the one that works for us. The one that makes our concentration go [tight on the object] like, I want to hold on to that. 

And then it's natural or it's common that we're holding onto it and nothing more is happening. And our habit pattern is to do something, have something happen, react to it, have something else happen, react to it. And when we're just parked on this one boring thing, the breath, the habit pattern is to want something different. And that habit pattern reveals to us that we don't really deeply believe the benefit of training our mind to park on what we, the meditator, says to park on it. We don't really believe that that's beneficial. ‘Yes, I do, or I wouldn't be in a class like this’. But if we really did, we wouldn't be struggling to learn methods to get my mind back and stay on the object. We would just turn on that ability and it would happen. Wouldn't it be nice? I don't know, maybe for you guys it has been like that. For me, I'm still working with it. 

Master Kamalashila has called the reasons why our mind repeatedly would rather think about something else or follow the noise into the car across the street is because we have some doubt in what we've learned so far. Doubt in either that it's true or doubt that we can do it or doubt that the methods we're using is the way to do it. Whatever our doubt is, there's something underneath that doesn't want to play. It doesn't want to succeed maybe, or maybe it's afraid of failing. We all have our own patterns and there's probably more than one in most of us that is what makes it such that that mind seems like it won't cooperate.

So Master Kamalashila is talking to us about those things, in a way giving us permission to say, okay, there's a part of me that either doesn't get it or doesn't really want to do it or doesn't think I can, and I'm willing to admit that and go looking for that pattern to see what I can do about it. Is there anything that we can't change once we are aware that we have it? No. If we figure out what the seeds are for it, stop making the seeds, clean out the ones we have, make the opposite seeds, [then] we can change that pattern, change that habit. We have to know what it is we want to change in order to do so. 

The quality of mind in meditation that's called NGAR, intensity… For my own mind, I like to use curiosity or fascination or, you know, thinking that there's something that's going to happen while I'm doing this practice that's really going to benefit somebody else. And it's like some combination of those thoughts, those ideas, is what will get my mind brighter and more alert and more eager to try. So just ‘intensity’ isn't descriptive enough for me. And Lama Christie called it passion. When we have passion for what we're doing, whatever we're doing, you know, we are fully engaged, fully on it. And because of the passion, we're not struggling to stay involved in it. She also called it desperate fervor. Wow, desperate fervor is like bigger, more urgent than passion. Passion feels nicer than desperate fervor. Desperate fervor can get pushed too far, which there's some future class where she'll lead us through a meditation where she has us push beyond the object and then increase our intensity and increase it and increase it and increase it until we see the intensity push us off the object to experience that subtle form of agitation. And she'll also put us into a subtle form of dullness, so that we can recognize it. And it's useful to do, it'll come later. It like popped in my mind in this session, maybe we should go there, but not yet, I guess.

So we want to find for our own mind's practice, meditation practice, what is the quality that we need to bring up in order to get the quality of mind that wants to stay on the object, whether the object is the boring old breath, or the object is the Holy Lama, vision of the Holy Lama, or the object is working on figuring out where that mental affliction comes from. The quality of mind parked on an object is the same for all of them. When we have it, concentrated clarity and intensity, that quality of mind is not dictated by the object. Habitually, that's where we are. We can have those three qualities of mind if the object is interesting enough, but we want it to be under our control. Now, under whose control, that's a different story, that's for future classes. For right now, there is a you who's trying to have control over that mind. 

So if we are parking our mind on our object, the breath, and it won't stay there, Master Kamalashila says that's evidence that we have doubt in the need to be able to put our mind on an object single-pointedly at our own determination. And if we have that doubt during the one hour a day of our meditation practice, you can bet you have that doubt during the other 23 hours of our day. The doubt in the benefit, the powerful goodness, of having a mind that can be single-pointed on an object of our choice. Doesn't mean we need to be single-pointed every moment of the day, but when we need it, we can turn it on, and then we can turn it off. 

There's a piece in there about when we look deep down and we feel our motivation that we're doing everything in life for the benefit of others, with my growing bodhicitta, I'm doing this to reach my total enlightenment so that I can help anybody, let alone everybody, get free of their suffering, then my meditation time would be the same. My ability to focus when I need it to focus would be there. If I'm thinking that the most powerful places that I do the deeds that help me become a Buddha for the sake of all sentient beings is out amongst what seemed to me as suffering beings, with what seems to me a human suffering body, that if I think that the best place to help people is out in the world with worldly ways of helping them, then we are not believing that I can do more for the beings in my world from my meditation cushion than I can in my outer world. Right, it's human. ‘Come on, I sit on my meditation cushion, I'm not helping anybody do anything. In fact, I need them to be quiet for me. I'm making demands on them. And yeah, I know I have to do it because that's the practice so that I can be the one that will stand on the billion planets. But meanwhile, I should be out taking the neighbor's garbage can in. I should be mowing their lawn. I should be…’ Right? I've got all these worldly shoulds that seem more impactful for people than my meditation time. And you see the mistake? It's during meditation time that I change my me so that my me, when they take the garbage can in, can be taking the garbage can in as a cause for my own enlightenment instead of taking it in to help my neighbor have a nicer day. Does it have to help them have a nicer day? Yes. But then they die or I die or the trash can breaks or who knows what. But still, even as I hear myself saying that, it's like, yeah, but today I had class early in the morning and then I had the window washers coming in the middle of the time that I would have been on my cushion. So I didn't sit on my cushion so that I could go and answer the door for the window washer. You know, what a stupid thing to let my practice time go for their convenience. So I still owe myself my practice time and it'll be, you know, nine o'clock before I get there and then I'll be tired. And it's like, I thought being nice to the window washers was more important than getting on my cushion this morning. Do you see? We still, I still do it - think that my worldly life is where I help people. But I also get to brag on myself that when I was doing retreats regularly, it was so clear to me that I could do more for my outer world from in retreat than I ever could in the me in my outer world. And I was eager to get into retreat and eager to get back into retreat once I was out of retreat. You know, it takes both, being in and being out, just like it takes both being on the cushion and not on the cushion. But there's this doubt, thinking that my cushion time is less important, less impactful on my outer world. 

[46:51]

And that's where Master Karmalashila and Je Tsongkapa and the other masters, that's where they go. But how do we show ourselves that in fact, our meditation time is not just as impactful, but even more impactful, is that they help us recognize more clearly the root of the misperception that is the cause of all the distress in our outer world that we see that we even need to fix. To be able to remove that deep root misunderstanding, we have to be able to reach that meditative stillness from which we can clearly analyze the appearing nature and the absence of true nature in order to grow the wisdom which comes from that direct experience that allows us to change that outer world by way of our interactions with it. So they're going to help us look for the doubt that's in the form of our belief in the self-nature of functioning things. Actually, Master Karmalashila focuses on our belief in the self-existence of functioning things. And it's odd, right? We would think that they would be going for the belief in a self-nature of me. If you can get to the true nature of your me, surely that would be the root shift that would change us. But apparently, our me as a functioning thing is a stronger belief than even our me as a me as a self-existent thing, interestingly. And then remember that the thing that separates Mind Only Mahayana from Middle Way Mahayana is the belief that if something functions, it has to have some nature of its own. Not self-existent, nobody thinks that, but some nature of its own. And then if we get over that, ooh, we really are at Middle Way. It's like the background for Master Karmalashila's text, this Gompay Rimpa that we're studying. 

The upward cycle of being kind, meditating well, and growing wisdom

So there was a verse in the end of our course one, I think, no, end of course two, that I wanted to show you again. Reading nine from class two. So I'm going to read it, but you can see it. Is it big enough to see? All right.

Back then, Master Karmalashila said:

Come to rest in the mind alone,

And stop imagining

Objects outside;

Fix yourself on the object of thusness,

Then apply this to even

The mind itself.

Once you’ve gone beyond the mind itself,

Then go beyond even

The lack of an image;

The yogi who rests in that absence of image,

Is he who sees

The Greater Way.

I love that series of verses. I remember having memorized it once, which means I didn't memorize it because I don't still have it, but I worked with it a lot. I find it so beautiful. And it's going to take the rest of our Bok Jinpa study… so we have course three and course four, four is a half of one, I think, to dig into this deeply enough. What we've done so far in this class isn't even talking about what this verse is getting us to. We were just exploring what are the factors that are influencing my ability to stay on my object at all. Those who have been studying Mahamudra, this maybe makes a little more sense because coming to rest on the mind alone is something that we've spent, what six months together, working on being able to do. So we'll dig into this more. At this level, we're recognizing that the key even to being able to get to fixation in our meditation is understanding dependent origination and emptiness even at our beginning levels. We can learn to concentrate really well without knowing anything about emptiness and karma, but understanding emptiness and karma shows us that it's not just effort or willpower that allows us to get rid of the doubt and be able to park our mind on the object because those experiences (getting rid of the doubt and parking on the object) will be ripening results of behaviors towards others that plant seeds that ripen as this positive result of being on our object deeply enough to penetrate into the truth of that process of seeds being planted by our mind and then ripening into our experience of our mind. And so it's really this circular situation. The better we understand where things really come from, the better we can create the causes for the outcome that we want, which is a deepening meditation so that we can experience emptiness directly. So will that be a pleasant result to reach being a shamatha level meditator? Will that be a pleasant thing? I think so, right? If it's what we want and then we achieve it, is that a good thing? I mean, technically, even if what you wanted was, I don't know, think of something bad that you want, that one might want… I can't come up with anything. But if we wanted something bad and then that bad thing happened to us, we would have to say, well, I'm happy that that bad thing happened to me because that's what I wanted, right? It's absurd because who's going to do that? But technically, you could because if you plant the seeds for something bad, you will get a bad result. So if you know what bad result you want, go plant the seed for it and you're going to get it eventually and then you achieve something that you intended and that'll be a good result. See how slippery it gets? So we want to plant the seeds for a result that is in fact something we want, through which we are making progress on our path. So the thing we're looking at wanting to want is this ability to focus our mind on our object of choice with sufficient focus, fixation, and clarity that we can hold it there as we then go on and investigate the appearing nature of that object and whether or not that appearing nature appears in the way we ordinarily think or not. And if we can show ourselves that it doesn't in fact exist in the way it appears to exist, then we've shown ourselves that it has what we call an empty nature, a no self nature. And when we can show ourselves that intellectually and park ourselves on that conclusion with the focus, clarity, and intensity, that conceptual aha is the opportunity for the experience to shift to a direct experience, no longer conceptual. In which case we are shifting from growing what's called SHERAB, which is the greater and greater, more and more subtle conceptual understanding of emptiness and dependent origination, shifting over to YESHE, wisdom, which is the direct experience of dependent origination and then emptiness. So he's going to help us understand the difference between a conceptual experience and direct experience. And it'll take us a couple classes to do that, to understand that we're growing our meditation career in order to be able to be aware as we go through these steps of deepening awareness of the experience we're having as we do our meditation on our object.

[1:00:13]

All right, let me see. So first off, Master Kamalashila reminds us that the karmic cause of deepening meditation is deepening morality. That as our behavior becomes more and more adverse to harming others, and more and more inclined to helping others, especially when those two are colored by our bodhicitta, our wish to reach that ultimate goal for all sentient beings, those seeds that are being planted are contributing to a mind that gets more… they use the word still… less distracted on and off the cushion. Somehow being more and more intentionally kind makes a mind that will get more and more still. Not meaning parks on one word and doesn't move off of it, but meaning you park it on your topic at hand and that mind will not pay any attention to the traffic noise. It won't pay any attention to the itch on your fanny. It won't pay any attention to suddenly being hungry. All of that can happen and there's no actual awareness of it, so you don't know whether it's happening or not and who cares because you're on the object. It also will not let itself drift into ‘not so interested in this anymore, eh, still on the object’. It stays in that keen, bright focus. That's what we mean by stillness. From stillness, we can then take that fine focus and drive it onto the appearing nature, empty nature, of the object with that same focus, clarity, and intensity. Do you see? So a stillness mind doesn't mean it can't then start thinking about emptiness. It won't do it on its own. We, the meditator, has to say, ‘okay mind, now's the time’ and we start this analysis. It requires thinking. It requires knowing what to think.

So we learn these different methods of analyzing our experience for what appears to be going on, and then we check to see if it can really be that way consistent with how we experience it. Those who did Heart Sutra deep dive learned how to do this. And then we look at, well, if it doesn't exist in that way, what way does it exist? And we come to the recognition of the seeds ripening and we recognize then that, oh my gosh, it can't exist in any other way than that because it's appearing to me. So with all these different meditations that we've learned and will learn, there are all these different methods, nuances, to basically applying that sequence. And then we find the one we like and play with it for a while and then try a different one when it goes dry. But then at some point, we don't want to rely on guided meditations anymore. Stop playing the thing on your phone and do your own meditation. Do it yourself because we need to be able to go through that sequence on our own because we won't always have the audio playing when we're walking down the street. We want to be able to do it ourselves.

All right. Let's see here. So Master Kamalashila is pointing out, like the party line says, the better our morality gets, the better our meditative concentration will get, and then the better our conceptual understanding of emptiness will get because our concentration is so much clearer when we're doing our analysis. And then all that goodness, goodness, goodness can ripen into growing wisdom, which technically the wisdom isn't wisdom until we have the direct perception of emptiness. But, you know, the Lamas say, you are growing wisdom. When you reach those high conceptual understandings of emptiness and karma, call it wisdom, right? To help us stay on the path. So, yes, we're growing our wisdom. And then as our wisdom grows on cushion, when we're off cushion, we have an even greater aversion to doing anything that might upset somebody, might do some harm because we understand so much more clearly that we're just hurting everybody, right? The only reason I would be willing to hurt somebody is that I think it's going to benefit me in some way. And as my wisdom grows, I see that that's just absurd. You know, if I crush a bug and my ribs crushed as theirs crushed, I would only do it once. Or if I saw it happen to somebody else, I hope I'd be smart enough to never do it myself. But because it doesn't happen like that, we convince ourselves that, well, this time it's okay, right? Because last time there was a ‘this time’ it was okay. I did it and the bug actually went away and so I think I did a good thing. And it's like, no. So as my wisdom grows, I won't fall for that kind of human logic anymore. And it shows in my behavior. And then because my behavior is getting more and more considerate, my meditation gets more and more considerate, they say. Frankly, I still feel like I'm in the gap, personally. But then I think, well, what would my meditations be like if I hadn't been as intentionally kind as I have been for years? Probably I wouldn't even be a meditator at all. So I can't really justify saying this can't be true because I've been kind my whole life and I still don't think I meditate well. That's a whole nother story. How do I know whether I meditate well because I have no idea what somebody else's meditating mind is like. Maybe I'm comparing mine to some ideal that nobody achieves, I don't know. But the point is, we'll even struggle against the explanation of the way to get our meditation to go deeper is to be intentionally more kind, more helpful off our cushion.

[1:08:54]

Geshehla calls it the still lake, right? Don't disturb somebody else's still lake if you want your own mind's still lake to be there when you want it. And if we understood the connection between my behavior and my experience, it would not be a struggle. That's where Master Kamalashila is going. The reason morality improves, concentration improves, [the] reason is because morality makes positive karmic seeds. And positive karmic seeds can ripen as my improved meditation because my improved meditation moves me closer and closer to the wisdom that proves to me that my morality creates my future.

During one of the Mixed Nuts translations, I think it was, Geshehla said this beautiful thing. I even wrote it down. He said, “Buddhism is not about whether things self-exist or not. And Buddhism is not about how they do or don't exist. Buddhism is about the fact that everything depends upon how we treat others.” LIke everything depends upon morality. If things exist with their qualities and identities in them, there would be no morality, there would be no effect of our deeds on others affecting our mind because we couldn't affect others. If their qualities and identities are in them, there's nothing we could do to them that would change them. And all of a sudden, it just becomes absurd to think something has its own nature in it. And it's absurd in my head, but as soon as I look out there, I'm thinking, there you all are, you in you. Even as I know each one of you is unique to my experience. You are real and you are unique to me, you are coming from my seeds, thank you very much for being so wonderful. So this pattern, kindness begets deeper meditation, we want to continue to prove that to ourselves again and again and again. And it's hard it's hard because we are believing that what I do off my cushion is more important than what I do on my cushion. And here it's saying, actually, that's kind of true, as long as what we do off our cushion is being done in order to empower our on-our-cushion time. So as long as our off-cushion time is choosing to follow our vowed morality, or just morality period, in order for our meditation to go deeper, then our off-cushion time maybe is more important than on-cushion time until we've reached stillness. Because our off-cushion time is what's planting the seeds to be able to reach stillness. That doesn't mean we'll reach stillness without sitting on our meditation cushion every day. We need to give it the opportunity to ripen. 

Let's take a break. I yakked through break time, I'm so sorry. 

[Margie: I have a question too, Lama Sarahni, if I could real quick. You were talking about the meditation in another class you taught where there's a progression of what it appears to be, can it really be that way? If it doesn't exist that way, how does it exist? Is there somewhere I can find that written down to do a meditation on that?]

Yeah, in Geshe Michael's Heart Sutra practice module, if those have been transcribed. If you find the meditations in that program in the daily practices, it's from that. It's called Kendrup Je's Four Step Emptiness Meditation.

Are we back? So Lama Christie added that when we are trying to live according to bodhisattva morality, it means holding to our morality regardless of how things appear to be happening to us in that given circumstance. And so it's that example we've been using, you know, the angry yelling boss, and my usual reaction is to lie to wiggle out of whatever they're blaming me for. This bodhisattva morality isn't just ‘no, I'm not gonna lie because that would be bad’, it's like how can I respond in this situation in the highest way for everybody? And it really bucks the system because all of our usual conditioning for how to react includes what people expect us to do, and so we're inclined to act that way just because that's what we're expected. It's like we're struggling against all of those habit patterns in order to hold to this higher conviction of being able to say, “I'm sorry you're upset with me, how can I help you” when the last thing you want to do is help the person who's blaming you for something you didn't even do. So it really… the practice of morality is not a simple thing. It's a constant effort of checking our quality of mind. And so it takes a high level of concentration to do it, tada, maybe that's why it builds our meditation. 

Okay. So then, once our meditation is deepening to the point where we are reaching stillness regularly, then we don't… part of stillness is the pleasure that comes on from that high level of effortless concentration. It's pleasurable. And then the risk is, “wow, this feels so good. I'm really on my object. I'll just stay here for a while.” And then your timer goes off and it's like, oh, we didn't use the opportunity to use that pleasurable state of body and mind to then penetrate into the appearing nature, the true nature, and the no self nature aspect of the experience that we were having. 

