Bok Jinpa 5

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Vocabulary

LAM DRIMA MEPA NGULDAM DAKPAY KOR The Pristine Path within an Egg of Silver (Nickname Silver Egg)

Pa Dampa Sangye (1100’s AD) Author of the Silver Egg

Milarepa famous Mahasiddi

DUKNGEL SHIGYE practice called putting your torment to rest

Machik Labdrong Yogini

CHÖD cutting practice

SAMAYA

GATE GATE PARAGATE PARASAMGATE BODHI SVAHA (mantra of the Heart Sutra)

DO Sutra

KYE RIM Creation stage

DZOK RIM Completion stage

Mahamudra

Nagarjuna Garbha

Sherab Sangpo (sk. Prajna Bhadra)

Dharmakirti

TING NGE DZIN GYI TSOK Recipe for Deep Meditation 

(sk. Samadhi Sambhara Parivarta)

Lopon Jangchub Sangpo author of the Recipe (Indian)

(sk. Acharya Bodhibhadra 200 AD)

Welcome back, we are Bok Jinpa Course 5, formally. It's June 24th, 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.

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

And then we hear them say, bring to mind someone you know who's hurting in some way, feel how much you would like to be able to help them, recognize how the worldly ways we try fall short, how wonderful it will be when we can also help 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, studying emptiness, independent origination, we glimpse how it's possible. And so I invite you to grow that wish into a longing and that longing into an intention and that intention into a determination.

And then we turn our minds back to our precious holy being. We know that they know what we need to know, what we need to do yet, what we need to learn yet, to become one who can help this other in this deep and ultimate way, just as our precious holy being can help us in that way. And so we ask them, please, please, please keep showing me, keep helping me, keep inspiring me, help me become like you. 

And they are so happy that we've asked, of course, they agree, our gratitude arises. We want to offer them something exquisite. And so we think of the 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 a paradise of a Buddha

and offer it all to you. 

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

Idaṁ guru ratnamandalakaṁ niryatāmiyāmi.

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 realize 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 realize Buddhahood for the sake of every living being.

I go for refuge until I am enlightened to the Buddha, the Dharma, and the highest community. 

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

may all beings totally awaken for the benefit of every single other. 

Meditation 1: The Goodness That Brought Us Here

So sink your body down into a meditation posture and then bring your [attention to your] breath.

Fine-tune the focus, fine-tune the clarity, fine-tune the intensity.

Now intentionally shift your focus of that attention to my words and their instruction.

Through your life, find what you recall as the impulse that started you searching in this lifetime.

Recall what it was and the reaction at the time and those various circumstances that was your search for answers.

Scroll through those experiences of this life that has brought you to here now with your level of conviction to your personal path.

Recognize how it's helped you so far and think of how amazing it is that we are here now. Is it luck? Is it something other than luck? Is it from things we've done in this life?

Have we done enough goodness in this life to sustain receiving increasingly profound instruction from our holy guides?

We have extraordinary goodness to be here. How much more is in our pocket? Can we know?

How we respond to our studies influences the extent to which we are using up our goodness and replanting or not. We are riding an inexorable force that was put in motion by some past you. It's a force that we can use to cultivate our depth of meditation, our depth of study to the necessary levels to experience emptiness directly.

Having that experience with the heart imbued with bodhichitta makes us self-sufficient and unstoppable. And so let your mind stretch out big enough to encompass all the effort we've made in this life to pursue our path and then stretch it beyond this life into the past lives in which we were also planting seeds for our spiritual life. Letting all those experiences be recognized as all part of what make you up.

Now stretch that mind bigger to include what seems like into the future, into your destiny. A mind so vast, a being so vast, that it's standing on those billion planets. Being what all the beings on those planets need to take up and to give up effortlessly, pleasurably being that love, that compassion, that wisdom. 

Let's sit with that for just one minute. Past you’s, present you’s, future you's and dedicate these few moments of effort to that specific result–standing on those billion planets, shining your light like their sun.

And then return your awareness to the appearance of this body in this room, here in this class.

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

Pa Dampa Sangye’s History

Okay, so we're starting a new text of study still within the course series called Setting Our Practice on Fire offered to us by Lama Christie McNally. This course was offered to us in January / February of 2006. That seems like not so long ago, but oh my goodness, 20 years. Used to seem like a really long time and now it's like scary how fast.

[broken internet connection]

It's good now? Okay, so let's go back to share. Testing, testing. We're here. We're back. Okay, I don't know what I said. We're studying two texts by Lama Christie in her intention to push us in our meditative ability / effort and to help us understand emptiness and dependent origination better at the same time. And so she chose these two texts to study in order to accomplish that task. One of them is called The Pristine Path Within an Egg of Pure Silver. And the other one is called Recipe for Deep Meditation. And I don't know what her reasoning was for those two particular texts, but we see how sweetly they come together, even though their authors are from different time frames and have very different personalities. It becomes a sweet merging to help us.

So this class is learning about the main author we're studying from, from the Silver Egg, and about the title of the text, etc. And at the end, we'll just touch into Recipe for Deep Meditation, but we won't go into it until next week. And then each class will have some of each, mostly.

So The Pristine Path Within an Egg of Pure Silver in Tibetan is this LAM DRIMA MEPA NGULDAM DAKPAY KOR. I won't be referring to it as that anymore. It'll be Pristine Path, although its common nickname is a Silver Egg.

LAM DRIMA MEPA NGULDAM DAKPAY KOR

So LAM DRIMA means this pure path.

NGULDAM DAKPAY KOR is the within an egg of pure silver.

The NGULDAM is silver. I'm not sure what egg means, if it's KOR. But this text is called The Pristine Path well, paths, plural, Within an Egg of Pure Silver.

It was written by someone named Pa Dampa Sangye. We don't know his specific dates. He was in that period of Indian Buddhism of the 1100s AD. He is an Indian pundit who was invited to teach in China and invited to teach in Tibet. And that's why we're studying it is because his teachings in Tibet became very popular and useful. The information that Lama Christie shares with us here, like his biographical information, comes to us from a text called The Blue Annals, which is a big, thick book of the stories of many of the different high Lamas within the Tibetan tradition. And so a lot of people use it as the encyclopedia. Who was that person? Go look it up in Blue Annals.

So the 1100s was also the time of Milarepa. A little bit after the Kadampa's, but they're still going strong. So there is already a powerful surge of Buddhism in Tibet in this period of time, but sort of scattered and needing help, perhaps. So Pa Dampa Sangye, when he does travel to Tibet, he meets Milarepa. And they do some co-teaching and collaborating together. You know, I don't know if Milarepa was, I don't know how famous he became in his time, but he's definitely one of the famous mahasiddhis in this time. But after he went through all his activities with his holy Lama, he did gain this very powerful, positive reputation as a teacher in his own right. And we learn some of our Diamond Way from him as well.

So he keeps good company, Pa Dampa Sangye does, is why I'm telling you that. Okay, so let me just tell you about him. He was born in the south of India. And apparently, miraculous things happened before and at his birth. One of those miraculous happenings was that when he was born, he already had all his teeth, like poor mom, nursing a baby with all those teeth. But presumably, the little guy was kind about it. He was the seventh son, which means mom has had six boys already with no girls in between, and along comes another son. And everybody knows the seventh son in that context, six in a row, and then seven. Not just seventh child being a son, or even not just seventh son when I've got, you know, six boys and seven girls already, I get it. It has to be in a row, six boys in a row, the seventh one, whoa, he's something special. So the parents already are keyed into that and they have a prophecy done. And the prophecy confirms that this boy has these propensities, the auspiciousness for great spiritual powers, and to reach some spiritual greatness. So the parents are cultivating that and see that even as a young child, he's interested in the Dharma, he's interested in learning and studying. And so they facilitate it. And he gets ordained and even initiated into Diamond Way at a very early age.

He goes on to master the Sutra teachings. I don't know what that means to master them. But he learned, he studied, he practiced hard. And he really takes to meditation, apparently. And he decides at some point that he wants to meditate in all these sacred spots. And so they say that he spent seven years meditating in a certain cemetery in India, and that he would then move from there to some other sacred spot and stay there doing meditation practices. Now, whether he was in isolation and staying put or also taking or giving teachings, I don't know. But they say when his students counted up all the years he spent in meditating in sacred places, it came to 50 years or more. So not meaning he did a 50 year retreat and then came out and did all the rest of this stuff. But over the course of his life, 50 years in meditation retreat, that's pretty impressive.

The biography says at some point he reaches the highest state of meditation, which Lamas say is code for seeing emptiness directly. Somewhere in all this process of his training, he starts ordaining people and initiating people. He's still in India all this time. And then he gets invited to go to China to teach. And he goes and he stays there 12 years. And then he's invited to Tibet and he goes between Tibet and India. And I'm not so clear how many times, but back to China. And part of that auspiciousness of seventh child is having these power siddhis that we know of as being the result of deep concentration, we will attain these different powers. And they seem like miraculous powers, but they simply have to do with the ability to concentrate and the understanding of the true nature of things. So apparently his particular special powers was this ability to disappear. And the ability to, they call it travel fast. But I don't think it meant that people would see him, he'd be going [running quickly], but they would say, you know, he was here in the town and I took a teaching from him and then all of a sudden he's not here anymore. And I don't know, we get a message. How long does it take to get a message from China to Tibet? I don't know. We get a message he's been in China for the last month or so. And it's like, wait, he was here two months ago. How can he… it takes weeks to get to China. Do you see? And so it wasn't like people saw him do this [move]. But when they put two and two together, it's, oh my gosh, he just disappears here and shows up over there. Cool, wouldn’t it? Oh my gosh, how much time and expense that would save.

His other gift was knowing his disciples' minds, meaning he knew like when they have a problem, he knows the problem, the ins and outs of it, and he knows the karmic cause and he knows the specific purification that's necessary. And so when somebody would come to him for help, like they wouldn't even necessarily have to tell him the whole story of this is what's going on with me. He'd go, “yeah, yeah. Okay. This is what you're experiencing. This is why. And this is what you have to do”. So the most famous story in this regard is around the woman named Machik Labdröng. She is the, probably the most famous lady Lama, Tibetan lady Lama. But before she was famous in that way, she is a practitioner. She has a Lama who is her spiritual partner and that Lama dies and she gets terribly, terribly afflicted. And she starts having all these awful calamities about her body, about her mind, about her situation. And she hears about this guy, Pa Dampa Sangye, that seems to be gifted in helping people know how to purify stuff. So she searches him out and just is saying, you know, I've come for your help, I'm having problems. And he goes, okay, I know, I know. And he tells her like the very issues that she's having, she's didn't even tell him. He goes, you're having this because of that and this is what you need to do. He says, the bottom line is every problem you're having right now has to do with your broken pledges to your root Lama. So he says, you know, that white discharge, vaginal discharge, that you're having, that's from having taken tantric students without expressed permission. He says, your body all covered with those sores was from taking food offerings and associating with people who had broken their vows. The fact that your state of well-being is gone is from being jealous of your Lama's other students. And in particular [broken internet  connection] and that's from breaking your samaya. There goes my internet.

[broken internet connection]

Okay, I'm going to try again. Must be important. Whoops. Must be important class, eh? Hello. Are we back? Can you hear me?

[Coco: We're back in all forms.]

That's a scary thought. 

[Rachana: Can I mention the last thing we heard was, I can't remember what the manifestation was, but she was jealous of other students. And that's the last thing we heard.]

Okay. She was jealous of other students, particularly the Lama's consort. And then even animals refuse her offerings and that is because of breaking her samaya. Samaya means pledge. So these pledges that we get, if we don't keep them well, the result will be, for her anyway, even animals wouldn't eat the offerings that she put out. He said, your failed fire pujas were from sitting on your Lama's seat, probably without permission. A failed fire puja means a fire puja where the fire keeps going out. He said, your being overwhelmed by base desires comes from not having made an offering to your Lama when he gave you initiation. And then the fact that the dakinis refuse to invite you to their parties is because of your improper partaking of tsok offerings.

So he says, here's what you need to do to purify all of this. You need to go find a king's mat. I don't know what that means. A king's mat and offer it to me, Pa Dampa Sange. And then offer the mat to yourself as the consort of your Lama. Number one.

Number two, find a relic of the Buddha and circumambulate it.

Number three, do a ritual bathing.

Number four, find a footprint of your root Lama and offer seven dakinis to it.

Eight, place an egg in your vagina and leave it there.

And nine, get a leg of lamb and a glass of wine and offer it to the assembly. Meaning the monk sangha. 

So she somehow gets a king's mat and she makes the offering. She finds the relic. She manages to do all of these things, including getting this one small leg of lamb and one glass of wine. And she goes before the sangha of monks and it is like, this isn't going to be nearly enough. And yet it was. And there were even leftovers.

So she goes to him and says, I've done all of this. And he says, well, do you remember the temple you built in Lhasa? And she's like, I built a temple in Lhasa? And he goes, Oh, so the dakini is a liar. And he hauls off and slaps her so hard that she passes out. And when she comes to, she can remember her past lives. “Oh, yeah, I guess I did build a temple in Lhasa”, some past life. And he goes, okay, take that egg out. And she removes the thing. And it's all awful with black gooey awful stuff. And he says, done. All that black goo is all those impurities fixed. And she says to stay pure, keep making offerings to your Lama, and take care of his students well. So she's cured of all those things that were distressing her. And she goes on to spread this lineage of practices that he was teaching, which is the lineage called DUKNGEL SHIGYE. DUKNGEL SHIGYE means putting your torment to rest. So he's teaching this practice. She also is teaching this practice. And he also taught her the CHÖD practice, the cutting practice, which became her specialty. And that's really what she's known for in the Tibetan arena is this practice of CHÖD. It's like CH, umlaut O, D, you don't hear the D. It's just that short CHÖD, CHÖD, CHÖD. And it means like cut, cut. But I don't, I don't have any, I don't know what that practice is. It has to do with cutting off mental afflictions, cutting off, right? Cutting, cutting away. I don't know anything more about it than that, however.

So this putting our torment to rest lineage of practices, DUKNGEL SHIGYE, it's actually based upon the Heart Sutra. And in particular, based upon the mantra of the Heart Sutra. 

The GATE GATE PARAGATE PARASAMGATE BODHI SVAHA

And what that mantra means and entails and cultivates as we use it, right? We understand “gone, gone, gone across, gone all the way across, Buddhahood, so there, may it be so.” But when we dig deeper into the meaning of that, it just keeps unfolding itself, doesn't it? So it's like through that understanding of the Heart Sutra, he developed this practice of just, DUKNGEL SHIGYE is like, okay, I've had enough of it, just I'm washing my hands of my ignorance, it's done. Like I've tried, it doesn't work for me, but apparently… not because it can't work.

Our Text–The Pristine Path Within an Egg of Pure Silver

So one of the things that he did was write this book called The Pristine Path Within an Egg of Pure Silver. And this book is like single verses that are a synopsis of what certain teachers taught him. And it's 55 different teachers who’ve taught him something. And it's presented as these are his 55 teachers that he had in life. But when we see who the teachers are, it's like, wait, it spans a couple hundred years. And, you know, so I don't know if he's like Arya Nagarjuna, his life really did span a couple hundred years. Or if he's saying, my Lama was this, meaning I studied from this person's writings. And then you can develop this relationship with the author of that text through our meditation practice, such that in our own mind, our own experience, we really do know them, we really do interact with them. Somebody on the outside would say, oh, it's all in your imagination. And it's like, you know, you're welcome to think that; for me, it's very real.

So he had these different groups of Lamas that he's like making himself a cheat sheet - This is what this Lama taught me, this is what that one taught me. And they're very beautiful when we see the whole pattern. And they come to us in sets of 11. I don't know why, but it's my number that gives me a message.

1. So he quotes from 11 sutra Lamas when he's learning his open teachings, his open practices. 

2. And then he gives us the teachings that he received from 11 KYE RIM and DZOK RIM Lamas, meaning Diamond Way. KYE RIM is the creation stage. DZOK RIM is the completion stage. Sometimes you see DZOK RIM spelled with a G instead of a K. It's just meant to make the word short, DZOK. So we get 11 different teachings about these two practices.

3. Then his third section is 11 Lamas teaching him what's called deep practice. Deep practice means using the practice of bliss as a path. And we'll get to what that means later.

4. The fourth section is 11 Lamas that are describing the paths he himself followed in his life, in which he spent a lot of time investigating his own nature of his own mind, Mahamudra. 

5. Then his fifth part, the last 11, are all Lady Lamas, which is interesting because it's not like at the end of his life, his last 11 teachings that he got were by women. It's not like that. These aren't sequential, but he's taken them by category and put them all together. And when we see the names of the Tibetan teachers, you apparently really can't tell the difference between a male name and a female's name. So you maybe wouldn't know that such and such a teacher was a woman versus a man, unless there was something in the teaching itself that revealed that. And not every dharma teacher's biography has been written and put into The Blue Annals. So there are some even authors of texts that we don't really even know who they are necessarily. But at some point, Lama Christie suggests that because he lists specifically, These are my lady Lamas, that he wants to show that somewhere along the way of a practitioner's practice, the need for the feminine aspect, the feminine contact comes up. And we'll see how that plays out to a certain extent in this course. And then a little more specifically in Bok Jinpa course 6. 

However, this course, Bok Jinpa 5, Lama Christie was given permission to teach this to those in the Diamond Way and those still on the shared path. So meaning this Bok Jinpa 5 can be taught openly, even though there's parts in it that is like, should this really be being said? It's because those who will be attracted to this teaching are properly prepared. And of course, the task of the teacher in sharing a class like this is to at least know enough about the student to know that they are properly prepared in order to protect them from misunderstanding and then slowing down their path later. But then when course 6 and actually 8 comes along, Lama Christie said, only Tantrikas, so sorry. So I'm going to do the same thing. So we'll only cover part of Pa Dampa Sange. We'll end up covering all of Deep Recipe for Meditation somehow. But there are certain of these Bok Jinpa courses that I can't share unless you are also my tantric students. So sorry about that.

Opening of the Book

So let me change share. So at the end of our course, some of our co-students had created a little spiral bound book of these 55 verses of Pa Dampa Sangye.

And it's so very nice to have it in hard copy for me in this sweet format. So Lama Sumati scanned it for me so that we have it. And then actually Rachana went ahead and also has developed the file for publishing it so it could be available in hard copy. Because we looked for the original one, and the people who made it, I guess, don't have access to it anymore. So thank you Rachana for doing that. See where that can go.

So if you read Tibetan, here is Pristine Path on the Egg of Pure Silver. Seems like there's an extra word here [in Tibetan], I don't know what it means. But we can see the LAM DRIME. Anyway, I'm going to leave it, that's not my forte… by Master Pa Dampa Sangye.

He says, this book is 

the personal advices of fifty-five accomplished yogis and yoginis, which were granted by that highest protector of suffering beings, that prince among men, the one who gave birth to the great stream of wisdom - the supreme path of seeing.

These advices have been organized into five different groups of teachings and passed down by him to Lama Bodhisattva Ananda.

So he has started out by saying, I bow down to my holy Lamas. All of these different beings.

So this is the format. You have the Tibetan and Lama Christie's translation. And then at the bottom, who that advice came from.

So he starts his book so beautifully. ‘Once you are certain’. Oh, wait, it's time for a break. Let's take a break.

[break]

Verse 1–The advice of Nagarjuna Garbha

Okay, so verse number one.

[1]

Once you are certain that

In essence

All known things comprise two truths

The mind which grasps

To things as two 

Is lost within itself

And then you know

That no existing thing

Exists in truth–

This is 

The advice of

Nagarjuna Garbha.

So the first Lama he quotes from is… or not quotes from, he summarizes what he learned from them, is Arya Nagarjuna. I like this guy. He's talking my language here. And the verse is so rich. So we know, what's the two truths? Deceptive truth and ultimate truth.

What do we mean by deceptive truth? Things look like their identities, their qualities, are in them so it looks like things are coming at me from outside me. That's deceptive reality. Ultimately, they're not existing like that, they are existing as not having those natures in-them from-them. 

Then we can say, well, then really the two truths, you know, they're not truths at all, because one of them is not true. Seems like it is because that's how we experience it, but things don't exist like that. Not like they used to and now they don't, but they never did. so I can see why they call it deceptive reality. But as we understand even more about what we're talking about, the concept we're talking about in the two truths, it's not just that the thing appears with a self-nature but doesn't have a self-nature, it's the appearingness at all comprises one side of experience. And the fact that it appears at all the way it does to me is proof that it has no nature of its own. And it's like, wait, how's that proof? And we need to work our way through that every single time. 

The very appearance of something can only appear if our mind seeds are ripening its appearance. And by appearing the way I experience it, that reveals that it has no nature of its own, because it depended on mind seeds ripening to make it be there. So we start out with, oh, things are appearing, but not self-existently. But our mind says, well, come on, they're still there in some way.  And they are. But as we are working with this simple, very first verse, it's like, well, we can go deeper in what's meant by the two truths. And at different deeper levels, we are like shrinking that gap between an appearing thing and its emptiness as being these two separate aspects, and reaching the point where to see one is to know the other. And that's when the mind that grasps to things as two is lost within itself is starting to pop up. 

You're getting to the point where, at least in meditation, we can recognize that, no, there's no such thing as two separate things, appearance and emptiness. There's both happening at the same time.

Then you know that no existing thing exists in truth. No existing thing exists at all? No, that's not what it's saying. No existing thing exists that's not this appearance pushed by my karmic seeds ripening and nothing but that – those two together. So it's like that is an extraordinary synopsis of what Arya Nagarjuna taught in his root text Wisdom. If you had to boil it all down to one verse, this would be it. 

And then apparently in the Tibetan, between these series of verses, he's using words that have multiple meanings in the Tibetan, that just isn't translatable into the English. And because we don't know the Tibetan, we miss these nuances of what the Tibetan can reveal if we know how to follow that path. Some of it is poking fun, some of it is like puns. But mostly it's these very nuanced concepts like the taking the two truths from deceptive reality and ultimate reality to just appearances and their no self-nature to what even gets more subtle than that that's kind of not able to verbalize, in order to reach this state of recognizing emptiness in appearances and appearances in emptiness. Because you can't have the emptiness of something without a thing that is empty of self-nature, right?

Okay, they say when you reach this subject and object not having this distinction anymore, it's dissolving into non-duality. But then we misunderstand the word non-duality and think, oh, everything becomes one. And when we learn how to investigate whether everything can become one, we recognize, no, we're misunderstanding that because that's impossible for there to be one without some other to perceive it as one. And then, whoops, it's not one anymore.

So amazing Nagarjuna showing us there's no subject without an object, there's no object without a subject, if we bother to investigate that verse.

Verse 2–The advice of Prajna Bhadra

[2]

When you can

Unify the taste 

Of myriad objects

The state of mind 

Which grasps to two 

Is devoured by itself

And then you'll know 

These many things 

Are but a single song–

This is

The advice of

Prajna Bhadra.

Prajna Bhadra’s Tibetan name is Sherab Sangpo. And that didn't mean anything to me for a long time. But now I recognize that Sherab Sangpo is in one of the lists of lineage Lamas in one of my practices so all of a sudden, it's like, wait, maybe I could know who this is if I took the time.

So Lama Christie pointed out that this middle verse in both of these verses, the first one said, the mistaken mind gets lost within itself. The mind becomes lost within itself. And then this one says, the mind is devoured by itself. And then the third one's going to say, the mind frees itself. And again, in the Tibetan words, there's more meaning in that than maybe in the English. They're all saying the same thing - when we come to perceive something different than we used to and our perception is valid, then our mind changes in some way. But he's making the point that for the mind to be lost within itself, for the mind to be devoured by itself, and the mind that frees itself, have all different nuances of meaning of how our mind gets changed by the realization that he's talking about in these verses.

So when we unify the taste of myriad objects means when we come to recognize that no matter what object is appearing to us, it is appearing in the way that it is because it's the process of my seeds ripening to see it the way that I see it, and it has no nature other than that. There isn't any experience we can have that isn't experienced by way of that process. So everything we experience has the same taste, the same flavor, of seeming like it comes from its own side, but in fact, can only be ripening results of our own past behavior. Nothing that's not like that.

When we are grasping this fact that nothing we can experience is experienced in any other way than any other thing that we experience, by way of seeds and nothing else, that's the state of mind grasping to two that devours itself.

What's the two that it's not grasping to anymore? The self-existent object and the self-existent me, or the self-existent object and the self-existent response reaction I have to the object? It's really not just two, but it's this two of a thing and its emptiness, and the two of other and me, those two get devoured.

How? Just because I know every existing thing is ripening out of my seeds, how does that devour my belief in objects and subjects? Well, because I'm experiencing me, I'm one of those myriad objects. And that means I arise in this from the same process of everything else. And that's a hard one to devour. “No, no, I'm the one who's throwing the karma. I'm the one who's ripening the karma. I'm the one…” And then as we say that to ourselves, we're pretty convinced that we're outside the system. We're beyond the karma ripening because we're doing the ripening. We are the projector. But that's not possible, is it? And it's like Pac-Man [eating everything] and devours the belief in this me as separate from the process happening.

And then we know these many things are but a single song. So I don't know what's the difference between being of the same taste and being of a single song? That would be what one explores as one uses this verse as a meditation object to see.

So somebody apparently says, look, how can the mind devour itself? Like if our mind is deceived, how can we use a deceived mind to look at things and ever come up with something accurate? A knife can't cut itself. A faulty equipment can't make the thing it's supposed to make accurately because it's faulty. And the answer he gives is, no, you've got the wrong metaphor. That rather this is like taking a twig or a little branch, cutting it in two, and then rubbing it against each other until it lights on fire and then it burns it up. So somehow that metaphor explains what this verse is saying. And we end up with knowing these many things are but a single song. So have fun with that.

Verse 3–The advice of Dharmakirti

[3]

Use logic 

To establish

Existing things.

Then cancel 

The distinctions made 

By holding things as valid

And you will meet 

A mistaken state of mind 

That frees itself–

This is 

The advice of 

Dharmakirti.

Who's Dharmakirti? Master of logic, right? Of valid perception. What did we learn, some of us are studying Course 13 right now. What do we know about existing things? How do we establish existing things? That which is perceived by valid perception makes a thing exist.

But then cancel the distinctions made by holding things as valid. Wait a minute, right? We're using something as valid to prove something exists. And then we would then explore, well, what really means ‘valid’? Valid given the information we're getting? Yes. But the information I'm getting believes what I'm getting has its identity in it. So yes, it's valid to see the mice run across in front of my car and so I slam on the brake. And then the car stops and I look and it's like, oh, it was a leaf. Now it's validly a leaf. It was validly a mouse before. And our mind goes, oh, phew, it wasn't really a mouse because it's really a leaf. But is it really a leaf?

No. It's validly a leaf, but it's not really either a mouse or a leaf or a horse or a bicycle, right? It's correctly my seeds ripening whatever I'm perceiving at the moment.

So just because we're having valid perceptions proving that things exist does not mean we are experiencing those things true to the way that they do exist. Because the way they do exist is as seed ripening identities / indications forced by our karmic seeds to perceive them that way. Valid perception does not include that, necessarily. So we can have valid perceptions that are incorrect. Not can, we do. We can have invalid perceptions that are also incorrect. Like double incorrect, because they're incorrect because they're not valid and they're incorrect because we're still thinking of them as in-them from-them, and they're not that either. We're not having a correct state of mind until we're perceiving emptiness directly, they say.

But we can't recognize that things don't have the nature of their own that we think they do until we can establish what it is there that we think is there. So we do need to establish the things as existing that we're going to look to see if they exist in the way that we believe. Use logic to establish existing things. Then use logic to recognize that that validity isn't correct. And so in that process, we will meet a mistaken state of mind. Our belief that the thing's validity makes it real. And that very mistaken mind will go, “well, that's silly” for whatever logical reason you've got. Because somebody else perceives it differently from me, that right there is enough. But we all have the one liner that is our trigger that says, oh, yeah, can't be the way I think. Logic helps us do that. Apparently, Pa Dampa Sangye learned logic too. Hooray.

So Lama Christie said, well, we read these together the first time and we get an idea of what they mean. And then if you take them onto your cushion and work with them, they'll start revealing stuff. But probably not in a short week of working with three of them in a week. But if you decide at some point to either go in retreat or to settle on something that you really want to work on deeply, then you would take one of these verses and chew on it, contemplating wise, and sit with your aha and work with one verse until you got something out of it. Whether that was a few days or a few weeks or a few months. Any one of them can trigger a whole cascade of understanding. That's the beauty of all of these.

Meditation 2: Deceptive and Ultimate Reality

Okay, so let's do a second sit.

Settle your body.

Once your body is settled, bring your mind to your breath.

Now bring to mind what you know about the two truths.

What does deceptive mean? What does ultimate reality mean?

How is it that those two make up every experience?

What, in your immediate perception, belongs to each category? First find your immediate perceptions. Exactly what are you experiencing now?

Which reality are those perceptions?

Every instant of experience is deceptive reality, isn't it?

And we call it deceptive because every instant of experience is actually ripening results of past behavior. 

Our own past behavior, our past experiences.

So experiencing an object as separate from me is not true. That division, me and the object of my experience is false.

Me and my experience is all simply moments of ripenings. And so we experience self and things in the way that we do. But that is not the way that they are.

