Bok Jinpa 4

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All right, welcome back. We are Bok Jinpa course 4, class 1, April 22, 2026. Thank you for being here. Let's gather our minds here as we usually do. Please bring your attention to your breath until you hear from me again.

Opening

Now bring to mind that being who for you is a manifestation of ultimate love, ultimate compassion, ultimate wisdom, and see them there with you. They are gazing at you with their unconditional love for you, smiling at you with their holy great compassion. Their wisdom radiates from them, that beautiful golden glow encompassing you in its light.

And then we hear them say,

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

Feel how much you would like to be able to help them. Recognize how the worldly ways we try fall 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. Learning about 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 a strong intention, we turn our minds back to our 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 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 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 fully awaken for the benefit of every single other.

The antidote for suffering

[6:57]

I'm going to talk a little bit before we do our first meditation. Let's recall why we are here, why we are studying, is because we recognized those three kinds of sufferings. The DUKNGEL GYI DUKNGEL, suffering of suffering. What's the other one? I have it written down. GYURWAY DUKNGEL, the suffering of change. And then the KYAPPA DUJE KYI DUKNGEL, pervasive suffering. Our tradition points out that other traditions, meaning non-Buddhist traditions, they recognize the suffering of suffering and want to be able to stop it or get out of it, and they recognize the suffering of change to some extent and want to get out of it. But what makes one a Buddhist is to reach this awareness of this pervasive suffering, this underlying moment-to-moment circumstance that we have in which we have absolutely no control over anything that's going on around us. So it's like, that's not how we heard pervasive suffering before. But when we keep digging deeper into pervasive suffering, my own experience is it just reveals itself on more and more subtle levels. Pervasive really does mean pervasive at every level. And when we recognize that this state that we're in is being in this total uncontrol, it's like everything is actually happening around us randomly without any… like we think we have control and we don't. And when we recognize we don't, it's scary. And if we have enough seeds, goodness, to recognize, oh my gosh, that underlies every kind of other distress, that's the one I need to be able to pin down and stop perpetuating in order to help anybody, even in a worldly way, technically. When we reach that level of seriousness about our wish to stop suffering, our tradition says, that's what makes you Buddhist, if you care about being Buddhist or not. Whether you formally became Buddhist and proudly say, “I'm a Buddhist”, or we live according to karma and emptiness, in which case, whether we've taken formal Buddhist refuge or not. I make the distinction, I'm a Buddhist with a big B, capital B, or I'm a Buddhist with a little b. Really, what's more important to me is to be the Buddhist with the little b, meaning I'm trying to live according to what I'm learning, is a functional explanation of where suffering comes from and how to stop it.

So there's a reason why we experience this total non-control of anything, even especially when we think we're in control. It's because we have this, we have what's called DAK DZIN. We've seen the word DAK DZIN. It means self-holding or self-grasping, and it does mean to hold to oneself. But as a belief system, this phrase is explaining how it is that we grasp to selves in everything, not just conscious beings, not just myself. Our DAK DZIN state of mind believes this pen has a self-nature, it has some identity of being a pen in it. It's the in-it, from-it idea, is what DAK DZIN means. A self of something, an object, another person, a me, a thought, any interaction that we have, we automatically are colored with this state of mind DAK DZIN. We're holding those things as having their identity in them. And because of that, that makes our interactions with the things and with the other beings that are also interacting with those things, it causes us to be selfish in our interactions. If the object's identity is in it, its qualities are in it, its pleasure that I get from it is coming from it, its displeasure I get from it is coming from it, then that means I need to do what I can to get it if it's the source of my pleasure, and do what I can to push it away if it's the source of my displeasure. And if there's somebody in the way of my getting it for my pleasure, I push them away to get it for me. That's human behavior. We learn how to do it skillfully as we're growing up, and we're supposed to do that. If we were someone who just gave everything that we wanted away, people would be like, what's with you? We would have been pushed away probably very early in our upbringing. “I mean, this one's just nuts. You can't rely on her for anything. You give her something, she's going to give it away to somebody else. I wanted you to have it, you to use it”, right? It would be crazy. But we don't do that because we have this coloring to every experience that no, the object holds my pleasure or my displeasure, and that colors our behavior choices and so it colors our morality. We'll get back to that in a minute.

That selfishness is what perpetuates our suffering. But there's an antidote to that suffering, there's an antidote to that selfishness. There's an antidote to that state of mind that pushes the selfishness that pushes the perpetuating the suffering, and if we can cultivate that antidote, we can stop the cycle. The antidote is to TU SOM GOM, right? Our learning, contemplating, and meditating. And then technically, of those three, the actual antidote to the DAK DZIN state of mind is the GOM, the meditation, the using meditation to reach that depth of concentration which can trigger the direct perception of the fact that there's no such thing as those DAK DZINs that we believe is in everything, including ourselves. The direct antidote to our DAK DZIN is perceiving emptiness directly. And we get little pieces of that direct antidote with every deep enough state of meditation in which we turn that concentrating mind onto the no self-nature of the object of meditation and get some level of intellectual glimpse that we then hold with a fixation meditation during which, you'd have to say, seeds are being planted with less DAK DZIN, and we come out of meditation in a certain way. And we're chipping away at those seeds of DAK DZIN, the belief in self-existence, the belief in things having their own natures. We're chipping away at that. That allows our behavior changes, our ability to choose our behavior differently. And that feeds our study and contemplation, which feeds our deepening meditation, which feeds our ability to get closer to the direct perception. We get this upward spiral going until we do finally antidote that belief in self-existence, but having antidoted the belief doesn't mean we've damaged all the previous seeds that are colored by it. And so, as we know, coming out of our direct perception we go back to perceiving our world in that same old way. But now we don't have the belief that it's correct so we're not automatically replanting the misunderstanding, we're finally burning it off with every perception. And then we use our morality, grow it deeper to move ourselves towards the end of all those seeds' ability to ripen into mental afflictions that were propelled by our belief in things’ self-nature until we are at that level where there's no more personal suffering, no more mental afflictions or seeds for more, but not yet having cleared the obstacles to omniscience so we still have things to do past 8th bodhisattva bhumi, you know the story.

[19:54] 

So Master Kamalashila, like we're towards the end of this Steps of Meditation text that we're reading from. If you recall, at the beginning he said we need to cultivate compassion as our motivation. We want to grow our compassion from plain old compassion, which is great, to great compassion which is that compassion that understands that the person's suffering is coming from seeds from their own behavior, and understands that their suffering is coming from seeds from my own behavior so that my compassion takes on a personal responsibility component. Because it's one thing to compassionately teach them to change their seeds, which we'll do, but it's more important actually for us to change our seeds to see them with suffering seeds. And it takes great compassion for them to change our own behavior. It doesn't mean turn your compassion on to you, it means include you in this great compassion that we're growing. So we start out recognizing suffering so we can grow our compassion. We add to that our intellectual study of dependent origination and the empty nature of things so that we can see the connection between our behavior and our suffering. And we work with our behavior towards others in order to grow the goodness that will help our efforts to meditate more deeply ripen as progress because we need goodness to see our meditation go deeper and deeper and deeper. That's a good result; it will come from kindness seeds.

Master Kamalashila brought us along in his explanation and then he explained that each time we… so we're cultivating our ability to get to the stage of meditation called ‘stillness’ on any object, and then we take our stillness level meditation on that object and at some point we apply ourselves to an analytical meditation on that object to come to the conclusion of its no self-nature at whatever level we can reach. And then we do a fixation meditation on that aha that we reached of the objects’ no self-nature. That's the vision side. So we use our stillness platform to grow a glimpse into the vision. Our stillness platform is holding us in that aha, and then something will shift, whether it's our timer going off or our inner timer going off, something will shift us out of that fixation meditation on the empty nature of our object at whatever level. 

And then Master Kamalashila reminds us as you're coming out of that, before you open your eyes, the next thing we want to train ourselves to do is to recognize that whatever is arising next and next and next is deceptive reality. It's odd that they use the term ‘deceptive reality’, not ‘dependent origination’, but it means the same thing, doesn't it? We call it deceptive reality because we're not perceiving it as coming out of our seeds. If we are perceiving it as coming out of our seeds, when that is actually happening, which will only be at that direct experience of CHU CHOK before we see emptiness directly, and then it won't be again until we… I mean, it will happen again, but it won't happen in a sustained way until we're at 8th level bodhisattva. I got myself distracted.

So we come out reminding ourselves that everything that now has started coming up again, appearing things, are going to be coming to me and I know that they are all deceptive reality. They're going to look like their identities are in them, but I'm telling myself right now they aren't that way. They are there, they will be there, but not with their identities in them [which is] the way they look. I'm reminding myself of that while I'm still in my deep stillness meditation. That doesn't sound so still, but it's still in relation to the original object.

So say your object is your holy Lama, and then you move into your concept or hopefully direct experience of the emptiness of the Lama. Then your mind stirs out of that and there's the Lama again. “Oh, my deceptive reality Lama.” Then we'll come down further and further and further until we're back into doing our dedication and opening our eyes, and then we want to do the same thing. “All of this, deceptive reality.” But then our training requires that we check carefully what's our gut reaction to when we say, “Oh, deceptive reality.” Is there a part of our mind that still goes, “Oh, so none of it's real”? I have to admit, I still feel that when I say “deceptive reality”, all of a sudden things feel less real. When I say, “Oh, all of them projections”, suddenly they feel less real. When, if I had it right, to say “projection” would make them more real. To say, “Oh, deceptive reality”, it would be like, oh, I know exactly how these work. So we're trying to get there, to this so clear on what we mean by those words. Why don't just change the words? Make up a new word that has no meaning at all, except the one you give it. “What I mean by Lama is nothing but my karma.” But it's like, oh, even that explanation makes me go “less real.” Do you see? It's like we can't fool ourselves. We have the seeds to believe that real means in-it from-it, and anything not in-it from-it is therefore not real, and that's pervasive suffering.

So each time we go into our meditation and come back out, Master Kamalashila says, remind yourself, deceptive reality, deceptive reality, deceptive reality. We're going to go on to explore how it is that until we are experiencing emptiness directly, we are having a state of stillness and vision that's deceptive. Our intellectual understanding of emptiness until it's direct is still deceptive. Do you see? I mean, technically, if by deceptive it means “I think it's not my seeds ripening, but it is”, even our direct perception of emptiness until we've had it is deceptive because the way we're thinking of it is somehow existing independent of my projections. “How can I project something so vast that I've never given to somebody before?” You know, it's not possible then, except that seeds grow, thank goodness.

He's saying, [if] you want to cultivate this experience [then] grow your compassion, grow your stillness, grow your morality, meditate conscientiously to reach stillness, use your stillness quality of mind to investigate the DAK DZIN, look for the self-nature in the object of your meditation, find the highest level of ‘no such thing’ you can get, fixate on that. And when you start to come out of it, remind yourself “projections and nothing but, deceptive reality and nothing but”, as you come down, down, down, down. Then he says, by the time you get back to your eyes open and ready to get off your meditation cushion, he says your compassion will be all that much bigger. So he's making this connection between the compassion that we start out with and the fact that every experience of a stillness, wisdom, fixation, at whatever level, will increase our power. It'll increase the understanding of where others’ suffering comes from such that we can't help but have compassion coming out of those meditations.

We make the distinction between love, like “I want to be the source of others happiness”, and compassion, “I want to be the source of the end of their suffering.” They're really saying, when you come down out of these glimpses into emptiness and deceptive reality, it'll get so clear that all suffering is a result of my own personal mistake. And our compassion becomes, “I have to stop my mistake for you, for everybody else.” In my own working with all of this, it's like you can't really separate compassion from love because you're getting these glimpses of the truth. I want to say that's true for everybody, but it's not true for everybody deceptively, but they're going to figure out someday where their suffering comes from. So you get to this place where you're recognizing, oh my gosh, everybody will someday get to this depth of aha where they see that they are actually capable of ending the suffering of every being in their world. And then as you're coming out of that, it's like, you just want to give it away, and so that's love.

The compassion is: I need to stop my seeds that are making their suffering. And the love is: I want everybody to know this. Of course, if you could just take it and pour it into somebody's head or put it as a tincture in their coffee, we do it in a minute. But if that worked, Buddhas would have done it for me. Maybe they did, but it just didn't work for me. But that meant I couldn't do it for anybody else either. We have to change us.

So there's this deep level that compassion gets to where our compassion for their suffering starts with our own seeds, our own seed changing behavior. And then as a result of that, we want to crank up the juice on our behavior towards others, on our level of morality. Maybe we're already so careful at not hurting anybody's feelings to the best of our ability, but every now and then, out comes something. We still have seeds inside of that original selfishness. We can stuff it and behave really, really unselfishly and then have resentment about it but then when we get pushed too far, that resentment takes over and out comes a goof. It happens. We know what to do, four powers.

Master Kamalashila is at the end of his book saying, when you come out of these deep meditations, go back to your understanding of deceptive reality which is getting keener and keener. It will grow your compassion and your compassion will grow your morality into greater subtleness. What morality? We are studying the Mahayana. So it's not just the morality of not killing, not stealing. It's the morality of the perfection of giving, sharing, sharing material things, sharing protection, sharing love, sharing wisdom, sharing knowledge, just sharing ourselves.

The perfection of morality, really avoiding harming, gathering goodness, doing both to help all beings reach their Buddhahood. The practice of not getting angry, which goes so much deeper than just those words. And then having a good time doing all of it. All of it contributing to the ability to meditate single-pointedly and using that to increase the depth of our intellectual understanding of no self-nature, growing our seeds for seeing it directly. In which case we don't stop, we continue the cycle. Because we again come out with greater love, greater compassion. And then we do it again and again and again. Not the direct perception necessarily, until later.

How our five heaps do not exist

Master Kamalashila goes on to describe what it is to be a bodhisattva master. He says… well, he quotes from a sutra, meaning a Buddha's teaching, called Cloud of Jewels, where Buddha is talking about mastering DAK ME. DAK ME is the no self, the no self-natures to things, which is the opposite of the DAK DZIN. The DAK DZIN is the self grasping, but not just meaning my self grasping, grasping to a self in everything, everybody. DAK ME is this knowing that none of those things have the DAK DZIN that I thought they did. It really shows us that they never had the DAK DZIN, they never had the self-nature. It was me having the belief in their self-nature, and that's what the DAK ME reveals to us. Not just that the pen doesn't have a self-nature, but that it was my mind putting the self-nature on the pen all along that made the pen have a self-nature because it never did have a self-nature.

The sutra describes this bodhisattva who becomes a master is one who has come to understand that their form is completely empty of inherent existence, and their feeling is completely empty of inherent existence, and their discriminating between things is free of any inherent existence, and all their other factors. Is this sounding familiar? And all the different consciousnesses that we possess are empty of any inherent existence.

It's so interesting. Some of us are studying ACI course 12 and we're on this part, investigating the five heaps. And then some of us are studying Arya Nagarjuna's Letter to a King and we just read the same part. And here it is in Bok Jinpa. I think it's a message for me about investigating those heaps again. I've done it before, I've done it a lot. I was mistakenly thinking I was done with that. “Just teach it to other people, you don't have to do it yourself” until I get this message. Huh, guess what, Sarahni? Okay, so thank you for the opportunity for that.

That practice really can be like a career practice. We can come to a conclusion probably pretty quickly about the heap of form having no self-nature. Feeling, discriminating, those can take a little bit longer. Heap of consciousness, they say that one's pretty easy. I don't find that one so easy at all. But then they say the heap of all-the-other-factors, if you take all the other factors one by one and don't go on to the next one until you've got a really good handle on the no self-nature of the jealousy-all-the-other-factor, it could take us quite a while before we get to the next one we want to work on. Because really in all-the-other-factors level is all of our mental afflictions. They say there's 46 or 52 mental functions in all the other factors. But then they also say there's what, 84,000 mental afflictions. And guess where those are? In our all-the-other-factors that make us up. So if we had to go one by one, it would take quite a while. So we'd want to get good at it or figure out how to do them in bunches, which is what our vows help us do actually.

In your reading, you'll see Master Kamalashila, he's saying we want to use these objects of meditation, the five heaps, to investigate the self we believe is there to see if we can find it to come to the conclusion that it can't be there and end up with this aha that there is no body, there are no feelings, there is no ability to discriminate between things, there are none of those other factors that make you up, there is no awareness. Sounds like Heart Sutra. And it is like Heart Sutra because that message in Heart Sutra is pointing out to us all the different factors of our experience that we believe have some nature in them. And the point of Middle Way is to find that middle ground where they don't exist the way we thought they did, but they don't not exist at all, and so therefore, how is it that they do exist, and then why do they exist in that way, to show us the connection between our behavior through which we plant the seeds that ripen into our experience, how our behavior is the tool for perpetuating suffering, and our behavior is the tool for stopping perpetuating that suffering. 

I have a story about the Heart Sutra that pertains Bok Jinpa, and that is in the courses before Lama Christie gave us an assignment besides our meditation and keeping our book, we had to do a paragraph of hypertexting where you take each letter of the Tibetan text and you put the English letter and you come up with the word and then you give the word a meaning. It was tedious and for some of us, David and I, it was like, “argh”, we had to force ourselves to do that. Then we did it and at the end of course 3, Lama Christie said, you're welcome to write a review of my course so I can teach better next time. David was brave enough to say, “I really dislike hypertexting. Can't we do something else like memorizing a text or something? Can't we do something else?” He never thought that she would... Anyway, so first class, Lama Christie said, “I came to realize that some of you don't like hypertexting.” And David tells this story, he says she looked right at him. She said, “so I decided that instead of hypertexting, we should memorize the Heart Sutra.” David's story is, “all right [excitedly]”, because he'd memorized it already in English. She goes, “right, so everybody's going to memorize the Heart Sutra, this term”, she paused, looked at him again and said, “in Tibetan.” And he goes, augh! And, you know, like those of us who knew turned to him, “yeah, thanks, David”, but in the end, it was really good for us. She gave us the option of memorizing it in Tibetan or Sanskrit. And then partway through, we had the opportunity to shift to Chinese, which the Chinese version of the Heart Sutra is much shorter than the Tibetan version. And there was something else I was doing that had to do with China and Chinese stuff so I opted to shift over to the Chinese version, which I did memorize. Then a few terms later, I was asked to go to Singapore for something. While I was there, they said, would you teach us the Heart Sutra? So, okay, great. So I said, you know, I was so proud of myself. “May I recite to you the Heart Sutra in Chinese because I know it”. [They replied,] “Yes, yes.” And so I'm saying it, and they're nodding and smiling and nodding and smiling. At the end, I said, “so, did you understand what I said?” And they go [shaking their heads], with the same smile. No. I thought I had that accent matched so perfectly, I was so proud of myself. They didn't understand it at all. I love to tell that story of myself. But I quit trying to memorize… no, that's not true, I memorized other things in other languages still, but… telling on myself. 

Anyway, I have the Heart Sutra in Tibetan, I have it in Chinese, and I have it in Sanskrit. I could get it in Spanish if I needed to. And somewhere it's probably in Russian already. So if anybody wants to challenge themself to memorize the Heart Sutra in some new language, reach out, I'll give you what you need to do that. It's an extraordinary seed planting opportunity that gives us rapid seed plant result recognition seeds to put something new into our mind that we can then pull out and say to somebody else. So like if you do want to assign that to yourself and you want somebody to listen to you, I'd be happy to be your mirror each week to hear you say, DIKE DAKKI TUPAY DU CHIK NA... We did it. But again, I don't know what I'm saying as I say it. I know the Heart Sutra in English, but when I say it in Tibetan, I can't think of it in English, I'm just being a parrot. So don't be like me. If you're going to do it, learn it, know what you're saying. And it's worth it, it really is, it does something major to our minds. Okay.

Investigating the heap of form

[49:37]

So Kamalashila is giving us as a meditation object, the heap of form. Typically we think of the heap of form means my body. But the heap of form really is referring to the process through which we give identities to any material thing. The heap of my form, I would say it ends at my body, but technically my heap of form includes this thing that I'm calling a cup, because it's part of my mind's ripening of my material world, and that's the heap of form.

One way to begin to analyze the heap of form is to do it with some familiar outer object that we believe has its identity in it. Then we go looking for what is it about the thing that makes us see it as the thing and we go checking these different factors that we believe is making us see it the way that we do. When we get familiar with doing that with cups and cars and pencils and pens, we can do it with other people as things. That gets a little bit more slippery because they're the people with their physical body, which is part of my heap of form, but they also have the consciousness that I seem to be aware of them having, and that would not be part of their heap of form. But what they're doing, what their physical body is doing, is that part of their heap of form or is that part of the heap of something else? It gets a little bit slippery.

Then we can do the same thing with our own thing we call my heap of form. And then that'll take us into an investigation of where does it actually end and the heap of something else's form start? Like when I'm holding a cup, is all of a sudden it part of my heap of form? Whereas when I'm not holding the cup, it's not part of my heap of form until I see it and then is it part of my heap of form? Where does my heap of form stop and some other heap of form start? Because if they have their own identities as heaps of form, we should be able to find where that one ends and this one starts. It seems very clear where it ends. But when we really go trying to find it, we'll find in our meditation that it's not so clear after all. Because there isn't.

So we know the punchline that when we experience anything, what's actually happening is that our sensory consciousness is picking up information, and then our mental consciousness related to that sensory awareness is taking that information and that's where the identity of the object gets put together. Then that mental picture colors our experience of the object and it happens so quickly that we miss it. We think we're experiencing the pen until we go really checking, and then we'll recognize that I can't actually experience the whole pen at one time. My eyes can only see a part at a time, my tactile can only be aware of a part at a time, but then my mind comes up with this whole idea ‘pen’, and I interact with a whole pen, not with the parts of the pen. Yet we showed ourselves that from the object itself, there's only information apparently coming from it. But as we dig deeper, we can show ourselves that even when I'm focusing on the part here [tip of pen], there isn't a whole part that I'm experiencing without my mind saying that's the whole tip. My actual experience can only be these little bits that get put together into the identity. So where is the identity if it's not in the object? If the whole identity is my mental idea, is the identity of the object in my head? Is my mind stuck in my head? It feels like it, but it can't be because the pen's not in my head. The pen's in my hand, but it's not in my hand in the way my misunderstanding believes it's in my hand, so it can be experience ‘pen in my hand’.

Then we think, well, the information must be there first and then my mind comes up with the identity of it and then the identity goes onto the object, right? That's how Geshehla explains it to us. At a certain level of understanding, that's true, and to experience it that way, to see the luminous image coming down to make the object that will be the precursor to seeing that nothing exists in any other way than that. But then when we even investigate that, we'll be asking, well, what comes first, the data or the idea of the data? What comes first, the car or the idea of car? This whole car is actually an idea. The car, a car, means a vehicle of travel, a particular kind of vehicle of travel. There's nothing in each part of that vehicle of travel that makes it vehicle of travel without the idea. But does the idea come after the parts, or does the idea come before the parts? Even worldly creation of a car, there had to be an idea first and then somebody mechanical put things together to try to match their idea. Ideas are these nebulous things that seem very unreal. But do you drive an idea of a car, or do you drive a car? Technically, we drive the idea of a car, because there is no car without that idea of the car. Yet when I hear my mind say that, it's like, “no, no, my idea of a car is in here [my head], the car is out in the carport.” And no, it's really the other way around. Well, not completely, because the car in the carport is not in... well, it is. Even the car in the carport is in my thinking right now, my idea right now. Someone will often say, “no, that can't be true, because you can get in your car and drive it, it works. You can't get in an idea and drive it so it can't be true that things are ideas and not real.” Kamalashila, Arya Nagarjuna, all those guys, they'll say, you know, “I appreciate your statement. It's not actually an objection, it's proof of what I'm saying. There is no car that's not an idea. So there's no car you're driving that's not an idea. Because it's an idea, it works.” Because it's nothing but an idea, we can get in the car and drive it somewhere and it's all the mental projection. It's all the seed ripening belief, and there it is. It works. 

Our old belief, car in-it from-it, have we ever driven such a thing? No, because there's no such thing. Do we think we've driven those? Absolutely. “Don't you dare drive mine without permission. If you do, take good care of it because it's mine.” We’re forced to think that way. It's slippery. 

Okay. So Lama Christie took us through a little sit in which we investigated a material object in our mind's eye to see if we could identify our experiencing the data versus the object. Which even as I say that it's like, what data would that be? But let's find it first and then we'll check to see what happens to it.

So let's take a little break and get refreshed because it's already seven o'clock and then we'll sit.

Meditation: Experiencing data versus the object

[1:04:25]

So set your body, you know how.

Then bring your attention to your breath. Use that object to turn on your focus, your clarity, your intensity.

We'll do an exploration in our mind's eye. We can also do with our eyes opened using an object once we learn how.

So bring to your mind's eye, a car, a specific car.

I know that that car that you have in your mind's eye is just a car in your mind's eye. But pretend that you are looking at a car outside your mind's eye, which I'm going to try and show you that there's no such thing. But with this car in your mind's eye, see if you can become aware of how your mind's eye is looking at that car. It is, in fact, scanning different areas of that object, picking up different details.

Show yourself all the different parts of this car.

It has parts we can't even see, but somehow we know are there.

Now go back to seeing the whole car at once.

Can you see the whole car at once?

Can you see both sides of it?

Can you see its underneath when you're looking at one side?

Show yourself what parts of the car you are seeing when we thought we were seeing the whole car.

From your given perspective, do you actually get enough information to have a whole car there? 

Now add to your visual image where that car is parked.

What are its surroundings?

Then recognize, that you can recognize where the car stops and the surrounding begins.

How is that determination happening?

Imagine you are just seeing colors and shapes. The color and shape called the hood of the car, the color and shape called the wall behind it.

What makes this distinction between that color, that line of shape, that other color?

We can come to see that it's our own awareness, our own mind, determining that there's an edge of the car. 

That that black round is tires, that to see two of them means there's four of them that I can't even see, all four at once.

Why are we seeing car out of colors and shapes?

Something is forcing our mind to do what it's doing.

And it works.

We have some need, that need pushes forth an idea. That idea pushes forth the colors and shapes’ identity of the needed thing.

But now shift back to how we normally perceive a car as out there on its own, independent of our mind putting an idea onto colors and shapes.

Probably the old way still seems more real, more comfortable.

But that means it's a fixed object. Complete, whole, independent of you sitting there, waiting for you to come interact with it.

If it's a fixed, whole, independent object, how could my interacting with it happen?

If it has its own identity, independent of my experience of it, I cannot drive it.

It cannot be fixed.

Watch your mind. 

Struggle.

The car that is your idea ‘car’, your experience ‘car’, is the real one.

An object independent of our experience of it is impossible.

So now let go of that. Think through that investigation to some glimpse perhaps you got. And dedicate that to using it to help grow kinder behavior, to help contribute to the end of all suffering.

And then bring yourself back up to your awareness of your body in your room.

When you're ready, take a stretch.

The three extraordinary trainings as a Mahayanist

[1:21:49]

Master Kamalashila is again pointing out that as we come out of an emptiness meditation and we're reminding ourselves of dependent origination and our sense of personal responsibility and so compassion, or maybe the other way around, our compassion and so personal responsibility, grow. Then our next urge is to serve, to help, to plant those seeds of kindness through which we can burn off our mistaken view and plant seeds for highest worldview in everyone.

1. The extraordinary training of morality

He says, your focus then will naturally be on your behavior, the extraordinary training of morality, which we've learned at the beginning is the foundation for the extraordinary training of concentration, reaching stillness. Which is the foundation for the extraordinary training in wisdom which is cultivating our direct perception. From which our extraordinary training of morality goes to more subtle levels, and our meditative concentration, I don't know that it goes to subtle levels, but we continue to empower it in order to continue to use our wisdom to color our experiences of morality. So these three, it's not like we finally finish them and leave them. They are so intertwined, they make up this upward spiral. 

Master Kamalashila makes the distinction in these three extraordinary trainings… of the three extraordinary trainings that are used, trained in, by those who are growing their bodhichitta, and those who aren't. It's a great debate, because if what you mean by bodhichitta is reaching enlightenment, and what you mean by reaching enlightenment is reaching nirvana, then you are growing your bodhichitta as you study your sutra and your Wheel of Life and you cultivate your avoiding harming others. So it's not fair to say only Mahayanas have bodhichitta. But Mahayanists define bodhichitta as the wish to reach total enlightenment for the sake of all sentient beings. When we have those two bigs, total enlightenment and all sentient beings, when we have that coloring our mind as we do our efforts in morality and concentration and wisdom, that motivation is included in the seeds that we're planting when we do it. And so the similar behaviors, avoiding killing, done with Mahayana bodhichitta, has a different effect on our mind than avoiding killing done in order to close the door to lesser birth or in order to reach nirvana, believing that that's the extent of what you could achieve in this lifetime. So not to be disrespected, because maybe we're not really even at the level where we really believe we could go to a lower rebirth and so we're going through the motions, but not really imbued with this deep, deep, deep need to change myself. Only we know at what level we're at at any given day, right? Some days our bodhichitta is hot and it's on, and other days, not so much. It's not like we get… I mean, eventually we get over a platform, but don't be surprised if something happens and you're thinking you're not making any progress. It won't last, don't worry.

The point here is that if we're at a lesser capacity practice of our three trainings, they are still beneficial, they are still going to move us along our path, but they aren't going to have the effect that they will have when we're doing the three extraordinary trainings from a bodhisattva wish because of the quality of the effect on our mind of the bodhisattva wish. That means our morality that we're focusing on is the six perfections, which includes the other morality as well in our morality of moral discipline. But it's more than those moralities to also be working on what's called the morality of the perfection of giving, the morality of not getting angry, the morality of having a good time doing our virtues. It's not that just the perfection of morality is the only place morality comes in. So he's pointing out that for the three trainings, our level of morality that we're working on is at this level of the bodhisattva.

2. The extraordinary training of concentration

He says, the extraordinary training in concentration is working our way through those nine stages of meditation to reach the effortless single-pointedness. So that's level nine, and then beyond that, to attain the stillness, which is the single-pointed concentration with those SHIN JANGs. That alone isn't necessarily the first level of the form realm platform for seeing emptiness directly; that's a level of further withdrawal of sensory input. But that once we reach that level of stillness, there are other levels you can go to, but they aren't any more beneficial for seeing emptiness directly than reaching first level of the form realm, meaning while we're there, we're planting seeds that if one of those seeds ripens at the moment of death would put us into a rebirth in the first level of the form realm. So that's not why we're doing it either, but it is the level of sufficient withdrawal from outer sensory input that we are able to ride our awareness into the no self-nature of our object without being distracted by some sensation from our body, some outside sound, some thought that pushes us out.

He says that effort to reach that level of meditative stillness, that's pretty similar, whether you're bodhisattva or not bodhisattva. But again, if we're doing it with a mind that's doing it for the reason of becoming total Buddha, the seed planting is going to ripen differently, taking us towards our Buddhahood.

3. The extraordinary training of wisdom

Then the third, the extraordinary training of wisdom, he points out that we ordinarily think the training in wisdom is about understanding emptiness, emptiness, emptiness until we see it directly. He says, but this extraordinary training of wisdom, it includes the deep, deep understanding that things are impermanent on all those different levels. Yes, everything's going to die or be destroyed. Yes, every experience is shifting moment by moment. There's gross impermanence, there's subtle impermanence, and then there's even a more subtle impermanence than that which is that fact that everything's changing moment by moment by moment is also a seed ripening experience and nothing but. Then the deep realization that things are suffering, things are suffering and the cause of suffering. Geshehla says suffering as a verb and suffering as a noun. We tend to not relate to a beautiful sunset as suffering as a noun. Suffering as a verb, maybe because it goes by and then pretty soon it's drab and “oh man, it was so beautiful there for an instant.” But suffering as a noun means, “whoa, look at that beautiful sunset. What a pain it is, how awful it is.” Come on, we don't do that.

Then another aspect of our wisdom is coming to realize that we think of our body as inherently a clean or pure thing when in fact it is impure. They say body and we think this body and it's like, we know it's got all kinds of ick about it, but come on, it's pretty nice overall. I can tolerate that yuck because overall it's a good thing, I can use it, please hang on a few years more. But then we were saying before, just a tiny little glimpse that where does my this-body stop and some other body start. Technically we can grow this relationship, me and my body, to not stop here [at our skin], to actually include other things, other beings. And Master Shantideva already showed us we already do it with our stuff. “You keep your [?] off my computer. You hurt my computer, it'll be as if you hurt me.” It's so ridiculous. It's just a thing, big deal, it doesn't hurt me. If I pinch you, it doesn't hurt me. And you remember the conclusion from that? We can decide that suffering anywhere is as unacceptable as suffering I actually feel. We make that determination. At what level is something suffering?