So Master Kamalashila says that when we grow our concentration, we're using it to grow our wisdom, our analysis by knowledge (Sherab), and our wisdom (Yeshe). And it takes both of those.. it takes both actually to have either one, technically. But most importantly, he says, we can't expect to be able to do clear analysis, let alone reach wisdom, if we don't have the concentration. And those two are also explained as stillness and special insight, or shamata and vipasyana, or SHINEY and HLAKTONG, depending on the language. And he says, those two, concentration and growing knowledge, stillness and wisdom, they are like the pair of having eyes to see and light. That we can have eyes to see, but no light, and we wouldn't see anything. And there could be light, if we don't have eyes to see, we're still not going to see anything. It takes both eyes to see and light to reach wisdom. So the eyes to see, that would be the stillness, the meditative concentration ability. And then the light would be the concept, the idea, the emptiness factor. And to be able to experience that wisdom, we need both. And it's like seeds… I see and hear those… the seeds of two things that are in fact one thing is a recurring theme in our teachings. And so here's another example of it. We use our stillness, not as a goal in and of itself, no matter how pleasurable it is, but as a tool to reach the wisdom of the true nature of the object of our stillness. All right. 

How much information is coming from your mind?

So then when we investigate our meditative object with our stillness mind for its appearing nature and actual nature, we need to apply our ability to recognize how it is that what's appearing to us is appearing as little bits of information that our mind is applying an identity and qualities and thus a story to. And it's like, that's a really long story how we get to that. So fortunately we've already, all of us heard the punchline so that I can go a little bit faster with it. So when we have an experience in or out of meditation, let's just talk about an experience through vision, a visual experience. We have all heard the explanation that what's actually happening as we experience our friend, the pen, is that there's information, color, and shape that the eyeball picks up. And then the mind processes, interprets, rearranges those colors and shapes and is forced to come up with an identity, and with the identity, qualities, function, right, the story. It's like dominoes. So my mind goes color, shape, tip, thing, thing, pen. And as soon as it's ‘pen’, even if it's not the word ‘pen’, the mental image pen, with pen is full of ink, I can write with it, writing communicates, all of that happens from just these small indications. But now if we really tried to pin it down, can colors and shapes give me enough information to come up with all of that? What's the color? Red and white, a little silver. See it shine? A little black. There are all kinds of things that are red and white and black. What's white and black and red all over? Remember that old riddle? Newspaper [red / read]. What's happening? Little bits of information that our mind goes, ah, pen. 

So let's do an experiment. Do you see what's on the board? 

What's your mind making of it? Not much, right? Little black dots on a fuzzy looking something that your mind is making white board out of, which I don't know what makes white board out of this stuff. There's nothing white about it except right here. But anyway, watch. Watch your mind. Don't watch what I do so much, but watch your mind. So here's your little bits of information. Okay, watch. More bits of information.

Oh, can you even see it? 

[Coco: I already put it together.]

Oh, who did that? 

[Coco: My mind, I watched it.]

Yeah, crazy. What did it make? 

[Basant: It's love.] 

The word love, come on, there's nothing love in that. How much information does your mind need to make pen? How much information does your mind need to make Sarahni teaching a class right now? Does it need anything from this [pen]? Oh, trick question. 

[Basant: No.]

[Lama Sarahni removing pen from screen] Well make pen now, Mike.

[Lama Sarahni showing pen again] You did it. 

[Mike: My seeds went away.]

Right. Right, the information went away. [removing board from screen] Make the word love on the board now. [bringing board back] Make it now. It's like you can't not see it now, right? For those who have seen it, you can't not see it. Just like we can't not see the cockroach in the kitchen sink. But the cockroach in the kitchen sink is also little bits of information that our mind goes, ‘eek, cockroach in my sink.’ But it's no different than that word on the board. So when we are sitting in meditation, and we're finally on our object sufficiently that we can start deconstructing because my mind's on my holy angel Lama image, it's like how much of this information is not coming from my mind? Well, come on, you're imagining them in front of you, all of it's coming from your mind. But what about the one who represents the one you're imagining, how much of them is coming from your mind? How is it any different? 

Okay, so let's do a little experiment, our own mental experiment. Not a proper meditation, but I'm going to guide you through some thinking. So sit again, please. 

Meditation - the difference between an imaginary object and what we think is a real object

[1:33:10]

Bring your attention to your breath.

And in your mind's eye, picture, you're holding a cup. 

Get it clear. What kind of cup is it? What color is it? 

Now, without a lot of analysis, bring to mind your general idea, general picture of the emptiness of that cup. 

You're still seeing the thing, the cup, and you're knowing something about emptiness about it.

Now, feel what it feels like outside of meditation to take that cup and use it. 

Feel how as you interact with it, you are somehow seeing it, experiencing it, wrongly. 

Can you find it? 

Go back to the cup in your mind's eye, being aware of its emptiness.

And then go again to you outside of meditation using the cup. Can you feel what pops up that wasn't there in the previous experience of the idea of the cup and its emptiness?

Something about us says, yeah, in my real life, I can hold the cup, I can fill it with juice, I can drink from it. In my meditating cup, I can't touch that one, I can't use that one.

But now tell yourself why the cup that your outside meditation you is using cannot be, just cannot be. 

And when you reach why it cannot be, park your mind there. 

Go back to the meditating cup, aware of its emptiness.

And then let that go and come back to this you in this body in this room in this class.

When you're ready, open your eyes. 

Deceptively simple exercise in feeling that feeling of the difference between an imaginary object, what we think is an imaginary object, and what we think is a real object, and how they both have the same nature of being an object ripening from our mind. And I don't know, when I get that glimpse, it just makes me want to laugh out loud because what I'm doing is just so crazy absurd, but I can't hold it when I'm not. When I'm holding the cup, I can't hold the absurdity of holding the cup, that it could be the cup that I think is here.

That example, Je Tsongkapa, he says, when we are picturing the cup in our mind, we are experiencing what comes from indications at a beginner's… like at the first level. Even when we were imagining the cup in our imagination, it's still that our mind is taking little indications of something and coming up with an imaginary cup. And so, right there, we have the first start of becoming aware of what it is to be aware of what comes from indications. And at first we say, what comes from indications is the cup, but inherent in that explanation is the cup that has its identity in it, and that's a contradiction. If we say, ‘if all I have is indications, and then there's a cup’, then the cup has to come from my mind, not the indications. And yet, the very cup that we are aware of is a cup in it. Like what comes out of the indications is a cup with its own nature, which is why we need to see ourselves experiencing the indications without the cup to prove to ourselves that the cup is not in or even on the indications. Like you saw all the little dots and all of a sudden it was the word love without even the word love there. It was your mind. The cup does the same thing because we don't get all the information. I see the front of the cup, don't I? No, you see the front of the cup. But none of us see the bottom of the cup or the inside of the cup. But does the cup I'm holding have a bottom and an inside? Yeah, we know it does. And we can use that awareness of knowing something is there that we can't see to grow the ability to know the emptiness of this cup that we can't see as we are experiencing the cup. So if we say, I can't ever see the emptiness of an appearing thing, it's like, well, we have the seeds for seeing things that aren't there. Maybe we need to do some rejoicing in that. It's like, wow, I do know things are there that I can't see directly, may it be emptiness.

The three stages of vision

So they say there are three stages of vision. [1] This seeing the indications, that's where I started. There's the mental cup. [2] Then recognizing what comes from seeking, Master Je Tsongkapa explains it, which is when we start trying to investigate what part of that cup shows me ‘cup’ to find that, man, it can't be there the way that I think. That's what comes from seeking. [3] And then that which comes from analysis, is we take what comes from seeking, which is the appearing cup, and deconstruct that with our analysis to come to see that, oh my gosh, that appearing cup is still not a cup so that it can be a cup for me. As it becomes the cup from the indications from the seeking, the no cup nature of the cup gets so clear that we see how it is that it can, in fact, be a cup for me without it becoming a cup for it or for anybody else. That which comes through analysis. When we reach that analysis, we've gotten there through thinking about it and we come to this high, clear conceptualization of what our conclusion is, which required putting this together with that together with that together with that, to come up with an aha, and that's still conceptual. And what we're growing is the ability for that conceptual experience, for us to sit in it and penetrate it somehow until it becomes direct. A direct experience of emptiness is not understanding this and this and putting it together to come up with that. It is direct. It's hard to even conceive because I'm not sure there's anything we experience directly until we have seen emptiness directly. Because our seeds have always been taking information and coming up with something. And so all of our seeds ripening are going to be doing that as well. And we say, oh, I'm experiencing holding this pen directly. But it technically isn't because I'm not directly experiencing it as seeds ripening and nothing but. And until I'm directly experiencing it that way, I'm experiencing it in a way that my mind is going [seeing indications] to come up with me holding pen. So am I doing it? Yes. That seems like a direct experience because it's not like somebody else is holding the pen and I'm imagining I'm holding the pen. I'm really doing it. But it's not a experience in the sense of the direct yogic experience of dependent origination and then ultimate reality. So even the direct experience of dependent origination, we can't sit there and imagine the seed ripening and going out and making the pot on the stove because that'll be one that we've conceptualized. It has to be something that all of a sudden, that's happening. And the power of that being a direct experience is the power that'll push us into ‘and nothing exists in any other way than that’ if we run and jump on our meditation cushion after that experience happens, as I understand. I don't know.

Okay. So this sequence of recognizing indications becoming an appearing thing and that the appearing thing isn't anything other than the mind making the appearing thing out of indications or onto indications, not sure how to say it correctly. And recognizing that the mind is making the thing, not the indications. And the thing doesn't exist in any other way than that. That sequence requires being at the level of shamata in order for that sequence to be able to push us into vipasyana, into the direct perception of emptiness. It takes both. Like it took the eyes and the light to reach the intellectual understanding, we need the concentration and the ability to analyze with clarity in order to have the pair of shamata and vipasyana happening. 

The preliminaries of cleaning, offerings, and refuge

Okay. There's one more part Lama Christie wanted to talk about and that was about the preliminaries to meditation. So Master Kamalashila isn't talking about it, she's using Ngulchu Dharma Bhadra’s text. And she reminded us that the first meditation preliminary for our career is to clean up your space every day. And then she said one of the reasons to do that is that anything in samsara that you let go unattended is rapidly deteriorating. And then to make an effort to clean it up or to fix it up each day supposedly slows down that deterioration. That would make a great debate. ‘What I do in the moment does not change what happens in the next moment.’ So I don't think my cleaning up the space is going to make the space last any longer necessarily. And cleaning up the space isn't going to make my mind 10 minutes later any cleaner. But cleaning up the space every day is planting the seeds for cleaning up my mind every day, and that's going to help my practice in the long run. 

Then the second preliminary is the habit of making offerings. Not because the holy beings need it, but as a method for gathering the goodness that assures us in the future of having our needs met, having the things that we need to be able to make offerings. So we make offerings, allows us to have the resources to continue to make offerings in the future. Also in the long run makes us into beings who are receiving offerings. But again, it's not that I make an offering today and tomorrow I can expect tons of incense to show up at my doorstep. And it isn't even really for getting the stuff back. It's for gathering the goodness that can ripen as my meditation going deep enough to grow the wisdom that makes me into a being that anybody wants to make offerings to. That means I can help them in some way or have helped in them in some way.

Then the next preliminary is taking refuge. And thank goodness we've been trained in refuge so clearly. It's not about expecting the statue or the textbooks or even the ordained robed people to stop the speeding bullet coming at my head. It's to help me change my reaction to pleasant and unpleasant things happening by way of how those three jewels have taught me about where things come from. So recalling that the Buddha jewel is a being who went from suffering being to totally enlightened being. So they made all the mistakes and they did all the goodness and they know what worked for them and maybe they can help me too. And then taking that one step further is that my own personal holy guide being is the one that I see as the one who's done that and now is directly connected to me, loves me enough to be willing to do what they need to do to get me to gain those realizations as well. And so I can rely upon what they teach me. I don't expect them to provide for me. I don't expect them to make miracles for me. What I expect from them is to be there when I need guidance. And that a deepening level of refuge is to become more and more keenly aware of what they are as a fully enlightened being, how they became a fully enlightened being. They overcame their misperception of their self-existent self in a world of functioning things and came to grow their love and their compassion so big that all the seeds they planted with those two states of mind grew their wisdom to the point where they are directly experiencing every existing thing in all three times. And then that love manifests as everything anybody needs in order to move them along the path as well. That does not mean that anybody necessarily sees what they're experiencing as the love of that Buddha, but we could. If we have the goodness to even consider it, we can say, well, maybe anything or anybody is their emanation helping me, and we can see how dangerous and slippery that could be for people not yet ready. And so we tend to start with just one being who does seem to be extra special for us. And we devote ourselves to them and we ask for their help and their guidance. And as we understand them better and better and we understand that their goodness is coming from our seeds, whoa. Where we might decide they really live is not so much some Buddha paradise, you know, 17 light years away, but rather right here in my refrigerator of heart seeds. Right? They're available to me if I could just remember or think of it that way. In which case I could, as my refuge, like any time I need to make a decision, tune myself into them and say, what should I do? Like, I think I know what I should do, but they've got the wisdom I don't have. ‘What should I do?’ And then maybe you hear this little voice, ‘go take a bath.’ ‘Yeah, but.’ ‘Yeah, but.’ Like if I make the determination, I'm going to listen. And they say, ‘go take a bath’, the ‘yeah, but’ is like forget ‘yeah, but’, go take a bath. Go to your neighbor and see what they want. ‘Yeah, but’. Go. It's a hard, hard practice to surrender to a Lama. Maybe it's harder if you actually have them out in front of you and they say, go take a bath. ‘Yeah, but.’ Maybe it's harder to listen to the voice inside because we don't believe, ‘oh, I'm just making it up. I must really want to take a bath right now, and I'm not allowed to do the things I really want to do.’ Am I? Oops. Right. I'm getting distracted. But refuge, refuge is the guidance in karma and emptiness and using that in our decision making. And Lama Christie said, start first thing in the morning. You wake up in the morning and whatever your state of mind is, ‘oh God, another day’, bring up some way in which your refuge in Buddha, dharma, sangha can bring you some uplift and some eagerness to do the practice on that day. 

She suggested take result refuge, which is - enlightened beings who are omniscient and see all three times know me, this one. So they also know my fully enlightened me already because that's in the future. So at least for the Buddhas, my fully enlightened me already exists. Okay, I'll buy that. ‘Hi [future Buddha self], I rely upon you.’ It uplifts me a little bit now to think, wow, that fully enlightened me actually already does exist. It's a little slippery, but maybe that's uplifting. Maybe that's even more discouraging, in which case don't use it. 

Find something else that'll kick us out of that doldrums of having another day. On the other hand, maybe it's like, oh, I've got to face that jerk at work again today, I really don't want to do it because they're going to push that button and blah, blah, blah. Then we use our refuge in karma and emptiness, thinking through the emptiness and karma of the three spheres of that jerk at work until we have a plan for how we'll try to interact with them and plant different seeds. And we get a little more eager to go and try it on for size in that morning. Use our understanding of karma and emptiness, our refuge, to shift our habit pattern starting first thing in the morning, aays Master Kamalashila, says Je Tsongkapa, says Lama Christie, so I get to say it to you. Not just the words “I go for refuge in Buddha, Dharma, Sangha.” If you have to change the words to make them real, change the words so that it's a useful tool taking your refuge. 

Meditation - Surrendering

Okay. I'm out of time, but Lama Christie gave us one more meditation. So I'll just say it to you so that you can have it from the transcript and then you can try it on for size. What she said was:

You focus your mind on your breath. 

You imagine yourself in a most exquisite, beautiful place for meditation. It's so fabulous. Take a little time to do that. 

Then you invite into that place with you your own holy, perfect angel guide, that being who is the manifestation of ultimate love, ultimate compassion, ultimate wisdom.

You see them there with you and you recognize that they had to have done the deeds that brought them to their renunciation, brought them to their path of accumulation, their path of seeing, their bodhisattva deeds, all the way to their path of no more learning. 

And that love makes them radiate, emanate out. 

And the one I see is that emanation just for me.

 And I haven't had those experiences that they've had and so I really don't know what they know about what I need to know. 

And so I can feel my devotion to them.

I can feel that I want their love to help me grow me into them, into an emanation of them. 

And feel your connection, your deep, deep holding, wishing, asking, begging, please help me, please help me, please help me. 

And feel they are helping, they want to help, they want us to turn our minds open to them. They can't make us do it. 

And once we do it, the floodgates will open when we truly surrender. 

And so just in this little short meditation that she gave, let yourself receive those floodgates of their blessing and make your own determination to be brave enough to follow that guidance. Give yourself permission to change. And then you would go from there on into whatever your other meditation was going to be, she said, because this is an act of refuge. So you'll see in your reading, it's described in a more Buddhist ritual way. And if you like the Buddhist ritual way, do it that way. And if you like this more personal way, do it this way. Make your refuge - a deep connection with that holy being.

Okay, thank you for the extra five minutes. Please forgive me. 

And remember that person we wanted to be able to help at the beginning of class. Having them as our motivation helps us understand, in a higher way, whatever it is we heard. And so please be happy with yourself. And think of this goodness like a beautiful glowing gemstone you can hold in your hand. Recall that precious holy being. See how happy they are with you. Feel your gratitude to them, your reliance upon them. Ask them to please, please, please stay close, to continue to guide you, help you, inspire you, 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 fills us so full, 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. 

Thank you so very much for the opportunity.

All right, welcome back. We are Bok Jinpa Course 3, Kamalashila's Bhavana Krama Part 3, Class 3. It is November [January] 28th, 2026, where I am. 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 who for you is a manifestation of ultimate love, ultimate compassion, ultimate wisdom, and see them there with you. They are gazing at you with their unconditional love for you, smiling at you with their holy great compassion. Their wisdom radiating from them, that 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, recognize how the worldly ways we might try or do try falls short. 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. With that intention, turn your mind back to your 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, show me that. 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 pure 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. 

Meditation - What is your motivation to focus your meditation

[7:32]

Now set yourself in for a short sit, please. 

Get your body fixed.

Then gather your attention to your breath, specifically that place where the breath leaves the body. Find that location and decide to focus on that spot. It's the place where you end and the rest of the world begins, in a way. 

Fine-tune your focus. 

Assess that mind's clarity, its brightness.

And turn on the intensity, fascination, curiosity. 

