Lam Rim 04

This is advertised as an energy retreat and the idea was, we traveled constantly. We just got back from John's house, we got Carol's house, we got back from Kiev a couple days ago in Bulgaria.Then before that some foreign country called Michigan and before that, Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver, and Paris. 

It was kind of a long trip. Lots of people come up to me. I see people during the breaks. We give programs and then during the intermissions I encourage people to come ask me questions. So I meet thousands of people from all over the world in any given year, and I listen to their needs.

A lot of them ask me about energy. They say, I don't have energy. I feel tired all the time, or I can't get things done. It seems to fall into those two kinds of categories.

One is they don't feel like they have energy and they feel tired. 

The other category which is similar is they feel like they can't finish anything. They start projects and they're not able to finish them. 

Those two things. 

Maybe it's 25% in the whole world, like anywhere: Asia, South America, Europe, Eastern Europe, North America. They all have the same thing. They say, I don't have energy.

On an apparent level it can be traced to eating poorly, or eating too much, or not resting properly, or not exercising properly, or the accumulation of toxins in the body.

Those are all manifestations of deeper causes, and the deeper causes are karma. 

What I thought during this retreat was we would work on both, the apparent causes and the karma of not having enough energy.

Then there's just a natural loss of energy as you get older.

I thought we could work on those three things. 

One is people have sort of a, not due to aging, but there's some physical problem or mental problem and then they feel tired all the time, or they don't feel excited or what do you call it, happy. My mom's name was Elizabeth, but everybody called her Bunky and since she was a little child. It meant like perky, she was bunky.

Sometimes we don't feel bunky, and sometimes we feel like we can't get things done. 

Then with some people it's just age. You're getting older and you're slowing down. 

Apparent causes to gain energy 

I thought in this retreat we could talk about that. We could work on the apparent causes. So we'll have programs on about how to eat better. You can actually try some new foods optionally. Anatole is going to teach us how to eat better and sort of experimental foods in a way that I believe that the food that my parents taught me to eat, now having been through a long life, I realized that a lot of the food that they taught me to eat is not good for you at all. It would steal your energy and make you dull and hurt other people, creatures. Basically all the food I was taught to eat when I was young is somehow there's a problem in it.

But foods are very hard to change.

You can almost tell where a person's ancestry is by seeing what they enjoy to eat. You can say, oh, you're from German stock. I'm some German stock. We like milk and potatoes and wheat, that doesn't change. You keep eating the same foods that your ancestors ate normally and it takes a big effort to break out of that and eat something that’s just purely on the basis that it's logical to eat it good for you. 

It takes a lot of strength to break out of your ancestral eating habits. Like they came from dinosaur days when they were killing dinosaurs and eating them. It takes a big effort to break out of it.

Anatole is going to help us with that. 

As far as flushing toxins out of your body, Mercedes has been working on that in the last year a lot and trying different things I thought we could try. These are all optional. If you want to try a flush of your kidney. We were going to do a liver flush, which is more complicated, but there aren't enough toilets here and it would cause some problems of urgent fight over ton of balls.

So we're going to do something a little softer. But she'll teach you how to do a more deep flush when you get home. 

I have watched her on the tours traveling, try to do these flushes and with very interesting results like big jars of rocks coming up. Everyone I know who has done the flush has this strange desire to keep their stones and show them to everybody. Like David and Sharon from Jeramukti, they keep it in their fridge, in their freezer and they show it to everyone that comes to their house and it's a big jar of stones that came out of their body. Eventually these would make you sick and they would steal your energy. I heard that his holiness had a gallbladder removed recently and he said he felt much more energy, and he taught for 10 days straight in Washington DC recently for the first time in a long time.

He said he just got his everything. 

Probably we don't want to wait until you have to take out your whole gallbladder, you could just flush it before that. 

Adriana's going to teach us. There's a whole thing that you can improve your energy just by sitting correctly and light bandas, proper posture, walking correctly, standing correctly and moving correctly. She's going to have a special, I call those optional energy breaks. They will have special programs and then you can come or you can not come. If you don't want to come, you can just go for a walk or do whatever you like. You can still sign up for all those things. 

That's (?). She's the CEO of the Diamond Cutter Institute. She worked for Hilton Hotels before that she was an executive, and for ABC. That's why I stole her for DCI and she's really good at time management. She has three kids if you count her husband, and she's just really good at it. 

She's going to help us with sort of project management of your time. 

There'll be a special program that she's going to lead about managing your time. She's just very successful, she's a CEO of a major company. She has two children. Her husband runs some radio stations for clear channel, and they're busy. Then they still do a lot of dharma work. She's very active in the church also. So it's not just one religion but two religions she's running along with the kids. 

I just thought that of all the people I know, she's handling intense personal time pressure gracefully and successfully. So I thought it would be nice to have her help us with that. 

Those are four different things. Then the yoga teacher, the yoga teachers have been asked to give us yoga series which stimulate your energy. 

Ultimate causes to gain energy 

All of them don't matter, they don't work.

They're like aspirin.

They don't have any power to do anything unless you plant the seeds. 

If you plant the proper seeds, then the juice fast is going to help you, the yoga is going to help you, time management will work and the food that you learn to eat will all work.

But by themselves, none of them has any power at all. They don't do anything.

Most of you have learned that. 

The evidence is that not everybody who drinks that juice has any energy.

Some people just push them to sleep. I drink coffee and it puts me to sleep.

It's not the thing, the thing doesn't have any power in it. That's what emptiness means. There's nothing in the juice, or there's nothing in the kidney flush, or there's nothing in that can help you. I know lots of people who slouch who have lots of good energy and very creative slouchers.

It's none of the above.

If you create the seeds, the proper seeds, then all of these things will work for you.

If you don't create the seeds then you might get sick from the liver flush.

In this retreat we're going to teach the techniques of taking care of your body and giving you more energy and having more energy, but then we're also going to spend a lot of time on creating the seeds that make it work for you.

I encourage you to think like that.

The meditations that we'll do and the teachings that we'll go through will help you. They will instruct you how to plant the proper seeds to have energy.

Then, if you do the yoga, and you take the flush, and you eat the kale or whatever gross thing, it'll give you energy. 

If you don't learn the meditations and you don't create the karma, then they won't do anything, you won't do them and they won't work.

I would like you to concentrate on two main kinds of karma to have energy.

One is self-evident for anyone who has studied more than 10 minutes, which is that we should be wishing energy on others. We should be working to provide energy to others. 

All the yoga teachers here, all the people doing the energy breaks, all the people organize the retreat, they are already creating karmic seeds for their own energy by creating an energy retreat for us. 

We'll be doing a lot of meditations, like Tonglen, it‘s a meditation based on energy and you'll be sending energy to someone you know who doesn't have energy. 

We'll spend a lot of time on that.

But there's another way to get energy, which is almost a tantric approach, which is your Lama. To ask your Lama for energy. 

Especially in Tantra, just to collect the karmic seed for energy wouldn't be only providing energy to others. It would also be properly and wisely requesting your own heart Lama, whoever that is. Everybody here has their own heart Lama. Hopefully.

If you don't have, then imagine them. Like the best one you can imagine. 

Then one of the best ways to create seeds for energy would be, is just to ask your teacher.

In the yoga Sutra there are these whole chapters about what to do and then he says, Or you can just ask your teacher. It's 210 verses. 209 of them are, Do all this stuff. And then he says in one, Or you could just ask your teacher.

Tonight we're going straight to the most effective way to get energy, which is ask your teacher for energy. 

During this prayer in which we are making offerings to our heart Lama.

You picture your own heart Lama, whoever it is. If you do not have a heart Lama, picture an idealized heart Lama. It could be Jesus or whoever. Everyone's different. 

During this ritual we'll start the process of getting more energy, of creating karmic seeds for more energy by asking for energy from our heart Lama. 

During this ritual, as we are bribing them, we are offering chips and coconut cookies and real irresistible things. We are offering all these things to the Lamas, to your heart teacher.

As we offer it in your mind, see them in your mind and then offer them all this cool stuff and see the energy pouring out of them into your heart.

That's all tonight.

The exercise is that you can plant seeds for more energy simply by asking. The more delusional it is the better.

If you think there's just sitting outside the window there about to pop their head up, because you asked them to come from Ukraine or wherever they are. The more you believe in them, then the more energy seeds you will get. Then the whole week will change your life. If you don't create the seeds then the whole week will just change your (?) movements. 

It's your job to plant seeds. I can't do it for you. I can talk, I like to talk, but it's you.