Same with this idea of our growing recognition of what I'm holding as pure that's, in fact, impure. Things that I'm holding as good things that are just suffering and more suffering. Not to leave us like, “oh, okay, I give it all up. I'm going to go sit at the base of a tree until I die because there's nothing else to do.” That's wrong conclusion. Because we're understanding that the reason I'm recognizing things are like this is because I misunderstand where everything comes from in the first place. So we have to recognize the mistaken way we're believing in order to recognize that's all coming from seeds, so it doesn't have to be like that. The things I'm blaming for being pure or impure are neither from their own side, so I can create things only pure when I get the goodness to be able to do that. Again, we're not trying to show ourselves, “oh, none of these things exist at all, there is no such thing as purity and impurity.” We're showing ourselves our mistaken view that it takes suffering things as being good things. “Well, there are some good things”. But they're still suffering and that's part of pervasive suffering.

Recognizing impermanence, recognizing suffering, recognizing that we're making the mistake between pure and impure. We've been making mistake at what is pure.

4. Natures or no natures

Then the fourth one is having that belief that things are in them, things have their identities in them, their qualities in them. That's the one we hold to be the wisdom - recognizing we believe they have their identities, but they really don't.

But wisdom, the training in wisdom, extraordinary training in wisdom, includes all four of these - impermanence, suffering, pure versus impure, and then natures or no natures. It takes all of them to get to wisdom, is the thing.

Impermanence, suffering, purity, and nature of the three spheres

So Master Kamalashila says when we are working with these three trainings, in order for them to move us towards our Buddhahood, we want to work with them with KOR SUM. KOR SUM means the three spheres. We want to do our extraordinary training of morality, concentration, and wisdom always with this attitude of understanding whatever we're studying applies to the three spheres. What are the three spheres? The subject side, the object side, and the interaction between. Subject: Sarahni. Object: pen. Interaction between: writing with it, demonstrating something with it.

What does it mean to be aware of the impermanence of each of the three spheres?

What does it mean to be aware of the suffering of each of the three spheres?

What does it mean to be aware of thinking it's pure when it's impure of each of the three spheres?

What does it mean to be thinking of each of the three spheres with their own self-nature in order to grow our wisdom of the three spheres?

Which we know the punchline: the object looks like it has its own identity, but it doesn't, it's coming from my mind.

Me: I think I have an identity separate from the experience of the object, but I don't. Me and me-experiencing-the-object is coming from my mind.

The whatever I'm doing to interact with the pen is coming from my mind.

We know the punchline, but if we really knew the punchline, then the three spheres' impermanence would also come as quickly. The three spheres' suffering nature would also come as quickly. The three spheres' pure or impure would also come as quickly. So maybe we do still have some work to do in our extraordinary training of wisdom that would help us grow our final one which is the no self-nature of each aspect of the three spheres to a deeper level. Maybe we're trying to jump into high school having skipped first, second, and third grade from these other levels.

Again, the most important level of understanding the three spheres is to understand the empty nature of subject, object, and interaction between, because then that means we could, in any activity that we're doing, be perceiving ourselves as Buddha me in Buddha paradise emanating, even as what it looks like to somebody else [is] me doing the dishes. Maybe I just start out imagining that to plant the seeds, and slowly those seeds can grow. If I can continue to do it, even when the object side is yelling at me, and the subject side is not liking it, can I still be aware of the empty nature of what's going on and imagine, “oh, in the emptiness of all of this, this is Buddha paradise, and we are solving all problems of the world right now.” And it's like on the verge of crazy so we don't want to jump there too fast.

So to hold to the three spheres with wisdom means we don't see any aspect of it as self-existent, as having its identity in it. If you remember Diamond Cutter Sutra, there's that part early on where Buddha says bodhisattvas do their acts of giving without seeing, without seeing anything at all. It seems so cryptic until we studied it well with Master Kamalashila, and then it's like, oh, they just don't see any self-existence in any aspect of what they're doing. Then we start to, whoa, what would that be like to be just moving through my world as this empty, constantly shape-shifting something or other? I don't know, you can't even put words to it, but how beautiful it could be to be just shining out as anything anybody needed at any moment, being that. I can't wait for that.

Meditation: Putting data together to come up with the whole

We've got 15 minutes, let's do a KOR SUM experiment meditation, a really simple one. 

[1:44:39] 

So settle yourself in.

Bring your attention to your breath to trigger the turn inside.

Now this time bring to your mind's eye some simple but lovely object. It could be a flower, it could be a friend's face, could be your Lama. Something interesting and attractive, but simple to look at in your mind's eye.

Now, anytime we are experiencing an object in whatever form, there are three things involved. 

There is the object There is the subject, that's your You. And that you is relying upon your eye consciousness, the receiving of the information in order to experience the rose, or the flower, or the object.

So identify these three factors. It sounded like four – me, eye consciousness aware of data, object, and the resultant experience of the object.

Shift between focusing your attention on each one of those separately. Being aware of the eye receiving the information so the mind can make object's identity.

Be aware of the object. But wait, it's not the object without the experience of the object. Before that, there were just the colors and shapes. 

But wait, at the point where I'm recognizing colors and shapes, that's the experience of the object by me-the-subject.

But wait, just thinking that is a different experience of a different object by a different awareness me.

Go back to the original object, start again. Find each piece – object, subject, experience.

And then look at it more subtly.

And then build it back again. Mind getting information, giving an identity, so therefore an experience. 

All the way back up to the original object.

What is it about the object that's making you see it the way that you just showed yourself you see it? Nothing about the object.

What is it about the colors and shapes that our eyes offer that makes the object the object? Nothing.

What is it about our mind that makes our mind take those colors and shapes and make object that we experience? Harder question.

If there's something about our mind that's doing that by volition because we want to, why do we ever put information together and come up with something painful?

Something is happening. But it's not that we have a mind that's choosing to take that information and put onto it ‘me experiencing the object’, and we are having that experience. What does that show us?

We call it karma, but what we mean is ripening results of past imprints made by interactions with others, which shows us that we can create. We do create, just not by wishing. We create by seed planting through what appears to be interactions with what appear to be those other than us.

The interaction between subject and object is the ripening result and where the seed planting happens.

Because nothing has any nature of its own, because our own subject has no nature of its own, our interactions are the field within which we create future interactions.

At any moment, every interaction could be perceived as extraordinary bliss and voidness. 

Now let your mind shift out of that conclusion. And as you feel yourself becoming aware of yourself in your room, recognize how this is the same thing happening, seed ripening information into identities, into me, and remind yourself that when you open your eyes, the first thing you see will be flowing out of your own seeds of kindness. Deceptive reality happening wisely with understanding.

So when you're ready, put yourself back into deceptive reality, knowing it, and then see it.

[2:00:2]

Ta-da. Nice. So Lama Christie asked us to do those two meditations for our time in between classes. They are dependent origination and emptiness, but they were added in a little different way. The KOR SUM, the not self-existent of the three spheres, and then the other one is recognizing how we're putting information together to come up with the whole, and believing the whole was there to begin with. So work with those two if you can.

Dedication

Okay, so remember that being that we wanted to be able to help at the beginning of class. We did some extraordinary goodness on their behalf, and that makes it an even better goodness. And so please be happy with yourself. 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 reliance upon them. Ask them to please, please stay close, to continue to guide you and 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 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.

All right, thank you so much. Questions, anybody? All right, see you next week. Thank you for the opportunity.

All right, welcome back. We are Bok Jinpa Course 4, Class 2. It is April 29th, 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. 

[Usual opening]

[7:39]

Meditation: Tactile sensation of breath

So settle your body in for a short sit. 

When you get the body parked, bring your mind to focus upon your breath at your nostrils, the tip of your nostrils. Get your mind parked at that object. 

We fine-tune our focus. We adjust our clarity. We turn on the intensity, call it fascination or curiosity or whatever works for you. 

Now zoom in closer or deeper on that object of focus until it completely fills the screen of your awareness. 

Now recognize we are focusing on this thing ‘breath’ at this location ‘nostril’. 

Identify what it is you are experiencing. Is it a visual experience somehow of air moving out, moving in? 

If we are deeply involved in that watching the breath and I ask you, “where exactly is that in space?”... 

Did you notice how your mind had to shift in some way to identify a location? 

Now go back to just focusing on breath. 

Now add to what is being focused upon. Add the sensation that's happening at that location as that breath goes out and comes back. 

Tactile sensation. 

Now zoom in on the tactile sensation to the exclusion of the visual. 

Can you experience simply the tactile sensation? 

Now if that tactile sensation was the only information, would you know it as breath? 

Now see if you can go even more deeply into this object we call breath to hear its sound. 

If you can find sound, try to focus fully on sound, dropping the tactile, dropping the visual. 

Is there anything about those sounds that necessarily are sounds of my breath at my nostrils? 

Now let the tactile sensation awareness return. 

And then the visual awareness return.

And then the you-the-watcher return.

And then let go of the meditation. Become aware of you here in your room, in class. 

And dedicate that effort to reaching the direct perception of the appearance of things, and so their no self-nature. 

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

[21:49]

Getting information from our five senses

So last class, Master Kamalashila was talking about exploring the heaps, the different heaps, and helping us to learn this process of what we need to cultivate in order to grow the wisdom with which we traverse our Bodhisattva career. So we were already talking about the heap of form, and for most humans, the heap of form is our own heap of form, right, means we think of our body and the parts of our body, our physical body. And that within that, for a sighted person, apparently our strongest, most automatic relationship that we have with our heap of form is through our visual input of it. And so we tend to always explore the heap of form by way of colors and shapes, and explore how it is that the colors and shapes seem to be what the eyeball picks up and then the eye consciousness assimilates that information in some way. And the eye consciousness actually comes up with the identity of the object, but included in that identity of the object, for a mind still stained with the belief in self-existence, is the belief in the self-existence of that very object. That technically what we've done is just gather information and then something about our experience of that information distinguishes that information from other information to come up with a specific object. And that included in that specific object is not aware that this is the process that's happening and so we believe that that object is in it and presented itself to us in some way, and so therefore we saw the object. 

As we are working on exploring this thing we call our heap of form, the exercise is to go looking for that heap of form that we believe is there in-it from-it to see if we can find that thing. And then we think form is limited to the colors and shapes and of course it's not limited to that because our heap of form is that experience that we have through all of our sensory doors. So our heap of form does include visual objects, auditory objects, but they also include the fragrances, the fragrances through which we identify things, the tastes, and the tactile. So when they put all of those together, those who are keener than me say we have the visual information that's like most of our experience, as long as we have vision, of course. And then tactile tends to be the second most important one because they say we will say as we are exploring whether the objects of my visual consciousness are really there or not, we will try to prove to ourselves that they are really there by saying “look, this visual information can't only be my projection because look, I can touch it.” And our ignorance says proof that it's something out there that I can touch that proves it's not just my mind taking vague information and making a cup because if that's all the thing were, we think, and I reached out to grab it, my hand should go right through it because it's just an idea. So we hold to our heap of form so strongly that even as we explore the visual heap of form to say, “oh, I really can see how I'm just getting indications of color and shape and it's my mind making the thing” when I actually interact with the thing as if that wasn't because I can tactile it. That conclusion I got before, which is, “oh, not enough information from it to make a whole cup” and then that just falls right away as soon as we say, “oh, but look, I can hold it, it's tactile” because we believe so strongly in our material world as something solid in it that it proves to us it is that thing. And somehow we think if I can touch it, hold it, move it, affect it, it must be real. 

So then we also explore this tactile sense. And there are so many different ways to do that. Nagarjuna loves the one where you go, “if this [cup] is here as a solid object, and this [finger] is here as a object, I should be able to find the exact place where this [finger] touches that [cup].” And I believe that I can because not touching, not touching, not touching, ooh [finger touches cup]. Not touching, not touching, not touching, ooh [finger touches cup]. Right? I think I can find it. Not there [finger not touching cup]. There [finger touching cup]. But once I identified the ‘there’, that had to have a first moment, a second moment, a third moment. So which moment was it that I actually touched the thing that was actually there? I won't be able to find it. But then my mind will say, yeah, well, if you can't find it, your finger should never hit it. Wrong conclusion. Why does my finger touch an apparently solid object? What's really going on? Explain it to yourself in the same way we explain the visual object. Eyeball can only pick up color, shape, not even distinguish between this color and shape [blue cup] versus the rest of the color and shape [my body]. To the eyeball, it's all just one screen of undifferentiated color and shape. It's the mind that goes and differentiates. It draws the line around this as a blue water cup and this as my head and this as glasses. That's the mind doing that. So how do we describe that in terms of tactile? And it's like, for me, language starts to fail because I can't say colors and shapes. I can say sensation, and this sensation [touching cup] is different than that sensation [touching skin] is different than this sensation [touching shirt]. And so as I go from here [cup] to here [skin] to here [glasses], the same idea, tactile information that's really undifferentiated in terms of object. And my mind is taking all that information and making it into, “oh, cool, smooth” [describing cup]. But “cool, smooth” isn't enough information, the mind has to go “cool, smooth cup.” But we recognize, well, that can't be coming from the cup because there are all kinds of things that my hand can tell, say, identify as “cool, smooth” and my mind identifies as something completely different than ‘cup’. Lots of things are cool and smooth that aren't cup. So that shows us that there has to be the idea “cup”, the idea “cup made of glass”, the idea “cups made of glass feel like this, cool and smooth”, and “those cups made of glass have solid existence so that they can hold water”. It's like our whole explanation of the idea that arises that makes it such that when certain tactile information is available to the mind, the mind can take that tactile information and wrap its idea onto it or around it and therefore, we can experience a cup, holding a cup. 

Without our idea “glass cup holding water”, would this thing be a glass cup holding water? 

Can I get enough information from just my tactile sensation? No. 

Can I get enough information out of the visual information? No. 

If it had fragrance, could I get enough information out of just the fragrance, or just the sound? No. 

No one of those groups of information is enough to identify the object. We say “no, of course, you need multiple stuff together to give you enough information to make this tactile with this visual to become this blue cup of water”. But if no one of them can give us the right information, how can six different things, or at least five different things, that aren't giving us the right information, how does a bunch of wrong information suddenly add up to the right information? It can't, can it? Something else has got to be going on. It does not mean we don't need eyes to see visual objects. We do. The eyeball is the mechanism through which information is presented. But can there be an outside object that makes the eyeball do that? Our experiential answer to that shows us what level school we're jumping to the conclusion of. If we say the data has got to be out there first and then I pick up the data and my mind makes the reality out of the data, that's a little bit lower than highest school. But highest school doesn't deny there's no data there. They're just saying, you can't really say the data is there first because you never are not having data that's being identified as an item. So it's not something that's happening sequentially, that you could cut it and say “data there” and then I come along and I make the data into the thing. And yet, once the thing is made, there had to be information that the label gets landed onto. So when we're talking about our heap of form, we tend to think, oh, we're just talking about my physical form, my physical body form. And then when we're exploring about the heap of form, we're using all these outer objects. And it really is the case, they say, that any physical form that we experience is actually part of what we mean by our heap of form. So it's one of those sneaky clues that they're giving us in our sutra career for a glimpse into what we're growing into in our ultimate career. And it helps us to be able to work with the development of our bodhicitta in terms of the exchanging self and others practice, which as we work on that more and more deeply, it shifts from exchanging self and others to expanding self to include others. Do you remember that? And it's like this is one of the ways that we can tiptoe into recognizing that our heap of form does not actually stop at our physical body. And not everybody goes, “wow, that's amazing”. I know at first it was like, “well, that's no way that's possible. I'm me. The truck is the truck. They can't be part of me.” And now it just seems like so obvious, but there's little clues along the way. 

How we rely on our material material world to be fixed

So as we are investigating these material parts of ourselves, or parts of our experience, we can investigate and investigate and investigate, and the idea is to come to some kind of question in our mind which is: if all I'm ever getting is undifferentiated information, or minimally differentiated information, and what I'm experiencing is my mind making the definitive object out of information, why? Why does it make blue water glass out of this information, and orange pen out of this information, and my left hand out of this information? Why? What makes it do that? Because I apparently can't do it by wishing it or I'd go [thinking] “blue water glass” and it doesn't work. Or I could go [looking at left hand] “right hand”, but it doesn't work, it's always left hand. Something's forcing me to be aware of things the way I'm aware, even though we've shown ourselves that it can't be the apparent object that's forcing me to experience it the way that I'm experiencing it, because I can't get enough information at one time to have a whole thing. I can only see the front of the cup. You can only see the back of the cup. But then you should argue with me and say, “no, no, I see the front of the cup”, meaning you, because from your side, I'm looking at the back of the cup. And it's kind of funny because I can do both. I can see me in the video seeing what I see as the back of the cup because I see the front. But I know that you're looking at the front, right? It's like, wow, so perfect an example. Do we think we get enough information to identify things? Yes, we do think so, but we can't because we can't ever get all the information that our mind includes in the identity of the object. When our mind makes pen, it makes a pen with a this side and a that side and a clicker and a point and ink inside, and we can't see all of that when we're looking at the object. And in fact, if we slow the whole process down enough, we will come to see that all we see is [little parts of pen]. Our eyeball pops around, getting little bits of information and along the way, the mind goes, oh, pen, orange pen, ink inside, right? The whole story starts ripening. And while that's ripening, the sensory input is still going [looking at various little parts of pen]. And yet, as our mind goes, “oh, pen”, which happens that fast, we think we've got a fixed object. So fixed, in fact, that I can pick it up and I can write with it, which is so ridiculous, because if it's fixed in the way I believe it's fixed, I wouldn't be able to pick it up and write with it, because fixed means fixed. And as soon as something changes, in order to change it, well, it can't be fixed anymore. “But if it's not still fixed as a pen, how come when I pick it up and I start to write, it doesn't just dissolve into a banana or a bicycle? It is fixed.” Wait, how is it fixed? From it in some way? No, my mind's got it fixed. My mind's got it fixed and changing at the same time. Is that nuts? Or is that miraculous? Everything has to be changing, changing, changing, changing, changing. 

And then there's this big debate. Is it changing, changing as in like this [increasing then decreasing]? Or is it changing, changing as in like this [finger snaps]? Because if it's changing, changing like this [finger snaps], it's not actually changing because there's not one thing that carries through. And if it is going like this [increasing then decreasing], then we're thinking there's one thing that carries through that's growing and it's like, “oh my gosh”, but that's for later. So we desperately cling to our belief that these objects that we interact with through our visual, our sensory perceptions, and the mind through which we are aware of those sensory perceptions, we rely upon those objects being somehow fixed in their identity once we recognize that. And at the same time, those fixed things have to be able to do something, they have to be able to change. Because if my fixed pen were really fixed, it wouldn't write when I pick it up to write with it and that would make me mad and I would throw the thing out, blaming the thing, when it would really be my projection making the thing so fixed that it couldn't function. 

So one of the tasks, Lama Christie was pointing out to us, is to show us how we rely on our material world, our heap of form, to be reliably fixed. And how then when those fixed things that are then supposed to do things in a fixed way, which is impossible, how our experience of them, when they do do what we expect them to do, we’re like, “okay, fine” and when they don't do what we expect them to do, we go [get upset]. And then we like and we dislike all because of this expectation of the solidity of our heap of form, when we can show to ourselves pretty easily that these fixed things, things that appear to be fixed, are in fact in this constant shapeshift as our projection shapeshifts its existence. And yet when we try to relate to a constantly shapeshifting me-and-my-experience, it's too nebulous. It's like the river flowing by and you can't ever step into the river, the same river, twice, right? By the time you go in and you go out, zillions of water molecules have gone by, and our me-and-my-experience is the same, this river flow of projections going. It's not like we're here [still] and it's going by, we are in it. Not one going along, but we are being it. We are this flow of our projections and our me is part of it, right? We haven't even gotten to investigating that yet. We are just investigating our heap of form, not just body, but my experience of my outer world and how I need 5822 West Circle H Place [my home] to be here every time I leave it and come back and so I hold that as a fixed thing that's still there. When I drive away, it's still there. And when I come back and there it is again, looking the same as it was before, I'm reinforcing in my mind, “see, my house is a thing that's there fixed. It's something I can expect to always be there, always be there the same.” Because if it's not the same and I drive home and it's different, it's like, where'd my house go? And yet it really is different. By the time I go away for an hour and I come back, I'm an hour different, it's an hour different, it's a miracle that I recognize it. And it's ignorance that I think it's the same house as when I left and that I'm the same one coming back to it. So it's like these nuances of catching what we believe makes me and my world tick to recognize that, oh my gosh, things just can't work that way and be what I experienced. If we're going through all of this and we're coming to the conclusion, “oh, so if what I see and what I touch are completely separate pieces of information, and all that makes this thing a blue glass partly full of water is my mind, seeds ripening”, we still think, “no, the thing has more reality than just my mind seeds projecting a mental image” because that sounds so nebulous. But look [clinking fingernails on water glass] how nebulous are my mind seeds for tactile object. That's what makes things a solid thing. Is it a solid thing just because I can grasp it? No. Is it non-existing at all? No, because look, here's something. Does the thing that tells me it's a blue water glass, does that exist? The thing that tells me it's a blue water glass, does that exist? [No.] Do I think it exists? Absolutely. But does it exist? No. And that's why this one [blue water glass in hand] does exist because this one is the one that my idea “water glass” fabricates out of this non-specific information [blue water glass in hand] that the sensory input has given. “Well, then something has to be out there for the sensory input to pick up and give.” And that's the next layer that one's investigation would go into. It's like, if the eyes have to give the information for the mind's idea to lay on it, then there has to be color and shape out there. But could there be color and shape out there if we don't have in our mind the idea: color, shape? Could our eyeballs be working and a mind still not know what the information was being presented? Yes. Which means the data itself is also a projection, the eyes picking up information that the mind makes into the object. The level at which the eyes are picking up just the information is also projection happening. When we go looking for the thing that gets the label, we don't find it, we find information presented to the mind that receives a label. That's also the same process: labeling, labeling, labeling, labeling. 

So we're pretty familiar with exploring a heap of form from the visual information. And then a fun alternative to that is exploring things from the tactile information that we get. And for me, that makes it much, much more clear that I can't get enough information from just tactile without my mind saying what the thing is. I think some of you have done that exercise where you have an unknown little object and then you just investigate it with the sensation of one finger and watch your mind going, “it's this, no, it's that, no, it's this, no, it's that”. And then all of a sudden, one more touch and kaboom, this whole mental picture shows up of what you think is in your hand. Even though you never touched the bottom of it, you never touched this side, but suddenly it has all of that. And then you open your eyes and see; sometimes you're right on, you got the whole thing, color, shape, everything out of just finger information, tactile information. Other times you're so sure it's this, I don't know, whatever, purple hair comb, and then when you open your eyes, it's just something, you were just totally way off base. So either experience, getting it right or getting it wrong, the experience is you really do see the mind going, “it's this, no, it's that, no, it's this, no, it's that” and then it lands on something. So Lama Christie took us through a little exploration, not like that because we didn't have unknown objects. You can't do that exercise all by yourself because you're always going to know what it is you put in your little bag. So you have to ask somebody, please put a little safe object in a bag, or more than one, so I can play with it. And then from time to time, stick your hand in the bag and pull out something and explore it with your eyes closed. It's really fun. 

But so let's do it just by exploring the experience of a tactile experience. So we're going to sit again. Yeah, we'll do it and then we'll take a break. So what we're going to do is take an index finger and touch it to something. You can touch it to your own other part of you, you can touch it to a piece of clothing, touch it to something because we're going to explore the toucher, the being touched, and the interaction between. We’re not going to look at all of them, but that’s what we need to be able to identify. So I don't want you to just think, “oh, my hand, and what does my hand feel like?”. That's not what we're doing. We want the finger touching something and we're going to explore that experience. 

So one thing I want to add first, however, is that in English we have this word called “feeling”. And we say, “my finger, I'm feeling the pen” but then that same word “feeling” also means emotions. Like I'm feeling happy, I'm feeling sad, I like the pen, I don't like the pen. That's the heap of all the other factors. So I'm trying not to use the word “feeling”, but there must be a reason in our crazy English language that those two words are the same. I don't know why I haven't figured it out. It seems really dumb to me. So when we're talking heap of form, we're talking tactile sensation. And when we're talking all-the-other-factors, we're having emotions. And then we have the heap of feeling and it's like, what's that one? And that's the one where it's just thumbs up, thumbs down, thumbs neutral. Just an attraction or an aversion, not even at the level of that word yet. And that's this raw feeling and it's hard to relate to that one because it goes by so fast, or it's so ubiquitous, I don't know which. Technically, the heap of feeling is the second most obvious of the five heaps that make us up. So it should be like really almost as obvious as my physical body is that there's a thumbs up or a thumbs down or thumbs neutral going on all the time. But to be honest with you, it's like, I can't find it till I'm 10 minutes past, “Oh yeah, I get it now”, but I can't get it in the moment because I'm already at the heap of all-the-other-factors having an emotional component about it. So maybe we'll get there someday is being able to find that heap because if we could see that that heap is nothing but seeds ripening, we wouldn't react to it so automatically. I wouldn't react to it so automatically that I can't even find it happening. I could get off automatic pilot and change everything to a thumbs up. I mean, that's the whole promise of Buddhism. 

So anyway, we're talking about tactile sensation when we say “feel”. So let's do this and then take a break anyway, even though I just talked through the last five minutes. 

Meditation: The three spheres of touching something

[1:00:36]

So settle yourself in, please. 

Always first bring your focus of attention to that thing we call breath. It'll get so automatic that you hit breath and your mind goes: focus, clarity, intensity. 

Now take one finger and touch something. And then leave it there touching.

And then shift your focus of attention to that very specific point where that finger is touching something. First find it, and then zoom in on it. 

Now explore that sensation for the part of it that is touching, the part that is being touched, and the act of the touch.

So maybe first it happens in your mind's eye and you get a mental picture, “there's my finger with the edge of its skin. It's sitting down onto that piece of clothing that covers my thigh.” And then recognize, “no, I don't have all that information. I have that sensation I'm referring to what I'm calling my tip of my finger. And I have that other part of the sensation that I'm referring to as the thing that it's touching.” 

And then ever so subtly there is the touching happening between those two. 

So if you're clarifying that with some kind of visual image, zoom into it a bit closer and look at those parts by way of the sensation.

Even sensation only. 

Does the sensation give you enough information to say, “index finger touching my dress?” 

Mine doesn't. 

All I get is warmth and pressure in a location. 

And I'm watching my mind struggle to say, “no, there's a finger touching my dress.” 

And my meditator is saying, actual sensation. What's there? Warmth, pressure. Not enough information to say even my index finger, except that I already know it's my index finger. Do you see the mind making the identity? 

Can there be index finger touching my dress if my mind didn't know index finger, if my mind didn't know touching, if my mind didn't already know dress? Is there anything about this experience right now that could be index finger touching dress? No. 

What is it that makes our mind make that identity? 

Where do mental images come from? 

They are results of causes. 

So shift to some other tactile sensation that your mind identifies. 

First, let your mind admit what object it believes is there touching whatever object we believe is there. See the mental image come up. 

And then compare that mental image to the direct information that you are receiving moment by moment. 

Is there enough tactile information to make that whole mental image? 

What if you did not have those seeds for that mental image? What could that tactile information be made into? 

Now let the whole mental image of what that tactile sensations is about come back up to your mind.

And then add to that your mental image of your very you experiencing that.

And that you in your room, in this class.

And dedicate that exploration to finding and experiencing your own true nature directly someday soon, if you haven't already.

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

[1:18:38]

I'm KOR SUMing all the time

So when we are first learning about the deceptive nature of things in order to recognize their no self-nature, we first learn that in relation to objects because they're easy to explore and pretty easy to come to the conclusion “oh, yeah, not in-it from-it”. And then if we pursue our efforts, we get brave enough to look at the appearing reality, deceptive reality, and no self-nature reality of somebody acting in a certain way towards us, the angry yelling boss or the yelling husband, in order to apply our same reasoning about the simple object towards this other being who has consciousness, so they're not a simple object anymore. But to be able to relate to them, to show ourselves that their identity of being a mean, nasty person causing me to feel this way can't be happening in the way that I think, designed to help us stop reacting in our habitual way to those circumstances. And then when we get brave enough, we can also apply that same investigation and reasoning onto our own me, our subject side, our own me. And you don't generally take people there right away because we're pretty invested in our me in-me from-me, even as we complain about “everybody's mean to me, I can never get what I want”. So it's like, it's a third step to be willing to go and investigate our own me. 

And the way that we like tiptoe into that is by investigating that KOR SUM, what's called the three spheres of any experience that we are choosing to use as our investigation. So Master Kamalashila is emphasizing, as we do any of these explorations into appearing nature, showing ourselves that the thing can't be appearing in the way it is without some contributing of my mind's conception of that thing... I lost my train of thought. We are wanting to be getting so much more clear of those three aspects of any moment of existence, that there's always the subject side, and then the object side, and then there has to be an interaction between. So to have one thing is to have all three, and then our misunderstanding of the process happening that we call a relationship between three things, that isn't really a relationship between three things, it's the process happening, happening, happening. In our investigation of that, piece by piece, we come to recognize more and more clearly where that threefold experience is really coming from as we show ourselves more and more clearly that all three aspects of KOR SUM are in these mental images. It's not that there's a me mental image, and an object mental image, and then the interaction between mental image. It's like every mental image has all three, and then it shapeshifts and it's a new mental image with all three, and then the next one, and the next. 

And when we recognize that it's all these mental seeds ripening, ripening, ripening, and we repeatedly show ourselves that the only place those mental seeds can come from, to be in there to do their thing, is they had to have been put in there by way of how this subject side interacted with what it perceived as object in the past. We're trying to get more and more grasp on our reaction to things as being the factor in which we influence what we're going to experience in the future. It's through this recognizing the three aspects of subject, object, interaction between, and coming to recognize they are not three different things, they are the projections ripening, ripening, ripening. Because then it shows us that our interaction, which is a part of that KOR SUM, it's almost like a fourth part. That's what creates the future experience. Then, when we really get that, that's when our behavior choices can become so succinctly and wisely designed and carried out that we are finally planting seeds for our Buddhahood. Again, we're talking Mahayana so what we're trying to grow as our conclusion about our understanding of the KOR SUM is, how do I then interact within these shape-shifting happenings constantly? How is it that I want to interact in such a way that I will stop contributing to the perpetuation of suffering, be contributing to the end of all that suffering, be contributing as the source of all happiness, and reaching that state of omniscience from which I can really do all of that stuff? Our KOR SUM, if it's motivated with bodhicitta, bodhicitta is going to be part of the conclusion that we come to when we recognize, “oh my gosh, this whole KOR SUM thing is based on my interaction with others”, understanding I'm KOR SUMing the whole time. There's nothing but these seeds ripening that has everything in it. Not my seeds ripening for you out there, but really creating, creating, creating, creating. Then I want to perpetuate all the goodness, and I want to eat up / burn off anything unpleasant. And we see how we're doing it already, we're creating our future already moment by moment. Let's do it in a way that will create a future where everybody gets it, everybody understands, everybody knows how to create their own Buddha paradise until everybody becomes their Buddha being in paradise emanating to everybody else. And it's like my consciousness bursts fuses trying to figure out what that's going to look like when everybody's totally enlightened. Like then what? But anyway, don't need that right now. 

So the important piece about investigating KOR SUM is to also find how we are expecting what we do in the moment to bring what comes next. Part of the conclusion in our recognition of these aspects of the three spheres is: no, it's impossible that what I do in the moment brings what comes next because those mental seeds can't… they're not cause and effect from one moment to the next. They are shape-shifting moment to moment to moment, but they're not cause and effect. They appear to be cause and effect, but they're not. If they were, there could never be a time when I reach out my hand, grab the doorknob, turn and pull, and the door doesn't open. But that does happen sometimes. It would never be the time that I turn the key on the car and it doesn't start, if turning key starts cars, the way we think. So investigating our three spheres to see that a subject doesn't touch an object to make the interaction happen in the way that we think helps us recognize that our automatic pilot response to situations may not be the actual response I want to do. It doesn't mean that you won't grab the doorknob, turn and pull, because that one seems to work most of the time. But would we keep yelling at somebody when we get yelled at and we don't like it? Would we continue to let ourselves yell at somebody else if we make this connection between getting yelled at and yelling at somebody else, even not yelling at that person? “I never yell back at the boss, but they keep yelling at me. Why could that be?” Well, maybe you yell at your kids. Maybe you yell at somebody else and it's like, “oh, maybe I don't even yell, maybe just something that I do towards somebody else makes them feel disrespected and what I really feel when the boss yells at me is I feel disrespected. Oh, it's not about yelling, it's about feeling disrespected and when I stop causing that, boss stops doing what causes me to feel disrespected by her. And it looks like they've stopped yelling. Or maybe what they're yelling is about how great they think I am from across the room. It's still yelling, it's just not causing me to have the same reaction.” So we're looking at our heap of form from these different perspectives to see that without the idea of that physical object, we never get enough information to have that object there at all. It's the idea making it. 