Zoom into that object to make it fill your whole field of vision, if you're mentally looking at it. Fill your whole field of sensation, if that's how you are relating to it. 

If our body moves or needs to move, then we've lost our object. 

If we hear something other than that place that we're focusing on, we've lost our object. 

The mind jumps off so easily. 

Why does it do that? 

What additional factor do you personally need to motivate your meditating mind to be so fascinated with something as ordinary as the sensation of my breath to the extent that there's no awareness or interest in anything else? 

Whatever idea has come to your mind about why it's so important to focus on that sensation at that location, turn on that motivation.

And then put your mind on the tip of your nostril breath again.

And check the quality of your mind on your object. 

Make any adjustment needed and sink back into it. 

We'll stay two more minutes. 

Check. 

Now let go of your object, but don't come out yet. Make a note - did your tuning up your motivation help your ability to park on that object? Did it help for the whole time or just at the beginning? What was the experience? 

Make a note and then become aware of yourself in your body in your room, so you're back here. When you're ready, come on out. 

I'm remembering these early classes when Lama Christie was spending quite a long time on just the breath. And I remember, and I still have this resistance, it's like, the breath is not a powerful object, I don't want to spend time on my breath, my mind is ready to go to the object. I'm getting dull, dumb, and stupid while I focus on my breath, let me get there. And it was always this big obstacle, when if I had just focused my mind on my breath, the time would have passed and we would have been on to the next. But I struggled, struggled, struggled. I still… you know, Geshehla says, now we count a hundred breaths before we go on. And it's like, come on, I've got so much more I can do in a hundred breaths worth, Geshehla. But, you know, I'm not really being honest with myself to say, but if I wanted to enough, I could choose that my breath is a powerful karmic object and park my mind on it and stay there. But can we? Can we just say, well, there's a reason I don't want to keep my mind on the object because it's boring and there's more important things to do. Or am I just making excuses for the fact that I don't want to put in the effort or I don't want to admit to myself: that mind has a mind of its own. It is not listening to me. And then, you know, who's in charge? Like really, who's more important? My me or my mind? Who has more power? My me or my mind? Like we're not going there in this class, but I can't help bringing it up because I hit up against that all the time. Who trumps who? Me or my mind? And, you know, some days it's the me and other days it's the mind, and other days it's the body and oh my gosh, you know, now we're in trouble. So we're learning this heightened awareness that can just recognize where we're at and what's going on. And then we're learning to add to that heightened awareness, a heightened understanding of the mistaken answer I give myself to what's going on here and then the more accurate answer to what's going on here. Meaning the what's going on here worldly, “Oh, I just didn't get enough sleep so that's why my mind can't be bright and clear, I just need to get more sleep” and then recognizing that there's some validity to that but in fact, I'm still thinking self-existently about sleep being something that would help my meditation be better. And there's really no connection between the two, as we understand. And that in fact, there's something else underneath that's creating the result of the experience of me trying to get my mind to do what I want it and it won't, it won't do it. Like all that's ripening results of past behaviors. 

So Lama Christie's, I mean, Master Kamalashila and so Lama Christie is coming back to helping us recognize that our efforts towards our goal, first goal being reaching stillness… if our progress is going more slowly than we like, it isn't really about lack of effort. There might be some component, but it isn't just “try harder, put more discipline in” because we understand we can work really, really hard at something and if we don't have the seeds to ripen that thing, it doesn't matter how hard we work, we're not going to experience it. We would need to be working on something else to get that result to ripen. And then the effort necessary would be focused in this other arena. And then the effort on the cushion would be not so much effort, it would be just what we do. It would be the enjoyableness of the practice. 

[25:43]

So we had learned that our efforts at learning to meditate are directed towards being able to reach the platform from which we can experience ultimate reality directly. And that for that to be a result, we would have to gather extraordinarily good karma, good seeds, adding to the ones we already have. So we must have past experience with meditation, both successful meditation and not all the way successful meditation. I say successful meditation because here we are studying in a class that you could say is like third level. We're not in elementary school or high school, we're not even in university. We're in post-grad work now. But that's coming out of us by way of goodness we have done in the past, related to our efforts to help others meditate, to help ourselves grow our concentration. And presumably we learned that in order to get good at meditation even then, we learned that concentration is a reflection of the quality of our behavior off the cushion. So maybe we didn't learn that in past meditating careers. Maybe what we learned is this is how you meditate and you put the hours on the cushion and you'll get good or you won't, just depending on your skill level or something. And maybe we didn't learn that “oh my gosh, that will be a result of my kindness, growing kindness, off the cushion.” And maybe that was the missing piece, that our effort to meditate brings us to instructions on how to meditate, and our past goodness, whether we did it on purpose or not, brought us to the teachings that say, look, our quality of meditative concentration is a ripening result that is a goodness that must then be planted by some kind of being kind to others. 

So Master Kamalashila is repeatedly reminding us that if we are finding ourselves like somehow stalled out in our progress of meditation, we would want to do things. One would be to check our off cushion time to see how intentionally, conscientiously we are trying to improve our level of ethical behavior. And number two, he says, revisit your motivation for meditating so that the reason we get on our cushion on a day-to-day basis is because we have some burning desire that to accomplish something, that we recognize only meditating will help us accomplish that, or give us the opportunity for our seeds to ripen that accomplishment, to be more accurate. And so we would not so much try harder in our meditation as we would try harder in our behavior change and work harder with our motivation before we even get our mind onto the object and then do our meditative practice. And still, as we know, there'll be some time gap between the increased effort in our morality and the increased intensity of our motivation and the improvement of any given session. It's not that if I have a really, really great motivation, I'm necessarily going to have the greatest meditation. Similarly, we could sit down with no motivation at all and have a great meditation. But how the seeds tend to work is that a strong motivation makes a strong meditation because the ripening of those seeds are connected. Because it took a strong motivation to help us fine-tune our ethics off the cushion and in our attempts, we actually saw some improvement, right? I mean, just because we decide I'm never going to get irritated again, that we never get irritated again. But because we're highly alert to it, we're recognizing it much earlier and as a result, not responding badly to perpetuate it. And son of a gun, it isn't too long before those things that used to irritate us, we just go, well, where was the irritation, right? I had the experience, but no irritation. It's a little startling the first couple of times. I think I told you once about the blender and the moldy composty stuff. And I put it on the blender, but I didn't have the top on well, and I cranked it up and it flew. And it's like moldy, stinky, awful stuff for the compost is all over the kitchen. And I laughed out loud, whereas old me would have like, and I was so startled that I didn't have that reaction that I laughed, you know, and it's like, well, may that happen again? No, no, I don't want it to happen again. But may I laugh out loud at myself when I don't react the way I expect myself to react? It happens, it really does happen. If it can happen to me, it can happen to you if it hasn't already, because I'm like the slowest one on the block here, honest. So Master Kamala Sheila is saying, don't berate yourself. If our meditations are not going the way we plan, plant the seeds for it. Don't stop the daily effort, because we need to give ourselves the opportunity to see how our seeds are ripening. And that's not going to happen if we don't ever get on the cushion. But we don't need to have this expectation of having a perfect meditation. We want to bring the effort to try, try, try, try. We plant seeds by trying. They are as powerful. That's all we actually ever do is try, because the result we see in the next moment isn't from what we did anyway. Right? So we can't say that I only did a good deed because I saw the good result. No, I saw myself try, and that seed's planted. So our effort in meditation on any given session is about the trying, less than how good was it? You know, I was at level seven for 75% of the time, yay. Not as important as I was checking, I was checking, I was pulling it back, I was adjusting, yay. I had my motivation strong, yay. That will serve our meditation career better than going, oh, another yucky meditation, right, in our book. Point out the good stuff, not the bad stuff in your book, I suggest, if you're keeping a meditation journal. So there's this connection between our conduct and our ability to concentrate. Okay. Lama Christie was a little harsh. She said, in fact, if we're not working on our own level of behavior, if we're not intentionally working on that with ourselves, then there's really no point in being in her class. It's what she said to people. And then she said, well, but don't quit class, right? Implying, work harder on your ethics, not quit class. And it's a little tricky because, I mean, all of us, I think, are amazingly conscientious, kind people. You know, it might be easier if it was like, oh, you know, I used to be the bully and I was mean to everybody. And now, wow, I see the error of my ways. I'm getting better. I can see how different I am. Right? You remember the story of Angulimala, right? His guru said, you kill a thousand people, string their fingers around your neck, and that's how you gain liberation. So he goes, okay, I'm on it. And he needed one finger left. And he comes across this guy walking down the road, and that's the next victim. And he's trying to sneak up on him. And the closer, like the hurrier he goes, the further away the victim is. And he's like, well, what's wrong with this picture? You know, he has every intention to kill the guy and chop off his finger and get liberated. And finally, I don't know what happens. He hollers. He says, what's up with this? How come I can't reach you? And it turns out it's Buddha, you know. And Buddha must have said something, you know, the result you're going to get from killing a thousand people and stringing their fingers around your neck is that you're going to be killed a bazillion times and your fingers are going to be strung around people's necks forever. Is that really the kind of liberation you want? And you know, the guy goes, and becomes a disciple and gets liberated in that lifetime because he changes himself so dramatically, so drastically, so quickly. So, you know, maybe if we were really awful, icky people, and then here we are, we could make faster progress. Maybe it's harder when we're already so kind. It's like, how can I be any nicer? It feels like that, doesn't it? Come on, feel free to admit it, because I know you're all amazing people. And there are just these little places where we can tweak things a little bit. And maybe there's just one that we need to find and tweak that one and your meditation practice will skyrocket. So that's what we need to do to plant our seeds to help us improve. And then in terms of the motivation, right, we've been using compassion as the motivation. There are people that are hurting that from our side, it doesn't appear that they're at least bit interested in figuring out the real causes for their pain. But we understand that the real causes of their pain is their karma, right? Not really. The real causes of their pain is my karma. So they really are waiting for me to help them and their pain, right? Oh, that's a little heavy. And the way we become the one that changes my karma to see their pain and so changes their pain is by gathering the goodness so that I can meditate deeply enough so that I can experience emptiness directly so that I can stop planting my seeds with ignorance so that even my best seeds in the world that I ever plant are still stained with the misperception. So does that make us motivated enough to park our mind on that one little sensation and stay there until when is she ever going to let me off this? I don't find it, right? Because it's like doing that is never going to make me stop their suffering. Let me get to the minute, right? My mind, let's get on with this. So Lama Christi pointed out, very likely we have had some experience that, you know, science calls it being in the zone or in the flow, you know, where just not suddenly so much, but you're in this space where things feel effortless and pleasurable and powerful and useful and you're just, it's like you finally got out, right? Your limited little you has somehow disappeared for the time being and it feels so amazing and then it doesn't last, of course. It's over and then it's so pleasurable we want more and then we tend to think that what we were doing at the time when it came on was the thing that made it came on and then of course we do that again and it doesn't come on, but we have the memory of what it felt like, how good it felt and how, you know, how different. We got this glimpse of some way that we could be and Lama Christi said that would not be a bad thing to bring to your meditation. The recognition that that past experience was similar to being in Samatha level meditation. The mind so focused on its object that all this agitating stuff about me and my world is, they call it shut down, it's not shut down, it's just that the mind is so disinterested in it that it doesn't matter whether it's happening or not and so for the moments of our meditation they aren't happening, but they could be. So that if we can remember what it was like to be in the zone or in the flow and how lovely that is, that can be what our meditation can be like if and when we can get our mind to cooperate with our meditator me that says park and stay like the puppy dog, sit, stay until I give you the release command and when we recognize that's what it takes to be able to get to that sensation of the zone, it's not exactly the same thing, but it's better than that, then maybe our mind will go, yeah, I like that and our me will go, yeah, yeah, I like that too, let's do it and it will help us in our meditative career progress, may or may not help in the moment on that day, but if we don't use it to help ourselves, right, we miss an opportunity to let it help if we have those seeds from having experienced it before. All right, so then another underlining part of our motivation is to recognize that we have this precious opportunity ripening out of our own refrigerator of seeds and we don't know how many of them we have left. We think, oh, I've been at this for so many years, I expect that they will continue until I reach my goal or drop dead trying and it's an assumption that allows us to get complacent. We don't know. It wouldn't necessarily take a bad car accident or having a stroke to lose the seeds. We could just experience something that makes us start to question, that makes us less interested, that makes us see that there are other things that come up during class time and, okay, that's all right, I can listen to the recording and then the recording comes out and we say, I'll download it later and then we forget and, oh my gosh, right, we lose our seeds and it just looks like life gets in the way, but it's our seeds quit ripening. It really does take some intentionality to keep ourselves on the path, which is partly why I spend so much time at the beginning and the end at setting our motivation and doing our dedication because I selfishly, I want the seeds for helping everybody have their motivation strong and their dedication strong. So it's easy at this level to say, well, I always have my intentions strong, so I don't need to set it before class and we don't even do our prayers anymore because, oh, I just have it in my mind, you know, and it's like, yeah, maybe you do, but I need mine stronger. Thank you very much. So thanks. But see, it's all intentional. You know, now from my side, I'm not saying you need this, but it's built into the beautiful system. So given the fact that it's our behavior off the cushion that creates the causes that are running the show of our progress in meditation, then we would want to be having some tool through which we can clear up the mistakes that we make and gather the goodness for the progress we want to make and rejoice in the goodness that we already have on a regular basis. So what does that remind you of? The seven preliminaries, right? We call forth, well, we do our refuge, et cetera, refuge bodhicitta. We call forth the holy being, we remind ourselves of their extraordinary good qualities in them, from them, right? Wrong. We admire them, we devote to them. We aspire to become like them. We feel gratitude. We make them an offering. The making the offering is gathering goodness. We confess our wrong deeds from all time, right? We go through our last day and pick out what we want to weed and we do our four powers. And then we do our rejoicing. And then we ask them to stay and ask them to teach so that we're opening ourselves up to receive. And then we dedicate right there, even before we've done our meditation. So we learn, it seems that we learned the best time to do our meditation is first thing in the morning when we get up. And then the first thing we do is our preliminaries. But then it's like, if we're using our preliminaries to improve our meditation practice, maybe we'd want to do our preliminaries again before we go to bed. Because who wants this five, six, eight, 10 hours of sleep to let the negativities that I did during the day continue to grow, waiting until the morning to purify them. It wouldn't hurt. So now you have to get off your phone, you have to read from the book, you have to do your coffee meditation, and you have to do your preliminaries. No, don't load yourself up like that. But it might be a wise idea, right? To somehow in your bedtime arrangement, you add some pieces of that to help our meditation career progress. Okay. So then in the reading for this class, Master Kamalashila is actually still talking about this pair of stillness and special vision, shinnei and lakton, or shamatha and vipashyana Sanskrit. And we understand that the stillness means that platform of meditative concentration where we can effortlessly park our mind on the object, free of dullness, free of agitation, so smoothly and effortlessly that it's both physically pleasurable and mentally pleasurable. And because of the pleasure of that state, the quality of that attention will stay that deep as we then use the still mind to do the analysis of the true nature of that virtuous object that we have our mind focused on. So we understand we need to reach that platform of stillness, platform of shamatha. And then from that platform or while on that platform, that's when we reach the special vision. And the question becomes, it takes analysis on the object to reach the special vision. And when is it that the lakton is happening? And some of the scripture says that that vision is pure analysis. And then other scripture, particularly as interpreted by the galukpas, say, yes, pure analysis leads to a conclusion that we then fix our mind on. So back to the stillness of the mind on this new aspect of the object. So a new object and the fixation on the conclusion of the pure analysis, meaning accurate, I guess, is what is the special vision. But then the debate goes a little bit further. It's like, is there a difference between reaching your clear aha about that holy lamas good qualities are not in them. In fact, they are not at all other than seeds ripening. And we park our mind on that aha. Is that the special vision that when we come out of it, we are so changed around the conveyor belt? No. Is it a higher vision than we've ever had before? Probably. But until we have that direct experience of that no self nature of whatever the object was, we don't have the special vision. But then is the special vision when we're in that absence? Wait, is special vision an appearance? Yes. So the special vision can't, we can't have it when we're having it. When we're in the direct perception, we can't say, I have the vision, because that's not it. So does it not actually, do we not actually have the special vision until we come out of that experience? You know, it seems to me, just tell me, right? Just tell me the punchline. And the punchline is, yes, we have to be at the shamatha level so that we can have this analysis that will take us to that level of fixation on an absence of something, and be able to penetrate that to the point of no even no awareness of it anymore. Right? The absence, we're totally immersed in the no self nature, nature of ourselves and all existing things beyond words beyond. Yeah. And then something stirs forth, long story, and out we come. And then we can't, we don't say, oh, well, we probably do say to ourselves, well, that was it. But they say a new ariya doesn't say to themselves, I just saw emptiness directly, because they know that they'll hear themselves say that and hear it wrongly. So they say they know they don't say that I find it hard to believe. But the point is, yes, we get to the special vision. But the question is, when do we actually get it? And again, we're so well trained. But it's a it's a good debate to debate with our own self. What are we thinking of this thing, the direct perception of emptiness, and the impact it has on our mind, right? We're thinking I'm thinking in some self existent way, in which case, I'm even thinking of it incorrectly. So I have to keep I get to keep chewing on it. What's you know, what's wrong with that explanation? So Ronnie, well, it implies that you're aware of it happening while you're in it. And that's not an absence, that's a presence. And so that's not it. Close, but not it. So that that, if the if the the analysis, even the pure analysis, is not necessarily the trigger for turning on that experience, that once we're done with it, makes it such that we now have that vision. What is the trigger? What is the trigger? Yeah, it's mental seeds, right? Of course, mental seeds. But what's the trigger for the mental seed that would be that? Right? It's, it's a hard question. We think, Oh, I should just know it. Surely, I've read that somewhere before, but it's really kind of slippery, actually. How do we ripen a seed for something we've never done before? If in order to plant the seed, we have to have seen ourselves share that thing with somebody else. Ah, I'm screwed. Right? I can't ever see emptiness directly because I can't ever show it to somebody. But I can try. Want to do it again? Every time we help each other see the no pen, so no self nature of the pen, we are helping each other plant the seeds that can ripen into that direct perception of the fact that there's no pen here other than the one I see, the one you see, etc. So we try, we try to bring beings experiences they've never had before, right? It doesn't have to have anything to do with emptiness and karma. If we've helped someone experience something new, then we have the seeds for experiencing something new. And that thought occurred to me once, and it was like this little light bulb goes off. And then I thought, well, what about powerful karmic objects? Were there powerful karmic objects in my life that I was able to help them have an experience they never had before? And you know who the powerful karmic objects are in our lives, okay? Mom and Dad. I thought about it. It's like, I was my mom and dad's first daughter. Wow. Wow. Like, that's almost enough, right? And I, you know, when I did this, and like, we traveled together, we went someplace that they never would have gone on their own. And it's like, whoa, I helped them travel to that new place. We've all helped people that people have new experiences. Technically, we're doing it all the time, right? Have you had this class before? No. Have I seen you before? No, not like right now. Thank you very much. Like if we could really get our mind to be thinking along these kinds of lines, we'd recognize the extraordinary goodness that we have. That if we could harness that, and do our rejoicing to feed those seeds, whoa, things, things happen. Okay, so let's take our break. Okay, I'll be back. So Master Kamalashila says, the reason we can't just sit down on our cushion and go into the direct perception of emptiness is because our mind is obstacled by mental afflictions. If our mind did not have mental affliction, obstacles, our mind would be nirvana, peace. It's sort of a funny thing to say, because to be nirvana, to be in nirvana means all my mental afflictions and seeds for more are ceased. And so my mind isn't ceased, but now my mind has peace of mind because it's no longer mistaken. And it's like as long as we are mistaken, we're not in nirvana. As soon as we're no longer mistaken, uh, that's not quite right. As soon as we're no longer perceiving things mistakenly, we are, suddenly in nirvana doesn't work. And in Diamond Cutter Sutra, Master Kamalashila, he made up a word, he called it nirvanicized. We are nirvanicized once we no longer have those mental affliction obstacles. But he says, but those mental affliction obstacles, they have a cause too. So there's a root cause of all the mental afflictions, which we know what it is. Our ignorance, we call it ignorance, but it doesn't mean there are some things we don't know about. It means our misperception of everything in every moment. And that misperception is a specific misperception, which is that the me and the other and the whatever's going on between all have their own identities, qualities, functions. They are the thing that's doing what I'm experiencing it doing.So then the identity and the function is in it. Whether we're talking about the car or the spouse, right? Or the friend or the yelling boss or the me or the me feeling I'm having any, any, right? Every moment of experience, we're misperceiving as self other interaction between all with their own function. And that's such a mistake that it causes us to behave in ways that perpetuates it. And that perpetuates our belief that when there's something unpleasant, I need to react in a way to avoid it. And when there's something pleasant, I get to react in a way to get more of it. And because underlying that is the mistake of where the pleasure or displeasure comes from, what we do to get or avoid as it replants the seeds in our mind, those seeds are colored with the belief that that thing did that to me. And that perpetuates the misunderstanding that is the root of the mental afflictions that are the obstacles to reaching the stillness from which we can purely analyze, from which we can reach the vision of the true nature, the absent nature of whatever our object is. He calls it our raw ignorance, thinking that there are things in a me that are actual things that function. And in your reading, he starts out this discussion by saying, look, nothing ever begins. Nothing ever happens. Nothing ever functions as a thing. So he doesn't say function doesn't happen. Function happens in some other way than what our raw ignorance makes us know. He says, and due to this mistake that we are making, this root mistake, we misperceive and due to that misperception, we act in a way that we think will bring us the result we want, but can't, because we've misperceived the whole situation. So our action will be misperceived as well. So he lists these six steps. We're familiar with the six steps. This is like another way of looking at Lord Maitreya's six steps. And he does reference Lord Maitreya's six steps, but he calls it, I have to find it, we experience something and believe that something has happened, that something has functioned. And then from the mistake that we are making, grow ideas and concepts, right? How we identify what just happened is colored by the, they did that to me, or that functioned from it. And because of that, we're bringing to mind those things incorrectly. And because we're bringing those things to our mind incorrectly, we have attachment to their self nature, attaching a self nature to things creates a certain viewpoint in our mind that we think is correct, that actually is not correct. And that view causes our mentally afflicted mind. And that mentally afflicted mind then chooses a behavior born of the mental affliction, mistakenly thinking that that behavior will solve the problem in this next moment. And we learned Lord Maitreya's six steps. And these six are not saying, they're saying, they're saying it differently, but they're describing the same process. Do you remember Lord Maitreya's six steps? We're born with the seeds from having seen things and self and other as having their own natures, identities, qualities function in them from them. Those seeds ripen into perceiving subjects and objects with their own natures. We have the seeds for it, then they are opening. Because of those self-existent me, self-existent other, some of those self-existent things are attractive and some are not attractive.And because of the attraction or the repulsion, I like, want, or dislike, don't want. And because of the I like, want, or dislike, don't want, I act to get or to avoid. Thinking what I do in the moment will bring what comes next. And the sixth step is ansamsara turns. Right? We plant the seed in our action. The sixth step is that is perpetuating that wheel. All of it's perpetuating the wheel, of course. And so when we were learning about those six steps, we can work to break the cycle anywhere along the six, but to actually put a cog in the wheel requires catching ourselves in the perception of the object or experience and then the instant of the in it from it and rejecting that, denying that. We learned it. See the gaccha and deny it, reject it, pull it away. The thing that exists independent of our projection is impossible. So whatever I'm experiencing has to be my projection. Because to pull away the gaccha doesn't make the yelling boss just poof, does it? It should help us act differently towards that yelling boss. Even as our hurt feeling, wanting to yell back is still happening in the face of the yelling boss, when we recognize, whoa, the one that I believe is there, independent of my seeds ripening is not there. This one is my seeds ripening. All right. You know, burn it off. How can I help? That's the last thing I want to say. But wisdom will help me try to be kind in the face of that unpleasantness. Now, not when your life is being threatened, not when you're trapped, right? Don't go there. Although technically, but the point isn't, oh, it's okay to let yourself be abused. Not at all. Recognizing why it's all happening and reacting differently than our automatic reaction is the power that we have in the moment to change things. It will change things. So the difficulty is that these six steps, either way you describe them, they happen so fast that we can't really say, okay, I'm at this point, I'll just drive the cog into the wheel and the whole thing will stop right now. Because we're already down here at the core of our core before we recognize, oops, I saw this whole thing wrongly. So we're trying to learn to increase our level of awareness of our cushion such that we can be more keenly alert to the patterns ripening and not have to wait until two hours after the event is done before we think, oh, that was all seeds ripening, right? I could have reacted differently. To do that is a great thing. And we're wanting to train ourselves to be able to turn that on in the midst of either a pleasant experience or an unpleasant experience and then find ourselves able to turn it on even at the level of something arising and I feel the attraction to it or something arising and I feel the repulsion from it before it's even clearly defined. Can we recognize, whoa, there's the pattern happening and turn that into seeds ripening, what do I do with it? So what do we do with it? When we've got something arising that seems attractive, we're going to want to do something to get it, get more of it, right? In order to perpetuate it even at that subtle level, we'd want to somehow turn our minds into sharing it, which is the opposite of what we do. Something's pleasurable, we go towards it, we grab it rather than go towards it and push it away to somebody else. But our wisdom would do that. And then when something's unpleasant, right? We're like, even before we actually act, we have this mind state. And then when we're strong enough in our practice, when we recognize that we like bump on a log thing and check out, am I safe enough to actually get to burn this off? In which case I don't need to run from it. I can engage, I can do something kind instead. If in that pause, it's like, no, this is dangerous. Run away fast. That's fine. But our human tendency is hurt it before it can hurt me. And that's what we're wanting to avoid like the plague. So again, what does all that have to do with meditation? The obstacles of our root ignorance are actually the obstacles to being able to sit down on our cushion and put our minds right into the direct perception of emptying. If we didn't have those obstacles, we would do that. And why do we still have obstacles when we heard about the pun thing so many years ago, and we've been working with it, and I'm still seeing it as a pen. Master Shanti Davis says, because you have doubt. Remember, we did that already. We have doubts. What kind of doubts? Yeah, my head says, this thing's only a pen because of my past seeds of giving pens to others. But my heart says, pen, my pen, leave my pen alone. So I'm sure to have my pen when I need it, right? All that kind of stuff going on. And Master Kamala Sheila says, if we let ourselves still have doubts, those doubts block us from being able to remove them or at work with the mental afflictions that are perpetuating our root ignorance. So the only doubts that are left are the ones that we haven't worked with enough to show ourselves the truth of what the doubt was resisting. So we have doubts because there are some things that we don't want to prove to ourselves are true. And usually it's because the implication is some kind of change that we're afraid of somehow, or don't really want to do. And so we let the doubt stay. Now, you know, there are some of the teachings that are still on the shelves. He's not saying take every one of those and get it fixed before you can see emptiness directly. But the doubt factor of, you know, how unpleasant does this situation have to be before our logic that keeps saying, no, this is my seeds, my seeds, my seeds, finally crosses over to everything else is my seeds, but not this one. Right? This one has to be coming from them. That's the indicator of where our doubt still lies. And I don't know, you know, I hope you never experience an experience when you find that level of doubt, but can we in our contemplations, right? In our imaginings, flirt with what would it take for me to not be able to take responsibility for the seeds ripening? How bad would it have to be? Like, I hear myself saying this because it isn't really me. It's like, whoa, I'm getting a glimpse and it's scary. So we're trying to get to the obstacle that prevents us from clearing the obstacle of our root ignorance. There's something blocking us from doing that, or we just would have done it already is his point. So maybe you have, and maybe I'm the last one, which case keep helping me. So there's another meditation that we need to do. Actually, there's two of them. I think I have time. We'll do them together. I'll run them one after the other. So this first one is about getting our motivation strong enough, like gathering the goodness for our motivation to get strong enough. And it's going to talk about bringing our field of merit with us in our meditation. And you'll see it in the reading. So in this tradition, when you have your holy being in front of you, that holy being represents all holy beings. So you can either see them all or just wrap them all into the one you have. And then when you're sitting there in front of them, you bring with you powerful karmic objects, people you love, people you like, people you know, people you've seen, meaning any being, everybody behind you. And then between you and the holy being are anybody who qualifies as enemy or dangerous or ones you don't like. So in this particular guidance, Lama Christi used as the beings that we bring with us for this effort in meditation, our mother and our father. So I'm giving this preamble because in that historical culture, mother, father, you know, we're seen as these powerful beings because they give us life. And so we owe them, we honor them, right? You keep them with you and you take care of them until you die. And you know, probably even back then, maybe you didn't like them so much, but you loved them dearly and you kept them close. And then in my world, I've shared this meditation with people and afterwards they say, you know, my mom and dad are not the ones I love most in the world. Okay, fine. For this meditation, the ones you use is the woman who has helped you the most, loved you the most in your world, whoever that is. And the man who has loved you the most and you've looked up to and they've helped you and cared for you, right? If it's your mom and dad, that's great. But I'm going to call him mom and dad, but you are welcome to use Aunt Mary, you know, my first grade teacher, use whoever motivates you because of what they've done for us. Got it? Okay. All right. 