This next hour and a half, don't waste your time. Don't space out. I know you're tired, you flew in from Hong Kong or whatever. Maybe you're on a little surge right now, maybe halfway through it'll hit you. But just hang in there and don't waste the time. 

People are notorious for wasted time during rituals. They think about anything else but the ritual.

I can do the whole Vajrayogini Sadhana without thinking about it once. I did it on the bus for 15 years without thinking about it. It's amazing. 

You don't have to focus so much on the words. The main thing is focus on your heart teacher and ask them for energy, for more energy to do good things to help people.

I want more energy. I want to get up in the morning bursting with energy and I want to be able to do all the cool things I want to do. I don't want to sit there and I'm tired. I don't want to sit there and I can't have a big project to do.

Like Rob Haggerty has to build a Spanish mission on 10 acres in Glendale and you just think, Give me the energy. Ask your Lama to give you the energy. 

You need some source. You can't do it on your own. Ask for energy.

Tonight, don't waste your time doing this ritual. Don't just hope for the, we're going to give you the food, don't worry about it. You don't have to think about it. Just ask for energy and see energy flowing into you. These are the seeds. Then the whole week all the stuff we do will work.

Normally you don't recite the stuff in the italics, but I think it's fun. Because there are some instructions in there, here and there, and there's some nice quotations. 

I figure we'll just kind of be dumb and read the instructions out loud together. 

We are going to do this together. Probably at some point I'll try to stop you and we'll eat. 

By the way, this is a special ritual. You're allowed to have tantric substances even if you don't have an empowerment. Only this ritual in Tibet, you're allowed to have tantric substances during the ritual. 

The very first day I met my first Tibetan Lama, they did the Lama Chupa.

I got off the bus in Dharamsala and I walked into Lama Chupa, and I had no idea what was going on.

But it's open to everybody and then you take some small tantric substances.

One of them is meat. The idea of taking the meat is, the production of meat, the making of meat is one of the greatest shames of our society. Maybe the greatest.

What's a shame? It's like something we should be ashamed of that it exists. 

That's the customer of killing another race of beings even exists.

In that sense we are savages. We don't need to eat meat. There's no need to. 

We have taken the most pleasant gentle animals and bred the gentleness into them so that we can kill them for their flesh. Which is pretty much the same as eating your mother's fingers or something like that. It's one step removed from murdering your own mother and eating her in flesh.

In later days people will see that. Right now it's just a huge source of misery for tens of thousands of creatures every day. That substances are stained with that violence. You can't eat it without…

We take a little bit of it to remember our shame, like that. We are ashamed that that's still going on. That's the purpose of it.

Think about it.

We take it in anticipation of the day when you cannot buy it legally. It will come, the day will come. In the meantime we're just sort of trying to apologize for that. 

Then the wine, alcohol is a useless is one of the most useless things in the world. It has harmed hundreds of millions of people. Both my parents were killed by alcohol. It's useless, expensive, it wastes a lot of the grain production of the world. It just kills people, it hurts people. 

It's the same thing. We take it in anticipation of the day when there's no demand for it and people stop making it.

Those are the meaning of the substances for this ritual. 

Ready? We'll just go through at some point we have to stop and take the substances. Custom (is) to take the substances with your wedding finger of your left hand, and take them like that and then you bite half of it and you leave half of it. You hold it in your right hand and then somebody will come around with a bowl and you throw the leftovers into the bowl.

You'll get a cookie, you'll get a piece of meat. The wine, you just touch your wedding finger into it and you just touch some on your tongue.

At the end we take all of the extra pieces.

When you get a cookie, you break it in half and you eat half of it. You take it with your wedding finger, you break it in half, you eat half and then you save half.

Then they'll come around with a bowl and throw it into the bowl. That is offered to the spirits of this place. Last year they were a little intractable and we softened them up. But it's the hard (wheat?).

We put the bowl out to stop the demons and other similar spirits.

Lama Chupa

(24:07) 

Herein is found The Rite for the Offering to Lamas.

In the language of India, this work is called the Guru Pujasya Kalpa Nama. In Tibetan, it is called the Lama Chupay Choga. And in English it's called the Rite for the Offering to Lamas.

I bow to the blessed feet of my holy Lamas, matchless in Their kindness. And I come to Them for shelter. Out of Your great love, take me into your care—in every moment, and wherever I may be.

I bow in devotion to the lotus feet 

Of the One Who Has the Diamond:

A wish-fulfilling gem who grants 

The highest of all my many dreams.

If I surrender myself to You 

Then I know I shall be granted 

In but a single moment of time

The ecstasy of the three holy forms,

And all the goals that are shared.

This is the highest means of all

For disciples of good fortune

To reach all that is good,

To reach all happiness;

Nothing can compare to it.

This is a string of lovely blooms

That I carry to you from the lotus garden

Of the open and secret teachings,

And the highest of advices—

Come don this jeweled necklace.

There is but one thing which is the very foundation for all the wondrous things that will ever come to those  who  seek  for  freedom.  It  is  the  very  source from which each and every good thing springs forth. It  is  the  very  root  of  infinite  attainments—both those which are supreme, and those which are held in  common.  It  is  an  instruction  which  combines every  crucial  point  found  in  all  the  spiritual advices  put  into  practice  by  deep  practitioners  of the ultimate path.

It is the  teaching upon how to take oneself, in the proper way, to a spiritual Friend who shows to us, perfectly,  the  path.  For  all  these  goals  rely  upon Them.

As the Blue Annals puts it,

The single door which includes within it 

All the advices of the spirit

Is never giving up our spiritual Friend.

This is the mine of riches

That produces every fine quality: 

Faith, the Wish for Buddhahood,

And all the rest as well.

The all-knowing Lord has said as well,

See that the very root

For setting in motion the forces

That will bring to you every good thing

In this life and those beyond it

Is to take yourself, and properly, 

To  a  supreme  spiritual  guide,

Striving to serve Them in both 

Your thoughts and actions too.

Never give Them up then, 

Even if it should cost you your life;

Please Them with the offering

Of carrying out Their every instruction.

This is what I, in my deep practice, 

Have carried out myself; 

Those of you who hope for freedom

Should seek to do the same.

He also spoke that

The very root for every fine quality,

Of every good and virtuous thing

In the world and beyond it too,

Is your Lord Lama, the One

Who showers you with Their kindness.

The Fifty Verses on Lamas says as well,

Grasp the fact that the Keeper 

Of the Diamond himself has said

That every attainment flows 

From your spiritual Master. 

Please Them completely then 

With everything you possess.

The Brief Text of the Jewel of Virtues puts it this way:

Those who are true disciples,

Who show honor to their Lamas,

Surrender themselves forever

To Lamas who are Masters.

Why is it that they do so? 

Because it’s from the likes of these

That they win the qualities

Possessed by a Master themselves; 

And it’s from Teachers like these

That they learn the perfection of wisdom.

The victorious Buddhas themselves, 

Who possess all the highest of virtues,

Have stated that all the qualities 

Of an Enlightened Being

Depend upon your spiritual Friend.

We can say then that—as an object with whom we 

can collect good karma and clean away obstacles— 

our  Diamond  Master  is  superior  even  to  all  the 

Buddhas there are.  As the Source of Vows puts it,

They are the Conquering Buddha 

Who has appeared all on Their own;

They are the one and only

God above all gods.

And our Diamond Master is superior

Even to all of these,

For They are the one who grants us

Spiritual advices.

It is for this reason then that undertaking a deep practice  of  the  Lama—a  version  of  this  practice which includes all the crucial points of the path— is the highest way of getting the very essence out of the leisure and opportunity  we have found in this  life.  As  such,  we  should  do  this  practice  as follows.

Begin  then  by  putting  your  mind  into  an exceptional  state  of  virtue.  Before  you  do Che sung so.) anything else, meditate upon taking shelter, and the Wish for enlightenment, and the four infinite

thoughts.

Start  off  then  with  a  deep  practice  where  you  see yourself as a god among gods—it could for example be any one of the three Angels of the Secret Collection, Highest  Bliss,  or  the  Lord  of  Terror.  Now,  from your holy body, fly forth rays of light. They go and clean every world, and every being that lives upon every world, of each and every impurity. Watch as each of the worlds becomes a celestial mansion, and all  the  beings  become  man  and  woman  Angels—a veritable universe of total purity.

(30:40) Geshe Michael:

Imagine that light is coming out of your heart and that you are making this world pure. All the worlds around, all the stars you can see.

Then ask your teacher, your own heart teacher for the energy to make all worlds good. Ask them for that level of energy.

(31:45) Everyone

Now bless the inner offering, and the substances of offering,  in  accordance  with  any  of  the  traditional rituals  of  the  unsurpassed  group  of  the  secret teachings.