And then we take that to include our belief in that object's function and the belief in our part in making that object function. That's the KOR SUM of the investigation of the heap of form interacting with another heap of form so that we can make our decisions. Lama Christie's example was if you have a headache, do you reach for the bottle of aspirin expecting the aspirin to take your headache away? I mean, I think most of us would say yes. And then when we've done our careful emptiness of the three spheres of physical heap, we might have the seeds to think, wait a minute, there's nothing in this thing called bottle of aspirin that can do anything in-it from-it for this sensation I'm having that I'm calling headache. Does that mean don't bother to take the aspirin? Or does it mean I'll take the aspirin because it's worked in the past and maybe I have the seeds for it to work in the future; and even when it didn't work in the future [past?], it didn't seem to hurt me so I'll believe that there's something that could be in the aspirin that could help me this time that if I didn't take it, I wouldn't get that benefit, so I might as well take it. We're like hedging our bets here and nothing wrong with that if we do it recognizing I really don't know if taking this aspirin is going to help my headache or not. You know, we've heard Geshehla say better would be to go find somebody else who has some kind of headache, some kind of pain, and give them the aspirin. “Well, why would you give them the aspirin if there's nothing in the aspirin that will help them?” To make the seeds so that aspirin could help me in the future. “Well, that's a selfish reason to go give somebody something that can't help them.” It's like, really, what do you do to help that other person if nothing we do can help the other person? I mean, we might say, “before I give you these aspirin, tell me about some way in which you helped somebody feel better.” “Oh, yeah, I did that, my cat was hurting, I pet her, she felt better.” “Okay, great, now take the aspirin.” But we don't do that. I actually did that the other day, it felt so good. In order to load the aspirin, both for them and for us. “But I've got this wicked headache, I can't go drive around the park, finding somebody who's having some pain before I can take my aspirin.” So maybe I need to do that while I don't have a headache so that when I have a headache, I can at least say, “I think I've loaded this aspirin by way of having helped that person before, and this one before, and this one before, and so now I'll see if this aspirin is loaded enough to help my headache. If it does, fine. If it doesn't, fine.” At some point, does it have to be aspirin that I load with having helped other people? Lama Christie used to say, Geshehla swore by chocolate chip cookies for solving his migraine. And it's like I swore by McDonald's french fries, actually. You know, if you got it just at the right time, they would cut it off. But if you missed that time frame, nah, didn't work. So see, nothing in the McDonald's french fries. And it wasn't other french fries, it was McDonald's. Now it's like, sorry, they're off limits so even if I had a headache, they wouldn't be allowed. 

So you get the idea. The reason we go through the emptiness of the three spheres on our cushion, in our contemplation again and again, is trying to grow this ability to be more aware of our automatic reaction to the KOR SUM that's going on right now. It's like a fourth factor. Boss yelling, thumbs down. I don't like it. I have this reaction. I think if I do this, it will stop that unpleasant situation so I'll do it. And the fourth factor is that I'll do it. What is it I'm willing to do? The same old thing? No, I just have showed myself again and again on my cushion that that same old thing is only planting images in my mind that when they come out, will come out as this kind of unpleasant circumstance. I don't want to do that anymore. I'll imagine what might I do in the face of yelling boss? Can I keep my awareness strong enough to say, “I'm sorry you're upset with me, how can I help you?” and see what happens, right? Whether they get madder or they go, “oh, okay”, you know that how they respond does not determine whether or not what I chose to say to them was the right thing to say. I will have planted my seeds differently and that's a huge rejoicable. Just to get off automatic pilot for the first time allows us to get off automatic pilot another time, and then that ability grows. 

Okay. So Master Kamalashila says we will grow this deepening awareness of how we are creating the imprints that will be our future experience in every moment of our now. And when that grows strongly, if we are on our intended bodhisattva path, trying to be bodhisattva path, our mind, our heart would… we'll start thinking, “oh, how do I really want to behave in order to create what I really want to create?” It's one thing to close the door to lesser rebirth, it's another to act towards other beings in order to create my own nirvana. But I want Buddhahood, I want to be on that bodhisattva conveyor belt to end of suffering for everybody. How does that wish influence my choice of interaction in every moment of KOR SUM, which is every moment. So in his text, he is going on to describe the actions of bodhisattvas, like how it is that a bodhisattva in training is using their growing awareness of the three spheres at every given moment. And again, I quote from Diamond Cutter Sutra where early on in the sutra, Buddha says something like: those bodhisattvas do their acts of giving without staying, without staying in anything at all. And then Kamalashila's explanation of that is they're not staying in a self-existent object of giving (the one they're giving to), they're not staying in the self-existence of the thing they're giving, and they're not staying in the self-existence of themselves doing the giving. They're not staying in that old belief in self-existence. And truly a bodhisattva arya, they're seeing things that way, but they're not believing it so they truly aren't staying in their old belief in self-existence. And those of us who are still trying, are trying to remember that yes, as I'm experiencing things as in-them from-them, I'm trying to remember that I'm mistaken, that old belief is mistaken. So I'm trying to put a cog in the wheel of the belief factor that's still there. And every time we manage to do it, even a little bit, affects the seeds in our mind. All the ones that were colored with full-on ignorance, ignorance we didn't even know was there, that full, and we're starting to doubt our own reality, we're not replanting our full-on ignorant seeds, the more aware we are of being ignorant. Which is kind of fun, right? We're chipping away at them, growing the goodness that will ripen as forcing ourselves to experience the emptiness of all those… I caught myself. I was going to say all those existing things, and then I was going to say all those non-existing things. And it's like, neither one of those is right. All those apparently existing things. As we catch ourselves recognizing that they aren't what they [we?] think, that's making a mental seed as we do that. 

[1:42:58]

So he quotes from a sutra called the Perfect Summary of the Dharma. And in that, Lord Buddha is going into how all five heaps are empty. But you'll see it in your reading, he says, “Bodhisattvas say, form is empty, but it's not the case that they don't work to strive to attain a perfect body of form”. It's like this riddle. This is still Buddha - “they understand that feelings are empty”, meaning the heap of feeling. “Feeling is empty, but it's not the case that they don't try to get ultimate bliss, the bliss of perfect meditation. They understand their discrimination is empty, but it's not the case that they don't strive to attain perfect wisdom. Bodhisattvas know how to use their deceptive reality. They know how to use KOR SUM, the three spheres, in the highest way possible.” That quote ends there. He goes on to call Bodhisattvas magicians. “Bodhisattvas are magicians in the sense of what they…” I don't know how to say that… how they are creating… “how they are creating.” We'll just stop it right there. “Bodhisattvas understand deceptive reality as deceptive so that they can use it to create the perfect things that will make up a Buddha paradise emanating to help all beings reach the place where they are doing the same. Bodhisattvas use deceptive reality because it's deceptive to create their Buddha mind and Buddha body.” 

It's significant that Buddha says, “the Bodhisattva understands their form is empty, but it's not the case that they don't try to create their perfect Buddha form”, the double negative. We've talked about it before, but it's one of those things that you sort of, you cook, you chew on it in words, and then drop the words and see if you can penetrate into what a double negative shows us that's more accurate than using a single negative or trying to simply negate something. So then one of the students in class years ago said, wait, why do they have to use deceptive reality? Why do you think? Like what else is there? For a non-Buddha, every experience is deceptive reality. Even if you're having the most extraordinary meditation and you're sitting in Buddha paradise taking teachings, that's still your appearing reality looking like it's appearing on its own if we're not nirvana level, so there isn't anything but deceptive reality until we reach omniscience. “Oh, so then deceptive reality goes away.” So if there was nothing but deceptive reality up to that point, we reach that point and now everything just poofs out of existence? No, there's no more deceptiveness except for the awareness of those beings that are still perceiving things deceptively. Well, is the Buddha mind deceived by that? No. Does a Buddha mind still perceive projections ripening? Yes. Somehow they are all simultaneous. That's one of those that makes my cognator burst wires, but still the same process happening. Imprints, exprints, if you can call it that. 

So we're learning to use every moment of every circumstance to recognize seed ripening, shape shifting flow, of this [subject] and that [object] and this experience. All of it is my seed ripening, shape shifting so let's create seeds that will make the river be exquisite for everybody, is the conclusion he's hoping that we can get to. So once a seed has ripened, it's done. We can't take that thing that's ripened and decide, no, I want it to be something different. It's not ever going to be that thing again because that series of seeds that created it [cup in hand], they're past. And so even if it comes back again [holding cup again], it didn't come back again. This is another, right? Another current moment of this experience [cup in hand] happening. And there's never not that not happening. By the time it's happened, it's too late to influence it. Until it happens, we have… not an ability to change something, but the stronger our wisdom understanding is, the closer we are to this empty nature at any given moment of anything, which is that all potential to be anything at any moment. And when we can hold that in mind somehow, even as we are starting to react badly to the boss who's ripening as this ugly event, we can be thinking, “Even this ugly event boss is empty of existence in this way. I don't have to react to her as a jerk boss blaming me. I can react to her as this empty being” and it'll help me to take my interaction with that being a little higher. Maybe I can think, oh, maybe she just had a really bad day at home and I can be a little more compassionate. Maybe I can think, oh, if I'm nice to her, maybe I can plant some seeds and someday she can be a student of mine. Maybe I can think, oh my gosh, could this possibly be my holy angel Lama knowing exactly what I need right now, which is to not yell back and say something nice instead, in which case, thank you very much, angry yelling boss that I really don't like, I'm going to be really nice to you because maybe you're my angel. And it's like all contrived in order to plant seeds in our minds to be able to interact with other beings in their empty nature, even once they've already ripened. Just because they've ripened doesn't mean they're not still empty of self-existence. So yes, it's ripened and gone, ripened and gone, but to interact with their emptiness means I'm planting new, very different seeds. And maybe that shift is enough to shift some other seeds that I've got that have been way down here, not able to come up. Maybe my shift in interaction now stirs forth something from before that brings up something that seems magical. And it's not the cause result of what I just did, it's the effect of this different interaction that brought up some old seeds that hadn't been able to get to the forefront. That's how that magic happens. When we're working on interacting by way of the emptiness of the three spheres, it can look like miracles happen. 

All right. So Master Kamalashila, in this reading, he says, what is the activity of a Bodhisattva? He says, any and every action of body, speech, and mind that is undertaken for others. And it's a pretty deep statement. We could hear it and think, oh, so I wouldn't even get out of bed until there was somebody available for me to get out of bed to help. And like, what do you do if you live all by yourself? You better get a goldfish or a dog or something because if you live all by yourself, you're just stuck. But is that really literal? Is it [rather]: No, we have in mind the fact that everything I do is planting seeds in my mind and so if I just think of benefiting all sentient beings with everything I do, that's enough. In which case, I don't ever have to see another living being, I just have to have in my mind “I'm doing this for all sentient beings”. Is that enough? No. Right? We'll fool ourselves into that one. So we work with it. We work with the depth of what does it mean that every body, speech, mind moment is in order to benefit all beings? How does that help color our choice of behavior? It's not meant to leave us thinking, Oh my gosh, I can't ever do that so I give up. It's meant to encourage us to have this mindset about understanding how as I interact with anything, I can be using it as a way to bring about a benefit for all beings. And so Lama Christie said, one way you can do it is like the example about feeding bread to the little bird. “I'm feeding you, little bird. May I make a connection so that I can someday be your teacher and help you stop suffering forever.” We can also think, like I said before… I forget the middle one right now. Is this being an emanation of an enlightened being giving me an opportunity to make them an offering? Is this me actually an emanation of an enlightened being going to be what this little being needs at this moment and I'm saving their life. Or anywhere in between. 

Lama Christie went on to say, look, another way that you can think of all this is that if it's true the fully enlightened beings are omniscient, it means they are aware of us and what we are doing, what we are experiencing every moment, aren't they? Which means everything that we experience can be an offering contributing to their bliss void wisdom, because everything an enlightened being experiences contributes to their bliss void wisdom. So if they're aware of me brushing my teeth, can I just think “Offering to you, Holy One. I know to you, this isn't brushing my teeth. I know to you, you know to me it's brushing my teeth, but I'm contributing to your bliss void wisdom”. Like every step, every breath, we're contributing to their experience. Man, that one's my fave. I can only do it when I'm out walking by myself or when I'm driving by myself, those two times. And it's like when I'm in my house, I can't remember to do it. When I'm interacting with somebody else, I can't remember to do it. But it's totally blissful to walk down the street knowing like I am offering and contributing to all Buddhas’ bliss void wisdom, not just one Buddha. Like I'm just waiting for those seeds to ripen, man. Can't be long because they’ve got to be powerful. It's funny, I thought I had figured that one out all by myself and then I go back and I reread these and it's like, oh my gosh, Lama Christie said that and it went right over my head in fourth course. So not to worry. It'll come back. 

All right. So remember that person that we wanted to be able to help. [Usual dedication]

Okay. Thank you very much for the opportunity. I love learning these classes again. So the two meditations was the breath, looking at it, and then finding it, tactile-ing it. And then it was the three spheres of touching something to isolate the appearing nature, the appearance having to come from our mind, not the.. I don't even know what to call it. Okay. Thank you. 

All right, welcome back. We are Bok Jinpa Course 4, Class 3. It's May 6, 2026 where I am. 

Let's gather our minds here as we usually do. [Usual opening]

[7:28]  

Meditation: The visual, tactile, and sound of breath

So settle your body in if you haven't already.

And then bring your focus of attention to your breath at your nostrils. 

First use that object to turn on the focus, brighten the clarity, dial up the intensity. 

Now shift from a general idea of focusing on breath to a very specific location at one or the other nostrils at its edge. 

Find that place first. 

So we found a particular place to put our focus. Now notice what your perspective is - you meditating on this location at your nostrils. Maybe it's as if you are behind your eyes or in your head somewhere, somehow mentally gazing to that location. 

Recognize what is appearing. Is it a visual image somehow, this focus on your breath at the edge of that nostril? 

If you lose the object, bring it back. If you're losing interest, turn it back up. 

Now still focusing on the breath at that nostril, shift your focus to the sensation we call ‘breath’ at that nostril. 

Zoom in closer to that sensation so that the sensation fills your awareness. 

If you lose your fascination, turn it back up. 

Now can your awareness be aware of the sound that breath makes? 

If we have full single-pointed concentration on the sound of the breath, there would be no sensation, no visual. 

Check your experience, is it toggling? 

Or are they mixed together - visual, tactile, sound? What does it seem like? 

Can you focus on all three at once? 

Now let all those details go and just focus on the breath at the nostrils like where we started.

And then dedicate this little bit of practice effort to reaching stillness soon so that we can use that state to choose our behaviors to grow the seeds to reach our ultimate wisdom.

Now become aware of your body in your room, in this class. And when you're ready, open your eyes, take a stretch. 

[21:22]

Exploring the heap of feeling

So Master Kamalashila is helping us explore the five heaps as our objects of meditation as we are training ourselves in reaching stillness so that at the same time we're training our concentration, our focus, our clarity, and our intensity, we are also growing our ability to investigate our object of meditation for its appearing nature and its ultimate nature. So that particular session was exploring the thing we call ‘breath’ as part of our heap of form. Which mostly they say heap of form is colors and shapes, but of course it's not only limited to colors and shapes. That's what we engage our heap of form with through our visual sense, which for most of us, it is mostly how we relate, but we have the other sense powers through which we engage our heap of form: the things that we hear, smell, taste, and tactile, they are sensations. Whether it's a sensation that I feel on my physical body [something touching my body] or it's a sensation that I reach out [holding paper pad], that information is as significant as the color and shape that my eyeball picks up that then my eye consciousness decides what to do with that. My tactile is doing the same thing, only sensory information, sensory consciousness, takes that information and says, Oh [feeling paper pad]. So if I had no eyeballs, it would be coming up with some identity just from my tactile. And then if it had sound, my sound consciousness would add something to it. If it had fragrance, if it had taste, all of those together combine to make our heap of form. And at one level, we're working with our heap of form and we think, Oh, this [my body] is the limit of my heap of form. But technically, our heap of form is anything we experience through eye awareness, ear awareness, nose, anything. So it's hard. You wouldn't want to say, “Oh, the car in the car park is part of my heap of form”, but it is part of my experience of form. So not form realm, don't think that, that's different. But the heap of form in our desire realm. 

But what we want to address in this class is the heap of feeling, and we started into that last class. And in English, the word gets confusing because in the heap of form, there is feeling, tactile, the sensation here [touching nose]. That's not what we mean by the heap of feeling. And then in English, we also have, “Oh, I feel angry. I feel jealous. I feel loving.” That's also not what we mean by the heap of feeling. We talked about this last time. What we mean by the heap of feeling is simply the thumbs up, thumbs down, thumbs neutral. And even to use the words ‘attraction’ or ‘repulsion’, they're almost too strong, too delineated. The sensation that we're working with at the heap of feeling is more subtle. It's like really deeper than those words of being attracted or repulsed. 

So we've learned we have the heap of form. And then heap of feeling is the second most obvious. And then the heap of discrimination comes hot on its heels. And then the heap of all the other factors that make me up. And then the most subtle is the heap of consciousness, the awarenesses, so the awareness of that mind taking colors and shapes and coming up with the physical visual form. That happening is the most subtle level of awareness amongst the five heaps. And then the mental functions, a little less [more?] obvious, which seem really obvious to me, right? When I'm feeling angry, man, it's there, it's big. And yet it's fourth level of subtlety, more subtle than discriminating between things and feeling (thumbs up, thumbs down). So it's like, wait, I don’t think I agree with that. Like in terms of when it happens, if we were to think of are the five heaps happening like sequentially, then maybe we could say somehow we make contact with something in our form heap, and then instant on that happening, we have attraction towards it or a repulsion from it. An instant to that happening, we then have a discrimination: “I like that, I don't like that.” And then “I want that, I don't want that.” And then actually it takes those three before we even have an object that I want. So we're going to talk about discriminating heap next time. Because in the discriminating heap isn't just “I like, I don't like”, but it's also what it is I like and what it is I don't like. So the heap of discrimination is doing this “like”, “don't like”, but it's also distinguishing red from blue, and you from me, and him from her, and cars from bananas. Like that heap of discrimination happening. And it always has before it the thumbs up or the thumbs down. And that always has before it something that's been contacted. So really, this is also described in the Wheel of Life, how those things all play together. And then it's also what Lord Maitreya’s Six Steps are talking about - why we do that and perpetuate it when it all leads to perpetuating suffering. So we'll get there eventually. 

But first, in order to investigate these heaps, we need to be able to identify them. So heap of form [touching body] is not hard to find. Outer heap of form [holding up pen] is not hard to find. But this heap of feeling, it can be divided into three or five, they say. So if you just divide it into three, it's just this like automatic attraction, or automatic repulsion, or automatic neutrality towards the object of the experience, even before the object is recognized, like fully delineated. Or they say if we're more subtle, we can be aware that we can have a physical response that's thumbs up, or a physical response that's thumbs down, or we could have a mental response that's thumbs up, or a mental response that's thumbs down, or we could have neutral. And they don't distinguish neutral mental versus neutral physical, they just call neutral. Lama Christie said, if you want to explore the difference between neutral mental and neutral physical, have at it. Because for me, there's clearly a difference. But apparently once something's neutral, it's neutral, doesn't seem to matter. I don't actually think there's anything that's neutral, to be honest. I think they just are being complete. 

So when we say this heap of feeling that's supposedly so obvious we should just be able to dial right into it, it's like, I can't, I don't… I mean, I understand it intellectually, but to say that's the next thing that happens after I contact an object [touching pen], that seems really, really subtle. 

So Lama Christie gave this example. But wait, let me do something first. So check in with yourself right now and what's your heap of feeling? [Thumbs up, thumbs down, thumbs neutral] Can you just give it, like the instant I say, “what's your heap of feeling right now?”, do you like go [two happy thumbs up], or [two thumbs down] or... I have to just stop and think about it. “Well, wait a minute, what are you really talking about? My body's a little tired, thumbs down. My knees kind of hurt [thumbs down] but as long as I keep talking, I won't pay attention to them. So I have lots of talking to do so that feels good [thumbs up].” And it's like, you can't really say thumbs up or thumbs down until you identify the circumstance that you're going to judge, and then that's not the heap we're talking about, that's [the heap of] all the other factors. Because we found what it is we're going to react to, like we're way past the heap of feeling. This one's so subtle and ubiquitous that we have learned to ignore it, and that's the problem because it stems from the misunderstanding of the true nature of the object that appears to trigger the attraction or repulsion. And by the time this has happened, we have the discriminating. And by the time that has happened, that's when we have a, “oh, I like them. I don't like them. I want them. I need to do this” and our decision to act happens in our fourth heap. But is fifth heap like waiting to be the last to happen? It's like, no, of course not. Our fifth heap is happening constantly. Without the fifth heap, the heap of awareness, without that going on, we don't even get our first heap of form. Without that [heap of form] going on, we'll never find our thumbs up, thumbs down. You can't really say these heaps are happening sequentially. But you can't say they're all happening all at once either, because they're not. 

So Master Kamalashila, remember his premise - Don't learn to meditate with your mind blanked out on nothing. First of all, you won't be able to do it. Second of all, you're planting seeds for a result you don’t want. Rather, learn to focus, fixate, clarity, intense on a powerful karmic object, and the ability to investigate the true nature of that powerful karmic object. And then while you're training yourself in stillness, you are also gathering incredible goodness so that when you have a mind you can put still-y on your object, you have the platform to be able to penetrate to that true nature of the object when we get there. So he's giving us all these different clues as to what meditations to train ourselves in. 

[36:17]

Okay, so Lama Christie's example of exploring this heap of feeling was: imagine you're sitting somewhere and in walks somebody that you like very much that you haven't seen in a very long time. So just imagine that scenario - they've just walked in the door. Your eyes and your heap of consciousness recognizes them. What's feeling doing? [Two thumbs up.] Right, like our attraction. And then hot on the heels, it's the move towards the “I like” [two thumbs up], “it's them” “Oh my gosh [excitedly]”. Right? So it's just that [excited/attracted] feeling. There isn't really… I can't get words that fit because it's such a subtle thing. It's the towards them. 

What if the person who walks in is somebody, so sorry, you really, really don't like and don't trust. [We back away]. Subtle. And then the rest of the dominoes end. 

So now, if it even were the case that once you recognize the person and you have the thumbs up and then as the seed ripening is going on through time, the thumbs up is staying thumbs up, which it may or may not, right, but let's assume that it does, that it's staying thumbs up and so we're continuing to be attracted to that person, how might we use that strength of that thumbs up feeling to investigate what's really going on? So we want to be using, as our object of meditation, the thumbs up feeling that was triggered by seeing the person. Seeing the person is heap of feeling. That's not really what we're investigating. We want to catch the [moving towards]. The way my me wants more of that. And to check out - is that feeling [of moving towards] coming from that object? And we want to go, “Yeah, because it wasn't there until they walked in. It has to be coming from them.” But then how would we investigate that? Well, if my thumbs up feeling towards them is coming from them, then everybody who sees that object would have to feel the same. And do they all feel the same? Like, I don't know, do I? But if it were the case that my thumbs up was coming from them then I would know because their thumbs up factor would force me to know that everybody experiences them the same way as me. It's not obvious, right? 

When they say if something is self-existent, it can't change, it can't affect any other thing… and that like… why is that true? Why is that true that a self-existent thing can't change. “Self-existent things change all the time in my world.” And it's like, yeah, proof they're not self existent, honey. But it's like, “no, no”, right. Self-existent means something existing independent of any other factor. Now, that's ridiculous, none of us believe in self-existent things. But do we believe that there are things that exist independent of my seeds ripening? Yeah, lots of things. Like my neighbor, she's out of town, where my neighbor is and what she's doing. I know I have a neighbor, I know she's somewhere, and I know she's doing something. But I don't really. I believe I do because I believe she exists independent of my seeds ripening. But even just to think of her is my seeds ripening. Can I experience something that I cannot experience? No, it's ridiculous, right? But that's the same as saying, can I experience something without my seeds ripening my projection of them? No, of course not. But my mind still says, “but there's all kinds of things that exist without my projections, because I don't even know them. I don't know about things, but they exist.” Do you see how I'm fooling myself? How do I know some things exist if I don't have a seed ripening to even believe that it exists is my seed ripening. But as I say, “all things are only my seeds ripening”, a part of my mind goes, “oh, so nothing's really real”, when actually my seeds ripening is what makes it real. 

So back to the thumbs up that's happened because this amazing person walks in the door. Can we show ourselves that my thumbs up is not coming from them? If it were, the thumbs up would always be the same coming from them. And it would be the thumbs up for everybody that perceives them. And I honestly don't know, right? 

And then another avenue we can look at is if this is someone that maybe you see more regularly, and this time they walk in the door and you get this, wow, double thumbs up, but three days later they walk in the door and you get a thumbs down. It's like, oh, even though I think at the moment the thumbs down is caused by them, the very fact that three days ago they gave me a thumbs up means something else is going on here. There's some other reason why I'm experiencing thumbs up right now. Does it have nothing at all to do with them? That's slippery because ultimately we would say, yeah, it does have absolutely nothing to do with them. But as we move ourselves like the elevator up and down the levels of schools, it's like, “no, there's something about them. My positive feeling towards them didn't just happen without them walking in the door. If I had a positive feeling because a banana came through the door, then that would have been from the banana, not from them.” We still think there's something out there that's pleasant-ish that my seeds then fill in the ‘me experiencing the thumbs up’. So we're holding to the object as the source of our thumbs up when it can't be. Pretty easy to show ourselves that it can't be that. 

[45:07]

So then we also want to look at the sensation, which gets more… well, it feels subtle when we're trying to investigate it, but it wasn't subtle at all when the person walked through the door, was it? [Attraction towards.] Like that is pretty obvious. So if you… like in your session, whether you're contemplating or meditating, if you can run this scenario back, and then in they walk, and up comes the sensation, then what you're going to park your mind on is this thing we're calling the thumbs up. Like, find it. Is it physical? Is it mental? Where is it? What is it? Is it there? Is it always.. is that sensation, if you can find it and pin it down, does that sensation always have to be what we call thumbs up? This one might be a little easier to do with a thumbs down sensation because we want it to go away, but do it with the thumbs up. The raw sensation… There is a raw sensation, it's getting label “thumbs up” and we want to pin that down. 

So Lama Christie gave this example. She said, suppose you're just learning to do yoga or you're starting some new athletic, and you need to stretch out before you do it. So you're doing some kind of forward bend and you're feeling your hamstrings, “Ow”. We've all done that and there's that pain down those hamstrings. And so we feel that sensation and we get this thumbs down and then hot on the heels of the thumbs down is the “I don't like this. Maybe it's going to hurt me. I should quit”, etc, but we stick with it. So now suppose time passes, we are learning more about yoga practices and why to do them. And we come to this new understanding that, in fact, this heap of form that I'm working with is made of channels and prana and that my work with my poses is about moving prana through these channels. And now when I do my forward bend, I reach that same sensation in that same location, but now my interpretation is, “oh, my channel stretching, my winds moving.” The same sensation gives a thumbs up instead of a thumbs down. Like if we can personally find a scenario where this sensation we're calling thumbs up could also be a thumbs down, then we can show ourselves that the sensation that we're giving the label thumbs up or thumbs down isn't the source of the thumbs up or thumbs down. The thumbs up or thumbs down is coming from somewhere else, it's not the sensation. “But it is the sensation because it happens [we have an attraction] and we call it thumbs up.” But it's more like seeds ripen thumbs up and then [attraction] is the sensation. And then we get this habit - “Thumbs up feels like this. Thumbs down feels like that. That's how I tell them apart.” But in that recognition, we are also… our task is to recognize that we think that sensation is what makes the thumbs up or the thumbs down, when the sensation itself is just raw data, information, that is what receives the ripening thumbs up or thumbs down. 

The me experiencing the heap of feeling

So we have the object we think is triggering it [thumbs up or thumbs down], we have the sensation itself, what have we got left to investigate? My me, subject side. So we're doing the three spheres. What about the me experiencing that object causing thumbs up, that object causing thumbs down? What me? Is there a me there first, that then the other walks in the door, I recognize them, I have the thumbs up, and me now is feeling thumbs up? Or is there… I want to say no me at all first, and then suddenly, them-thumbs-up, me-feeling-thumbs-up shows up? Like that can't be. There can't ever be a moment that my me is not there. And so there must be some contact between my me and my sensation, or my me and the object, or my me and the conclusion thumbs up. Like what's that connection? Does it happen in an instant of time? Does it happen in a location in space? Does it not happen at all? Does it happen from both? Those are four possibilities. What is the me that's experiencing the thumbs up? Is there a me experiencing thumbs up independent of the thumbs up? “Seems like there has to be because I was there already. Me not experiencing thumbs up, and then now me experiencing thumbs up because something shifted.” Did it shift because the me-before disappeared, and now there's the me-now? What's going on really? What do we think is going on, let's go to there. “Me. Me is here, then I experience something, and it's thumbs up or thumbs down, and then I do stuff.” That's the one we're wanting to look for - that me that's here and suddenly, up comes this experience and it triggers this whole story about who just walked in and how wonderful they are and what I want to do to help them and, right, the whole story gets triggered the instant my me shifts from this one with a story about that other thing, to this one with the story about them, until the story shifts again, or the mind shifts again, or.. what shifts again? And now I have a story about something else. 

So maybe in walks this amazing person and I've got my thumbs up and then three seconds later in walks somebody I really don't like and all of a sudden my thumbs up goes to thumbs down. But my thumbs up person is still there. How can I lose my thumbs up just because the thumbs downer came in? The story changed. If it's coming from the other person, it wouldn't change like that. “No, but the thumbs down is now coming from that other person.” You can't do both at the same time, you'd have to toggle thumbs up, thumbs down, thumbs thumbs down, which is really more like life, isn't it? Like, “come on, she said it 15 million times, can she get on to something else? I love this class, but oh my gosh, I'm getting sleepy”, right? It's like the story is constantly doing [thumbs up, thumbs down, up, down, up, down]. This is what our heap of feelings seems to be doing, in my experience. And blaming, blaming the other. Even blaming the sensation in the sense that “this is what feels good feels like” and “this is what feels bad feels like” so as soon as I have that one [I assign thumbs up], as soon as I have this other one [I assign thumbs down], and then I'm stuck in that. Like you could never shift the sensation of stretching hamstrings from something unpleasant to something pleasant, but we do all the time. 

So it shows that when we understand the emptiness of the three spheres of the heap of feeling, we don't have to go along with it. When the person we thumbs up towards comes in [thumbs up], and the person who thumbs downs usually comes in [we can thumbs up]. If we had our wisdom mind clear, in would walk the thumbs down person, but there would be no thumbs down. We could be very well aware of our story landing on them and our reaction to our story wouldn't even be thumbs down because our understanding of where it's all coming from (my seeds ripening). We've trained ourselves to recognize my seeds ripening something pleasant, “Great, let's share it”. My seeds ripening something unpleasant, “Great, let's burn it off and not perpetuate it”. So the choice of.. let's call it “response” instead of “react”, our choice of response would be, “wow, share” [for] the thumbs up person, and “wow, burn it off” [for] the thumbs down person. 

I don't know, who do we need to be more kind to for planting our seeds? The one we're feeling is thumbs down. The one we're feeling thumbs up is the one we naturally will be kind to, not meaning don't do that. We want to focus on that one, but for our growing wisdom, we might decide to choose focusing on what would have been our thumbs down person. Like I'm feeling myself even resist saying it. It's like, go to them, take them some cookies, get them some water because they [are a thumbs down person for us], right? Because this [thumbs down] was trying to happen, I'm going to force it [into thumbs up]. Which of course we can't do, but we can try. And Master Kamalashila is like giving us these clues of things to work on in our meditation. Because until we get convinced of the no self-nature of every instant of heap of feeling, when we're in the midst of it happening, we won't be able to get off automatic pilot and respond instead of react. We will have reacted by the time we recognize that it's happened. 

So we don't try to fix all this stuff when we're in the heated example of life where we're working with our crazy thumbs up, thumbs down. We do it on our cushion again and again and again, and find what will help us trigger remembering the ahas that we get on our cushion when we are in the moment of reactivity. And you know, it's just seed planting. I don't mean “just”, it's simply seed planting again and again and again so that they can feed each other and grow. And then someday we surprise ourselves and in walks somebody who you expect to give you a thumbs down and instead, your whatever goes [moving towards], ”wow, there they are”. Right? It shifts. Is there anybody or anything that couldn't shift like that? No. Do we expect them to shift so that I can get a thumbs up or thumbs down? Yes. Can that ever happen? Only if I change my seeds can I see somebody else and have my reaction to them be different. Even if they see themselves as going from somebody who was nasty to somebody who's really, really wonderful, if my seeds don't also ripen that way, I'll still find fault with them because my story about them is a thumbs down story. It's not that we're making up the story on the fly, it's coming out of our seeds. And then our mind says, “right, because they hurt me before so I expect them to hurt me again”. And so I'm braced and ready to not let them hurt me again, because that's my expectation of them. And those are our seeds from having been the one who did the hurting and repeatedly did the hurting so that we left someone expecting us to hurt them. And, you know, we can say, “not me, not in this life”, but we understand seeds, we understand the mental continuum that we would have to admit that is my experience (the them that I expect to be nasty) so it has to be something that I've planted in my own mind, right? Not to beat ourselves up about it, simply to recognize the blame factor that we put onto the other is not productive. It isn't accurate. And so when we react according to it, we are reacting in a way that's also inaccurate for the result we want to get. 

