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Kopan
West —
NOVEMBER 2004
By Venerable René Feusi
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Establishing
a Daily Practice
[You may have a]
question about this retreat, or something that was said
that you don’t understand, or about how to put it into
practice. So
for those who want to establish a daily practice, I
advise you to start like what we did this morning.
I found it most beneficial to have a practice
where you work on three things together in a balanced
way: a part prayers, like we just did; a part
single-pointed concentration; and a part analytical
meditation.
PRAYERS
Prayers give you the
blessing. They open your heart.
They make that the meditation will work.
Without blessing, if you keep on studying and
meditating without doing prayers, you will feel that
your meditation dries up, that the softness is missing.
You have the words, the words are clear, you know it,
but somehow it doesn’t move your heart, it just moves
your head. So
then you will see that your spiritual practice can split
between your head and your heart.
Your head knows but your heart is not able to do.
The prayers should comprise of: prostration,
refuge, bodhicitta, the seven limb, mandala offering,
then request to the master, then receiving the blessing
by reciting the mantra.
So here during this
retreat it has been done with Shakyamuni Buddha, but you
can do it with Chenrezig, Tara, or Vajradhara or
whatever other practices or deities you have connection
with. And if you have a spiritual master, to increase
the fastness of the blessing, you would see the deity as
inseparable from your spiritual master, from all your
spiritual masters.
CALM
ABIDING
The second point to
work on is calm abiding, because without calm abiding
you have no penetration. Nothing sticks in your head. It
just stays at the surface. Even if you understand
emptiness correctly, you are not able to make any use of
it because your mind doesn’t penetrate and doesn’t
stay.
The same thing with
Bodhicitta--you might have some good heart, but if you
don’t have a certain level of concentration, you
cannot stay in that state. The mind is just too much
moving around all the time.
And then lam rim based
on the blessing and the working on calm abiding.
The two main meditations on the lam rim are the
two Bodhicittas, conventional and ultimate Bodhicitta--personally I do both together.
BODHICITTA
So I spend one or two
minutes on equanimity. I check my daily outlook, whether
I have that equanimity in the way I relate to others or
not. Then
the second point is quite easy once you have come to the
conclusion that you accept that all beings have been
your mother because you have had beginning-less lives.
Whether your mother or not, at least you have been
closely linked to all living beings, because the string
of consciousness is beginning-less.
So then all beings have been intimate to you,
very close to you. So you try to reflect on the beings
which have been the closest to you in this life, and
then you try to generalize or universalize that feeling
that all beings have been so dear to me.
You try in your
meditation to look at the beings around you, and whether
you can see them as dear, as that person you hold most
dear, and you try to transfer that feeling of dearness
onto all beings. Then
you try to develop concentration on that state, that all
beings have been so kind to me, while they have been our
mothers, while they were our partners, children, parents
and so forth. But think of it in a more general way to,
how thanks to all beings we can use roads, cars,
airplanes, eat food and so forth.
All these depend on the kindness indirectly from
so many other beings.
We can reflect on this. We think we are self made
and but actually, all what we are from the language we
speak, to the clothes we wear, the food we eat, whatever
we do or use in everyday life is always made by somebody
else. So to reflect on that also makes you remember
their kindness indirectly.
And then naturally what
arises in the heart is a desire to repay the kindness.
They do so much for me, how can I be so self absorbed?
So naturally you feel like repaying the kindness.
It’s like your mother, she does so much for
you, she asks you for a favor, of course you are going
to do it. It’s
like we have such a deep debt towards them, that if they
ask for a little something, you just do it —and it is
so easy to do. The more you contemplate the kindness of
others, you reach that state where it is natural to give
something back. It
is not an effort anymore or a ‘good deed’. It’s
completely natural.
It comes from the heart spontaneously.
And then on that base,
you meditate on the equality of self and others. Like
Shantideva says, we are all one being in reality.
We are all one universal family.
It’s like the different limbs are part of the
body, so we all are members of the human family, like
His Holiness the Dalai Lama would say. You try to expand
your heart and mind to include or to hold in your heart
all living beings. And you see that we are all equal in
wanting to be happy and in not wanting to suffer. There’s no difference at all. So then how can I be happy as
long as there is one being who’s suffering somewhere.