To  sum  these  rituals,  we  first  repeat,  three  times, the  sacred  syllables  of  om,  ah,  and  hung.  With this,  the  offerings  become—in  their  essence— wisdom  itself.  In  their  outer  form  they  assume the  appearance  of  the  inner  offering,  or  that  of  the individual substances of offering. As for what they do,  they  act  to  trigger  an  extraordinary  form  of the wisdom of bliss and voidness, by acting as the objects of the six sense organs.

Watch  now  as  the  entire  surface  of  the  earth,  and entire sky overhead—all of space itself—are gradually covered by a massive cloud of offerings: outer offerings, inner offerings, and secret offerings; an inconceivable quantity  of  the  substances  of  pledge,  and  pleasing parks of creatures.

With this we have reached the main part of the ritual, which is more easily performed if we recite it in verses of poetry. And so you should speak out the following lines,  without  allowing  yourself  to  be  distracted  in any way.  Go through the ceremony even as you reflect upon its meaning.

The broad highway of the gods is indivisible bliss and void,

Covered now with Samanta Bhadra’s offering cloud.

Within it stands a tree which grants a thousand wishes,

Lovely with its leaves and flowers and fruit. 

Atop the tree is a throne of sparkling jewels, held aloft by lions,

Set with full cushions of lotus, sun, and moon. 

And upon them sits my Heart Lama, who has paid me all

Three kinds of kindness, the essence of all the

Buddhas.

[Note: In the case that our Root Lama is female, the following lines may be adjusted accordingly.]

My Lama is in the form here of a monk in the golden robes,

With a single face and two arms, a smile shining forth.

His right hand is in the gesture of teaching Dharma; 

His left is in the gesture of meditation, and in it He holds

A sage’s bowl full of deathless nectar. 

He wears the triple,

Of saffron, and the golden hat of a sage

adorns His holy head.

(32:22) Geshe Michael:

The next section gives an alternate way of visualizing the number. I personally would just visualize my own heart Lama in their usual clothes. But that's the point of why they have two options. For me they're just in jeans and whatever.

(34:48) Everyone:

If  you  feel  it  fits  better  at  the  moment,  you  can instead recite the following lines, after “the essence of all the Buddhas”:

My Lama is in the form here

of the Lord of the Secret World, the King,

The Keeper of the Diamond, sapphire colored,

with one face and two arms.

In His hands He holds a diamond and bell, 

and embraces the Queen 

Of the Empty Realm, enjoying His play in

simultaneous bliss and void.

He wears jewel ornaments

of a hundred different fashions,

And He is clothed in the silken raiment

worn by the gods themselves.

Whichever  of  the  two  you  decide  to  use,  continue

with the following— 

His body is adorned with the marks and signs of an Enlightened Being, 

And He sits in the midst of a thousand shining rainbow rays, in all five hues.

His legs are crossed in the lotus posture,

and the five parts of His being

Are totally pure—

the five Buddhas who have Gone to Bliss.

The four elements of His body are the four 

Holy Women; His doors of sense,

And His tendons and joints and ligaments,

are actual bodhisattvas.

The pores of His skin are the 21,000 destroyers of the enemy, 

And His limbs no less than the Lord of the Angels Fierce.

The rays of light are the protectors of the directions,

Spirits of harm, secret, the worldly provide His platform.

Surrounding Him are rows of my direct and lineage Lamas

And masses of close Angels, Angels of the secret world.

He sits circled by a sea of Buddhas and bodhisattvas,

Warriors and Their Angels, and the protectors of the word—

All marked by the triple diamond of the three doors of expression. 

And then from the letters hung fly rays of light in the shape of hooks,

Beckoning Beings of Wisdom from the Land of Reality,

Drawing Them in to melt indivisibly, turning then perfectly firm.

Come my root and lineage Lamas,

From the past and present and the future,

True source of perfect happiness and goodness,

Together with the company 

Of close Angels and the Three Supreme, 

Warriors and Their Angels,

Protectors and guardians of the Dharma. 

Come to us here, stay firm with us here,

Drawn by the power of Your compassion.

In  this  way  then  we  are  seeing  our  Lama  and  the Keeper  of  the  Diamond  as  being  indivisible,  one  from  the  other.  This  in  fact  is  the  idea  behind  a great  many  works  of  the  secret  way;  as  the  Fifty Verses on Lamas puts it,

Never imagine that your Master

Is in any way separate from

The Holder of the Diamond.

This  view  of  things—that  the  five  heaps  and  so  on are actually the Buddhas of the Five Families and the rest—follows the idea expressed in the Secret Book of the String of Diamonds with lines such as:

The holy body of a victorious Buddha

Comes in stages to reside

Within your Diamond Master’s form.

And  so  we  should  picture  this  Garden  for  planting  goodness;  hook  the  Beings  of  Wisdom  and  bring Them in; and then see our Lama, with heartbreaking  faith,  as  all  three  places  of  shelter,  wrapped  into  a single person.

Think  now  upon  the  words  of  our  protector, Nagarjuna,  who in His book on the  five stages has said,

Abandon every other kind of offering,

And devote yourself completely

To making offerings to your Lama.

The act of pleasing your Lama

Brings you to the attainment 

Of the highest form of wisdom,

The knowledge of all things.

What this is saying is that it is of greater meaning to make an offering to your Lama than it is to make offerings to all the other Buddhas and bodhisattvas that there are. You need first to come to a realization of  the  fact  that  this  is  absolutely  true;  and  then begin the presentation of the Seven Steps. The first of these is bowing to your Lama—

I bow down to the lotus feet

Of the One Who Has the Diamond;

To the holy body of my Lama,

So like a precious jewel.

To the One who in compassion grants me

Entrance to the realm of bliss:

Who brings me in a single moment

Even the ultimate state, of all three bodies.

The wisdom of all the billions of Victors

Appears in whatever way it takes to tame us;

This is the highest form of skillful means.

I bow at the holy feet of my highest Savior and Refuge:

To the One who comes now masquerading

In the golden robes of a monk.

You have ripped out every wrong,

Along with its seeds, from the very root;

You are a goldmine of jewels,

An infinite mass of high qualities.

You are the one and only door

To all happiness and help;

I bow down to the dear feet

Of my Lama, the Holy One.

You are the reality of all the Buddhas,

Of every Teacher of gods and men;

You are the source from which

The 84,000 forms of high Dharma flow.

You stand shining in the midst of a crowd

Of all who have seen emptiness;

I bow down to my Lamas,

So kind, so kind to me.

I send forth copies of my body

Equal to the atoms of the paradises, 

And bow myself down in devotion,

In belief, singing a sea of praises,

To the Lamas of the past and present 

And future, in every corner of the universe,

And to the supreme and triple Gem:

To every being there is who may be worthy.

We  prostrate  ourselves  thus  to  Them  in  respect expressed  in  our  actions  and  words  and  thoughts. The  next  step  is  to  present  Them  with  offerings. Make your presentation then as follows, being sure to stamp the practice with your realization that the giver, the gift, and the  one receiving the gift are a single expression of indivisible bliss and voidness beyond all conception.

Here is an ocean of gifts,

A vast cloud of every fine thing there is,

Which I present now to my Savior and Protector,

My holy Lama, and to those within Their circle.

Here is a broad vase of sparkling jewels

Arranged in perfect symmetry, And from it softly falls the nectar

Of the four waters of deathlessness,

To make the world pure.

Earth and sky are suddenly filled

With lovely blooms sprouting on stems, 

Some scattered, some strung, patchwork colors.

The highway of the gods is cloaked

In sapphire summerpuffs—

Lapis clouds of fragrant incense smoke.

Masses of lamps in a million worlds—

Suns and moons, burning jewels; 

They wipe away the darkness there 

With laughing, playful rays of light.

Waves pass back and forth across

A massive sea of perfumed water,

Giving off the delightful scent

Of camphor, sandalwood, and saffron.

Here next is a mountain peak 

Of the most delectable dishes and drink

Of gods and men, bursting with

A thousand different flavors.

The entire surface of the earth,

And all below it and above,

Overflow with the beautiful melodies

Of a million kinds of music.

I cover every corner of this universe 

With Goddesses of both inner and outer

Offerings of the senses: the very best

Of things to see, hear, smell, taste, and touch.

I cover a hundred billion worlds, each possessed

Of four continents and a central mountain,

With the seven most precious objects,

The seven almost as precious, and the like—

The most perfect worlds, the most perfect

Beings to live in these worlds, treasure troves

Of all the pleasures of gods and men, 

Everything anyone could wish for—

I offer with thoughts of faith to that highest 

And most excellent karmic object,

To that massive storehouse of compassion,

To my Savior and Protector.