Okay, let's take a break. 

Are we back? Okay, so let's do a short sit exploring this heap of feeling in this same way towards a person who walks in. 

Meditation: Recognizing the story happening

[1:07:12]

So settle your body, settle your heap of form. 

Once that locks in, bring your focus of attention to your breath at the nostrils. 

Get the meditating mind locked in. 

Now bring to mind a person or object that you feel very, very strongly about. Either strongly positive or strongly negative, you decide. 

And then imagine that being or object is there with you. And experience your sensation of attraction, or repulsion.

And also see if you can find your belief that this feeling towards them is triggered by them in some way. 

Ignorant reasoning says, “I feel like this towards them and I didn't feel like that until I saw them. It has to be coming from them.”

Now ask yourself, is that in fact accurate? 

Explore. 

What part of being aware of them caused your thumbs up feeling? 

Where did that contact get made? 

Is the feeling always the same every time I see them? 

If I did not know them already, would they trigger this thumbs up? 

Recognize how our own mind is playing a movie, a story about that information… making it that person, their qualities, that trigger my sensations. 

Recognize those experiences as your own mental images ripening, ripening, ripening, ripening… 

which make the sensation, which makes the sensation coming from them, which makes them real…

by way of our story, our seeds ripening. 

What if the story about them stops? What happens to the feeling? 

And does the feeling stop because the person stopped, or does the feeling stop because the story stopped? 

What's the difference? 

Show yourself that there is no object that triggers the feeling. 

The object is empty of triggering the feeling… 

and so my story triggers the them triggering my feeling. 

And if the feeling is pleasant, my story is a result of kindness. 

If my feeling is unpleasant, my story is a result of unkindness. 

So how do we want to respond…

within this story to create a new story for our future? 

And now recognize your meditator, your subject side, feeling the thumbs up towards this other. 

Recognize our misunderstanding. Our subject side is believing that I am here independent of my-story-me that those objects are coming at. 

Recognize that if that me is independent of that me's experience, then my experiences could not change me…

and that means I could not experience anything… 

and yet I do. 

Every moment of me experiencing, feeling, is shifting.

Seeds ripening. 

Because that me existing independent of that is not there. 

I thought it was, but I see that it's impossible. 

The me feeling is the story, the ripening, happening, results of past experiencing happening. 

Try to recognize your me's ultimate nature is totally available…

always absent of a self-nature,

and so present by ripenings…

feeling…

with every instant of awareness, discriminating. 

And so that other being, too, their true nature is their availability to be, 

which is why the one you experience is unique to you,

and can appear to trigger a thumbs up or thumbs down. 

And so decide that this empty-self...

determines to try to be a thumbs up experience for others,

in order to create more thumbs up for everyone.

And dedicate what we've done to recognizing the power of that intention… 

for shifting all of existence. 

Then become aware of you, the story of you, in your room, in this class. 

And when you're ready, open your eyes, take a stretch, still recognize the story happening. Nice. 

Four stages on the path of preparation

[1:26:00]

So Master Kamalashila, he says, if we make great effort to practice these meditations, as I've described them… so he's like looking back at all of the texts that he's written so far. He says, “Anyone who makes great efforts to practice the meditations, as I have described them, will pass through the 12 levels”. And what he means by the 12 levels is all those stages of transformation all the way up to total Buddhahood. Anyone who practices Kamalashila's method and meditations. All right, that's nice. A nice clue, right? 

So he then says, the first level we reach is the level where we act out of faith. And it's curious because that term “the level where we act out of faith" is a synonym for the path of preparation. And it's like, wait a minute, isn't the first path the path of accumulation? And is he saying that that's not even a level towards Buddhahood? The path of accumulation, we're not on the first level? Not meaning the first bodhisattva bhumi, just the first stage towards our Buddhahood doesn't happen until we're on path of preparation. And it kind of makes sense because we won't ever get to a path of preparation if our path of accumulation hasn't happened. What we're accumulating is our renunciation. We're accumulating enough disgust with samsara and my old habits of perpetuating things. Like the world is just so broken, there has to be something different, and then we all went searching. That was our path of accumulation. 

And then path of preparation actually starts when… in our tradition, it starts when we hear the explanation of emptiness and karma. Like we could call it refuge, impermanence, karma, or we could call it the pen thing, in any way that we got this clear enough explanation of things don't happen the way we believe, and that there's an explanation for why they happen so that we can investigate it. When that has gotten strong enough that we've dedicated ourselves to a path of study, to our TU SUM GOM, then we're on our path of preparation. And Master Kamalashila says, that's when you're at your first stage going towards Buddhahood. So we're not talking about seeing emptiness directly yet at that stage, we're not yet even talking about the heart opening bodhicitta. He is a Mahayanist so he is implying that as part of our path of accumulation and our path of preparation, we're also working with our bodhicitta, both the deceptive one and ultimate. So he says this first level… we reach our first level when we're practicing out of faith. But he does not mean blind faith. He means faith born of logic, faith born of scripture. So it's a conviction in the likely truth of the promise of the marriage of karma and emptiness, before we've seen either one directly. Before we've experienced dependent origination directly, before we've experienced emptiness directly, there will be some level at which our study, our logic, our scriptural authority, we will have proved it to ourselves that we actually can't lose our faith anymore. And when we reach that level, he says, that's the first level. It's not the first bodhisattva level, it's not like that. But that's what starts us actually on our path of preparation. Our belief is really, really, really strongly grounded. He says that faith is unshakable such that we can never be shaken by demons, meaning we won't ever get shaken off the path because of our understanding. Now, that doesn't mean you've signed up as a Tibetan Mahayana Buddhist forever, but meaning your logic of the truth of dependent origination and emptiness, nobody's going to be able to talk you out of it. 

So path of preparation, the whole thing, is also called “the path of acting out of faith” because what moves us from faith to the next level is the path of seeing where we experience directly, direct yogic experience, of ultimate reality. That comes hot on the heels of the direct experience of dependent origination. I mean, we've always been directly experiencing that, we just didn't know it. So the knowing [about] the seeds ripening happening, and that comes hot on the heels of something else, and that... And so that whole four-level process of path of preparation ends up in our path of seeing, where our faith shifts to direct knowing. 

And so in this first stage of path of preparation, Master Kamalashila calls it… the four stages are called the stages that trigger the point of definite separation. So the point of definite separation means when we separate from simply deeply held conviction in the truth of emptiness and dependent origination to direct experience of both of those. So the definite separation means when we come out of our TONG LAM and we are arya, we are definitely separated from something. What is it we are definitely separated from is our old belief that things exist in the way they appear to exist. We may still be perceiving things as in them coming at me, but as arya, we don't believe it anymore and we never will again believe it. So this “definite separation” is the term Kamalashila uses. He's not saying path of seeing is called that, but the path of preparation leads to this definite separation from our old belief. We understand that we don't stop perceiving things as self-existent for a long time after that. But because we no longer believe, we're not replanting seeds of ignorance, which means that seeds that we still have for ignorance have an end time. They'll lose enough power to make it over the threshold at some point, and then we'll even damage the remnants of those that can't get over the threshold. And it's that process through which we are moving through the bodhisattva bhumis. So path of preparation takes us there. 

He says that our path of accumulation, meaning our realization of our renunciation, serves as the material cause, that which flops over into the result, the NYERLEN GYI GYU, of our path of preparation. So without our path of accumulation, the path of preparation won't happen, even if we're studying. So suppose we meet the ACI, we don't really have much renunciation, but we're fascinated by the ACI and we're studying it and we're learning it. But if we don't have this deep renunciation of samsara, then even what we're learning is not said to be our path of preparation. Lama Christie said, until we really, really want to deconstruct our world, our experiences, our self, we're not going to apply ourselves to our studies in our path of preparation in a way that will bring it to some fruition. There's nothing in what we study in path of preparation that in-them from-them is going to help us change. It's our seeds ripening. So we use that to grow our wisdom and be able to use it. 

So the scripture says, this path of preparation and the realizations that come on it, these four levels of realizations, they are all born from a deep meditation. And Kedrup Je, so in your reading, you're also going to have some of Kedrup Je’s writing about this. He says, the deep meditation that's being alluded to here is stillness, shamatha, that single-pointed concentration with the SHIN JANGS on that first level of the form realm platform that is the foundation for the concentration that is necessary to actually allow the trigger of the direct perception of the no self-nature of your object of focus. Not that just being on that level will automatically trigger that, but without being on that level, our effort to trigger it, our concentration, won't be able to sustain the intensity of the ultimate reality if we're not on that level. So it sounds like the movement from one path of preparation to the next should happen in deep meditation. And yet our own amazing lineage Lama describes his CHU CHOK, the fourth stage, the fourth realization on the path of preparation, as something that happened not in meditation, [but rather as] seeing the pot on the stove. And it's not contradictory because the effort that we make in our deep meditation, doing these meditative practices where we are exploring how we believe things exist, how they can't exist like that, how their appearing-ness is there, and how that reveals that they can't have any nature of its own, in all these different scenarios, that effort in deep meditation is planting seeds such that outside of meditation, our efforts in study, especially the CHI JEDRAK study, our use of our logic, our keeping our morality to plant our seeds, that the goodness that we do in our meditation contributes to the ability to behave in ways that plants the seeds that bring our meditation to a deeper level, to deeper ahas, intellectual conceptual ahas in each session, and that's planting seeds that will ripen as the experiences of the realizations, the ones that happen on the cushion and the ones that happen off the cushion. So when they say it's born of deep meditation, it does not necessarily mean it happens in deep meditation. But without deep meditation, it's not going to happen outside of meditation, because that's where we're planting the seeds for the ability to become more aware of how our seeds are making things. 

So they're making this distinction between conceptual experience, meaning deceptive reality, and direct experience, which direct experience alludes to the direct experience of emptiness because any other experience of emptiness that's not direct is by way of conception, by way of some ripening understanding of what's meant by emptiness, what's meant by the no self-nature. It can be really, really, really subtle, but until that's the direct experience, it's still a conceptual experience. And as long as it's conceptual experience, it is deceptive reality experience, which means it's not quite correct. Which is why even a very, very high conceptual understanding of emptiness is not enough to completely cut the belief in things having their own nature. Man, it's this close, but it's not enough to do it. 

So the first level of path of preparation is called “warmth”. And they say that in that one, when you come out of your deep meditation, you recognize, “oh my gosh, those objects, they don't exist the way I thought”. It's from a deep conceptual experience on the object and how it can't have its own nature, and me experience it the way that I do. At some point, something happens in a deep meditation, when we come out, it's like, “how did I ever miss that before?” Related to objects, mostly outer other objects [holding eyeglasses]. Master Kamalashila calls it the concentration when you meet the light. 

Then on the next level, it's called “peak”. This is where, because of making the effort to become accustomed to this understanding that all those objects that look like they have their identities in them, they just can't, we're getting used to that. And because of practicing that, Master Kamalashila says we reach the concentration where the light proliferates, which means it spreads from not just the few objects that we were familiar with investigating, but it spreads to other objects as well. So it would spread to other beings as objects. And it would spread to all of our experiences as objects. And as we get more and more aware that everything about my experience is not in-them from-them the way they seem to be, we're at this level of called “peak”. And again, it's going to influence our interaction with those things. 

The third level is called SUPA, which means mastery, not patience. And this is where they say we have our first deep aha into the emptiness of our own subject state of mind, our own subject side. “Man, I don't exist the way I thought I did”. Master Kamalashila says in that meditation, you probably finally experience residing in consciousness alone. But that all by itself isn't quite enough. We would have to understand that consciousness as being the appearing side of my mind, and then be able to recognize that that's not its true nature; its true nature is its emptiness that allows it to appear in that way. And holding that with a deep conceptuality that when we come out of that meditation, it's like, “oh my gosh, what I know about my outer world is true for me, subject side”. That deep aha is called mastery. 

And then the fourth one we know is CHU CHOK, right? The highest experience, the highest thing. The highest thing that we can experience in deceptive reality is the act of deceptive reality happening. So deceptive reality is the way we experience everything in-it from-it, and to experience deceptive reality directly for the first time means we are experiencing the luminous seed images ripening and laying over the information that makes the object show up - Geshehla's beautiful explanation of CHU CHOK. From that experience, the power of that experience, we can run and jump on our meditation cushion and like repeat it, repeat it, repeat it, I would guess. And then the power of that experience, the accumulated virtue that brought on that experience, will push our shamatha meditation on our object into the direct perception of the emptiness of the object, once we do our analysis to get there. And then it will shift from the aha of the analysis into that direct yogic experience. So CHU CHOK is the highest deceptive reality experience we can have, the most pure. And then what comes is ultimate reality, which is finally no deceptive reality. And then something stirs us forth, we come out of that. 

So people might misunderstand and say, “No, they said that these realizations are born of deep meditation so how can you have your CHU CHOK while you're out of meditation if these realizations have to happen in meditation?” And they're pointing out that something born of meditation means the seeds were planted in meditation for this extraordinary result outside of meditation. So it's not contradictory for Geshehla to say, “this is what CHU CHOK can be like” and it's born of deep meditation on your object applied in such and such a way that moves us through our path of preparation. 

I missed it. In that third stage, mastery, once mastery is achieved, apparently our level of understanding is such that seeds that we have that would send us to a lower realm can't ripen. So they say at the level of path of preparation “mastery”, we can only take higher rebirths. But by higher rebirth, they don't mean if you reach mastery from the human realm, you can only become jealous God or pleasure being because we don't want that. Higher birth means human and higher. So it kind of means that once we reach mastery level, next lifetimes are always going to be human, and then not even pleasure realm gods because we're being so careful not to plant seeds for that. So we're pretty much guaranteed. The conclusion is we're pretty much guaranteed human lifetimes until we reach total enlightenment as long as we don't go off track with our meditation and end up in a pleasure being realm, form or formless realm. 

So Choney Lama Drakpa Shedrup, he also has an explanation of these four levels of path of preparation. He describes the first level as the emptiness of the objects that have to do with the mentally afflicted side of things. And that the second level has to do with the emptiness of objects that have to do with the pure side. And that the third level has to do with the emptiness of misperceiving subject state of mind. And the fourth level has to do with the emptiness of correctly perceiving the subject state of mind. And Lama Christie said, that's just really confusing. But she wanted us to have this little piece of the puzzle because maybe for any one of us, as we are exploring our path of preparation, that will make more sense than Master Kamalashila’s. So don't discount it, but put it into the mix as you are exploring your path of preparation. 

We could take this information and look at ourselves in our practice and be able to clarify, like, where am I? Have I even made it to path of preparation? Am I at mastery level yet? Where am I? And it's like, Lama Christie made it sound like it ought to be obvious. And personally, it's like, feels obvious some days and other days, it's like, what was I thinking, I'm not even close. But again, it's not like we reach one level and then we're there forever until we reach mastery and above. 

Okay. So last thing, another thing to explore on and off the cushion is how these heaps relate to each other. Like, how is it that the heap of feeling relates to the heap of form? And how does the heap of feeling relate to the heap of discrimination? And then how does the heap of discrimination relate to the heap of form? They all really are all tied together like a network more than a sequence. Once we experience something as the source of our pleasure or the source of our displeasure, we can't help but like it or dislike it. Those two are so tied together, but don't have to be. Like they don't even have to happen. They are happening, but they're happening by way of a big mistake. Mistake being: that object triggered the like or dislike, that object triggered the pleasure, the displeasure, so the like or dislike, and so I blame the object. So as we're exploring these feelings and reactions to the feelings, where we end up finally is recognizing it can't be coming from the object. Not just by telling ourselves that over and over again, but by showing ourselves that over and over again, both in and out of meditation, and then we can finally get off automatic pilot. And at that level of mastery where you can no longer ripen a lower realm, it seems to me it's because you've overcome that automatic blame factor for whatever your experience is and its pleasantness or unpleasantness. So if at the moment of death, we're having an unpleasant experience, which they say it is, we're going to blame that unpleasant experience on our fear or anger or whatever, and then boom, we're going to send a reaction seed and that's what colors our lower realm rebirth. If we don't blame the experience we're having for our up or down, we're not going to trigger that fear from which we react because we could have the fear and go, “okay, who cares [if it’s thumbs up or thumbs down]?” And then it's not going to push us to a lower realm. That wisdom happening, not that we're thinking it, because we don't have cognitive thought by that time, but our conviction of what's happening has shifted enough at mastery that our blame factor is really, really diminished. Not gone yet, because that doesn't happen until out of path of seeing, but gone enough, which is inspiring, I think, is to reach mastery. And you know, Geshehla, he's amazing. He says to us all the time, just by hearing the pen thing and then just by you hearing yourself explain it to somebody else, that's enough, no more lower realms. And it's like, maybe, maybe not, but I see his reasoning because if we understand the pen thing enough or believe in it enough to try to teach it to somebody else, that's built from seeds where we've worked on it before. And that plants seeds for this wisdom that hopefully will kick in before we do find ourselves in that dying. So, you know, he's not making stuff up, of course. So pat yourself on the back. And that really is the time to do, because that's the end of class. 

So remember that person we wanted to be able to help. [Usual dedication]

Okay. So we'll have class next week, but then on May 20th and 27th, we'll be off because I'm going to be away. So mark your calendar. You get to two Tuesdays, not really two weeks, but two Tuesdays. Okay. All right. Thank you for the opportunity. I always learn a lot. Thank you.  

All right, welcome back. We are Bok Jinpa course four, class four, it's May 13th, 2026. Let me remind us that there'll be no class next week, the 20th or the 27th. And we'll be back again on June 3rd. We'll have three more classes to finish this Master Kamalashila's text. And then we'll decide what we're doing after that. 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]

[8:18]

So let's settle in. Park your body as you know how to do. 

Once you have that body set, you can just forget it and instead bring your focus of attention to your breath at your nostrils. 

Tom, for this session, you stay at your nostrils, would you please, on your breath. 

Go through your own sequence for focusing that mind on the object.

Checking and adjusting the clarity.

Checking and adjusting what you mean by your intensity. 

Allow that mind to settle into its object. 

Now instruct that focused, clear, intense, meditating mind on what I'm telling you is your object. So let's actually do that as an example. Get back on your breath, object breath. Meditating mind, focused breath. 

Stay on the breath, even as I'm talking. Hard to do, stay on the breath. Stay on the breath, stay on the breath. 

Now tell that meditating mind, “time to change objects to the instructions coming”. And the instruction is recall why we are learning to meditate. 

We see suffering in our world. We experience suffering. 

We react to it. 

We've learned that that whole sequence is unnecessary… All that pain can be stopped. 

We've learned that to do so, we want to reach a deep state of meditative concentration called stillness… from which we can penetrate through to the true nature of all that pain… so that we can stop it… once and for all.

We want that stillness… that quality of our mind in which we can say, “park on this object and stay there until I tell you to do something differently”. Meaning you tell it to do something differently. 

We call it single-pointed. 

If our body is shifting around, the habit of the mind jumping to its attention is so strong. 

So we learn first to get the body still. 

Then we practice again and again, parking the mind, the awareness on an object of our choice… and checking on / off? Bright or subtle? Intense or dull? Agitated or sleepy? Making the adjustments necessary.

Like training the puppy dog to sit, stay, come, roll over. 

Our minds can reach a state where it's eager to do what we want it to do. 

Meditation: How is my single-pointed focus as I change my object?

So let's explore a little bit. 

Because of my instructions, intentionally move your object of focus from hearing what I'm saying to following the instruction. But feel your mind intentionally change because you say so, not because I say so. 

So now focus on the space between your eyebrows. 

Find it mentally as if you draw a line on your forehead from one eyebrow to the other. 

Park your attention on that physical location. 

Notice your perspective. 

Notice whether you're finding that point is a visual idea, or a tactile idea, or something other. 

Now intentionally shift your object of focus to the roof of your mouth. 

Put the tip of your tongue behind your front teeth, the two front teeth… and then follow the sensation as you move the tip of that tongue straight back the midline. It goes over that rough area into that hollow… you find a little hill, you go over the hill and back as far as you can reach. Then bring your tongue back to the highest bump on the hill.

The tip of your tongue touching that place. Zoom your focus of attention to that location where your tongue touches the palate. 

Now let your tongue drop away and move your mind's focus straight up until it intersects where that line between your eyebrows and it would cross. 

Use your mind to explore it until you find that location. 

Note how that location shows up for you. Is it a visual picture? Is it a sensation? 

Check your level of clarity. 

Check your level of intensity, curiosity, or fascination. “Where is that? What is that? Am I there? Am I not there?” 

Keep exploring, enjoying the exploration. 

If you feel something, zoom in on the feeling. 

If you see something, zoom in on what you see.

And stay there. 

Check, are you still engrossed in that tiny little spot? 

And now with your intention and your mind's focus, see or feel, experience this place expanding, expanding, expanding in all directions. 

How big can you make it… by way of your focus of attention? 

There's no limit to how big you can make it, if you want. 

And notice, does making it big dilute your focus? Or increase your focus? Just notice. 

And then adjust. 

Are you still on that drop? That place, huge as the universe? 

Now intentionally, with the power of your focused attention, draw it back… slowly, enjoyably, fascinated.

Back to that tiny little place where we started. 

And check the quality of your attention now. 

Now intentionally let go of that object of focus. Bring your object of focus back to being you inside this body, inside your room.

And dedicate that exploration in single-pointed focus to all beings reaching their single-pointed focus that they will use someday to bring an end to all suffering. 

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

What is it to be single-pointed?

[31:44]

So if we were able to have that location as our mind's object of focus, without the mind going “itch”, [then us bringing the mind back with a] “no”, or “lunch tomorrow”, [then us bringing the mind back with a] “no”, without jumping off, without sliding into almost falling asleep, then we stayed on the object. And that meant if we were on the object, whether we then said to the mind on the object, “now make the object big”, as long as in the process of making it big, we didn't go, “whoa, it just passed by the Eiffel Tower”. Oh, whoops, off, right? “Oh, this is stupid” [bring the mind back]. If we just continue to expand the thing, we are still on our object. The object is changing, we're intentionally making that change and following it; we're still on the object. And it's something that our mind… like I needed to hear that again and again and again, because it seemed like I was only on the object if I kept the object there and nothing changed about the object, about my quality of mind, about how I was feeling about it. But it's not that. There are all kinds of stuff could happen during our single-pointed meditation. It stays single-pointed as long as we are always directing that change and it's related to our original object. 

So anywhere along the way, if all of a sudden the mind pops off, [then we’ve] lost it. When we were learning the stages of meditation, we don't even start checking for dullness and agitation until we're on the object long enough that we can check for dullness and agitation. And then when we were first learning that, we were using an object that we weren't intentionally changing in any way. And now we're ready to crank up our skill and then explore as I shift how I'm using my meditation object. Is my puppy-dog-meditating-mind well-trained enough that it goes, “yeah, yeah, I'll do that. Yeah, yeah, I'll do that. I'll do that. Will that make you happy? I'll do that.” That's what we want is a mind that is that eager to do what we tell it to do. 

And then the danger is, well, if I'm telling it what to do, then isn't that like off the object? Who am I, the meditator, if… right? It gets confusing. Finally, that all comes together and you don't have this schizophrenic “are you on the object or aren't you, because that's being off the object”, right? But somehow we learn how to do it and then finally you get the ability where you just turn on your object, you park on it, and the meditation that you're gonna do also turns on and runs. It's kind of magical because somebody has to be saying: do this, now do that. And we don't wanna be listening to a guided meditation forever because then we actually are only getting single-pointed on somebody telling us what to do, not on doing it ourselves. So at some point we learn these meditations and we do them ourselves. 

So when we are intentionally changing our object… not changing the object, but the object goes from teeny teeny to big big, that's changing the object, but it's not changing to a different object. So I don't know how to say that. As we are intentionally directing things to shape shift and coming back, and doing it all single-pointedly, there's no limit to what we can do with that object of focus. 

And the key factor in all of it, which we didn't do yet in this particular meditation, was to remind ourselves that at any moment of our awareness on that object, what's happening is ripening mental images and nothing but. But if we take a single-pointed focus practice and then turn that on, we're not on the object anymore until we've learned how to turn on our analysis without losing the object, and that's something that comes with time. But typically what they teach us is practice your fixation and don't worry about the mental image of emptiness yet. Then shift after five minutes of fixation effort, then shift and do your analytical exploration of your object - “How do I think it exists? How do I know it must exist? Why is that true? If it's true that it's mental images, my ripening seeds and nothing but, what's its true nature? Oh, that's emptiness of it” with a mind that's focused on all those aspects of the questioning and answering without jumping off to lunch or without getting too sleepy to get the answer. And then when we do our analysis and come to our conclusion, “oh yeah, even that bright clear thing is mental images and nothing but. Cool. Now let's suck it all back - mental images and nothing but”. When we get our conclusion, then we park again on the conclusion with that single-pointed focus on the absence of something that we thought was there that was never there. Do you see why it's so hard to park on an absence? Because we've been practicing parking on a something, on a presence, and that's what our mind is good at. So the poor puppy dog is trained to park our mind on a presence, on a presence, on a presence, “and now you want me to do it on an absence? What are you nuts?” So that too takes practice and reward, practice and reward, practice and reward. 

The blazing wisdom that understands nothing exists

[39:59]

So we're at the point in Master Kamalashila's text where he's reached his explanation of reaching TONG LAM, reaching experiencing emptiness directly. He's been building us up to that through the chapters. What do we have to do to gather the skill, to be in the quality of attention where this could actually happen? And I don't know, it's like we want this rich, deep explanation like he's been giving us on how do we make that shift from seeing everything as seeds to experiencing directly the fact that nothing is anything but that? And all he says is like these two short paragraphs that says you'll reach the point where you recognize directly the no self-nature of the self and all its parts, and then you'll reach that blazing wisdom, and then you'll go on to get used to living according to it. And then he goes right past it. He does say “and you'll now be free of 112 mental afflictions”. But out of 84,000? Like still, 112 is better than 110, but come on, it's not enough. It's significant, of course, we know. But he just leaves it at that. 

So Lama Christie, she went digging into the database with Geshe Michael's help and she found other writers in our lineage that were willing to attempt a deeper explanation of the process of seeing emptiness directly. And then each one, they're helpful, they're fascinating, they're interesting. And my mind goes, it can't be exactly right because none of them can be exactly right because we're trying to convey in written conceptuality something that is non-conceptual, something that's beyond conception. So the only way to talk about it is conceptually. And then Lama Christie says, what it feels like is we are like going in these concentric circles. Is that the right term? Where you start talking about it in this broader way and then you try to explain it a little bit more accurately and the conception gets a little tighter and a little tighter and a little tighter, but you can't ever get to it because you're trying to do something with a presence of something you're trying to get to an absence. So you just can't ever explain the experience of emptiness directly. And then the author always says, so we shouldn't even try, but [they go on to try]. So we take all of these different ways that they have tried to explain and then we read them and we explore them and we recognize that none of them are exactly it. But all of them will help us to get closer and closer and closer. So you have those in your reading, a couple of different ones and have fun digging into those. 

So he describes the experience of the direct perception as this blazing wisdom. Which is, I don't know, it's a little bit interesting because in my own mind when I'm hearing Geshe Michael describe going into the direct perception of emptiness and he says that you just can't say anything about it, you're in this sheer absence of oneself and all existing things. And when I first heard it, I remember my mind thinking, oh, just like a blind person in a dark room, as if it would matter that the room was dark, just nothing appearing. And then it's like, oh, that's not quite right, it would have to be something clear, like the clear space between me and my screen. It must be like that, it must be clear. And maybe that's close, but it's like the only way I know something is clear is because I've got these two things on either end, so there still has to be something to establish the clearness between. But I'm seeing the clearness as something, not as an absence, unless I intentionally turn my mind to say, “oh, what I'm seeing between me and this is an absence, not a clear space”. Do you feel the difference? So it's like trying to work with my mind. And then, but a blazing light, a blazing light sounds like, wow, this big flash. It sounds like you're in a dark room and somebody turns on all the fluorescents, like, whoo. And that can't be right because that's a presence, right? Light is a presence, isn't it? And so it's like, we really can't describe this thing [called] experiencing ultimate reality, the emptiness of all existence. And then we get to diamond way and they call it the clear light. And it's like, wait a minute, that sounds like a positive, and there's this long discussion about what they mean by it that'll come later.

[46:53]

But Lama Christie said that she resonated with his “blazing wisdom” in the sense that what is experienced… again, this is so hard… in that experience of finally ultimate reality... I'm stalled... That is so indescribably vastly different than any previous existence, previous experience… like the only time you would say, “oh, that was like a blazing wisdom” is once you come out of it, of course. But she says the reason he's using that term is because all of a sudden something has turned on about your understanding of existence that's so glaringly bigger, different, higher, extraordinary than anything ever before that it is like this blazing wisdom that has turned on in your mind. And he uses that term to describe. Not like it's happening when you are in the direct perception because you can't say that anything's happening, but it's not that nothing's happening, right? There's the direct experience of the absence of self-existence of self, other, interaction between all of it, but now you know something so extraordinarily beyond what we knew before. That's why he calls it an experience of blazing wisdom. 

And Lama Christie explained that what makes it so extraordinarily bigger, even after all our study and working our way through all the different schools, back and forth, is how we then know, as a result of the sequence of the CHU CHOK, the direct experience of the seed ripening identity of the object followed by the deep realization of nothing exists in any other way than that, sheer absence of me and all, and we come out of that now knowing that nothing exists. She used the term, “nothing exists”. And it's a little shocking and bewildering. And it's like, my mind still goes, “no, no, no, that can't be right”. But she says you come out recognizing that there is absolutely no pot on stove. Beyond even the, “no, there's the data and then my mind makes the mental image”. That is true. But as we are trying to explain to ourself, “Here's our friend, the cup”. And we know that each one of us experience this object unique to us. And even as we know that, if you check your mind critically, we're still holding that there's an object that my mind is experiencing unique to me. And I know when I look for the object, I'm just going to find something more subtle there that I'm experiencing unique to me. But do you see - we're holding on to some other that's there before my seeds make it into a more specific identity. And coming out of your first direct experience of ultimate reality is to recognize that, ‘No. There's not only no self-existent cup, there is no cup’. Does that mean there's no mental image cup here that I can't use? No, that's how and why it's here. But the new arya has made this leap from needing to say, “oh, it's not there from its own side. Oh, it's not there self-existently. Oh, it's not there like I thought it was” and they're able to say “just not there at all” and not mean it doesn't exist at all. When they say there's no cup there at all, they know exactly what they mean. Because there is a cup there - the one their seeds are ripening - me and the cup, holding it, right? It's all happening. It's not a me [separate] and the cup [separate], right, it's [all coming out of one mental image], this moment of experience [another ripening mental image], this moment [another ripening mental image], this moment [another ripening mental image], this moment [another ripening mental image], and nothing other than that. That's what makes everything. And that's what makes everything real, and that's how things have always been real. It's not like, “oh, there used to be things that existed and now they don't”. Do you see why it's blazing wisdom? It's, “oh my gosh, how come I couldn't see this before”, because now it's so obvious, even as coming out of it you're not experiencing it like that. How frustrating that must be, right? To know it one way and not be able to experience it that way. I thought she explained it really, really beautifully. Blazing wisdom. 

And then what do we do with that? We use the six perfections to learn how to choose our reactions to things in a different way, in a wiser way. So she said, we can see then, like a little deeper into the Heart Sutra and what it was trying to describe to us as it explains how a wisdom being perceives all five parts of the body, all five heaps as empty of any nature of their own and goes all the way to “there are no eyes, no ears, no nose, no tongue”, even to “there's no suffering, there's no cause of suffering, there's no cessation of suffering, there's no path to the cessation”. Wasn't that a shocker when we first read the Heart Sutra? It's like, what do you mean there's none of all that stuff? If there isn't, what are we doing? Until we explored it a little bit. And then one of the explanations says when you're in the direct perception of emptiness, none of that is appearing to us so of course you would say, in emptiness there are no eyes, no ears, no suffering, no nothing. But when we're understanding it more deeply from this level of someone who's seen it directly and then been willing to say, like this was the effect of it on my mind, we see that they still know that there's no eyes, no ears, no nose, right? Based on this blazing wisdom. And they don't mean none at all [pointing to eye], right? When we were doing Nagarjuna, it's like, “that doesn't cause that.” “No? Not at all? Not at all at all?” Or just not at all the way we think? Do you remember that refrain? To help our minds wrap our minds around it without freaking out. But in fact, there is no suffering. And I have to say, “independent of my seeds ripening making me perceive suffering” which is what makes suffering, but that doesn't make any suffering out there, which is where I think my seeds make it be. “Oh, my seeds explain why I see all this awfulness in my world”, but I'm still thinking that makes that real awfulness real, more real because my seeds make it. But see, I'm thinking of it wrongly. But how does it help to say, “oh, it's just not there at all”? Because that's not true either, right? It's there. It is awful. It's happening. With blazing wisdom, it's happening solely from my seeds. And it's terrible. And there's a cause for it and the end of the cause and the path to ending the cause. There is those, but only my mind seeds ripening making it so. It’s really, really slippery. It really does take taking it onto our meditation cushion and exploring and trying to find the conclusion and then recognizing, oh, that's not quite it. But every time we try and reach some little sense of being closer, we're making a huge impact on all of those previously made mental imprints that believed in the self-existentness of me and other all along. So every time we question that a little bit, is some 64 per instant’s worth of chipping away at our conviction that things have their own natures. So it's worth the effort. 