You try to stay in that state with calm abiding, where
your mind is so vast it includes all living beings. You
stay a little bit there, and you wish happiness for each
and every one, that they don’t have pain.
Then if you have time,
and you don’t need to do the analysis each time,
remember the point that the suffering experienced in the
world comes from my selfishness.
Basically you can bring it back to a selfish
attitude because all the non-virtuous afflictions are a
result of selfishness.
And that all the happiness in the world comes
from cherishing others. All the happiness! How nice the
planet would be if there were no killing, no stealing,
and no sexual misconduct and so forth. If everybody
would care for each other, the planet would be a
completely different place. So you can see it from
projecting out in the world that it’s exactly the same
for me. If I care and love people around me, whatever
action I do will be virtuous, so my own happiness will
be a result of that.
And then you can
reflect that it’s impossible to reach enlightenment
without bodhicitta.
If I cherish myself, I’m not even on the path
to enlightenment. No matter how many prayers I do, how
much meditation I do, if I don’t have the attitude
genuinely from the heart of cherishing others, I
haven’t yet entered the Mahayana path.
And then on that base
you do tong-len. You
can start by either taking or by giving. It doesn’t
matter. Usually
it is mentally easier to do the giving. You just expand
love, you wish them to be happy.
Love is a genuine deep-hearted feeling, how nice
it would be if they were happy.
Genuinely from your heart you wish everybody to
be happy. You
send rays of light out, and you touch the heart of
beings. If you put that in the context of tantra where
you are a deity, from your deity’s heart you touch all
beings’ hearts, and you transform them into whatever
deities you practice. So if you practice Shakyamuni
Buddha, you transform all beings into Shakyamuni Buddha. You transform their ordinary bodies into the deity body, into
Shakyamuni Buddha’s body. Basically, you give them
everything--from everyday happiness up to the highest
enlightenment. And as you visualize beings of light,
yourself as a being of light and others as beings of
light, it becomes very blissful, warm-hearted and full
of light. And
spontaneously you see the benefit of loving others in
your state of mind. Within that state of mind of wishing
all beings to be happy and giving them that happiness,
you experience such a well-being.
Then, while being in
that state, you reflect that superficially they don’t
have that happiness. They’re not enlightened because
of their ignorance, because of their believing in
inherent existence, in wrong self, and their mental
affliction and karma. So you take away their ignorance,
mental affliction and karma. And that gets destroyed.
But you don’t get weighted down by their negativity,
by their suffering. All these things get dissolved into
the light of your heart. It just adds fuel into your
love and compassion. So the more you take on the pain,
the negative karma, the mental affliction, the more it
increases your love and concern and compassion for them.
The more you inhale their problem, the brighter your
heart becomes, the more light you have. It’s like
adding gas onto the fire.
If you do that, you’ll feel that meditating on
tong-len is very pleasant. It’s very peaceful.
And then you aspire,
you generate the responsibility of actually doing that.
You think: ‘This is a nice meditation, but I’m just
sitting on my cushion. I’m not doing anything.
I’m just doing that in my mind.’ Do this to
make this strong determination:
I’m actually going to bring all beings to
enlightenment. And I’m going to liberate them from all
suffering. But
you realize that, at the moment, I’m not capable of
doing that because I am under the control of karma,
mental afflictions, and ignorance myself. So on that
base you generate the strong aspiration to reach
enlightenment for their sake. And like that you generate
Bodhicitta.
So the state of mind of
Bodhicitta has two aspects. Your mind is pervaded by
love and compassion for others, this genuine wish to
bring all being to enlightenment, and then realizing
that you are not capable of doing that because you are
under the control of karma, mental afflictions, and
ignorance. So you have these two states of mind
simultaneously in your mind. It is said that this wish
to reach enlightenment for all sentient beings is a
primary mind and that the love and compassion is a
secondary mind, or a companion mental factor in the
state of Bodhicitta.