There's no such thing as a thing out there. There are only moments of experience ‘Me experiencing a thing out there’ seeds ripening that experience.

Zero in on one repeatedly experiencing sensation / perception, and try to find how it is there independent of your awareness of it there.

Can you catch recognizing it can't be there in the way I think. It can't be there as the thing I think it is. 

And sit in that conclusion with nothing more. Try. We'll stay two more minutes.

Check.

Nice.

Now dedicate this small effort to gaining the realizations through which you'll help someone else reach CHU CHOK, the perceiving the seeds ripening into the image someday.

And then bring your attention back to your body in the room, and in this class.

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

So our instruction was to use these three verses as our object of meditation for our daily practice between that class and the next one, which for our group was four or five days depending on where we were. And we get a whole week. So even if you aren't, you know, having a one-hour meditation practice, give yourself time to contemplate these three deeply, meaning undistracted by other things, think them through carefully. Chew on them. Talk to yourself about them. Come to some deeper conclusion about what you understand about them. Please try. We are planting unstoppable seeds, says Geshe Michael. And then we can leave them there as the kind of seeds that take hundreds of lifetimes before they go off, or we can add to them a little bit every day and they'll grow faster for us, is the promise. Okay.

Recipe for Deep Meditation

So the second text that we will be studying is a text called TING NGE DZIN GYI TSOK.

We know the word TING NGE DZIN, don't we? Single-pointed concentration. Stage what in the one to nine stage? I think it's eight, actually, maybe it's nine. Where we say, Mind, think of tennis ball. And the mind goes, Okay, tennis ball. And in order to get off tennis ball, you have to go, Okay, enough of tennis ball, go to racket? And it goes [immediately there], and it sits there. Like, how refreshing to have a mind that does that because we've said, do it. Mine doesn't. Unless whatever the thing it's on is interesting. Then, yeah. But we should be able to do that regardless of the interestingness of the object–that's reaching shamatha.

Anyway, TING NGE DZIN GYI TSOK. TSOK means to gather together. To gather together what we need to reach single-pointed concentration, technically, is what this text is about. Lama Christie liked Recipe for Deep Meditation because a recipe tells you what to gather together and gives you instructions on how to do it in order to come up with the thing that you want. So, this text is like that.

In Sanskrit, it's Samadhi Sambhara Parivarta. So that also somehow means what to gather together to reach deep meditation.

It was written by someone they call Lopon Jangchub Sangpo.

LOPON means master. JANGCHUB SANGPO means Buddha… What is Sangpo? Sorry, I'm not finding it. I don't know what Sangpo means. But in his Sanskrit name, Acharya (Master) Bodhibhadra. We've studied Bodhibhadra, I think. I don't remember the context other than here. Bodhibhadra. His dates - 200 AD. So, he's an Indian guy. Because in 200 AD, Tibet is not Buddhist yet. But when they study him, they give him a Tibetan name. They don't always do that and I don't know the reason why.

So, in your first reading, we just have the introduction to this text where the author pledges to write the book. And he divides the book into nine parts. These nine ingredients. They aren't the usual nine that we're familiar with, but knowing the nine will recognize how his nine are related to moving through the other nine. They're just not direct correlations.

He's really practical and down to earth about how to clear out obstacles to a conducive state of meditation and how to cultivate the state of meditation. It really is like, I don't know, nowadays, you go to look up a recipe on the internet and the person who's offering the recipe, they tell you everything about themselves and their dog and how they developed the recipe before you get the recipe. And he's a little bit like that. You know, friendly, homey, personal, showing us that he knows what he's talking about. As opposed to Pa Dampa Sangye, who's this crazy yogi Lama. He just says, this is what Nagarjuna taught me. You know, I probably studied Nagarjuna for 20 years, but this is the pith of it. So he's just this, Do this, do this, do this. Put an egg in your vagina if you want to clear out that crap. That doesn't mean every lady, that's.. But he just like, do this, do that. No nonsense kind of guy. And this other guy is like, no, no, here, I'll help you understand better. It's kind of sweet to have both in this class study.

In his text, he goes into things like demons, and obstacle-ers, and all these weird things that our Western mind goes, oh, that's just Tibetan superstition. But when we understand how to interpret and then use those words that they use, it's like, oh, I get why they call them demons instead of just plain old mental afflictions. And then when we gather this different relationship with our mental afflictions, that we have a method, a tool, for managing them in a more direct and personal way than keeping them at this arm's length. “This is my anger. This is my jealousy.” But rather, it's like, Egads, that looks like an ugly guy coming at me right now and it's like, I’ve got to do something with them. And that's a more direct way to work with our anger once we catch on how and why it works. So I hope I can convey that to you.

So in your reading, you'll also see that a fourth verse from Pa Dampa Sangye, but she did not cover it. And we covered it, but not for another class or so. Not because it's any harder than the others, but just in terms of its context for where we are. So you're welcome to read it, but recognize we didn't talk about it, which is why when you read it, you go, “she didn't say anything about that one”. It is true. I didn't.

So this is the end of this class. I don't think many classes will end early, but it's okay for the first one to do so.

Are there any questions, comments, anything you want to share about how your meditation practice has been going so far? No, that's okay. So in that case,

Dedication

Remember that person we wanted to be able to help by coming to this class.

We learned stuff that we will use sooner or later to help them in that deep and ultimate way and that's an extraordinary goodness. So please be happy with yourself and think of this goodness like a beautiful glowing gemstone you can hold in your hands.

Recall your own precious holy guide. See how happy they are with you. Feel your gratitude to them, your devotion to them. Ask them to please, please stay close to continue to guide you, help you, inspire you.

And then offer them this gemstone of goodness.

See them accept it and bless it, and then carry it with them right back into our hearts.

See them there. Feel them there–their love, their compassion, their wisdom.

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

By the power of the goodness that we've just done

May all beings complete the collection of merit and wisdom

And thus gain the two ultimate bodies that merit and wisdom make.

So use those three long exhales to share this goodness with that one person,

to share it with everyone you love,

to share it with every existing being everywhere.

See them all filled with love and kindness, filled with wisdom. And may it be so.

Okay, thank you again for the opportunity. Helps me to review these courses. Okay, see you next week. Bye-bye.

Welcome back. We are Bok Jinpa Course 5, Class 2. It's July 1, 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]

Meditation: Single-pointed Focus on Breath

[7:38] So let's do a short sit together to practice our shift from ordinary mind, non-meditating mind, to single-pointed focus mind. And so start with whatever steps you use to settle your body.

Now we're going to focus on our breath, but don't go there yet. What I'd like you to do is, as you turn your meditating mind on and you're turning its focus to those sensations at the nostrils we call breath, watch how that mind goes from its outer mode here in class, how it draws in to come to focus on this single object breath at the nostrils. So when you're ready, do what you do to bring your mind to your breath and watch it happen.

Once you're there, watch what happens.

Notice the effort it takes to keep it there.

Notice that if you work too hard to keep it there, it actually pops off. And so notice the amount of relaxing that helps hold that mind on the object.

And notice how if we relax into it too much, we lose that clarity. We get sleepy and it'll pop off again.

Now being on that object with just enough effort to stay and just enough relaxation to stay can be quite enjoyable. So whether it actually is or isn't enjoyable, turn on enjoying wherever you're at with it right now.

Notice how if you increase the enjoying too much, restlessness, agitation arises.

And if we let the enjoyment slide away, along comes the loss of clarity and then the dullness.

The enjoyment is a quality of our mind, our experience. It's not coming from the object.

Choosing to be single pointedly focused and then being single pointedly focused is what's enjoyable about the experience.

Check the quality of the mind right now, on the object or not. Correct.

If it was on clarity, intensity, make your adjustment and we'll stay one more minute.

Nice. Now dedicate those efforts to growing the ability to focus with clarity and intensity at your discretion such that you can sustain a direct perception of emptiness on behalf of that other person that you want to be able to help.

And then let go of that object. Become aware of yourself and your body in your room. When you're ready, open your eyes. Take a stretch.

Review Verses 1-3

[19:42] All right, so we are studying Pa Dampa Sangye's Pristine Path of an Egg of Pure Silver within or of or in, I'm not sure. This amazing practitioner, Pa Dampa Sangye, who studied from many teachers, meaning the texts of some of those teachers, through his in the flesh teachers, of course. And then he says for his own benefit, he puts together this summary of what I learned from this one, what I learned from that one. And the summaries are really amazing synopsises of the teachings of the ones we at least know about, right? Nagarjuna's, Dharmakirti's, there are a few others that we're familiar with. And then in his couple of verses, it's like, oh, my gosh, that just cut to the quick of it, which then helps me recognize that whoever this other teacher is that he's doing a summary of, I have no idea who they are. It's like, OK, there must be some really juicy stuff in these verses, because I see from the verses of the teacher that I do know more about how rich his writing is. So I find it encouraging when I go through these verses again, to recognize that every time I have a chance to share them with somebody and I'm looking at them in preparation, it's like, oh, my gosh, I see it in another way, right? The meaning goes a little bit deeper. And I remember back, kind of remember back to when we were first learning this the first time, and I thought I was understanding them. And now I realize, phew, you know, just for the most part, it was over my head. So it's so fun to go back and look at them again and again.

So last class, we talked about the first three verses. I'm just going to read them to you again before we go on. And then this class, Lama Christie picks up at verse five, and she keeps saying, we'll get back to verse four, we'll get back to verse four, but it takes a little while to get there. Okay, so here's what Pa Dampa Sangye is saying.

[1]

Once you are certain that

In essence

All known things comprise two truths

The mind which grasps

To things as two 

Is lost within itself

And then you know

That no existing thing

Exists in truth–

I don't know why it always comes to me to say that again, No existing thing exists in truth. Because exactly what we think we mean by that has all these different levels, right?

This is 

The advice of

Nagarjuna Garbha.

..meaning our hero, Arya Nagarjuna.

[2]

When you can

Unify the taste 

Of myriad objects

The state of mind 

Which grasps to two 

Is devoured by itself

And then you'll know 

These many things 

Are but a single song–

This is

The advice of

Prajna Bhadra.

[3]

Use logic 

To establish

Existing things.

Then cancel 

The distinctions made 

By holding things as valid

And you will meet 

A mistaken state of mind 

That frees itself–

This is 

The advice of 

Dharmakirti.

[4]

No reason

To be shrouded by 

The darkness of our actions

When they can be

Transfigured by

The enemy power:

Suppressing

Any lapses in our

Thoughts or words or deeds–

This is

The advice of

Gunaprabha.

Gunaprabha is the Vinaya master, remember. We'll get back to it.

Verse 5–The advice of Ratnakara Shanta

[5]

Accustom yourself

To the state

Of all things

To manifest

The qualities

Of the Buddha

Rise from

The great projection

In a Body of Form–

This is

The advice of

Ratnakara Shanta.

Now it's interesting and intentional, I believe, that there are no punctuation marks in here. And when we work with, like technically all of these, but this one in particular I found, it changes the insight if you put a period.

Accustom yourself to the state of all things. [period] 

To manifest the qualities of a Buddha rise from the great projection in a Body of Form.

Or: 

Accustom yourself to the state of all things to manifest the qualities of a Buddha. [period]

Rise from the great projection in a Body of Form. 

It has different meaning, both useful, right? For my puny mind, probably both not exactly what he's trying to say, but interesting. So Lama Christie was working off the Tibetan, which even after all these years, all I see are squiggles. So I can't quite do it that way. But I can help us unpack the English words. So that when you work with these verses, you have some clue as to how to go. But I don't mean to say this, what I say, what I say, what Lama Christie said, is the way to interpret this verse. She's just showing us how to go about looking at words, thinking about their meanings, applying it to what we already understand about the principles of karma and emptiness and where things come from and where we're trying to go. And investigate, investigate, investigate for ourselves, because each one of us will get a unique meaning out of each one of these verses, and that is really so extraordinary. But there's a sequence to them that she's helping us to recognize.

So here are this one,

Accustom yourself

To the state

Of all things

To manifest

The qualities

Of the Buddha

The accustoming oneself is referring to Lojong, not a specific Lojong, but Lojong in the meaning training our mind, which does not mean training our IQ. It means training to get our intellect and our love compassion side to be in more sync. We can think of it as left brain, right brain being in more sync, but we think of it as mind and heart as being in sync better.

So get used to practice being familiar with the state of all things. And here it's referring to like all existing things, the state of all existing things. Get used to the state of all existing things so that if we see any given thing, because we understand the principles of all existing things and why they are what they are, it applies to any given thing. But we're thinking of it here in terms of this great big picture.

What is the state of all existing things? What is it that we're Lojong-ing, that we're getting used to knowing about all existing things? Because when we get familiar with that for the big category, we can be familiar with it in the specific instances of that big category. So the all existing things really is meaning all the things that we are perceiving at any given moment, all the things that we can ever perceive. And then it also means any given thing we are perceiving at the moment.

And what is it that when we familiarize ourself with that, it will help us go on to manifest the qualities of a Buddha. Like what is it that makes Buddha Buddha perceiving dependent origination and emptiness simultaneously in all three times, that omniscience. So what is the state of all things that we're wanting to get used to? On one level, it's like, wow, there is all existing things. And it can be changing and unchanging. And within the changing, it can be physical or mental or those things that are not quite either. Right? We understand all existing things. But is that what it is to understand all existing things? No, that's worldly all existing things. To understand the state of all existing things, we understand, oh, that's everything's appearances. But is that to understand the state of all things to just recognize that's what's appearing, so that's what it is? No, it's only half the picture, right?

To understand the state of all things is to become more accustomed to an awareness in which for anything I experience, I know it's not just an appearance. It's an appearance forced on me by the ripening results of my past behavior. Oh, is that what it means? No, right? You guys are all on it. It takes something else. So it's not just the appearance. And it's not the awareness that the appearance is forced on me by the ripening of my seeds. But it's also the fact that its appearance reveals the object's lack of self-existence.

Why? Why does an appearance necessarily have to lack its own nature? Because its appearance is unique to me.

No it's not. Everybody sees the blue, whatever those are in my background. They're not unique to me. But of course, when we stop and think about it, yes, they are. And they are unique to you. And it's quite miraculous that we think that we agree that there's some kind of beaded curtain thing there. But even when I say that, every one of us is hearing it in a way unique to each of us. And that reveals the fact then that that object cannot be saying, I am a blue beaded curtain. Because if it's saying, I am a blue beaded curtain, then we would all have to see it, experience it the way it reveals to it.

And to be honest with you, I hear myself say that. And I go, yeah, but it is a blue beaded curtain. Everybody sees it as a blue beaded curtain. Right? My old mind takes over, even as I'm explaining the reason why it reveals to us the fact that it is not a blue beaded curtain from it, because we all see it. Do you see how backwards that seems? No, we all see it. That's why it's a blue beaded curtain. No, honey. Right? You all see it. And that's why it's empty of being a blue beaded curtain from its own side. Because we all see it differently. Right?

Accustom ourselves to the state of all things–appearance. Appearance forced on me by ripening seeds and appearances that reveal their empty nature. Just the things, is that enough to manifest the qualities of a Buddha to know that every pen, every horse, every bicycle lacks its own nature? No, there's two other aspects that are missing, right?

The three spheres all need to be accustomed to their state. Which is me–the one perceiving the blue beaded curtain also is an appearance, also forced on me from my seeds. Also, therefore, empty of self-nature. Well, if I don't have my own nature, who the heck is the one seeing the blue beaded curtain? We're going to go looking for that one throughout our Bok Jinpa course.

So then there's also the seeing of the blue beaded curtain, which also has to have these aspects. Appearance, yes. Appearance forced by seeds, yes. Appearance forced by seeds and nothing other than that. The emptiness of it. So accomplish, accustom ourselves to the state of all things. Man, there's a lot inside those three lines.

And then through that, we manifest the qualities of a Buddha. What are the qualities of a Buddha? Knowledge, love, and power. Remember from Uttaratantra years ago? Knowledge, love, and power. How does understanding appearing natures forced by seed natures and nothing but lead to knowledge, love, and power? That's something to think about.

Then rise from the great projection in a body of form. So the term projection here, the Tibetan term is TENDREL, which usually they translate it as dependent origination, which means everything depends on something else. Which if you leave it just in those English words, it's like, you know, we know that. But then as we take it more deeply, we recognize, oh, technically, everything depends on the ripening results of imprints made by how I interacted with others in the past, which is another way of saying karma.

So technically that arise from the great projection is saying, you know, when you come out of that emptiness directly… No, I can't even say that. To manifest the qualities of a Buddha, meaning to become Buddha, you are experiencing all existing things and their emptiness simultaneously. Of all, all, all things in all times. So ordinarily we would think, oh, projections, right? That's what's appearing, what's appearing. But to rise from the great projection, you must be meaning something deeper by the great projection. And yet we say, okay, we will go into and come out of the direct perception of emptiness multiple times before we have the goodness to not actually come out the final time, but stay in the direct perception of emptiness and arise in the appearing nature of everything simultaneously. We arise as omniscient being. So now it's like, wait, wouldn't Buddha go into emptiness one more time and then come out of emptiness as a Buddha? And it's like, no, because he's staying in emptiness because he's perceiving it all the time. She's perceiving it all the time. You will be perceiving it all the time. So you're not going to come out of emptiness again that final time. You're going to be it. So now maybe this idea of the great projection is saying, look, we understand when we're experiencing emptiness directly. It's like water poured into water. There's no distinction between self and other. And you're there in the absence of self nature of all existing things, including yourself. And it seems like for that period of time, there must be no projections happening. Like finally, we've reached clear of appearing things. We've reached emptiness. But do you see how that couldn't be accurate? To experience emptiness directly has to be a ripening, of extraordinary merit seeds but it has to be a ripening. It has to be an appearing thing. It's an appearing thing of an absence. That's where it's like. But the great projection then, maybe, teacher Ratnakara Shanta was pointing out, that even that direct perception of emptiness, which seems like the first time we're not having any projections at all, is in fact, the ultimate projection of all time. The projection, me experiencing emptiness directly, without the words, without the conceptuality, the raw direct yogic experience. And that understanding that even the direct perception of emptiness is a projected experience is somehow crucial to this accustoming our self to the state of all things. It's helping us recognize that as we're learning about dependent origination and emptiness, we're flopping: Think about dependent origination, how appearances are. Then recognize, oh, all those things are empty. Think about what emptiness is empty of. And it feels like there are these two different things. Work on this one, work on that one, work on this one, work on that one. When in fact, to be accustomed to the state of all things is to see or think or know about any existing thing, you automatically know their lack of self existence, their emptiness. And that we can't even think of emptiness without having a something that is empty. That's getting us closer and closer to manifesting the qualities of a Buddha. That deeper subtlety of understanding of what we mean when we say, oh, dependent origination and emptiness. Getting to the point where it's like this [holding hands folded]. Two things, one they say, but that's not right either. Something that has a this side and that side. But this particular, this side and that side, one side's a presence and one side's an absence. That sure seems lopsided, but it's what it takes for anything to be anything.

So we're talking about this big picture thing. Accustom yourself to the state of all things. Put whatever punctuation mark you're going to put in there. To manifest the qualities of a Buddha. Rise from that great projection in the Body of Form. So the body of form for Buddha is called the rainbow body. We were talking about that this morning. I think the body of form is the appearing side of that mind that is now omniscient. And that appearing side, the body of form has the body of form that it perceives itself as. And it has the body of form that others perceive it as. And it has the body of form that it sees its outer world as. That didn't come out right. It also sees an outer world and that knows that outer world's state of all things. So the body of form has the paradise body and the emanation bodies.

And I used to think of those in one way. And now it's like, oh, it's so much more than what it seemed like I learned in ACI… Here's the Buddha in their paradise. They look like this. They have those marks and signs. And then they are sitting there in their garden and they look out and they see Sarahni there in Tucson having elbow pain. And, oh, I'm going to go show up as, I don't know, that little cream that I put on and I'll be cream for Sarahni's elbow. And I know Sarahni can't see me as Buddha, but that's what I do for Sarahni.

But it's not even like that, right? It's the love and compassion and wisdom that's ripening. That Buddha in that Buddha's paradise also ripens as whatever any of us are needing at the moment. And not only that, but anything any of us are experiencing at the moment, whether we know we need it or not, anything we are experiencing is our current ripening, which is exactly what we need at the moment, even though we don't like it most of the time. So, man, cool, that body of form. I am so eager for my emanation being. That just sounds like so much fun. Paradise being all right, you know, have your picnic, pick your flowers, fine. But I want to be paradise being. Tired of this limitation.

All right. Lama Christie gave us just a really brief little meditation related to this. But as I'm looking at it now, it's like, well, this is odd. I wonder why she chose this, but we're going to do it anyway.

Meditation 2: Your Body

[49:52] So set your body. When you have your body set, bring your attention to your breath. Watch the mind come in. Turn on the focus. Turn on the clarity. Turn on the intensity.

Now the object of this meditation session is your own body. So bring to mind what comes up for you when I say, Think of your own body.

Does a picture image come to mind? Is it more a sensory, tactile, sensory image? You decide. 

Now ask yourself, what is it about this image I have in my mind right now that tells me that's my body? If you have a mental picture as if you're looking at yourself, explore how much of that mental picture does it take for you to be sure the mental picture you're looking at is your body and not something else.

If you're using the tactile sensation, investigate, What information am I actually getting? And is it enough for it to be telling me, This is my body?

Our habitual belief is that our body declares itself to us as our body. Explore your actual experience to see if you can find the fact that your mind is determining your body, not the body determining itself. How can you show yourself that?

The mind is projecting those colors, shapes, my body, or those sensations, my left hand. Which means the ‘my body’ that I thought was there declaring itself is not there.

Can you find a ‘your body’ there independent of your experience of it?

That's impossible, isn't it?

The body that is there is our ripening projections moment by moment by moment. It's presence, it's appearance, changing moment by moment because it's absent of its own nature.

Switch back and forth between what's there and what is absent.

Can those toggles overlap? What's there has the absence.

Nice. Now dedicate those seeds to reaching this accustomed to the state of all things.

Then bring your mind back up to being aware in the body, in your room. When you're ready, open your eyes, take a stretch.

Let's take our break.

Verse 6–The Advice of Brahmin Shankara

[1:05:10] In verse number six, Pa Dampa Sangye goes from that big picture, Get used to the state of all things and now he's going to zero in on using a specific example of an existing thing. And he synopses advices from someone called the Brahmin Shankara.

[6]

Get a firm grip

On the sound

And what grasps it

Then slaughter

The mind

That grasps to itself

Expose

The deception

Of that which is truthless–

This is

The advice of

The Brahmin, Shankara. 

I don't know if this is Shankarashita. I don't know if he was Brahmin, where we know Shankarashita, but I don't know if that's who this is. So Lama Christie said that, that first stanza, get a firm grip on the sound and what grasps it. She says, it's very clear in the Tibetan that it was not saying get a firm grip on sound, the concept sound. But rather here he's pointing out, pick a sound, a specific experience of sound and identify the sound and what grasps it, which is the hearer of the sound, which we learn that really it takes three things to be happening. There has to be the sound, the object, and there has to be the door of sense, so that we would say the cells of the ear mechanism through which decibels are detected. Then there has to be the ear consciousness, the hearing. Those three things together are necessary in order for an experience of a sound to happen.

It's like, well, where's the mind in all of that? Is the mind something separate or is the mind that ear consciousness, in which case it's not the eye consciousness because we're focusing on the ear consciousness at that moment. Is there a main mind and then there are all these different consciousnesses within the main mind, or is there only the consciousness of the moment of experience and then the next moment of experience and then the next moment of experience? What would happen if there was no moment of experience? What mind would there be then? But can there ever be a no moment of experience? Like we had that discussion somewhere else. Is non-existence possible? A non-existent thing is possible, but can there ever be a moment when there's not something being ripened?

So anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself.

Get a firm grip on the sound and what grasps it, meaning get a firm grip on this mechanism of the experience, hearing something, not just hearing, not just sound, but a specific thing. So like snap your fingers, you hear the sound and old belief is snapping my fingers makes a sound, vibrations go to my eardrum, eardrum vibrates, those little bones do their thing, goes to the brain, the brain goes, oh, finger snap. And we go, ah, you know, that's old explanation. Now I understand finger snap information, ear consciousness gets presented that information and something about ear consciousness and main mind go, oh, finger snap happening. Technically me hearing finger snap, not just finger snap, because there's the three spheres happening. The hearing, the thing I'm hearing the hearing, the me aware of the hearing is what's ripening. So we're wanting to clarify the way hearing is actually happening versus the way we think the sound is happening, which is something out there that I hear that then I recognize. So we recognize the three spheres of an instant of something that we are hearing: the sound. 

Then it says, it then slaughter the mind that grasps to itself. So I just asked, is it the ear consciousness that determines that that's finger snap happening? Or is there a main mind that has the ear consciousness that has the experience that clarifies it? Like, is there a mind separate from all this happening that then says, oh, I'm hearing finger snap.

Can there be a mind independent of hearing fingers now that's hanging out, hearing something else that then along comes finger snap and the mind goes, oh, finger snap. Is that possible?

Do we think it is? I still do.

That's this slaughter the mind that grasps to itself. So even as we're thinking it through, hearing, what's really happening in hearing decibels, information, consciousness, determining, I'm thinking that all through. I do have a mind that's separate from it happening because it's happening and I'm thinking about it. My mind has to be separate, doesn't it? But that only means we're looking at the wrong object when we're saying my mind is separate from the hearing the fingers snap. Because when I'm saying, no, I have a mind that's separate from it because I can analyze it while I'm listening to it. The mind that's doing the analyzing, it has its own three spheres going on: The thing it's analyzing, the analyzing and the subject side that's involved. So when we go looking for this thing, the mind that we think is the thing that's hearing the sound and we work out the details that no sound isn't heard because the sound imposes it, it's because this threefold process happens. We still are thinking, no, no, but it's the mind that's experiencing that. And then we go and apply that same process of the object, the thing that's grasping the object and the grasping of it for the mind, and we go, Oh, my own mind just showed myself that that mind is also part of the projections happening. And we have therefore exposed the deception of that which is truthless.

What does truthless mean? That's a weird word. That which has no truth, that self-existent mind that is the one doing all of this.

Is there such a mind? No.

Does that mean I have no mind at all? No.

Does that mean the mind I do have is the one that is the dependently originating forced by karmic seeds and nothing other than that mind? Right.

The my own mind doing the projecting, that is truthless. There is no such thing. But I think there is. And that's the deception. So, how do we expose the deception? Go looking for it. Go looking for the hearing the sound, the way we think we hear sound. Only to find, well, that's not how I hear sound after all. But I'm using my mind to figure that out. So, my own mind must have its own nature. Then use the same process to look for that.That's the advice of the Brahmin Shankara. He must have known what he was talking about.

It has to do with the emptiness of the three spheres. Which when I explore the three spheres, I come up with four of them. But nobody seems to agree with me on that in the scriptures. So, I only mention it because if you're finding a bit of a conundrum here, I'm in good company.

I want to do verse seven. Lama Christie gave us another experiential session. But I want to do verse seven first and then we'll come back to it.

Verse 7–The advice of Jnanagarbha

[1:17:20] Verse seven says,

[7]

Kill the mind

That thinks things work

Through your powers of observation,

See the wisdom

Of that object

Free of all elaboration,

Then your perception

Of this cycle

Will be free of the extremes–

This is

The advice of

Jnanagarbha.

So, we've heard these words. The mind frees itself. The mind devours itself. The mind did something else. Lost is lost within itself. And here we have another one. It isn't like the mind itself doing it, but it's like intentionally to get rid of this mind that thinks that things work. How are we going to do that? This guy says, through your powers of observation.

And it's like, wait a minute. My mind believes that turning the key starts the car. Because that's my direct experience. My powers of observation say, my car will not start without turning the key. 

But is that where we leave our powers of observation for these purposes? Jnanagarbha would say, no, you're only partway there. Watch day by day by day. Does turning your key to start the car happen every single time?

Every three years or so, you turn the key on your car and it doesn't start.

Oh, because the battery dies in the desert every three years.

Yeah, but if the turning the key was the cause for starting the car, it must do it every single time no matter what.

So, anything that we think works in the way we think it works, if there is ever a time it doesn't work, even just once out of bazillion, it means the way we believe it works isn't how it works really. It's how it appears to work. Yes, you appear to need a key.

But then I hear myself, oh, it just appears to need a key, which means you don't really need a key, which means I could leave my keys in my purse and just stare at the car and should be able to start it up. And that never works. As opposed to the key only sometimes never works, sometimes doesn't work.

So, he really is saying, yes, ordinary human habit, we look at our powers of observation and we say things work. But when we go looking deeper, we use our own powers of observation to recognize things don't work in the way that we believe they do.

Are we saying keys don't start cars? No, we're not saying that. We're saying that's not the real reason that cars start. That's what we're using our powers of observation to come to kill the mind that believes there's something in turning the key that starts the car.

When we are able to recognize that, well, if the key starting the car works sometimes, but not other times, there must be some other factor involved. And when we find a common denominator to those other factors involved in any circumstance where we thought something worked in the way that I believed it did, and now I see that it doesn't work in that way, the common denominator is always me.

And then what's the common denominator between me and my observation? It's my experience. 

And what have I come to know about my experiences? They have to be results of causes.