Let's take our break and we'll explore it in another sit. 

[break]

Meditation: Exploring “there is no body” and “there is no suffering”

[1:03:10]

So set your body for a meditation.

When you've got your body parked, park your mind on your breath at your nostrils to trigger your mind to park. Meaning the focus, the clarity, the intensity turns on, using the sensation of the breath at your nostrils as the trigger. 

Now let's explore Heart Sutra statement “there is no body”. 

So intentionally turn your object of focus from the sensation at your breath to the sensation that you call your body. 

We have a mental experience. 

Maybe it's tactile sensations, maybe it's warmth or coolness…

a sense of shape. 

Your meditating focus is exploring this thing “my body”. 

And when you have those different aspects of it clearly identified, check each one. 

What about that sensation gives you enough information to call it your left hand? Your right shoulder?

Find the mental image aspect of the experience through which the identity happens. Can you find it? 

And then what happens if you withdraw that mental image?

Put the mental image back on.

“Oh, phew, I do have a left hand.” 

Take the mental image away. 

Is there enough information to be my left hand? 

Whatever is left is also a mental image, take that one away. 

Whatever is left, take that one away. 

Is there any amount of body there independent of a mental image? 

And that's what's meant by “there is no body”. 

And so there is the body that I have now, and now, and now, and now. 

Now let's do a similar exploration. For the Heart Sutra phrase “there is no suffering” or “there is no source of suffering”, you use whichever one you prefer. 

So think of some cycle of suffering that you are currently experiencing. 

Any life situation within which we act towards another in a way that we are intending to get some good result, and then what happens next may or may not be the result that we wanted. And if it is, we're somehow satisfied. And if it isn't, we are upset again. 

Find some small or big such cycle. 

Recognize how that pattern flows beyond our control. 

It's happened by the time we are aware that it has happened. 

And so it seems like it's that thing, or that other, that nasty yelling boss that has upset me. 

And so we push away the things we don't like. 

We grasp to the things we do like. 

All happening so seemingly uncontrollably.

Unaware that we are perpetuating the very cycle of distress that we are trying to avoid. 

So it cannot be true that there is no suffering. 

It's all suffering…

isn't it? 

Now recognize how it is that the situation that's causing the distress is mental images forcing us to perceive that, forcing us to experience that in that way. 

How do we know that it's mental images? One way - not everyone experiences this situation in the same way I do. 

Another way - we could explore the actual information we're getting from our eyes, our ears, to recognize that we never get enough information to come up with the story that we experience. 

Another way would be to explore the feeling that we're actually reacting to.

Or to explore the action we are compelled to do to see whether it can truly bring the result we want. Many different ways. 

And when we come to the conclusion, “no, my mental images and nothing but”...

we can explore removing the mental image. Not that we actually can, but just imagine what if I didn't have a mental image “angry yelling boss”? What would this experience be? 

What if I didn't have the mental seeds for anger? What would this sensation be? 

What if I didn't have the seeds for thinking something harmful could bring a good result? Would I react like that? 

What suffering is there without our mental image ripening it? 

What samsara is there without our mental seeds ripening it? 

What Buddha paradise is there without our mental seeds ripening it? 

Now think again of this particular cycle of suffering you were working with. 

And as we put our mental images back on, put them on intentionally wisely. 

My response will be this to plant seeds for a beautiful future for all of us. 

Those sensations will be love and compassion. 

That being who still seems to be the source of distress is someone who actually is helping me burn off some yuck and create goodness. 

Imagine different mental images ripening. 

And then shift back to the mental image of your body in your room. 

Notice if your mind goes, “oh, finally I'm back”.

And don't let it stay there. Say, Yes, we're back to the current mental image me, and this current mental-image-me functions in a current mental-image-me way. 

And so because this form is empty, I can create an immaculate paradise body of a Buddha. 

Because feelings are empty, I can create and perpetuate incredible bliss all the time. 

Because suffering and the source of suffering are empty, it can all be stopped forever for everyone. 

And I will do that, no matter how long it takes me. 

And so dedicate that exploration to bringing forth your pure world for everyone's benefit. 

And when you're ready, get grounded in your room and open your eyes, take a stretch. 

Stepping through the doorway from conceptual understanding to direct

[1:27:08]

When we're working on our emptiness meditations, and hopefully they start actually going deeper and deeper, it's very likely, says Lama Christie, that at some point we will reach a level, like an experiential level, in a particular session where we are really, really close to actually stepping through that doorway from the conceptual understanding to the direct. Now, it of course means we're already at that platform of stillness. We're already at that deep ability to analyze succinctly, come to the conclusion, and then penetrate that conclusion beyond its conceptual level. And she says it's very common to hit an experience of fear that will kick us out. It's quite a strong fear, actually. Not a like shocking kind of thing, but a wall that you can't push through because our belief in self-existent me, not the “self-existent I exist independent of any other factor”, but still this deep holding to a belief that there's a me there that is empty of self-existence as opposed to the true nature which is absence. And this tiny still clinging to a me, when we get close to its dissolving into emptiness, into its absence, there's a piece of it that says, I am not going there. It's afraid of annihilation. It's afraid that going into emptiness, even with all of our study, there's this deep sense of, no, I will disappear and never be known again. And there's this deep, deep inherent fear of that. And she says it's rare and special to even reach that point, that depth of meditation. And then to reach it and not be able to open the door and step through, she says it just feels embarrassing. Like it feels like, man… because it took such goodness to get there. Now it is goodness to get there so you haven't like burned off seeds and you're done, have to start over. But she's like… I didn't recognize it until like now and I'm reading these words again. And it's like, ohh, like I had that experience, and I understood what it was and I tried to get back to it and I couldn't. And so I haven't talked about it to other people. 

And her reason for bringing it up is that if we start backing out, why do I still have that deep, deep inherent belief in a me when I've been working on that emptiness for lifetimes, let alone intensively for years on this one, how come that's still in there? And she like backs it out and backs it out and backs it out. And she says, maybe deep down, we don't really believe that this suffering is something that we can stop. Or maybe we don't really deeply, deeply believe that my belief in a me is deeply ingrained in the cause of all that suffering. Like who wants to admit I made it all? You know, it's big enough to say, oh, okay, I'm gonna take personal responsibility for fixing it all, yay, I'll be the hero. But that means I also have to take personal responsibility for causing it all. “No. No, no, no, no, no." And that me that refuses to accept that half of the responsibility is the me that's afraid to actually let go into its own true nature. Even as I beg and plead, “please bless me to see emptiness directly, please bless me”, there is a part of me that goes, “maybe not really”, right? To hear it said helps us look a little bit again. And not with embarrassment, to be able to say, “yeah, I think I really am afraid of disappearing into emptiness, maybe there is a part of me that thinks that means I don't really exist”, which is a misunderstanding, but an easily experienced one. It's that cliff - if I don't exist the way I believe I do, I must not exist at all. “Nope, I am middle way.” “Yeah, but Middle Way is too hard to hold. Am I me or am I not me?” 

So she suggests that the more we work on our emptiness / dependent origination, this marriage of these two, off the cushion, in our interactions, as we're doing the dishes, looks like dirty dishes, looks like me washing dishes, looks like it's all my mental images ripening, in fact, there's nothing here. It's like,” no, there's not nothing here at all!” Watch our mind say, “no, it's not nothing”, because it's not nothing. It is true, it's not nothing, but it's also true that it's not what it appears. And that doesn't make it something else, right? This constant shapeshift. So the more we trigger in any moment of experience “yeah, seems like it's in-it from-it, but I know it's not. My mental image is making it exactly what it is, and so what do I want to create for the future?” The more we do that, the more at ease we will be as we get closer and closer to experiencing the no self-nature of my self. Just because we've built the habit of making ourselves remember that what I'm experiencing isn't the way it is, but it isn't nothing at all, right? And non-existence is impossible. There are non-existent things, of course, but the non-existence of you, the subject side, is impossible. Given the fact that there's existence now, which is the one thing we know is true, that existence is established by valid perception, by a subject side. It's the subject that's having valid perception. That's the only valid perception we can validify, is our own. Any valid perception you're having, I don't know; I think I do, but I don't. So the subject side always has to be, so we cannot disappear. But Sarahni will disappear. So we see how slippery that is. In the direct perception of emptiness, there will be no Sarahni seeing emptiness directly. Can't be, that's not absence, that's not ultimate reality. So it's one thing to go, “I know I can't not exist”, and as I say it, I misunderstand it. And so it's gonna help me reach that door, but it's not the thing that's gonna help me step through that door. Yes, all the familiarity helps me get there. 

So she says, the best tool to being able to go through that door when we get there is all the seeds that we've made from having surrendered to our Lamas. The surrender to the Lama piece is one that she keeps coming back to again and again throughout Bok Jinpa. And it's confusing because who do we mean by our Lama? What do we mean by our Lama? Like, that's a long, long story. But this being whom we hold to be made of love, compassion, wisdom; the one who knows us better than we know ourselves; that one who loves us more than we love ourselves, is that possible? Who knows exactly what we need, whose compassion compels them to be exactly what we need. Like from our side, maybe it looks like they’re some ordinary human who does all kinds of weird stuff. Or maybe this Lama is this connection with a being who's not in the flesh now, that one who we know can give us direction, can guide us. And then we can have such a being and we can park them over here and say hello to them in the morning, and the rest of the day completely forget about them. And we can grow our relationship with that being, whether they're in the flesh or not in the flesh, whether they're next door or not next door. And we can grow this reliance upon their wisdom, upon their love, and learn how to open ourselves to receive that guidance and then live according to it. Like follow its guidance even as boss is yelling, I should yell back, their wisdom is saying, “no, tell them how much you love them. Tell them how much you appreciate them yelling at you.” And your you is going, “no way, they'll think I'm crazy.” And we fight with those beings. And they're like, okay, fine, up to you. They're not gonna go home mad, they're not gonna reject you. They just go, “all right, we'll try again later”. 

But this idea of surrender is giving over our belief that I know best what's for me. It's incredibly hard for a modern person, right? We've evolved to take care of ourselves, to be independent, to be the one who knows what's right for us. Like, we're all good at that. And so it can be particularly difficult to put ourselves into this space of, “no, I don't know what's good for me, you tell me.” Because then what if they're gonna tell me something wrong? What if they're gonna abuse me? What if, what if, what if, right? Because that's all happened too, right? We've surrendered to somebody and they've abused it. Or somebody surrendered to us and we abused them. “Egads, not me.” But, do you see? Yes; if I could even have that fear, it means I have the seeds of having done that. So it's not an easy practice to surrender; it's not at all an easy practice. And yet the power of it, as we even try it on for size and explore it and use it to some extent, the seed shift that we make is extraordinarily powerful. And it grows this relationship with this being that is the power that'll carry us through that door when the fear wants to arise, and instead the devotion to the Lama does and we can step through. So that practice of turning to the Lama, whatever it is we mean by that, to this being made of love, turning to them when we're in distress. And it just sounds like going backwards, it sounds like going back to church, you know? “Give your power over to somebody else.” And I think most of us have rejected that at some point. And yet here we are back to it, but back to it in a whole different mode of understanding. This way of opening ourselves up to the flow of the lineage, the power of the divine, and let it color our actions and reactions. 

How else are we gonna change? We don't even know what it's like to be a divine being, why not let them pour themselves into us and shine forth and see, just see what it looks like by the time it gets colored by all these human filters. It'll still be better than human me making what I think is the right choices. It's hard to do in everyday life because we're on automatic pilot. One of the beauties of retreat time is we can explore what it feels like to just say, “I'm not gonna do anything until I hear from you.” And then, you know, the voice says, go to the bathroom. “Okay, I'll go to the bathroom.” And then the voice says, go sit. “Okay, I'll go sit”, right? It's kind of fun. You just don't move until you hear the instruction. And then surprisingly, stuff comes and then your mind goes, “no, you're just making it up.” Maybe, but maybe not. And then that plants the seeds for this connection to build and to happen. 

All right, that's all I have for this class. We have a few extra minutes if anybody has comments or needs help with their meditation or wants to share anything from their progress in meditation. Again, the idea here is learning to meditate but as we're seeing, it's really classes on exploring emptiness and dependent origination. They go so much deeper than what we get to do in the ACI or even in the Diamond Way. 

So anything, anybody need any help? Or would you rather have 15 extra minutes? Yes, Roxana, thank you. 

[Roxana: Thank you, dear Lama. I liked more the first meditation that we did than the second one, to be honest. I really enjoyed the first one.]

Yeah, it is meant to be a playful exploring. What's it like when I do this? And what's it like when I do that? As we're growing our single-pointed concentration. That's why she did it. 

[Roxana: Thank you. I have a question regarding the example you were giving right now about suffering and about washing the dirty dishes. So because there aren't any dirty dishes and that's why we can use it as washing my suffering, washing my pain, washing, that's the purpose of it.]

Right. I'm washing away my ignorance. I am creating my Buddha paradise. I am bodhichitta-ing, I am bodhichitta-ing.

[Roxana: Thank you. I just wanted to make sure that I got it right. Thank you.]

And you know, if we do that out loud, the people around us, like pretty soon they're gonna think we're crazy. So keep it to yourself if you're afraid they'll put you in the, you know, hospital. But if you think it would be helpful, say it out loud.

[Roxana: Thank you. Well, you know, I'm setting an example. It's an opportunity, isn't it? The seeds are there for somebody else who listens.]

[More Q&A and usual dedication]

Okay, welcome back. We are Bok Jinpa, still course 4, Class 5. It is June 3rd, 2026. Let's gather our minds here as we usually do, please. Bring your attention to your breath until you hear from me again. We'll do our opening prayers and then I'll yak a little bit and then we'll sit together. 

[usual opening]

[8:05]

So thank you for coming back after our two weeks break. And remember that Master Kamalashila is teaching meditation as a tool for us to move ourselves through those five paths to becoming a being who can bring all others to the happiness they seek. It's easy to forget that that's what we're doing here. And then it's also easy when we don't have class from week-to-week or day-to-day, it's also easy to slip right back into our usual patterns. And so I hope that you can think back the last two weeks and just find something that you did where you made a little greater effort in your meditation, trying to track it a little bit better, just to do your own personal rejoicable. And maybe you can honestly say to yourself, I used that two weeks to really work on looking for my heap of form. And pat yourself on the back for whatever depth of meditation that you worked on. 

The purpose of these classes, Lama Christie kept reminding us, is to give us, share with us, the tools to be able to deepen our meditative concentration so that we can have that necessary piece of the puzzle to cultivate our realizations through those five paths. And tracking our effort, even when we may think, “oh, my effort is going nowhere”, the tracking it plants seeds that will ripen as progress, whether we feel we can see it or not. And then if we are focused on moving into the Diamond Way with Geshe Michael, we'll find that the efforts we made in trying to reach single-pointed concentration will serve us in that practice as well, because those practices don't take the time to practice getting to stillness. We have to put it in there, knowing how to do it, knowing where in those practices it can fit. So I know I've said before, but I think of having gone through our Diamond Way training, there are people that went through it that didn't also receive Lama Christie's Bok Jinpa series. And you know, they got the full course, they got everything that they need, but it made it for me all so much richer to also have these skills, these tools, these insights because it deepened my ability to understand what I was learning. So it's like, I'm hoping to share that with you as well, whether you go on to Diamond Way or not, doesn't matter. Well, it does matter, but I share this with you, whether you do or not. 

Restless boredom

So Lama Christie uses this term, restless boredom. And it seems like an oxymoron. We have these states of mind of restless boredom. And that restless boredom is this huge blocker to being able to sit in the single-pointed concentration that we're trying to achieve, if we haven't already. And it's curious because we would think the state of mind of boredom would lead to dullness. But restlessness is agitation. And it's like, how can you have both? Restless boredom. But restlessness gets so agitating, you've got to give it all up and stop. Boredom gets so sleepy, you've got to agitate to wake yourself up. So it's not that they're happening at the same time. It's that they're swinging back and forth, really, technically, throughout our day all day long. And I recognize them - I'm on a certain topic for a certain period of time and then the boredom kicks in. There's nothing boring about what I'm working on, it's just a fatigue sets in. “Okay, too much, I've got to go do something else.” That's the restlessness. I think I need the restlessness to wake the boredom up. And then the restlessness gets too much and it's like, “Oh, man, give me some boredom, please, to calm me down.” And the difficulty is we think that the object that we turn our attention to is the thing that either wakes me up or calms me down. And it isn't, is it? Right? It's all seeds ripening. So that maybe the thing serves to bring my mind down and maybe it doesn't. And maybe something that used to serve to bring my mind down now doesn't, and I have to find something new. 

So we're still working with this idea that we think it's our meditation object that has the quality to hold our focus or not hold our focus. And if I'm working with a meditation object and I just can't get single-pointed on it, there must be something wrong with it. “Let's go to another one and see if that one will hold my attention.” So there are some that we are more attracted to and so it is easier to hold our attention on them. But actually, if we continue to do so without recognizing it isn't really the object that's so fascinating, it's my seeds for the object to be fascinating. And can I plant my seeds such that anything I turn my mind on is fascinating enough? Like, won't that be nice to have that kind of control over our focused attention to say, “okay, time out on this one, turn to this one”, and our mind just goes [switches] and stays there, and then [switches] and stays there, instead of [going all over the place], which mind still does. So sometimes it's good to take time off from learning more, more, more, more, and just sit with one practice over and over and over again, to meet up with that restless boredom. And to take this puppy dog mind that's used to getting its own way, and say, “restless boredom or not, sit there and be fascinated.” And what happens when we try? That mind goes, “no, no, I'm not going to do that”, like the two year old, right? So that's our practice when we're practicing purely our meditation skills. 

And then as we've learned, on any given session, we don't want to lose the opportunity of any amount of concentration that we've gathered; lose the opportunity by not digging into the nature of our meditative object. It appears to be there so there's a part of my mind that believes it's really there. But then can it be there in the way I think it is, in-it from-it, and still me experience it the way I do if somebody else would experience it differently? “Oh, I see. It doesn't have the nature I think it has.” And rest in that absence with the same fascination we were trying to cultivate when we were resting on its presence. So it's not an easy thing to reach single-pointed concentration and then turn that single-pointed concentration onto the insight factor. It takes practice. And for the practice to be successful, it takes seeds. And for the seeds to be made strongly enough, we study, study, study, meditate, meditate, meditate, contemplate, contemplate, contemplate, and serve the high holy being who shares those wisdoms with us. Serving our Lamas in whatever way that looks like is the power behind the seeds of our meditative training practice that actually makes them into seeds that are powerful enough to bring about the result that we're looking for in a reasonable time frame. So it really isn't so much about more time on your meditation cushion as it is about more attentive seed planting in our off-cushion time that we bring to our on-cushion time that will propel our meditative practice. It's not so much the training time as what we do in between time. And then what we do in between time, of course, is keep our vows and make those offerings of keeping the vows to those holy beings that we have before us or we have in our hearts all the time. So it sounds easy to do. It's just we get on automatic pilot of human life and we go all day and then it's like, oh my gosh, I forgot. But as soon as we remember, “okay, it's all my seeds ripening. I offer it to you, holy being. Help me, please. I regret I forgot. Let's get back on the pony and go forward.” 

So let's go forward and let's just practice a little single-pointed concentration. Which Lama Christie gave us a different version because she's recognizing that if we have a new object to explore, we're more likely for our mind to latch on and stay so that we can plant some seeds for being able to latch on and stay on anything that we turn our mind to. 

Meditation: Practicing single-pointed concentration

[20:37]

Okay. So I suspect by now you have a sequence that you go through when you sit to meditate. So I'm just going to say, start that sequence and then come to your breath. 

Use your breath as the object to trigger the sequence of fixation, clarity, and intensity. 

Now turn your mind from your object, the breath, to recalling why meditation matters to you so much. 

Now think about why doing your session on behalf of someone else's benefit, why that matters. 

Consider whether or not you think it's true that you can do more for those people in pain in your meditation session than you can in worldly life. 

And is it just any old meditation that that would be true for, or something special? 

And so recall that every moment of trying to meditate with this high motivation on behalf of a suffering being is planting seeds that will move us towards that goal of being able to help them. 

And so with that motivation, let's practice single-pointed concentration. Which means on an object free of dullness, free of agitation. 

So the object we will use is a version of our breathing, but it goes like this. 

Look inside and find your tailbone. 

Hopefully you can identify its location and move your focus of attention from its bottom tip, up about an inch, where it widens and meets what's called your sacrum. 

Notice whether your experience of that is visual, or more tactile, or something else. 

Whatever you find, as you peer at it more closely, you see that in the center of it there's a tiny shining bright light. 

It's sort of surprising. We expected bone, but inside that bone seems to be this bright shining light. 

So turn on that fascination to peer at that bright shining light. 

And notice then as you are breathing out, that little light gets smaller. 

And then as you breathe in, you notice that little light gets bigger. 

And it's a fascinating connection. 

And so as you explore that connection, your mind is going closer and closer to that tiny little bright light. 

If you want to, you can even go down inside that bright light. 

So that now as you exhale, that bright light expands out bigger, bigger, bigger. 

And as you inhale, it draws in smaller, smaller, smaller. 

Fascinated with the imagery or the sensation or both. 

And let's sit with just that imagery with three minutes. 

Check.

Check

Now check. Right now, are you on that little ball of light breathing? 

Assess in that three minutes - How much was I on it? Did I ever lose it completely? Did I lose the fascination? Did I fix losing the fascination? Did I get bored? Did I fix getting bored? 

Give yourself an honest assessment, including “I was actually on that baby for a little while. Good for me.” 

Now bring your mind back up. Let yourself become aware of your self in your body in your room. And dedicate that exploration to being able to go a little deeper next time for the benefit of that other person who doesn't have access to this. 

And then come on out, take a stretch. 

[39:02] 

So again, recognize that single-pointed focus does not mean stopped, nothing happening. Single-pointed focus means I have an object and I stay on that object focused, clear, fascinated, whatever the object is doing. I don't lose the object. So our object was that little dot and our breath, which is two objects, but technically it was the breath's effect on the little drop that was the object. And it was doing stuff the whole time, but as long as we were doing what it was doing the whole time, we were single-pointed. If that single-pointed was single-pointed and fascinated, we're at level seven. If while we're there, we're there long enough for the pleasures to come on, “Whoa, this is so easy”, whoops, just lost single-pointed to have that thought. But you get the idea. It becomes so pleasurable to just be on that object. You don't have to think, ‘whoa, I've got the SHING JANGs.” It just gets pleasurable. That's shamatha. Then from shamatha, we can stay at shamatha and peek at what's appearing, what is it really? We didn't do that in this session, but we would if we were using this as our single-pointed focus and then using it as our object to explore emptiness. “The little breathing light. I'm just making it up, it's in my imagination because she said so. Right. But even that wouldn't happen if it wasn't seeds ripening. So mental images happening, mental images happening, and no reality other than that” would be where we would explore. Still focused on that little light going out and in, if that's what your imagery was, or the sensation if that's what your experience was. Do you see? So single-pointed can be very active and not lose single-pointed. We lose single-pointed when suddenly we're thinking about lunch or suddenly we think, “well, I'd rather move this up to my heart.” That's changing the subject. So you get that. 

So we're in Master Kamalashila's Bhavanakrama and we're getting so close to the end of his text, this text. And last reading, he had reached his statement about reaching the path of seeing. And he was saying stuff that led up to that, what leads up to that. And he said, “thus is born the path of seeing. This occurs just after the experience of the supreme object — a blazing wisdom arises, which sees directly the lack of any true nature to any existing thing. For the first time, you are in a state devoid of any elaboration (at all), and have passed beyond this world. The bodhisattva is now residing in immaculate, utter purity”. He then goes on to talk about the bodhisattva levels as we cultivate our path of habituation. That's like all he says about path of seeing. First you get seed ripening experience, then you get blazing wisdom, free of all elaboration, and then you're on path of habituation. So Lama Christie dug up more quotes from different Lamas to help us explore it a bit more. And then in the process of that, all of this course, we've been exploring the five heaps, exploring our experience of the heaps, using them as a meditation object to both reach stillness and to experience or experiment with our dependent origination and emptiness viewpoints about those five heaps. So we had talked about the heap of form, and we had talked about the heap of feeling (just thumbs up, thumbs down, pleasure, pain), and in this particular class, we'll explore the heap of discriminating between things, the third heap. 

Overcoming our fear of getting close to emptiness

So Lama Christie was saying, last class and into this one, that we have this internal block, humans have this internal block that kicks in that prevents us from effortlessly going into a direct perception of emptiness. And that internal block has to do with our perceived level of safety that we think we have here in our human life. We understand that human life is the best one to have for a spiritual practice and I think I can say we all have a quite fortunate human life. We all have our struggles and our problems, but we've got roofs over our heads, we've got water in our pipes, we've got food. We're not struggling for survival, which would make a spiritual path pretty unimportant to us. So we have the goodness of a human life that allows us to turn our minds to our spiritual path. And we understand in that path that there is nothing good about this samsaric realm; no matter how great our human life is, it's all suffering. Intellectually, we get that. And then experientially, we're comfortable, and we're safe in that comfort. And we actually have probably experienced that as we study and work with our practices - our safety, our comfort, gets rocked a little bit. We have these ripenings, these purifications, and our habit, our tendency, human habit is, “yikes, I don't like this purification, thank you very much.” And probably in past lives, we've run away at that point. “If my spiritual path is going to make me suffer, I don't want any part of it.” When on the other hand, we've been taught when we study virtuous things, we ripen non-virtuous things sooner than they otherwise would have ripened so it doesn't matter how bad they're ripening now, they would have been worse. Like, is that helpful in the middle of a terrible ripening? It's like, egads, this could have been worse. “Yeah, but it could have been not at all too.” But that's fooling ourselves because if it happens, it's because we have seeds. And we know those laws of karma - if we’ve got them, they're gonna ripen sooner or later. We might as well ripen them sooner - no matter how bad they are, they're less bad. But who wants a spiritual practice where you're begging for bad stuff to happen to you? That's actually one of the misbeliefs that you lose on your path of seeing is that harmful spiritual practices can be spiritual practices. Just make yourself have pain is not a spiritual practice. Practice well and you'll get plenty of pain, you don't need to bring it on yourself. But who wants a spiritual path like that, come on? We want one that's nice. 

[49:39]

So it's all because we have this illusion, Lama Christie kept calling it, of some kind of safety in our current position. And then when that safety gets rocked, which it does every time we get close to recognizing that all of those existing things through which I am going for my safety, don't exist. Like what happens to my safety? It doesn't exist either. And no rational healthy mind wants to jump off a cliff without knowing that there's a net down there. And so as we work on our spiritual practices, we study emptiness believing we want to get close to it, and then [when] we get close to it, there's this deep inner belief in self-existent me that will back out. It's fear. It's experienced as fear. And it's at the superficial level, that fear of cutting into that safe place that we're in. So even our practices get to a safe place, a comfortable place. “Yeah, I can meditate at that level. I do it every day. It's routine. No problem” and we think it's going to last forever, and guess what? It doesn't. Something happens and it cuts into that routine. And then it's not easy to step back into it again. 

So one of the ways, well, the way that we address that fear is to push ourselves into looking for and at dependent origination and emptiness as often as we can outside of meditation. We study, we explore, we contemplate, we share with friends. We try to build this habit of anytime we're interacting with anything, we recognize, looks like I'm doing dishes, it's seeds ripening doing dishes, all of it's empty. I can think of myself as creating my Buddha paradise by doing these dishes. The emptiness of the three spheres. We can be reaching for the keys to turn on the car and think, whoa, if this works, it'll be a miracle. Even though in my mind, it's like, I know it's going to work. But any way we can remind ourselves that we are experiencing things in ways that don't exist the way we believe them to, we'll get more and more familiar with this things are not what they look like they are. And we're just playing with it in our mind. Just growing the habit to remind ourselves nothing has any nature. “That yelling person, my seeds are ripening making me see them like that, I don't know who or what they are. This feeling that I have, so hurt, why are they doing that to me? That's a ripening; it has no nature of its own. This same feeling could be, I'm so in love with you.” Right? And we say that and it's like, “not them, egads, they're terrible.” We're right back into our old worldview. But to just play with it, explore it, it puts a kink in the seed planting instead of being on automatic pilot “everything is the way it seems”, we at least have these little seeds of, “well, maybe not.” How often are we actually doing that if 65 per second, 24 hours a day? If we do it twice, maybe we're doing pretty well. But that's two times more than we did the day before so hooray for that. Exploring it over and over and over is what helps us cut away at the fear that's going to come up as we start to get close. Almost like if we were to start to get close prematurely, but that's impossible. We can't get close to seeing emptiness too soon for our seeds. But to build the seeds for it to happen, we want to be chipping away at this belief that I'm comfortable like I am. “Deep down, I don't really want to change. Change is too scary because we don't have control over change.” Technically, we could have control over change, couldn't we? And I'm not sure we'd want control over change, but we could have it and use it to help other people. 

So our ability to get closer and closer to emptiness directly is also cultivated by increasing the times when we get outside of ourself and have the other as our… I'm not saying that right. We cultivate our ability to go into the direct perception of emptiness every time we cultivate our sense that self and other are not… I have to say ‘not different’, but that's not exactly right. That self and other are equally important, that others’ happiness is the source of my happiness. So really that exchanging self and others, that is actually expanding self to include others, practice of Master Shantideva is really powerful seeds for being able to get close into that direct perception of emptiness without the fear because the fear is of losing oneself. So we've all had those experiences where we're in an experience where we've lost our sense of self, right? That's not the direct perception of emptiness, but we're so in the zone with what's going on that the me, me, me, me has finally shut up for a short period of time. And if you remember those, they are pleasurable, they are at ease, they are fluid, it feels good. And there's no reason we can't step right back into that if we had the seeds for it. And having the seeds for it allows us to then get into that direct perception of the no self-nature directly without that fear because we've been in and out of me-versus-other and me-the-most-important in our meditation time in our outer life. So again, Lama Christie said we can study the texts on emptiness, we can contemplate them, we can talk about them with others, we can debate them, and we should. And we can play with them in our daily life as we're interacting with other objects, and we should. And we can increase the power of all that by doing it in service to our holy lamas whose task is to teach everybody about emptiness and dependent origination. So if we are exploring what they've taught us, and trying to put it into practice in our life, and then offering that to them even if it’s in our minds, and that is serving that Lama, that is honoring that Lama, that is planting seeds that strengthen the seeds of our practice to help us have less fear as we are going into getting close to that direct perception of the no self-nature of all existing things, the main one being one's me. The scariest one is one's own me, the no self-nature of me, because self-existent me believes it's going to disappear. Is it going to disappear? What it? There is no self-existent me to disappear. But the belief in it, that's going to disappear. And that's probably more scary than it. 

Okay, so Lama Christie went on to say… oh, it's break time already. Oh, my gosh, let's take a break. I was just getting going. 

[1:05:31]

Okay, so we would say we have me and my five heaps, right? My heap of form, my heap of feeling, my heap of discriminating between things, my heap of all the other factors that make me up, and my heap of consciousness. And then through all of that, we create all these stories about our me and our life and our personality and our moral values and our behaviors. And like we have all these stories that we live within and according to. And the thing is that these stories through which we hold on to this illusion of safety are based on these five heaps. And the problem is not the five heaps themselves, but our misperception of those five heaps. So when we say, “yes, I have the heap of form”, I still automatically think, okay, I'm talking about this tangible thing that I can see [my body], and that somehow the form also has to do with tactile ability [touching arms and face], right? I can feel it. But then what about all the other form [rest of the world that is not my body] I see? Is that not part of the story me? “Well, it's not my body for sure, right? This is a blanket, those are those dumb beads, that's not me.” But it is part of my heap of form, isn't it? So it's like, wait, what is this heap really? 

I have the misperception that it's limited here [my body], but I also have the misperception that it makes itself somehow, right? My heap of form [my body] is different than your heap of form [your body], right? I can't touch Nancy, but if I could, I would be doing that [patting her cheeks], right? “Her heap of form is different than my heap of form because it's hers. It's in her. It's from her.” And of course, I'm misperceiving, not the fact that it's form, but I'm misperceiving because I think mine has me in me, and you have you in you, and right? Independent. That's what we mean by self-existent, but we know it doesn't mean self-existent. By having our identities in us, we think our heap of form has some identity of its own. And then when it's threatened, “oh my gosh, what's going to happen?” because I rely on my heap of form that has its own nature to feel good, to be healthy, etc. 