And here I present, both in my imagination 

And also in my hands, the shining flowers

Of the goodness done in acts and words 

And thoughts by both myself and others:

Offerings of the blooms that grow 

At the edge of the sea of wishes—

Gifts of the whitest deeds of both

The world and of peace,

The thousand petals spreading forth

To steal the heart of every being,

Goodness of this world,

Goodness beyond this world.

I send out then a hundred thousand clouds

Of Samanta Bhadra’s offerings of scent:

A garden filled with the finest fruits

Of the three extraordinary trainings,

The two stages, and each of the five paths.

These I present to please

My Lord, my Holy Lama.

I offer finest tea from China, Tea with a saffron hue,

Giving off a delightful fragrance

And laden with a thousand flavors—

I offer as well an endless ocean 

Of the nectar of deathlessness: 

Burning and pure and realized,

Made of different substances

Like the five hooks and five lights.

I offer too as holy mates

Exquisite, beautiful ladies of illusion,

A crowd of Messengers born

Of holy places, the secret word, the simultaneous;

Lovely slender women

Glowing with youthful strength, 

Masters in the 64 arts of pleasure.

I offer to You

The highest form of mind,

The ultimate Wish for enlightenment:

Great wisdom

Of simultaneous bliss, 

Free of every obstacle;

The Sphere Of every single thing

Free of any

Projection of truth;

The Indivisible, 

The Spontaneous,

That which is Beyond 

All thoughts to imagine,

All words to describe.

I offer You a thousand different forms

Of that excellent elixir which smashes

The sickness of the four hundred and four

Different afflictions of the mind.

And to please Your heart I present as well

Myself to be Your servant:

For as long as space itself remains,

May You consider me Your own.

(46:25) Geshe Michael:

Then we'll take the offering substances. (…)

Then also we'll do the second half faster.

You could picture your Lama in your heart and when you take the substances you're sending them, they intercept them on the way to your stomach and it's accustomed to, they're going to take out now the offense to the local spirits. It's accustomed to make a little noise to attract.

(62:45) We‘ll start again. Don‘t forget to try to concentrate on your heart Lama and ask them for energy. 

Everyone:

With  the  lines  above,  you  have  made  the  outer and inner  offerings,  as  well  as  the  secret  offering, and  the offering  of  suchness—along  with  the presentation  of  the elixir,  and  our  own  selves  as our Lama’s servant. As you do make each of these offerings,  remember  to  accompany them  with  the corresponding  visualizations  described above.  We now perform the remaining steps of the practice— the steps of confession and the rest—as the natural continuation  of  those  which  have  gone  before,  in the following way.

I stand before my Lama of perfect compassion 

And confess whatever negative deeds I have done

For time with no beginning, as well as those

I encouraged in others, or even was glad were done.

With feelings of deep regret I admit them,

And I swear as well that I will avoid

Repeating them in the future.

Nothing in the universe possesses the slightest sign

Of anything that is natural to itself;

Nonetheless, both normal people and those

Who have experienced emptiness directly

All do perform pure deeds of white which then

They experience as pleasure and happiness—

If only in a way which resembles a dream.

From the bottom of our hearts then we rejoice

In all the good that any of these beings

Has ever been able to accomplish.

Let fall we beg You a rain

Of the Dharma, deep and wide,

From Your heart, covered in a hundred clouds

Of Your perfect knowledge and love;

Let it fall upon the garden of pure white lilies— 

Help and happiness for infinite living beings—

Bringing the blooms to open, stay, and thrive.

The Diamond Body knows no birth or death;

Yet still we beg You to always stay with us,

Never passing into final nirvana,

For as long as existence itself remains—

Stay this long, as we hope You to,

All of us who are waiting vessels

For the King of Kings, the Two Combined.

I take the mass of pure white karma 

That  I’ve  created  with  this  practice 

And dedicate it that I may be taken,

In all my lives to come,

Into the care of my holy Lama,

The one who has granted me

All three forms of kindness.

I dedicate these deeds that I might 

Never again be parted from Them;

And that I might come to attain the state 

Of the Combination of the Two,

Of the Lord, the Holder of the Diamond.

Practice  thus  the  Seven  Steps.  At  the  point where  you offer  your  confession,  you  can—if time   permits—confess transgressions   of   any of  the  individual  vows  found  in the  three  sets  of commitments;  recite  the  Prayer  of  the Lama, the Keeper of the Diamond; and go through the Confession of the Downfalls of a Bodhisattva, or other similar practices.

Bring  to  mind  next  the  following  lines,  from the  Secret Book  of  Empowerment  into  the Teachings  of  the  Angel who  Wields  the Diamond:

Spend your time thinking about 

The fine qualities that your Master possesses,

And never consider any of the faults

Which you imagine that you see.

By considering Their qualities,

You reach your attainments; 

By imagining  Their faults,

You deny yourself attainments.

As  these  lines  are  meant  to  express,  we  must maintain a  constant  state  of  awareness,  assuring that  our  mind never  falls  into  imagining  that  our Lama  possesses  any kind  of  fault.  We  spend  our time,  rather,  undertaking  a careful  contemplation of the benefits of taking ourselves to a Teacher, and the  problems  of  not  doing  so,  as  these have  been described in the high open and secret teachings.

More especially, the simple act of hearing our Heart Teacher’s  name  spoken  out  loud  is  enough  to  rip away from us any need to fear a birth in one of the realms of misery. Just thinking of Them is enough to  dispel  the  sufferings  of  the  cycle  of  pain;  and  if  we  only  beg  Them  to  do  so,  They  can  grant  us  all our  spiritual  goals,  with  perfect  ease.  See  your Heart  Teacher  then  as  They  really  are:  the  single embodiment  of  all  three  of  the  Jewels—a  place  of  refuge which can never fail us.

Decide then that there  is no one and  no thing else in  which  you  can  put  your  hopes,  and  with  fierce feelings  of  devotion  make  supplication  to  Them using verses such as those of Love with  Nothing it  Sees:  the Miktsema Mantra.   Repeat the verses a  great  many  times,  and  then  recite  the  following lines of supplication as well—

(68:18) Geshe Michael:

If you know the Mikme Mantra, recite it. We do it just for a few minutes. If you don‘t know that mantra, you can recite your teachers name.

(69:50) Everyone:

All fine qualities flow from You,

A vast sea of ethical deeds

Whose depths are filled with the jewels

Of Your infinite spiritual learning.

You who wear the robes of gold,

Lord, second Buddha upon this Earth,

Elder of wisdom, keeper of vows,

I make my supplication to You.

You possess all ten of the qualities 

That make one worthy to teach the path

Of Those Who Have Gone to Bliss; 

You are the Lord of the Dharma, 

Who maintains the tradition

Of countless victorious Buddhas;

And I make my supplication to You, 

Spiritual Friend of the supreme way.

You have perfect control

Over what You do, and say, and think;

Great wisdom You possess, and patience.

You are infinitely sincere,

Incapable of dishonesty,

Or misrepresenting yourself;

And You are versed in the secret word,

And all the secret books.

You have the pair of ten qualities;

You are a master at drawing,

And a master of explaining. 

I make my supplication then

To the King

Of the Holders of the Diamond.

With these lines then we have made supplication to our Lama through mention of the qualifications of a Lama as described in the teachings on discipline; in  the  shared teachings  of  the  greater  way;  and  in the  teachings  of the  diamond  way.  We  continue now with:

I make supplication to the Compassionate One,

To my Protector, my Savior—

To the one who teaches the pure path,

The path of Those Gone to Bliss,

Just as it really is—

And who teaches it to beings like us, 

Beings gone wrong in the days of dark,

Beings most difficult to control, 

Beings who could not be tamed

By countless Buddhas who have come before.

The time has reached us

When the sun of the Able One

Has sunk below the horizon;

And there are many living creatures

Who have no one to turn to, 

No one who can protect them.

And so I make this supplication

To my compassionate Shelter and Savior,

To the One who takes up

The deeds of the Buddhas.

I make this supplication

To my compassionate Shelter and Savior; 

To the one who has been praised

As the highest Garden where I can plant

The goodness of my virtue—

For it is said that to honor 

But a single pore of Your body

Is a higher good than paying respect

To every single victorious Buddha

Of each of the three times,

And in every corner of the universe.

The assemblies of Angels who wear 

As jewels the three bodies of the Ones

Who Have Gone to Bliss 

Assume a seductive dance,

They  send  forth  an  illusion 

Born of Their skillful means,

And then suddenly You are here,

Guiding all the creatures of this world 

In the guise of a normal human being—

And so I make my supplication

To my compassionate Shelter and Savior.