If you do this
meditation regularly, at the beginning it takes quite a
while to actually induce each of these states of mind,
but once you are acquainted with them, then you just
[clicks fingers] say the outline and you are in that
state of mind. You
just [makes sounds--“chu, chu, chu”] and you are in
different state of mind.
You don’t need to think about it because you
have thought about it so much, just remembering it you
are in that state of mind.
And if you have concentration, you can just
sustain it, remember it. Just like you decide to stay
angry, you stay in equanimity, in love and compassion,
and you stay in these states of mind, one after another.
Right?
You stay in Bodhicitta.
RELATIVE
AND ULTIMATE BODHICITTA
Why did I speak about
Bodhicitta? Ah, yes. So the
main practice is the two Bodhicittas.
The other one is emptiness. So these solve all
problems, you take all problems at the root.
We should meditate on this everyday. If you do
meditation, you meditate on that everyday.
You spend at least ten minutes on each. And as
Atisha says in a small lojong prayer, while you are with
others, the main emphasis is love and compassion,
friendliness. If
you are alone, the main thing is emptiness. The main emphasis is more emptiness when you are alone. There
is no ‘I’.
LAMRIM
REALIZATION
And then if you see
that your mind gets lazy or starts getting involved in
trouble with people and things like that, then go back
to the basics like the precious human rebirth. It’s
good to have those in the background. It’s good to
recite a lam rim prayer every day which covers all the
points, like the Lines of Experience that I read.
Pabonkha Rinpoche says that the realization of precious
rebirth takes about two weeks to gain. Impermanence and
death takes a few weeks too.
Refuge takes also two weeks. Karma takes one or
two weeks. So it’s not that long to get so you don’t
keep on meditating on it in depth. But if you see that your understanding of it degenerates,
then you go back to it. You see when your mind becomes
completely involved in the world again, your mind
becomes completely worldly. And that emptiness and
Bodhicitta is not effective anymore to bring you out of
that state, then you go back to basics and say, “Look
what’s going on here? I have this precious life, and it’s not going to last very
long.” It’s
puts your priority again straight, to go back to
basics--the suffering nature of cyclic existence, oh,
I’m still there. No time to relax yet.
HOW
TO RELY ON SPIRITUAL TEACHER
So it depends on what
you want. If you want to get those realizations, the way you would do
it, you would do the prayer, and you would stick two
weeks on each topic.
So, for example, if you are doing retreat,
usually in the lam rim, you start with guru
devotion—that’s the first lam rim topic.
But as that topic is explained in the context of
tantra, it’s a bit difficult to start with. It’s
easy for people who have already found their spiritual
master with whom they have a good connection and are
already practicing tantra.
Then it makes sense. Otherwise it’s good to
read the topic once to get a general idea of what it’s
all about, then to reflect and meditate a little bit on
it, to know you have to have that realization at some
point, but you are not able to do it now because you
need a vajra master to do it properly. Because in that
context, in highest yoga tantra, in order for the master
to give you the fourth initiation, especially the fourth
one, he has to be a Buddha.
So any master who has given you the fourth
initiation of highest yoga tantra is a Buddha.
Or at least from your side, you have no choice
but to see him like that and to practice guru devotion
as if he were Buddha.
So now in the context
of lam rim, not the context of tantra, you don’t have
to see him as Buddha. You have to see him as a respected
master which has the bodhisattva qualities, which
basically refers to having good morality, having a
certain level of concentration, having a certain level
of wisdom, having more love for others than for himself,
and a certain level of equanimity - those are the basic
qualities of a Mahayana master. He should also have more
knowledge than the disciple. So if your master has those
qualities, on that basis you can start developing
respect and getting lessons like that. You don’t learn
something from somebody if you have no respect.
You know that from school.
If you have respect and admiration for your
teacher, the more you learn from the teacher, and the
more your own practice will progress.
LAMRIM
RETREATS
So if one does lam rim
retreat—I don’t know if it’s relevant to speak
about that here because few of you are living that
lifestyle, with maybe one or two exceptions. But maybe
sometime you’ll do it in the future, if you do, do
four sessions a day, each session exactly as we did this
session - a part prayer, a part meditation, a part lam
rim. The first session in the morning do guru devotion.