How do I put the cause for an experience into my mind by way of what I see myself thinking, doing, saying to others. Like, thank goodness I know the punchline, because that's still not directly obvious to me. Oh, the key only starts the car because my seeds ripen it. The key only starts the car because it's my current experience result of past causes that were similar, so I help somebody else start their car with a key. And it's like, that's only partway there.

So anyway, I'm not going to go there. It would take too long.

We're revealing to ourselves through our own personal observation of things that are supposed to work in a certain way, and they don't always work in that way, to ask, well then, why is it that they do or don't work? What is it that I'm bringing to the party? And the next verse says, see the wisdom of that object free of all elaboration. Elaboration is this word that we'll use again and again in Bok Jinpa. It's referring to the seeds flowing out so quickly that it's making our experience of things and how those things are interacting and changing and moving. So it's like the story that we're putting on that's making our experience, me and my whatever's going on at the time, me in this class. It's my elaboration happening. We do use the word elaborate, meaning I'm telling a story and I embellish it. And that has a little bit of context here because as our experience is happening and we understand that experience is happening by way of these mental seeds ripening, the energetic of it is like this up-bubbling of something that gets more and more complicated as it goes out, more and more rich, more and more detailed, until the seeds for it wear out. And then by the time the seeds for it wear out, it's been followed by other seeds. So it's not really that this goes out and ends and there's a pause before the next one comes up, because there's never a pause. But there's this sense of this elaboration is this outflowing information that is the story of me and my experience moment by moment by moment. And we've been showing ourselves up to this point, anywhere there's an appearance, there also has to be the emptiness of that appearance so it can appear the way it does to me.

So, by killing the mind that thinks things work, not as my seeds ripening and nothing but, grows this wisdom that there isn't any such thing as an object that's not an elaboration, that's not a seed ripening image, story, sound, tactile, and that because there's nothing, not that, everything is possible. The perception of the cycle, meaning the whole cycle of experiences, will be free of the extremes. The one extreme is things have to exist the way they look to me. And if they don't exist like that, then they can't exist at all. And Geshe-la always says you'll only fall off ‘they can't exist at all’ if you have an inaccurate explanation of emptiness. But I feel my own mind when I'm going through that and reaching the conclusion of no, the thing isn't out there the way I think. There is an instant where it's like [flipping over] so it's not there at all. And then fortunately like I know that's coming and so it's like get back up here. It's the way it is because of my elaboration. Elaboration meaning it's my seeds ripening, me seeing what I'm seeing, experiencing what I'm seeing, the thing working in the way it is or isn't at the moment.

When we are free of all elaboration, that can be referring to the direct perception of that emptiness of those functioning things, especially me. Because that is a free of elaboration. Although previous verse said or one of them said that is also a projection. So you could do this whole debate. It's like no, your direct perception of emptiness is not free of elaboration. It is still an appearance. But there's no conceptualization. There's no mental words, even if they're pre-verbal, that the elaboration means this identifying, discriminating between things, feeling, then having mental afflictions about them. All of that is this elaboration. And when we're understanding that we are elaborating and we understand that everything is seeds ripening and nothing but, then we can hold this middle road of no, things are not the way I think they are, the way they appear to be to me because I don't think that anymore. And I know absolutely that things do not not exist at all because they exist exactly the way my seeds are making me see them exist, which is sometimes the key works to start the car and sometimes it doesn't. And when I know that, why am I going to be surprised or upset on the day that the key doesn't work? I would rather be amazed every time it does work. Woohoo! Miracle! Woohoo! Miracle! Like if I could go through life amazed by the seeds that are going off, I don't know, I think I'd be more fun to be around, would say Jnanagarbha. Let's see if that's all that she said.

Yeah, she's pointing out here that there's a more subtle piece in this two stanzas. The stanza about using our powers of observation to recognize how things must be seed ripening, they can't be working the way we think. We come to a new conclusion about how functioning things actually function by way of our powers of deduction. So we come to have SHERAB, which is knowledge about something that's more accurate to its true existence than our ignorant knowledge. But then in order to have wisdom, YESHE, we directly experience something that we get to the direct experience of it by way of having used our analysis, our deduction to show ourselves that something isn't what we thought. So that we can grow that direct perception that it isn't what we thought. And then that direct perception gives us a quality of knowing that they use the word YESHE instead of SHERAB. They're both words for wisdom, but the SHERAB is more knowledge, knowing, and YESHE is this wisdom of direct experience, particularly direct experience of the no self nature. Okay. All right.

Mediation 3: Experiencing Sound

So let's go back and do this other experiential session that has to do with the verse about experiencing a sound, not just sound, but a sound. And then after that, I have a little bit more about TING NGE DZIN GYI TSOK.

[1:33:00] So set your body again.

And turn on your focus, clarity, intensity using the object of breath to trigger it.

Now intentionally shift your object of focus from your breath at your nostrils to something that you are hearing. So notice first, if your mental gaze shifts, where it shifts to.

And then recognize any sound that comes up. Maybe there's a sound that's constant. Maybe there are sounds that are shifting, changing.

Be fascinated.

And first step is to intentionally recognize what that sound is. Ordinary belief, our computer fan, traffic…

And then separate that elaboration of the sound's identity from the experience of the sound.

Now there's a more subtle mental picture, a more subtle label. Maybe it doesn't even have a word.

Recognize at whatever level of experiencing sound you are at now is also ripening mental image. Can you get more subtle?

Can you find an actual sound that's presenting itself to you? A sound that is there before your mental image sound happens. Can you find such a thing?

Try this sequence again. The sound out there presenting itself to you.

Then recognize, no, that is an idea.

But the sounds, the decibels, they must be there. No, if I don't know decibels, they couldn't be there either. They have to be coming from me, even as they appear to come at me out there.

So that thing making the sound the way I thought, there is no such ‘that thing’.

And there is a ‘that thing’ making the sound I am experiencing by way of my own mind's images. 

Catch the toggle: the appearing sound and the absence of the one that is appearing to you.

Find the middle road between those two extremes.

I am hearing that sound, but it's not the sound that I think it is. And it is not no sound at all. Because I am hearing sound. I am hearing sound. Hearing sound happening.

Okay, let the sound go. Come back to your awareness in your body, in your room.

Dedicate to that becoming more and more clear, more and more obvious.

The elaborations and free of elaborations coming together, someday soon if they haven't already. 

Is everybody back?

The Work of Demons Interfering With Our Meditation

[1:45:29] So there's a little bit more for this class, which is from our Recipe for Deep Meditation. And last class was its introduction, where is his name, JANGCHUB SANGPO.

He said, I'm going to compose this book for you. And then his first chapter is a chapter on what we need to get rid of in order to just begin to gather all the ingredients that we need to reach deep meditation.

So it's kind of like we're getting ready to bake this fabulous cake. And the first thing we need is to make sure that the bowl that we're going to bake the cake in is cleaned out and available to put our ingredients in. So he says, there's stuff we need to get rid of. And you know, it's like, seems to me there's all kinds of things, my wrong view, my agitated mind, my dullness, etc. But he says what we need to get rid of is the work of demons. Whoa, the work of demons. And that once you've cleared out the work of demons, you've got the foundation for good meditation. 

And it's a little difficult, you know, in my upbringing, there were no such thing as demons. And so it took a bit of a leap of faith getting into this Tibetan tradition where man, demons are apparently all over the place to understand what they're talking about. And again, you know, thank you to our amazing Lamas, because they'll talk about demons and in the same breath, say, and they are all your seeds and your mind and your own past behavior. And they're real, and they're out there and they cause all kinds of trouble. And they can be really nasty, or they can become your friend, they can become your greatest protector.

So it's like, are they real or are they not real? If they're all my projections, they must not be real. Wrong. Because they are my projections, they are very real.

Well, who the heck are these things? Oh, yeah, they're my anger. They're my jealousy. They're my personified in a way that I can then work with them. We are actually going to learn a little bit of them in that way. But there are demons. There are beings, entities, streams of consciousness, for instance, there is one type of demon that is a mind that when it ended its previous life, did so with a mind really, really imbued with attachment and clinging and greediness and pride. And that mind then projected itself into an experience of being a being who just cannot get its wants and needs met. We recognize that as hungry ghost realm. And apparently, there are 36 different kinds of hungry ghosts you could become, you could project yourself as, and only one of them gets this designation as being a demon. And why, I don't know. But this idea of a demon has some connotation that that being has enough sensitivity with the human world that it makes some kind of contact. I don't think it sees itself contacting a human world, but it somehow is having an impact on our world. Our seeds are ripening that there are these beings that we can't see who actually are somehow attracted to us and they don't like whatever it is that we are doing. And their impulse is to interfere, to get in the way, to cause trouble, to keep you from doing that thing that you're about to do. And traditionally or classically, it's when we are doing virtuous things that these particular types of demons especially don't like the virtue. Now, why, I don't understand. But they say these in particular, the ones that are hungry ghost type demons, they'll come in that really, really late part of sleep night, really, really early morning when it's still dark outside and our intellect mind is really not functioning. And so we're very susceptible to other things. They'll come and make bad dreams or they'll make disturbing thoughts when you first wake up. They'll somehow be mischievous in that way. And they say, especially when we're doing something like a retreat, really working hard to deepen our awareness that they go, all right, let's make some trouble here. And it's helpful to know that that can happen because our tendency would be, I'm working so hard in my retreat and I just can't do it and things are going wrong and oh, woe is me. But it's like, no, it's just a demon. Is it your own seeds demon? Yes, but it is a demon. And so we can go, okay, I know how to deal with demons. I'll just deal with the demon and I can get right back into my swing of my retreat.

So there are different kinds of demons with different kinds of specialties apparently. And so then the more we know about these demons and their specialties, the more we're able to recognize them. And when we can recognize them, then we can actually grow the skill to either decide, okay, just a demon, I can ignore this, or we can grow, they say in deep meditation, we can grow the ability to call them forth, recognize them, and enlist them to help us, to turn that demon into a protector or into a friend, which helps them, right? More commonly, the demon interferes in a way that's scary and uncomfortable, and our natural reaction is shoo them away, get rid of them. And that sometimes works, mostly doesn't. And so our tradition teaches, well, what you do is you bribe them, especially when you're first starting a retreat, you make them a torma, right? And you bribe them and say, here, take this torma now and scram, because if you come back, I'm going to split your head open, like really kind. But then when they do come back, you don't split their head open. You teach them about emptiness and karma and you kill them with your love. And they either go away because they can't stand being loved, or they turn into your best friend and helper. 

So in Recipe for Meditation, to understand that because it's such a virtue, to decide I'm going to learn to meditate, the demons will come out in force. So the first thing to do is to rid ourselves of the work of the demons. Otherwise, we'll just keep struggling, struggling, struggling with our meditation.

So Lama Christie said to our group, look, between now and next class, please investigate your own experiences and beliefs about subtle forms, subtle entities. Do we believe there are such a thing? I'm not saying if you don't believe, you have to believe. Not. I'm saying, maybe think back, maybe there have been had experiences that you had, that we've explained in a certain way. And it's like, well, you know, maybe that was some kind of spirit entity, whether it was a bad one or a good one. And maybe I have had contact with these entities. I just didn't have it in my lexicon to interpret it in that way. So I called it, I don't know, some scientific phenomenon or something.

So just consider, could there be conscious entities that I didn't think I was subtle enough to be aware of, but maybe I am after all. And then, are they suffering beings or are they enlightened being emanations? Oh my gosh, now where do we go with that? Possibility.

Do they have to be dangerous? Might they be dangerous? What do I do? How will I work with them?

Just think about it. Don't need to come to any conclusion. And if you get scared, please reach out to me because that's not the point.

All right. So that's our class two.

[Usual Dedication]

Thank you for the opportunity. Okay, thank you. Thank you everyone for the opportunity. My pleasure. 

[Dinara: This word that you used, elaborations. I was trying to translate it in Russian and there are several different translations. Can you give more like so I can understand what's the better word to use in Russian?]

Elaboration means making more out of something than is there. Adding details, making a story out of not enough to have a story. Things appearing and getting more and more detailed. We're not happy. But the implication in this tradition is it's all flowing out of seeds, right? It's the appearing nature of stuff, okay?

Welcome back. We are Bok Jinpa Course 5, Class 3, July 15, 2026, where I am. Aren't we glad we've been working diligently on our meditations, given that program Geshe-la gave? I hope we've been working hard on them. Now, hopefully, we got a little boost, right? Maybe work a little harder. 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 1: Focusing on the Breath

So let's settle in and work on our focus. So set your body as you are familiar to do and then direct your focus of attention to your breath at your nostrils, zooming in your focus.

Get it clear. Is it a visual? Is it a tactile? Is it a temperature? What are you actually focusing on? Identify it to fine-tune that focus. And let go of those words and simply experience turning on the clarity, bright quality of mind, and then adding the intensity. I like the word fascination. It's a kind of oxymoron. You want this bright, fascinated mind that at the same time is like a relaxed observer of a fascinating movie.

Now, for the purposes of training, notice whether or not your mind is content with that focus, clarity, and fascination on that object, or does it take a bit of struggle, effort to hold it there?

The longer you are on that object, does it get easier to stay on it, or does it get harder? Just notice today, because tomorrow it will be different.

Is there something in the way of your total absorption in this simple sensation breath at the nostrils?

Does it seem to be a losing interest or a wanting something else, or a doubt? Can you identify this blocker? And whether you can find a name for it or not, recognize it's just another ripening, simply a mental projection, this feeling of wanting to leave the object, simply an impulse shifting.

We can call it a demon, come to force us off the object. Because there is no reason why we cannot totally immerse ourselves in complete concentration on the object of our choice. And then any urge to leave it would be some other impulse.

Is that urge coming from inside of you, or from outside of you? And does it matter? 

Let's stay two more minutes. Simply on the breath.

Nice. Now let go your object, your breath, but don't come out yet.

Stop and recall: What extent was I on my object, or off? Just give a kind note.

Could I identify that feeling, that force that was causing some struggle?

Recall now that all of that experience was cascading mental images from that vast ocean of mind and then bring yourself back up into your body, into your room. And recognize that when you open your eyes, you will again be experiencing these cascading mental images from the vast ocean of your mind. So when you're ready.

Lama Christie repeatedly shared with us that we're not likely to have the seeds to be able to reach deep states of meditation just by force of will. That it takes this steady exploration of these states of mind that we're not so familiar with, so that we can recognize when there's an urge to come off the object, or recognize when the urge is getting dull and uninterested, so that we can be keen to them arising at more and more subtle levels, so that we can adjust our concentration more swiftly as they arise. And so to do that, we actually need to spend a little time actually finding them, identifying, This is what it feels like as I'm ready to lose the object. This is what it feels like as I'm losing my intensity and sliding into subtle dullness. Subtle dullness is hard to even recognize. We're at dullness before we notice because maybe we were never even at the intensity. So it is okay when we're using the simple breath as our object to explore these aspects of being on or off the object. Yes, it seems like, well, that means I will never reach 10 breaths of concentration because I'm checking out these other things, so I'm not fully on the object. And you're right. Once we get familiar with that, it will become your automatic method of adjusting to stay on your object, the breath, and you don't need to be doing it intentionally anymore.

At what point you shift from intentional to unintentional, I don't know, you will know. Like when you first learn to ride a two-wheel bicycle, you know, and you're doing this with the handlebars, these great big adjustments to stay upright. And then as you get better and better, your adjustments to stay upright become almost imperceptible. It's like that. There'll be a time when you set your mind on your breath and it will be like riding the bike with this imperceptible adjustment going on. That was my own mental image for actually reaching level seven, was me and my bicycle are going down within that four-inch center line, never getting off the line and barely adjusting, just zooming down that line. But just… it's not a mental image in my mind. It's just my way of describing what I felt. Okay.

Stopping the Work of Demons

So this class is picking up from last class where we had just met Loppon Jangchub  Sangpo, the author of Recipe for Deep Meditation. And in his first chapter, it's about what we need to get rid of. And he says, what we need to get rid of is the work of the demons. And that just sounds so foreign to me in my culture that I was so grateful to Lama Christie's deeper explanation of what's meant by these demons. And it still took me a long time to get from, oh, they're a self-existent thing out there that I just can't see, to understanding that they are my own projections ripening, and that makes them as real as the taxi cab that runs over my legs. But they are not anything outside of my karmic ripenings. And yet they are something that impacts me more as an outer factor than as an inner factor. And that's where it becomes helpful to have this idea of something called demons that help us actually interact with our mental afflictions in a way that's so much more effective. So I hope that I can get that across to you.

So in this meditation, Lama Christi was saying about what find that urge, whatever it is, that makes us want to leave the object. It arises before we leave the object. It's there first, and then off we go. Like, what is that? We could say, oh, it was a sound from the outside. But it was like, no, the sound happened, but there was some impulse that made us go to that sound and to get all the way out to the sound for the sound to be bird in the tree. We could have felt that impulse and stopped it, and that outer sound would never manage to have become bird singing in a tree. It wouldn't have gotten anywhere beyond the unidentified sounds that weren't part of my experience. This heightened sense of awareness is what we're wanting to cultivate. But what is that that makes the mind alert to all of that? You know, science would say it's that part of our brain whose job it is to keep us safe. If we're going to turn our focus so inward that we've shut off our sensory input, there's still a part of us that's so sure that we are there in an environment that we now can't contact. That means there's something in that environment that could get us before we could run away. And it's deep, deep, subtle brain function that is also ripening karmic seeds, so it doesn't have to continue to interfere when we can become aware of it. Which you can see that's why it's pretty important to be meditating in a place that we feel is safe. Right? We can eventually meditate in a burial ground with wild animals running around when our concentration is deep enough and our karmic seeds are good enough that we won't get eaten. Until then, we've got this protector. 

And my own experience is like, I think it's that protector that's the one that keeps popping up and pushing me off the object. Just check to make sure you're safe. I don't, it doesn't sound like that, but it won't let me go deep. And then recognizing that, I can add to my preliminaries, perhaps, you know, I'm safe. This is a safe environment. We're only going to be here for an hour, right? Talking to my own self to see if I can get it to just go sit on a couch for a little while, take a break. Let me have this time and leave me alone.

So, however, we can identify this urge. That's what we're looking for in this discussion by Changchub Sangpo about stopping the work of demons. So, on our cushion, it's this thing that urges us to get off our object. But we have a similar kind of urge that is what will trigger like a sudden mental affliction. Those out of the blue kind of states of mind where somebody does something and it's not so bad, but we are way more angry about it than makes sense. Or a sudden jealousy comes up. You know, little mild mental afflictions, we can consider them the same. But when we're learning about this demon factor, it's helpful to start with these experiences that maybe we have where it's just like, whoa, you know, why did I act like that? I had one just recently, actually, and I'm embarrassed by it, but it got me. And I didn't apply what I knew it was to apply until after the fact. And then it's like, oh, what was I thinking? What was I letting happen? Right? It got a hold of me.

So, these things that flare up in our minds that we can't control, do we call them me? Like, when we have these wild things that it's like, whoa, I don't act like that. But do we still go, what happened to me? That was me? Or is there some kind of sense of something came over me? And it's okay to think of it either way.  Sometimes mental afflictions are, yeah, that was mine, full on. But sometimes they're like, who was that? What happened there? Like my recent one.

So, that's what we get to talk about in this first part of class. Like, when you are listening to your thoughts, it's funny, right? There's you, and there's somebody yakking inside there. And you, the listener, and them, the yakker, are they both you? 

You know, and there are those thoughts that we intentionally direct. I'm driving to the grocery store. I will get canned tomatoes and bananas. I'm thinking those things. And then there are those thoughts where you're driving along minding your own business and, you know, out comes this thought out of the blue. And, you know, maybe not even be a mental affliction. It's just like, where did that come from?

Is there a difference in those thoughts? Are the ones that I direct more me and the ones that I don't direct? Are they some impulse from the outside that vibrates my brain and makes mental words come? I, you know, I don't know how it really works. But there is this difference, right, between the mental words happening in our mind. 

We do kind of identify with some and don't identify so much with others, both in the things in our mind and in the things outside of us. So Lama Christie's example was, you know, this was how many years ago? 2006. And she was talking about the president and the war. And it's like, oh, my gosh, I've gotten nowhere in my karma. In fact, you know, here, I thought I was doing better. But it's like, when we think, right, that guy and this war, we don't identify that as part of us. Is it part of us? Isn't my seeds ripening and nothing but absolutely? But then when I think of, oh, you know, the memories I have and the thoughts that I'm having, even as I'm talking to you, it's like those I identify with. You know, there's some me that's doing this right now. And I identify it as me or an aspect of me or something I'm doing. And that's different than that outside stuff, even though they are both nothing but cascading mental images out of the ocean of this mind. They both have the same existential quality. Not a word that I usually use, creating a very different experience, but not any more or less real one from the other.

So why do sometimes we get these wild, crazy, emotional upsets? Even if something triggers it, why is it so big? Is that me or is that something other than me? And how is it helpful to even think about it that way?

So this tradition, this book, Recipe for Deep Meditation, says, look, there are demons. And what demons do, what makes a demon a demon, is that they disturb the mind of anybody who's engaged in pure things. And I was chewing on that, trying to understand what that would be. And it's like, there is a kind of mind stream ripening, other mind stream than mine, who for whatever reason, they are in this reality in which they crave strong feelings of distress. But they can't feel. And so when they see someone being peaceful, somehow they know that if they interfere with that person's peacefulness, that person will get distressed. And this entity is wanting to feel that distress. To them, that distress is pleasurable. So they stir up trouble, get people distressed, try to feel the distress, but can't. And so, you know, they get frustrated and misbehave some more. And you get this cycle of interference happening by this poor being, who's just trying to get some pleasure like the rest of us, but is going about it in all the wrong ways. So they're perpetuating their inability to feel the pleasure that they want, because they're disturbing the pleasure of others to try to get it. So karmically, they're just perpetuating their inability to feel the pleasure they're wanting to get.

So then, like, how do we deal with that? They are these outer beings, just like there are hell realm outer beings, hungry ghost outer beings. Are they my karma ripening? Yes. And they exist. Are you my karma ripening? Yes. And you exist. And you are separate. And you are human. I see you as human. Maybe you don't. So same with demons. They are a quality of mind.

Which category of suffering beings? Hungry ghost-ish. Remember, we learned there are like 36 categories of hungry ghost. I don't know the details, but they're in there somewhere, from what I understand. So these beings, their specialty is to wreak havoc on anybody's successful practice, anybody's holy practice, anybody's holy project. And Lama Christie says it shows up as 

• suddenly a group that's working on something special, you know, is suddenly fighting over something.

• Or they might even just influence the weather such that it's too hot, and people are on edge and cranky. So they can't quite get along.

• Or too freezing to meditate deeply, right? Like those kinds of things are somehow under their control. I don't know how. That would seem like they have a certain amount of goodness to be able to have power over our weather. But it's an interesting thought.

• They can create sickness.

• They can create weather.

• They can rain on your fire puja.

• Or they can blow the wind so strong you can't light the fire.

They cause disturbance because for them that's pleasurable. Or would be if they could feel anything.

But the worst thing they do, apparently, is they plant seeds in our mind to lead us astray. And Lama Christie echoed Geshe Michael, who loves to mention C.S. Lewis's Screwtape Letters, which is that book about, you know, this devil guy who's got a nephew, a devil in training. And the nephew's, you know, really eager to do devil deeds to people. And the uncle says, no, no, you get to be more subtle, right? Get this guy. So they have this target. Get this guy to go to church. He goes to church, you know, once or twice a week. He thinks he's so devout and so pure. But when he's in church, all he can think about is the beautiful legs of the girl in front of him. And all he can think about, right, is what's going on outside. He's like distracted while he's in church. So he thinks he's doing such a good job being at church. But all the while, it's just like he's not getting anywhere because the devil's impressing on him all of these distractions. And then little by little, the distractions take over and the guy's finding reasons not to go to church anymore. And then the poor guy, you know, apparently starts to deteriorate. And I don't know what happens in the end. I'm sure that good wins out. But it's a subtle recognition that these demon activities aren't always the big, obvious, oh my gosh, that's an ugly, scary, awful thing happening. It can just be as subtle as losing interest or choosing lower priorities or getting complacent.

And then our tendency is to go, oh, what's wrong with me? I'm getting complacent.

And here's a teaching that says, it's not you at all. Like you're under the influence of a demon. Take it up with the demon, right? And this will take care of it. And it's like, all right, what's the difference between taking it up with the demon and turning the screws on my own discipline? It feels different to our egos to say, oh, I can actually help this demon by getting them to stop interfering with me because them interfering with me, they're making bad karma for themselves. And if I refuse to participate in what they're trying to get me to do, then they don't make the bad karma of like fully influencing me. They still get some. And that maybe in the process of helping them not continue their bad karma so much, maybe I can even eventually get them to make this shift in their thinking. And maybe I can get them out of their demon-hood. Now, the thing with those demons.

So anyway, so the verbiage that we see in our literature is, do not make friends with your mental afflictions. Become the warrior, slay them, fight with them. Don't make friends with those demons. You've got to crush them, kill them. And it's like, you know, I am not a crusher, I don‘t want to kill anybody, not even my demons.

And they say, yeah, but if you come at a demon with love and compassion, they run away screaming because to them, that's the scariest, most awful, horrible thing. So it's like, wait a minute, that's what I want to do. I want to love them into helping me instead of hurting me. But if I try to love them into helping me, they run away. Well, that's what I want them to do. I want them to run away. So, okay, fine. Love them into running away. But they'll be back, right? Because I can't keep my love up like that. And when I slide back, back they'll come to disturb me so that they can get the pleasure that they want.

So then it's like, what if we meet that demon with wrath? Like, I'm onto you, demon. You can't have power over me. I'm after you. They're going to go, wow, cool, great. They're going to stay close. And then you're going to refuse to act according to how they want you to act. So the demon influence when everything's peaceful and the group's working together so beautifully and the demon gets involved and upsets everyone and everyone's tendency is to blame somebody else for what's going wrong. And that whole group of people, they go, oh, demon activity. No, we're going to do the opposite of what our demon impulse is making us want to do. I want to yell and blame at that person? I'm going to take responsibility. I'm going to deal with it. I'm going to fix it myself, said the little red hen. We do the opposite of what the demon impulse is making us react as. And that's what it is to slay the demon, right? We haven't taken a sword to the demon's head. We just refuse to let the impulse that they push influence our behavior. And that's what cuts the cycle.

How many times will we have to do it? Whatever it takes until those interferences stop happening.

Will they stop happening forever? Yes, someday.

How long does it take? Your guess is good as mine.

And every time we do it, right, we are increasing our goodness, moving ourselves along the path. We are refusing to participate in the demon's demon activity and when we're strong enough to do that forcefully with love, that influences that demon such that at some point, those very demons can be your own protectors. They can become your own students, right? We have the stories in the Diamond Way of these deities that have these ugly, awful faces because they were the deities that have now pledged their protection to be protectors or students, but they get to keep their old image for their own identity. I don't know why they would, but they do.

So, it is true that there are demon influences that are outside of us. And it's true that those demon influences outside of us are nothing but our seeds ripening. And that's what makes them real. So whether we are actually physically experiencing one like some people do, or seeing figures or ghosts like some people do, or our only way of recognizing that they are present is by way of these uncharacteristic reactions to things, we can still identify that mental afflicted situation as demon influence and thereby already know that we are not going to follow that natural reaction. We're going to do the opposite.

So in that way, we confront these demons. We stop demon activity, which is the first ingredient to the ingredients of deep meditation. So it must be happening on some level that we we attract these influences in our very effort to shift our mind to becoming a meditator. No, it's not a bad thing. It can't bring about a bad result. And it can attract these influences that don't like that you're becoming this calmer, peaceful, more concentrated being. All right.

Demons of the Home Life

So the reading will talk about four different kinds of demons and then they'll list five true to Tibetan literature. And it makes some comment about these demons are particularly associated with the home life. So making the distinction between an ordained life, a traditionally ordained life where you live at the monastery, isolated, don't own anything, participate in the community versus the life in which you own stuff, you make a living, you have family, you have friends, you have obligations, you have ownership of stuff. And that these particular four types of demons can be avoided by giving up the home life. But of course, it doesn't mean you don't have demons and they never come to those who are living the monastic life. They're just intentionally avoiding the factors that trigger them. So they don't interact with demons so much. You know, I don't know, I've never lived in a monastery. So I don't know. 

Lama Christie said, he does not mean to say that it's a bad thing to have relationships, to own a house, to have a job, to have a family. That we can use them for good. But what he's pointing out, she suggests, is that as a practitioner, we've developed some level of renunciation towards our pre-dharma relationship with our world, our outer world. But our renunciation has not been necessary to give it all up and go live in a cave or live in a monastery, that we have the seeds to be able to use our worldly circumstances as part of the path, which is karmically from past lives of having learned that high practice, actually. But then the task is to not forget and fall back into our worldly relationships and worldly habits, as we're using our circumstances of our home life as part of our practice.

And it's hard because we start out in an ordinary home life and we never actually go out of it to step back into it in a new way. We're learning to relate to our ordinary day of life in a different way, and it's difficult to sustain that. The beauty of going to programs where you go away and we immerse ourselves in teachings like just happened recently. And then you go back into your ordinary, not so ordinary anymore life, gives us this opportunity to feel the difference a little bit. But it can be hard. We can lose our motivation in our moment-by-moment day-to-day worldly life. It does not mean that we failed as practitioners. And it does not mean that our worldly life is a bad thing. It means our concentration is slipping, our mindfulness.