I make my supplication 

To my Lama supreme—

All the Three Supreme,

Wrapped in a single person. 

The very parts of Your being—

Your heaps, Your categories,

And the gateways of Your senses, 

Along with all Your limbs—

Are actually made of the Buddhas

Of all five families, kings and queens, 

As well as all the bodhisattvas,

And the Lords of the Angry Angels.

I make supplication to my Savior,

The first Savior of them all, 

Savior of the Union of the Two,

King of all of those

Who are Holders of the Diamond,

Lord of the hundred families

Of the world of secrets,

Single being inside of whom 

Reside a billion masses

Of Angels of the hidden worlds

Born of the cosmic play

Of the wisdom of omniscience.

To You I make my supplication,

For in reality You are nothing less

Than total excellence, 

The Wish for enlightenment

In its ultimate form;

Never-ending, never-beginning,

Lord of all, existing in all,

Indivisible from all the worlds there are,

And all that move upon them—

Indivisible from the play

Of simultaneous bliss

Free of every obstruction.

Make  supplication  thus  to  your  Lord,  by  focusing  your  mind  upon  Them  single-pointedly,  and expressing all the fine qualities They embody: those which are outer, inner, secret, and suchness itself. You must especially speak the following lines—

(74:56) Geshe Michael:

We do this verse three times and at the end we pause. This is the main place where you'll ask your Lama, your heart Lama for energy. We will recite this verse three times and then we'll meditate.

You are my Lama

You are my Close Angel 

You are my Angel of the Sky

You are my Dharma Protector;

I seek no other shelter at all

From this moment on to the day 

That I reach my final enlightenment;

Reach out, snare me with the hook

Of Your heart’s compassion,

However far away I am,

In this life or the next, 

Or in the time between. 

Save me from the terror

Of this suffering life; 

Save me from the terror

Of a lower peace;

Grant me all attainments,

Stay forever at my side,

Protect me from every obstacle.

(3x)

(Meditation)

(78:52) Everyone:

I repeat the words three times,

And because of the power of my prayer 

Rays of light burst forth from the places

Upon my Lama’s holy form

Which relate to Their sacred deeds,

Their sacred words, and sacred thoughts.

The light comes forth with the nectar 

Of deathlessness and sinks into my body,

Into the same three places on me,

Both in three different stages and as one. 

I am cleaned of the four kinds of obstacles,

And receive four pure empowerments,

As well as the four holy bodies.

I watch as a copy of my Lama

Comes with joy and sinks into me,

Granting blessing to my being.

We next recite special lines which have the combined effect  of  bestowing  upon  us  our  Lama’s  blessings;  calling  upon  the  compassion  of  Their  holy  heart; praying  for  all  we  wish  for;  and  developing  the good heart of the path of the greater way:

Thus I have made offering 

To my holy Lama, And in devotion made to You

My supplication too—

Planted these within the highest

Garden that there is, Highest of all Gardens.

You, and You alone, my Savior

Are the very root of every 

Happiness and good for me;

Through the power of the deeds then

That I’ve done here may You grant

With joy the blessing that You keep me

With You ever after.

This is the one and only time 

That I will ever find

Spiritual leisure and fortune

Such as this;

Bless me to see

How difficult it was to obtain, 

And how quickly it is destroyed;

Bless me to avoid becoming distracted 

By the meaningless business of this life—

Bless me to take the essence of life, 

Bless me to give it some meaning.

Bless me to take heartfelt refuge

In the Three both rare and supreme

For the fear I feel for the fire 

Of the pain of the lower realms.

Bless me to throw myself

Into giving up every negative deed,

And accomplishing every good.

Tossed on the mountainous waves 

Of my karma and harmful emotions,

Ripped by the razor teeth

Of the sharks of the three sufferings,

I beg Your blessing please 

To come to a fierce desire

To escape from this ocean of pain,

This infinite sea of fear.

Bless me to relinquish the vision 

Of the unbearable prison of this cycle

As a garden of earthly delights;

Bless me to find the treasure 

Of the jewels of the realized,

All three of the higher trainings;

Bless me to take up the banner

Of highest victory,

The victory of freedom.

Bless me to contemplate

How each of these tortured beings

Has been my very own mother,

And paid me every form of kindness,

Over and over again.

Bless me to develop sincere 

Compassion for each of them—

A love like that of a mother

For a cherished child in pain.

Bless me to develop joy 

In the happiness of others,

Recognizing that both myself

And others are in no way different: 

None of us wants even the slightest

Form of suffering—

None of us ever feels as if 

We have enough happiness.

Bless me to see that this chronic disease

Of taking care of myself 

Is a road to all the misery

This very act seeks to avoid.

Bless me to put the blame

Where it really lies,

And reach a bitter hatred

For it; bless me

To destroy the mighty 

Devil of my tendency

To watch out only for myself.

Bless me to see that cherishing

All these Mother beings 

And the wish to see them all

Reach every form of happiness

Is the door that leads to

Infinite numbers

Of perfect personal qualities. 

Bless me then to love them all

More than my own life, 

Even if every one of them

Should suddenly think me their enemy.

Bless me then to reach the ability 

To see myself and others equal, 

And to exchange them for myself

In a state of mind, to sum it all up,

Where I finally grasp the difference: 

The problems that come from acting

As infants do, thinking only of themselves;

And the good that comes from acting

As the Lords of the Able do,

Thinking only of what others need.

Cherishing myself Is  the  door  to  every 

Trouble that there is;

Cherishing my Mothers

Is the foundation

Of every quality I could have;

Bless me then that this deep practice

Of exchanging others for myself

Might become the very heart

Of my daily path.

And so bless me my Holy Lama, 

Bless me, Lama of Compassion, 

That every living being there is

May find every kind of happiness: 

Let all the evil deeds and obstacles,

Let all the pain that ever comes 

To every living being,

Every one of them my Mother, 

Come and ripen upon myself,

Ripen upon me now,

And let any goodness I ever do,

And all  my happiness, 

Be sent away to others.

This world and every being 

Who lives upon this world 

Are filled with the results 

Of every wrong ever done—

Let a shower of suffering fall,

Of things I never wanted.

Bless me to see it all as a way 

That all the fruits of my own bad deeds

Might finally be exhausted—

Bless me to learn to turn every problem

That ever comes to me

Into a path that takes me further.

In brief, bless me that I learn to change

Everything that appears to me,

Whether it be good or bad,

Into a path for increasing 

The two forms of the Wish

For enlightenment,

Through practicing the five powers, 

Essence of all the Dharma there is,

And experience then only joy.

Bless me that I may learn the

Skillful means of all four practices,

Where I turn everything

That I ever encounter

From hour to hour

Into something for me

To meditate upon.

Bless me that I bring great meaning

To this life of leisure and fortune

Using the teachings to practice

Developing the good heart,

All the various commitments,

And the different kinds of trainings.

Bless me to use the mystic machine

Of giving and taking Riding on the breath—

Love, and compassion,

And the willingness

To free all beings myself— 

To practice that one thought, 

The Wish for enlightenment,

To free every living being

From this vast sea of suffering.

Bless me to restrain my heart

With pure vows of the daughters and sons

Of the victorious Buddhas,

For these are the one road traveled

By every conquering Buddha 

In the time before, and now,

And all there is to come. 

Bless me to devote myself

To the practice of all three forms 

Of the morality of the highest way.

Bless me to master

The  perfection  of  giving, 

Using the private advices

For increasing thoughts of generosity

Free  of  any  possessiveness, 

By changing my own body,

And all the things I own,

And all the good I’ve ever done,

Or do now or will ever do, 

Into each and every thing

That every single living being 

Hopes to have for themselves.

Bless me to master

The  perfection  of  an  ethical  life, 

Where even at the cost of my life

I never cross the line 

Of a vow, whether it be

One of those of individual freedom,

Or of the bodhisattva, 

Or of the secret word;

And where I gather within me virtue, 

Where I accomplish the goals of beings.

Bless me to master

The perfection of avoiding anger, 

To the point where I would never

Feel upset at all if every living being

In all the three realms of being

Became angered at me, 

And spoke harshly to me,

And criticized me, and threatened me,

Or even took my life;

Bless me to reach the point 

Where my reaction to them

Would be to want to help them.

Bless me to master 

The perfection of joyful effort,

Where I would strive

For supreme enlightenment

And out of compassion 

Never become discouraged,

Even if I had to remain

For infinite eons in the flames

Of the lowest realms of hell

For each of the infinite beings there are.