So we misperceive our heaps - our heap of form, our heap of feeling, our heap of discriminating. The misperception is the problem, we understand, not the form, not the feeling. And in fact, when we are finished misperceiving our five heaps, they become our five wisdoms. If they had their own natures, they could never become the five wisdoms. They could never become those five Buddha families that you will be in the end, says the dakkye. It's only because our heaps lack any nature of their own, because their heaps are empty, that we can transform those heaps into not-suffering heaps anymore. Buddha-you will have five heaps. They will be called mirror wisdom, discriminating wisdom, dharmasphere wisdom, equal wisdom, accomplishing wisdom. And it's like, “okay, how can you be a thing if you're just wisdom?” And it's like, how can you be a thing if you're a self-existent heap of form when there's no such thing as that? So we're trying to grapple with our automatic perception of our heaps to then investigate whether in fact they can exist in that way, and me experience them in the way that I do, and somebody else experience them in the way that they do, in order to show ourselves that they can't exist in the way I think they do. Because if they did, everybody would have to experience them in the same way I'm experiencing them and nobody does. They're all unique to me. And like old ignorant worldview would say, right, they're unique to me because they're self-existently me. Wisdom says, no, of course, they're unique to me because they're empty. And that's where we're trying to go. 

Exploring the heap of discrimination

So Lama Christie said, let's explore the heap of discrimination, discriminating between things. It's the third in subtlety, the third in obviousness. Form is the most obvious. Feeling is the second most obvious. Discriminating between things is the third most obvious. And it goes by so swiftly that it's actually really hard to catch ourselves doing, even as we're doing it constantly. So the heap of discrimination is that telling-things-apart experience. To be able to distinguish a pen from a pencil, a hand from a finger, blue from white, right from wrong, me from you, that distinguishing between things is one of the five heaps that is singled out because it's part of the big problem. Misperceiving our heap of feeling and misperceiving our heap of discriminating, they are singled out to get their own heaps because they are the cause of the perpetuation of suffering. Remember that from ACI, I don't remember [which] - important pieces of that Wheel of Life, Lord Maitreya's Six Steps, or the 12 links. 

So in learning about the heap of discrimination, the word “discrimination” for me automatically triggers like a negativity, an ugliness, discriminating between a black person and a white person. And so for me, that word always triggered something unpleasant. And so it's like, what do they really mean, discriminating between things? Are the things already there, like the pen and the pencil, and then I can just tell the difference between them? That is part of discriminating. But it's like, even it's at the level of delineating things, like giving the things their identities is another way to describe what's happening on the heap of discrimination. Suppose, I think you've seen it, like draw this scramble of nothing and then if you look at the scramble, you can go, “Oh, look, there's a heart there. Oh, look, there's a tree there. Oh, look”, right? In this scramble of no specific thingness, you can actually find just about anything if you find the right curves. So Lama Christie was describing the functioning of the heap of discrimination is the mind doing such a thing, drawing lines around things to come up with the identity. But then that leaves the connotation that it sounds like it's doing it step by step by step, right? It's like, there's no specific thing here yet and the mind goes [making outline of pencil] and then “Oh, pencil”, when in fact, it goes, [ripening image of] pencil, [ripening image of] pencil, [ripening image of] pencil. But to get to “pencil”, the mind has taken information and come up with an identity, a whole, a label. A seed ripening is doing that, but it's useful to think of it as our mind drawing a line around a set of information and coming up with a whole identity. So Lama Christie talks about it in this way, drawing lines around. I like thinking of it as like find the hidden object in this picture, remember that kid’s magazine, I used to love that. 

So there's nothing wrong with finding the picture in the non-specific, it's the believing that the picture showed itself to us that is the misperception of the heap of discrimination. And we have that perception so swiftly that we don't recognize that it's our mind taking the information and putting on “pen”. We think it's the pen saying it's pen. So misperceiving the identification of the object, misperceiving the discriminating the pen from the background. It's not coming from the pen, it's not coming from the difference between background and pen, because all of that is our mind, [taking] information, [making] identity. So however you want to describe your heap of discrimination, try to get that factor of there's like the all potential everything, but nothing specific, and then the seed ripens, and ping, the object of interest is delineated. But then it's not actually just the object, it's the me seeing the object, me holding the object, me writing with the object. All of that is also being discriminated. You see why the word doesn't quite fit for me? It's all being delineated, made out of non-specific everythingness - now it looks like this, now it looks like that, now it looks like this. That's the heap of discrimination in action. And it's really hard to catch because by the time we catch it, it's done and 65 [fingersnaps] later. So it really is one of those that is pretty subtle. And yet, it's number three so it's not as subtle as catching the feelings, the emotions, the mental afflictions coming up. And it's not as subtle as catching the awareness. I don't know, I think awareness is pretty darn obvious. But it wasn't when I first started so these things do change, which is proof that they're not in them from them or they couldn't be experienced differently. 

All right. So again, in our misperceiving our heap of discrimination, one of the major ways we, at some level want to, keep misperceiving our heap of discrimination is in this arena of me and you. So we are making that distinction - “I stop here, you start over there. My needs are my needs, and they're more important than your needs because they're the only ones I'm in charge of.” Now, am I in charge of my own needs? Technically, I'm not the master of them, for sure. Then, as we have learned, my efforts to help somebody else reach their happiness is the only place my own happiness can ever come from. And so as I'm beginning to understand that, I'm beginning to understand that “well then, maybe somebody else's needs are actually at least as important as my needs.” And then one way Master Shantideva taught us about that is by learning those three levels of practice of exchanging self and other, which culminated in the expanding sense of self to include other, so that it became so effortless that we took care of others in the same way that we take care of ourselves because that's where the seeds for our Buddhahood will come from. 

So here in our heap of discriminating between things, we see that's a big one that when we're ready, we will want to work with is this seeds for insisting that me stops here at my body, and you start there at your body and so therefore we are separate and have separate needs, when it's really very arbitrary, taught Master Shantideva. He was talking about suffering - the other person's suffering versus my suffering. Do you remember that? And he said we say, “oh, you prick me with the pen, I feel it, it hurts. You prick them with the pen, I don't feel it so it's not my pain.” And his conclusion is, but you know it hurts them, right? “Sure, but I don't feel it.” Yeah, but if you know it hurts them, you have to do something about it because it's still your seeds that it hurts them, because it doesn't have to and maybe it could give them the pleasure and bliss through which they can reach their own Buddhahood. Wouldn't you want that for them? “Sure.” Right. So it's arbitrary how we decide where I end and the other begins. Does that mean there's no self and other? Does that mean I'm the only existing thing and everybody else is just an appendage of me? No. Everybody is other because my seeds make you other, and I'm other for you, and you're other for me. And all together, we are all others, right? All contributing to all, which I just love getting back to that conclusion any chance I get. So our heap of discriminating between things isn't something that's going to disappear. It's something we want to do wisely. Buddhas have heaps of discrimination and they say that's what compels their every experience to be blissful. They discriminate everything as blissful. It's like that word discrimination doesn't seem to fit. They experience everything as blissful. Right. That's saying the same thing. How can we experience something if we haven't discriminated it? “Out of the mass of nothingness yet, there is your beloved.” You can't experience the beloved without your mind drawing the line and saying, there they are, yay. That's where they come from. Does it make them not real? No, that's what makes them real. Any other beloved is not possible. “So why do they yell at me?” Same reason. 

All right. So let's explore. Let's explore, see if we can catch our discriminating happening. So let's do this little sit. 

Meditation: Catching our discriminating happening

[1:24:52]

So set yourself as you do. 

Bring your focus of attention to your breath at your nostrils. 

Now focus your attention on the top of your head, the outside top of your head. 

There's a sensation there. 

Maybe there's a visual image.

And invite your mind to scan down this outside of your body. Going down. 

Let's go down the back of our heads first. 

Notice what you are using to determine “that's the back of my head”. 

Come around to your ears. 

You know they're there. Can you actually feel them? 

Your temples and forehead.

Your eyes.

Nose from the outside.

Cheeks and jaw. 

Go down to your neck. 

What makes your neck your neck? 

Across your shoulders.

Down your arms. 

Come to land on your left hand. 

Your left hand is resting on something. 

Explore that sensation. 

Focus in on the sensation alone. 

Can you find anything about the sensation that says “my left hand on my thigh”? 

Take away the discrimination. Go to just the simple sensation.

And find the top of your hand. 

Is there even a sensation there? 

What's making your mind say, “there's the top of my hand”? 

Explore this thing, your left hand. 

Catch your mind finding your pinky finger. 

Find your index finger. 

Find your thumb. 

Is there enough information to make thumb? 

Where is the line between thumb and hand? 

Who makes it? 

Where is the information that makes hand out of five fingers? 

Can you catch your mind putting on the label on simple sensations? 

Now can you take away your mind's label “left hand” and simply experience sensation?

And recognize that sensation too is the mind discriminating, giving the label to that experience.

Nice. Now allow your discriminating to reveal your being in your body, in your room.

And dedicate that exploration of your heap of discrimination to bringing you closer to seeing emptiness directly. 

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

I like that exploration. It shows that our heap of discrimination is not so hard to see. As long as I keep my eyes closed, I can catch it. As soon as I open my eyes, it's all over, but it's still useful. 

The fortitudes you have and the 112 mental afflictions you lose in jetob yeshe

[1:38:42]

So I have some technical fun stuff to cover yet. In your reading, Master Kamalashila, he says that stuff about emptiness and then, right, you're on the bodhisattva bhumis on your path of habituation, and he says you've gotten rid of 112 mental afflictions. And it's like, 112? The party line is you lose three at the direct perception of emptiness. Do you remember the three? Belief in self-existence, that's gone. Any doubt in the path, that's gone. And then the third one is the belief that harmful practices could be helpful on your spiritual path. And, you know, those three, they make sense, they're logical. But 112? Like, whoa, I want the 112 version, thank you very much. Although out of 84,000, what's the difference, really? 

But Lama Christie went to look and she found a couple of different explanations and that's what I want to share. She found a text by Choney Lama Drakpa Shedrup, one of the textbook writers that we're familiar with. He says something interesting. He says, there is a stage called the Uninterrupted Path and the Path of Liberation. And he says these two together occur during the direct perception of emptiness. And it's like, wait a minute, direct perception of emptiness is a finally non-conceptual end of all elaboration for 20 minutes, there can't be anything else going on in there. So it is debatable what he means by this. But what's interesting is that what he describes as the Uninterrupted Path is the process by which we get rid of our intellectual tendency to see things as self-existent. And then the Path of Liberation is the moment after you get rid of that. 

So we've heard that in the direct perception of emptiness, you come out of it and no more belief in self-existence and on your way to nirvana or Buddhahood, depending on your motivation, because you're no longer planting seeds of ignorance. Still have lots that need to ripen or be damaged, but no more planting seeds ignorantly which means you've cut the 12 links of dependent origination. You are still planting seeds, don't think that they don't still make imprints. But no more karma because karma by definition is made ignorantly. So he goes on to describe that. I'm going to just read this because I don't really understand it. The uninterrupted path is said to have eight stages of fortitude, two stages of fortitude for each of the four truths. So there's two stages of fortitude that go with the direct perception of the truth of suffering, and two stages that go with the direct perception of the truth of that cause of suffering, and two that go with the direct perception of the truth of the end of suffering, and two that go with the direct perception of the path to the end of suffering. It's like, yeah, but those don't happen until after you're out of the direct perception. Yes, you're still in your path of seeing, I guess, if they call Jetob Yeshe, the aftermath wisdom, still part of path of seeing, and I think that's even debatable. But he's saying that the power of that experience of finally direct experience of the no self-nature nature of all existing things, especially oneself, influences the mind in such a way that when we come out, we have these. And then we're told they ripen into this recognition of these truths. So in the direct perception, we had, for instance, some kind of experience of our own death and when we come out into the aftermath wisdom, we know our own death to be true, and we know the circumstances afterwards, right? We've heard Geshehla describe all of that. And so something happened in the direct perception that we're not directly aware of, but it has influenced us so that we now have these truths, some of which we then experience out of our direct perception of emptiness, as we understand. 

So, he says, in these two fortitudes for each of the truths, one of the fortitudes is towards the object, and one of the fortitudes is towards the subject. So the subject is our own state of mind. And she says the fortitude that they're talking about, Lamas say… I'm going to say more in a minute… the fortitude of the subject side is this subject state of mind that experiences that emptiness of that truth. So the truth of suffering is the object, the mind that experiences the truth of suffering also experiences the emptiness of the truth of suffering. Do you see the difference? The truth of suffering is “everything is pain”. The emptiness of the truth of suffering is “everything is pain because it's nothing but seeds ripening and so it doesn't have to be”. So it's this strength of mind with which we not only perceive the truth of the cause of suffering, but also the truth of the emptiness of it, which is kind of critical, don't you think? If we're thinking that those four truths are some self-existent thing, then we don't have it right. And you couldn't believe that having just experienced directly the emptiness of them because they're part of ‘all existing things’ that you just sat in the no self-nature nature of. So as Arya, you can't misunderstand, but as a non-Arya learning about the four truths, we probably are thinking of them as having some nature of their own that's going to be the thing that I'm going to get a hold of that's going to change me from ordinary being to Arya. And it's like, not if I'm misunderstanding them too. “Shoot.” So thank you, Lama Christie, for pointing that out because I wouldn't have thought of it myself. I would have thought, yeah, I understand those four truths. 

So they call it fortitude because fortitude means strength and strength here means to have… it's more like courage. And it derives from the fact that once we've experienced emptiness directly, we've lost all fear. So we had to have already cut our fear a lot in order to reach the direct perception of emptiness, that's what we were talking about before. But then coming out of that direct perception with what we now know to be true, you are Jigme, fearless. Not that bad things won't happen to you, but that like, you just know, you know what's going to happen, you know what you need to do, you know you're on the path, you know you can't fall off the path no matter what you do, you know you're on your way to the Buddhahood that you were motivated to reach. Like you just know, so there's nothing to fear. Hard times will come, but all right, bring it on, who cares? Like King of Kalingka's story, right? The guy's tied down, he's getting his fingers and toes cut off. It's not pleasant, it's terribly painful. He knows exactly where it's coming from, he's not blaming anybody. He's like, yay, bring it on, this has got to be the end of it. It's fearless. So these fortitudes are this knowingness that gives this confidence, and I don’t know, you don't even need courage anymore because there's nothing to fear, you're just on the path. You're just doing what you have to do. It seems like, what a relief. 

So in this explanation about these fortitudes leads into how do you come up with 112 different mental afflictions that are gone after your direct perception of emptiness. And she finds that explanation by Master Ngawang Pelden, who's also somebody we'll get to know better later. He says it goes like this, and again, I'm going to read it. We have the three realms: desire realm, form realm, and formless realm. Each realm has 10 mental afflictions for each of the four truths. I don't understand, but let's just go on. So there would be 40 mental afflictions for the desire realm, 40 for the form realm, 40 for the formless realm. That should be 120 mental afflictions that you get rid of, but there's only 112, so what's going on? Apparently in the form and the formless realm, those beings cannot have the mental affliction of anger. I don't know why not, but they don't. So they can't have anger towards suffering, anger towards the cause of suffering, anger towards… right? So they are missing four from the form realm, four in the formless realm. So you have 40 mental afflictions in the desire realm, 36 in the form and 36 in formless, and altogether that's 112. And once you've experienced emptiness directly, I guess, even if you end up in any of those other realms, which I don't see how you could, but if you did, those mental afflictions would be gone. Those mental afflictions are all gone because of your direct perception of emptiness and this thing about the fortitudes. So that's where the 112 comes from. 

So now what are those 10 mental afflictions of which there's only eight in those other two realms? They are the standard five major mental afflictions. We know what they are: ignorant liking, ignorant disliking, pride, jealousy, and doubt. And then the other five that make up the 10 mental afflictions are those five main wrong views: the perishable view, the extreme view, the wrong view, the ass backward view, and the thinking harmful spiritual practices could be beneficial view. 

So perishable view, we've learned, is the view that there's a self-existent me. Technically it's the view that any identity is in-it from-it, a self. They call it the ‘self in person’, but they don't mean just conscious being, anything. A self in anything is perishable view because when we stop believing that, stop seeing that for sure, that view is just gone. And to believe in that means everything's going to be gone because it's not true so it doesn't serve so we do the wrong things to get happiness - perishable view. 

Extreme view is that view that things either exist the way they do, or if they don't exist like that, they don't exist at all. And I don't quite understand how you live in that view as a worldview, but it certainly happens as we're exploring, as I'm exploring, emptiness and dependent origination, those two pop up, the two cliffs. 

And then wrong view is, usually here they mean the wrong view that doesn't believe that karma and past and future lives are true, or doesn't believe that there's such a thing as Buddhahood or that we could reach it. 

And then the ass backward view is the one that believes that my view is correct. And they say it as “my wrong view is correct”, but I don't think of it as a wrong view. I think of it as a correct view, but in fact, it's the view through which I cannot get the happiness that I'm trying to get, that kind of wrong view. 

And then the last one, harmful spiritual practices don't work, are not necessary. 

So those factors are still present, are present in the desire realm, obviously, still present in the form realm, except without the anger, still present in the formless realm somehow, except without the anger. And once we've seen emptiness directly, they're all gone. That's cool. 

[1:56:03]

So Lama Christie had one more thing to say, which isn't from the reading, it's from her effort to help us understand based on her own experience. And that is telling us again how extraordinarily different an Arya is from non-Arya. And we've heard it again and again - because of their experience and what they now know to be true about themselves and every other existing thing and being in their world, they are like not even human anymore. They look like they have flesh and blood, they look like they still have human karma, but their mind is so elevated over what it has ever been before that the difference between them and ordinary being is, they call it an abyss, a chasm. There's a chasm between us. And then Lama Christie said, imagine you're looking at an amoeba under the microscope, and you're recognizing that poor amoeba is so limited to whatever amoebas do, I don't know what. And you can think of the difference between our mind and the amoeba's mind and it's like, whoa, I could never explain emptiness to the amoeba and know whether they're catching on or not. And she says, well, that's what it's like for an Arya to us. It's like they're talking to an amoeba. They know that they can't really explain what they know, what they experience directly, because we just can't get it at all. 

She says, but out of their wisdom, love, compassion, everything they do, everything they manifest is for our benefit because they know that they are now this powerful karmic object. Do you remember it was course two, I think, where we learned once you've seen emptiness directly, you're qualified to be bowed down to by gods and men. And I have this like, yuck, I don’t want to be bowed down to by gods and men. But then it's like, it's not from your side, you-the-Arya side, it's because of the karmic seed planting that they get. Well, then why don't you just advertise being an Arya all over the place? Because somebody who goes, “no, you're not”, they get hugely powerful seeds of reject also. So it must be this delicate dance for an Arya as to who and when to reveal it to, and who and when not to. And so it's actually quite extraordinary that we have a Lama that felt it was necessary and took the flack for it for years, years. Like the first time he declared it was 2004, I think, and it was a brouhaha. So everything they do is for our benefit. And all they want to do is perpetuate the dharma. And all they want to do is teach people and preserve what's available for people. And anything else that they manifest as doing is for our benefit because they don't need any of it. So I hear a teaching like this and I just get really humbled and embarrassed to ask Geshehla for anything. You know, it's just like, you just translate, you just teach, I'll help any way I can, but let me just stay out of your way. And it always felt like that, even at Diamond Mountain, you know, we're at board meetings and we're supposed to be voicing our opinion about what should be happening at Diamond Mountain, you know, and here's this Arya. It's like, Geshehla, oh my gosh. And then I'm confessing here, I would even see this amazing Arya being doing stuff that is like, “Geshehla, don't do that. That's dangerous. That's gonna damage our 501c3 status and then we'll have to pay taxes and we'll go out of business. And, you know, please.” And it's like confession that I could see that happen anyway. 

Lama Christie said, lastly, even the laws of reality don't apply to them anymore. Like gravity, like distance, like, you know, who knows what. She said, but in her personal experience, when she would see him do something that qualifies as a miracle, she'd be like wowed and inspired and a few days later she'd want another one. So she says, they know not to show this different relationship with their world for our benefit. So it says to us, the more we can open our heart and our mind to the amazingness of these Arya beings, the more they can help us, the more they can lead us along the way. And our tradition is so much about surrender to the Lama, surrender to the Lama. And it's a dangerous position because it sounds like you need them to access the divine when, right, we're all about accessing that divine directly ourselves. We all have that tool. It's like it's not about surrendering to the Lama for any other reason than to open ourselves up for them to pour into us what they're pouring in already. It's just bouncing off, you know. It's this idea of surrender. All they want is for us to see emptiness directly and so everything they do is designed to bring us along. And we struggle, we fight, for whatever reason. And we don't need to, right? But it's our choice. 

Okay, thank you for the extra minutes. 

[Usual dedication]

All right, welcome back. We are Bok Jinpa Course 4, Class 6. It's June 10th, 2026. This particular class is one that we'll all get more out of if we have the biggest open heart that we can have as you pull it out of me. So if you know how to do that on your own, do it. I'm going to try and help you trigger it. 

Think of something about our world right now that you care deeply about. And if you don't have something like that, think of somebody that you care so deeply about, who we see is in some kind of difficulty, some kind of distress. And we recognize that the distress wouldn't be so bad if they understood where it was really coming from. And we have a little bit of glimpse, and even that little bit of understanding, gives us this bittersweet feeling as we witness their difficulty. It's frustrating because we can't fix it for them and we want to. But we also know it's simply a big mistake and it will end. It will get better. It will even be ultimately resolved someday for them and for us. And we feel so deep, deep down in that we can help them in that way. We can change our own perceptions, our own belief systems, our own being such that that kind of distress, that kind of frustration about that kind of distress, can be so far in the past that nobody even remembers it. And so feel that deep inside - that wish, that longing, that urge to bring forth this one person's solution, or this one issue's transformation. And try to hold that deep longing and intention as you then bring to mind that being who for you is a manifestation of ultimate love, ultimate compassion, ultimate wisdom. And turn this longing to help others to this feeling we get when we see that this being is present, is gazing at us with that extraordinary love, that extraordinary wisdom. We know that they are in fact pouring that towards us, even into us. And the more we open up to receive from them, the more we actually do and can receive. And so show them this longing in your heart. Ask them please, please, please fill this space with love like yours, with wisdom like yours. And we see their response is to just smile bigger than they were before, they shine brighter than they were before, and we feel that love and that wisdom pouring from them to us. Feel yourself filled with their wisdom, filled with their open heart, filled with this natural shining that forth, from you to other. And then ask them again to please continue to bless you, help you, inspire you. And of course they agree. Our gratitude arises. We want to offer them something exquisite and so we think of that pure world that they're 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 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.

The fearlessness you gain

All right, so we'll do our two proper meditations a little bit later. Last class we were talking about aryas and that path of seeing. They point out that one of the main characteristics of arya is this freedom from fear that arises as you come out of that direct perception, and it's a unique quality of having had that first direct perception of emptiness. 

So Lama Christie gave an example. She said suppose you're a pretty healthy person and then one day all of a sudden you get this terrible pain in your stomach and it's a pretty bad pain. It's something new and with the pain, which is bad enough, you also have this fear. Like automatically your mind's going like “what if it's serious? What if it's going to get worse? What if it's not going to go away? What if it's cancer? What if, what if, what if?” And the pain actually gets worse because of that emotional component of fear. And then someone comes along and says, “Oh that pain? I get that pain every time I eat pizza with raw onions”. And you go, Oh I just had pizza with raw onions. And the person says, “And it goes away after an hour, so for me it's no big deal”. And then for us, it's suddenly that fear lessens, that concern lessens. We go, oh maybe that's going to be same for me and in an hour or so it'll go away. And the pain is still there but that heightened sense of [stress] is going down. 

So Lama Christie was trying to describe teeny little baby analogy of what it must be like coming out of the direct perception of emptiness now that you know from direct experience the true nature and true cause of every experience that we've ever had and ever will have. So that even if, I don't know, you might have in your future some wicked horrible event happen, there isn't the fear of “Will it be forever? Will it last forever? Will it, will it, will it?” because you know. Not that you're like seeing everything, but the not understanding and having this expectation of something going on, we're being free of that. So probably an arya if, I don't know, they're in a dark alley and some big mugger guy is coming out at them, they're gonna feel some, “what's gonna happen?” But for me it would be like terrifying and not understanding, but for them they're like, “okay, I know where this is coming from” and then they know how to respond. And probably by way of their response, they change what's happening going forward. So imagine being that kind of free. 

Then there's a deeper kind of free which is part of what you come out now deeply aware of is the fact that your… I don't know what to use, it's not your ‘me’... your subject side is endless. So that fear of death, sort of think automatically holding that death could mean total annihilation, that's gone. So another level of freedom from fear is, yeah, I know this body's gonna die, this personality is gonna disappear, but the process [fingersnapping] that it is me and my world, the three spheres around this subject [pointing at self], endless. We could use the word immortal, but it's the wrong connotation, right? We think of immortal means this thing's [this body is] gonna go on forever and oh my gosh, I hope not. But the subject side, but even then ‘immortal’ isn't right because then that would imply this subject side is somehow the same and never ends. But the freedom is that you don't need that subject side to be the same because you know so clearly that it's changing moment by moment by moment by moment, but never is not [existing]. We're never the same two moments in a row but we are never not. To me, that's the words I use to try to zoom in on this sense of what it will likely be like when I know that as a direct experience fact instead of a logic and meditation work fact for myself. 

So why am I going there? This being who is now arya, if they've become arya motivated with their wish to reach total enlightenment for the sake of all sentient beings, when they come out of that, they find themselves on that first ‘bodhisattva bhumi’, is the term that we use. And the second part of this class is going to be about these descriptions of the different bhumis, to the extent that I have something to share. For me, anyway, it seems like there needs to be more. But this arya reaches this fearlessness which is characteristic of our mind once we are at that level. And we have grown our goodness to be able to reach that level by way of our study, contemplation, meditation, serving our teachers, serving the dharma, gathering the goodness to reach that. So until we have reached that level of fearless as arya, all of our practices are still practices born of faith. And remember, years ago in ACI, there's those who practice out of blind faith, and those who practice out of faith born of logic. And there are those of us who practice out of some combination of both, I admit. And that's a good thing. To have faith is a good thing. To have faith born of logic helps us stay on the path when no matter what we do, we still seem to go three steps forward and two steps back, which still happens to me. 

Okay. So Lama Christie said you can know when your emptiness meditation is taking you deeper and deeper when you recognize that you have less fear, less of that concern when something's happening that seems to be out of our control or out of hand or unexpected or unpreviously experienced so we don't know which direction it's going to go. If those kinds of things in the past would have sent me into a big tizzy and now it's like, “all right, we'll ride this, we'll see where it goes, I know how to plant my seeds”, it is evidence that our emptiness meditation is going well, even if we think, “ah, my emptiness meditation is terrible”. If we see it influencing us in this way, it's a great sign, said Lama Christie. 

Exploring the heap of consciousness

[19:38]

All right. So in our meditation skill exploration, Master Kamalashila was taking us through using our five heaps as the object of our meditation in order to grow our single-pointed focus and, at the same time, use our single-pointed focus on those objects to investigate their appearing nature and their no self-nature so that we're growing our concentration and our insight together in order to weave those together, so that someday we will use single-pointed concentration on a virtuous object in order to trigger the insight, meaning the direct perception of the no self-nature of that object. 

All right. So we had talked about the emptiness of the heap of form… well, we had talked about investigating the heap of form, and we worked with it a little bit. And then we went to the heap of feeling, meaning thumbs up, thumbs down, and thumbs neutral, physical or mental. And then we explored the heap of discrimination, meaning telling things apart. Did you have fun with that, watching your mind make the distinction? So you would think the next one we would explore would be all the other factors that make us up, but Lama Christie chose to go to all the different kinds of consciousness that we possess. She helped us explore the heap of consciousness. So that's what I get to do. Now, some of us have already studied and practiced Lobsang Chukyi Gyeltsen’s Mahamudra training, and so we have a healthy amount of practice becoming aware of aware. And maybe even have used it to explore the me being aware of aware, and gone down that beautiful rabbit hole. But in this context of this class, we hadn't gotten there. So to be doing a meditation of trying to become aware of aware, if those who've studied Mahamudra, if you can remember the first couple of weeks of that class, we were going into just reaching the flow, aware of the flow of things. And it was probably a month or six weeks before we actually got to the aware of the flow of awareness. And I know I got questions of, “I don't understand what you mean aware of aware.” And I remember being there. And yet, after years of working with it, I remember that I was there but I can't remember what it was like because now to me to be aware of aware is so clear. So we're just going to dabble about it tonight. And then explore it a little bit on your own and know that a deeper dive into how to become aware of aware is coming, if we keep with this Bok Jinpa training. 

Okay, so there is a connection between growing this ability to be aware of being aware… no, not to be aware of being aware… growing the ability to be aware of the ramifications of being aware of aware, and this growing freedom from fear of anything that's arising, or hasn't arisen yet that could arise. There's a connection between those two - this keen level of awareness, and less and less fear. So when we were checking the heap of form, we were exploring how ordinary state of being believes that when we experience something of form [holding pen], we think we experience the whole thing. What am I holding? I am holding a pen. And everything that we believe pen means is the thing that I'm holding. And then we learn to actually explore. So you can't really explore it except by way of what you see [since we’re on Zoom]. If you were holding your own pen, then you could explore “what information am I actually getting?” My eyeballs, colors and shape, that's all they can do. My fingers, tactile, maybe it could tell round versus square, I don't know. But can I get enough information just from fingers to label that thing ‘pen’? Or just from hearing? Seems like it [clicking pen]. Nothing else makes that sound, I don't know, can you hear it? The computer on purpose gets rid of it [noise], but you know what a clicker pen sounds like. Same with eyes - do we get enough information? No, and yet, here it is. 

So we were trying to explore and experience how in experiencing a physical object, what is actually happening is we get these pieces of information and then our mind draws a line around them and says ‘pen’. And it happens this fast [fingersnap], like faster than this, because it's happening 65 per finger snap. And so we go, “Okay, well, that's cool. There really isn't a pen there without my mind doing that. And then with all these other factors coming together, voila, pen that I can write with.” And then we explored the three spheres of the heap of form, which had more to do with my own body heap of form and how there has to be a subject side and object side and an interaction between going on. And then it's like, well, where is my body? If it needs all three of those going on at one time, then… how can there be a body if there's all those three, right? It's like, wait, what's going on here? And then we explored that with the heap of feeling. It was a lot harder, wasn't it? Because the heap of feeling is less obvious than the heap of form. And then we explored it with the heap of discrimination, same kind of idea. And now we're at the heap of consciousness, that awareness. And the word is difficult to understand. 

So here's our friend, the pen. And when you look at it and experience the pen, we're just experiencing, technically you're experiencing the picture [over zoom]… you describe it in your own mind. And the object she's holding is this thing, the pen. And we have that experience this moment, this moment, this moment. Now shift a little bit and part of you take one step back and see if you can be aware of perceiving that lady [Lama Sarahni] in the picture holding the pen. First, it's just the experience. Now it's like, wait, I'm aware that I'm seeing her. Now go back to just the experience. Now go back to, now I'm aware. Can you get it? Yeah, it's hard. Try it with some object that you hold. So just pick up something and hold it in front of you. Then look at it and just experience the object, “all right, pen”. Now just for a moment, shut your eyes. And then when you open them back up again, you're experiencing the object, but then see if you can be aware of yourself experiencing the object. Then go back to the object directly. And then switch to aware of doing it, aware of experiencing it. It's a little bit like you're the witness instead of the doer. Can you feel it? Can you describe that sensation? I don't have words. I call upon the words of the lineage that say, “oh, that's clear and aware”, like clear and aware happening, but it doesn't seem adequate to me. I can't describe it, to go from object to aware of aware of the object. 

So we're going to explore it a little bit. Don't be concerned if it's frustrating and you think you don't get it, because it's subtle. Our most subtle quality of being is our heap of consciousness. And yet, how often do you think that you are not aware? Like never, right? Even when you're in deep, dark sleep, there's still a consciousness going on. But how often during the day are we aware that we are aware of something? For me, I have to stop and think about it to trigger it. And then if I'm all by myself, I can hold it for a little while. But if I'm interacting with somebody else, it's just like, it's too subtle. And yet it doesn't have to be that subtle, we'll see. In Mind Only school, they say, Look, there's a part of our mind that's sort of behind the activity that's going on at any given instant, that's aware of the activity that's going on in every instant, and the reason that we say that is because we can say, I had tomato soup for lunch. They say, in order to be able to say that now, that's proof that I had to be there aware of having tomato soup for lunch in order for that me to be able to say, I had tomato soup for lunch. So the very fact that we have these memories of something that we did earlier is proof that there has to be this little part of my mind that's always watching what the rest of the mind is doing. It's a good argument. 