And so it's part of the practice, is to learn to remember that I'm in my home life intentionally to use all those aspects of my home life as a tool to bring about the end of suffering for everyone. And it doesn't look any different washing the dishes with bodhicitta in our mind than washing the dishes with, you know, who's in the news on our mind. But who's watching, is our own video cam and it makes a difference to that. What's on our mind as we're doing our worldly deeds. So it's not the worldly deeds so much, assuming we are on an ethical worldly life. It's what's going on in our mind as we do the deeds that makes the difference between life as a spiritual practice and worldly life. And the demons don't want us getting into this high level of everything in my worldly life is to bring about the freedom from suffering of everybody. I don't know why they don't like that. They're part of everybody. Their suffering will end if they just help me do it. But they don't see it that way. Yeah, do you see? So the stronger our practice, it might be for a while, the stronger our practice, the harder things get. Because the more of these interferences come and we might think, oh, I'm just not making any progress because it's just getting worse and worse and worse. Because we don't realize, no, no, it's getting better, better, better. And these challenges show that it is.

Is it just reverse psychology? Did they make this up to say, Come on, you're doing fine. Keep up with it. I don't know. I know I have had experience with people that I believe have interactions with these demons. And so I've seen it with my own eyes, but I haven't felt it myself. So I can't exactly say for sure. But there are such things because we have the seeds for them.

So let's take our break and we'll go into the four kinds of demons of which there are five.

[Rachana: A quick question, because I've been thinking about meeting a demon and then if we love them, then they run away. And so maybe we want to act in kind, like not kindly, but in a similar way. And I want to be careful. And so like the only example I have rolling around my head is when Geshe-la told somebody about what he'd done with selling the car. And then they're like, well, that was stupid. Then, you know, if that's a demon, then would an appropriate response to be telling, be very pressing, don't be like, yeah, you're right. It was so stupid. I should have spent hours and hours researching how to sell a car and, you know, like spent all that time, maybe waited a week or something until after, you know, the magic was gone and then did it properly. Like that would have been like, is that, but is that like weird? I can't tell if that's like meeting them in kind or if that's just weird. Like, I don't know how it is to meet them in kind.]

All right, so the in kind is that when we recognize they're a demon, we like say to ourselves, absolutely not, right? They can't have any influence over me. I'm on this. But then our next action, if their impulse was for us to get angry, then we absolutely refuse to get angry. And instead we stay, you know, do something, especially kind, helpful, unangry to somebody else. And the demon goes, ah, give up on her because she was supposed to get angry and didn't. But my, in order to do that, I had to go, You demon, I'm not going to do what you're pushing me to do. Going to be kind to this other person, not to the demon.

[Rachana: Okay. Thank you for clarifying.]

Thanks for asking.

Q&A

[Gabi: Holy Lama, may I also ask you a question?]

Yes.

[Gabii: Um, like almost an hour, we've been talking about like a demons, who can behave any particular style. And, most of the time, it sounds like it's a self-existence for them. And, when we're saying they can do and we can react or we could not react, it's, like devices in between they are there doing something and it depends how I will react on them. Which is absolutely impossible. And, in particular case, you know, in our situation, that a lot and I'm dealing right now, like a health issue and, okay, I do agree that it could be interferes with the demon power. And I do agree that I have to be more kind and patient with what is going on. And even, you know, explain to them, don't do this because you enjoying completely ugly things. It's not going to bring you to the happiness. But it's still coming out of my seeds. I mean, where's that point when I'm not talking to them, I'm still talking to myself with understanding of my past behavior and et cetera, you know, just, it's sometimes like a weird position.]

It's a very weird position. And that's what helps us understand that we're actually trying to address it. So I could ask the same question. At what point do we know when we're at the grocery store that there's nothing out there at the grocery store for me to buy that's not ripening of my seeds. Like the items at the grocery store are no more or less real than the demon activity.

Yes, there are outside of my physical body items at the grocery store. I can buy, if I have the seeds for that experience. Yes, there are outside demon influences that I can't see that can influence me if I have the seeds for that.

If we don't have the seeds for demons, I could be talking for hours about demons and you wouldn't hear it, or you wouldn't understand it, or it would be meaningless, or you would hear me talking about babies. You know, I don't know. It is our seeds and nothing but and they are as real as the taxicab.

Yes, Roxana.

[Roxana: Thank you, dear Lama. Okay, I do have the seeds for demons, for ghosts. I'm very sensible. And a couple of weeks ago, in the stroller, I had the baby with me. So I was pushing her at a certain distance here inside the house and I was just walking her with the stroller, okay? And all of a sudden, one of my earrings, which I always wear, usually I have gold earrings and do not take them off for weeks. So they have to be, I mean, the lock has to be very precise. So when I sleep with them, they wouldn't hurt me or when I will swim or whatever I do, I'll know they'll be safe. So that earring suddenly flew on the baby's legs. I mean, it didn't fell down. I mean, like somebody had… and it was locked. Okay, so what I did is, what is going on? I didn't panic. I did nothing. The surprise was that it was locked. Yeah. And it was whoom, I mean, projected, not, it could have fallen, you know, if it was opened. And I have felt this presence when I'm working in something Dharma in my back, Edward sends it. He's kind of afraid of being alone in certain rooms. I have talked to him. So, I mean…]

Let's go offline with what you can do with that kind of demon, right? Because it'll take a little time from class.

[Roxana: Okay, thank you dear Lama.]

Four Different Kinds of Demons

So these four demons.

1. Demons instigating trouble

There is a category of beings whose specialty is to instigate trouble. 

• They cause arguments between groups of practitioners.

• They inspire thoughts of malice or jealousy.

• They make the room too hot or too cold. So people get cranky, that kind of thing.

2. Demons that cause distractions

Then there are demons that cause distraction. They intentionally try to distract our mind during a teaching or during our meditation. They make us either overly sleepy or dull or create loud noises, right? Something that pulls our attention away.

3. Demons that make us possessive

There are demons that make us possessive, the texts say. And in the sense that when we are making an effort to pass our things along to do our activities of giving, we get out some things. I'm gonna give these away. And before you've actually done the giving, it's like, wait, wait. I'm gonna need that for something else, right? What if I don't have it when I need it? Those kinds of thoughts. And then, oh, I can't, you know, we get an excuse for why we can't give it away yet. That kind of possessiveness. I must say that's one of the reasons why in ordained life, part of the factor is that you just don't own anything. Because when you don't own anything, these feelings of possessiveness just don't come up. But it's an avoidance less than an actual clearing out, of course. So it's helpful to do time in a monastery. But it doesn't say for sure that we wouldn't be under the influence of these demons of possessiveness, let alone our own actual possessiveness, right? So this demon activity is when, no, no, I really wanna give this stuff away. But then it's like, oh, no, no. I need it for myself. Not just, no, I really know my neighbor's gonna need this next week. I'll keep it for her. That's different. So the demons of possessiveness can occur in response to physical things. And then the demon of possessiveness can occur in response to our relationships, the beings of our relationships. That when we are cultivating our relationships as part of our spiritual practice, those relationships are beings towards whom we are making our virtue. And so creating a new world by way of our interactions with those beings. And worldly relationships are more based on this person. I rely on this person for certain things. Maybe they're my source of safety. Maybe they're my source of comfort. Maybe they're my source of support, right? Some various aspects that when we are in a relationship, we have these expectations of them and they of us. And that those all have to do with our worldly concerns for safety, comfort, meaning. And then our emotions, our attachments, our possessiveness gets kicked in when anybody interferes with that person in my relationship or something about me interferes.

So they're not saying that relationships and possessions are bad things in and of themselves. Of course, they're not. It's the state of mind with which we keep them, use them, interact with them that either keeps us swirling in Samsara or we're using them to move ourselves and others beyond that samsaric world, right? Stopping perpetuating Samsara. We use the same relationships and things to stop perpetuating samsara as are used to perpetuate Samsara is our state of mind as we are interacting with those things that makes the difference.

So even as we're making progress, those demons don't like it and they'll influence us in such a way that circumstances can come up and our jealousy will pop up, or our anger that our partner is not acting in the way that we expect them to act. And then, right, we're gonna blame them and react badly to them. And then when we're recognizing, it's like, oh, demon activity here. The demon wants me to get mad and blame the partner, or wants me to interfere with that other person getting close to the one I wanna be close to. But I recognize it as demon activity and I've got pre-planned the opposite of jealous behavior. It's like, when I feel this jealousy attack, I'm gonna do whatever I can to bring two people together instead of act on the jealousy, which is, How am I gonna get in between the one that I am jealous about and the one I'm jealous of, right? Jealousy makes us get in between.

So this refusing to act the way the demon is instilling us to act is what it is to fight the demon. And when it comes to our possessiveness, it doesn't mean throw everything out on the street, right, and live under a bench. It means grow this mental awareness of how and why we're using the things and the others of our relationships. It sounds bad to say using them, but we're using them as powerful karmic objects, which means we're being helpful, kind and caring, because that's the kind of world we wanna make, right?

That was the third kind of demon.

4. Demons that grant backwards thoughts

They're called backwards thoughts in the Tibetan, where that means you have thoughts that cause us to doubt virtue, causes us to doubt goodnesses that we've done, causes us to doubt goodnesses that we're planning to do, causes us to doubt the truth of the books or the study. Basically, they somehow influence us to start to believe that, well, Samsara is not so bad after all. Like they're interfering with whatever level of renunciation we're at, because our renunciations momentum is growing, growing, growing, and it's moving us in this direction that for some reason that demon’s threatened by. And so they have some ability, some types of them to influence our own perceptions to bring us to this doubt, doubt in our path.

Lama Christie said, we will be getting to a place in our practice where we know that everything we do will be just meaningless unless we're doing it for a higher purpose. So it isn't so critical what we are doing, as long as it's ethical. It's the Why we're doing it, the state of mind that we're doing it with, as I talked about before. And it's like, well, how do I know when I'm doing that enough? Do I just set up my motivation early in the morning? And is it strong enough to carry me all day? Like everything I do is intended and dedicated to bringing all beings to total enlightenment. I say that like first thing my eyes open. And does it hold me without actually thinking it again later? Do I need to stop every two hours and check? Maybe that would help. Do I need to stop every 10 minutes? I don't know. Like how long does our influence last? Only we can say for ourself.

What does it mean to finally have a mind imbued with Bodhichitta? Right, to the point that when you're going into your direct perception of emptiness, you're only doing it in order to reach total Buddhahood for the sake of all sentient beings. Is that on your mind? Probably not saying the words. But has it so colored our being that our mind is influenced in that way as we go into that profound experience? And the way we know that it was is that when we come out of that experience, we have the hopping billion planets experience as Geshe-la described, seeing the faces, right? That's the explanation, his explanation of what it is to have the direct perception of that deceptive Bodhichitta. It's not deceptive at all. It's a direct experience. But that's what they mean by the Bodhichitta that we want our mind infused with. That's not what we mean. That's the result of what we mean. And then we'd have to say our mind is imbued with that in the same way that our mind's imbued with emptiness after our direct perception of emptiness. But we need to go into our direct perception of emptiness with the mind imbued with Bodhichitta. How do we do that? How do we know we're so imbued? And I don't know, right? It's the practice to grow it, grow it, grow it, grow it until somehow we're so colored by it that we don't even brush our teeth without being imbued with Bodhichitta. That's the practice that we're working on.

So those are the four demons.

5. Evil God of the Desire Realm

The fifth one is called the main demon and it's called the evil god of the desire realm. Sounds like a movie character. And this one shoots five arrows into us.

1. The arrow of pride, 

2. the arrow of indecisiveness, 

3. the arrow of stupidity or mindless actions, 

4. the arrow of unconsciousness, and 

5. the arrow of total mindlessness or stupor.

So they say, of those five arrows, pride is the cause of the other four. Karmically speaking, pride causes all of those. Pride means me is the most important thing. Doesn't necessarily mean you're up there, you know, beating your chest, I'm the greatest. But it's the attitude of my needs first and then I'll take care of everybody else. Okay, and it's a little bit like contradictory. It's like, no, there's the king-like Bodhichitta, right? I've got to reach Bodhichitta first in order to help everybody. But the way we reach Bodhichitta first in order to help everybody is by taking care of everybody before we, right…, ahead of ourselves. But it isn't even so much that, because sometimes, you know, you're out of potluck and everybody, nobody wants to be the first down the line. And the Bodhisattva hangs out to the back of the line, but then nobody steps up. So maybe the Bodhisattva just starts the line and is the first one down the line so that everybody else will go. In their mind, it's like, yeah, I've been happy to be the last one, but none of us would ever eat. Just so it's, right, it's not a black and white thing.

Pride, one of the key factors in pride as well is that when we are receiving teachings, pride blocks our ability to learn new stuff. That this state of mind, this quality of mind pride is the, I've heard it before, I know it, been there, done that, right? That kind of, right? It's not like I know better than you, teacher. It's not that at all, but it's this subtle state of mind. It's like, yeah, I get it. Which means we don't get it differently. We don't get it newly. We don't get it higher. If we're not coming to a teaching with, oh, you know, the humility and teach me, teach me state of mind. It can be subtle. Pride is a deep, a deep knot in our system.

So in the scripture, they have these discussions. It's like, where do these demons come from? You know, do they hang out around you, or they just show up, or do you walk into them and then they become aware of you. And it's like, does that mean that when I'm having these episodes of pride, it's not actually my pride at all? It's this demon somehow pouring pride into me, blocking me? And it's like, it's a, there's no yes or no answer to that. It could very well be my own pride popping up, or it could very well not be my own pride, it can be this demon influence. Does it make a difference whether it's my own pride or the demon making me feel prideful? If I'm alert to demon making me feel prideful and my strategy is to recognize it and do the opposite, and when that pride attack comes on and it's my own pride attack, why don't I just do the same thing? Recognize and do the opposite.

So either way, my pride, demon pride, that the result when we're working with it is to do the opposite, the intentional opposite of what our habitual reaction to that mental affliction has been. Our own unique reaction. Maybe when somebody's yelling at you, you cry. And that's your own unique reaction. And so we want to cultivate some different reaction than that just to get off the automatic pilot.

So apparently they, somebody along the way who has the special vision goes to Lord Manjushri and asks, you know, what's these demons? Where do they come from? Why is there demon activity? And he gives a characteristically enlightened being type of answer. He says, What's the point of demons for those who are not practicing the path, if that itself is a demon?

So, you know, he was talking about people not on a path at all. Are they just under the influence of demons? And it's like, no, because the demons are not the least bit interested in them because they're not doing sufficient goodness, that is what attracts the demon to wanting to disturb somebody. Ordinary humans are so ordinarily disturbed all the time and the demons don't get anything out of that. So they need to stir up some kind of disturbance in a place where there isn't disturbance. Why? I don't know.

So there aren't demon activities, if you're not on some kind of path where you're trying to change your own self, become more loving, peaceful, that virtue activity is what the demons want to disturb because that disturbance, I guess to them, is the greatest disturbance. So Lord Manjushri says, you know, demons don't bother anybody who's not on their path, who's not trying on their path. Because to just not be on your path, you might as well be a demon. You're just running amok with your own emotions, affecting other people and being affected by other people to get what you want. That's what demons do. That's what they're doing. Not calling humans demons, but he's pointing out, the demon activity comes from the goodness of our own practice.

And it's like, wait a minute, you can't get a bad result out of a good deed. Can you? What about Diamond Cutter Sutra? Anybody who studies this is gonna suffer. Isn't that getting a bad deed out of, a bad result out of a good deed? And we go, oh yeah, it's just purification. Like it's our way to give this platitude, right? I've heard people say that, you Buddhists, you know, it's all a magical thinking and you answer everything with ‚purify and make merit‘. You know, and then that means you can justify anything. But it's not that we justify doing anything to anybody. It's that we use that understanding to understand why we're experiencing things that are unpleasant when we're trying so hard to be kind. Like how come bad things happen to good people? Because we weren't always so kind. And so here's just another level. Yes, it's our own seeds ripening. And yes, those seeds ripening are ripening in the form of this demon activity that's interfering with our practice. So it's not actually our own failure. It's our own progress that's bringing the bump in the road because our progress brings the demon activity. Do you see the value?

Are we just making it up? No, but yes. Right? We're understanding it in this different way. If we're trying, trying, trying, trying and still all this awful stuff happens, right, Gabi? We're going, how can I practice any better? I don't know what else to do. Versus doggone, I was doing really well. So well, in fact, I attracted demons. And instead of getting discouraged and upset, I'm just going to carry on with my peaceful, kind, helpful doing.

What is the demon do? Maybe he goes, okay, I'll try again. Or maybe they go, what's up with this person? Or maybe they just give up and leave you alone.Depends on how we've responded when other people get upset or don't get upset, right? How we've reacted to others in the past. We're going to see how the demon reacts coming out of our seeds as well.

So we can be, Ah, demons, I need to slay them and get rid of them. Or we can be, Ah, demons, sign of my good practice. I'm going to be harsh and wrathful against this urge to be mean or to be critical with myself, or to be critical with somebody else. And I refuse to act like that. And that's seen by the demon as, egads, I want no part of her. Because she's been kind in the face of, she should have gotten all upset. And she's not giving me what I want. They go away. So it really, it's like convoluted to think through this idea of demons and how we use them to spur our practice forward and how helpful that is to keep us from getting discouraged by our efforts. Because the stronger our practice, the more likely we meet demon activity. And now we can recognize, ah, it's not my practice failure at all. In fact, it's my practice success. And it just is a little detour in the road while I deal with this interference.

By not acting the way their impulse is making me emotionally want to react. It's such a key factor. We don't go back to the demon. We go, demon wants me to get jealous? I am not getting jealous. I'm going to do this instead. Demon wants me to get angry? I am not going to act out of anger. I'm going to do this instead.

So demons are our projections ripening, stirred forth by our virtue. Does that mean they're not real? No, they are very real. Just like the taxi cab running us over is very real. And nothing but our seeds ripening. It's an important piece.

So now, going back to that idea of, you know, those thoughts, there's that war going on over there. That's not me. But this mental affliction about the war going on over there, that is me. And that reaction makes me want to… [making angry noise], towards somebody who's causing the war over there. And that's exactly what the demon wants me to do, is react with blame and force and get that guy out of there. Rather than think through the karma of it and come up with a wiser response to the situation. 

So by not owning the mental affliction, we give ourselves this space to be able to respond to it instead of react to it. When it's a part of me, it's so much harder to weed out, like as hard to get rid of a habit of getting angry or a habit of blaming somebody as to cut off your thumb just because it's gotten in the way a few times. But when that anger is identified, no, no, this is just a blocker entity because I'm doing so well, we can get a hold of that emotion, that pattern, that sequence and change our response. So it's a really useful tool that, you know, you don't want to be saying it out in public when you're at the grocery store. Hey, demon, get out of my way. But we can be using it in this internal recognition of these mental afflictions that come up. That's not me. There's this other influence happening, showing me how to behave differently. Okay.

So Lama Christie said, we learn how to slay our demons. But meaning we learn how to channel those strong mental afflictions, those strong feelings and reactions in order to not act from them in our ordinary way. To have this pre-planned other method of response for when that powerful feeling of anger comes up. And we try on different ones for size until we find the one that fits us. Which means, right, we need a couple of episodes that would make us angry in order to try on these different flavors of response instead of react. And that's what makes it the practice. Because we don't walk around looking for somebody to make us angry, angry so that we can do it. We just stay on alert to circumstances and the feelings so that we can trigger this new attempt at a new response. So we want to see ourselves as the warrior, the Bodhisattva warrior, who's going to slay these demons, not the demon themselves, but to slay our automatic reaction to them. So that instead we respond with wisdom and kindness. Again, not to the demon, but in the circumstance of the demon's influence.

My friend and I are getting along and the demon doesn't like it. And now the friend says something and suddenly I'm insulted. And I want to insult my friend back. But I go, oh, demon, I'm onto you. How dare you try to do that to me? And instead, I praise her. We've just burned off a whole slew of automatic what I do when I feel insulted. And at the same time, we've helped this demon not complete what they set out to do, which was to hurt somebody to get their own pleasure. So we've helped not just me, but them. So now it's like, whoa, this demon practice can be quite powerful. Not that you call them to you. Don't do that. But they aren't something we need to be afraid of once we understand what's going on. They're wanting sensation. And they think that if they get us all riled up, they'll get some. And maybe they do. I don't think they do. But that's all that's going on. And they misunderstand that they can't. They misunderstand their circumstance.

So I don't know personally, but I know of that there are ways that you can interact with those demons and you can guide them or show them or somehow help them recognize the position they're in. And help them get out of that realm and start over. There are also methods where they say you pin the demon, which I don't understand why you would want to do that. Padmasambhava was specialist. He went into Tibet at a time when there's all kinds of demon activity going on, because the Dharma was just starting to build. So there's a lot of virtue happening. And these demons go [grumpy] and Padmasambhava gets called in because his specialty is dealing with demons. And they say he just pins them to places. And somehow they become helpful once they're pinned. It doesn't sound so nice to me. But there's something that we apparently are supposed to know how to do as Diamond Masters, is pin a demon. But I'd rather convince them to take on a new life, right? 

Okay, so Lama Christie said, we start by recognizing that there are such conditions, that there are such beings, and that maybe sometimes when we have those, you know, out of the blue, wild emotional reactions to something, that maybe it is a demon activity. And then to be appalled that they dared to influence you. Like you take on this, like, how dare you demon? I refuse to go along with what you want me to do, and you turn and do the opposite. It's not suppressing that emotion. It's responding instead of reacting.

Oh man, I'm running out of time.

So at this point, Lama Christie said, let's go back to Pa Dampa Sangye. We skip past his verse number four, Master Gunaprabha's verse that says,

Verse 4 - The Advice of Gunaprabha

[4]

No reason

To be shrouded by

The darkness of our actions

When they can be

Transfigured by

The enemy power:

Suppressing

Any lapses in our

Thoughts or words or deeds—

This is

The advice

Gunaprabha.

Gunaprabha is the Vinaya master, author of Vinaya Sutra, right? Short book on ethical life. He says that this darkness of our actions, shrouded by the darkness of our actions, meaning, you know, we've been practicing so hard and now this mental affliction comes up and it's like, oh my gosh, I don't understand where it came from and what do I do with it? And I must be a really lousy practitioner after all. Instead, transfigure them with the enemy power. The enemy power means the antidote. 

What's the antidote? Here it's, do the opposite. Whatever that darkness that's happening, the anger, the jealousy, the possessiveness, the blame—do the opposite. The enemy power is refusing to do what the demon's influence is pushing us to do. Suppressing any lapses in our words or thoughts or deeds.

The lapse would be letting ourselves fall back into blaming them, blaming us. I'm so bad, right? I'm justified in my anger. And so therefore I should blame the other guy or lie to get out of it. Whatever our reaction is.

Here's this Vinaya master. He doesn't say, keep your vows. He says, use this full-on emotion to do the opposite. And suppressing lapses in our thoughts, words or deeds means when we have this process at our fingertips, our speech, our actions, our thoughts won't be phased in the slightest by the next situation in which a mental affliction is arising. We just turn and do the opposite.

And Lama Christi said, go back and look at the verses that we've covered so far. So we did the three before and we've done a couple after. And why do you think this one, which is about purification in the face of unpleasant things happening, why does it show up at the time that it did? Between those other verses? And she didn't say why. It comes up a little bit later. But it'll give you insight into the progression of his verses. They're not just randomly chosen. They're weaving us in this upward spiral of understanding. So verse 4.

So then Recipe for Deep Meditation, he says, look now, really we want to be dealing with the root of the demons. Like the deeper cause of the demon is our conceptions. It's the word TOKPA. Which T-O-K-P-A is also spelled, help me, Janet, if I get it wrong. There's an S there somewhere. T-O-K-S-P-A. T-O-K-P-A, one is conceptions and one is the state of non-conceptual, sorry, the state of realization. 

And what he's saying is that the real overcoming a demon is to be in the state of non-conception, un-conception. And it's like, well, duh, you know, if you're a non-conception experience, you're in a direct experience of something. And then you wouldn't be fooled by this demon. You wouldn't be fooled by the circumstance that's causing your mental affliction. You wouldn't be fooled by the mental affliction if you're non-conceptual about it. You wouldn't even be having a mental affliction. You're having some experience, but it's not conceptualized into something. So you can't really have an experience that's non-conceptual and be in our sensory informed world. Because as soon as we are picking up colors and shapes, we've got it conceptualized into tree, or a tree. So to be non-conceptual doesn't mean we're passed out and unconscious. It means we're experiencing directly.

But what is it that we actually experience directly without a conceptualization of it? You know, some scriptural say, blue. To just experience blue is a non-conceptual experience. But then to talk about it, I have to conceptualize it and say, think I'm seeing blue. While you're seeing blue, you can't say I'm seeing blue. That's conceptualizing.

So the non-conceptual alone isn't enough to understand how to use it or the impact of it. We also need to have our understanding of the no-self nature of the conceptualized things. So together, the state of mind that's non-conceptual that is holding to that thing we call emptiness is what destroys the root of demons.

So are they saying the direct perception of emptiness will destroy the root of demons? It's yeah, because the root of demons is our ignorance. Our belief in self-existent anything, everything, including me is the root of Samsara and part of Samsara is this demon activity. So yeah, you know, ignore demons until you see emptiness directly and then there'll be no such thing. No, out of emptiness directly, you could still be influenced by demons. Only you're not gonna be having the conundrum. Are they a self-existent demon? Are they…, what are they really? It'll just be, oh, demons ripening my past seeds, right? Our action towards in that situation will, hopefully will come easier to do the opposite. But it'll be the same practice, the same effort.

So the two together, the non-conceptual state of mind holding emptiness, even before it's the actual direct perception of emptiness is what helps us destroy our demons. So great, boss is yelling, the huge demon anger comes up. Just try to sit in a non-conceptual understanding of emptiness then. For me, it's not gonna work. I use that one on our meditation cushion to get more and more familiar. And then I need to use my conceptualized plan of action in the event of demon activity to do the opposite. And when we bring those two together, we're chopping away at our misperception from which demons come in the first place, right? Our own selfishness. 

All right, so we have only seven minutes. May I have like five more then plus our dedication at the end? And we'll do the second meditation. Yes, thumbs up, thumbs down. Anyway, if you have to go, go, it'll be on the recording. But do please come back and do it because it's the second meditation of the set.

Meditation 2: Reacting to the Work of a Demon

So let's settle in.

Feel the body settle and lock into place and bring your mind to your breath.

Feel your mind settle and then lock into place.

Now leave your breath as the object and think about your thoughts in the past two hours during class. Were there any demon planted thoughts in there?

Strong reactions, uncharacteristic reactions, distractions, sleepiness?

If not, think back further to some experience that maybe popped into mind when I was talking about demon influences and replay the incident whether during class or other and see if you have a sense of those feelings, those thoughts, those emotions. They're me, they're mine.

And notice what they seem to inspire you to want to say, or do, or even think and recognize how when we identify with those emotions, those feelings, they come in a powerful surge that drag us to that reaction. But what if we recognize them as this other factored influence, simply this entity trying to upset me on purpose?

Can we intentionally decide to reject that flow of feelings into reactions? There's me, that's not mine. I don't need to react in that way.

See that influence as some kind of power you want to overcome and get the feeling of being this strong warrior who has everything you need to be able to overcome it. 

The strength of your practice is what drew it to you in the first place. So the strength of your practice can easily overcome that tidal wave of emotion into reaction. Our weapon is to do the opposite without vengeance.

So now go through the logic. Are these negative thoughts and feelings in fact me, I'm just pretending it's a demon. Or is that negative thoughts and feelings really a demon?

We are diamond dealing ourselves. Those thoughts, those feelings, they have no quality of belonging to us or not belonging to us. That line is shifting and shiftable. 

What's the advantage of recognizing this?

How we respond is where our power to create the future lies. When the feeling, the emotion is not mine but influenced by this other suffering being, is it easier to act towards the situation of that feeling in a different way? And what happens to the thought and feeling and the behavior it made you want to do when you do the opposite instead?

And as you see yourself doing the opposite instead, see too that that demon says, oh, I give up. They lose interest in you. Or you can see them transformed into your helper or your student. They no longer have interest in the work of demons. 

Understanding the true nature is what transforms it.

Those demon activities are made by karma and they're unmade by merit.

So we can use this as a practice by identifying our main demon, our main mental affliction and identify its opposite and the behavior that its opposite would propel and make a plan to do the opposite regardless of the demon activity that comes in the future. And then be on guard for that demon activity to do the opposite. And in fact, do the opposite even before any demon activity arises. Eventually, no more demon. 

Dedication

So recall the being at the beginning of class that you want to be able to help. 

Recognize that we have heard about some powerful, crucial factors that we will use eventually to help them in that deep and ultimate way. And so be pleased with yourself. It's your goodness ripening. And think of this goodness like a beautiful glowing gemstone that you can hold in your hands.

Recall your own precious holy being. See how happy they are with you. Feel your gratitude to them. Your reliance upon them. Ask them to please, please stay close to continue to guide you, 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 feels so good we want to keep it forever and so we know to share it.