Precious human rebirth the second. The third you would
again do precious human rebirth.
And the fourth one you would do emptiness.
So with guru devotion,
you would stay on that for six months, at least, the
first session should always be guru devotion.
The second and third you would move through the
lam rim, so you would stay two weeks on precious human
rebirth. When
you feel you have really got it, you know, you have
really meditated on the eight freedoms, how rare it is
to get all these conditions together, how hard it is, or
what you can do with it. Once your mind is steeped in
this kind of understanding, your state of mind is,
‘wow, it’s so precious what I have’ then you move
to the next topic, impermanence.
You would stay on that topic again.
To realize that life is impermanent or that death
is certain is quite quick - in two or three days you get
it--that everybody has to die, that everything is going
to disappear, even this planet.
So you realize the certainty of death.
And then you go to the second point, that the
actual time of death is uncertain. So that takes more
work. You
need to spend two or three weeks on it, to really get it
down, that death is not in ten years, it’s not in
twenty years, as we all hope.
Death can really be at any moment.
Am I ready at any moment to die?
You start thinking, yes, I hope to live ten or
twenty years but it’s really not sure.
So death comes to you, today might be my last
day. You
live more in this perspective.
You have this long-term plan but you also live
each day as if it would be your last day.
If you live within the
realization of the lam rim - this
precious human rebirth, impermanence, that you can die
any day, then naturally your selfishness decreases.
Because if I am going to die today, all my the
persons that I am attached to, I won’t see again. It really decreases the mental afflictions. And
then you reach the third point, if I were to die,
what’s the use of my friends, my wealth, and even my
body? I
cannot take it with me.
The only thing I can take with me is my state of
mind. How
much attachment do I have?
How much detachment, how much love, how much
understanding of emptiness—that’s the only thing we
take.
And then it’s helpful
to spend a few days going over the lower realms, if you
don’t have a big problem with it. It’s very helpful.
It’s kind of like a cold shower. Yes, psychologically
it’s a cold shower. Wow, something amazing is
happening. Yes,
there’s no guarantee I won’t end up in something
like that. Myself
I like to reflect on the health on this planet - reading
the news, people get burned in the third degree, or
things like that, or being beheaded.
Thank you so much.
Some horrible thing happens. Or being
imprisoned/interrogated in Guantanamo Base. Gosh, you
don’t say, “Please give me the answer to my
question.” You know the torture a human being can
inflict on others is just mind-blowing.
So if you were on the recipient side of those
tortures. . . .
So then, simply the
health, what it is, it’s just that suffering, you
don’t die. The human being has an advantage-- if you
suffer too much, you collapse, you die. So the
consciousness cannot stay, but in hell you don’t have
a physical body so you don’t die. It’s a body of
energy that is created by your karma. So you suffer and
suffer and suffer and you don’t die. And if you die
your karma creates the body again. It’s like a mental
body, or an astral body or dream body.
The suffering lasts as long as the karma is not
finished. It’s not because you die and it’s finished
and you are born somewhere else.
I think it is good to
know the mental affliction linked to each action so that
you know that each time you are angry you actually book
a space down there.
Each time you become too obsessed about
something, you reserve a body in the ghost realm. And
each time you are stupid, kind of dull, your mind
unclear, foggy, you reserve a place as an animal.
And on that basis your refuge becomes very
strong. Then you spend a week or two weeks on refuge,
going through the outlines on the Buddha’s qualities.
You spend two weeks on that.
And then the refuge becomes very stable - the
qualities of Buddha, dharma, sangha.
Then you move on to
karma. Again you spend two or three weeks on karma, the
second and third session, until you feel you get all the
ins and outs about it. Then you move to the Four Noble
Truths, again two or three weeks. And then you stabilize
your renunciation, your aspiration to reach
enlightenment, again two to three weeks. And then you
move on to Bodhicitta.
So then you have the
first session in the morning which is guru devotion, the
second and third, Bodhicitta, and the last one,
emptiness. So you would do a glance meditation to
maintain the realizations you got on the other topics -
a glance meditation on precious human rebirth,
impermanence and death, suffering of lower realms,
refuge, karma, cyclic existence, and develop a
determination to be free.