Highest school says, actually, that's inaccurate conclusion. Just because you say, “I had tomato soup for lunch” doesn't prove anything because that's a current moment seed’s ripening as a memory “I had tomato soup for lunch”. But it doesn't in any way prove whether or not you had tomato soup for lunch because it's a current moment seed’s ripening as a memory that isn't… whatever happened for lunch is long gone. If I have seeds for the memory of tomato soup for lunch, that could have been from some kind of seed seven lifetimes ago, I don't know where that came from. Just to have memories doesn't mean what we are remembering actually happened. That's unnerving. I had all kinds of good things and not so good things happen to me in my childhood, and they're all very real. And they are all very real, however, there's no way to confirm that they ever happened or didn't. Which leads us to that ability to do all that spiritual revisionism that's so helpful, but that's a different class. 

[36:52]

So what is the point? This ability for apperception, self-awareness, that Mind Only explains by way of a part of our mind that's always doing the watching, isn't… it's an explanation that can be helpful, but it's not an ultimate explanation for how our consciousness is functioning. In order to reach the highest understanding of our own heap of consciousness, we want to explore our way all the way to the intellectual understanding of the no self-nature of our heap of consciousness and every moment of consciousness experience that we have. If those consciousnesses have any nature of their own, then we will always be stuck with the way our consciousness is now, which I don't know about you, but my consciousness believes that things have their identities in them. And if my consciousness has that as part of its nature, I am stuck. So I want to reveal to myself that my own consciousness lacks self-nature, and as I try to do so, my belief in my own consciousness having a self-nature rears its ugly head to say, “that can't be that your consciousness has no nature because you have consciousness moment by moment.” See, it's a very sophisticated argument born of that like almost automatic misbelief that if my consciousness doesn't have its own nature, it can't be at all. And intellectually, we know that's impossible, but experientially, when we are aware of what our awareness is doing in response to the awarenesses that are arising, we will see that, oh my gosh, it slides off that… or at least towards that cliff really rapidly. And we need to roll it back again to be able to get this really clear domino effect of when we get close to understanding that my consciousness itself cannot have its own nature, that the next domino that falls is, “so therefore, I have this consciousness, and this one, and this one, and this one, and I can never be without one”, which is the opposite reaction to when our ignorance is trying to work out the no-self nature of my consciousness. Am I getting it across? I can't tell if I am or not. 

So, habitually, we are experiencing our experiences and just going along for the ride, reacting to them, mostly on automatic pilot. And then in order to get off the automatic pilot, we would need to have some ability to experience our experience in a little bit of a different way to get us off the automatic pilot, and we call that ‘growing our mindfulness’. So as we're mindful of what we're experiencing, that practice makes us feel a little bit distant from the actual experience. So it's more like we're watching ourselves water the plants instead of just watering the plant, watching myself eat dinner instead of just eating dinner. And in that space, we can watch ourselves have this sense of upset from the boss yelling at me, and watch myself want to yell back, and in that watching myself state of mind, hopefully, I can “no, I'm not going to yell back. I'm going to instead try on something new. I'm so sorry you're upset with me. How can I help you?” Not saying I want to help you because I probably don't, but I'm willing to say “how can I do it” in order to plant new seeds in that given situation, and how aware of myself I would need to be in order to choose that new response. What does it take? 100% awareness? 50% awareness? I don't know, 10% awareness? That's what we get to explore - to see how your own use of your growing awareness of awareness can help you in your decision making. 

So just like when we are recognizing that we're taking bits of information and coming up with a whole to make the thing of the physical form, consciousness is doing the same thing in its awareness of what it's experiencing. And it's so slippery because it's like, “no, my awareness of the pen depends upon the pen. My awareness isn't self-existent because it depends on being aware of something.” Is there anything wrong with that? No, that's true. But is that the deepest meaning of the dependent origination of my consciousness? No, because there's something deeper that's pushing my awareness of the pen than just the fact that the pen is here. My seeds ripening ‘me perceiving pen happening’ and that consciousness is moving moment by moment into that experience. And then new seeds are planted, but it's not like there's a pause in the ripening as the planting is happening, is there? It's not like, okay, receive [pause], give [pause], receive [pause], give [pause]. It's all happening spontaneously, almost simultaneously, we could say. 

And so this key factor in what we're trying to become aware of is how… awareness itself… no… how the process is pieces of awareness being lines wrapped around them to come up with the identity of the awareness. So pen versus awareness of pen, the same process is happening for that awareness to become awareness of pen. Some subtle pieces being put together into the whole. That's too subtle for me to experience. The best I can get is the moment by moment awareness shifting, but I can't find how this group wraps around and becomes awareness of pen and this group wraps around and becomes awareness of the itch on my knee. And yet I do know from all these investigations that we've done that it has to be happening that way. Everything else happens that way, consciousness has to be happening in the same way. And then I can use that to try to explore it, which is what Lama Christie tried to help us do. She uses the term: many disparate things get lumped together to become the object of consideration. So even in the case of awareness, many different disparate awarenesses get lumped together to become awareness of pen. And then it's like, okay, that kind of makes sense because there would be the awareness of the eye information and then the awareness of the tactile information and maybe the awareness of the auditory if there was. 

And then even the awareness of the idea arising, “Oh, that information is pen. Pen’s write. Pen's run out of ink. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't” and the whole story that happens surrounding this experience that I'm having. Is there any part of that that I can be experiencing that's independent of a moment of awareness of some information? Is there any part of any experience that doesn't have an awareness with it? Can we experience anything independent of awareness? No. Well then how come it's so darn hard to get a hold of if it's so constant? If you ask a fish, What's it like to swim in water? They'll go, “What are you talking about? I don't know what it's like”. But you've lived in it your whole life. “Lived in what?” It's so automatic that we can't identify it. And yet it's a pretty crucial piece of unraveling our misunderstanding of our world that it's worth delving into this thing ‘consciousness’. 

And then it's not just one consciousness, as we know, it's the consciousness of our eye information, our ear information, all the information that we get about our physical world, and then all the information we get about our reaction to those experiences. And all the information we get about telling them all apart or together. And all the information we get that becomes all the other factors that make us up. And so these different awarenesses that we have, they say there's six (eyes, ears, nose, taste, tactile, and then thought), but then, I don't know, is there a different consciousness that's aware of emotion? It's like, I don't think you can say there's only six consciousnesses, personally. But it's enough to work with, certainly. And then, of course, probably most important to all of them is the consciousness of thought. Because without that one, could we have the thought, “this is pen”? Like the consciousness of our ideas of things. I'm going to go out on a limb and say, that's really where the action is, is where the ideas take hold. Our beliefs in things’ identities - they're not in here [in the pen] coming at us, they're in here [in us] going out. So if we can catch that, the awareness of the pen going on to the pen, what's that? CHU CHOK. And very swiftly after that, it's like, oh my gosh, nothing exists in any other way than that, especially me. And then we're on our way to the end of suffering. So it is a big piece to reach that confidence in our meditation skill to be able to work with awareness itself. I keep saying that. And anytime I have someone who's asking me a question and they go, Can I talk about awareness itself? I have to say, Timeout, no such thing as awareness itself, we can't talk about it. But I keep saying it because I don't know how else to lead us down this exploration. 

Okay. Sorry, I lost my track. So let's explore finding the awareness of something in just a short meditation that Lama Christie gave us which will give you a tool that if you want to explore it for the rest of the week. It's one of the two meditations I'll give. So let's sit.

Meditation: Finding your awareness

[53:15]

Get your body settled so it will stay still and you can forget about it. 

And then bring your attention to your breath at your nostrils, as we usually do. Use that to trigger the focus, the clarity, the eagerness. 

Now let's zoom in on this thing ‘breath’ and choose to focus on the raw sensations happening. Drop the word or idea ‘breath’ and just go to the sensations. 

It's a nice sequence, something always present. 

Yes, changing, changing, but there. 

Now become aware of paying attention to those sensations. 

The sensations are still present, 

but maybe they seem a little distant, 

or seem something in between. 

Go back to the sensations direct.

And then try again - aware of paying attention to the sensations. 

Now hold this aware of paying attention to the sensations, 

and notice whether that aware is staying the same or also changing, shifting in some way. 

Go back to the sensations of the breath again.

And then step back a little bit to the awareness of the sensations. 

Is it one awareness or is it also this moment, this moment, this moment? 

Go back to the sensations of your breath. 

Let's try it with a different object. 

Become aware of the index finger of your left hand. 

Describe to yourself how you know those sensations, that location, is the index finger of your left hand. 

Some activity of awareness gathered all that information and came up with the idea, the label, ‘my left index finger’. 

So we know moments of awareness are happening as we experience our left index finger. 

Shift from ‘my left index finger’ to ‘aware of putting on the label’. 

If you wiggle that left index finger, what happens to the awareness? 

What came first - the shift in awareness or the wiggle of the finger? 

Step back a little further. Open up to anything arising… and recognize the necessary awareness… that accompanies that arising. 

Now one more piece. When you shift from awareness of the index finger to awareness of the awareness, who did that? 

Who's deciding to watch awareness versus objects versus being distracted? 

And if you can find that, who found it? 

What's happening here? 

Okay, let that conundrum go. Come back to the sensations of your breath. 

Come back to you here in your room in this class. 

Try to identify the glimpse you got, whatever it was. And dedicate using that glimpse to grow the end of all suffering for everyone. 

Then when you're ready, open your eyes, take a stretch, and we can take a break. 

[1:07:10]

[Victor: Teacher, can I ask a question? Because just now when I was doing this exploration, because I think basically it's two things. It's the form of awareness, and I noticed that mostly it's the awareness of consciousness. But then when you ask us to go back to be aware of awareness, then I'm like, it's like actually try to catch the moment of the seed ripening, like 65 seeds per second, 65 seeds per second. At the beginning it's like, I don't know what the instruction is about, you know. I mean, I'm seeing the same thing. But then after I try like a couple of times, I realized it's like I want to try to witness the seed ripening, the CHU CHOK experience. I'm going to the correct direction, I mean, for this meditation?] 

Yes, yes, that is a good direction to go. And the learning how to be keenly aware of awareness happening is a little different practice than trying to direct finding something that's happening. But the two go hand in hand. The conclusion will be, “there's no awareness without an awareness arising as an awareness aware of something. There has to be the three (subject, object, interaction between) with every single piece.” And that's what you were finding, that's where your mind went with it.

[break]

[1:12:18]

So one more little piece about the heap of consciousness Lama Christie shared was pointing out that these terms ‘consciousness’, ‘awareness’, ‘emptiness’, ‘car-ness’, that N-E-S-S that we tag on in English, it's meant to convey the fact of whatever the root word is. So consciousness means the fact that conscious is happening. Awareness is the fact that there is aware-ing happening. Emptiness is the fact that something's empty of its own nature. It's not defining a thing that you can put in a bottle, right? Consciousness is not a thing. Consciousness is the fact that we are always conscious of something. There's no consciousness that just sits there not doing anything. There's the fact that we are conscious. And then if you take that line of thought, it's like, well, facts are unchanging. But what my conscious is doing is constantly changing. But the fact that conscious is happening, that's always true. Changing moment by moment, but always true. Consciousness, awareness, emptiness. It's one of those subtle factors that's a big clue. Put it in your box to work with along the way. 

The bodhisattva bhumis

Okay. So, now let's switch to the reading, Master Kamalashila's last little bit of this version of his Bhavanakrama. He's been saying all along - train yourself to reach stillness so that you can reach insight. And I know he really didn't emphasize it, but he's teaching us that from Mahayana path so that we can reach emptiness, so that we can move ourselves through the bodhisattva bhumis, so that we can become a being who's stopping all suffering. So he's being complete by then explaining at least a little bit about the bhumis, and then Lama Christie went to some other places to get a little bit more information to help us. It seems like such an important piece, like what we do on these different bhumis, that I'm always waiting for the teaching that says, on this bhumi you do this, and on that one you do that. And we get a little bit of it here, but it's all like, “I still don't understand.” So let's start that and see if we can get more. 

So we understand that we don't start our travel through the bodhisattva levels, the bhumis, until we reach path of seeing… until we come out of the path of seeing. Not that we wouldn't come out, I don't think. So the Sanskrit is the ‘bodhisattva bhumis’, meaning that the levels of practice through which we are getting used to what we now know is true about reality, and in the process, damaging and burning off all our past mistaken seeds and planting the merit that will grow us into Buddha-us in Buddha paradise emanating. So we have 10 bodhisattva bhumis, and the description explains that to get onto the first one, we have the highest experience of ordinary life, which is seeing the seeds ripen. And then from that we're propelled into direct perception of emptiness, path of seeing, motivated with our bodhicitta. And part of our path of seeing is the realization of those four arya truths, the 16 aspects that we now know are true, and we are on the first level of bodhisattva path of habituation. So to get onto a bodhisattva bhumi requires a direct perception of emptiness. And then to move from one bodhisattva level to the next, also apparently requires a direct perception of emptiness. And Lama Christie described that once you're on your path of habituation, you may or may not have more direct perception of emptinesses very often. We've heard Geshe Michael say it doesn't happen again for a long, long time. But it's not necessarily the case, Lama Christie suggested. And that it's not that every time you go in and come out of a direct perception of emptiness, you move bhumis. But rather, during your practice time on a given bodhisattva bhumi, what you've realized in the direct perception of emptiness that put you onto that bhumi, you're working with that in this life experiences in order to gather the goodness that is mastery of that bhumi. 

[Bodhisattva bhumi one:] So, for instance, the first bodhisattva bhumi is called, in Tibetan, RAPTU GAWA, which means incredible joy, PRAMUDITA in Sanskrit. And in this incredible joy, it is this first time in one's lifetime that one is free of that fear. And that alone would be joyful, but then the other thing that you are deeply aware of is that new sense of the relationship between self and other such that the old relationship always had self-need first before other, that now because of the experience of the direct perception, that self need versus other need or want has shifted. And there's not this antagonistic relationship between self and other anymore, that rather, there's this almost automatic sense of… the word is sharing, but that word fails because sharing still means “mine is mine and I'm just willing to share it with you.” But rather, this being's perspective isn't “mine is mine and I'm willing to share it with you”, it's just like, “everything about me is for all, for everyone.” And it's so different than what before was always “What about me?” Even the most amazing Mother Teresa’s there, if she was an arya and I don't know, there's this wee little bit of “what about me” first and then you override it and you are incredibly kind. But imagine being without that somehow, and incredible joy. So really the joy part is that sense of… I don't know how to word it, right? Just everything for others. And so the practice is the perfection of giving. It's about actually using everything that before that experience you thought you owned, or that was yours, or was under your control, or was about your own comfort, your own safety, and all of a sudden there's no need for any of that for my own comfort and safety. And you just use it for everybody's benefit, whatever that's going to be, however it goes. And how joyful that would be - no need to protect anything, no need to work hard to get it for me before I give it to you. Just this automatic how to perpetuate abundance. Incredible joy. Just everything becomes about serving others. 

[Bodhisattva bhumi two:] So as we're doing that, we're gathering goodness. And at some point that goodness is sufficient, and our meditation is still working, and whatever it was that helped us, we use to go back into the direct perception of emptiness. When the direct perception of emptiness happens and we have sufficient seeds from those levels of giving, we come out of that direct perception of emptiness and now our focus of practice is what is called the second bhumi. You haven't gone anywhere. Maybe this whole thing happens in a different lifetime, I don't know. Maybe it all happens in one lifetime, I don't know. But the point is, it takes the in and out of the direct perception of emptiness again, which is interesting because you would think once you've seen it, you've seen it. But it has some different influence. Same experience…not same… identical emptiness that we experience, but coming out with a different level of knowing, or a different level of being. Its impact on us is different. 

And so we end up on the second bhumi called DRIMA MEPA, which means immaculate. It means immaculate. VIMALA in Sanskrit. So this level of practice is now you're still giving, giving, giving, and now the focus of practice is perfecting our morality. Now our morality is already extraordinary at this level, of course, but perfecting the morality, like the perfection of giving, has to do with this awareness of the no self-nature nature of the three spheres of whatever circumstance is happening that we are choosing our behavior around. And that the influence of the wisdom is such that our behaviors are always directed towards doing the highest and best at any given moment. So we're not working specifically with our freedom vows, specifically our Bodhisattva vows, specifically our tantric vows. We are holding this moment-by-moment impulse to be being the highest benefit. Every moment. And it sounds like it would be, oh, then I should do nothing but translate texts, right? Geshe Michael, like he probably does it sitting on the toilet, I don't know, but like every moment he's translating. Or maybe for somebody else, it's like, “Every moment I'm discovering a cure for cancer. I've got to be there. I can't do anything but that.” And it isn't really that the thing that we are doing is the highest, it means the attitude with which we are doing anything is the highest, for the highest benefit. 

So then all those things that we've learned about, ‘how do you make your karma the most powerful’, ‘how do you make highest merit’, like all of that's coming into play, but now it's coloring your very movement, your very breath, everything you think. Everything is from this state of mind... like, I don't know how to describe it. For myself, my own conclusion is: everything is an offering. If everything and everybody is empty of self-existence, then everything is the holy beings, and they're aware of everything I'm doing and so I'm contributing to their paradise. If they're aware of me, they're aware of what I'm doing, thinking, saying; I'm going to make it all an offering. Which means I don't want to be thinking those ugly, nasty thoughts. That would be a not very nice offering; I want to keep it beautiful. And so it begins to infuse everything we do - doing the dishes, brushing our teeth. Remember years ago, “when we have true bodhicitta, every smallest thing we do becomes a cause for our Buddhahood.” It's like, bing, here it shows up again. Everything we learned has been planting seeds for something that we will experience in the future. It's so extraordinary. 

[Bodhisattva bhumi three:] So we're working on this amazing level of immaculateness and we gather enough goodness to have maxed that out. I don't know, can you possibly? Then we have another direct perception of emptiness and we come out of it and we find ourselves on the third level, which is O JEPA. These two Os [O JEPA and O TROWA CHEN], they're supposed to have the umlauts on top of them so that they sound like UH [a little like as in ‘hurt] instead of O, but I don't know how to put umlauts on there. But ‘U JEPA’ didn't do it either. So O JEPA, in Sanskrit means PRABHAPARI, which means ‘radiates light’. PRABHA is shine, shine all around. PRABHAPARI - radiates light. What do we know about the third bodhisattva bhumi? What's the third perfection? Perfection of not getting angry, perfection of patience. It's like, what does the perfection of patience have to do with radiating light? But do you remember the King of Kalingka story? That poor yogi, tied down, getting his fingers and toes cut off because somebody misunderstood. And from his side, he's just radiating love. And he says, “King, I love you. This hurts, but I love you.” And it makes the King even madder, right? “You can't possibly love me”, right? Whack [King cuts off a body part]. And then, “prove it that you're Mr. Patience for, you know, zillions of years.” And he goes, “well, if it's true that I have nothing but love for you, then may my fingers and toes reattach” and they jump up and bing [attach]. I mean, imagine the King, “I just did a really bad thing!” But like that radiant. 

What does it have to do with not getting angry? Patience, tolerating unpleasant stuff. It's not even tolerating anymore, it's like, “all right, bring it on. It doesn't matter.” Does it not matter? Of course it matters. But it matters for a whole different set of reasons, apparently, when you're at that level and it just makes you shine more with more light. But here's the interesting thing about that level, that bhumi level - as you're working with your patience, you are also perfecting worldly levels of concentration. It's like, wait, that's a different bhumi. What's happening on that different bhumi is a different thing. So it must take extraordinary level of concentration to have something like getting your fingers and toes cut off and still be concentrating on “seeds ripening, nothing but. I love this guy. I feel so badly for this guy because of what he's making for himself. And this is just working off the rest of my karma. In fact, he's helping me. Cut off some more, please.” Like, whoa, that's nuts. 

In that growing depths of worldly concentration, we also then grow the power of concentration such that we then remember word for word any teaching we receive. “Whoa, I hadn't heard that before.” You know, we've heard of those holy beings in Buddha's time, that they took a teaching from him and then years later when he passes away, they go, “Oh, I remember he said” and they spout the Heart Sutra, apparently word for word for what he said. This comes from a kind of non-distracted mental focus that it gets put in there and then you can like get it out, or maybe they look in there and they can read it. I don't know how it works. But it's interesting that that grows at third bodhisattva bhumi, it just seems curious how to work that out. Kind of implies that our ignorant dislike, which is what makes our anger, contributes in some way to our inability to concentrate well enough on what we're reading or hearing, or maybe even saying, that it doesn't make the impact that sticks in a way that we can bring it back out, that we can repeat it. Or we can ripen it on demand, might be a better way to say it. Interesting.

[Bodhisattva bhumi four:] So we work with our practice of patience, gathering goodness, at some point go into another level direct perception of emptiness, come out, and we're on fourth bhumi - Ö TROWA CHEN. In Sanskrit, this is how it was written in the notes and it doesn't look like a Sanskrit word to me so I don't know for sure, but it sounds like ARCHI SHMAT. It means… TROWA CHEN means blazing light. Blazing light. Remember Kamalashila said you go into your first direct perception of emptiness and you have blazing wisdom. Curious. They use the same term here. Blazing light. It refers to that perfection of joyful effort, having a good time doing all your other virtuous deeds. And it's like, come on, you've been having a good time all along because I think these things are pretty… I don't want to say effortless, but they're so obvious what to do and how to do it, you just are applying yourself moment by moment. So this joyful effort, Lama Christie suggests, is more about a physical and mental quality of being that's energetic and almost effortless. And that what a pleasure it would be to be the one who's sharing, being what others need and want, and doing it with this highest intention, highest benefit for everyone. And with this radiant love that's a result of our patience practice brings this effortlessness of being like that, and what a pleasure that would be. So perfection of joyous effort takes on this new connotation, not so much what we're doing, but what it feels like to be doing all the rest of it. 

[Bodhisattva bhumi five:] Then we gathered that goodness, come in and out of another emptiness meditation, and we reach the fifth bhumi - SHINTU GANGAWA. In Sanskrit, SUDURJA, which means extremely difficult practice. This one is our meditative concentration, perfection of meditative concentration. It's like, haven't we perfected meditation in order to see emptiness directly, didn't we do that a long time ago? So there's something else in the bhumi perfection of meditative concentration that's way beyond reaching shamatha and using it to reach insight. So it's described that at this level of practice, the predominant focus is concentration on KUNDZOB DENPA and DUNDAM DENPA. So we remember these DUNDAM DENPA - ultimate truth, ultimate reality. And KUNDZOB DENPA - deceptive reality. Appearing reality versus its emptiness. And as we are studying these things, because of our ignorance, we can't help but think of any given thing as either its deceptive reality or its ultimate reality. And we think one or the other, I can experience one or the other. And that implies that it exists as one or the other. And of course, that is inaccurate because there is no appearing pen that doesn't lack its own nature, and there is no emptiness of the pen that doesn't depend upon an appearing pen to lack its own nature. So apparently it takes this long in our journey to reach the place where we are actually working with those aren't two sides of a coin, they are the coin. 

And that's what's happening on our perfection of meditation, perfection of getting used to, maybe. I haven't heard that from scripture, but you know the term ‘gompa’ means ‘to get used to’ and then we call it ‘meditate on’. And so many times in the scripture, they say, Go meditate on that. But it's the kind of thing that you don't just sit on your cushion with, it's like you go out and you try it on for size in the world. And they call it meditation, but what they mean is go get used to emptiness and karma while you're dealing with your yelling boss. And it's never clear to me which one are they talking about - sit on your cushion, or go out in the world and try it on for size. And maybe they're always talking about both. But here it is, reaching that point where not one or the other, both. 

[Bodhisattva bhumi six:] Then we gather that goodness, we go in and out of the direct perception of emptiness one or more times, but finally the time that pushes us over into the sixth bodhisattva bhumi - NANDU GURPA. AHBIMUKA in Sanskrit. Sixth level is manifesting every quality. Nandu Gurpa or Ahbimuka means manifesting every quality. But what it means is manifesting every quality of a Buddha. But wait, this is only bhumi number six, perfection of wisdom, how is that every quality of a Buddha? Like maybe they don't mean every quality of a Buddha, maybe they mean the specific quality of Buddha. But the specific quality is their omniscience and omniscience doesn't start at sixth bhumi. So the name of the bhumi is a little bit hard to sort out, thank goodness for the Lamas who teach us about it. 

They say at this level, we are working specifically with our perfection of wisdom, the version being SHERAB or JNYAYA. SHERAB in Sanskrit is PRAJNYA. YESHE in Sanskrit is JNYANA. They are both words for wisdom, but they have a different connotation. So Sherab or Prajnya is as in Prajnaparamita. Sherab kyi parol tu chinpe. That Sherab, which is wisdom, but more in the sense, Lama Christie suggests, as knowledge, like the knowledge of wisdom. Like you've reached the wisdom in your direct perception of emptiness and you come out and you're not directly perceiving the emptiness of things anymore, you just know that it's true. And then as you're working your way through your bodhisattva bhumis, you're still perceiving things as having their identities in them, right? We don't lose that until we get to eighth bhumi, we're only on sixth, perfection of wisdom. So what we're focusing on now is increasing this, I don't know, like not directly perceiving that things are empty, but it's getting this heightened awareness of the knowledge of the emptiness of things, which is a little bit different than the perceiving the actual emptiness of things as you experience their appearance. Difficult, but a little similar to what we were trying to do before. The difference between just experiencing the pen and being aware of ourselves experiencing the pen. We can be aware of the emptiness of the pen intellectually and then we can become more keenly aware of knowing the emptiness of the pen, even if we're not perceiving it directly. Seems to me we're doing that all along, but somehow in this particular bhumi, it's got this increased concentration on growing the meaning and function and experience of our SHERAB, our knowledge of emptiness dependent origination. 

And that grows into the, I don't know if it's the ability or the spontaneous happening, of a state called SENLAM MEPA. Senlam Mepa means meditation without concepts. And it's a long story what that actually means, because it can be misunderstood to mean, “oh, just blank your mind out”, which Kamalashila proved to everybody is not what to meditate on. But meditation without concepts means there's no putting two and two together to come up with an idea of something, everything is direct. And it's like everything direct, like there's no way to explain what that means… to experience something without the label in between me and the experience, it doesn't seem possible to me, but it must be, and that's what's happening apparently on this perfection of wisdom. Growing our wisdom into the perfection of wisdom isn't just knowing the emptiness of the wisdom, we know that already, but somehow how we use that.

[Bodhisattva bhumi seven:] We gather the goodness, we come out, we come to the seventh bodhisattva bhumi called RINGDU SANGWA. DURGAMMA in Sanskrit. Number seven means ‘come a long way’. I think like ‘we have come a long way’ is the meaning of it. But it has this connotation from the Sanskrit, the DURGA is like ‘hard work gone a long way’. So it has this connotation that: man, we've been working so hard and now we've reached this level seven. And I don't know if it's like congratulatory you worked so hard you got here, or if it means you thought you've been working hard but fasten your seatbelt because now the work really comes. I don't know. I'm kind of leaning towards the second one. The scripture says at this level we are working particularly on concentrating on the perfection of method. Seems to me we've been doing that all along so I'm not sure what they mean by method here any different than our activities in our outer world. 

[Bodhisattva bhumi eight:] But we gather that goodness, we go in and out of the meditation, we come out on eighth bodhisattva bhumi called MIYOWA. In Sanskrit, ACHALA. Eighth bhumi means… she didn't give it to us. What happens on eighth bhumi? No more seeds for mental afflictions. No more seeds at all? No more seeds that can ripen. So including the seeds to perceive things as having their own natures. So we finally stop misperceiving our world, even though we stop believing in the misperception. That's the innate seeds for self-existence are finally so damaged, they can't go off. That happens in Bodhisattva eighth bhumi. I don't know if it happens the instant you wake up there, or if that's what you're working on and by the end of your eighth bhumi, you are fully Nirvana-cized. I'm leaning towards that. Because that would be what you'd be doing on your eighth bodhisattva bhumi is, whatever is necessary to finalize the inability of those seeds to ripen into seeing anything as self-existent. Which means you're perceiving everything as coming out of your seeds, I would think. And if you've perfected your previous bhumi, which you had to have, you would be experiencing that directly, not conceptually. Hard to understand what that means. Miyowa, eighth bodhisattva bhumi.

[Bodhisattva bhumi nine:] But that's not the end because we're on bodhisattva track. So we gather the goodness, we go in and out, we come out on ninth bhumi - LEKPEY LODRU. [In Sanskrit,] SADHUMATI. Ninth level is called Notable Intellect. That seems like a… Notable Intellect…. like a teeny little statement when it should be like this big. I don't know the word for that... an understatement. It seems like a major understatement to call ninth bhumi ‘Notable Intellect’. “You're pretty smart now.” [Laugh] It's like egads. At this point, they say we are able to communicate with every single aspect of the teaching to all types of being. So it's not yet that we are speaking the dharma and everybody's hearing their own language. Not there. But when we teach the dharma, it exactly matches what whoever hears it exactly needs to hear. On that level, that's happening. That's growing out of the goodness. They call it, we're working on the perfection of power as our predominant focus. But now the word ‘power’ means something completely different. The power to fill other beings' minds with the wisdom is the way I would interpret it, but it probably goes much beyond that as well. Certainly not the kind of power that we see misused in our human world. 

[Bodhisattva bhumi ten:] Then you gather the goodness, you go in and out. We're almost done. Oh, I was supposed to do another meditation for you. And we come out on CHUKYI TRIN. [In Sanskrit] or DHARMA MEGA, which is called Rain Clouds of Dharma. The tenth Bodhisattva bhumi. It's meant to convey this vastness. Like think infinite and we can't do it, so we need some kind of vastness. So we've all had some sort of experience either standing on top of a high mountain and you see mountains, mountains, mountains, mountains, mountains, or you're on a cliff and you're looking at the ocean and it goes forever. Or the night sky and a black moon and all the stars. Like you can't help but expand. But imagine that expansion to the tune of all existence. We just can't get it. So they say this is the level at which we are cultivating the being in all Buddha paradises, getting teachings from all the Buddhas, and already emanating to and for others, just not yet the countless spontaneous to everybody. So our being on bodhisattva ten is as if we're a Buddha, but not quite. Not till the end of bodhisattva ten does the final shift happen in which we are perceiving emptiness / dependent origination of all existing things at all times, and because of the love and compassion that got us there, we then spontaneously effortlessly manifest as everything for everybody. But we're doggone close on bodhisattva bhumi ten. 

So Lama Christie took us through an imagining of moving through these different states, and you know what? We'll do it next class because we have a little bit of time. Next class is our last class for course four and then as I said before, we'll just start up with class five. But that finishes our study with Master Kamalashila next week. So we'll finish this up then. Meanwhile, feel free to play with these different ideas of the bodhisattva bhumis and what they might be like. And it really is a great goodness to fantasize about being on one of those bhumis and what life at school might be like, Nancy, when you're on your bodhisattva bhumi practice of patience and you're shining your love. You're already doing it, but maybe it'll give you a little extra oomph so it's not so exhausting at the end of the day, but rather invigorating, right? Yeah. Sweet. So we're allowed. It's like our tendency is to think, “Oh, I can never do that” and even get maybe discouraged hearing those explanations. It's like, Oh, lifetimes, I'll do it. But to just explore it, doesn't even have to be in meditation, just sit with a cup of tea and, “oh, what will it be like to be that effortlessly doing my highest good for everybody?” And then you'll be surprised one day - you'll be out and challenged in some way, and you just react with this little bubble of love instead of [being upset], and it's like, good job me. So fantasy works. I forget. 

[Usual dedication]

Okay, welcome back. We are Bok Jinpa Course 4, Class 7, on June 17th, 2026. And this is the class that completes our study of Master Kamalashila's first book called Bhavanakrama, translated as Steps of Meditation. And it's extraordinary to study a text all the way through, from start to finish. We almost never do that, like in worldly lineage or our Buddhist lineage. So, Lama Christie mentioned it, she didn't make a big deal about it. But I want to because it's completion, right? And completion seeds is an important thing that I need. And I kind of assume that by you being here you believe you need them too, so yay.

And that said, I'm going to ask again for you to email me, letting me know of your intention, like do a request for Bok Jinpa 5, which I intend to start next Wednesday, right? We're just going to pick it right back up. But I need to fine-tune my email list because there are a lot of people that don't attend and I don't know what they're doing with the recordings, and I just as soon give them the opportunity to say yes. So I know some of you have already told me yes, but I'm going to start a new list. So please, before Sunday, just dash off an email and say, please, please, please. And then I'm going to announce this again at the end of class, if I can remember, so that those who show up after can get it as well. And then, you know, those who don't get the message and don't ask, if they squeal… Anyway.

So I owe you a meditation from last class. And then we have the one from the beginning of this class. So I thought we would do our opening prayers, go right into the beginning one from this class and then go right into the last one from last class and then come out. So, you know, I don't know how long the both will take, but just so you know, it's coming. Okay?