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

So use those three long exhales to share this goodness with that one person. To share it with everyone you love. To share it with every existing being everywhere. See them all filled with loving kindness. Filled with wisdom. And may it be so.

Okay. Thank you, my dears. Thank you for the extra minutes.

Okay, welcome back. We are Bok Jinpa Course 5, Class 4. I missed a little part of Class 3 in reviewing for Class 4, I realized. So, we'll do our opening prayers and then I will finish that part and then we'll do the first meditation for Class 4, 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]

[7:09] So, last class we were talking about demon activity and how that demon activity contributes to our afflicted feelings in any given situation and that our task is to then declare to fight the demon. But what fighting the demon actually means is refusing to identify with that negative emotion as our own and more importantly refusing to act from it in the way that we normally or ignorantly would. And so, instead of doing what the negative feeling would usually propel us to do in response, we choose to do the opposite. And by doing the opposite, we have refused to follow the demon what it wants. We've refused to give the demon what it wants. And in so doing, we've broken at least one episode of this cycle of, I get this feeling in this situation, I react like that to solve the problem. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn't. But regardless, I do it again the next time, thinking that it will work. And somehow, when we're able to disconnect ourselves from being the one who's the cause of the negative emotion and saying, no, this negativity, it's the demon activity, makes us better able to decide to do the opposite because suddenly it's just a little bit further away from being me, that negative emotion.

So, suppose we have a situation where we're feeling jealous and our habitual reaction to the feeling we call jealous is to criticize the person we're jealous of. And that in a situation, we decide, no, that's the demon activity making me feel this thing I call jealousy. And instead of letting the demon have its way with me, I'm going to praise that other person instead. Because we're fighting with the demon. We're not putting a knife in the demon. We're just refusing to follow the impulse that the negative feeling would have made us follow out of our own habit.

So, in the reading, there was that verse from the Sutra requested by that child of the gods called Highest Jewel.

The moment one recognizes the work of a demon 

is the moment this person becomes free of the deed.

The moment one stops this work of a demon 

is the moment this person is free of the blame.

And I just wanted to point out those verses from the reading because with it, we get this nuance of the benefit of actually trying out this idea of demon activity.

Is the demon activity a ripening of our karma? Yes.

Is the negative emotion a ripening of our karma? Yes.

Is it impossible that our negative emotion jealousy is propelled by demon activity that wants us to interfere with the goodness of those two getting time together? For some perverted reason, the demon thinks us getting upset by that situation will give them pleasure.

So, when we decide, no, I'm not going to go along with that, we recognize that this feeling that I have that I'm calling jealousy so automatically, that feeling, there's nothing in the feeling itself that has to be jealousy. It could be any other thing, actually, and it doesn't even have to be labeled as a negative emotion. That's all tied together in the ripening seeds. When we own it, it's me, it's my jealousy. It's much harder to come to the conclusion and so I'm going to praise that other person instead. But when we go, wow, there's this outside force, right? Not outside our karma, but outside my identity that's making this happen, I don't have to play along. We can do it.

What pops in my mind is, suppose where we have some kind of symptom, symptomology in our body and we don't yet know what it is, what it's from. It's a whole lot scarier to have all this symptomology and you don't know where it's going. And then you go to the doctor and the doctor goes, oh, you have a virus. It's going to go away in a week. And then, oh phew. You don't have to panic. You don't have to react badly. You don't have to do a billion things to fix yourself because it's just a virus. It's going to go away.

It's like to think of demons when we're in the midst of a emotional upheaval of some kind, gives us this space to say, okay, I refuse to go along with them. I'm going to do the opposite instead–which is really hard to do when it's our own negative emotion happening to us for some reason.

Those demon activities come up as our practices get better and better, they say, because demons don't need to get involved and interfere with people that are already not caring about their morality. Quite why that's true I don't understand yet, but as our practice is getting stronger and stronger, it's more likely that we'll have demon activity trying to interfere. And then it can be helpful to say, oh, I'm attracting demons–rather than saying, oh my gosh, my practice is lousy when it's actually quite good. So, also helps us in that way.

They love to cause these obstacles and they are trying to get pleasure out of making me hurt. And when we say, I'm onto you, Mr. Demon, Ms. Demon, I won't let you hurt yourself by hurting me by making me hurt another. I won't do it. We've got these aspects of our seeds that we can be addressing through this one so-called entity, the demon. I'm going to protect you demon by not letting you hurt me by making me hurt somebody else. And wow, it just cuts our cycles pretty quickly, which is why then we went to that verse in Padampa Sangye about Master Guna Prabha,

[4]

No reason

To be shrouded by

The darkness of our actions

When they can be

Transfigured by

The enemy power:

Suppressing

Any lapses in our

Thoughts or words or deeds—

Like I would never have tagged that verse to this Recipe and Deep Meditation discussion about demons without Lama Christie having pointing that out. But he's saying any situation where there's negativity arising and our habit is to react negatively as well, we don't need to be thinking, oh, you know, I was so bad before, these awful things are coming up. The harder I try, the worse I do. My practice is lousy. He says no, recognize that any ugliness that appears to us can be used, used to do the opposite of what our habitual reaction would be. And using the demon activity process just helps us do that. Is it the only way to do it? No, because we're going to see in this class that there's also an opposite, not an opposite of a demon, although there are, but an opposite way to use the same reasoning.

Okay, so that's what I wanted to share from last class. Let's go to the start of class four with its meditation.

Meditation 1: Motivation for our Practice

[17:53] So settle your body, please.

Once you have your body parked, bring your mind to focus on your breath at your nostrils. Draw that mind into its meditating mode.

Watch and feel as that mind settles down, releasing all those various images that made up your day.

Now let go of breath as the object and turn your mind to thinking of the reason you come to class. Why is it that we claim to want to still our minds and understand emptiness?

Is there someone waiting for you to achieve your goal?

Not just one, but pick one and whoever they are, call them to mind and reach out to them, reach out to them with your heart. Whatever that looks or feels like for you.

Through this contact with them through your heart, you communicate to them your promise that you're coming, it won't be long, and that you will be able to help them in that deep and ultimate way.

And so picture beams of light streaming from your heart, one of them to that one person, more of them to others that you want to help.

All those beings who we know are in pain and every beam of light is our promise to them, I will come. I will take your pain. I will help you. I will love you.

Feel that promise going out to those beings, letting it grow bigger and bigger that it feels we might burst.

Now once this love is clear and strong, recognize these beings for who and what they really are, projections cascading out of this mind stream, and so is my me, part of those cascading images–ripening results, and these relationships function.

Ripening results, and that's how and why we can stop their pain, save them from suffering.

We are ripening mental images of someone in pain, and so that's a pain that we can stop. It's a pain we can change. If it wasn't our mental images ripening, we could do nothing.

This is the appearing side, let's explore the other side of the coin.

There are no other living beings in pain other than those in these images.

Try to find a suffering being who is not from our own seeds.

All those beings our heart rays are shining upon, where is a single one that is not our own seeds ripening?

All those beings to whom our light rays are shining, there are none that are not our own mental images ripening.

So all who are still there, who are our mental images ripening, are objects of our love.

Our emptiness understanding will help our love grow bigger, and if that doesn't happen, perhaps we're not understanding emptiness accurately.

Now move back into simply focusing on the feeling and the imagery of your heart love shining rays out to all those different beings, strengthening your promise to be coming to them soon, to bring an end to all that suffering.

And then come up further to your awareness of this you in this body, in this room, in this class, and dedicate to future meditations in which the triad understanding mental images and so understanding emptiness leads to increasing love for those beings.

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

[36:22] Lama Christi said, when we have as part of our daily meditation, this method of pulling our mind from the outer frenetic world deep down into our own being and use that to trigger our reason for meditating, and that reason for meditating is the fact that through our love, because of dependent origination and emptiness, through our efforts, we can and will put an end to all suffering. And she was giving us, we've done this many times in different ways, ways to bring that in and have it be a visceral sense rather than an intellectual ‘I'm going to free all beings’ in words, bringing it down and having a visual or sensory experience of how it is that we will someday put an end to all suffering.

So this is another sweet example of that, where she also uses not just the feeling and the imagery of the light connection between us all, but actually also triggers, remind ourselves that that's all seeds ripening. And then when we do the nothing but, does anybody in that picture disappear? When we say, oh, show me any one of these who's not my mental seeds ripening, do they disappear? No. Which is why our love can go [heart open up], oh, they're all my mental images. So yes, I can bring them to happiness. That's what love is, right? I want you happy. And if they're not my seeds ripening, no amount of ‘I want you happy’ is ever going to help, because I can't do it for you. I can't make you happy. But I can make you happy, right? My seeds can make you a happy being, ultimately happy being. And that's what we're promising.

So, such a simple meditation, but she said, if we have that sequence down, she says, there'll never be a reason good enough to skip your meditation, because it feels so good to get in there and recognize what love really is and how it does make a difference, because it makes a difference in our own seed planting. And that's where all of the difference happens.

Okay, let's get to our verses. 

Verse 8 - The Advice of Shantideva

[40:22] So we're back to Padampa Sangye’s… I'm escaping me, we call it The Egg, but the full title has just slipped out of my mind. We are in his section, the first part, which there was an introductory part, and then we're into the first part. And this verse eight says,

[8]

It can be

Completed in

One single teaching.

Just train

Your mind in

The two kinds of the Wish

Then you will

Bring about

The two kinds of goals—

This is

The advice of

Shantideva.

We call him Master Shantideva. These verses by Padampa Sangye, they're so rich, they're so complete. And we see it more when we know the author that he's synopsing. And like, man, did he catch it with Master Shantideva.

It can be completed in one single teaching. We're going to come back to that later. But I immediately recall that in the story of Master Shantideva teaching Guide to the Bodhisattva's Way of Life. You know, it's a whole book, we use three months to study it. He gave that whole teaching in one day. And it's like, wow, then just train your mind in the two kinds of Wish. But what do we know about the two kinds of wish? The wish is Bodhichitta. What two kinds of wish is he talking about? What two kinds of wish do we know about?

We say, oh, MUN SEM and JUK SEM, right? The wish in the form of a prayer and the wish in the form of action. Our Bodhichitta in the form of a prayer is where we first hear about Bodhisattva activities, or we both first hear about maybe we could reach Buddhahood. And it's like, oh, man, that would be so wonderful. That would be so amazing. And we're inspired. And maybe we even are inspired enough to do a little ceremony that says, I'm going to vow to aspire enough to someday act like that, just to keep the aspiration, the feeling, the prayer. And then the second kind of the wish is when we actually activate that prayer and start changing our behavior according to how a Bodhisattva, one who wants to reach total enlightenment for the sake of all sentient beings, actually acts. And maybe we even solidify that prayer in the form of action by taking vows. And then by tracking our vows until we know them well enough, at least until they are fully guiding our behavior choices. Two kinds of the wish.

But we also know there's another two kinds of the Wish, right? What are those two kinds? Deceptive Bodhichitta and ultimate Bodhichitta. And then deceptive Bodhichitta, we say, well, that's those two, the wish in the form of a prayer and the wish in the form of action, because it's our Bodhichitta as we put it into play in our deceptive realm. What makes our deceptive realm deceptive? That we still perceive things as in them, from them, coming at us. We still believe that things are not just mental images forced by my karma because we still, I'm still, I hear those words, just mental images forced by my karma and suddenly things become not real. When actually to say, oh, things are just meaning nothing but mental image forced from my karma. If I really had the right reaction to that, that would be, oh, that's what makes them real. Oh, no wonder, right? But I don't have that automatic reaction yet. Intellectually, yes, but not reactively.

So deceptive Bodhichitta is our efforts to change our behavior driven by this high aspiration that I'm doing towards events and others that I still am perceiving as independent of my karma and so places where I plant my seeds for new karma. It's kind of like illogical what I'm thinking I'm doing, even as I'm doing it. But then we learn that there is this experience that we could have where our heart opens so much that we have that experience of seeing the face of every existing being and reassuring them and loving them, and basically doing what that meditation was that we just did. Although we did an ad seeing each one's face, we just sent our light rays from our heart and promised to come help them. And it's like, to have that direct experience must be extraordinary. And they call that deceptive Bodhichitta. And it's like, wait a minute, that's the first time your Bodhichitta is really happening, isn't it? How can that still be deceptive Bodhichitta? But then they would say, well, you could say it's the highest form of deceptive Bodhichitta, because technically, it could still be that our minds are still imbued with ignorance. I mean, it's like, it's an appearing reality. So it's still called deceptive reality. But it's like, how can that be deceptive? Because it's got to be born of that belief that everything is your seeds. So it really gets slippery, this idea of deceptive Bodhichitta. But we need to keep making the distinction between deceptive Bodhichitta and ultimate Bodhichitta. Because ultimate Bodhichitta is the term for perceiving emptiness directly. So in perceiving emptiness directly, there is no appearance happening, unless you want to debate that the experiencing emptiness directly is appearance, which it has to be. But it's not an appearance. It's not an appearance. And it is still mental images ripening, but it doesn't ripen into a subject-object interaction between experience. It's the lack of self-existence of all of those somehow.

So even when we say the heart-opening Bodhichitta experience must be the ultimate one, it's like, no, because ultimate Bodhichitta is the absence of self-existence of all existence, including me.

So now in this verse, it can be completed in one single setting. Just train your mind in the two kinds of Wish.

Which two is he talking about? Wish in the form of the prayer, wish in the form of action. Or train yourself in the kind that's going to open your heart completely and ultimate Bodhichitta. So we explore a little bit further.

Then you will bring about the two kinds of goals.

So there's some connection, there's some connection between deceptive Bodhichitta and ultimate Bodhichitta, clearly. And then there's some connection between deceptive Bodhichitta, ultimate Bodhichitta, and the two kinds of goals.

So what are our two kinds of goals? What were Buddha's…? Yeah, common and highest. So in those two kinds of goals, common and highest, would the common bring about the result of the end of my own suffering or the end of all beings suffering versus the highest?

So common goals, we might say, ah, the common goals actually aren't enough to bring about the end of suffering. Those are the goals we reach on the way. And the highest goal, if we're Mahayana, our highest goal is reaching Buddhahood.

And what is it that we know about Buddhas when they've reached Buddhahood? They have satisfied all goals–their own goals and the goals of others. They have done it. Remember that discussion? Well, if they've already ended my own suffering, how come I had such a rough day? And it's like, that's still hard to really verbalize how they can have already ended my suffering.

So how do we find this correlation between the two kinds of the two kinds of Bodhichitta and the result being achieving the two goals–reaching one's own freedom from suffering and having achieved the end of suffering of all beings. Which then those two achieved goals is Buddha's having achieved those two goals by way of being knowledge, love, and power, those three qualities that they have–which helps us recognize a Buddha's omniscience and their appearance. If experience is a combination of appearances and consciousness, that's still going to be true as a Buddha being, which means that we need to do something to create all of our appearances as pure appearances. And we need to do something to create all of our consciousness as pure. I don't mean raw consciousness, although I think that's what it is, but pure meaning only goodness, only perpetuating virtue. 

So there is a difference between the appearing side of a Buddha and their mind side of a Buddha. And we learn it in terms of Rupakaya, the form body of Buddha that we learned has two aspects, like depending on who's looking, maybe? Their paradise body. Geshe-la says the way they perceive themselves in their own paradise. And then their emanation bodies, the way their compassion, love automatically shows up to all those beings whose goals they've already satisfied. That's where it starts to get slippery for me.

Does their emanation appearing to me impose upon me the ability to know it's there, to experience it, to perceive it, to recognize it? No. Buddha can't change my karma. If I have the karma to see something appearing to me as a Buddha emanation, then I will. But if I don't have the karma, then I won't. And maybe I have the karma to consider maybe something's an emanation, which is maybe halfway to actually having the karma to see the goodness, the merit to experience something appearing to me and experience it as a Buddha's emanation. The emanation can't make me do that. I feel sorry for emanations because they've been all around me for eons, just waiting for me to recognize them. And I probably step on their feet and spit on them. I've probably been really rude to them. And I'm so sorry. Please help me. But because they are appearances of this exquisite loving compassion, they can't get their feelings hurt. They don't lose patience, right? Because it's so spontaneous, effortless.

Buddha's appearing nature, that's results of causes.

What have we learned are the causes for a Buddha's form body? Method side, right? So our practice method side.

What makes up our practice method side? Mahayana.

Which of the six perfections make up our method side? Anybody remember what Master Kamalashila said? It was surprising. He said the first five make up method side. And it's like, wait a minute, everybody else says the first four or three and a half, right? So we think it should be so clear. These make up my method side. They're going to become my Buddha appearance. These make up my wisdom side. They're going to make the seeds for my mind of Buddha. We can see the first three, I think, pretty clearly. Our practices of giving, sharing, ethical discipline, not getting angry. Those are pretty clearly things that are happening amongst a world of outer things, outer people.

Then you get joyous effort, which is having a good time doing all those things. But then our joyous effort needs to fall over into our meditation or we won't enjoy it enough to do what's necessary. And joyous effort is really a much more internal thing that we're cultivating. We don't have to rely on having somebody to give something to, to cultivate this joyous effort. So we can see how it could go to either direction: adds to the development of our rupakaya and adds to the development of our mind of a Buddha.

And then in meditation, Master Kamalashila is saying, no, meditation is actually part of your method side, because it's the tool we use to reach wisdom, but it's not wisdom. And it is something that we physically do. So kind of similar to joyous effort, you can see how it applies both ways. And then we've also said that in part of our section on meditation, it's not just that we're reaching Shamatha, it's that we're growing our mindfulness off our cushion as well, which is what's necessary to be able to have the mindfulness to find ourselves in a situation where we have an ethical choice to make in order to live according to our vows or not. So even our meditation skill is being used in our method side because our mindfulness is applied to our giving, our moral discipline, our not getting angry.

So all of a sudden, these things that seem so cut and dry are starting to wobble in terms of what plants the seeds to become our Buddha-me and Buddha-paradise emanating. It takes all of them, of course.

So where does the two kinds of Bodhichittas come in having to do with the development of our Buddha bodies, our appearances, and our Buddha mind? Does our wish, does our deceptive wish grow our form body or our mind body? It's like, well, that's a little slippery too. The wish is a thought. The action that the wish in the form of action propels plants the seeds for what's going to be my form body. But the mind behind it, the motivation behind it must be contributing to the mind behind or within the form bodies of my Buddha. We can't really say this goes to that and that goes to this because it takes both for all of them. Does it?

I'm at break time. Let's take our break. We're not done yet with this verse.

[1:07:36] Okay. So generally speaking, we can say that [?] leads to our form body of our Buddha and that ultimate Bodhichitta leads to our mind body, Dharmakaya, of our Buddha, our omniscience and the emptiness of the other three… Anyway.

So Lama Christie is pointing out that both kinds of wish are what we're training in, in order to bring about those two kinds of goals. And then she went back to the first part, it can be completed in one single teaching. And she said, yes, we recognize Master Shantideva gave the whole picture in one teaching, but recognize that Master Shantideva also emphasized that the highest practice that we can do in our Bodhichitta training, our deceptive Bodhichitta training that leads to the ultimate Bodhichitta is the DAKSHEN NYAM JE, equalizing and exchanging self and others. So Lama Christie offered, right, we have no commentary on Pa Dampa Sangye, so we don't know what he had in mind. But she offered to consider how it is that cultivating our intellectual understanding of the practice of DAKSHEN NYAM JE, equalizing and exchanging self and others, and then the efforts we make to put it into practice, how that practice in one practice encompasses both the development of our deceptive Bodhichitta and the use of our growing ultimate Bodhichitta. It requires a high level of understanding of the emptiness of our self in order to effectively progress in an exchanging self and others practice.

And so Lama Christie was sharing how perhaps this verse is pointing out how one single practice can be the complete practice, like all we need in order to grow our two kinds of the two kinds of Bodhichitta, to plant the seeds that we need that when they ripen, ripen as our reaching the two kinds of goals. That practice, equalizing and exchanging self and others, as we explore it deeper and deeper, it actually grows into expanding self to include others, doesn't it? And for it to do that, our understanding again of the emptiness of our me, and the emptiness of other, and the emptiness of the interaction between those three spheres, all of them can be nothing but cascading mental images from this one. I don't even want to say out of my mind because that separates me again. But the experiencings happening from this perspective [the subject side], like words just fail, are always this one's [the subject’s] seeds ripening the experience of this one, others and our interaction between and it's constant, this constant shapeshift.

And as we learn to expand our sense of self from only the me to somehow all three of the spheres, not that me becomes all three of the spheres, the subject side stays the subject side, but we're identifying with all of it, we're identifying with the happening of it and then the response to the happening of it.

So Master Shantideva had pointed out, look, we automatically reject this idea of exchanging self and others because I'm me, you're you. And he says, well, actually, if you look, we're already equalizing and exchanging self and others. We're already expanding our sense of self to include others, right? If you have a child, you've done it with your child. If you have a pet, you do it with your pet. If you have an object that you own that is important to us, we do it with our object. That's my computer, get your hands off my computer. And we do it with our future self, even though that future self doesn't exist anymore. And we actually do it with our past self, even though our past self doesn't exist anymore either.

So he says, don't give me that ‘I can't do it’. You already do it. You just don't want to do it. You remember that chapter in, what chapter was it? The meditation chapter, is that wild? His meditation chapter was not about the nine stages of meditation. It was about learning to exchange ourself and others amongst other stuff. Pretty exquisite.

So Geshe-la had taught this in the Death Awareness practice, if you recall. And he had those images about the other person on the other side of the table, and it was pretty confusing. And then we got to the last one. It was the ice cream parlor. Anybody remember that? And you've got the one ice cream cake and two people and one fork, and you intentionally loop your red string around both of you. And then because of that, you step inside the circle and they go, why did you do that? And you say, oh, it's just arbitrary. You know, now we are, we are we. And then you both dip into the cake with the same fork and you both eat.

And then later on, he teaches, functionally, your mouth is my mouth. If I want a donut, I put a donut in your mouth. And my old mind goes, well, I don't get to taste the donut. But it's not really about tasting the donut. It's about the happiness that the donut brings. And it's like, why does my happiness only depend on this mouth eating the donut when the happiness I see you get from eating the donut is also my seeds? Wouldn't that be just as satisfying to give you the donut? If giving you the donut makes me happy, happiness was the goal. And I made two of it instead of just one from my own. So we would like donuts, just give them away. And then what happens, you know, eventually they're flooding in. It's not that donuts will be flooding in necessarily. It's that pleasurable experiences will be flooding in because you've been flooding them out. But still that's from a perspective of I plant my seeds in you, and then I know there's a delay and then it's going to come back to me. But technically with the exchanging self and others, when we're doing it well, effectively, and we see ourselves giving the donut to the other, the way the karma is being imprinted now, it's not karma anymore, because karma is the imprints made when you see yourself thinking, doing something towards another.

Well, what if you're thinking, saying, doing something towards you, another part of you? Do we make karma when we take care of our own foot? Technically, we don't. Do we make mental seeds? Yes, but it's not called karma. And it's instant because we take care of our foot and our foot is taken care of. We don't have to put the band-aid on the foot, but the band-aid isn't actually there for three days until the putting the band-aid karma ripens for the band-aid to be there. It's like instant.

So, what happens if the other that you are with is perceived by your mind as part of you? Now, your recorder is recording this outflow and receiving happening simultaneously. And then, that's what's imprinted. It's the giving-receiving simultaneous. What do you think that’s seeds for? Omniscience, perceiving everything spontaneously, directly. So, it's like, oh my gosh.

It starts with equalizing. Everybody has equal right to happiness.

Then, exchanging. I know what makes me happy. I'll try that for you. Like, your happiness becomes how I get happy.

And then, we make this shift to growing to include them. And that shifts us from making karma to making merit, and we're not even Buddhas yet. Maybe we can't actually see ourselves sharing with someone as another part of me until we've seen emptiness directly. Maybe. I don't know. But the practice is such that we're chipping away at our ignorance every time we are able to have this sense of ‘I am doing for another part of me’. But as long as we're still thinking this me, when I say me, we don't have it right, and it's not making karma. We need a different word for our subject side when we're doing exchanging self and others in order to have this shift in imprints that we're making.

But this explanation helps us understand this difference between karma and merit. Like, why merit is something that doesn't wear out. Why it perpetuates. So, when we're doing this sharing and receiving simultaneously, it's perpetuated because this one receiving is sharing with this one that perception of the receiving. And it's just going like this. But the way Lama Christie described it is, it's just this constant outflow. Like, anything we do for another from this perspective of DAKSHEN NYAM JE is like a ripple out into the universe. It isn't planting a seed that has to come back. It just keeps going out. Because it's this doing and receiving happening together just keep going somehow.

So, I'm still cooking that. Because it seems to me it just bounces back and forth. But if my exchanging self and other is not limited to this one but not that one, then anything I do for this one also includes that one. Because if they're all included in me, how do I say my big toe is more special than my little toe? Right? I work on my big toe, it affects the little toe. So, if we're exchanging ourself with everybody, not just a few, I think that's how it makes this imprint be expansive instead of bouncing back and forth the way karma does.

Meditation 2: Exploring the Boundaries of Myself & Others

All right, let's do our second meditation please.

[1:23:02] Settle your body and then bring your mind to your breath.

Now picture sitting there with you is that person from the beginning of class that you know is in some kind of pain, some kind of difficulty. See them there. Identify what kind of distress you are aware of them having.

Now tune into our usual relationship with their pain, which is their own experience, their own habits, their own circumstances.

Most of us have this natural instinct to separate ourselves. That's their pain. I want to help, but I don't want to feel it.

We draw this line between the end of me and my own pain and where they are and their pain. We make a distinction between us.

And we do so because we have such a firm grip on our identity as me.

So, let's explore our me.

Do you have the sense that your me ends at the edge of your body, the outer outline of our skin? It seems like it. Which means that we identify our me somehow in relation to these bodies.

Master Shantideva points out that not a single substance of this body has ever come from your you. Its original little body came from the egg and sperm of two other people. That flesh and blood and bone has been sustained by food and water and sunshine and sleep in a safe place. Those are all not me things.

This body cannot define me. My body, okay, but not me.

So, I must be my mind. But what moment of mind is it?

Our experience is that we are collecting moments of consciousness that have already passed and lumping them all together in this present moment and calling it me. And within that lump, there is also future me. But it's all fabricated, all conceptualizations happening.

Can you find a sense of experiencing your me as these mental images that has no other existence than that?

When we think of mental images, we tend to think there's a me those mental images are coming out of so that me experiences what I experience.

Try to experience the me with each mental image cascading.

Will the real me please show itself, the me that's not part of those mental images? There's none.

And there is the constantly changing me part of every image flowing.

Now add back to those images that person sitting before you and their pain.

Our me and them, and our me experiencing them in this constant flow.

If there is a pain that I can perceive, it is my own pain, my own seeds causing pain, whether I feel it directly or not. And so I want to try to stop it.

I want to take it on and destroy it. And maybe that thought immediately makes our old me arise, clamping down that heart. Or maybe that thought opens our heart further and shows us that we can in fact bring an end to all pain.

Go back and establish it again: seeds ripening forth me and my experience that other person and their pain, me seeing it. Feel your heart's response.

The more we practice opening our heart, because of our understanding of the emptiness of things, the more we will glimpse the specifics of where those troubles come from. The better able we are to help another know how to respond to what we see as their own pain, the more our heart opens, the more effective our efforts to help become.

So see that because of this contemplation, your heart does catch on and zillions of rays of light fly forth from it, light that is love and wisdom. And one beam goes into that one person, and other beams go into all those other beings, all of them perceived as other parts of ourselves.

And so we can let those beams of light continue to shine as we draw our awareness back into what's ripening as this body in this room, in this class, and dedicate to the creation of a new reality for everyone.

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

[1:41:00] Master Shantideva, I'm supposed to do four verses in this class. I'm not going to be able to do it. Hmm.

Okay, next verse. Coco, can you see it well enough to read for us verse nine?

Verse 9 - The Advice of Aryadeva

[9]

Once you can grasp

The objects

Appearing to your mind

Grow agile in

The method side

Of interdependence

And you will come

To recognize

The natural state of thusness—

This is

The advice of

Aryadeva.

So who's Aryadeva? We know, right? Heart disciple of our friend Arya Nagarjuna. My hero. So Aryadeva is tasked with carrying on the lineage that they say is like where the Mahayana turned on in Buddhism. And it's not that Buddha didn't teach it, of course, but Arya Nagarjuna's explanations of the marriage between emptiness and dependent origination came at a time when beings were ready to hear that in deeper ways, and I guess to recognize then that their own capacity could be to reach total Buddhahood. Like before that, the Lower School's goals are to reach their own Nirvana. Like that's the best we can do. Not that everybody was limited that way, but the way the Buddhist tradition was carried through, it seemed like Nirvana was everybody's goal. And then the Mahayana hits the scene with this deeper understanding of the marriage of dependent origination and emptiness. So here's Aryadeva, Pa Dampa Sangye's synopsis of everything he learned from Master Aryadeva.

Wait, they didn't live in the same time. But we don't live in the same time as Arya Nagarjuna, and we've learned all kinds of stuff from him. We're going to learn more as we go on with our Bok Jinpa course. So like his synopsis of Master Shantideva, this synopsis of Aryadeva, the more we know of Nagarjuna's and Aryadeva's teachings, the more we get out of these verses.