You would spend 15 minutes on that just not to
lose the feeling of those state, but the main bulk would
be Bodhicitta, emptiness, and guru devotion. You’ll
reach a point where these are quite stable in your mind.
CALM-ABIDING
Then you reach a point
where you see that, if you want to have a realization at
a deeper level, you need to improve your concentration.
That’s where you start to put more attention on
Calm-abiding. Okay, Bodhicitta, you can get it a little
bit. But if you really want to feel the union with your
guru in a stable way, you need to have calm abiding to
be able to stay there.
And then Bodhicitta, if you want to have it in a
stable way in a break time, you need a certain level of
calm abiding. The same thing for emptiness, if you want
it to penetrate, to really remove mental afflictions,
you need to develop calm abiding. So at some point in
your retreat, after a few months, you start seeing, wow,
without calm abiding, you cannot go very far.
So you start working on pacing the mind on one
object for 10 minutes and when you are comfortable with
that you gradually extend to 15 minutes etc..
You should stop the session of calm-abiding
before you are exhausted, so that you have the wish to
come to it again.
If you have a deity
practice, you could use the deity’s body as an object
of calm-abiding. If
you go through the nine stages of calm-abiding,
—yourself as a deity.
It’s, how to say, it’s taking the result into
the path. You
imaging yourself as a Buddha so you transform actually
yourself into a Buddha, a body of bliss and void. You
meditate on that. You develop calm abiding on that.
In the Gelugpa
tradition this is how you would gain realization during
a retreat. That’s
how Choden Rinpoche, Kirti Tsenshab Rinpoche lived. Kirti Tsenshab Rinpoche spent seventeen years in retreat -
ten years or twelve of which doing this lam rim and a
few years on tantra. Because once you have the
realization of the lamrim, if you have guru devotion,
emptiness, and Bodhicitta, tantra is nothing.
With tantra, in three years you can get
enlightened it is said if you have the base of the
lam.rim realisation.
In three years you get it, but if you don’t
have the base, you can spend your whole life doing
visualizations and you get nothing. You lack the ground.
Basically you get imprints--all your sadhanas and
prayers. It’s just imprint for a next life.
It’s great to get imprints from tantra.
Or, if you are very fortunate to be reborn in the
pure lands. Choden Rinpoche also spent some twenty years
in retreat. Amy
asked Kirti Tsenshab Rinpoche, because she was quite
close to Rinpoche. She went out with Rinpoche a few
times to visit doctor and to have lunch so she asks him,
“You spent twenty years just on the lam rim, doing
these prayers, just the lam rim?”
And he said, “You do these meditations for a
while and suddenly your mind is blessed and moved by
these meditations and suddenly something click in your
mind and your realization comes very fast”.
You make very little progress for years and then
suddenly, because of the merit of doing these practices
and purifying and collecting merit, then suddenly these
things come together and very quickly you get high
realizations. So this is a little bit of the yogic path
in the Gelugpa tradition.
Student
question
Normally they say you
keep it, but from my experience you get a bit bored
going over the reasons.
So then you start doing it a little bit
different. Like
you start reciting prayers like different praises to the
guru. You would be a little bit more creative with your
guru devotion than just reading the lam rim part.
GURU
YOGA
Doing your Lama Chopa,
is actually guru devotion meditation because all the
main points are in there.
You don’t need to do necessarily a separate
meditation because in there the verses reflect on the
guru’s qualities, kindness and request of blessing, so
all the main point are covered.
The guru yoga of Lama
Tsong Khapa may be a little bit short because you
don’t have all the reasons a guru is a Buddha. In Lama
Chopa, many verses remind you to see the guru as a
Buddha, so doing the Lama Chopa would replace doing the
lam rim on guru devotion after a while because you have
all the points which remind you of that state of mind. Basically the essence of guru devotion is to see the guru as
Buddha, that you have no doubt that the guru is Buddha.
It means he is here not just when you are in his
presence. He is Buddha even if you are in your room, the
Buddha, the guru, is right here in front of you because
he has the omniscient mind.