Meditation - Bringing others into our meditation, teaching them, and seeing ourselves change

[1:29:05]

That said, set your body. Get it parked. Push down those sits bones, feel the energy rise up as a result.

Scan down the outside, positioning things as you like, relaxing things as your scan goes down.

Come back up the inside, giving your mind that lift.

The body locks in comfortably, nicely, and your mind comes to that place at your nostrils that we call breath going out, breath coming in.

Fine tuning your focus. Brightening your clarity. Turning on your eager fascination. 

Now shift your object of focus from that spot, your breath, to in your mind's eye, you are sitting in this most exquisite, beautiful, safe, amazing place.

Your special meditation place.

And then become aware that sitting at your left side is this extraordinary woman who helped you in this life. 

You're so grateful to her. You love her so much. You take her hand. 

You want to help her. Worldly ways and ultimate ways. 

She smiles at you with this expression of hopefulness. 

And then you see on your right is that man who helped you so much, who is always there for you.

Was able to guide you, help you feel safe.

Feel your love for him. 

And you take his hand.

Feel your wish to help him too. Worldly ways and ultimate ways. 

And see him smile with this expression of hopefulness. 

Then behind you are those closest to you, emotionally closest.

And behind them a little less close. 

Recognize some specific people, and then allow that vision to expand to be any being who's ever seen you, any being you've ever seen. 

All gathered there.

And feel the feeling of wanting to help them all, because of what we know about where pain comes from, and how it can be stopped forever. 

Then you recall your own precious holy angel guide there before all of you, facing you. 

Their love, their compassion, their wisdom shining into you. 

And so you use your mental telepathy with all of these beings. And you teach them what you know about emptiness. 

You describe the pen to them. 

You describe how it reveals those four explanations for why things happen the way they do, that we call the four laws of karma. 

You might even hear one ask, Oh, but what about the bad seeds I already have? What do I do with those? And you teach them the four powers. 

This session could go on for a long, long time as you guide them and help them come to understand the mistake they are making in their efforts to get happy. 

And in doing so, we know that we are changing our own seeds to see them as suffering being, so that we can actually see them change. 

And then in the end, recognize that you look down at your own hands and you see them shining in light.

And look at your legs and whatever part of your body you can see. It's all radiant, radiant love, radiant wisdom. 

And you recognize that by teaching all those others, guiding them, you yourself changed. 

You yourself became a being made of love, made of compassion, made of wisdom. 

And as this new you looks out into your world, you see that there are some beings there who are not seeing themselves as these holy angels that you now see them as. 

And they come to you and they ask you to teach them, to guide them. And you know you already have. And so you know you can now. And you know that they will use what you teach to come to see themselves as holy angels because you already see that. 

And so you say to them, sit down with me, let's meditate. 

And you guide them through settling their body still. 

And you guide them through focusing on their breath, to bring on their focus, their clarity, their intensity. 

And then you say to them, bring to mind some object that you are really, really attached to. Some object that if someone took it from you, you would be really upset. 

Now focus on that object. 

And you, the angel, recall how your ignorance perceived that object that made the attachment be so strong. I'm using my mother's engagement ring. I'm so attached to it because it represents her. It's important to me, my connection to her comes through that ring. 

If someone were to take it, they would take my connection, and so I need to keep it. I need to protect it. I need to mistrust anyone who might handle it or come across it. 

This is all my wrong view, my old wrong view. 

Now analyze that view.

This object, my mother's engagement ring. If it were sitting on the table and my neighbor comes by, would they see Sarahni’s mother's engagement ring? Not if I hadn't told them. 

But my old mind says, yeah, but still, it is that to me. 

Yeah.

Does losing it mean I will forget my mother? No, of course not. 

There are many things that were hers that I don't have anymore and I still remember her. 

My attraction to the ring, my willingness to potentially hurt someone to protect it, to keep it… It's based on my misunderstanding. 

My behavior choice comes from that emotional attachment, not from the object itself. 

With your own object, keep deconstructing the object's identity, the object's function, and the attraction that we have because of its function, to show how it's all a mistaken understanding. 

If the ring is the source of my feeling good about fond memories of my mother, then anyone who puts on the ring would have fond memories of my mother. That does not happen. It's not in the ring. 

This root mistake of believing things' identities and their functions are in them, it's not intellectual. 

It's experiential. It's already happened by the time we recognize it. 

We were born with the seeds to believe in the selfness of things, the selfness of self. 

And that leads to selfishness that makes us protect and grasp.

As our intellectual awareness of seeds ripening, revealing the empty nature, our disbelief in those objects, those functions, starts to grow. 

The things that we were so sure were so tangible, so reliable, so foundational, we're not so sure about anymore. 

As we keep letting go of those things and others' identities in them, it begins to feel like we are the only existing thing. 

But that is impossible as well. 

As we let go and let go… we can meet the opposite of that root ignorance.

The wisdom.

Coming to rest in that all potentiality of all existence, including self. 

And what stirs us forth from that is love… the outpouring of this truth to share with all those beings of your appearing world.

Sharing with them the steps of the path… to reaching this wisdom that is stirred forth by love… and so perpetuated. 

And so now recognize that that precious holy being is still there with you, inspiring you and blessing you. 

Recall your motivation to become the one who can help that other in that deep and ultimate way. 

And recognize the extraordinary goodness that we've just done, and be pleased with yourself. Think of this goodness like a beautiful glowing gemstone that you can hold in your hands. Look to your precious being. Feel your gratitude, your reliance upon them, and 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 love and kindness, filled with wisdom. And may it be so. All right. Nice job. You were all so still. Fabulous. 

All right, welcome back. We are Bok Jinpa Course 3, class 4 on February 4th, 2026. 

[Usual opening]

So Master Kamalashila is inspiring us to want to reach stillness so that our exploration of dependent origination and emptiness can go deeper, so that at some point we can trigger the direct experience of ultimate reality with a mind imbued with bodhicitta, so that we really can help others in that deep and ultimate way. Of course, not that trying to help others in deep and ultimate ways isn't useful, of course, it is. So in order to reach stillness, we need to be able to put our mental focus onto the object of our choice and keep it there for as long as we determined to keep it there before we got there. Then when we have that quality of focus, we use that same quality of focus turned onto the investigation of the true nature of whatever our object of focus is, when we're ready to turn it to that. We're learning that process. I hope that's not unfamiliar. 

Meditation - where is the line that divides inside of you and outside of you?

[9:13]

So let's sit together and see how we do. 

So set your body, you know how. Whatever your method, go through the sequence the same every single time. Don't cut it short. 

When you get that body parked, commit to it staying still. Our mind won't stay still if with every itch and every discomfort we wiggle and move. It takes movement of the mind to make that happen. Determine ‘sit, stay’, body. 

Once you have it there, bring your focus of attention to that point at the tip of your nostrils. And your object of focus is the air where it leaves the body and the air as it flows back in at that location. 

You mentally look around until you find it. 

Then park that focus there. 

Check your clarity.

And then turn on your intensity, a fascination, a keen interest in those sensations at that location.

Breath leaving, breath returning. 

Now keep your focus on that location, those sensations. And you, the meditator, ask yourself, how much of my mind is on that object? 

What other things are being perceived as I focus at that location? Anything else? 

Whatever you find, let it go, focus more intently on just that one object - sensation of air out, sensation of air in. 

As you experience that, notice whether your focus of attention is losing interest or whether it's gaining interest. 

As we gain interest, the experience encompasses more and more of our mind's field of experience. 

Check again - on or off the object, quality of the clarity, quality of the intensity. Make your adjustment.

Sink into those sensations even more deeply. 

And then without losing your focus, your meditator-me will do some exploration. I will ask you questions. Don't answer with complete mental word sentences. Just explore and get a sense. 