So Lama Christie helped us start to unravel. Once we can grasp the objects appearing to our mind, this is reminding us to explore how we think things appear to our minds, how we're learning that they don't appear in that way, they appear in a different way. And that even as we understand that, we still hold them, believe that things exist in a certain way. So for instance, when we perceive this object [holding up a cup], what appears to us is the sensory information, just color, shape. How we hold it means what our mind does with the color and shape. Oh, cup, stained cup, bird cup. And then what we believe is that it's a cup in it, from it. These three ways that objects appear to our mind, in order to investigate whether objects that appear to our mind in that way really appear in that way, we have to recognize that that's how we experience them. Thank you for the Buddhist teachings. I don't know who else would teach me that, that there's color and shape. What I hold it as a cup and what I believe it to be in it, from it. Do you see these three parts?

We're not trying to stop doing the three parts. We're wanting to recognize that that whole process of misperceiving the cup in my perceiving the cup is showing me that in fact, the cup can't exist in that way.

So once we grasp the objects appearing to our mind in the old way, then we can go exploring. Do things really exist like that? We can grow agile in the method side of interdependence, meaning we can piece by piece remove or show ourselves that there can't be the cup that I believe is in it, from it. If the cup that I'm holding is dependent upon my mind taking raw information and coming up with cup, how can it be cup in it, from it if it depends on my mind to do that? Like it's so obvious that we miss it if we don't sort through it.

The belief depends on these two things happening. And without the belief cup in it, from it, it isn't, it isn't…, right? It isn't useful. But technically, the cup that's in it, from it is not the useful cup because there's no such thing. That in fact, the cup that ends up being here from colors and shapes in my mind making cup is dependent on something from my mind, not dependent on the information.

So first we recognize how we're perceiving something ordinarily, which means mistakenly, but we don't know it's mistaken yet. We're going to show ourselves that our ordinary way that we grasp to objects is a mistaken way of grasping to objects. As we find our mistake in our perceptions, we have to ask then, where does the perception come from then? And it has to be something that's in our own minds already, because it's our own mind that takes the information and comes up with cup, self-existent cup, or cup from my own mind cup. Which is what we're trying to experience happening, this cascading seeds ripening into cup–CHU CHOK.

So as we work on finding how we do it mistakenly, exploring whether that can really come up with the self-existent cup we believe is there, recognize no, that's not where the cup comes from. We get more used to coming to the conclusion, I am perceiving a cup. It is a valid experience. It has to be coming out of my mind in some way. And so those seeds in my mind had to have been put in there in some way. The method side of interdependence is growing our understanding of cause and effect, to go beyond worldly cause and effect, the seed making the tomato, to recognize that the fact that a seed makes a tomato in my world is a result of some kind of kindness I did in the past.

How does seeds making tomatoes have anything to do with kindness? Well, it's a consistency thing that is the goodness that reveals that tomatoes from tomato seed has to be a result of kindness, not just kind of neutral thing. If we had seeds and we don't know what we're going to get from the seeds when we plant them in the ground, how helpful is that going to be? It's helpful to have the seeds ripening for this worldly seed makes that kind of worldly plant that brings that kind of worldly result. Does the seed actually make that result? No. Our karma makes this seed make that result. And that's deeper understanding of interdependence. It goes deeper yet, of course, that there isn't anything that I can experience that's not coming out of my seeds. So everything is dependent on my seeds. And even the seeds are dependent on my seeds., and how do I make seeds. How do I make mental seeds? So our interdependence goes from understanding the principle interdependence to understanding the method side of interdependence, which is the way I make the seeds in my mind is by way of how I perceive myself thinking, saying, acting towards the other. So just to understand interdependence isn't enough. We have to understand its method side, which is how we make it, like not how we make interdependence, but how we make the seeds that are the causes for the results of our experiences through our behavior.

Now, I don't remember Geshe-la ever going through this sequence to prove that to us, but we should be able to do it, and that would be part of another session together if we ever wanted to try that on for size.

The more agile we get in understanding the connection between our behavior and our mental seeds and our experiences, the more accurate becomes our grasping to the objects appearing to our mind. We quit seeing the raw data coming up with cup and believing it's a self-existent cup. We see the raw data we come up with the cup and we know it's our seeds ripening cup.

And we will come to recognize the natural state of thusness.

So the natural state of thusness, we know is code for emptiness, but it's also code for Buddha nature. So do we always think Buddha nature when we think emptiness? Or are we thinking of those as like somehow different? If we think of the emptiness of the cup, are we thinking the cup has Buddha nature? It's like, no, we think of Buddha nature relates to something that has consciousness, right? It's the consciousness, the emptiness of the consciousness that is our Buddha nature.  But the cup does have a natural state of thusness because its natural state is that it is empty of its own nature.

So, as our understanding, the method side of interdependence, it will, our mind will naturally recognize that those things that I think have their own natures in them, from them cannot. So we will better recognize the emptiness of the objects of our experience. And then we can also explore our interaction with that object of experience to see whether my sensations that I'm feeling, that I'm calling jealousy, that I'm blaming on that circumstance are really coming from

1. the circumstance

2. or are really those feelings having to be jealous, and 

3. does how I react to this feeling of jealousy really the way that it's going to relieve the discomfort, or really the way that's going to change the circumstance to make the discomfort go away when that discomfort really isn't related to what's going on, right?

So we can also use this in the interaction between-subject-object to explore our method side of interdependence to come to recognize the natural state of thusness of that aspect of our experience. And then we can do the same thing with our own subject side to come to recognize how we hold the information, getting the identity and believing that identity has its own nature to explore whether that can be true, to come to recognize our own method side of interdependence related to our subject side, to then recognize our own emptiness of our subject side–which is our natural state of thusness, which is our Buddha nature.

So Aryadeva is helping us tag our behavior to our identities and our experiences in order to shift from this ‘I'm me self-existent me independent of my seeds ripening. I'm the me who has the seeds.’ –to this growing relationship with our own Buddha nature.

Does that mean we're all little Buddhas just waiting to be revealed? No, technically. But do we all have the potential to see ourselves as Buddha me and Buddha paradise emanating? Absolutely. Why? Because we're conscious. Why? Because we ripen selves, others and interactions between we have what we need to change how we plant our seeds. Okay.

Lama Christie shared a story about Aryadeva. He was known as a great Bodhisattva. And he was known as a great logician. He was one of the gatekeepers for Nalanda University. And they said one day, he was out for a walk and this old woman, you know, they always call her a hag. This old woman comes up to him and says, Hey, aren't you Master Aryadeva? Aren't you that great Bodhisattva? I don't know. What do you say? Would somebody say that?

She goes, Well, if you are, I need your eyeball. Like I'm in desperate need of your eyeball. Please may I have your eyeball? You know, and his heart goes out to her and he reaches in, pulls out his eyeball, hands it to her. And she goes, she takes it, she throws it on the ground, she stomps on it. Poor Mr. Aryadeva. He admits he had this loss of faith at that moment. And it's like, man, if people are going to be like that, I just don't think I can help them. Like his 18th Bodhisattva vow crashed. No doubt he had a doubt the moment after. They don't talk about that in the story. 

They say that he, you know, in the future, later on in that lifetime, he was teaching in the monastery. And you know how kids can be the kids were berating him for having one eye, only one eye. And, you know, they were being mean to him somehow. And he got all like, wrathful with them and he said, I see more with my one eye than you see for with both of yours, you know, and just shut them all down. 

So that the reason they're telling this story is that they offer that that old hag was actually a demon and that he, his practice was so strong that his seeds ripened this demon activity but not recognizing her as a demon. And he actually had a brief action from the demon activity, which was to have this doubt and that the demons intention somehow was to interfere with his ability to influence people and to teach people and to debate with people, somehow thinking that if now he suffered from having just one eye, it would be hard and people wouldn't listen to him.

But he goes on to be an even greater teacher with one eye than others with two. And so he did in fact, end up defeating the demon because the demon didn't get what they wanted, which was to be an obstacle to his teachings. But then it's like, think about how, if you were Aryadeva and you had known that was a demon in the form of the lady asking for the eyeball and smashing it, how would our response have been any different? You know, and Lama Christie just really didn't offer. She said, just think about it. He wouldn't have stabbed the old lady. He wouldn't have been mean to the old lady. Maybe he wouldn't have pulled his eye out because he would have caught on before and done something different. Or maybe he would have pulled his eye out, but he wouldn't have gotten upset when she trumped on it. I don't know. Think about it. Think about it oneself. How is it that someone as wise as Aryadeva could not understand demon activity and what would it be like for them to understand demon activity?

So I only got partway through this class and I'm sorry about that. We'll just do it next class. It's too rich a material to skip stuff or to go too fast. So thank you, but we'll wrap it up.

[Dedication]

All right. Thank you so much again. I apologize for the extra five.

It is July 29th, 2026. Let's gather our minds here. We'll offer our prayers and go right into our first meditation, which will be the same as the first one we did last week, or as the same as it happens when you do it a second time. Same topic. So let's gather our minds here as we usually do. So please bring your attention to your breath until you hear from me again.

[Opening]

Meditation 1: Bodhichitta – My Promise to Help

[7:32] So set your body for a meditation, if you haven't already.

And then set your mind by using your breath at the tip of the nostrils as the object to trigger that shift from outer worldly attention to meditative focus attention.

Now turn that mind of meditative focus to the new object of considering the reason why you meditate. Why are we here in class?

Why do we need to still our mind?

Why do we want to realize this thing emptiness in deeper and deeper experiences? Why?

Is there someone in your life who is waiting for you to help them in this deep and ultimate way?

Maybe they don't even know they are waiting for us. They are hoping for something to fix it all.

Feel again that wish to help them. And then imagine that that wish grows so strong that your own heart reaches out to them to communicate to them: I'm coming. I'm coming.

And see that form into a beam of light like a cord from your heart to theirs.

One cord to that first one person. And that beam of light is our promise, I will come. I will stop your pain. I will bring you to that love that is the cause of all happiness. I am doing it, just wait for me. I'm coming. Riding on this beam of light between your heart and theirs.

And then of course we think of another person we love so much and another beam goes to them with the same message.

And maybe another.

And our own feeling of love grows with every beam that shines forth.

And once we have that love strong and clear shift to recognizing who and what those suffering beings really are. Our own projections, just like our own selves ripening, ripening results of our own past behaviors and habits, ripening projections of our own mind. And that's why we can help them. That's why we can save them. 

Keep your heart beaming that light and you knowing that their pain is my mental image and it is real. And because it is my mental image I am the one who can change it. If it were not my mental image I could do nothing.

Rest with this beam of light shining forth to this suffering loved one with this keen awareness that it's all our own cascading mental seeds including us, and that's what makes it real. Our pain, their pain, our love, their love growing.

This is the dependent origination side. Now add the emptiness side. Find that being in pain who is other than our own ripening mental image of a real being in pain.

Does this being in pain exist or not exist?

And as we realize this true nature of their appearance, their pain, our love for them and none of it anything but our projections, does our love grow or does it fade away?

If it fades away we are misunderstanding something. When it grows because we understand the dependent origination and emptiness marriage, we are glimpsing truth.

Understanding emptiness increases our love, increases our ability to really help another. And so see that on those light rays you are also sending to them this understanding of the marriage of emptiness and dependent origination.

And as we radiate those beams of love, our own source of those beams of love grows. And so we will never run out.

So leave one version of you in this space of constantly sending these rays of love and wisdom. And another part of you become aware of being in this body, in this room, in this class, so that this class too is flowing out to them on these beams of light.

And dedicate this small effort to someone in your world, you coming to understand that in fact they've seen emptiness directly.

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

I like that meditation. It takes longer to say than to do, right? Once you know it, it just feels so good. So thank you for the opportunity to share.

On the Second Path

[26:14] All righty. We are on to Pa Dampa Sangye's second part of his book. The first part, the first path, as you recall, were the summaries of what he learned from 11 different sutra teachers. And, like, wasn't the first one Arya Nagarjuna? So it's like, whoa, okay, we're in heavy duty company here. And that series of verses was going through how we have been learning to better understand what's meant by deceptive reality, or dependent origination, or karma, or my appearing reality, or my experiences, or me and my world. Like, all these different ways that we're trying to describe our appearance experiences. And then within that, we're trying to learn how it is that the way we believe that they exist, as in them from them, is in fact impossible. Not just, oh, I don't think so, but, like, impossible so that we can stop reacting to what still appears to us in that old way that we still impossibly see in the wrong way. But now we know we're doing it. Somehow we're trying to get to that intellectual ability to catch ourselves in the belief it's out there at me and reject that even just mentally, Nah, it can't be like that.

And then the flip side of understanding what's meant by ultimate reality or the no self nature of all those appearing things and all those different catchphrases that we try to use trying to explain this inexplicable thing called the emptiness of self nature of something that has to be there to be empty of self nature. And our mind says, like, one of them's got to be there first. And that whole first section of his verses is like weaving this ways to override our dual mind–Is it this one first and then that one? Or that one first and then this one?–to try to get to the place where it's like, no, it's both. Both. Both. Both. And we can't do it through words. We can't do it through speaking. We can't do it through intellect. But we can do it. Like, how does that work?

So we were exploring all these different little, you know, just one verse phrases of all these clues to catch on to that. Then we move to the second path.

Verse 12 – The Advice of Buddhaguhya

So verse 12 of our Pristine Egg of Pure Silver. He says what he learned from this particular lama

12

Cultivate

A state of mind

Where all you see is pure

It will erase

The lines of your

Belief in things that function

Now all you see

Displays itself

As emanation bodies–

This is

The advice of

Buddhaguhya.

Lama Christi said she didn't have the dates of this person Buddhaguhya. But the name Guhya is the same as Gupta, which means secret. And Buddha means Buddha. So here's this guy named Secret Buddha. It's like, he's not so secret if we're calling him Secret Buddha. But we also hear that, you know, when you're born or when you get your new name, whenever that new name comes, the new name is sort of predictive. Like whoever gives you the new name must see that you and the future who embodies this meaning of this new name. So I know there are those of you who've gotten new names from me. And it's like, I know I did my best, but I'm not omniscient. So I don't know if I got it quite right. But we see that they end up actually coming true. Like Lobsang Drakpa got his name Lobsang Drakpa when he was like seven years old. But he grew into it, I guess.

So here's this guy, Secret Buddha. He either grew into the name or they already knew he was. But anyway, he's the one who taught Pa Dampa Sangye this message. You know, over time, probably.

Cultivate a state of mind where all you see is pure.

It will erase the lines of our belief in things that function.

Now all you see displays itself as emanation bodies. 

So already we have a clue that this second section of Pa Dampa's work is talking about his Diamond Way training. When we use the words cultivating all we see as pure, that's a clue that we're talking about KYERIM, Creation Stage practice. In Creation Stage practice, we're imagining things to be happening in a way that we don't actually see it that way with our sensory apparatus. But we cultivate this ability to decide that things are pure.

And it's really slippery. It's like, things are not pure. We spend our Sutra training recognizing things that we thought were pure and good were in fact nothing but suffering. Like all those beautiful things in life, pleasurable things in life, to grow our renunciation strong enough to set us on the path to the end of all suffering, we have to recognize that there is nothing but suffering in the desire realm. Like what's up with that? The desire realm means these are things I want. Yeah, right. So does that mean all those things I want are really in fact impure and so not worth wanting? So give up all your desire? Give up all your wanting stuff? No, like that's not even the message in Sutra, for the Bodhisattva anyway.

But it's really hard to hold this idea that being in the midst of a migraine headache, everything is pure. And it's like, all right, I can think it. I know this is purely my karma ripening. I know it's going to purely come to an end pretty soon. And I know that I can use this to suck migraine headaches out of the world. But it does not make that experience pleasant. Assuming that pure things are always pleasant and that impure things are always unpleasant. And that's part of the study and the practice, even in creation stage work, is that we can be saying, yeah yeah, I'm imagining all these wonderful things happening, imagining everything is pure as long as I'm on my cushion in my Sadhana. But as soon as I get off my cushion and I go out into the world, [shaking head] I don't see everything as pure. Because in our seeds are ingrained these beliefs that things, qualities and characteristics are in them. And so if I experience something that's supposed to be pleasant and it's not, it's its fault and I get disappointed and I don't know what to do with it, right? I get mad at it, or them, and blame them and act in ways that just brings more of that kind of disappointment and misunderstanding. Or it's flat out unpleasant and we believe it's in it from it and we think me in me from me. It's like, I don't deserve that. So even when it doesn't fool us with its pleasantness being unpleasant, because it's flat out unpleasant, we still blame it and we're offended by it and so we react badly. And so we really hear the thing say, oh, cultivate a state of mind where you see all things as pure, there's a part of us that rejects that. Because it's like, it's not all pure. It's all suffering. I just spent 20 years of my life proving to myself that everything is suffering. Don't now tell me that all those suffering things are pure.

What's wrong with my logic? When I recognized all things are suffering, I'm still believing it's in them from them, which means their purity would have to be in them, from them too, which I can't have it both ways. Pure and impure are opposites. So which one is it, honey? Are they pure or are they impure?

And we know the punchline. They're neither. They are blank. They are empty of being pure or impure, pleasant or unpleasant. So they can be whatever it is that's ripening out of my own mind at this given moment. So are they when they are unpleasant, are they impure?

What if you are with your holy teacher's manifestation and they do or say something that offends us and we're careful to hold our reaction to that being, oh, they're showing me something I needed to know. They're ripening something for me that I couldn't have ripened otherwise. Wow, this is unpleasant. Thank you very much.

Is that unpleasantness a good thing or a bad thing? Is it a result of some unkindness or some kindness? If we've received this special teaching and it cleans something out of us in doing so, even if it was unpleasant to go through it, can we say it's a bad result? Just because it's unpleasant, it isn't necessarily a negative thing, a bad thing. So our seeds were ripening for that to happen. Talk about black and white seeds, right? The white seed of getting a direct teaching from our holy Lama and the black seed of perceiving it as something painful and then the white seed of reacting to it as wow, thank you so much. Like what do we end up with? Two whites, one black. All right, clear to doubt, we're on the white side, right? We're building. But it's one example of showing that when we get an unpleasant experience, yes, it's a ripening of some way in which we had similarly seen ourselves be the cause of someone's unpleasantness. But that doesn't automatically mean that that circumstance or activity or whatever is necessarily impure. It's not necessarily unpleasant, but we don't necessarily have to react in a way that will plant another impure seed. That's what I'm trying to get at.

We can experience something unpleasant and in doing so, how we respond to it plants new seeds for purity instead of perpetuating impurity. When we understand that the judgment of it being unpleasant or pleasant is our seeds ripening. You could go so far as to say different seeds from what's ripening, but they're so tagged together you can't call them different. But somebody else might experience their Lama saying something similar to them and they don't have a bad reaction to it at all. It's not what's been said. It's our seeds ripening, our reaction to it. So when we're saying, Cultivate the state of mind where all you see is pure, that is one of the main practices in the Creation Stage practice of our Diamond Way life. But it's not just, oh, decide you are the princess in the palace and then everything will be that. We first recognize things are neither pure nor impure and so because of their empty nature, their blank nature, I'm going to choose to respond to them as pure so that my seed planting includes me interacting with a pure being.

So what is interacting with a pure being, how is that different than interacting with an ordinary impure being? They look the same, but in our own thinking there are different ways that we come up with how we can authentically say, okay, this is a seemingly ordinary human experience, but I recognize that my job is to see it as pure. I'll say I can agree it's purely my karma ripening and nothing but, and maybe that's the highest I can go. That's the highest I could go for a long time. Purely my seeds ripening, okay. And then slowly the goodness of being able to do that actually grows into, oh, I see it's purely empty of anything but my seeds ripening. That gets a little bit closer, bigger maybe, not closer. And then as we grow what we mean by pure, we start getting glimpses of what Geshe-la says is like angels, angels showing up to help us.

Like we had a sweet example of that this morning. We ventured into the real world, and we're doing these different errands, and we were at the Mexican embassy expecting to be there all morning, waiting our turn, and the receptionist just dealt with what we needed, and within 20 minutes we were out of there. And it's like, whoa, like that was an angel experience.

And then we went to the UPS to drop off some boxes that Sumati needed to ship, and they were heavy, not too heavy, I could do it. And we were getting his walker out of the back of the car because we were going to put one box on his walker, and I was going to carry the other one. And this young man drives up, he gets out, he's got his hands full, and he goes, well, let me help you with that. So I hand him one box, and he takes it in one arm, and he goes, You have another box? I said, yeah, but… He goes, no, no, I put the second box. He's holding it in one arm. And it's like, wow, like angel for sure. And I said it to him, and he just looked at me funny. And then I turned around. I don't know what I was thinking, but by the time we headed towards the store, he was already in there, and he had sat the boxes down. But it's like, whoa, they just show up. And then on our way out, I realized how heavy the door was, and he managed with two boxes in one hand and a handful, he had managed to open that door too. And I thought to myself, Sarahni, you didn't even think highly enough of the angel that just saved you to go hold the door open for him. It's like, ugh. But just to recognize how special that was, that's seeing the world pure.

Did he have wings and glow? No. But somebody stepped up to help us, you know? And I see where that came from. We used to do that kind of thing when we could, and now we just do it in a different way. So my point is, the purity shows up in surprising ways. If we are expecting it to show up like things made of rainbow light, it might be a long time before we see results of our practice of See the world as pure. But when we start to recognize these unexpected eases, unexpected helps as, oh, manifestations of this thing they mean by See my world as pure.

We could have just said, oh, what a nice guy. But we recognized, no, no, right? Angel's showing up right there when you need one. That's this practice that we're growing, and it does take some effort to pretend at first–which we all used to know how to do when we were little kids. We pretended really, really well, didn't we? And then, gosh darn, we grow up and we forget to do that. But call forth, give yourself permission. Just maybe keep it to yourself for a while so that you don't end up worrying the people that love you. She's seeing angels. She has a best friend who's a giant rabbit. Okay, we've got a problem here. Keep it to yourself until the time is right. And then you let, you know, you drop these little, wow, thank you, you're my angel for the day. Okay.

It sounds like just magical thinking. You know, pretend it's pure and it will be pure as you have your next headache. And it's like, no, it's not pretend. It's recognizing not one or the other, not pure or impure. So to respond to it as if it's pure, plants a seed to see things as pure or real in the future. Like not having to imagine it, it will just happen, like these fun experiences that we had today.

So then what is the definition of purity and impurity? If we just said it's hard to tell which is which because it's not related to what it feels like in the moment. It's not related to whether it's pleasurable or unpleasurable. How do we know when something's pure versus impure?

Lama Christie went to get the definition from a Vinaya book that says, Things that are impure come from karma and mental afflictions,and they don't help us fix our mistaken view of the world.

So what qualifies as experiencing something as impure when what we experience is coming from karma and mental afflictions and it does not help us break that cycle. So when we experience something pleasant or unpleasant and we experience it and react to it in the same old way from believing that its identity and its qualities are in it from it, that it defines the impure experience–the impurity of the object, the impurity of the interaction between, and technically the impurity of the subject. The impurity of all three spheres is happening when we are on automatic pilot. I speak for myself, non-arya being on automatic pilot. Everything is impure no matter how pleasant because none of it is helping me stop perpetuating my belief that things as identities and qualities are in them, from them.

So if we have ignorance in our minds at any given point–which for me I always do—, and we allow that relationship to go on, then that makes all our five heaps impure, because I am made up of five heaps and the first heap is the heap of form and my heap of form does not end at my skin. My heap of form includes any form that I experience and so therefore all is impure as long as my mind still believes that all those heaps and forms have their nature's identities in them, from them–which is what ignorance is and what ignorance does. It seems like we're stuck though, doesn't it? Right. Yay. Rachana says, no, we are not stuck. Absolutely not. Don't even entertain that thought. Yay.

So then what's pure? What's pure, they say, is anything that helps us fix our mistaken view. Anything that does not contribute to the flourishing of our mental afflictions.

So I'll say it again. What is pure? Something that helps us fix our mistaken view or something that does not contribute to the flourishing of our mental afflictions.

So Lama Christie asked, Is our Lama, whoever that is, are they pure or impure? Is the Dharma pure or impure? It's like we can read Dharma books and believe they're in them from them and set them aside and not behave any differently. In which case that Dharma has not influenced us in any way that helps us stop our wrong view or stop our mental afflictions. If we don't use it that way, there's nothing in the Dharma that can make us change. There's nothing in the words of the Dharma that make us understand what it's saying. If it could, Dharma written in Tibetan, we'd all read and we'd know what it was talking about. Dharma written in Sanskrit, we'd know what it's talking about because it would be in the words, in the Dharma itself. It can't be. And same with the Lama.

Our Lama is totally pure. Everything they do is out of their love for us in order to bring us to our ultimate happiness as quickly as possible. Even when they're beating us up with the frying pan. Even when, I don't know, they're kicking us out of the Sangha. Even when they go off in a different direction and it's like, I don't want to learn that stuff. How do we really negotiate that? It's all this test of our own worldview. And it's easy to say, but it's so hard to be in the midst of it and still hold our state of mind where everything is pure when it's not going the way I want it to. It's supposed to… Life is supposed to get better and better and better as you study the Dharma. And it's like, that has not always been my experience actually. It's hard sometimes to even stay on the path when our expectations are failing again. But they only fail because we put the power into the things and there's no such power in the words, in the Lama.

Well, then why study the Dharma? Why have a Lama if they've got no power? Who gives them the power? What gives them the power? And there's no power other than that power we give them. Okay, so just decide they're Buddhas and they're omniscient. And then you open your eyes and it's like, yeah, but they look the same. They're supposed to look different if they're Buddhas… There's our wrong view again. So we have this wicked thing in every one of our seeds that we're struggling against. And this is one of the ways to do it, Cultivate the state of mind where all we see is pure. But because we understand that all that we see is empty of being pure or impure, so we can choose to respond to it as a pure event, something that's happening in order to show me my ignorance so I can overcome it, show me my mental affliction so I can respond to it differently, recognize that the appearing nature is out there coming at me is not the one that's there. All these different ways that we use this understanding, it looks impure, but I know it's blank, empty, and so I choose to respond to it as if it's pure and what would that look like? What will that be like? Because that's how we plant the seeds to see things as pure, even pure in them, from them, but that's impossible. Because in them, from them won't help us cut our misunderstanding. So when our response to things as if they're pure start to ripen, our experience of things as pure will have to include some sense of it's not in it, from it, it's coming from me, because that's the only other option. We've already figured that one out through all our sutra practice. Do you see? So it's like so much in these short little verses.

Why is it then that practicing seeing all things as pure will erase the lines of our belief in things that function? Just what I've been explaining. I won't say it again. The things that function means that thing is unpleasant. It's functioning to cause me to feel unpleasant. That kind of function. And when we recognize, no, the thing is impure. Yes, I'm having this reaction to it. No, that reaction does not have to be acted upon in that way. I am going to respond as if this is a pure event and it makes it a pure event because now I'm cutting away at my ignorance. And that's what the definition of pure is.

So the things functioning to cause me pleasure or displeasure, it will start to erase those lines. Where is the pleasure and displeasure coming from? The seed planting ripening, not the thing.

So then his third section, Now all we see displays itself as emanation bodies.

Lama Christi went through this sequence. She said, suppose we're sick in some way. And we probably see that as a really impure thing. And we would have to ask ourselves, where did it come from? What's its result? If I keep blaming it on how I feel, what's that going to create for me in the future? And what did I do to make this happen in the first place? Because if I can identify that, I know what to do is the opposite. I kind of think of it differently. I think, what is my human reaction wanting to do in response to this situation? And what's the opposite of that? Because I don't know what I did to cause the thing, but I know how I want to react to stop the thing, blaming it, doing something, what's the opposite? But both ways brings us to this question of, where did it come from in the first place? All of it, where did it come from in the first place?

And then she does this 90 degree turn. And she said, to answer that question, you have to then stop and ask yourself, do enlightened beings exist? If they do, do they love us? Remember everything you know about what it is to become an enlightened being. If they love us, would they do absolutely anything and everything to save us from our recurring suffering? And if they could, then wouldn't they have to emanate to us to do it? Whatever it is that they can do, which is not reach in and take our suffering away, but they can do something. Don't they have to make contact? At least from their side, they have to make contact. So wouldn't they emanate?

So can Buddhas emanate?

If they emanate, are they limited to only animate creatures?

Are they limited to a single emanation at a time?

Then is it possible that any given Buddha is emanating every single experience that we've ever had?

Like the ramification of the answers to all those questions ends up with, well, then they have to be everything all around me. I don't know, even me. Wait a minute. Okay, they can be me for you, but not me for me. Because, come on, me is me. 

Lama Christie didn't go there. She left that part out.

Can we say that if there is at least one fully enlightened being who got there by way of ultimate love and ultimate compassion and ultimate wisdom, then isn't it true that they have to be emanating as everything for each one of us? 