Where there is the omniscient mind, there is the
sambhogakaya from your guru’s side.
His Holiness the Dalai Lama is right there in
front of you in your room even though he might be in
India and very busy. It you have that realization that
the guru is Buddha, then your guru is there right where
you are. So that’s the first realization that you get
there. And
then the second is to remember his kindness.
You see from the point you enter the path, even
in previous lives, the dharmakaya, the Buddha is what
made you create the virtue to have the special human
rebirth in this life.
And in the life he created the condition for you
to meet the dharma, give you all the teachings and
initiations and things like that.
Basically he gave you the whole path to
enlightenment. So you try to remember his kindness like
that. He gives you worldly happiness, he gives you
liberation, and he gives you enlightenment. So by
thinking about his qualities, and then his kindness,
then you have the right state of mind of having proper
devotion. And
then on that base the blessing is very strong. They say
how much blessing you receive is dependent upon how much
devotion you have. So the more respect and devotion you
have for your teacher, the more blessing you get from
that teacher. It’s like that.
I think we all experience that in small ways,
some privileged moment in our lives.
So there you just try to make it stable.
And then, especially,
as long as we have an ordinary mind, which is not stable
in realization of emptiness, we always project forth.
It’s natural. We always have doubts, seeing the
guru as ordinary, so then one has to work with that in
the outline of the lam rim—what I see is not
necessarily true or maybe he manifests in such a way
that for some reason I don’t know.
You try to work in ways so this doubting mind
isn’t an obstacle to your devotion.
That’s a very key point.
And maybe the Buddhas manifest in such a way just
to purify my mind and mental obscurations - even if he
scolds you. Different stories are given as exemple- like
the guy who himself was a teacher, with his close
student and each time they went to visit the guru of
that guru, the teacher
got scolded by his own master.
“You are so stupid.
You are so silly.” He was always criticized. So
each time they went to see his guru he was criticized.
So then the disciple asks his guru, “So why do
you keep on going to visit him?
Each time he scolds you. He criticizes you.
Everything you do is wrong.
Why keep on going to see him? You are a great
teacher yourself. Why do you need that?”
He replied to his disciple, “Well, don’t
think like that. Actually
the guru is so kind to me. Each time I go to visit him
it’s like a hundred thousand prostrations because he
purifies my mind. Each time he scolds me, each time he
criticizes me, it’s the greatest purification.
You see, that’s the
right attitude, because that’s the way that criticism
comes from. It’s karma ripening. If you haven’t
created the cause, it wouldn’t happen.
But if you are able to take it, because it comes
from your guru and because you have the right attitude
of devotion and respect, that criticism becomes the
greatest purification.
Those states of mind
become firm in your mind when you have the realizations
of guru devotion. By meditating on it, it becomes firm
in your mind. And then your spiritual path becomes very
fast because the main interference to spiritual progress
is lack of devotion, or mistaken devotion, mistaken
practice with a guru. That’s the biggest obstacle for
spiritual realization.
[Paraphrased comment
from a retreat participant: In certain cultures, guru
devotion would be hard and I think it would be hard in
our culture.]
Yes, it’s the most
difficult one. That’s why you don’t have it in the book.
Because to us for now, to start there would freak
people out. Like
His Holiness says, the best way to start in Buddhism is
with the Four Noble Truths. Because that’s fact.
So you start there. And then you respect the
teacher as a kind person.
He has more knowledge than you.
And you can see he has a kind heart. Or you can
see his morality, his concentration and wisdom there,
and he knows a little bit more than you.
That’s feasible. To see the guru as Buddha, is really in the context of tantra.
It’s where it becomes indispensable.
Any questions about that?
[Question: How to do if
one hasn’t time to do four sessions?.]
So normally that’s if
you are able to do four sessions a day. That’s how it
is explained, at the end of Liberation, Pabongka
Rinpoche also clarify a little bit, the signs of
realization of the different points of the lam rim.
So if you would do
three sessions a day, if you only manage to do three
sessions, let’s say you manage to do two in the
morning and one at night, you would do guru devotion,
moving to the lam rim in the second, and emptiness for
the last one at night.