So on that place where the air shifts from being outside to being inside and vice versa, at what point does that air become a part of you? 

There's a line that divides outside of you and inside of you. Can you find it? 

Is it the air that changes, that makes it be inside versus outside? 

Check your focus, your clarity, your intensity, enjoying the exploration of those sensations. 

We can't find a discrete line between outside and inside, can we? 

And yet, clearly, the air goes out, the air comes in. 

All of it is mental images. Awarenesses happening.

Mental image ‘exhale air out’, that sensation.

Mental image, this sensation, air in. 

Watch what mental image arises when I say ‘outside of you’... ‘Inside of you’... ‘The you that has an inside and an outside’. 

Is there a line where these three mental images meet? 

Do they happen sequentially... or simultaneously? 

Now check again - are you still focused at that location, those sensations? 

What's the quality of your clarity? Quality of fascination? Make your adjustments.

Focusing on that object, understanding mental images, constantly shape-shifting, and nothing but. 

We'll stay two more minutes. 

Check.

Nice. Now release that object of focus, but don't come out, don't open your eyes yet. Make a mental note - “I was really on my object 50% of the time, I think”, or 30%, or 95%, you decide. “My clarity was pretty bright. My intensity waxed and waned.” You make a note.

And then dedicate to reaching deeper levels for the benefit of that other.

And then bring your awareness to your body in your room and you in this class. 

Wiggle and shift a little, and then when you're ready, open your eyes, take a stretch. 

Nice job. Everybody was rock still, everybody that I saw anyway.

[30:21]

So we've been… Master Kamalashila has been reinforcing the fact that we need a really strong goal in mind, a strong motivation to be able to get these like untamed puppy dog body, and untamed puppy dog mind, to cooperate with this untamed me that suddenly decides “I want to take charge and I want to be able to make this kind of progress”. If we don't have a powerful goal in mind when we hit snags and obstacles, we're going to give up. When we have a strong goal and we keep reinforcing that goal, even when we have struggles and obstacles, our goal helps pull us back or keep us going. And then it's not just that goal setting it five minutes before we sit on our meditation cushion, we're wanting to grow our goal in mind to be something that we're getting obsessed about so that we're thinking about it all the time off our cushion, that helps us keep it in mind on our cushion. And we had those options - our compassion for someone else's suffering, we bring that to the party; our own suffering, we bring that to the party; our renunciation. All of those different tools that we have for keeping us motivated. And what we are understanding is that all of that suffering is caused by our misunderstanding of where happiness comes from. And that our deepest goal then is to be able to cut through that misunderstanding because in doing so, that's where we actually step onto the conveyor belt of the end of all suffering for everyone. And it's not that we're not making progress until that happens, we are. And that event that steps us onto the conveyor belt is such a major shift in our progress, that we set it as one of our first major goals. And we think about it, and we take classes about it, and we read about it, and we cogitate about it, and we question ourselves about it, and we question our dharma friends about it, and we try to figure it out. And until we experience it directly, we don't have it right. Even with the perfect analytical debate coming to the conclusion, if it's a conclusion we're holding in our appearing nature mind, it's not it, it's not ultimate. Close, close, close, close, of course, but not it. 

So Lamas say, fantasize about karma and emptiness. Fantasize about getting it really accurate. Fantasize about being able to inspire others to learn about it. Fantasize about having inspired yourself to live according to it, whether you've actually proven it to yourself or not. Just “I’m going to fantasize about living that way” and see what happens. Fantasy doesn't at first become reality, but it will. It'll help us be willing to behave a little differently in a worldly circumstance if we've imagined behaving that different way in that certain circumstance again and again and again. We can imagine, here's the boss yelling at me again, what would happen if I did this? And then you just imagine, how did they react? Oh, wow, that one didn't work, they got madder. What might they [be] like if I react this way? And you try them on for size in your own imagination. It can be a really powerful tool in preparation for the actual event. Technically, if we get our imagining going well, and we can be burning off the boss yelling, and planting the seeds for responding with wisdom in our imagination, you might surprise yourself. Number one, you actually do that next time they yell, or number two, you keep waiting for them to yell at you and they just never do. That can happen too - the seeds can shift simply by doing this repeated imagining of burning it off and reacting well. The fun of a meditation practice. 

Physical and mental isolation

Last class, we talked a little bit about reaching that thing called isolation. And then curiously, we were talking about it in the ACI groups as well - in Master Shantideva's meditation chapter, he was teaching us about reaching isolation. And there is something to be said for the physical isolation of taking yourself into a deep solo retreat from time to time so that you are in a space where you're in a routine that's the same every day for the days you're going to be in so there's less distraction by “what do I do next? Who's needing me for what?” to get into this undistracted state. Just we're undistracted worldly, we still have lots of distractions in retreat, don't get me wrong. But we can take ourselves into a physical isolation for a period of time in order to work more deeply with our own mind habits in our meditation work and all the things that we do in retreat. And then we come back out and we say, ‘now I'm out of isolation’ because we're back out in our worldly life. And Lamas say, yes, you're back out in worldly life, but your sense of isolation does not have to go away. Because the isolation really wasn't about removing yourself from your worldly life, it was about learning how to isolate ourselves from the old habits of the old world view that reacted to things in the way everybody reacts, the way we're taught as effective human being. It's a kind of physical mental isolation to be willing to swim upstream in the face of your needs, your worldly needs, to decide, “I'm not going to yell back. I'm not going to lie to wiggle out of this. Everybody expects me to, and I'm not going to do it.” And you're on your own. Nobody's going to pat you on the back for singing the praises of the other person that's applied for the job promotion that you want so badly and you go and promote the other person. Everybody's going to say, what are you nuts, you're not going to get the job doing that. And you just go, “okay”, right? Karmic suicide, Geshehla says. It looks like karmic suicide, but it's not, right? It's ignorance suicide. But it's we’ll be swimming upstream. You know, unless you live in a Dharma center with a bunch of Dharma people, but even then, sometimes, right? So isolation means isolating ourselves from our habitual reaction to our habitual world, in the habitual ‘what about me’ mode. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with us - we are all extraordinary people because here we are. So physical isolation also means this kind of living differently, no matter what others think. 

And then there's mental isolation, there is also the mental isolation that we do when we go into retreat. And then similarly, it takes mental isolation to be able to hold our physical isolation when we're out in our worldly life. Because the mental isolation is this refusal to go along with the mindseeds that are ripening “them in them” and “me in me” and “they're doing that to me”, to mentally refuse to agree with that or to go ahead with it. You can see how those two are tied together. Without the mental isolation, we won't be able to do the physical isolation of acting differently and the actual physical isolation of going into retreat, from time to time. And giving ourselves the space to explore the true natures of things increases the power of our ability to hold both our mental isolation and our physical isolation when we're out in our worldly life again. And it's a cycle. We go into retreat for a little while, we come back out, wait for a while, we go back in for a while. It really is a beautiful pattern in life once we can manage to ripen those seeds for our own life supports that. And you would think that once you have that pattern developed, it would stay forever, and guess what? It doesn't. It takes effort to keep it going. But it really is beneficial to learn the skill of solitary retreat. And they don't have to be three years, right? They don't even have to be a month, but build up to at least two weeks. And then hopefully you like it so much that pretty soon it's three weeks, and pretty soon it's four weeks, and pretty soon is five or six weeks because you see so much progress made, not just on yourself, but on your whole world. And it's difficult because it seems like, oh, you're just escaping your world. Before three-year retreat I was talking with a friend in the dharma who I really, really admire and they kept saying, you're just escaping life for three years. And I kept saying, no, I can do more for my world from retreat than I can do in my worldly body. And they kept saying, no, you can't. And I kept saying, yes, I can, watch me, see you. And, I don't know, but that was their perspective, a good practitioner. And their seeds was, no, I engage in the world as a bodhisattva, I don't leave the world. For me, I can engage in the world deeper from within my mind because my mind is not trapped here. If it was, I would have to take it out to interact with other people, but it's not. But that's a personal thing. When we get that aha about retreat, then it isn't such a struggle to find ways to be able to find life circumstances where we can do retreat. It's not about willpower, it's not about manipulating everybody. It's about planting the seeds, right? And then it works out. Not necessarily easily, right, Nancy, but it works out. And it helps. 

Okay, so we are also learning that this experience of ultimate reality directly will, like any other experience, be a ripening result of some past thing that we perceived ourselves thinking, saying, doing towards others, right? And if it's the most impactful thing, positively impactful thing that can happen to us, then wouldn't it have to be the ripening of some extraordinary powerful goodness or kindness? And it's not so much that we have to find one thing to do that's most powerful; it's that we accumulate a lot of goodness done, colored by the mind that wants to achieve that goal, that gathers the goodness that will push us in this direction to where at some point, those seeds burst forth as CHU CHOK pot-on-stove experience, followed hot on its heels by nothing has any nature of its own, other than that experience, and then coming out of that and having the bodhicitta, I hope, and then the four Arya truths. So it will be a ripening of goodness. For that kind of goodness to ripen, we also know we have negative karmas that are decreasing the powers of our goodness so we want to clean out our negative seeds and keep adding to our positive seeds, directed towards having that experience of ultimate reality so that it can ripen, so that it will ripen. 

The importance of a Lama

And in order to do all of that, we need to know how to do it. And so for most of us, we weren't born knowing how to do it. And we weren't born into a culture that taught us how to do it when we were six years old, mine didn't, maybe you guys did. I had to find somebody to teach me and help me and answer my questions and inspire me. And so I saw at some point that I needed a teacher, I wanted a teacher. And my thinking was I need a teacher because I need somebody who knows, who's done it before, who's ahead of me on the path, right, so that they can teach me. And then comes that subject about the Lama. So it's one thing to have a teacher - I had teachers that taught me to read, I had teachers that taught me medicine, I had teachers that taught me acupuncture. Great people that I really, really admired. And I had teachers, my parents, and they all taught me how to be an apparently more effective human in a human world within which I continue to perpetuate obvious suffering, suffering of change, and pervasive suffering. So, you know, wonderful, amazing influences in my life, but not taking me to the ultimate. 

So then comes this idea of the Lama. And now in this tradition by ‘Lama’, we mean that one that we see as really superior to us, not just a human who knows more, but someone who has those realizations, someone who's maybe even already totally omniscient but showing themselves as an ordinary human so they don't freak us out with their shining light, right? Our view of them is somehow more extraordinary even than our most powerful, important worldly teachers. And they say, these beings, the reason we need Lamas is because they are our garden of virtue. Our garden of virtue meaning… well, what does a garden of virtue mean? Like they are the goodness that we're trying to grow in ourselves. And to step into a garden of virtue, wouldn't it mean that if there's any fruit, ripe fruit, feel free to pluck it, feel free to enjoy the garden, step into that garden of virtue and let yourself enjoy it. Like in one sense, it is saying how pleasurable it is, how safe it is, to have this relationship with a Lama. And it's like, really, safe and pleasurable? It's like, whoa, you know, it rocks the boat. But in the long run, we don't have anybody who's more safe, more reliable, more pleasurable than this being that we call our Lama. That Lama loves us unconditionally, and there isn't any human being that's capable of that. The one who loves you the most, if they are human, their misperception makes it such that there will always be some level of self advantage in their love for us. Not their fault, ignorance’s fault. But our Lamas, they love us unconditionally. They love us because they perceive our empty nature and so they perceive that all of our suffering is a big mistake. And they see that there is a me that's already free because they perceive past, present, future at the same time and so their love, their compassion spontaneously emanates as anything this one needs. Do I see it like that? No. But can I know it to be that? Hopefully, right? As we're growing our understanding, that's the relationship that we are wanting to develop with this holy being we call our Lama. But why? Is it just because they know what we need to give up and take up? Is it just because they've done it before? Is it because they've pledged that if we ask, they'll teach? What is it really that makes the power of the Lama? And it's the fact that their relationship with us is the only relationship that will take us out of samsara. Will help… will make… not make/help… empower us to stop perpetuating samsara. No other relationship but our Lama can do that, can be the source of that. And it's something to really cook and logic and figure out why that is true. Once we figure it out for our own personal Lama, then of course, we still understand that that doesn't make it true for everybody else who knows that person, or who even considers that person their Lama. Everybody gets to figure it out themselves. And don't impose your Lama on somebody else. If you happen to have a similar one, hooray, but recognize you're all still perceiving them in a way unique to each of us. So really the power of a Lama is the fact that they are the most powerful karmic object for us because they are the karmic object that we interact with, designed to empower us to stop perpetuating samsara. And that's really the only reason that they are there for us. And it's the underlying reason we take a Lama like, even I suppose, if we don't really know that, if we have the seeds to be attracted to this tradition that, you know, in the olden days, when the British first met the Tibetans, they called the Tibetan religion Lamaism. Because everybody was Lama this, Lama that, Lama this, Lama that, you know, and the British were just seeing this one admiring that one, they all look the same. And so they, in a way, really disrespected because it's like, “come on, that's just another human just like anybody else, God can't show up like that.” So it's interesting, finally, it got cleared up, it's not Lamaism at all, it's Buddhism. Like Buddha, Buddha is the Lama. 

So why is it that we need such a powerful karmic object to move us along the path? Is there anything really that they even do that makes us change? Like, no, because if they could make us change, boom, they'd have done it a long time ago. Like the poor Lamas, they're like, “come on, Sarahni, we've been at this for lifetimes, would you just get on with it?” And I'm, you know, struggling and whining and I'm so tired. They're just going [hand to head], they're so infinitely patient. All they want for us to do is use them. It sounds awful, doesn't it? They want us to use them to purify and make merit. And how do we do that? 

Oh, it's time for a break. Good. Let me gather my thoughts before I answer ‘How do we do that?’

Are we back?

Our relationship with our Lama

So Lama Christie reminds us that if we have a Lama, or we have the wish to find our Lama, those are ripening results of past goodness seeds that has something to do with the power of a teacher. And so it's karmically driven by our own mind, our own power. And then for that person who we're calling Lama to have taught us that this life is suffering, and that suffering has causes, and if you stop the causes the suffering will stop, and that there's a way to stop those causes, stop making them, all of that that we hear them teach us is coming from our mind as well, right? Which doesn't make them not real, and does not make it such that we are just making it up, like our imagination. And it is such that it is our goodness creating them, and recreating them, and recreating them, right? To keep them in our lives, to keep us on our path. 

Then the Lamas said, the karma to perceive someone as having these qualities, and the karma to hear that they can teach me how to stop samsara, those are different seeds, but they're linked, they're connected in a way, in that both of them will move us along this path to richening our relationship with this being such that we interact with them in a way that moves us along the path. 

Lamas gave this example: We can read those amazing texts that Geshehla and his translator team are just cranking them out so exquisitely, you know, hard, hard work, but they're coming to fruition now. And we open and we read the words of Holy Nagarjuna and Rendawa and Je Tsongkapa, and it's like, wow, they are so amazing, but technically, whose mind are the words on those pages coming from as we read them? It's weird, right, to think the page we're on is the page that's ripening. We can't see the other pages until we go to them. There's nothing on those other pages until we turn the page. And our mind says, “no, no, don't be silly, it's all printed”, but we don't have any way of confirming whether it is or whether it isn't because we have to look to see. So as we read Je Tsongkapa's words, it's coming out of our own mind. Like, how can that be? How can it not be? And in the same way, our Holy Lama is coming out of our own mind. “Well, then what do I need a Lama for?” Does that wisdom ripen out of me without them? It's so slippery. Why do my seeds ripen a Lama outside of me before they ripen the seeds ‘me with those qualities’? Wouldn’t you think me would come first and then I'd see them - me pure being, now I see a pure being? But somehow it's - I see a pure being and I think, “Oh, I'm not like them”. And I'm not, but I created them so I've got to have some seeds in there that are at least that good because they are my highest karmas ripening, aren't they? If they're the most powerful karmic object, the only one that can help me stop perpetuating samsara, they've got to be the highest karmic object in my world. 

So now their job is to be that powerful karmic object for me. They can't make me do it. They're just there, available. However I use them is up to me. How much can I surrender? Lama Christie always uses the word ‘surrender’. How much can I surrender to them and just give myself over to the wisdom of their guidance, give myself over to their love. If we lived with that person, like Geshehla did Khen Rinpoche, you know, everything was for Rinpoche and what Rinpoche told him to do. It would be hard, wouldn't it? As a modern human, we're taught growing up to be effective, make choices, right? We know how to be effective human beings. And then to, when we're in our twenties, go and throw ourselves at the feet of somebody who doesn't hardly even speak English yet, and see them in this way that made him fight against his human inclinations because of this higher vision that he had already, at that age. And we don't all have that opportunity to go and live with a great master like that. We could see how powerful and swift it would be, what a struggle it would be. And all of those struggles would be purifications and opportunities to make merit and it would be happening almost moment by moment in our day. 

Most of us have a relationship with this holy being and they live far away and we only get to see them a couple of times a year. And when we do, there's a bazillion other people only getting to see them that time and so we don't really even still get to interact with them personally, but at least we're close by and we get to maybe make them some tea or something. And then for some also, that holy being, whether we were close or not so close, they've already left their physical body and we don't even have access to them. Actually, I don't have access to one, and I don't know whether she's still in a body or not. But we just lose access and then it's, I don't know, is it easier or harder? Is it easier or harder to serve a holy Lama that's distant? You know, we hold them in our minds, we hold them in our hearts, we can offer to them, but we can fool ourselves, right? Because we don't have their apparent reactions to what we're doing right there in tangible form. Maybe we have a keen sense of them in our heart and a keen sense of when I've done something, she goes, “what was that about?” And I catch it and I change, but also I could miss that and not recognize it until three days later. So we can have an effective Lama relationship from afar, we can have an effective Lama relationship close by. We can have an ineffective Lama relationship close by because we don't actually use them as our powerful karmic object and we take them for granted and we're not available to them, and etc. Or… what was the other one? We can have a close relationship where we do use them, and we can have the close relationship when they're far away and can still get benefit. 