So they emanated as my migraine. Wait a minute, Buddha, would you knock that off, please? Like it's not up to them, is it? They're emanating what I need. I needed all those migraines? Oh, my God. Okay, what if I had responded to all those migraines as Buddha? I don't know. Would I be able to go, oh, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you? Or would I be going, oh, please go away and leave me alone? I don't know. I hope not the second one. When we're going through this process of cultivating a state of mind where all you see is pure, we have to go through everything being empty of self-nature in order to come to the conclusion, I can respond to them as if they are pure, and that will help us see that those things are not functioning to make our pleasure or our displeasure. And that goodness, the goodness of responding as if it's pure grows the goodness that allows us then to recognize, oh, my gosh, all those empty things are in fact Buddha emanation that I see as a wall, as a hummingbird, as a blue sky, as the air I breathe, as the ground I walk on. Oh, my gosh, thank you. Oh, my gosh, like offer it all, everything I experience. I always like to say, look what you look like to me, and they roll their eyes because it's like, oh, my gosh, yes, your place is beautiful, but it's like nowhere close, honey. But when we get this train of thought that we can trigger, we get these glimpses of actually like walking through this being, Buddha being who's emanating everything to us, similar to walking through the emptiness of everything, and it's just appearing as we go. We did that or we'll do it coming up with Nagarjuna. It's like it's all in this such a simple verse, set of verses, a synopsis of what Pa Dampa Sangye learned from this guy, Secret Buddha. He must have known what he was talking about because this is so rich.

So this is saying, yes, things appear. We have experiences, the ones we like and leave us suffering, the ones we don't like are just outright suffering, and along through the whole thing, we're just on the way to dead. And we're saying, I'm going to choose to recognize all of that is empty, and so I'm going to choose to respond to it as pure, so that I create more pure seeds in my mind, seeds that will be chipping away at the ignorance and the mental afflictions. See my world as pure. 

That's not so different from what we learned from Deep Recipe for Meditation of those mental afflictions. Look, they're not yours. They're a demon trying to interfere with you, trying to sway you to act badly again when you don't want to act badly. It's just the demon. Choose a different point of view so that we can choose our response differently. And then we even heard those verses like once you recognize the work of the demon, you are free of the deed. You are free of the karma. It's like as long as we don't follow with what the demon is wanting us to do, we are free of the deed. It's the same idea. Mental afflictions? Blame the demon, but don't let yourself act from it. Mentally afflicted reaction to something, see that it's pure and don't respond in the same old way. Respond from love, compassion, wisdom. But it's the same idea. Divorce ourselves from the automatic reactive reaction. You can do it that way or you can do it this way and through the course of our day, we can do both of them according to what's going on.

Lama Christie said, the end result of doing the pure cultivating is this growing sense of gratitude and appreciation. Like if we're walking around through our holy angel Buddha providing everything for us, it's like, oh my gosh, thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Thank you for this headache. That's used to you too. I know it's going to go away. Maybe it's the last one in the whole world. Right as you're, it's possible. It is possible. And Pa Dampa Sangye is wanting us to understand that. I'm sorry that took so long. Let's take our break.

[Rachana: I'll throw in a quick rejoicable. I heard something about like the US might be out of weapons, so we can't bomb anything anymore. Yay. We're close to that.]

Yeah, may it stay. Out of weapons.

Meditation 2: Everything I Experience is Buddhas Emanating

[1:17:00] Let's do a second sit, just a short one.

Settle your body.

Settle your mind. Like you push the button on the radio station and it just goes there.

And then turn your focus to my words. And in your mind's eye, look at the walls of the room around you and know them as emanations of a holy being. Every part, every atom.

Feel the air around you. Know it as a precious Buddha touching you.

Feel the cushion of your chair, an enlightened being there for our comfort, our support.

Feel your clothes, these enlightened emanations protecting you, caressing you.

Become aware of your own body. This thing, it feels like we are somehow in. All those parts of our body, holy beings made of light, providing this place for us to stay.

Everything we hear, those Buddhas speaking to me.

Even my own thoughts, all of those emanations propelled by love, their love for you.

Let yourself feel it. Let yourself accept it. And feel your response.

Now come back to your awareness of yourself in this room made of Buddhas, class made of Buddhas.

And dedicate this little session to a deepening awareness of our relationship with enlightened emanations.

And then when you're ready, open your eyes, come out.

So our author's method is when he starts a new part, his first verse is this big picture thing, and then his subsequent verses dig into the same concept in more subtle ways. So I wouldn't have figured that out if Lama Christie hadn't pointed it out. So thank you very much. I don't want you to think I'm really deep in these verses. But once I see it, it's like, whoa, this guy was incredible. Whoever he was. Like all we know about Pa Dampa Sangye is this and the story about Machik Labdrön.

Verse 13 – The Advice of Vageshvara

[1:25:05] So next verse, which is related to how we do the seeing the world as pure.

13

Train in the word

For a sense

Of the sounds

It will cancel

The clinging

To eight worldly thoughts

And you'll recognize

All that you hear

Is a mantra–

This is

The advice of

The famed Nageshvara.

Nageshvara means lord of mantra. Mantra means secret word. It also means protect the mind. So together, the use of mantra is using secret words to protect the mind in some way. Which has all to do with using sound to create. How we use sound to create.

So his first section, Train in the word for a sense of the sounds. Apparently in the Tibetan words. It can be read as, Train in the word could be read as like learning the words of the mantra. You're given a mantra. Om Gate Gate Paragate Parasamgate Bodhi Svaha, and at first, we don't really know what it means. And so they teach us, you know.

Gate means gone. Gate, gone. 

Paragate, go far.

Parasamgate, go all the way.

Bodhi means Buddha.

Svaha means, you know, do it, done.

And then it's like, yeah, but gone. What does gone mean? Gone to where? Gone how? Right. So we learn the words so that when we say the sounds of the words, those sounds are given that meaning because we've studied what the sounds make the words, make the meaning. Because it's not in the sound. The meaning is not in the sound. The word is not in the sound. The meaning is not in the word. We have to put it all in there. And then once we do, when we produce that sound, we are producing the word we are producing the meaning. And it's like, no, I'm just saying a mantra. And it's like, yeah, but. When we are just saying the mantra and we've been trained in saying the mantra, then that mantra can have power.

Do you remember we learned what makes a mantra a mantra? Is the being who first spoke the mantra had to be a holy being. And then the beings who are using the mantra has to be keeping our vows well. And it's like, did that really ever make sense? It still isn't quite clear how that makes a mantra a mantra. Like a holy being, everything they say is mantra? But until I keep my vows, no mantra is mantra. No mantra works. Which means it's not mantra if it doesn't work. But how do we know it works? Do you have to say the mantra and the thing you're intending for it has to happen right away? Or can it happen weeks later, or years later, or lifetimes later? Like how do we know it's working? And it's like, do we need to know it's working? If we understand about the word and the sound and the meaning, then we don't actually need any kind of verification that it worked. We do it because we know the influence that it has. And when it shows up, like almost who cares. Yes, we care. But we're not focused on the result. We're focused on the seed planting as we do. So the doing of the mantra is the seed planting as we're hearing ourself do the mantra in order to bring about a certain result. It's not that the mantra can do anything to bring about a certain result. Which is why when we do mantra, certain results can come about. But they can also not come about until later. It's the doing the mantra that plants the seed. Not the result of the mantra that plants the seed. 

So this can mean, when you learn a mantra, learn what it means. Learn what it's supposed to sound like and do the best you can to make it sound like that when we use it.

Then it can also mean work with how it is that words and sounds have a relationship. Check out how sounds and what we think is the relationship between sounds and words, and see if we can show ourselves that that can't be the actual relationship between sounds and words. Because if so, every time you made that same sound you would make the same word, and it would have the same meaning for everybody who hears it, or pronounces it, says it. And that would mean we could never misunderstand each other–but we do often. So it cannot be that the sound and the word and the relationship of what the word means are related to each other in the way that we believe they are.

This sound, dog, means... Right? You just got a mental image of a dog in your head. Every one of us have a different one. But it all fit dog. But of course if we weren't English speakers and I said those sounds, it would be meaningless or maybe it would mean something entirely different. Words and sounds.

Can we make words without sounds? Yes, I think words all day long. Will you shut up in there? But it sounds like a sound inside my head, doesn't it? I mean, you don't know what's inside my head. But I'm assuming your sounds are the same. They sound like words. Have you ever heard them and they don't sound like your own voice, somebody else's voice? You know, mine are almost always, I don't know if it's my own voice or not. But there have been times I've heard this voice go off in my head. It sounds like the same one I'm always listening to but it told me stuff I didn't know. And it was so cool, because it's like I was just asking myself questions and all of a sudden I was getting answers. And it's like, wow, really? Wow, really? And it went on for, I don't know. It went on for a week or 10 days. And then circumstances shifted. And it wasn't some different voice or other voice, and it wasn't telling me to do stuff. It was answers to questions.

It's like, was that mine? Were those my words? Those somebody else's words? Whose words were they? Whose wisdom was that? 

What do we believe is the relationship between sounds and words? They cannot be self-existent the way we believe them to be. Sounds don't make the words if we don't know the words, the sounds are making. Right. But what does it mean to be not self-existent in Highest School? Nothing not my own seeds ripening forced on me by results of my past behavior. So every sound that makes a word for me is nothing but my cascading mental seeds creating my reality, and yours the same.

So it's not just sounds don't make words. Sounds do make words forced by my karmic seeds to see it that way. And no other sounds making words than that.

So another level of understanding Training in the word for a sense of the sound. 

But then it says It will cancel the clinging to the eight worldly thoughts. I still don't quite get this connection, to be honest with you. You know, I get the conclusion. But why does he say that eight worldly thoughts specifically of all the things that he could have said understanding about that emptiness of sounds and words, nothing but my seeds ripening. It will stop me from having these eight worldly thoughts. 

What are the eight worldly thoughts?

1. I can only be happy when I feel good. 

2. Which means when I don't feel good, I'm unhappy.

3. I can only be happy when I'm getting what I want.

4. Which means I'm going to be unhappy if I'm not.

5. I can only be happy if I'm well-known.

6. And so when I'm not well-known, I'm unhappy. 

7. What's the fourth one? It's kind of close to that one. When I'm spoken of highly, right? When I'm praised. I can only be happy when I'm praised.

8. If I'm not praised, which is different than being criticized, right? But I'm unhappy either way.

How does understanding sounds and words and meanings cut my eight worldly thoughts?

What I hear the other person saying, well-known or praise, nothing but my seeds ripening. So who's to blame? My past behavior.

So how can I say that my happiness or unhappiness is related to what they're saying to me if what they're saying to me is my seeds ripening? It's coming from me and so my reaction to what they're saying to me is also my ripening seeds. I can let them ripen and not replant them. I'm already feeling it. My feelings are hurt. I can't stuff those back down effectively. But I can say, okay, this whole thing, those words meaning this making me feel hurt. It's all my seeds ripening. Great. Thank you emanation of a Buddha. Have at it. I'm going to respond in this way. Which would work if when we respond in this other way, they stop doing whatever it was they were doing, that's hurting our feelings. But what if they don't? What if we respond differently and they just keep at it? We have to still respond differently until our seeds stop ripening for that experience. It's really hard to keep that worldview going as our habit of the eight worldly thoughts is really trying hard to bubble up: No, no. It's them doing that to me–through their words, through their communication. Which if we think about it, probably a really major way in which we interact with others is through our speech and our communication. Yes, we're there physically with somebody. We are interacting visually. But in terms of our actual interactions, so much of it comes through speech, and we think we understand what they mean. We think we understand what they're trying to say. Then we answer and they get offended. It's like, why are you offended? I just answered your question. Because they're hearing our words so differently. Because my words that they hear are their seeds ripening, my words that I hear are my seeds ripening, and it's no wonder we do this oftentimes [talking past each other]. It's quite amazing that we ever do this with anybody, technically.

So this deeper way of recognizing that what I'm experiencing, I'm blaming on the other, having a reaction to it, choosing to recognize that I'm misunderstanding something in the process, and I refuse to act according to what the feeling is, the reaction is making me want to do. That's how I end up breaking through my eight worldly thoughts, I am happy when this happens and unhappy when that happens. Because my happiness or unhappiness is not really related to what's going on. It's forced with the ripening of those seeds. 

And we'll recognize that all we hear is mantra. Like, how does he get to that? 

Mantra is these pure words given to us by a holy being. Because of our goodness, we get them. And through our goodness, they can be effective to use them. And that at some point our not reacting in the way our eight worldly thoughts makes us want to react, we gather the goodness that ripens as hearing things more and more purely. When we hear things purely, what we will hear is mantra.

Buddhas apparently speak in mantra. Sounds like they're giving a sutra. But somehow it's all mantra because it's all words that protect the mind. It doesn't all become the mantra from that sutra. But it's all mantra. Pure words that protect the mind. Words with secret meaning, meaning secret power, meaning no power in them, only the power our goodness gives them. That kind of secret.

So this fellow whose name is Lord of Mantra, his teachings to Pa DampaSangye is this. In all these subtle variations about how sound and words and meaning relate to our eight worldly thoughts and our reactions, and how as we make our responses more and more loving, kind and wise, our experience is we hear things in more and more pure ways. That's sweet.

Lama Christy gave us another little mantra. Sorry, another little meditation. And she also talked about the recipe for deep meditation for a few minutes. Not sure I'm going to have time to do all of that. But let's do the meditation because it has to do with this hearing, hearing sounds, hearing words.

Meditation 3: Hearing Mantra

[1:44:18] So push the radio station button of me meditating, meaning hear me.

Get that attention bright and clear and sharp.

And then listen. 

Gate Gate Paragate Parasamgate Bodhi Svaha

Now repeat that mantra in your mind.

Feel the concentration that it takes.

Where does it feel like the words are?

In your head? In your chest? In your belly?

As you hear the words, can you feel them at all?

Gate means gone. It means accumulating our renunciation.

Gate means gone. Gathering our preparation for our transformation.

Paragate, gone over. Gone to the other side. Meaning having reached wisdom, and now knowing everything comes from us, not at us.

Parasamgate, using that wisdom to create a pure world for everyone. 

Bodhi, that pure world created.

Svaha. May it be so.

Feel those sounds resonating within you.

And recognize none of those sounds and none of those meanings are in them, from them. Ripening results of our own past goodness, ripening as hearing and feeling that message vibrating within you.

Gate Gate Paragate Parasamgate Bodhi Svaha

Now let go of that experience, that image. So sorry to cut it short.

Dedicate whatever glimpse we got to sharing that message with someone someday.

And then when you're ready, come back to awareness in your body, in your room, in this class.

Recipe for Deep Meditation

[1:52:15] And we have a little bit of Recipe for Deep Meditation. I think I can get it done in a few minutes. So Master Bodhi Bhadra in his first section is, we have to stop the work of the demons. And he goes on to say, and none of that effort will be successful if we don't throw ourselves into the pursuit of studying and contemplating the Dharma teachings. It's like the preliminary steps of our growing meditation progress is to get rid of the work of the demons. And the only way we'll be able to do that is to study, study, study, contemplate, contemplate, contemplate, serve, serve, serve–to grow the goodness that ripens as our ability to recognize, oh, demon activity, not me being a jerk, demon, I'm going to do the opposite. It's that piece, the strength, the awareness, the in-the-moment awareness to choose a different reaction comes from the goodness that we make by studying, by learning. Technically, by sharing studying with others. Because we can study, study, study and not ever apply it, or never actually learn it. Because there's nothing about studying that's any more self-existent than anything else. They are motivation, how we use it to help others, whether we help others study, whether we've helped others study in the past is whether or not our study now will be benefiting us. So, of course, we want to study together. I never liked study groups, personally. But I see the advantage of them. To study together makes everybody get the seeds.

He says, further, when we're trying to meditate, we will have those obstacles. And in order to even recognize that we have obstacles to meditation, we have to learn about them. And we have to learn about what the antidotes are. And we have to try them on for size. Like maybe one antidote works for you or that obstacle, but it doesn't work for this other one. And maybe an antidote works for somebody, but not for somebody else. Like I never found certain ones of those antidotes for meditation worked for me at all. I had to come up with my own. And that's fine. But if I didn't know I had the obstacle, I would never have bothered to find an antidote. Without a teacher to point out, these are the things that are probably going to happen, we wouldn't otherwise necessarily recognize that it's a problem.

So he says, before we even sit down to meditate, make sure we've built our foundation. And it's like we could spend lifetimes building our foundation and never meditate. So of course, we don't say don't meditate until you've built your foundation. But start your meditation practice at the 10 minutes, add a minute a week, as we are also studying and growing our foundation, which of course is also going to include not disturbing others' minds, avoiding interrupting, doing all those karmic things that help both our study and our meditation sessions hopefully go better.

Then he says, and you know what? Really, to make it such that our study actually grows our foundation, we should, even before we study, go make offerings to our holy Lamas. It's like even before you build the foundation, the first thing we do is offer an honor to our Lamas, they say. And it's like, okay, that's how we make the highest merit when we're seeing the Holy Lama as this only special being. And we do something to please them, to help them. We're growing this incredible goodness that is going to help our efforts and anything go better, go more sweetly, go more easily, go more effectively.

So he says, yeah, I just said the first thing you do is study, but the real first thing you do is make offerings to your holy beings, which is why it's built into our meditation preliminary. We make offerings. It's all really built in.

But then Lama Christie pointed out, it's like, what if someone didn't even have the seeds to hear of such a thing as a spiritual teacher, as a Lama, and they wouldn't have the seeds to understand or to even hear that there's a value, there's a merit to be made by making offerings that will improve the likelihood of our success at anything that we do attached to that activity. If they don't have the seeds to hear that, how do they ever first start gathering enough goodness? How do they ever know to make that first offering that starts the spiral going that could end up as a person who can meditate well, a person who can grow their wisdom? It's kind of like heart sinking in a way, because I remember I didn't hear the word Lama until I was in my mid-30s. I mean Lama in terms of spiritual being. And then it was like, it was sort of nah, what a weird idea. And it took a number of years before I caught on to the meaning of it, and a number of more years before I caught on to the idea of making offerings. And even still, I feel like I'm the slow kid on the spot.

But then Lama Christie pointed out, yes, to think that there are beings that don't have the seeds to even know that, it's like, oh man, it grows our compassion. She said in the same time, what a miracle it is for us to be here, taking classes that are pointing out the value of that practice that you've already been doing, whether you knew why you were doing it or not, you've already been doing. You had the seeds to be attracted to some practice where we put out an altar or a candle, or we make offerings to somebody for some reason, because we honor them. We think of them as somehow able to help us in some way. That’s extraordinary, to have the seeds to resonate to that in a tradition that shows us why to do it. It's not just oh because I'm honoring a Buddha. It's for our own benefit, but that's not why we're doing it. We're doing it for everybody's benefit. And how easy is it to put out seven bowls of water every day in order to stop all the suffering in the world? And it's like, I just forget. Even as I'm doing it, I forget the power of that practice. So, Pa Dampa Sangye says, you want your meditations to go deep, make offerings to your holy beings. Like that's the foundation. And then study and sit on your cushion, but make offerings. They don't have to be physical offerings. They can be, they don't have to be. They're a state of mind offerings to the Holy Lama, a state of mind. And we'll talk about it more as we go. We're out of time. All right.

[Dedication]

Thank you so much for the opportunity. I love these courses. Thank you. Have fun with those two meditations. There's actually three. Thank you. Thank you for attending. Okay. Thank you. Thanks, everyone. Have a nice week. Bye-bye.

All right, welcome back. We are Bok Jinpa Course 5, Class 6. It is August 5th, 2026. 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 1: Motivation for Meditation

[7:21] So settle your body for our beginning meditation. Go through your sequence.

Bring that body to stillness so our mind can get there.

And then turn on your focusing meditation mind using the sensations of breath at the tip of your nostrils.

And once that meditating mind is locked on, locked in, intentionally change the object of focus to recalling that person that we want to be able to help. Think of them clearly and the distress that we perceive them as having.

And now explain to yourself very clearly how it is that you sitting in this class is going to help them.

We are here in this class to change our own seeds in our minds in order to change that other person's pain. How else could we help them other than changing our own seeds? 

And so we rededicate ourselves to this process of changing our seeds to change their circumstance.

Ultimately, we change our own seeds such that the very word suffering, the very word pain, the very word death all become meaningless.

So see that person before you and reach out to them with your heart, your heart's wisdom. See the connection between you and know that they are waiting for your help, whether they know it or not, to increase the power of our effort, the power of our wisdom that knows that we can bring about this change for them.

And so with that motivation, dedicate to hearing something in this class that will be particularly helpful to inspire you or your meditation practice and then allow your focus of attention to return to you in this body, in your room, in this class now. And when you're ready, open your eyes.

Review Second Path Verses so far

[19:05] So this course five has been in Master Pa Dampa Sangye's text and we had reached the Second Path, his second set of 11 teachers. And just to remind us what we're talking about, I'll read the couple of verses that we've done. So his verse 12 is,

12

Cultivate

A state of mind

Where all you see is pure

It will erase

The lines of your

Belief in things that function

Now all you see

Displays itself

As emanation bodies–

This is

The advice of

Buddhaguhya.

So we talked about that. I hope you explored it a little bit. Then he says, he gets more specific.

13

Train in the word

For a sense

Of the sounds

It will cancel

The clinging

To eight worldly thoughts

And you'll recognize

All that you hear

Is a mantra–

This is

The advice of

The famed Nageshvara.

So the first verse was talking about seeing all things as pure, meaning really experiencing everything as pure and we talked about it. But now he's specifically saying, maybe I was saying the things that we see. But let's also explore the things that we hear. Not just in terms of purity, although it comes out to be the same thing. But when we explore the relationship between sounds and words and our mental seeds ripening, we see this connection between our reactions to things that we experience, and this relationship between our reaction and our identification and our judgment of those things–all of which is driven through words, whether they're words that we're actually hearing or they're mental words, the words through which we identify things. And then when we start to separate the words, the sounds, the identities, from our reactions to the objects, somehow that changes our relationship with the sounds and the words. And we can use them in a different way. Either use the ones we hear in a different way or use the ones we make in a different way. And that's where the idea of mantra comes in. Which is a big piece of our Diamond Way practice is our use of mantra, particularly in the Creation Stage Level, which is what he's talking about here.

Verse 14 - The Advice of Gudharipa

So here's the verse for this class.

14

Sever

The root

Of the 80 inborn

By training

Yourself

In emptiness

Then you'll know

The clear light as

The body of Suchness–

This is

The advice of 

Gudharipa.

Apparently, Gudharipa, whoever this person is, is also known as Godhari, which means cow herd. So there's some famous yogi named the cow herd, who literally was a cow herder, but also had these other skills. And who these people exactly are, Lama Christie did not go into. So I really don't know.

What we're offered here is that this is a being who taught Pa Dampa Sangye his Creation Stage practice–whether this person literally was in the flesh at the time or through the lineage I don't know either. But nonetheless this Lama's specialty is this 80 inborn and severing the root of those 80 inborn and what the relationship of reaching the clear light is here.

So what all this is talking about is the 80 inborn are beliefs that we have, thoughts and beliefs about those thoughts that we have, that we're born with. Inborn means we're born with them. And they're not just some random old 80, they are a specific thought, 80 specific thoughts that are singled out as important because of all the thoughts that are withdrawing as this life comes to an end. These are the last 80 to go before, I want to say before we're dead. But technically the body is dead long before these 80 are completely dissolved away but let's not care too much about that distinction right now.

When a being dies naturally, like ordinarily, untrained, untrained dying, towards the end of that experience what's happening is that these last subtle winds and minds are, they are called dissolving. But by dissolving it means they're no longer moving. But it's not that they've just gotten still, it's like they're not even there to move. And the significance of that has to do with the fact that there has to be some movement of this thing called winds, prana, energy, like a current of energy in order for the mind to move.

So a mind without a wind, without a movement is incapable of any experience. So the mind and the winds, the mind and the prana move together like a rider and a horse. I think we've all heard that. So these last 80 inborn, they use the word thoughts but they mean beliefs about things, are the last subtle movements of that wind that moves the mind before you reach what in Diamond Way is called the clear light, what in sutra way would be called reaching your own emptiness. But when we die untrained, that all passes by unconsciously experienced, because long before it, we've lost any kind of awareness because of the chaotic breakdown of what we relate to as our mind, which was intellect, which has to do with brain function. So once the brain stops functioning, the intellect stops functioning. And if we relate our mind to the intellect, when the intellect stops functioning, we're just dead. It's like there's no awareness of awareness going on. So although it is true that even in an untrained death, you reach the clear light, you don't have any experience of it. So it can't do us any good. And whatever subtly happens that we reach that culminating thing and we turn and the whole system starts up again in reverse and we end up in our next life, whatever that's going to be.

So the point here is that when we understand how the body in its new life, body and mind in the new life are being formed, we can understand better the impact that, or the relationship between these 80 inborn and the structure of the physical body and the relationship with the mind with those things. And when we understand that well enough, and we have training in how to ride the experience that we would call dying in a conscious way, we can use these withdrawal of the 80 inborn to consciously reach our own experience of the clear light. Not like Sarahni will be going, Oh, here's my clear light. It won't be like that at all. But there will be an awareness of the experience of the clear light, which changes our being forever.

So it doesn't however, just say sever the 80 inborn. It says, sever the root of the 80 inborn. So that the 80 inborn are particular thoughts and beliefs, as I said before, that are all based on a misperception there. So these 80 are mistaken inborn perceptions. And of course the underlying mistake is the belief, the thought, and the me having the thought and the object related to the thought all have their own individual identities and existence, independent of being karmic seeds ripening, the cascade of ripening. So it's the ignorance that needs to be cut to stop these 80 inborn from being mistaken.

So when, when a new human is conceived, the first thing that apparently appears is this little nexus of wind, of movement that makes a little hub of channels. Like if you think of a movement of something going from here to there, it, it will, it will go in a path, right? It has to get here. It's going to go in a line, not that it can't do this, but that pathway that it goes in, they call it a channel. So it does seem like suddenly there are these tubes and then there's something running in the tube, but that isn't quite accurate that there's a tube first and then the wind moves in it. The movement of the wind declares the channel, the pathway through which it's movements going. And when that wind is moving, it's carrying mind with it.

So at first, like the, we've heard the mind is attracted to this couple and then suddenly it's trapped in the womb. It's this very subtle, tiny hub of a couple of wind moving channels that the mind is now moving on. And those channels split off and they make little spokes and the spokes elongate and they go out and they branch and they do all these elaborate things. And as they do that, that vibration of the movement of the wind and the mind is what is bringing forth the structure of that little baby body. And so pretty soon it's got hands and arms and feet and heads and eyes and ears and all the things that make up this infant in the womb, is all the solidification of this movement of winds and mind as it goes out to create the form, the SUK, the fifth heap, SUK.

So baby's born, the winds and mind are moving constantly in response to experience. And our experience of that is baby me growing up into adult me growing up into an old me growing up into a dying me.

And at the point of dying me, this reverse process is happening. The winds are losing their power to continue to move out and carry the mind all around. And one by one, those winds that support our physical world stop going up and they go in a sequence: Earth element stops being experienced, then water, then temperature, then movement itself and then we reach the still. And after the still starts this withdrawal of the 80 inborn misperceptions.

There are things like thoughts of not wanting something like not about a thing, just aversion, attraction, jealousy, doubt, love, certain sensations. The list is weird. You would think it would describe like the most subtle experience that a human could have. But some of those last inborn clingings to identities are very odd. But the point is that those winds stop moving the mind and so they stop happening. And they go in groups. Like first, the first 30 of them go away, I think. Wait, I always get this backwards. But I can't find it in my notes right now.

Like 44 of them go away. And then 33 of them go away. And then the last seven stop being manifested. And when the last of the last one stops being manifested, one has reached what's called the clear light. One's clear light. It sounds like a bright, clear thing that you see. But it's just Diamond Way's word that's used for reaching emptiness, the emptiness of our me. And the emptiness of our me is the simple, no me that's not ripening seeds. But there's no ripening seeds happening. That's not true. There's only a very, very, very, very, very subtle ripening seed. And we're not aware of it. Because what we would be aware of, if we do this consciously, is we'd be in the direct perception of emptiness, only you got there through this different method so it's called you're in the clear light. But it's not like a clear light that everybody goes to. In the same way, there's no emptiness that everybody's a part of. It's the clear light that's related what we were calling your me, but we don't even call it that anymore, because the wind that me rides on has ceased moving. So you can't talk about it. You can't explain it. But then we try, right? Because we learn about it.

So then as we learn about this thing, the clear light, part of what we learn about it is the clear light we experience through this process is identical in quality to the clear light of a Buddha, a being whose already a Buddha. Their clear light is their Dharmakaya, their body of suchness. So we know the bodies of a Buddha, right? Their form body, they've got two, their mind body, they've got two–their omniscience and their Dharmakaya, their emptiness of all the other ones. So that is experienced when we experience the clear light. So we aren't experiencing the Buddha's clear light, we are experiencing our clear light. And it is identical, identically lacking any self nature as the Buddha's Dharmakaya. So it's essentially identical, but it's not one and the same. And that's why we've been talking for years about what is it to be identical, but not one and the same. So in this process of going through the withdrawal, when we've severed, we finally sever the root of the 80 inborn, is when we reach that experience of the clear light consciously.

Not like consciousness I've got right now, because it will be much more subtle than that. But it's the equivalent in Diamond Way of having our direct perception of emptiness, where our ignorance, our belief in things having their own nature is cut for good. We still see them as having their own natures. But because of our experience of emptiness directly, we no longer believe it even as we see it.