And then if you do only
two sessions a day, one in the morning and one at night,
you would do guru devotion in the morning and the rest,
going gradually through the lam rim at night. You know, precious rebirth, just moving through it like that.
And if you only do just
one session a day--[hearty laugh!]. . . .
My feeling is that if you do half hour, I would
do as if three sessions.
I would do ten minutes, ten minutes, and ten
minutes, to work on all three.
EMPTINESS
They say emptiness is
very important. My
feeling is that we should read something everyday about
emptiness. Because
if for a while you don’t read about emptiness, your
understanding about it becomes narrower and narrower.
If you keep on reading about it, your mind
becomes sharper and clearer about it.
So the more you read about it, not necessarily
always the Prasangika view, but sometimes different
schools, it helps.
Your mind becomes more sharp, clearer.
If you know the reasoning and you say, “I know
it now,” and you just relax in that, you’ll see that
your understanding just becomes smaller, smaller,
smaller. You become less precise or less sharp.
At least I see myself,
sometimes I put more emphasis on it.
I read a little bit everyday on emptiness, and I
get very sharp, very clear about it. And if I don’t have time, I just do Om Shababa ,.., like
that and I stay in emptiness, and, after a few weeks of
doing that, my emptiness becomes very simple. [laughs].
So also you have to see that in the lam rim
meditation you have three stages. How to say it? Lam rim
meditation you have different ways.
You have the glance meditation. Where you just go
over it. You
read the points, the outline. You know, precious human
rebirth, the eight freedoms, and what you can do with
it, and how hard it is to get and things like that.
That’s glance meditation.
Then you have the
actual analytical meditation.
Where actually you go into it.
You just read one point and you reflect on it
experientially. Then
you try to experience, to live that point of the lam rim
- I have the freedom of not being born in hell. So you
imagine what it would like in hell and how it would be
impossible to practice the dharma.
And you say, I’m free of that problem.
Or you say, I’m not a cripple. Or I’m not
blind. Or,
I’m not stupid. You
know, some people’s minds are so stupid that they
cannot get it. Or,
in this life, you become a terrorist. That’s your
spiritual path. That’s
having a wrong view. So we don’t have this wrong view.
We’re not on a outer jihad. We are not
completely led astray by some worldly passion, like
becoming some big businessman or politician.
We are not carried away by some huge stuff that
prevents us from any spiritual practice.
Imagine what it would be like.
For me, I imagine myself as a soccer player.
[laughs] Yes,
it is a good meditation.
Like Beckam. [laughs] How hard it would be to
practice dharma. You
have to stay on top in that sport.
You have to work so hard, training everyday, and
then you have all this fame business, to give autographs
to people. Also to go to TV interviews, journalists
running after you, or watching into your home, trying to
take pictures of you and your wife.
You wouldn’t have any private life. You are
bothered all the time.
On top of that your reputation.
It’s hard to practice.
So like that you realize, in this life I’m free
of that. That’s
nice. So that’s meditation analytically.
DIFFERENT
TYPE OF LAMRIM REALIZATION
So to get the
experience, in an analytical you have to go quite deep,
so that’s called the effortful realization of that
point of the lam rim.
You get to that state of mind by meditating on
each point by going into it - like how nice it is to be
free. That’s
the effortful realization.
And if you do that for two or three weeks, then
you go to the spontaneous level.
Maybe reading the
outlines, you go to the experience of that outline, like
that. So that would be considered a realization of that
point of the lam rim - when you have the effortless
realization of that point that you only get after going
through the effortful way.
So often people do only glance meditation of the
lam rim and they think they got the experience of the
lam rim. But they never even started the path. They have
read the lam rim. They know it by heart. But they haven’t entered the path of the lam rim yet.
Because you have to go through the effortful
stage. You
put yourself in each stage, you live it, and then from
inner experience, you come to that state of mind.
Otherwise it’s just learning it intellectually.
You hear what the lam rim topic is, you know
about it in a dualistic way. Whereas the other one,
it’s an inner experience.
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