How it works out is going to be what? Ripening results of our own seeds. And so how do we build whichever version we can benefit from the best - whatever circumstance we find ourselves in, we train ourselves to fine tune it and still use our Lama as our powerful karmic object. Making offerings to them, following what they teach us to do, asking for guidance. Our Lamas aren't stuck inside their bodies like maybe we feel we are stuck inside our body. Are they in your heart at the same time that they live in whatever city they live in? And are those two different Lamas or are they the same? Don't we have access to the one that's in our heart 24/7? “Yeah, but what they say to me, I'm just making up.” What anybody says to you, you're just making up. It's coming out of your own mind in the same way. We gain our confidence that the answer we get when we ask the Lama in our heart, “what should I do in this situation?” that when we get the guidance, we train ourselves, it's like, was that my ego or was that my Lama? And that's part of the practice is learning how to do that. We will make mistakes and we will not make mistakes. And we'll be able to tell the difference as we work with it. Of course, though, the most clear understanding is if that voice tells us to do something that our ego-me says, “what are you nuts?”, it probably really is from the Lama because it's so different than what ordinary me would choose to do, even extraordinarily kind me. The Lama's perspective is emptiness and karma, not “what's the best thing for my future me?” which still has this self-existent me wanting to gain in some way. Even if I twist it around and say, “that person wants me to yell at them, but I'm not going to do it. I'm going to be kind to them anyway because I want everybody to be kind to me.” Right? That's a better reaction than human reaction, but it's still based on self-existent me in a self-existent world trying to be more kind. We start there, it's progress. And Lama's job is to keep pushing us to become more and more aware of our misunderstanding so that we can stop using it to color our behavior choices, even the kindness behavior choices. 

So how do we use them? This most powerful karmic object, how we use them in the most powerful way? We want to do so because that will influence our minds such that we can actually experience changes in ourselves and our world within this lifetime, is the promise. To try to change ourselves from suffering being to not suffering being, without a powerful karmic object to use to do that, we'll take three times 10 to the 60th countless eons after we've gained our bodhicitta. It just takes too long. You want to shorten that? Take a Lama. Can it be any old person? Good debate. Technically, yes. Practically speaking, probably not because of our own ability to hold the line. And once we have this conviction that that one is the one who's made of love, compassion, and wisdom, whose sole motivation for their interaction with me is to get me to get myself totally enlightened as quickly as possible. When I have that conviction, I go to them and, in a way, make them accept me as in this relationship. You have to. You don't say that, you beg them. But technically, you're gluing yourself to them, and they want us to do so, but they have to wait for us to figure it out. And then once we do, that's when the magic starts to happen, says Lama Christie. And we make this declaration “they are my Lama”, and in our own mind we make this declaration, and so everything they do and say to me is for my enlightenment, no matter what. And Lama Christie said, as soon as you do that, Geshehla says too, as soon as you make that decree, they will do something that looks not so Lama-like. And that's when the practice starts - to hold the line of our wisdom, to hold the line of recognizing that it's our own book that we're writing as we go. The Lama is pages on that book. They've ripened, the words are there, as if written by someone else, but the page behind it is as yet unwritten. That's the emptiness of the three spheres of our relationship with the Lama. How we respond to them and the situations that they appear to put us in is the arena within which we plant our seeds. We can have our responses to them be kicking and screaming like, “wow, are you nuts? I can't do that”, you're fighting against them. They're not going to struggle with you, they're not going to say you have to do it. They're just going to say, okay, fine. Right? They're not in any hurry, they're already enlightened. They are infinitely patient. Of course they want to take you and shake you upside down and say “for crying out loud, quit struggling”, but that's up to us to change our seeds. So she uses this term surrender. The more we surrender to that being as this infinitely loving, infinitely compassionate, infinitely wise, there to get me totally enlightened, the more we surrender to that, the faster the magic happens, says Lama Christie, the faster we experience these changes in ourselves and our world. And it's totally up to us how fast we go by way of how devoted, how surrendered we are. 

But what is it we're actually surrendering? Like the self-existent me that knows what to do, the self-existent me that makes good choices, the me that's in charge. Like even in our without-Lama training, we're struggling to find that me that we believe is in charge and then find the gakcha me, the one we believe is in charge, that’s in-it from-it, to find that son of a gun, there's no such one in charge and then rest in that aha. We can do that without surrendering ourselves to this holy being. And we can surrender ourselves to a holy being and make this transformation go faster. Will it go smoother? It depends on your seeds. Maybe, maybe not. With our conviction that everything this being does is purely for our benefit, then when they do something like give you the instruction to carry out some project with that person you dislike the most in your sangha group, and you want to make all kinds of different reasons why somebody else would be better for that project. Our surrender is “I recognize I don't want to do this, I recognize I could logic my way out of this situation, and I recognize that I made this distinction that the Lama knows best and so I'll do it.” And we put ourselves in that uncomfortable, unpleasant situation with gusto. To please the Lama? No, to make our seeds. Will the Lama be pleased? Maybe, maybe not, that depends on our seeds. Some like laugh, you must have had that already. “Yeah, okay, I leap” and then you leap and they chew you out for it, “Why in the world did you do that?” “Well, you told me to.” “Yeah, but I taught you about blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Why didn't you come and say in all due respect, I couldn't do that.” Where's that coming from if we have a cantankerous Lama? All of it coming from us, and that's what makes it real. That's what makes them powerful. Our tendency is to think, “oh, it's all my projection so it's not really real. I'm the only real thing, projections aren't real.” Projections are the only real thing. Never has been any other way. So we make a very real Lama by way of our projections. Everyone that ripens is done and gone. So we ripen Lama and then we act towards them as if they're some kind of ordinary person: Lama, [plant seed thinking of them as] ordinary. Do you see the power? Lama, [plant seed thinking of them as] ordinary. Oops. Not so much Lama, [plant seed thinking of them as] not so much Lama. No Lama at all [ripens for us]. It can happen. It has happened. It's tricky. 

So this surrender thing is probably the hardest part of our practice, says Lama Christie. And maybe for a lot of us, it's like the last thing that we need to really do before we actually can get to that level of shamatha and vipasyana and onto the conveyor belt because there's still a part of us that's struggling against that give up and because we don't have them right there with us in the physical body, because we believe they're more real in the physical body than they are in our heart. Which one's more real? They're both mental images coming out of our mind. It's lovely to have one in the flesh, but then they're there, over there, and then they're over there, and then they're over there. The one that's in your heart is always there. Hello. What's more available to you? And are they different? No. Same love, compassion, wisdom. It's not limited to their physical body, and it's not limited to inside your heart either. So then maybe sooner or later, they start showing up and they look very different. And maybe even look like multiple differences at the same time. I don't know, it's possible. 

So Lama pointed out that the reason the surrender is actually difficult is partly because we are steeped in this really limited view of ourselves. If we didn't think, oh, me, self-existent me, Sarahni with these personalities and these past experiences of this human life, like I'm so geared to believing that's the real me, then the real me is stuck in that, limited by that. And that limitation blocks my ability to really let that surrender happen enough that will inspire this newly growing me to behave differently in the face of the same old challenges. If we're clinging to me and how I behave as the real me, it's really, really hard to train that me in a new habit. Surrendering to the Lama helps us surrender that. We're admitting that me is limited and archaic and I don't want it anymore, thank you very much. But I don't know what to do or how to be from this emptiness me. “Lama, you know. I just turn myself over; inspire me, take me, show me, make me become you.” We can hear the words, but to experience it, it takes some exploration, some imagining, some fantasy to what it might be like. We're going to do it a little bit. And then growing this ability to have this relationship with this holy being, whether they're in the flesh close to you or not in the flesh close to you, so that we can train ourselves to use them, to rely upon them for the seed planting that we do all day long, all night long. 

All right. So let's do another meditation session. The quality of our meditation is a reflection of our past kindness, our level of morality, right? Because a good meditation is a pleasant result, it had to be planted by some kind of kindness. We're wanting to grow the goodness of reaching shamatha, SHINEY level. The way we grow our goodness the fastest is by planting our seeds with our powerful karmic object. And so we put that holy being before us in our meditation and we spend our 20 minutes, half an hour, hour, focusing on that holy being in our mind's eye, maybe let's say in our mind's heart, feeling them there, seeing them there if we're visualizers, knowing they're there. And feeling that love, that compassion, that wisdom. And feeling our connection and feeling what it would be like to have an awareness of that connection helping to color your behavior choices, whether you're doing the dishes or driving your car or interacting at work, to have their words coming out of your mouth, their actions coming out of your hands. And it's like, are we really willing to give ourselves over to another being? We'll meet that later, that resistance. So when we are spending the time focusing our attention on this holy being, we want them to be as holy as we can make them in our imagination. And then is it our imagination? When we call forth the holy Lama, and there they are before you, is that mental image something you've made up in your mind or are they actually there? And how do you make that distinction? Alright, so let's explore it. 

Meditation - Your arising Lama and your arising you

[1:34:01]

Sit your body.

Bring your focus to your breath. That triggers the mind parking on the breath, that triggers the clarity, that triggers the fascination, the curiosity with what's to come. 

We have this bright, clear, curious mind. And with every exhalation, that bright, clear, curious mind relaxes the tension without losing the clarity or the intensity. 

We feel that mind lock on to its meditation mode... We remove the object of focus being the breath… Let your mind, it'll feel like it opens up and sinks back a little bit, dropping into this safe, relaxed, but alert space. 

And there in that space, you find that pure, exquisite being waiting for you… That being made of love, made of compassion, made of wisdom. 

See how exquisitely beautiful they are, male or female, however they appear to you. 

They are radiant. 

You feel the warmth of their being there. 

There's an exquisite fragrance.

See their expression… a love like you've never seen before. Focused on you… because you are so exquisite to them… so special. 

See their gaze… their smile. 

Notice if you're feeling any discomfort with being there with them, any hesitancy, any doubt. 

Identify it.

Recognize it as just simply karmic seeds ripening… and let it go. 

Sink in deeper to their presence there with you… their love, their wisdom. 

Gaze deeply into their eyes… and you find that you can see how they see you. 

They see your empty nature… the emptiness of your body… its potential to be this exquisite thing made of acts of love and kindness. 

They see the emptiness of your mind, its capacity for omniscience… its capacity for ultimate compassion. 

Imagine yourself being this one they see.

A being made of love, made of compassion, made of wisdom. 

All of that goodness radiating an exquisite body of light. 

Feel being that glowing love and wisdom. 

Now recognize this you is a mental image. 

Your ordinary you is a mental image. 

What's the difference? 

Which is the real you? 

Is there a real you? … Something the same two moments in a row? 

Now settle into a you that you can hold.

And focus again on that precious holy being, the Lama… and see the emptiness of their body, the emptiness of their mind. 

What makes them appear to you in the way they are appearing now? Is it something from them? 

Now let them arise however they do. 

Let yourself arise however you do.

And look at them closely and make them a promise to work hard to grow the causes for the result of reaching, experiencing, emptiness directly… because there is pain in our world. 

Ask them to help you. 

Ask them again.

And ask them again.

And of course they agree. 

Then dedicate these seeds that we've planted to bringing about the end of suffering for that other one, which of course means a shift in our own minds, our own hearts.

And then bring your awareness of you in your body, in your room. 

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

Well that's a fun one, hey? 

So in your reading you will see that Master Kamalashila is talking about omniscience and how we have obstacles to omniscience and how we overcome those obstacles. And he's going to backtrack it down again to why we want to work hard on reaching stillness so that we can start that upward spiral. And then at the back of that reading, Lama Christie uses Ngulchu Dharma Bhadra to point out that the fourth meditation preliminary, not of the seven limbs, but of growing our career in meditation, the fourth one is practice of the Lama practice. Growing this relationship with this holy being and what that all means, and then planting our seeds with them. Growing our ability to do that, whether we're with them physically or not. Especially when or if we are able to be with them physically, but not limited to that, because we want to grow the goodness that can ripen this change swiftly enough that we can see results in this lifetime.

And then technically, is it the seeds we planted last week that will ripen when I'm 93 years old? Maybe, but those seeds are adding to other seeds similar. And all of them get this boost by way of the goodness I do towards the Lama. So it doesn't really matter whether it's this seed planted brings me the result next week, or this seed planted was the one that pushed two-million-years-ago-seed over the hump, the result ends up happening. The thing is, we don't really care about the result. What we care about is the ability to continue to plant, plant, plant, plant, plant, regardless of the result. And how we decide what to plant was based on, “well, if this ripens at me, will I like it or will I not like it?” But do you see, we're really ready to move beyond even that as our criteria. We still use it in our judgment, but in doing so, we're saying, “I'm acting so that these kindnesses will come back to me”. And we're reaching that level of investigation to try to get beyond that motivation of wanting what “I want” to shift to “what will help everybody is what I want”. That's our growing bodhicitta. So like all of this is merging into one. We're trying to grow our direct perception of emptiness, which is called bodhicitta. And we're doing it motivated because there's suffering in my world. I want to stop everybody's suffering, not just mine. As long as I keep thinking, I do this to get that result for me, I'm limiting my seed planting. My seed planting is being colored by getting my own result. We will get our own result even better when the reason we do our deed is because it's going to benefit everybody and everybody includes this one. But it's slippery. It takes us a while to get there. And we're starting to plant the seeds for that as we're doing this Lama work of recognizing that their good qualities are our own ripenings and so we want to perpetuate their good qualities by serving them and trying to live as if we have those qualities too. And how do we know what qualities? By being around the Lama. And we see how they act and react. So it's this beautiful circular thing. It's not a sequential progress so much. We're feeding it as we go. And again, with these classes, we are very early on in the process, but all of us have studied so much that it probably feels a little bit like from college, we've gone back into third grade. But it's worth doing, I'm finding personally it's worth doing. Every time I go through those ACI courses again to share them with somebody, I learn more. They are so rich and so deep. So it's worth going back to third grade and resisting the, ‘I know all this, I've done this’, but like beginner's mind, right? Be as if we're learning it newly and we'll gain greater benefit from it. 

Okay, so let's do our dedication and then if you have questions or need help. So remember that being we wanted to be able to help at the beginning of class. All the goodness that we planted will be for their benefit, they will even experience it someday. And that's an extraordinary goodness so please be happy with yourself. 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 devotion to them. Ask them to please, please stay close to continue to guide you, inspire you, help 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. 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. They don't have to do any of this training, they just wake up knowing. And may it be so. All right. So thank you so much. Questions, anything you need help with? We have two extra minutes and I'm happy to stay longer because I owe people some time. Going once, going twice. Going three times. Okay. Bye-bye. I love you. See you next week.

Welcome back, we are Bok Jinpa course 3, Class 5, Master Kamalashila's Bhavana Krama Stages of Meditation. 

Please make a note that we'll have class next Wednesday and then we'll be off until March 25th due to a variety of reasons. So we're not completing our course 3, we'll have two classes yet to go, but whatever we're working on with our meditation, you'll get really good at it. It's probably going to be an important one. 

So let's gather our minds here as we usually do, please. Bring your attention to your breath until you hear from me again.

[Usual opening]

So last week we talked about the fourth meditation preliminary of the six, of which the seven limb preliminaries are a part. And that fourth one, as you recall, was the Lama, the power of the Lama. And we worked a little bit on what is the Lama and what is their power. And so we're going to do a little bit more around that topic, which tells us of its importance. If Master Kamalashila spends extra time on it and Lama Christie spends extra time on it, there must be a reason. So let's gather our minds here. Let's settle in for our first session. 

Meditation - How you see your holy Lama

[9:18]

Get your body set and determine for it to be still. 

Once you have your body set, you bring your concentration to your breath.

Turning your focus to those sensations at the nostril… adjusting clarity… turning on the intensity.

How much effort are you making to keep that mind bright and clear on that object? 

It's easy to get sloppy. 

Lama reminded us that there's a resonance that gets set up when a group is meditating together, actually doing anything together. 

When we are all on our object, it's easier for each of us to stay on that object. 

So let loose the focus on your breath… to get a feeling, an idea, that we are all connected as a group right now. Even as we seem to be only together on this Zoom link… energetically, it's as if we are all in the same room together. 

And so think of - if we were all sitting almost elbow to elbow, we would more easily recognize that the quality of my mind's attention is contributing to this influence on everyone's mind on their object. 

So now go back to focusing on your breath with this added dimension of doing it powerfully in order to contribute to the power of the group. Each of us, able to turn on that mind of single-pointed focus. Try it again. 

Check. 

On or off the object - correct. Clarity - correct. Intensity - correct. 

Now intentionally let go of that breath as the object and turn your mind inward to settle that mind into that exquisite, beautiful, special place you have been developing. 

Sink down into that holy of holies… and you find you are there with your mother on your left, your father on your right, holding their hands. 

And everyone you know are there with you, sitting behind the three of you.

And they are all listening to you. 

Alert for what you are going to show them, what you are going to teach them. 

Now picture your most perfect, holy, enlightened Angel Lama, there in front of you and all the rest. 

See them clearly, or feel them clearly, there with you. 

They are gazing at you and you are looking deeply into their eyes. 

Everyone there with you is feeling this experience you are having. 

They are experiencing that precious holy being through you.

Feel your love for them… feel your devotion… your reliance. 

And that’s teaching all those others with you. 

Think of all that this holy being has given you. 

Feel your gratitude. 

And now, for the benefit of your mom, your dad, and all those beings there with you who are counting on you to lead them on this path someday, review in your meditating mind why this being before you must be a fully enlightened being… as if those there with you are hearing your explanation to yourself.

We'll sit four minutes. I'll say “check” from time to time. You do your own exploration, analysis. 

Check. 

Check. 

Nice. Now let go of that… look at the faces of all those beings with you… they've learned something. See how happy they feel. 

Look at the face of your precious Angel… see how happy they are with you. 

Make a dedication that these seeds that have been planted will grow to bring about the end of suffering for every existing being. 

And then bring your mind up out of that special place into awareness of this body in this room. 

Wiggle your hands and feet a little, and then when you're ready, open your eyes, come out, take a stretch. 

Is my Lama the Buddha?

[28:57]

So how did you do with your logic about why that being before you is a fully enlightened Angel-being made of love, made of compassion, made of wisdom? Were you convinced? Were the people around you all convinced? All right, I see a lot of yeses. Good job. Did anybody go blank? Did anybody go like, start down this train, “No, no”, then this one, “No, no”, then that one? There are a lot of different avenues we could go. We're also well trained, right? You know how to go “if this, then that, if that, then this, then this, then this, then this, therefore, ta-da.” And that's the idea of that meditation was to be really clear in our minds about how we come to that conclusion - “This being is my holy angel.” But then are we misunderstanding ourselves when we say the words? Are we taking them to be something… there's so many ways to say it… them really a Buddha? Like that's what we were coming to the conclusion, right? “They are a Buddha!” But if they're “oh, they are a Buddha in-them from-them, independent of my projection”, [shaking head]. There is no such thing. No my-special-Buddha, no Shakyamuni Buddha. There is no independent-of-my-karmic-seed-Buddha Buddha, is there? But like, watch your own mind when you answer that. It sure seems like there is one independent of my projection, like the one you project. But does that exist for me? Sure it does if I know you're projecting it, but then which one exists for me - your projection of them, or my projection of you projecting them? See, it gets so slippery so fast. And you know, all these holy Lamas, when we say, oh, it gets so slippery so fast, they go, “Duh, right. Right. That's proof. Not that's not proof.” 