So similarly with clear light, we've cut our ignorance. And that's what stops the 80 inborn. Does it mean we don't ever have jealousy again because that one of the 80 inborn was jealousy? It's like, no, not yet, it will happen. But it won't be jealousy that arises that we blame the circumstance on. We'll like recognize, oh, those are jealousy seeds ripening, just ditch them and move on. We won't act from them anymore, is the explanation. So in this process of learning our Diamond Way practices, one of the practices in Creation Stage is learning this process that's called the dissolution, which would be dying, if it happened to an untrained person. But it's using that process intentionally, because of our ability to stay single pointed focused, regardless of the circumstances that we are experiencing. Which means we're not necessarily going to go through that process consciously, if we're not able to reach a shamatha level meditation, where nothing can rock us from our meditative focus on our object at hand. Which in this case would be the dissolution process happening from our side, whereas those watching might be, ah, she's dying. Right? That's their problem. I'm having a different experience here. Requires the ability to meditate deeply, which is why we're learning about it in a meditation class.

So the reason we want to sever the root of the 80 inborn is because we want to sever our ignorance, because these 80 inborn are obstacles to omniscience. Well, so as our other 84,000 mental afflictions we have constantly. But these are like the last most subtle versions, and so they get a chance to be targeted as we are working towards clearing our obstacles to omniscience. Now, I don't know if there's some specific practice in clearing our obstacles to omniscience, but we get this little clue about going through what would be called the death process, but using it in this highly trained way that makes it not the death process at all, that allows us to grow ourselves into our Buddha me more swiftly than through our sutra practice.

So what's also useful about this concept of the dissolution and the relationship with these 80 inborn is learning about this relationship between the movement of our prana, and the movement of our mind, and the appearance and experience of our body. And how those are all so interrelated, that not only can we learn to use our dying process, we can use our living process as well, similarly–intentionally, consciously–by making this connection between our subtle body, meaning those channels that the moving in that move the mind in those channels as well. And our reactions to our experiences in order to do the work that's called both outer and inner. So in Diamond Way, we get this pledge about being committed to both inner and outer methods. And then what exactly that means depends on what we're studying and what level of the Diamond Way we've been doing outer and inner methods, even in sutra, in the sense that when we talk about the six perfections, we have the giving, the moral discipline, not getting angry, having fun doing all of that. And then we have the inner practices of our efforts to learn to meditate and our learning our emptiness meditations and then performing them, right? Those are inner in the sense that they're done inside our mind. And the outer ones are done out with objects of our world, mostly other beings, of course. So outer and inner, like more clear in sutra. And of course, it takes both. It takes method and wisdom to bring about the change that we're trying to plant our seeds to create.

And then it can get a bit more subtle in that when we are working specifically with preparing our channels to help us manage our behavior and our mental afflictions, they say, you know, do your yoga practice or your tai chi, whatever practice that you do, that's designed to work on your subtle body, and that's your outer method. You're working on you. You're moving your physical body in such a way that's the outer method. But it's not the physical muscle that we're working on, it's the flow of energy that becomes the muscle function. That is what we're actually working on when we're doing those kinds of practices. So although they are outer practices, our physical body is moving, they're actually inner practices because we're working on the subtle chi. And then for those to actually be effective for the reasons we're using them, which is to cultivate the ability to reach that clear light, we also need to have in our thinking or our awareness as we are working on those channels, why we're doing it, about the understanding that these movements of mind and wind are all pushed by my karmic seeds. And if it's pleasant, it's seeds of kindness. And if it's unpleasant, it's seeds of selfishness. And I'm doing all of it so that I can become a being who can stop everybody's suffering. While we're doing our method work is what makes that method side of practice that will take us to the end of suffering.

So then the inner is the thoughts as we're doing that practice. And the outer is the experience of the subtle movement of the body.

Then Lama Christie was explaining, when we are sitting in meditation, working with our Diamond Way Creation Stage practices, we are imagining things happening in a sequence. And that imagining things happening in a sequence is our outer method. And the inner method is when we add to that the understanding that when I withdraw all of these elaborations, and go into the clear light, that's when I can become a being who can help all beings stop their suffering.

So to add the wisdom piece, even when it needs to be intellectually added, that's always the inner method. The subtlety of why we're doing whatever we're doing, included in whatever it is that we're doing, whether it's an outer thing, or an inner meditation, no matter how subtle, to always add the, and this is nothing but seeds ripening, and it's true nature is empty. Then makes our practice be both an inner and outer at the same time, even as what we're doing is meditating deeply, which seems like it's all an inner practice. And that's the point here, is that when somebody's sitting in meditation, and they're in perfect stillness, someone looking at them, just like, there's nothing going on in there, right? It's like, hello, nothing. But in fact, what they're doing is both outer and inner method at the same time. And that's extraordinary. It's extraordinarily impactful when we understand why to do it and then are able to do it, which is harder than understanding it. 

So that's the point here, is we can reach seeing emptiness directly by this different method, because this different method trains us to utilize both outer and inner at the same time, even in the experience that seems only inner. Because when you combine the both, you've got another version of combining two things into one, which is what we're trying so desperately to do. Not subject-object, subject-object, but subject-object without a third thing.. Anyway, okay.

As we are aware of this winds moving my mind and my mind moving my winds, as we are doing our meditation practice, whatever it is, it helps prepare us for being able to go through this sequence of the dissolution into the clear light and the recognition then of our own body of suchness. And it's like, wait, you mean I have the Buddha body just by reaching clear light? It's like, no, but we reach our own clear light, our own emptiness, which we have now, don't we? So do we already have our body of suchness? And it makes a good exploration. If the body of suchness has to include the emptiness of our omniscience, I don't have a body of suchness yet, even as I'm resting in my clear light, because my mind wasn’t omniscient, isn’t omniscient. But it is the emptiness of my own mind now is, I have it now. And the mind that I have, when it's perceiving itself as omniscient, it's still this subject side's mind. So this subject side’s mind is emptiness now, I have it now. And I'll still have it when this subject side's mind is perceiving itself as a Buddha mind.

So how is my mind's emptiness now different than my mind's emptiness when I'm a Buddha? The emptiness is not different. Sheer absence of being anything but seeds ripening. The seeds ripening it is ripening it as something different.

But so do we have our Buddha nature now? Yes. 

Oh, that means I'm a little Buddha already. No.

I'm a little potential to be a Buddha already. Yes. And so are you and so's the worm and so's the demon. And so…, right? Any existing being, conscious being, emptiness is their Buddha nature.

So does a table have Buddha nature? Table has emptiness, but it doesn't have Buddha nature because it doesn't have a mind. Takes the mind. Our Buddha nature is the emptiness of our mind.

So my mind and your mind, they're one in the same thing, right? No.

So our emptinesses are different. Careful with the word, right? No, they're identical, but they're not one in the same.

Okay. All of this in this beautiful little verse about the dissolution without ever mentioning that word.

So let's do another meditation. And wait, wait, wait, I missed something. In this inner outer combination, Lama Christie said, as we understand better and better that our very ignorance is riding on those winds that are moving through our channels, that make up our channels, to add that piece to our meditation, makes it such that we are using our winds and mind relationship at the same time as doing the meditation that we've always done before.

So we do an emptiness meditation, trying to get to an understanding experience of the no self nature me. And when we do that understanding that that ignorance that I'm trying to overcome is simply a movement that the mind is riding on, somehow empowers my meditation to go deeper in impact for our reaching seeing emptiness directly, whether it's clear light or sutra way. So it's like, we know we have ignorance. And we know that that ignorance is coloring every seed. And so we know, well, then that ignorance is riding on a wind. We dissolve that wind or stop that wind from moving, the ignorance can't move either. The mind of ignorance moves on a wind that makes the ignorance be experienced. When you stop that wind, ignorance stops. When winds stop, is it at death or in deep meditation that triggers the same process. Okay, now let's do a sit.

Meditation 2: Gross and Subtle Body

[1:01:45] So settle your body.

Get it fixed, and then get your meditating mind fixed. Use your breath.

Intentionally shift your focus of attention to this thing we call our body. Get an overall sense of it and recognize that inside this physical body, there are these layers of tissue reaching into the inner organs. And all of it is interconnected with various systems, blood vessels, connective tissue, nerve tissue, all of it interconnected.

And recognize that on a more subtle level, more subtle than our physical eyes can look, there is a network of energy movement. It could be the acupuncture meridians. It could be other systems of the winds and flows and nadis. But this subtle gridwork of energy flow that branches out from one very subtle hub. And as those subtle channels radiate outwards, they branch and turn. And this thing our gross body is manifested by them, with its head and eyes and ears, arms and fingers.

And inside those channels is flowing this power, this movement upon which our awareness rides. It is vibrations, sound on some level, although not sound we hear with our ears, light on another level, although not light that we see with our eyes.

So imagine you can turn on this seventh sense. And you look into this body. And you actually see this hub of strands of light and vibration generating outward and branching and flowing and making those things you call legs and toes, arms and fingers, head and tongue and teeth and eyes.

And as you're exploring this subtle body, we recognize this subtle body is functioning just as well as that physical body made of more solid stuff.

So toggle between what your body looks like inside according to ordinary human understanding, and what this body looks like inside from our spiritual perspective. 

Establish which one seems more real to you.

One version of our body needs food to eat, to be sustained.

The other version needs some other kind of substance more subtle.

Which one is more real?

Which one is there, independent of your seeds ripening it to be there?

Go back to the physical body as the physical thing with the physical organs. Have you ever seen one directly? Your own?

Go to your energy body. Have you ever seen it directly your own?

So why is one more real than the other?

Which one is there, independent of our seeds ripening it to be there?

Feel that absence. Try to sit in it.

When something pulls you out of that emptiness, find it again with the toggle between the two bodies. Recognize them both as mental images ripening and find the one that exists independent of that.

Find it again, that absence. And equate that absence with the emptiness body you will have when you are Buddha.

Then love stirs forth, and the winds and mind moves again, and the channels flow outward. Making up a body. Flowing outward further, making up an outer body, an outer world. Flowing further, being what every being needs.

And dedicate these glimpses to quickly, quickly becoming one who can help that other stop their suffering forever. And then become aware of being here in your chair in this class. Come out when you're ready, take a stretch.

And we'll take our break. 

Recipe for Deep Meditation: Avoid Teaching

[1:22:50] So we move on to our Recipe for Deep Meditation text, for improving our skills in that deep meditation. And if we recall, we started out learning his chapter about what to give up. And surprisingly, what to give up was the work of demons. And there was that thing about blaming on a demon, and it's not my seeds anymore. Like, could that really be true? And then second part was like what to do. And surprisingly, the to do wasn't sit on your meditation cushion, add a minute every week. The to do was study, memorize, say your prayers, gather the merit, do the seven limbs, clean out. And then he said, and to get all that to work, make offerings to your holy beings. Right? I remember saying that. Did I say it?

Then the next chapter is what to stop sometimes called what to avoid. And here, Master Bodhibhadra, he says, Now, now that you have gathered all of our book knowledge, and our memorizations are firm, we even took our Maroke exam, like we are done studying all that stuff. He says the thing to avoid at that point is teaching it. And it's like, what? Because from the get go, Geshe Michael has been saying, you took ACI course 1? Go teach it to somebody else. But wait a minute. I haven't done course 2 yet. Doesn't matter. Teach them what you learned. Share what you learned. Right?

I quickly recognized, come on, I'm not teaching anybody anything, but I can share. Right? My first ones, I remember where David and I had the amazing opportunity to go to some of his holiness, the Dalai Lama's teachings and I just took notes like crazy. And then my friend who couldn't go, you know, would you share with me what he taught? And I said, yes, sit down. And I went through my notes with her. And then that just evolved and evolved, and somebody then was saying, Oh, you know, could you, could you teach something? They use the word teach. But in my mind, it was always, no, I have no business teaching it. I don't know this stuff. But I can share with you what's been shared with me. And, you know, Geshe-la wants us all to be doing that, because we see, we know what seeds that plants for our understanding. So we do want to be doing that.

But here, Master Bodhibhadra, he quotes from a Buddha’s Sutra that says, well, no, I have to take that back. It's not a Buddha’s Sutra. It's some Master that says,

The victors never mentioned that someone who has not achieved a state of clairvoyance would be of benefit to anybody teaching.

Meaning, if we're not clairvoyant, don't think you can benefit anybody by teaching them. And, you know, that makes me really nervous, because it's like I should push and right now. But remember, when we were talking about, who was it, Pa Dampa Sangye and Machik Labdrön. She's having all these troubles and she hears about this Lama that seems to have this great insight. So she goes to him. And, you know, before she even opens her mouth, he goes, Oh, you're having this, this, this, this and this is and this is what you have to do. And then she has the goodness to say, okay, instead of arguing with him, and then she gets these extraordinary results. So it's one thing to teach somebody, it's another to share what we've received. In Western language, we sometimes have this phrase, we say, I'm going to teach somebody a lesson. It usually has a negative connotation, you know, that it means I'm justifying doing something not so nice, in order for them to figure out something about their behavior that I somehow can't just say, I have to teach them a lesson in some way. And it's a little bit like that, right? Unless we really are in the position where they've asked us, Teach me, teach me, teach me, we have no business thinking that we're the one who should or could teach somebody a lesson. So in a sense, that's meaning this as well. When we are clairvoyant, that means we have reached this Siddhi, it's a meditation Siddhi power, that is such that by way of our powers of observation, and this goodness of all that meditative concentration, we somehow are able to interact with someone and know what they need.

You know, as Buddhas, we will be what they need. As clairvoyant, which is not omniscient, clairvoyance is not omniscience. Clairvoyance is this power, through which somehow we know something about somebody that we don't have any business knowing conventionally. And then we also know the karmic correlations well enough that we would feel compelled maybe to say, you know, it seems to me like you're in such and such a situation, and maybe if you did this, this, this, and this, it would help. And that would be teaching.

So it is true that the victors never said that somebody who's not clairvoyant could benefit anybody by teaching. But Geshe-la makes it very clear that it does not mean wait until you are omniscient before you try to teach anybody anything, because you will never reach omniscience if we're not trying to share the wisdoms with others, because that's where the seeds for wisdom comes from.

10 Steps of Cultivating a Bodhisattva

So Master Bodhibhadra is also helping us figure this out. And he goes to a sutra where what's being described is how a teacher cultivates a Bodhisattva along their path to their Buddhahood. So if there's a teacher and they have this new fresh student, and they recognize that that student is a candidate for Mahayana, then they start teaching them the basics and help cultivate that new student to growing their Bodhichitta, their Bodhichitta in the form of the wish, and helping them grasp the Bodhichitta in the form of action, and the ultimate Bodhichitta, which is the wisdom. And so then there's a stepwise process through which the teacher cultivates this baby Bodhisattva.

And his chapter about what to avoid, meaning avoid teaching, goes into these 10 steps, not in detail, but just reviews, because it shows us where the teaching that we're supposed to avoid until we have the qualifications actually falls in our 10 step process of cultivating the Bodhisattva. And interestingly, out of 10, it's number 3. When we reach the qualification to teach, it's only 3 out of 10 in the levels, not levels of Bodhisattva, but in this stepwise process of the teacher bringing the student up.

1. Get them have the seeds to make the Dharma work

[1:33:00] So the first one is called Inside Them, but meaning, get them to recite the prayers, memorize the prayers, take them through their ACI courses. So just what we were hearing before, to start our meditation career, study, study, study, memorize, memorize, memorize, serve, serve, serve, contemplate, contemplate, contemplate, make offerings to your Lamas, because that's what makes those things work.

2. Get them to dwell in isolation – Solitary Retreats

Secondly, when the student has cultivated all of that, you get them to dwell in isolation–are the words, meaning you get them to be enthused about going on retreat, solitary retreat, their own personal retreat. Often enough that they're getting familiar with what it is to be alone with their own mental afflictions with nobody else influencing us with who we are and what our qualities are. So when we are out amongst our world, we're with our best friend, and that's when we are best friend. And then we're with our auntie, and that's when we're niece. And then we're with grandma, and that's when we're grandkid, right? All these different identities are imposed upon us, we impose them upon us by way of the relationship with the person that is reinforcing that, both good relationships and unpleasant relationships. They're all our seeds ripening, and they're reinforced by our relationship with the other person. When we're all by ourselves, there's nobody to reinforce us. There's nobody to whom to be the wife. There's nobody to whom to be the best friend. There's just me and my mind, right? And in a Diamond Way retreat, there's the me and my mind and what I'm trying to imprint that mind with in this very intentional way. So we go into one of these retreats with some plan to imprint that mind in a special way that we would be too distracted to do in our outer life, but recognizing that part of the advantage of being in a solitary retreat is that we have this amazing opportunity to see what's really down inside there that we don't ordinarily do.
So here he doesn't mean, oh, push them into isolation and make them live in the forest until they're ready for step 3, but it does mean cultivate one's student to develop a lifestyle in which regular personal isolation retreats are a natural part of life, whether it's a weekend every quarter of the year, or builds up to a week or 10 days, or builds up to a month twice a year, totally up to the student and the teacher relationship. But the idea is actually take physical time, isolated.
And then that helps us reach that mental isolation that Master Shantideva talks about that is necessary for good meditation, not just the ability to isolate our minds while we're sitting on the cushion, but be able to isolate our aware-er even as we're going through our daily life so that we're taking on this more witness or attitude so that our reactability to things slows down so that we can more wisely choose our actions in responses to situations instead of react from automatic pilot.
So all of it comes together and this benefit of going into regular personal isolation gives us this time to reboot like we reboot our computers.

So second cultivating baby Bodhisattva is learn to do, teach them to do retreat, inspire them to do retreat.

3. Get them to teach

Third one is when they have their foundational information and they've got this retreat pattern and they recognize how that retreat work helps them. That's when you insist they become a teacher. So step three, get them to teach, find places where they get exposed as a teacher, urge them, urge them to teach. Teach in the sense of sharing what you've learned, make clear what scripture, what's personal experience–doesn't necessarily mean we're already at the point where we have the clairvoyance where we can look into somebody's karma and teach them a lesson. But maybe by that, this third level time to teach our study and our retreat has brought us to the concentration level where our clairvoyance opens up from time to time. Doesn't necessarily mean we have it all the time, but our powers of observation increase, our ability to see patterns and to deduce things logically will sometimes make us seem like we're clairvoyant to somebody else, but you're just connecting the dot and making a suggestion. And then it's like, wow, how'd you know that? Didn't, right? Just paying attention and our powers of concentration like that off the cushion increase when we're our powers of concentration on the cushion increases goes hand in hand. Okay.

So Geshe-la encouraging us all to share what we learn. We, like kind of have an obligation to do that. We don't have to say when we sign up for an ACI class, I promise to teach it, but it's kind of like implied because ACI program is a teacher training program. Remember? So, Ah, you've gone through it. Guess what? You're trained to be a teacher. And it's like, no, I'm not. No, I'm not. But yes, we are. And so Geshe-la is urging us to all teach. Lama Christie says, now we see what helps us fulfill that obligation: finish your ACI stuff, get good at retreat, learn about ourselves in retreat, and then have the confidence that by way of those two goodnesses seeds planted by doing them, we are in the position where we can and should be sharing as the one doing the sharing as opposed to, No, no, I don't know anything I can't possibly share. And it's the teachers, the one who's cultivating that new student as a teacher's job to help encourage them and hopefully bring together the circumstances where they have their opportunities and so forth.

Then once we have those three factors happening in the growth of our Bodhisattvahood, that's when we add these other factors, stages 4 through 10. It's supposed to feel encouraging that although he quoted a thing saying, don't think you can teach until you're clairvoyant. It's like at step three in our Bodhisattva training, be eager to share what you know, when you get a chance and dedicate it to actually having repeated opportunities to do that. So now let's go through the rest of these. Lama Christi went through really quickly.

4. Get them to build self-confidence

The fourth one is called help that fledgling Bodhisattva be content with themselves, and content with themselves here means help them gain the kind of self-confidence that comes from our study, our retreat practices, our sharing with others. All of that goodness grows into this kind of self-confidence, not arrogance, not ‘I know everything’, but this ability to be in front of other people and share something that's new and different, right? We have this confidence that we've worked with the methods and the wisdoms and have some ability to say, look, this has worked for me in these ways. And that's why I want to share it with you. Not because it's some theoretical thing, but it helped me to understand this.

5. Get them to cherish the moment

Then the fifth one is called urge them to cherish the moment. And when she went looking to see what that meant, she found two different explanations. One cherish the moment, I think we see it in Lojong training, is to recognize that in any moment I could be dead. So this moment I'm not dead. And so I want to use my moment to my greatest ability. And then the next moment too, if I didn't drop dead and then the next one too. So one is cherish the moment is an indicator of our awareness of our own impermanence.

And then cherish the moment also is apparently a code word for Shamatha. I don't get that. I wouldn't have gotten that on my own in a million years, but to reach Shamatha level meditation, single pointed concentration with those two blisses is what it is to cherish the moment. And the only thing I can put together would be, it's probably the closest time when we can be in a now moment unfold in either direction is when we're shamatha. So the implication there is, we do not need to be a Shamatha level meditator in order to teach because Shamatha comes at step 5 of our fledgling Bodhisattva and teaching is at step 3. Yay. Right? So if you think you can't teach because you're not a good enough meditator, sorry, if you finished your ACI. Okay.

6. Get them to a state of fearlessness

Cultivate in them a state of fearlessness, JIGME. This state of fearlessness means we have a knowledge of the marriage of karma and emptiness that's so strong that nothing can shake us from it. As our understanding and living according to karma and emptiness is still not this strong yet, things can happen in life that although we know what the words mean–karma and emptiness, and we have all this experience, life can get so painful or so hard that we just can't access that wisdom again. Grief is the main one that will do it. We can be a powerful practitioner and then someone really close to us dies suddenly, and you didn't have a chance to be involved and help them, et cetera. It's just like this sudden huge loss and our ability to apply karma and emptiness to cope with that apparently just the bottom drops out of it typically. It doesn't have to, but it's common. 

Suppose we're a really careful practitioner and we get in a nasty car accident, and then we're all broken up and it takes months of recovery to learn to walk again. The likelihood of being able to say, yeah, this is all my karma. I'm going to go help somebody else learn to walk again. It's just remote. No, do we still have it? Yes, but the ability to use it will shift. Why am I talking about that? Because there is a level of this knowledge that is at such a level that apparently none of those situations will rock us from the ability to still apply ourselves to it. What a relief that would be. They call it fearlessness. Not that you wouldn't be afraid if a big mugger is coming at you in the alley, but that you'd know what to do. You wouldn't act automatically from the fear, hurt them before they can hurt me. You would automatically act. You'd probably grab them and hug them instead of fighting. That strength of knowledge, it's called fearlessness.

They say it also is a level of confidence where we are eager, willing, and happy to take on anyone's questioning of our belief. Meaning ready and willing to debate. Our strength of knowledge is so powerful that we know that in our debate with somebody, in our argument with somebody, we understand how to carry on that discussion with them without feeling threatened or at a loss, or I'm insufficient in some way, but just able to help weave them through this investigation to bring themselves to their own new conclusion without feeling like, oh, I can't do that. I'm being threatened. Maybe I don't understand it well enough, to imagine being so free of that. Like you've seen Geshe-la explain a debate, like if we had his kind of wisdom, anything anybody throws at him, he's gonna curve it around and get that person to understand better. That kind of fearlessness.

Level 6, that kind of knowledge does not come at stage 3 Bodhisattva. We don't have to have that kind of strength of knowledge at fearlessness level before we can try to share with people what we've learned. Hooray, right?

7. Get them to understand the meaning

Then number seven… Can't read my own writing. Number seven, the words are: understand the meaning. And Lama Christie said this 7, 8, 9 and 10. We understand the words, but not sure we understand the meaning of the words starting with this one, understand the meaning. And it reminds me of some story. Oh gosh, I can't remember who, Naropa, wasn't it? He's the gatekeeper, and he's out for a walk and some hag shows up and, oh, he's reading a book. He's reading the Dura text or something. And this hag comes up and goes, hey, Sunny, like, what are you reading? And he goes, just the blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And she goes, oh, nice. Like she appears happy with him. And she says, oh, you know, do you understand the words? And he goes, of course, I understand the words. I'm the great Naropa. Isn't this Naropa, Coco? And then she goes, well, yeah, but Sunny, do you understand the meaning? And he goes, well, of course, I understand the meaning. I've been studying my whole lifetime. And she starts to wail and moan and cry. And she's so upset. And he goes, I'm so sorry. What did I say to upset you? And she said, well, you're this great Bodhisattva monk, yeah? You just lied to me. You know, monks that lie. Oh, my gosh. Right. You're going to burn in hell. And I'm like, that's why I'm crying for you. And he goes, what do you mean, I don't know the meaning? And she says, well, because you don't. And he says, well, if I don't, who does? And she goes, well, you need to meet my brother, the great Tilopa. And Naropa just has this epiphany. Ah, there's something I'm missing. Tilopa must be my Lama. I've got to go find Tilopa. And he ditches the whole Naropa University. And he goes on and we know the rest of that story. That it's like to know the meaning is too different to know the words. And if he didn't know the meaning, how can I possibly know the meaning? It has something to do with the emptiness of the words, doesn't it? And the emptiness of the meaning and the emptiness of my understanding of the meaning and the emptiness of all that business. So get them to understand the meaning.

8. Get them to follow the teachings

Eighth one, that was the eighth one. Get them to follow the teachings. Like what? Didn't we start following the teachings at step 1? So it's something deeper than to follow the teachings because to get here, we had to have been following the teachings all along, but something deeper.

9. Get them to remove ignorance

Help them to remove their dark ignorance. Right? We've been trying to do that all along. So it must have something to do with helping them cultivate their direct perception of emptiness or their clear light, depending on what practices they're doing. Like again, haven't, if we're their teacher coaxing them along this path, haven't we been trying to get them to see emptiness directly since the beginning? So I don't know how this is any different than that. Help them remove their dark ignorance.

10. Urge them to be molded into perfection

So when we recall the Bodhisattva activities, which is the six perfections, until we have wisdom, our six perfection activities, our six perfectionizers, because we do our acts of giving moral discipline, patience, in order to gather the goodness to deepen our meditation and to cultivate the direct perception of emptiness. And then with that now vastly changed state of mind, we continue to do our acts of giving now with the wisdom that at least fully believes in the emptiness of the three spheres–subject, object, interaction between–so that we are burning off our old seeds that are colored by ignorance and growing our wisdom in the sense of how directly we are perceiving things as seeds ripening and nothing but. So we're still gathering the goodness of the perfections, but now we're doing it with a mind that has wisdom instead of was growing wisdom.

So this one, whereas urge them to be molded into perfection, I wouldn't think you would need your teacher to be urging us to do that because we are already doing giving, moral discipline, not getting angry, having a good time, and we just continue to do all of that stuff. But now we're actually perfecting them. And when we have those perfected, all of them, I would wager that that's what it is to be Buddha when our giving is perfected. And that doesn't mean all people in poverty disappear because we've reached Buddhahood, but our love, compassion, wisdom is emanating as all those beings need. That doesn't mean the being sees it as receiving what they need because the sun shines, whether the flower is in the shade or in the sun. Your Buddha, you will emanate whether the other person sees that as what they need or not.

So those 10 steps, he says in your reading, he'll say,

And so keep your actions and your words in accordance with your mind.

That's what it is to cultivate our Bodhisattvahood. And then apparently when Buddha was teaching this, someone comes along and goes, Oh my gosh, I've ruined my practice. Now what should I do? And then the answer to that question is,

For children, the process of death causes grief.

It's a little weird, right? You ask this specific question and the person answers a different question. And the point here is that we might have the goodness to have access to the teachings at some point in our life. And then for whatever reason, we got distracted and then we find ourselves facing the end of our life and our mind goes back to the Lama and we call him up and we say, Oh Lama, precious Lama who loves me so much. The doctors say I've only got a month to live. What should I do? And Lama says, look, it's too late. They don't say that. What they say is, yeah, the process of death causes grief. Like, sorry, too late. And that's Master Bodhibhadra's point is that if we keep putting off our practices, we will find ourselves in situations where when we finally go, ee gads, I should be practicing, what should I do? It's too late to do anything.

Now, it's never too late to help that person, but for the person themselves, a month before being dead is not enough time to do much of significance. Plus if… Anyway.

So Lama Christi was talking to a bunch of very dedicated practitioners. It's fairly early in our career of our training and she was already encouraging us to get more serious. Those who hadn't finished their ACI courses, she was really pushing everybody to finish them. Those who weren't yet doing retreats, she was encouraging people to figure out how to get them done. We'd already received our initiations, but not any training really yet, but encouraging people to do their retreats and encouraging people to teach, to teach what they've learned so far, share what they've learned so far.

I will leave us with the same thing and we are going into a break. I'm sorry I couldn't finish this course. We have one more full class, but it'll make a nice synopsis as well. That will happen on September 9th, our next class. Meanwhile, I ask you please do some version of the two meditations that we did in any one of these classes. Always the one where you motivate to be on your cushion because of the other person's suffering, because we know it's our own seeds. Then pick one of the second halves and explore it through this break time, please. Working carefully on your focus, your clarity, your adjustment of focus and clarity for agitation and dullness. Try to track to see if you can find a specific antidote to your personal recurring theme that blocks your meditation. 

[Dedication]

Thank you again so much. I always learn stuff. Please come back. Thank you. Hope so. See you in September again. Thank you. See you in September. Thank you. Love you.