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

[Opening]

Meditation: Practicing Stillness by Focusing on the Breath

[10:15]

So our first meditation we’ll practice stillness, using our breath as the object, and then we'll shift to the other meditation. So start your sequence of setting your body, making it still.

And bring your attention to your breath, the breath at the edge of the nostrils, watching that breath go out, come back in, using that to trigger the mind, turning on its focus, turning on its clarity, adjusting its intensity.

Now let's fine-tune using this breath object to explore stillness. So you pick whether the breath object for you is a visual image, or a sound image, or a tactile image, which aspect of this thing we call breath you wish to use as your object of focus. You decide, and then find it.

Focus that meditating mind on that, only that.

Be fascinated.

Check.

Check.

Now check, is that object staying the same as you continue to focus on it, undistracted?

Or is it changing moment by moment, and yet still your object?

How much of the last five minutes has your mind been totally filled with that object?

How can our mind be single-pointed focused on an object that doesn't stay the same moment by moment?

Remind yourself what it is to be single-pointed, that object to the exclusion of all else.

Okay, so now let your mind loose and come back to just simple breathing happening and listening to my instruction.

We'll shift to last week's second meditation. It's an imagining meditation.

Meditation: Imagining Ourselves as Buddha

[22:20]

We had been talking about reaching the first bodhisattva bhumi to start that process of moving through all ten of them. And we know that to reach first bhumi requires reaching TONG LAM, the path of seeing. And so turn your single-pointed meditating mind tool on to imagining what it's going to be like to be seeing emptiness directly.

Now imagine what will it be like when your mind shifts and you come down out of that experience. How will you be changed? What does it feel like?

What is it you know to be true?

And how does that affect you?

Imagine what you will be like when you are free of the fear of the unknown.

Imagine what it will be like when your heart is so completely open.. that you are there to do anything for anyone, to bring them some small happiness, available to be exactly what they need at the moment.

Imagine a constant awareness that every single moment is being put to highest benefit, the greatest good for all existence.

Imagine what it will be like to have no anger ever again, not the slightest irritation.

Imagine being free of any kind of stagnation of body or mind.

Imagine a state of mind where you are constantly balanced with the deceptive world and the world of emptiness.

Imagine a state of mind where all concepts have been left behind, all experience direct

...and so interacting with all with this extraordinary love

...an extraordinary dance of love, compassion, wisdom being, focused, clear, fascinated.

Nice. Now offer that experience to that holy being and then, sorry, but bring your awareness back to this body, this room.

Dedicate those moments to someone you love, having some glimpse of where their ultimate reality can go.

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

[35:30]

The scriptures tell us that when we sit in meditation and imagine what it is to be a fully enlightened being, even though we can't get a teeny fraction of what it's going to be like, the moments done pretending are so hugely powerful that they set in motion that Buddhahood coming to reality. And, you know, it means someday. But just drop that and recognize, well, that wasn't so hard to sit there just imagining. In fact, it was maybe even fascinating enough that I was on the edge of my seat about some of it. And then we come out and we think, oh, it was just, you know, five minutes. It was more than that, 10 minutes, of just imagining. But don't discount. And then when we offer it and dedicate it, we've just put those seeds in the good karma bank, the merit making bank. So hooray. And our meditation can be that sweet.

The 10th Bodhisattva Bhumi

Okay, so back to our text. Master Kamalashila's end of his text, he's been talking about the ten bhumis through which we reach our total Buddhahood. And we just have the tenth bhumi left to talk about, apparently that you're reading for the class 7.

And it's like it's thrown me for a long time when they say, you reach the bodhisattva bhumi and that's this realization. And it's like, well, do you get that realization and that's why you're on the bhumi. Or are you on the bhumi and what you do on the bhumi, you come to that realization. And once you have that realization, now you're on the next one.

And when it got to bhumi ten, it was a little bit more confusing because some scripture would say Buddhahood is bodhisattva bhumi ten because that's the highest bhumi. And it's like, no, that's still bodhisattva bhumi. And when you're Buddha, you're Buddha, not bodhisattva. But it's like, that's not right. You're still bodhisattva when you're Buddha. But where is it in bodhisattva ten? If bodhisattva ten is my Buddhahood, does it happen the first instant of bodhisattva or level ten? Or does it happen at the last instant of level ten? As if the level is a place and then you walk into it and you march along in it and then there's no end of it. So it's like you just keep going like this [going straight] because you never come out of it because now you're Buddha. And it's like, really, what's going on here? And it still isn't completely clear in my mind.

But Kamalashila is giving this framework that says bodhisattva bhumi ten is this level in which we have already stopped perceiving anything as coming from itself. We did that actually at bodhisattva bhumi eight. Where along there, I'm not sure, but it happened. And then we had nine to do some stuff. And what's happening on nine is apparently this increasing… this shift such that we're able to emanate. But when I say those words, I hear them and it's like, well, that sounds like I'm sitting somewhere, and then I decide, oh, there's somebody on the corner of Fifth and Broadway who needs help, whoosh, I send somebody to Fifth and Broadway to help. And maybe at that level, that is what the emanations are like, more like coordinated. I don't know. But at Buddhahood, they're spontaneous, right? It's the spontaneous part of you.

So on level nine, there's something about the shifting in our karmic seeds such that our emanations are happening, our ability to do our emanations. We are continuing to clear out the obstacles to omniscience, but we don't fully clear those obstacles to omniscience until something inside of bodhisattva bhumi ten.

So Kamalashila says that what's happening on bodhisattva bhumi ten is that we are reaching omniscience, which kind of sounds like it's something that's coming on gradually, and then boom, you get the whole thing. And then, I've always thought, no, it seems to me like you're not, you're not, you're not, and then you are, once that last seed that's the obstacle to omniscience is gone. And, you know, I don't know. You tell me when you get there.

But he says that what the bodhisattva is doing on bhumi ten is working on clearing out what's blocking their omniscience and that what they reached then, where is the word… We finally gain total omniscience and unstoppable wisdom. And at that point, we have mastered bodhisattva level ten. And at that point, we are Buddha. So it's the mastery of each level that completes it, if we can say we complete it.

So what are those obstacles to omniscience?

He says they are a very, very subtle kind of grasping. So we've heard Geshe-la explain that from beginningless time, we have perceived things and believed things have their natures in them, from them. So every seed that makes up like every part of us in our world is colored by that mistake, that misperception. Finally, we see that, oh, my gosh, everything is seeds ripening. And then nothing but that, direct perception of emptiness, come out of that and put.. like connect the dots, which becomes the 16 aspects of your four Arya truths that've been coming up so frequently. And then because we now no longer believe that the things that look like they have their natures in them really do have their natures in them, we are not replanting that mistake. We're still experiencing it, but we're not replanting it. And then slowly, slowly or fast, fast, we are burning up seeds with the stain and planting new seeds without the stain.

But if it's taken forever to make all those seeds, there's got to be something else that we can do, or it would take forever to replace them all with wisdom seeds, in which case you'd never get there. So in the process of not replanting ignorant seeds, we are still cultivating planting that wisdom seeds, and we are then particularly doing particular deeds with the wisdom in order to get ahead of this process of ‘you have to ripen every single ignorant seed you ever made’. We need to get ahead of that. So because we went into our path of seeing with the mind imbued with bodhicitta, then we come out of our path of seeing on the first bodhisattva bhumi, and its task is to do the perfection of giving. And in the process of doing that, we are making our seeds really, really powerfully, because now we're actually doing it with the wisdom that we were pretending we were doing it with when we were using our perfections to gather the goodness to be able to see emptiness directly. All of that's familiar.

So we've been working on gathering these virtues with our wisdom, which means every seed we plant with our wisdom in mind is adding to every other seed that's been planted with wisdom in our mind. So our wisdom is growing. It doesn't seem like it needs to grow because we've experienced emptiness directly, but we want as many seeds with that as possible. So they're all adding, adding, adding as we interact with our world from this state of being Arya.

So through to the eighth bhumi, mastery on the eighth bhumi is where whatever, however we manage to do it, we're no longer even perceiving things as having their own identities. It means we've damaged our ignorant seeds so much by all of our wisdom that although there are still some in there with that ignorance, they can't get over the threshold to manifesting an experience of something in it from it. Everything we're experiencing is manifesting as coming out, coming from our own consciousness. Coming out of our own seeds ripening.

So, you know, I don't know. I can't quite imagine that as a Nirvana being you're sitting there among, like you're the first chick that ripened in the basket of eggs. And it's like, oh, here comes the next one. Oh, you just see in the seeds pop open. I don't imagine it's like that. But I imagine that it's like you are so keenly aware that it's your own results of your own deeds bubbling forth, that there is just no blame factor going on anymore, even in the slightest, in the ripening of our experience. Like King of Kalinka. Just King, I love you so much. Whack. I still love you so much. Whack. Because of the clear understanding of what's going on. Not clear understanding, clear experience of what's going on. But that's only Bumi eight.

Then nine, you still are not seeing anything coming from its own side. That's done. That's over forever. But there's still those remnants. And apparently the remnants block our ability to experience our own mind as omniscient, whatever it means to be omniscient.

So what does it mean to be omniscient? Like we know the punchline perceives emptiness and dependent origination of all existing things all the time directly, meaning free of conceptions. There's no MING DE SHAK TSAM going on, direct experience. And it's like, how do you direct experience anything without a name and a term?

You know, it's like, oh, yeah, omniscience, I want it. What the heck is it? No idea, but it sounds great. Because we can't conceptualize it, can we? Yeah, to be able to know the mind of every being, right? Diamond Cutter Sutra said, “I know the mind of every existing being directly”. Whoa. Sorry, I am embarrassed for you to know what's going on in this head, Buddha. I'm really, really sorry to waste your time. But they just love me all the more, thank goodness.

So it's like there's something that has to completely be destroyed to ripen the experience of our mind in its full capacity, omniscient. The remnants, remnants, just dust from having believed in things as self-existent are blocking us from being omniscient right now. So it's not so much that we have to build something new about our mind to be omniscient. It's that we have to clean something out, this dust from believing things are self-existent. He calls it grasping, getting free of grasping.

And it's like, well, I thought we got free of grasping a long time ago. Because grasping meant: I want apricots. If I can't have apricots, I'm not going to be happy. Isn't that grasping? And it's like, yeah. But more subtle than that is the pleasure of apricots is in them. It's more subtle than that, the identity of apricots, pleasure or not, is in them. It's more, it's deeper than that, the existence of apricots are out there. Whether I know them or not, it goes deeper than that. Do you see?

So the obstacle to omniscience is still this deep dust in all of our seeds, even though they're wisdom seeds that block our experience of being able to perceive emptiness and dependent origination simultaneously. Grasping is the thing that needs to get cleared up. Really, really subtle grasping.

So another task in one of your retreats is to dig deep down into this, What do they mean by grasping? And how does desire figure into grasping? And what would it be like to be really completely free of this belief and perception in subject-object interaction, like this three-fold thing that's happening all the time that establishes all existence and still does when we're Buddha, but not in the way we think it does.

Master Kamalashila says, our minds are way too small to grasp even the tiniest fraction of one side of one quality of Buddha. We just can't wrap our conception around infinite, what it is to be infinite. Our Buddha being is infinite.

So Lama Christie said, if you've ever done a meditation where you get this glimpse of something so vast that it's even overwhelming, and actually it's very likely that when we reach that experience, the natural human reaction is to go, Cool, and back out of it. Like it's a little scary because it's so overwhelmingly vast. And she says, however, that's a little glimpse. It's like a little teeny glimpse. And if we were able to step through into that, it would very likely open up and we might get a bigger glimpse.

So we can't conceive of what it is to be Buddha. And yet they go to great lengths to try to describe to us what it is to be Buddha. And they encourage us to imagine what it's going to be like to be Buddha because of the seeds we plant, as puny as they are. And in that description, they say, well, you can describe Buddha in terms of their body and their mind. Their appearing, their appearing nature and their mental nature. And we would call that the rupakaya–the form body, and the dharmakaya–the mental body, the body of all things, technically. And then they say, well, you can further define their form body as two, the nirmanakaya and the sambhogakaya. So the nirmanakaya is the emanation. And then the sambhogakaya is the form in their own paradise. And if you try to think that through, it's like, well, so there's going to be my Buddha, me, that I perceive myself as in a pure world. Because that's all the seeds I've got, is for a pure world. And then there's going to be the Buddha, me, that other Buddhas see, which puny me thinks they're going to see the me Buddha the way I see myself. And they are, because they're omniscient. So they'll see me perceiving me the way I perceive me. But they're going to perceive me according to their seeds, too. Right? So, wow, even my sambhogakaya just took this little shift and it's exactly what it is.

And then as we've learned that the other aspect of the Buddha's form body, what it can be perceived by others is the emanation. They call it emanation bodies. I like to say emanation being, which is what gets sent forth to help beings who don't see themselves as enlightened beings, who see themselves as suffering beings to help them along their way, along their path. And then, again, those words sound like you're sitting here and you're sending things out for this and that. But the emanation happening is a result of the loving compassion that we use to grow our wisdom, to move us along our bodhisattva bhumis. And so that factor of our loving compassion makes up our Buddha, me. And it's not like it's here and it has to be turned on somebody who's suffering. It just blasts forth. The instant we are Buddha, we are blasting forth this love and compassion. And it appears as whatever anybody needs at any moment. And at first it's like, okay, somebody's saying a prayer and I'll try to manifest something for them. And maybe they can see it and maybe they can't. But it doesn't matter. I'm there to love them anyway. Or maybe I'm the puppy that shows up for the little kid. But it really gets even more subtle than that. You are just everything that anybody needs or wants at the moment. So it's like you're sitting on a chair right now. You kind of need that. Isn't it reasonable to say that that chair is some Buddha emanating for you? Because they love you? Because their pledge to become Buddha is to become what anybody needs? And it's like, oh, man, now I'm totally boggled. How can I be everything for everybody? But won't it be cool? Won't it be neat to have our very identity beyond just being whatever you need? And if it happens to be, I don't know, a trip over a bucket and you break your foot, I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. That's what you made me do. I mean, it isn't like that. But you just are. You are what they need because of love, compassion emanating. So your emanation body.

So we've got our two form bodies. And then there has to be the mental body called the dharmakaya. Which, like, OK, the mind of a Buddha is dharmakaya. But then it has two aspects to it. There's non-dharmakaya, which we would say the omniscience. So the mind that is experiencing. And then the second aspect is the dharmakaya, which Geshe-la says, It’s the emptiness of the other three.

And I don't know, that gets to me, that gets slippery trying to explain that to myself, exactly what that means. But the mind that is omniscient is empty of self-nature. Its omniscience is seeds ripening and nothing but. And its form body in paradise is seeds ripening and nothing but. The emptiness is the nothing but part. And the emanations are seeds ripening. Your seeds and whatever seeds of the one who's experiencing you, whether they experience you as a chair or a hug or, oh, my gosh, there's the Buddha in front of me. Right? That's up to them, not up to us. 

So the emptiness of every instant of every aspect of you, Buddha, is an aspect of your mental being. And Lama Christie points out that if we have a mind right now–which we do–that mind is currently empty of self-existence. And the emptiness of this mind and the emptiness of this mind, when it perceives itself as omniscience, are identical.

Are they one in the same? That'll take a long debate. They are identical. So the emptiness that we have now and the emptiness we will have as Buddhas, we can say, because the mind stream is somehow connected, we can say our emptiness now and our emptiness then is something we already have. I'm not sure I could keep that one up on the debate ground or not. But that's the party line. Our emptiness now is the promise that this mind will perceive itself as omniscient, made of love, made of compassion someday. Because the truth is stronger than the lie. 20 years of study and a synopsis by Master Kamalashila.

So Lama Christie's question was, are we sure Buddhas even exist? Oh, it's time for a break. Let's take our break. Oh man, there's a beautiful rainbow right outside my neighborhood. Yay, thank you. 

[break]

How do we know Buddhas exist?

[1:08:26]

So how do we know that Buddhas exist? How do we know anything exists? How do we ordinarily prove to ourselves that something exists? We experience it directly with our sense objects, and then we say, see, it exists. But I know I've personally experienced something in the ordinary appearing world that was impossible to have happened in the ordinary material world way. So I know from my own experience that to say ‘seeing is believing’ is invalid, which would then mean touching is believing, hearing is, right, all the rest of that is also invalid.

So then if we think of Buddhas, how do we know Buddha existed, if we believe that the way you prove something exists is you see it, you experience it, and then you go, See, it exists because there it is. And have we ever seen a Buddha? So hopefully it's going to go, Oh, yeah, I have. And then if the person who says that is somebody that I believe is reliable, that may be enough for me to go, oh, okay, if they exist for them, I know this person, I know they won't fib, they won't... So I trust that Buddhas exist for me too, but, you know, that'll carry me only so far.

So then how do we decide? Like can we really prove to ourselves that Buddhas exist? We can prove it to ourselves maybe, but we can't prove it to anybody else, just from our own decision, can we? So how do we go about proving to ourselves that a Buddha exists?

We know the very Buddha’s teachings say, Use scriptural authority and logic. But scriptural authority only works if we've already come to trust the authority behind the scripture. And it's like, well, that's a circular argument. We're saying that the Buddha exists because the Buddha's writing exists, but the Buddha himself never wrote anything down. So, okay, that doesn't work. 

So then in Buddha's teachings himself, he says, Don't accept what I say until you try it on for size. And then, you know, you check it against your own personal experience, against your own analysis, against your own... What was the third one? I can't remember. And I don't know, those three tests drive me crazy. Because Buddha says, you know, that angry yelling boss, it's not coming from them. It's coming from you. And it's like, well, if I check that against my personal experience, it's coming from them. If I do it with my analysis, they're a jerk. And I should yell back, right? I can't come to the conclusion that Buddha is right or that that… I don't come to the conclusion that that helps me, unless I get taught how to really think about it. Or unless I'm at the place where I'm searching for a truth rather than trying to justify my old belief.

So, you know, when we're already in that space of, This place is broken, there's something wrong, I need an answer. And then we meet with teachings that say, you're right. Everything is broken. Everything you ever thought was pleasurable–it's not. It's in fact, a source of suffering and more suffering. And once you figure that out, you can stop perpetuating suffering.

And Lamas say, we can confirm that with our personal experience. Yes, even the most pleasurable things come to an end and leaves me wanting for more. Yes, I'm constantly dissatisfied. Yeah, I see. And if they said that, and I can prove that to be true, and a Buddha becomes a Buddha through all these other factors–I'm not going to go through them now–but one of them is the fact that they themselves can only experience things validly and correctly. It means they can only hear themselves saying what's true. Even when what they say is true sounds different than what they said was true over there. It's still valid and correct. And it's up to me to figure it out what the two meanings were. So once we confirm that this teacher teaches me something I can confirm, and I believe that they themselves cannot hear themselves say anything inaccurate. Then I can say, oh, then all the rest of the stuff they taught must also be accurate and correct, correct and valid, and I want to figure out what the heck it means and how I can use it to stop perpetuating this broken world.

So it's a conclusion that we can come to as we understand more and more these factors that through which a being shifts from perceiving themselves as a suffering being to perceiving themselves as a fully awakened being. If this fully awakened being was just born fully awakened, they wouldn't know what it is to suffer. They wouldn't know how to help people stop suffering. So this being had to have been suffering and did what was necessary to change. And so once I understand all those pieces, it's like, Ok then, I will check out what they have to say and I will try it on for size. And I'll keep at it as I see stuff shifting in me, as I see stuff shifting for other people. It will confirm my belief. And what started out as faith born out of logic will become more and more belief, not beyond belief, beyond faith, but belief until we really reach some level of direct experience of the truth of the teachings. And then hopefully very shortly after that, we reach the seeing the seeds ripen and then emptiness directly. So then there's this big piece of becoming...

[internet connection lost/break in video]

[1:20:05]

Hey, that was thrilling. This is a first for old dog. I've got my phone as a hotspot. Oh, no, maybe not. It's back on again. Oh, man, I was so proud of myself. Oh, well. 

Oh, I was on a roll, too, about loving compassion. The difference between Nirvana and Buddhahood is love and compassion. Wanting to reach our total Buddhahood for the sake of all sentient beings instead of wanting to reach my total Buddhahood, period. That would only be Nirvana. Not ‘only’, like I wish. But… So when a Buddha is a Buddha, they also must be ultimate love, ultimate compassion, ultimate wisdom. That's what we will be forced by the seeds ripening because of the seeds we've planted from all those kindness, wisdom's deeds we did ever since we first heard the pen thing and it like attracted us. So we're already well on our way. Yay.

So then if there is a Buddha–let alone more than one–and their wisdom of omniscience was reached because of the influence of compassion and love, then they must be emanating, that love and compassion must be emanating to us right now. Right? Because they couldn't withhold it if they wanted to. It's up to us to see it or not. They can't make us do it. The poor thing. It must be so frustrating. Sarahni, come on, like would you please get with the program? I'm trying. I'm trying. You still look like a floor. You still look like a mosquito. Sorry. [laughing]

But it's kind of fun. It's like, look at you, look like you look like to me. And they go, Oh, God. But anyway, it's just fun to explore and play. And it's and it's not like, yeah, it's made up.

But so Lama Christie said that our world view is determined by the extent to which we know Buddhas exist. And when you unpack that, it's really beautiful. It would take you through all your ACI classes, everything we've learned so far. Our world view is determined by the extent to which we believe Buddhas exist. Because if they exist, they must be emanating. If they're emanating, they must be everything that's happening to me. If it's everything that's happening to me, it's all their love. And what am I doing complaining about everything? 

I would be so different if I really had that perception moment by moment. And the only reason I don't is because my seeds aren't full of it yet. Someday they will.

OK, so let's do her second meditation from this class. And then we have a little more to wrap it up.

Meditation: Your journey from now to Buddhahood

[1:24:36]

So set yourself again in your meditation posture so that this limited body can just be forgotten about. And you can go fully into your world of consciousness, awareness, mind.

Set your body.

Bring your attention to your breath.

Now think how your whole world view rests on whether or not you think Buddhas exist.

Whether or not you think existing Buddhas emanate to you.

If they do emanate to us, that emanation must be propelled by or made of their love and compassion for us.

Their compassion is because they experience how we experience ourselves as suffering. And they know how unnecessary it is. They also already see you as pure.

Now think of your own self and what it will be like to travel through all of those steps. From wherever you are right now up to your own fully enlightened being.

And upon reaching that moment of transformation, you are instantly touching every existing being. You are so much love that you are there with them as if your arms of love embrace them all, no matter where they are.

And what will it be like for that entire experience to be experienced as all coming from you. All being you, no conscious thought, no conscious action. You simply shine love. Everything for every being–all that vast activity, all single pointed.

Check your focus, your clarity, your intensity. Adjust what needs adjusting and be that shining love. We'll do two more minutes.

Now recognize that there are beings you are emanating to that can't see you as this pure being made of love, made of compassion and wisdom. And so you appear to them in this human suit to be able to help them more directly.

And then recognize there's a little more to do in this class to be able to help them in that way. And so become aware of yourself in this class, your body in your room. When you're ready, open your eyes.

[1:36:38]

So we can't get it right, what it will be like to be your Buddha you in paradise emanating. And it's great, great goodness to pretend. And when we do expand it like this and something way better, way more, so that we plant those seeds.

Synopsis of the Bhavanakrama

So Lama Christie, because we're finishing up this text, she wanted to just synopsis. So that we might have a picture in our mind of where we went. So the whole course is a course about the importance of reaching Samatha, stillness meditation. That level of concentration in which we can take our mind and say, Park on this object because I say so–to the exclusion of anything else with clarity and fascination. And then we'll investigate this object. Maybe it'll do stuff. Maybe it'll go places. But we'll never go, Oh, this is getting boring or we'll never go, What's for lunch. Stillness is on the object, even as the object is doing stuff, even as we're choosing to have the object do stuff. As long as we're not falling off or losing the intensity, we're on the level where Samatha can develop. Samatha develops as those two practice eases come up.

So he's not just making his case for how to develop it, but more importantly, he's making the case for why to develop it. Because without it, even if we have the experience seeing the seeds ripen in our mind, if we don't have the seed planting of reaching a Samatha level concentration, we won't be able to sustain the meditative focus necessary to go into the direct perception of emptiness, which CHU CHOK is like the precursor for.

So, I don't know, maybe that's not completely true. Maybe if you're just a regular meditator– whether you're at Samatha regularly or not–we could have the goodness that after seeing the seeds ripening, we could still get into the direct perception of emptiness. My own logic is: surely that's the case. But not to use it as an excuse for being sloppy about our reaching Samatha or being overly critical about whether we've reached it or not–which was my specialty. Anyway, that's a long story.

So, first of all, he started out saying cultivate compassion, cultivate great compassion, meaning not just, Oh, people are suffering, woe is me. But I understand where suffering is coming from and it's unnecessary, which actually makes our suffering deeper and stronger when we understand that it's because of our broken world that people suffer at all. And then it's like, oh, man, I've got to help them stop it. So we use other’s suffering in order to grow our compassion that motivates us enough to work on our own ability to concentrate.

So, we spent a bit of time exploring our levels, our limits of compassion.

And then he said… then we start studying the teachings about where all that suffering is coming from further, and we do the TU SOM GOM thing. We study, we contemplate, talk about it with other people, debate it. And then once we have the ability to concentrate deeply, we actually meditate. And so, if you remember, we went through, I think, a whole course, maybe a course and a half, where we thought we were meditating. And he goes, okay, we've been contemplating really well. Now, let's see if we can meditate. Because the contemplation was working out the details of our meditation object, and then the meditation is to go into our conclusion single pointedly. There's the stillness again. So, if we can come to a conclusion, but we can't hold it single pointedly, then we're back contemplating. Which is my specialty. I get to the conclusion, I get there. And then it's like, how am I going to explain this to somebody? And blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, shut up in there. Let's do it again. Over and over and over.

The meditation is: getting in there and getting the deep aha, and sitting with it. The contemplation is all the mental [thinking it through] to get there. But we can contemplate single pointedly as well. Or we can contemplate it scattered. So we're still working on our single pointed focus, even when we're at still contemplation level.

Then he says, let's take our contemplation specifically into this relationship between the way things appear and the way they really exist, meaning dependent origination and emptiness, seeds ripening and things nothing but that. And we touched briefly onto the Arya Nagarjuna sequence of ‘functioning things don't function in the way that we think that they function because they don't actually start or stop or stay, and they are not caused by the things we think they're caused by–and they do function’. So we need to figure out how is it that something can function if they don't start, they don't stop, they don't stay, they don't have causes, they don't have effects. It's like, it's not that they don't do those things. It's that they don't do those things in the way that we think. Because the thing that we call the cause and the thing that we call the result are happening in two different moments in time and places in space and they can never touch. So we went into that just ever so briefly, as I recall, in our contemplation, getting it more and more clearly intellectually.

And then he said, Great, and at some point, you stop all that analysis and you park on your aha. And we cultivate the special insight, the Vipassana, which ultimately is the direct perception of emptiness. But in any given meditation session, it's the conclusion we reach from the analysis that we did. So we spend a certain amount of time on the analysis. We reach a conclusion. We fixate on the conclusion to let it sink in. And like, what's that like? Experience it and find out.

He then described the nine levels of meditation to help us to be able to assess where we are in our ability to turn on the single pointed or not, so that we're able to track. And we went briefly into what it is to reach the single pointed concentration stillness level called the first level of the form realm. Which isn't in the first level of the form realm, as we know, but is a level of concentration that plants seeds that if one of those were to ripen at the moment of death would ripen as a lifetime in that level. The point being, there are levels of meditative concentration that are deeper or higher, however you think of it, than that first level of the form realm. But those are not necessary for making the shift from our single pointed contemplation to our single pointed special insight Vipassana. We only need to be at first level of the form realm level concentration. Yay.

Then, so that was course one and course two. In course three, we went more into whether functioning things can function, which of course they can, but how they can we already talked about is different than what we think. We talked more about deceptive reality and ultimate reality, and how we use our behavior to manage our karmic seeds.

Then he goes into talking about how, as our wisdom grows, our compassion grows as well. So he started out saying, you want wisdom? Start with compassion. And then by the time we're towards the end of his book, he's saying, once your wisdom is growing, you will also see your compassion growing. Because the more clear we are about the causes of suffering, the truth of suffering and the causes of suffering, the more clear it becomes that we don't have to continue to create more suffering. We can help others stop creating more suffering also. And so our wish to end our suffering grows into the deeper wish of how others can stop their suffering and the fact that it's going to happen. So our wisdom grows our compassion, just as our compassion grows our wisdom.

Then towards the end of that, he was talking about how method and wisdom are connected and how there are different levels of understanding of this relationship between method and wisdom. And at the beginning level, he says, we're recognizing how the first five perfections lead us to the sixth. So other scriptures, they say the first four and a half are the method side and then the last two and a half are the wisdom side. But that we've got these two different aspects that we're working on.

Then he says, it gets a little more subtle after that. He says now at some point our method and wisdom, the method refers to our analytical meditation and the wisdom refers to the resting single pointedly in the aha. Whether we're seeing emptiness directly at that moment or not, we're using our analysis to grow our wisdom and then through our sitting in the aha and the seeds we're making while we're doing that, our future analysis will also go deeper. And you've got this beautiful cycle of method and wisdom.

Then he goes a bit subtler and he says, wisdom and method can also culminate in JETOP YESHE as method and TONGLAM as wisdom. And it's like, right, because the direct perception of emptiness is the wisdom that we've been working to create, to reach. And he says, right, but then we're not done. Like now we have the actual wisdom through which we make that method, the seed.. the method makes the seeds that makes us actually start the transformation process. So we've been saying use method to get wisdom, use method to get wisdom. Then we get wisdom and now we use wisdom to get method. Now we're using wisdom for the method of our perfection of giving and we're using our wisdom for the method of our moral discipline, etc. And so that by the time we have our wisdom of wisdom, what's that going to be? Oh, my gosh. And further.

He says, once you are at wisdom and method versus method and wisdom, that's when we're moving through the Bodhisattva levels. And we went through the names of the bodhisattva levels. He didn't really say exactly what we're doing on each of those levels. We know the first four, at least, five meditation, six wisdom. The others, I'm not so sure what the activities are. They have to do with the four modes of a Lama and how you gather disciples. But what if you're not a Lama and you don't have disciples? How do you do it?

And in the end, he says,

Even if we were to deeply explore one tiny faction of a single side of their spontaneously arriving arising qualities [meaning Buddhas] we would not be able to imagine them. We are unable to wrap our minds around the Buddhas or the Dharma. But I can give you just a brief glimpse of these beings now that they have reached the final end of perfecting themselves for the sake of both themselves and others and have gone to the end of eliminating every flaw. The conquering Buddhas reside in the body of the Dharma. And for as long as this cycle of pain still exists, they also reside in the body of complete enjoyment and the bodies of emanation, working spontaneously for the sake of every living being. So anyone with any intelligence should try really hard using every method available to them, since that is how to develop faith in these conquerors. They're our source for every goodness and how to attain their perfect qualities. And in accordance with the tradition of the Buddha's own teachings, I have clearly set forth this path of the children of the victors. And by the power of this act of no little virtue that I have done, may all of us feeble minded creatures quickly reach the highest state of mind.

Ta-da! We completed a text. He finally says,

This brief treatise on the steps for meditation was written by Master Kamalashila at the behest of the glorious (Flotsen?), Lord of all. This completes the first book of the Steps of Meditation. The Indian Master Prajnavarna, the Master Editorial Translator Yeshe De, and other assistants have worked to translate this, edit it, and bring it to this final form. It was translated into English by Christie McNally under the guidance of her Holy Lama, the realized being Geshe Michael Roach.

You completed that text, that study. Think of the amazing great seeds that you've made. The effort that you went to. What you've learned. Why you learned it.

And think of this goodness like an exquisite beautiful gemstone that you can hold in your hands. Everything about the beauty of that gemstone is your goodness.

Recall your own precious holy guide. That being made of love, compassion, and wisdom. You know them as you do because of your goodness.

Feel your gratitude to them, your reliance upon them. Ask them to please, please stay close to continue to guide you, help you, inspire you.

And then offer them this gemstone of goodness. See them accept it and bless it, and then carry it with them right back into your heart.

See them there, feel them there–their love, their compassion, their wisdom. It fills you so full you can't contain it, and so we 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 these clear still minds opening to love, opening to wisdom because of your effort. And may it be so.

All right. Thank you again for the opportunity. We finished something. Ta-da. Yay. Thank you, dear Holy Lama. Yes, you're welcome. Love you. Thank you so much, Holy Lama. Please teach us, please stay. Yes, please. Always stay. Thank you. You stay. You have to stay to meet me. Thank you. So let me remind on the recording as well. Remind you to please dash me off an email to say yes, I want to do course five. It's still about meditation. It's not Master Kamalashila. And I'll send the materials. I'll send the materials after I've got my list. Right? So next Wednesday, I love you. Please keep meditating. Please work on Shamatha.Okay. Thank you, Holy Lama. Thank you so much. It's such a pleasure. Stopping. Okay. All right. Bye-bye. And farewell again.