Bless me to master

The perfection of  meditation,

Where I am able to stay one-pointed

In a balanced meditation

Upon the nature of all things—

The fact that every object there is

Is devoid of any reality— 

Without a moment’s distraction

In dullness or wandering.

Bless me to master

The perfection of wisdom,

Where I can stay within

That deep meditation on space,

On the ultimate, combined with a state

Of greatest bliss—

With a sense of practiced ease

Brought on by the state of wisdom

Which explores the meaning of suchness.

Bless me to master 

That single-pointed meditation

Upon the illusion,

Where I realize

How things can appear, 

And yet still not be real:

How all things, both outer and inner,

Are like an illusion, a dream—

Like a moon that floats

Upon a crystal lake.

Bless me to come

To a realization

Of what Arya Nagarjuna really meant:

Of how all the things

In  both  the  cycle  and  beyond  it 

Could possess not even an atom

Of something which was their own,

And yet still exhibit without fail 

A dependence of cause and effect,

Each of these two qualities 

Dependent upon the other,

In perfect harmony,

Without the slightest contradiction.

Bless me that after all this 

I  travel—by  the  kindness 

Of the captain of the ship,

Of my Holder of the Diamond— 

Across the ocean of endless depths,

The teachings of the secret way. 

Bless me that I come to cherish,

Even more than my life,

The secret pledges and vows, 

The root of every attainment.

Bless me to reach the point 

Where I am able to master

The deep practice of the first

Of the two stages:

Where I can transform

Birth, and death, and the inbetween 

Into a Buddha’s three holy bodies—

Where I am able to clean myself

Of every stench of the tendency

To see the things around me

As something normal: 

Where every single thing

In  the  world  around  me 

Strikes me as just another piece

Of my Angel’s holy body.

Bless me to attain

In  this  very  life  the  path 

Of the Union of the Two:

Of clear light joined

With the body of illusion, 

Which shall come to me

When You, my Savior,

Set Your lotus feet

At the center of the channel

Of the dance, 

Inside that place

Where the eight petals 

Of the heart meet together.

Bless me in brief, my Savior, 

That in all my lives to come 

You might take me after You;

Never let us ever be parted,

Let me be that one daughter, one son,

Who stays within Your heart— 

The one who upholds every secret

Of Your holy deeds, and words, and thoughts.

Wherever it is, my Savior,

That You might decide to manifest

Yourself becoming enlightened,

I ask that You allow me

To be there in the very front 

Of all who there surround You;

May I win the joyful fortune 

Of seeing each and every dream I have,

Each and every thing I need—

Both here and now and ultimately, 

Come true without the slightest effort,

Simply on its own.

Because of this my supplication, 

My Lama supreme in joy descends

To the tip of my head,

In order to grant these blessings.

I beg You now to return 

And keep those holy feet,

Shining in light, planted here 

Deep within the lotus petals

That lie within my heart,

Nevermore to leave.

(92:08 ) Geshe Michael:

That's good. So we'll do a short meditation. See lotus pedals in your heart and ask your Lama for energy in general just to become bunky, and have always a lot of energy. 

Then ask them for the power to complete the things which you start, the projects and the goals that you have in your mind. 

Ask them to stay in your heart and give you this energy. 

That will be the end of this ritual.

(95:07) Geshe Michael:

Thanks. That is nice. It's a nice ritual. We'll do another one at the end, because all everything we need comes from our teacher. 

Find your teacher, more properly to create your teacher and then just ask. Then you always have energy and can do the great things you want to do. You need a heart teacher.

Meditation on the Preliminaries & to Come to the Present Moment

(2:30) Sit down straight.

—

Please come to your breath. Watch your breath.

—

Please ask your heart teacher to come to this place.

If you haven't found them yet, picture an ideal picture.

—

Bow down to your teacher by thinking of one quality they have that you would like to have. The reason we go to a teacher is because we believe that they have something that we would like to be.

Bring to mind the one quality about your teacher that you must admire, your heart teacher.

—

Make an offering to your teacher. The best offering is the offering of your practice. Which may not refer so much to your meditation, but to maybe reconciling with the person you have a problem with.

Offer your teacher the sweetest thing you've done in the last few days.

—

Then clean your conscience before we meditate.

Think of the most negative thing you've thought or said or done in the last few days. 

Tell it to your teacher openly.

Make a decision to try not to do it again, at least for a few days.

—

Then think of the best thing you've done in the last few days.

Tell your teacher and be happy. See that they're happy.

Think about something you saw someone else do, which is inspiring, the last few days, and celebrate that in your mind.

—

Ask your teacher to teach you.

Put into mind, I'd like to think of something I would like to be by tonight. 

Maybe some change in my feelings, maybe more cheerful, more understanding of other people.

Then ask your teacher to help you become that.

—

Ask your teacher to stay with you today, throughout the day, seen or unseen, and guide us, protect us.

—

Come back to your breath.

We will do a very short meditation called the present moment. 

Staying in the present moment.

First I'd like you to remove a small part of your mind.

Take a small part of your mind away from your mind. Step back. 

I like to step physically back, a little tiny piece of my mind steps back.

Then that little piece of my mind, which I imagine in the back of my skull, is going to watch the rest of my mind. 

Just observe your mind this morning. What's your mind thinking?

We are just starting a retreat. The mind will be a little unsettled.

It's a new environment. You don't have your unusual fridge and iPhone and iPod. 

Step back, observe the state of your mind.

Try to observe what kind of thoughts are coming up.

What are you thinking about? 

Watch the mind thinking the thoughts. 

Don't be in the thoughts. Watch the mind thinking the thoughts from a distance.

—

One more time. Watch the thoughts in your mind. Watch your mind thinking those thoughts. 

I'd like you to observe for just a minute, two minutes: 

Are those thoughts about what's going to happen today or tonight or tomorrow, next week?

Or are those thoughts about the past? How you got here? What work you didn't finish? What somebody said to you last month?

Or are those thoughts about the present? 

So check the thought. Are they past, future, or present?

What's the theme?

There might be a mixture, but what's the main? What kind of thoughts take the most time in your mind in the next few minutes? Past, present, or future?

Just observe. Don't try to control.

—

Come back again. 

I like to think of it as a wall. I guess that's what a firewall is.

There's a wall in front of my forehead or in the front of my skull, which is clear.

It's like an energy field or a wall. 

That wall is going to block any thoughts of the future, meaning even later this morning or tonight or next year, any thought about the future will be blocked by the world.

I can still think about the past or I can be in this present room, but at all costs I must not think about the future.

Watch your thoughts, watch your mind thinking your thoughts. 

For the first time, try to control those thoughts. Don't allow any thoughts beyond now.

Now, a second wall behind your mind. A clear wall. It blocks any thoughts of the past. Last night leaving your home, or what your boss said to you last week, or what your partner said to you the week before, or what your ex partner said to you last year.

All thoughts of the past are blocked. 

All thoughts of the future are blocked.

Settle in to this room, the present moment of our life and surrender to this present moment.

Block when you start to think of something after this moment, block it.

When you start to think of something that happened before this moment, block it.

Relax into the relief of being in the present moment.

No worries, no expectations.

—

Then ask your teacher who's in front of you, ask them to come into your heart.

Park in your heart for the day, for eternity. 

Then when you're ready, you can open your eyes, stretch it a little bit.

Introduction to Lam Rim Program

(25:33) First of all, I'd like to thank you for coming. I know some of you traveled a long way. Singapore, London, South America, Russia, Hong Kong. Good to have you here. 

For me it is very nice. We travel a lot. We're almost constantly traveling.

This 10 days is sort of a rest for us also.

We get to sort of slow down and look at our life, think about our life. It's nice to have brothers and sisters from every part of the world to do it with. It's very pleasant for me.

I used to come to Preco when I was a kid to church camp. It's not far from here. The the whole place is to me very beautiful and it means a lot to me. I am glad that you came and I'm glad that we can be together.

This is part of a larger course. I spent about seven years in New York teaching the Geshe course, which is the ACI courses. Those are 18 courses and those are done. Now people are passing them on to other people.

Then we spent seven years at Diamond Mountain doing the tantric courses, the secret teachings. We did a good job on that. Miraculously we got through it.

There's 20,000 pages of translation for those 14 years. It's good and it's something you can pass on to other people. It's all finished.

Then I thought it would be nice to give a transmission of this text.

This is a text that was spoken by my teacher's, teacher's teacher, Pabongka Rinpoche. He gave this teaching, I think it was 1921. He gave this teaching for 24 days in Lhasa. One of the monks in the audience was Trijang Rinpoche the young Trijang Rinpoche. He was 20 at the time. But his Lama Pabongka Rinpoche asked him to take notes and he did. 