Okay. So when we are in meditation, we have the freedom to see that being as absolutely, totally perfect in every way, right? It's our imagination, it's our meditation time. Just go for it. It doesn't matter if when you're out of your cushion, you go, “that wasn't realistic, they're not really like that.” In our meditation we're only limited by our belief that we're limited. And with the exquisite training that we've received about what it is to be a fully enlightened being, we have enough information to create this really exquisite one. Not just what they look like, but what they're made of - trillions of virtuous deeds motivated by loving compassion and wisdom, and so everything about them reveals all these good qualities, and we can just go through sequentially what all those good qualities are showing up as in this visual representation of them. And we learn the details of that kind of visualization later, but we don't have to wait till then. They can be as beautiful as you like. 

So Lama Christie shared the sequence of thoughts that she uses. It does not mean it's the only one, but she always starts with just saying to herself, are there enlightened beings in the world? And it's like, if we say yes, we can go on with her sequence. If we say, “well, I don't really know”, then we would go in a different direction. So I'm going to assume we all say, “yes, I believe there's at least one, Shakyamuni Buddha, the one that we have the records about the teachings from.” And then he tells us he had a teacher. Okay, so well, then there must be two. And that one's going to say, well, I had a teacher too. Okay, so there must be three, right? So that's one way to go that there are Buddhas in the world. 

So if there are fully enlightened beings, do fully enlightened beings have the power to emanate? And I find that wording a little bit off because it's not that they have the power to emanate; their qualities of enlightened being spontaneously emanate. So if there are enlightened beings, there are emanations of enlightened beings because that's part of what it is to be an enlightened being. We know the four bodies - paradise body, emanation body, omniscient body, and emptiness body. So if there's Buddha, there are emanations of Buddhas. 

So if there is a fully enlightened being and they are emanating, would they necessarily be emanating to me? What is it to be a fully enlightened being? Omniscient, perceiving emptiness and appearances of all existing things simultaneously all the time. Am I an existing thing? Say it to yourself, we're not talking about me, we're talking about you. Say to yourself, am I an existing thing? Yes, that's about the only thing we know for sure, right? I am. So if you are an existing thing and there is a fully enlightened being in the world, do they know you? They have to. And if you are an existing thing in the world, do they then have to be emanating to you? Yes. Don't they? They're emanating to every existing thing to be what that existing thing needs. 

So is that enough proof to say this one that I have in my mind's eye is that being? You could say, “well, not quite.” But on the other hand, we are intentionally bringing to our mind's eye a mental image of a being who for us would look like that if for us they showed up as that. We're just imagining what it might be. Does that negate the fact that whatever is appearing to me is a Buddha's emanation, just the fact that I'm making it up? My mind's going, “yes, it negates the fact”, but it can't negate the fact because anything I'm experiencing, logically, is an emanation of a Buddha. So even my imagination of that being as a Buddha, that's an emanation as well. We go, “oh, as an imaginary thing.” Yeah, but technically, we'll get there later, everything I experience is an imaginary thing, but we'll get there later. So we're still trying to track down how our mind is trying to show ourselves that this being that we're holding in front of us must be a fully enlightened being. And do you notice how your mind's saying, “well, not the one that's in my imagination, but the one that that imagination pertains to who's the real thing outside of me, that one's the real Buddha. This one in my mind, that's not, I'm just imagining”, right? Because just imagining doesn't make them there, does it? Or could it? 

So still, my logic thing is going like this [all over the place], so let's pull it back. If there's Buddhas and Buddhas are omniscient and they emanate, then if there's somebody that I see in my world, imagined or not, who my perception is that they know what I need and they're willing to help me with what I need and they teach me about what I need, then could I say that they are the highest of my ripening karma? If I see a being who can teach me about karma and emptiness and say to me, “look, you're meant to stand on a billion worlds and love every existing being into happiness”, would that be a powerful goodness ripening? Yes. So if my seeds are ripening in that powerfully goodness way, wouldn't I perceive that as a being who has these qualities that I'm perceiving them as having? And I'd be careful there. Because yes, I'm seeing the being with those qualities and my misperception is seeing them with those qualities in them, which they don't have in-them from-them. But my seeds are ripening so exquisitely that I see them as this real being with these real qualities and so I rely upon them, I devote myself to them, I surrender to them. How does that help me? Because to see them in that powerfully high way makes them a powerful karmic object for me. Whether they see themselves as that or not is actually immaterial, it's how we see them. And when we see them as this powerful karmic object, then everything we think, say, and do towards them are powerfully planted seeds that can move us along our path more swiftly than the same interactions with a being who we are perceiving as not infinitely loving, infinitely compassionate, infinitely wise even if that other being we are seeing as extraordinarily loving and wise. The power of the seed planted is where the Lama gives us the power. The Lama doesn't give the power, our own understanding of this being gives us the power for them to give us the power to use them as powerful karmic objects. And that's what they want so that we make our behavior choices in these powerful new ways because of what they've taught us. That we'll listen to them and we'll follow their advice because we understand that they had to do the same thing to become these holy beings. Right? Even the them… oh, how can I say this? The them we see as fully enlightened was at one time not fully enlightened and they had to purify and make merit to become fully enlightened. And that's why we can know that they know what I need to do because they had to do it themselves. Which one is it for me that had to do it themselves? The one that's there for me unique to me? The them from their side? Until I'm omniscient, I won't actually know, will I? So there is no them-the-Buddha with the power to just bonk us on the head and say, “see me as a Buddha for crying out loud.” If they could, they would. They're probably doing it all the time, you know, bonk, bonk, bonk, and we just either stop noticing or don't recognize because if we don't have the seeds to perceive them in this high way, it doesn't matter whether they see themselves as Shakyamuni Buddha or a gnat. They can't make us see them any differently. 

So then how can they help? How, if I've never seen a Buddha before, can I imagine one with sufficient power to plant the seeds with sufficient power to ever become one? If they have any kind of self-existent nature of being those good qualities, we couldn't ever get there. But the fact that their goodness is coming out of our own seeds means we're already so close; just to entertain the idea that a Buddha is my karmic ripening. Cool. 

So back to the imagined one. Are they Buddha? You know, you have to say, “well, according to whom?” So yes, no, both, neither, right? Which is why, didn't we conclude last time - my Lama is a Buddha because I need them to be, so that I can learn from them, so that I can plant my seeds powerfully with them, so that I can see the aspects of me that I can't see, they get to show me and then I can work with them and overcome. I need somebody to be a fully enlightened being for me. But then, “well, then why is it like the rabbit and the ant and the apple on the tree, why aren't they all Buddha?” But you see, they all could be, couldn't they? Not even could be, they all are, technically. But it's like a big leap to go from, “oh, there are Buddhas in the world” [to] “therefore the ground I walk on is the Buddha, the air I breathe is the Buddha.” We can't jump there, most of us can't. So like one comes out of us as extraordinary. 

I had this sweet friend years, years, years ago, and we were studying the ACI together. She not as seriously as Sumati and I, but she went to the Uttara Tantra teachings at the YMCA and she saw Geshe Michael for the first time. He walks into the room and she goes, “<gasp> there's Buddha.” And I'm looking at Geshe Michael, I was like, whoa, what's she seeing that I'm not seeing? Because it was so spontaneous out of her that it really blew me away. And it still happens. People see him that way and others of us don't, and it's not that one's right and one's wrong, it's proof that our ripening mental seeds color our experience. And then we behave according to our experience in the moment, and the way we behave perpetuates what we experience. So if we want to experience that being differently, then we behave differently even before we see them as different, in order to see them as different when those seeds of behaving towards them in this higher way ripen. When are those going to ripen? Next week, next month, next lifetime. It's like you keep it up until they ripen. How long do I have to see them as my holy Angel? Until you and they are both holy angels, spontaneously, without having to stop and think about it. Well, how long is that going to take? As long as it takes. As many seeds as you need is how long it will take. Maybe it's one, maybe it's seven lifetimes. We don't know, but it has to happen. When you get those seeds being planted in this profound way, there's no going back if you want to. And that's partly the power of Diamond Way is when we get properly prepared and we do our part, the seeds that we're planting are seeds on this trajectory, moving us towards our goal. And we may be saying, oh, I need it to happen in this lifetime or I need it to happen next week, but it's the same deal. Just plant, plant, plant. Don't worry about the result because it's going to happen. It has to happen because of the way we're planting the seeds. So all that impatience and, “oh, woe is me”, it can all just be ditched. The thing is, it sneaks back in as things in life get hard.

All right. So Lama reminds us that just as we're getting our logic down so clear that, “oh, yeah, this being really is a Buddha” and even when we say “really is a Buddha for me, I'm going to devote myself to them”, like the next time we get close to them, they do something very not Buddha-like and it pushes our conviction. And it's not like they sit around thinking, “how am I going to get Sarahni to push her conviction”, it's all happening effortlessly because it's all driven by my own seeds and my own doubts and et cetera. So it's wonderful that the Lamas warn us about that. But then it sounds like they're making excuses. Like if you're talking to your Lama about it, and they say, “look, okay I'll take you as my student.” And they say, “but recognize that you're going to wake up one day and not see me as so special, and that'll be up to you to work on.” And we go, “well, wait a minute, why would a Buddha say that? They're perfect, they can't fib, they can't…” Right? We'll start questioning. And that's technically the purpose - for our own mind is to show us all the nooks and crannies where we're still clinging to a me because their task is to get in there and yank out all of our clinging to me, self-existent me. 

Okay, so are they a fully enlightened being or aren't they? What if there they are and nobody else is perceiving them? 

[Margie: Geshehla would say you can't tell if they are and you can't tell if they aren't.]

Exactly. Exactly. And that's where we're going is to get to that conclusion and then be able to live in that conclusion and then therefore come to the conclusion, “then I will interact with them as if they are a fully enlightened being. Because I can't tell whether they are or they aren't, I will act towards them as if they are.” And it's hard enough to do that with one being, but as we habituate to it, then son of a gun, you start doing it with another one, and then another one. And it becomes more and more habituated to everyone you interact with is some version of your holy Lama, your holy Lama Angel. And that's what it is to be in the mandala, actually. Like everything you interact with is that Lama’s manifestation. They look like they're limited to this one being, but as we're learning that we ourselves are not limited at the edge of our skin, of course, neither is our Buddha Lama. The one we see appears to be limited in that way but why can't they be the beautiful tomatoes in the grocery store? And then it's like, well, what do we do with that? Do I eat tomatoes? Yes, of course, they want you to eat them, yes, of course. And then it gets a little bit, you know, again, a little bit squirrelly about how we interact with everything as our holy angel Lama. And then when we can't do it, because I don't know about you, but in my mind, I set it up in the morning and then by the time I've gone to the bathroom, I've forgotten. It's hard to maintain it, especially when something goes the way you don't like it because we so habitually “they're doing that to me”. And our mind wants to go, “my holy angel would never do that to me, would they?” Yeah, maybe that's exactly what they would do. Why? To hurt me? Because they hate me? No, because they love me and they… right? Anyway, you're getting the idea. 

Valid versus correct perceptions

So where Lama Christie went with that was, suppose you're driving down the road late at night. It's a dark night and your eye, you see something dart in front of the car. You're sure it's a mouse, you slam on the brakes, it's a leaf. What just happened? Was there a mouse there when you slammed on your brakes? Did the mouse turn into a leaf? Which one's more real? Now that you've got your car stopped and you're staring at the leaf, which one's more real? The mouse or the leaf? What does your mind say? The leaf, because there it is, there it is, there it is. The other thing that was a mouse for the instant, turned out not to be a mouse at all, it was really a leaf blowing across. But is that accurate to say it's not a mouse, it was a leaf all along? Was the mouse a valid perception? Yes. We weren't drunk, we weren't high, we saw a mouse, that's why we slammed on the brakes. We don't slam on brakes for a blowing leaf. Maybe we should. So in the moments that we perceived a mouse, we were having valid perception mouse there. But then what happened? That valid perception gave way to a new valid perception, leaf. And along with the leaf valid perception is some kind of belief then that the mouse was a misperception, right? “Oh, there was no mouse there. I misperceived mouse, it was really leaf.” Valid perception mouse turns into a recognized misperception mouse with the therefore not misperception leaf. The leaf is now our current valid perception; is that or is that not also a misperception? Somebody commit themselves. Are we seeing the leaf as, “oh, it's really a leaf. I just thought it was a mouse. It's really a leaf. Now it's a leaf because now it's still a leaf, still a leaf, still a leaf, still a leaf. That confirms that it's a leaf and so always was a leaf. And so therefore the mouse, valid at the moment, was misperceived.” The leaf, valid at the moment, and this moment and this moment and this moment, is it also being misperceived? If we're not perceiving its emptiness and dependent origination simultaneously with leaf, we are misperceiving it, aren't we? In the same way that we were misperceiving the mouse. “No, it's not the same way at all!” But it is the same way, is Master Kamalashila pointing this out. And we won't get that from just the reading without Lama Christie's explanation of what this reading is trying to really point out. 

So when you're reading the reading about omniscience and the blockers to omniscience, he just gives these couple of one-liners. “If we have blockers to omniscience and if you remove the blockers to omniscience, you'll be omniscient.” And it's like what it means to have blockers to omniscience is this mouse / leaf thing. I thought it was a mouse, it was valid as a mouse. Then I have valid perception leaf along with the valid perception that my mouse was a mistaken perception. And then I hold my leaf to be a leaf from its own side, which makes the leaf misperception also, just a different kind. But it isn't really a different kind in the end because the valid perception of the mouse, although that made mouse there for us, was also a mouse in-it from-it. So even the valid perception was misperceived. Even if it stayed a mouse, it was misperceived. And all of that valid but misperceived, is it because there's something mistaken in the mouse or something mistaken in the leaf? What mouse, what leaf? It's something mistaken in the mind of the experiencer of the valid perceptions that are mistaken. So in ACI, we went round and round about valid perceptions. When we first learned about valid perceptions, we kind of assumed that to have a valid perception was a correct perception and Geshe Michael let it lie. All the way up, little clues in ACI 6 Diamond Cutter. But we didn't really get to that discussion about valid versus correct until we were at ACI 15, a little bit in 13. But not until 15 before the punchline is we have valid perceptions all the time because we're not high, we're not drunk, but we've never had a valid correct perception until we perceive emptiness directly. 

You could take that a little bit further and say, we don't have a valid correct perception until we perceive emptiness and dependent origination simultaneously because that's really how things are existing, not just as empty because you have to have a thing that's empty of self-existence. So you have to have both to have either one, don't we? So maybe we don't ever have valid correct perceptions until we're omniscient. The scripture doesn't say that. They say valid correct, the first one we have is direct perception of emptiness. So hooray for that. The point is… part of the point is, there are different levels of understanding of what's misperceived about those valid perceptions according to the level of teachings we've received about it. Perhaps we have a mind that's capable of Listener level comprehension, or perhaps we have the seeds to be capable of Self-made Buddha quality realization, or perhaps we have the seeds to have Mahayana level understanding that puts us at Mind Only level, or Lower Middle Way level, or Highest Middle Way level. And as we learn all those different levels of understanding of what is meant by the misperception, we can catch ourselves doing them and respond differently so that we can plant our seeds differently, so that we can understand differently, so we can move ourselves along our wisdom path. 

Let's take our break. 

[1:12:16]

So how does our example of the mouse leaf pertain to our perception of this holy being, our Lama? Valid perception mouse. Valid perception leaf. Valid perception, oh, I was mistaken about that mouse. Valid perception leaf. Valid perception roadway. Valid perception parking lot. Valid perception door to my apartment. Right? Shifting, shifting, shifting, shifting. What about the Lama? The Lama, fully enlightened being Lama, who one moment looks / acts ordinary. Next moment looks / acts extraordinary. Next moment isn't even there, who knows? Is it different? Is our valid perception ‘them normal human being’ more or less correct than our valid perception ‘them fully enlightened being extraordinary love’? Is one more real than the other? Maybe we perceive that extraordinary love, compassion, wisdom most clearly when we're in our meditation and we're meeting with them there in our holy of holies of our heart. And then we open our eyes and they're picking their nose. And we like close our eyes and they’re perfect again, and we open our eyes and… like, which one's more real? Yeah, neither, if we mean by real [they are] in-them from-them. “Oh, so there's no real Lama there at all, right?” No. Wrong. There is the Lama there. We're having valid perception, there is an existing thing. Our valid perception, if it does not include their emptiness and dependent origination, then it's mistaken no matter how we're seeing them. If we're not seeing their emptiness, we're mistaken. Maybe we can not be seeing their emptiness, but not believing in their self-existence and we might be closer to correct. That would be if we have seen emptiness directly and are now out of it, right? But until then, any moment of experience of that Lama is valid and misperceiving / mistaken, because we're believing that the qualities and actions that we see in them are somehow coming from them, and that's mistaken. The qualities and actions we see them doing is coming from our seeds ripening. Our seeds ripening making us perceive what we are perceiving as them and their actions. 

Influencing our seeds towards our Buddhahood

What do we do with that? So that's valid. We can interact with these Lamas as valid perceptions, understanding that we're misperceiving - we're taking them to be self-existent when they're not. I can still interact with them. And so we might say, okay, I'm just going to interact with my valid perception of them; when they're normal human, I'll interact with them as normal human; when they are looking holy, I'll interact with them as holy. What's wrong with that? We're never going to get anywhere because our valid perceptions will just keep being mistakenly responded to and so we'll replant the seeds for seeing them being this constantly shifting ordinary being, loving, kind, special, ideal, and our seeds won't ever reach the point where every shifting moment of them is more and more exquisite. Is that going to happen from them? No, it might look like it, but we create that by how we respond to this them-now, them-now, them-now, them-now, regardless of whether they appear as ordinary, kind, loving, mean, it doesn't matter. Our task is to respond to them in ways that will plant seeds that will ripen more and more pure world, which probably is going to start with seeing them in a more and more pure way before we start seeing the rest of our world or even ourselves more and more purely. It might be a clue to our practice about how much more extraordinary our Lama is getting as we are carefully interacting with them in this way that understands their empty nature and so I will choose to hold them as a fully enlightened being so that they are powerful karmic object for me so that when I offer them those flowers, I'm creating my Buddha paradise, not just getting flowers in the future. It's our mind that establishes all of that, as proven by the mouse and the leaf. Interesting. 