He took very good notes and then his Lama asked him to make a book out of the notes. I think he spent 20 years on making this text. I think Trijang Rinpoche was the greatest poet and writer of modern times in Tibet.

He took those transcripts and they came out as a piece of, I think the highest piece of literature that is written.

It's extraordinary. It will never be match. Tibetan is now becoming a lost language and it is exquisite. Just as a piece of literature it's exquisite. 

On top of that, it's like the most meaningful piece of literature ever written. 

I thought my teacher taught it to us three times, twice in New Jersey and once in Washington DC. 

I was lucky, I was his driver, and his crook, and his laundry man, and his gardener. 

I got to hear all three and I thought it would be a shame if I didn't pass it on—the oral lineage. 

Let's do that next. That's like the third cycle of teachings.

That will take 10 years. We'll go through this book. Then I thought for dessert we would do the emptiness and meditation section from Je Tsongkapa‘s great Lam Rim, which is another five or ten years—which is probably the greatest presentation of emptiness and meditation ever. That would be dessert at the end.

So the whole thing will take, I'm saying 10 years, maybe a little longer. I don't know. This is the second of 20 or more installments.

We did the meditation and the emptiness part first, already, from this book. Because we thought when we went back and started from the beginning, we would have that tool, those tools with which to practice the rest of the teaching. 

Now we're going from the beginning.

What I am hoping to do is type a session in Phoenix of 10 days, twice a year, followed by a session in Prescott twice a year.

This is more of a silent retreat, which will start on Sunday, the silent part. 

You get 10 days of instruction in Phoenix twice a year and then twice a year we come here to digest it and try to put it into practice.

The way it's working out is that 10 days in Phoenix is not enough for me to cover all the materials. We'll cover half of the new material here. I'll be giving teachings and then we'll be meditating on the subjects. That's the way it's going to be. 

There are homeworks in your notebook. I encourage you to do them. 

It's kind of unusual that I actually finished the homework mostly.

When we get to the new stuff, which is I think on Tuesday you will start doing the homeworks also. If you want to do the course efficiently.

I'll also start printing out the homeworks for the first five classes, which were done in Phoenix earlier. I'll review those classes here. So if you didn't get to Phoenix or you didn't do the online thing, you could do the first five homeworks now here.

Then by the end of the 10 days you have finished this course.

Five homeworks from before, which I'll cover a little faster here, and then we'll slow down and cover the five classes that we haven't done yet.

Motivation for Students to Finish the ACI Courses: The world needs teachers

Why should you finish the course? 

Why should you do all the homeworks and all that?

We went to Eastern Europe just two weeks ago. We went to Detroit first to warm up and it was good. 

Then we got invited to Bulgaria and Kiev, Ukraine and we were sort of nervous because we had never been there and we didn't really know the ground team. 

Like you're going to show up and they put you in some freezing place, no food and it happens. 

We were like, oh, this is going to be a rough trip. We were getting used to it. We got to Kiev. They said, well, you have to have a lunch meeting before the talk. 

I'm like, with who? 

They said, these guys are from Ural (SIB?). It's a Russian conglomerate or whatever you call them. It's a Russian company. They said they help sponsor the thing, you have to have lunch with them.

I go to this restaurant, and Kiev is full of mafia restaurants. It is very slick and one dinner costs two weeks' pay. We went in there and we got our private room and there's these big corporate guys.

I'm like, well, tell me about your company. And they're like, you don't know Ural (SIB?). 

I'm like, no. 

They say, Ural (SIB?) is the biggest corporation in the world. And I'm like, oh really? 

(the others) We have 30,000 workers. We own all the banks in Russia. We own the petroleum production in Russia. People know about us usually.

(GMR) Okay.

So I put on my corporate thing. Okay, tell me about your profits and your budgets. 

Then the weirdest thing happened. A really strange thing happened. 

I said, tell me about what you want to achieve in your profits and how do you want to reorganize your company, and what kind of contract dispute are you having or anything like that. 

Then, there's this guy, he turns out to run all of their real estate operations in the world, thousands and thousands of buildings and banks. 

I'm like, Hi.

He's like, You don't know me. I was like, no. He throws all his cards at me. 

(GMR) So what can I do for you?

(The other) We are required to read your book for the last five years, all Ural SIB employees are required to read the Diamond Cutter in russian. 

I said, God, that's a lot of copies, and it's all black market. I never saw a penny.

(The other) Yes. We understand the book and using the book, this is why it is so successful now we are going global. We are control the world probably. 

But he said, but we don't want to know from you how to make money. We finished that. We all have money. Every other managers, the owner—he's a multi-billionaire. We have money. We don't need money though. 

Now we want peace, finished with the money already. We all have Mercedes. We all fly to Paris for vacation. Now we want peace. He was really beautiful. He said, Mainly we want peace for our children. We want to know, can you teach us how to bring peace to our children? We care about, we're worried about our children. 

He was beautiful. It was really beautiful.

I thought, in my perception, traveling constantly, the dream that we all had for, Oh we can change the world or something, like that, is happening. Very, very unexpected, quickly. 

There are 30,000 people in a former mafioso company in Moscow that I've never heard of. What's in here can be transmitted to the world at large—and they really want it. 

Everywhere we go, more and more people come. We get constantly invitations to new countries and we can't do it. We can't physically. We're trying and it is crazy. We're in Paris for two days, and then we're in Montreal for one day, and then we're in Vancouver. It's like 30,000 miles of travel in a week and we can't do it. It's not enough people.

We need more help.

Uncle Sam needs you. 

I take a lot of teachers, we had 10 really fine teachers on the last tour, and we have a list of 20 teachers for Taiwan and Singapore the next trip. It's not enough. We don't have enough people. 

I don't want to send people who are not ready. I tried. We stuck in a few semi trained people and then we had discussion groups and it was scary. They weren't going to worldview. They're off on, I think the euro's going to go up. I'm like, ow. It's not the point.

We need people who are trained. Desperately we need people. There are hundreds of cities that want help. You can go to Krasnodar. I had a delegation came from Krasnodar. I said, Excuse me, where is Krasnodar. They said, You don't know Krasnodar. I said, No. 

They said, In southern Russia, we are big city. Everyone reading your book there. You send team.

I'm like, I don't have enough people. There's everywhere like Lisbon, Krasnodar and Santiago, in one day they asked. The French ambassador to Chile, the head of a business school in Lisbon and the former Cosac Warrior regiment leaders from Krasnodar, they all want this stuff, now. 

Probably have to do the Corsacs first because they're kind of more violent.

Finish the courses, do the courses, do the homework and get ready. We need you. 

They need you, and I need to draw from you. I need the fresh meat. I need people to send on this wild…to Sophia. Sophia means wisdom.

They were awesome. They were totally awesome. But we don't have enough people to follow up, and I can't send people who are not trained. I can't send people who did the first three classes but didn't do the rest of the other summer. 

I'm watching. Michael Moore, and Bonnie Moore and Sharae. I contact them and I say, Who's done the courses? They say, The people traveling with you haven't done the courses. I am like, You got to finish the courses and you got to do the homeworks. You got to. I'm not going to take people who don't, and I need people. We need desperately need people. So try, do this homeworks.

It takes like half an hour. Just write anything. You'll pass. Copy in part of this week's time magazine. See if anyone notices, it's okay. Really they need you, everyone everywhere. The mafia in Russia is dying for you. The fact that you could change 30,000 people in a couple of weeks, that's pretty cool. 

Think about it. That's what you're here for.

(44:46) I'm going to review the first class that we had. 

I think first I'd like to do another meditation. I'm going to do more meditation. 

Do a bunch of small meditations during the day.

So it's time to do another meditation.

Short Meditation on Personal Motivation to Learn Lam Rim

(45:16) Sit up straight,

Close your eyes.

Come to your breath.

—

Simply, quietly, in a relaxed way, examine why you came here to this retreat for these 10 days.

I'd like you to mosey around the idea that you could learn something here that develops you internally and in your knowledge. But mostly in your heart that could actually in a short time become vital and lifesaving to people around the globe. 

Imagine that what you learned here this week would enable you to save people's lives around the entire world.

Spend some time with that thought and that vision of yourself.

—

Please come back to your breath and slowly open your eyes. Stretch.

Review of Lam Rim Class 1 - The Importance of Having a Teacher

(52:48) I'm going to cover quickly the items on the first homework that some of you may not have done. Now that you're all excited about finishing the whole course, it would be a shame if I didn't cover all of them.