So when we do a meditation where we've got that Lama before us and we are thinking about their amazing qualities, the more we do a meditation like that, the more we can also imagine what it would be like to have those same amazing qualities. So as we're thinking about the Lama, “wow, they're omniscient. What do you suppose that mind is like? Their omniscient mind, seeing the emptiness of all existing things and all existing things. Like all things? How many is that? Where are all those things?” We get this mental image we're building up, a feeling of what maybe it's like to be omniscient. And as we're just thinking about their experience, we get a little glimpse into it. And that glimpse can grow. It's influencing our own mind seeds so that every time we come back and do the good qualities of the Lama, they get a little easier to bring to mind and we plant seeds to feel them, to get a glimpse of what it might be like. 

So we have these different qualities - their omniscience; their holy great compassion, which they wrap into that “love”, let's call it holy great love. We don't ever talk about it that way, but we could. Their paradise being, what that might be like; and their emanation being. We have all these different qualities that we could sit with them, that our own mind is giving them those qualities. And as we imagine them having them, we're imagining what they're like because we don't know unless you're one of them. We have to think about it and try it for size and see what it's like and “wow, that's not quite big enough.” All the while we're doing that, we are planting seeds in our mind for those qualities to be seen in us. By whom? By ourselves and by other beings. “Oh, that's creepy, I'm not trying to make you see me as omniscient”. But yes, I am. I want to become a Buddha for the sake of all sentient beings. It's not prideful to say I'm trying to plant the seeds in my mind so every existing being in the world, when they interact with me from their side and I see them interacting with me from my side, their experience is ultimate love, ultimate compassion, wisdom. We say we want to be Buddha, then we are out to grow that. 

The Lamas say our minds not only have the capacity for omniscience, we only don't experience our own mind as omniscience because we have blockers to it, which is a little different than saying we have to create the seeds for omniscience. It's not saying we already are omniscient, but it's saying that if we can just remove these blockers, omniscience is what comes next. And those blockers, of course, are our belief in things having their own nature, and then the remnants of those past beliefs once we no longer see the world that way. But they're just blockers. And to understand that is a big shift, actually, in our seed planting and seed ripening, because it makes omniscience seem not so far away, not so impossible. Lama Christie would say again and again, there's really no reason why we shouldn't be directly aware of every mind and every experience in every mind, because it's all our seeds ripening anyway. We just have blockers to being aware of all the seeds that are ripening and being planted in any given moment. So your reading is going to be talking about omniscience and these blockers to omniscience. 

The lines we draw

And last class, we did a meditation where we were looking for the line between the outside of our body and the inside of our body, and hopefully you explored that a little bit as well. And hopefully it also became pretty clear that what we call ‘outside our body’, ‘my breath outside my body’, is a mental image [of] ‘things outside my body’. And inside my body is a mental image [of] ‘inside my body’, which would mean if you went looking for the line between the two, you would find, ‘well, that's simply a projection happening as well’, that I can't actually find the actual line because everywhere I think I find it, I can still divide it a little bit into front, back, middle. And so we actually can't find a dividing line between inside and outside, can we? No, we project one and then we function as if it is a real line between me and you, right? Those of us who are studying Master Shantideva are talking about equalizing and exchanging self and others and it touches into this idea of where does me end and you start? It does not mean, however, that in the end, we're just one big blob of existence with one big blob of a mind. Because if that were true, the instant one part of that blob got fully enlightened, all parts of the blob would experience it the same way. As soon as we separate pieces of the blob, it means there can't be one. ‘All’, we can talk about ‘all’, each one's contribution to the ‘all’. But often the word that comes up as we're getting close is, “oh, I really am all one because it's all this mind”. And even Mind Only school says there's nothing that exists outside of your mind. So come on, there is just this one mind, right? Wrong. 

So Master Kamalashila points out that this idea or experience, there's a me here and there's another over there. And that's a subject state of mind perceiving an object, whether that object is perceived as having a state of mind or it's an object that's inanimate, that this subject state of mind for ordinary beings is always necessarily also projecting that self and other have their own independent existences, independent of the perceiver's mind seeds ripening. He says he knows that we don't think that there's anything that exists totally independently of anything else. Everything has causes or parts. But he knows we're not automatically understanding that when we say something exists self-existently and we negate it, what we mean is that there could be anything that exists outside of our own mental seed ripening. But then when we say, “oh, okay, so nothing exists outside my own mental seed ripening”, that a very automatic conclusion is, “well, then I'm the only thing that really exists, everything else is my ripening projections” because we somehow automatically think ripening projections are less real than when they weren't known to be ripening projections. And that's part of our misperception. Because has there ever been anything that we've experienced that's been outside of our seed ripening that experience? No, impossible. So all those things that we thought were things that were existing outside of our mind seeds ripening were actually mind seeds ripening, we just didn't know it. But they always were. So now when we're recognizing, “oh, nothing is anything but a projection”, when we understand, that would make things more real, not less real. And the same for our own sense of self - our self-existent me would become less real and our me as part of the projection in this constant shape shifting would become more and more real. 

So when we say, “first I saw a mouse, and it was a real mouse. And then I saw the leaf and now the leaf is the real leaf and so the mouse was mistaken”, keep that in mind and then when we go into meditation and we have a Lama that we see in the flesh and we take them into our meditation. And now when we're seeing them in our meditation, we're seeing their skin glowing in light, and more expression in their face, and maybe their body made of jewels and we think, “well, my real Lama is that flesh and blood Lama, and this one that I'm having in my meditation, that's my imagined Lama” and we come out of the meditation and our mind naturally thinks, “that was really cool that time I spent with my imagined Lama, but my real one is this one.” And that's like saying, “now that I'm staring at the leaf, there's no such thing as the mouse.” The mouse is gone, but when it was mouse, it was really mouse, and when it's leaf, it's really leaf because it's never really either one. And that's the same for the Lama. So when we have a ripening experience, that ripening experience can be the ripening experience of the Lama flesh and blood, and it can be a ripening experience of Lama body made of light. And both of them are mental images ripening. They both have the same quality, existential quality. So neither one can be said to be more real than the other. The one we're experiencing at the moment is the valid, correct or not, depending on how we're experiencing them. And they can be this one, and then that one, and then that one, and then that one. Not just they can be, they are, instant by instant. It's a miracle when we have some consistency, right? They look like body of light, they still do, they still do, they still do. Wow, right? We did something really extraordinary to be able to sustain that over a period of time. And so it's not at all surprising when something shifts, and it's like, “Oh, my gosh, they've got a hole in their pants. Like, how can that be, an Angel could never have a hole in their pants.” But it's just our seeds shifting. They haven't shifted. What's wrong with that? What they? There isn't a they, right? There isn't a they that can't shift, and there isn't a they that can shift, so there is a they who's shifting constantly which is how they can be our holy Lama for us, our holy Angel for us. And the same is true for us, right? Constantly changing, changing, changing mental seeds perception of oneself, let alone how we perceive other beings perceiving us. Makes it all possible. We get these glimpses of what we're really trying to do as we dig in in this way. 

So Master Kamalashila, in the reading he goes through the different levels of understanding of selflessness that Lord Buddha taught from the early teachings up to the highest teachings. And again, he just does them in these one sentences. They're clear when we know what he's talking about, but they seem cryptic. And when he gets to the section where it says, “and there, Buddha taught to some people that everything is their own mind”. He doesn't say Mind Only school, he says, “and there are people who came to understand that everything is in their own mind.” And he says, as we grasp the fact that this… no, not as we grasp the fact… as we experience an object so deeply that our meditative concentration becomes single-pointed on the object, what that means is the mind is so engaged in that object that nothing else can appear to it, including its sense of self. So our lineage is careful to say when we meditate on the candle flame, you don't ever merge and become one with the candle flame. But single-pointed concentration on this candle flame will feel as if there is only candle flame. No me perceiving candle flame to the exclusion of all else else because candle flame takes over everything. We're not going to meditate on candle flames because it's not powerful karmic object, we meditate on our Lama. What if we meditate on our Lama with such single-pointed focus, that we have no self perceiving Lama, but just Lama. Imagine the seeds being planted. 

So he says, when we get to that level of… call it penetration to the object of meditation, and the object of meditation is the selflessness of the object of meditation, that we will reach non-duality. Like what that is, is non-duality. And he says this funny thing - when somebody is experiencing that, not in it, but after it, he says, they use the word “non-duality”. But then Geshehla and Lama Christie point out that when we hear the word “non-duality”, because we're thinking of two self-existent things that become one self-existent thing, we're misunderstanding non-duality. He's saying, when subject / object lose their distinction between them as two separate things, to be able to describe that, one will naturally use the word “non-duality”. And then the point is, somebody hearing them say that will misunderstand it and say, “Oh, everything becomes one, because that's what non-dual means.” But it doesn't mean that here. It means that for there to be an appearance, it must lack its self-nature. There can be no lack of self-nature without a thing that has no nature. So it takes both to have both; it takes both… you can't even say both to have either, because there's no such thing as either, there's only the non-duality. But it's not one thing, because one thing wouldn't need these two. It's like we can't really get it conceptually. We try to, and we go, “Oh, that's it” and if we leave ourselves at “Oh, that's it”, we will get stuck at some subtle level of misperception because the conclusion we always want to land in is, “Oh, that's not it either.” Do you remember when you go looking for the thing that gets the label, you won't find it? It doesn't say you won't find anything; you will always find something more subtle getting a label. It's a process. So we can't ever come to an explanation that says “this is it” and if we think we have it, keep chewing on it. And it's so hard to rest in this conclusion “Oh, I can't get to the conclusion, and that's the conclusion” because our mind wants something concrete instead of this nebulous whatever. And it's only because of our seeds, right? Some of you will go, “Oh, I get it, I've been struggling against that nebulous conclusion, thinking I had to have it concrete.” Have at it. But most of us that need a final answer concrete, just it's like, right, my forehead's flat from beating it against the wall thinking “now I've got it”, “oh, no, that can't be it.” But it's fun. 

So any line that we think we can find between this and that, past / future, far / near, our mind is making lines between those things for functionality. But when we go looking for the functionality that comes from those distinctions, we find that there's no such thing as that functionality independent of our mind seeds ripening a functionality happening. So we need to do another meditation. Lama Christie went into Mind Only school with the constructs and other powered things to help us investigate that., but if I do that I won't have time for the second meditation and she really wants us to do both of these meditations - the Lama and then this investigation. So let's do the meditation first and then if we have time, or if you want to stay a little later, I'll do the Mind Only thing for you. But let's do the meditation. 

Meditation - the difference between memory and what we call our current real

[1:44:13]

So set your body in. 

Bring your attention to your breath to settle your mind in. 

And this time watch as that exhale gently extends longer with each exhale, let the inhale go by itself. 

Now let go of that as the object of focus and listen to my instructions… Bring to mind some recent pleasant memory, something from yesterday or the day before. 

And consider how our minds think of this event… We think, I remember yesterday… I remember there in that class listening… I remember what I was wearing… I kind of remember what I was feeling. 

Now see if you can find a part of your awareness of that memory that holds that that event happened like that… actually happened. 

We are remembering something that we did. 

When you can find that belief about that memory, check to see if that belief is true… or is it a gakcha? A thing that exists as something other than my current mind seeds ripening? 

Does that experience that I had yesterday still exist somewhere … And I'm reaching my mind through the ethers to connect to it? 

Can our mind reach into the past and find something? 

Think of the memory again... What valid perception are you having right now? 

It's a valid perception of a memory, but is it a valid perception of that event that happened and is gone? 

Does our valid perception of this memory, can we confirm in any way that that event actually happened? 

If the event is no longer happening, there's nothing to confirm. 

We are having current moment ripenings of something called memory. 

It is a current experience, not a memory of some past experience. 

We actually have no way of knowing if this memory we are holding actually happened. 

Not that it didn't, but not that it did. 

Try to stay in that floating between, or absence, of either or.

One more minute. 

Come back to the memory, now imposing an awareness of these are seeds ripening, shape shifting.

And then let go of the memory and become aware of you, your body in your room... and add the awareness - this too, seed ripening, shape shifting.

And come out a little further as you open your eyes. Whatever you see first, impose the recognition of seeds ripening, shape shifting, and nothing but.

So whenever you're ready. 

What’s the difference between imagined and real?

[1:55:35]

What's the difference between an imagined mental image and a real mental image? Let me rephrase it first. What's the difference between the mental image of a thing we imagine and the mental image of a thing that's real? Yeah, Natasha says there's no difference. And you're right, there's no difference, but if we sit into meditation and imagine we have a body made of light, does that mean we have a body made of light because it's no different than the mental image of my real body which is made of flesh and blood? So there has to be some functional difference or must be some belief that there's a functional difference between a mental image that's imagined and a mental image that we call real, but why is that the case? Because they are both only mental images ripening. So it should be the case that we could have ripening an imagined perception to be as real as a real perception, but to get there we would have to change our definition of real and change our definition of imagined, wouldn't we, because just to use the words real versus imagined, we are making a distinction between these two different results. 

But now in Mind Only school they teach us that there are those three attributes. Buddha says, “I'm sorry, did you misunderstand when I said all of those things I taught, they have no nature? Did you misunderstand? I'm so sorry. What I meant was there are things that are powered by other things - changing things that have their own causes and conditions, they just have no nature of their own. They're not self-existent because they depend upon the power of other things for their existence and what they do. Changing, changing, changing. And then there's the attribute called constructs, KUNTAK, where the being who's perceiving something is actually thinking they're contacting that other powered thing, but in fact they are giving that other powered thing its identity and its function and its qualities by taking information and giving it those qualities. And this thing called the construct that the mind of the experiencer comes up with and lays on the object, that construct is complete, it's whole, it actually is not a changing thing the way the thing that it gets put onto is changing. The construct is made by the mind and technically that person, that subject side, whose mind is making the construct, they're actually interacting with their construct, not with the other powered thing. They never actually get to the other powered thing because we're always interacting with these constructs. 

Now, our mental constructs, they can come up with things that exist and they can come up with things that don't exist. This is slippery. Meaning our construct can ripen as some imagined thing and included in the construct is, “oh, that's an imagined thing.” Geshehla's example, I remember - think of a 50 ton tomato on the roof of your house. That's a construct. You just had some mental image of this humongous tomato up on a building. Ridiculous, right? In our reality, there's no such thing, but we can have a mental image of it. But think of an actual tomato on the roof of your house. Different mental image. And with that mental image might be, if I were to say, are you sure there's not a tomato on the roof of your house? We would say, I need to go up and look. Whereas with the 50 ton one, we go, no, I know it's not there. So the function of a construct that's imagined and the function of a construct that we say is real is different. Our reaction to them are different, but are they different? They're both constructs. They both, neither the 50 ton tomato nor the little cherry tomato, have any reality other than our construct of them. 

Why does one work and the other one doesn't? How is that useful to us? Do they all not work or do they all work? Anytime we have an experience, it's a ripening result of some way we planted it. So whether our ripening experience is ‘egads, 50 ton tomato on the roof of my house’, ‘not really’, or ‘cherry tomato on the roof of my house’, ‘oh really?’, how we respond to it is the power that we bring to our understanding of our experience as a mental image. That our experiences as mental images makes things real, whether they are imaginary or real real, right? Everything has always been projected reality and that is reality. And those things that we thought were real because they were in-them from-them, there has never been such a thing. So we need to change our definition of real or quit using the word. And every time I say that, I turn around and I'm giving a class where I'm saying “really” all over the place because it's so hard, it's so hard to make this distinction. 

So then apply that construct “imagined thing”, construct “real thing”, both constructs either way to the mouse and the leaf. And then apply it to my Lama and see how it helps us to understand that however we are perceiving them at the moment, they are always an object towards which we plant our seeds. And if we want our seeds to be planted as powerfully as possible, then we decide that no matter how I perceive them, I will respond to them as if I had seen them as a perfect holy being. And we learned - do that with one with whom it seems to come easy, it can be your sutra teacher at start and then it grows. You meet somebody else and then maybe they're the one for a while. And we're looking for the ‘the one’, but there's no such ‘the one’ other than what our seeds are ripening. So our seeds will someday ripen a ‘the one’ for Lama, for relationship, for anything, but only because we've planted the seeds for that special being. And we plant the seeds for the special being by behaving towards somebody as if they're a special being, even if we don't see them that way. And see how dangerous that is - “Well, wait, this being I'm planting my seeds as a holy one, they beat me regularly.” Yeah, no, that's not right. Run away fast. It doesn't necessarily mean the theory is wrong, no, it means we're not quite ready probably because if we complain that they beat us regularly, it means we're not understanding. Could we be in a position where they beat us regularly and we enjoy every minute of it? Well then we wouldn't call it being beat up, would we? Because of the emptiness of things. It's really dangerous, this idea is I will respond to them according to how I want them to be. It's dangerous until we really understand. So you don't just turn it on to anybody at first until your seeds are so good that you want to. But we have one being and we work with that one carefully. Which Lama says that is why we can't let ourselves think of our Lamas as ordinary, no matter what mistakes they make, no matter how they hurt our feelings, no matter what. When we've made this determination, they're the one that I'm going to work with to see as the angel, we want to be sure to tow the line. If we stop towing the line, will they ditch us? No, absolutely not. But our own mind ditches us, makes it harder and harder. 

Okay, that wasn't too long extra. So Lama Christie wants us to do that meditation where you logically review to yourself why your Lama is a Buddha. And then this second one, which is exploring the difference between what we call imagined and what we call real, or what we call memory versus what we call current real. Somehow use some tool that you like to investigate how these mental images ripening can still be mental images ripening when it's a mouse and then a leaf. When it's Lama Angel / Lama Jerk. When it’s “I remember them doing that to me, it must have happened that way” / “Oh, maybe it didn't.” That spiritual revisionism can be really helpful. So however you want to use that second part of the meditation, explore it. 

So remember that person we wanted to be able to help at the beginning of class. We have set in motion the end of their suffering and that's a great, 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 Lama being. See how happy they are with you. Feel your gratitude to them, your devotion to them. Ask them to please, please stay close, 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 our hearts. 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 every existing being. I forgot to share it with everyone we love, that's in every existing being. See them all filled with loving kindness, filled with wisdom. And may it be so.