The very first thing is the title of the book. 

I had embarrassing situations in India where I didn't know the book I was studying. I was asked by his Holiness senior tutor, and it was a bad minute of my life. You should know the name of the book that you are studying. 

NAMDUNG LAKCHAM.

It means liberation. (…)

LAKDA = hand

DANG = to thrust a gift into somebody's hand. 

The name of this book is a Gift of liberation Thrust into your Hands. 

Like you're just standing on a speed corner minding your own business and some Lama rock spine shoves liberation into your hand and you're like, oh, what's that? Cool.

The implication is that even if you don't do much work, you're going to get liberation. They just shut it in your hands. I don't like the other translations. Liberation in the palm of your hand or something like that. The idea is, if someone's like, Here, take it, and they jam it into your hands. Liberation jammed into your hands.

That's the meaning of the title.

I'm going to read you the whole title. (Reading Tibetan)

I'm just going to go over each piece of the long title. Every Tibetan book has a long title and a short title. So somebody says what you're studying, you don't have to say, you don't have to do that (the long title in Tibetan). 

You can just say, NAMDAK LAKCHAM. 

But there's a long title and it has an important meaning.

First of all, the main title of this book, the long title is DUCHEN NINGMA

DUCHEN means Amirta. 

Amirta = deathless

A = not

Mirta = mortuary

Amirta = the nectar of deathlessness

Nectar itself is a Greek word for passing beyond death. Nec means death, like necrophilia. Tar, as in Tara or in transportation, means to crossover.

So nectar means to crossover death. 

It’s Amirta.

The name of the book is DUCHEN MINGMA, The Essence of a Amirta. 

The essential Fluid of Deathlessness is the real name of the book.

These are instructions which accomplish the jamming of liberation into your hands. 

They are profound, probably meaning that they cover emptiness.

You can explain emptiness to a big crowd of uncooperative Ukrainian, and Russian guys in two days. You don't have to go to the monastery for 28 years or something. It's just that what you see around you is coming from seeds in your mind. That's coming from how you treat other people. That's all. To understand that that's the way the world works is profound. That's all we do. 

We just go around the world teaching people that and it's cool. Because they become extremely successful and happy.

SUBNGAL = complete, nothing was left out

There are steps to enlightenment. There are certain steps you have to take.

There's an instruction manual. It's like a lawnmower manual.

It has 18 things you have to do.

If you don't do one of the 18 things, your lawnmower won't start, and it'll be a useless bunch of metal in your front yard. 

Liberation is the same. There are certain steps you have to take. They have to be in the right order, and you have to do all of that. 

TSUN = they're all here

MAGNORAL = nobody screwed them up

They are pure, they're authentic. Nobody added some dumb thing that you don't need to start your lawn mower. Or that's wrong. 

MAGNORAL, it means it's all here and it's complete and it is correct, it's authentic.

It is the heart essence of the incomparable king of the dharma.

Who would that be? Je Tsongkapa, the teacher of the first Dalai Lama, who was really incomparable. Really, the Einstein of Dharma, unmatched. Nobody comes close. Just practical stuff you can take to Bulgaria, and in two days everybody's like, Life has suddenly changed. It's cool.

These are the steps of the path to enlightenment.

You should know that Lam Rim, Lam means path. Rim means step. 

So Lam Rim means steps on the path.

It has two distinct and completely different meanings. 

Lam Rim means a type of literature which gives you all the stuff to imagine. 

You can say, what kind of book are you reading nowadays? You say it's a Lam Rim text. 

Or what kind of meditations are you doing? I'm doing Lam Rim meditations. 

That's like a generic term, genre.

Then Lam Rim KYI REMPA means each one of the steps is also called Lam Rim. 

The whole thing is called Lam Rim and each step is called Lam Rim.

The first step of all Lam Rim is how to find your heart teacher and how to serve there. That's the first Lam Rim of the Lam Rim.

Then the second Lam Rim is something else, like that. 

RANG TSCHING means a teaching based on someone's personal experience. 

Pabongka Rinpoche, who was the teacher of the teacher of the present Dalai Lama, He gave this teaching based on his own personal experience.

He went through the traditional Lam Rim, but he threw in a lot of his personal experience, which is called a NYAM TSCHING. 

SUNCHING means notes. Somebody took notes. These are the notes of the 24 days of teaching in Tibet in 1921.

Inside this book you can find the cream of 200,000 scriptures. You could save a lot of time. It's all in here. It was presented in the form of DAMLAK.

DAMALK means your Lama gives you... You go into the room with your Lama and they say, Look, you've been eating too much. They don't say it in front of everybody else. DAMLAK is like personal messages from your Lama.

This is the personal message from Lama. That's the whole title of the book, and that's one of your homework questions.

Trijang Rinpoche, we call him Kyabje. Kyabje is a name for a high Lama, especially for one of the tutors of the Dalai Lama at any given time. 

In our current historical setting, His Holiness the current Dalai Lama had two tutors, Kyabje Ling Rinpoche and Trijang Rinpoche. Kyabje Ling Rinpoche made it to America. I was his driver for a while. He gave us Yamantika. It was far out.

Trijang Rinpoche passed away in 1981. He was my teacher's teacher. He was my teacher's heart teacher. He spent a large part of his life making this book.

I believe the karma of making this book—there were in Lhasa alone, there were 30,000 monks. Any of whom might've been qualified to some extent to teach the Dalai Lama. He was chosen out of 30,000 monks to be the Dalai Lamas teacher.

I think because of the karma of serving his own teacher. He could have been famous on his own and he was later, but he chose to devote his time to creating this record of his teachers‘, spending many years of his life. I think the karma of that is he became the teacher of the Dalai Lama. 

Then he explained something about the teaching that they went to.

He talks about the style with which Pabongka Rinpoche delivered this teaching.

I like it and I think it's something we should learn.

You're going to end up in some obscure village in Bulgaria as the DCI rep. 

These are some clues about how you should teach.

This is how I'd like to see you teach. 

Pabongka Rinpoche was very unusual. He broke out of the monastic mode and he took the Dharma to the people up Tibet. Normally the monks in their wall of the monasteries, they rarely saw the lay people. They got very ivory tower. They would discuss small points, fine points of philosophy, and then right outside the wall in their fields, the peasants would be laboring. They were never taught anything and they never went to school. The fields were owned by the monasteries and they would just work all day, then they would come home and eat a little bit, and then go back the next day and work.

That's why there was a communist revolution in Tibet.

Pabongka Rinpoche broke out of that mode and he tried to bring the Dharma to the people and he got in trouble for it. He was criticized.

Trijang Rinpoche, at the very beginning, speaks a little bit about Pabongka Rinpoche‘s style, and I like it.

1. He would always use stories of real life. 

When he taught, he wouldn't just sit there and say, This is the first Lam Rim, this is the second Lam Rim.

He's constantly going off on stories about this naughty monk, or this government official who is corrupt. He would go off on these really fun stories.

We'll talk about a lot of the stories. I like the stories. I think you remember things better with stories. If you can imagine sitting in a mafia restaurant in Kiev with a slick silk suited mafia oil tycoon from Moscow, and he's crying and asking for peace for his children. It stays in your head.

It's a real picture and it happened and he was there. It's more powerful I think.

You're going to be different. Your life experiences are different, and those are valuable to the people you teach. They want to know real experiences from your life. They don't want you to just sit there and repeat the text, or Geshe Michael's experiences. They want to know your experiences and that makes it real for them.

2. He proves stuff logically. He proved stuff reasonably. 

We were in Ukraine, we were in Kiev. We went on retreat, there were 50 people from Moscow, 50 people from Kiev. I don't know how they get along. I don't think it's too good, given that the Russians killed a couple of millions of Ukrainians.

But there's little tension in the room. They're all staring at me. They don't want to listen to this stuff. I think it's important that you just prove stuff logically to them. 

If you go through the pen thing and you go through emptiness and aspirin, why aspirin doesn't work, you force them to think logically about what you're saying.

Everyone responds to logic.

Logic is not some stupid drive thing.

What the beautiful thing about what you have to sell. I'm going to send you out to make the sales jobs. The beautiful thing about the product I'm asking you to sell is that it makes 100% pure goddamn sense. Every detail of it makes sense. 

Nobody can sit there for two days and not get it.

By Saturday night they're all crying. By Sunday, all these old Russian ladies are kissing you, and these tough corporate financial heads and stuff, really tough people. They're all like…. 

Because there's no logical flaw in what you're presenting.

It all makes perfect sense. It is perfect. The system is perfect. We may not present it very rough sometimes, but it's logical. You explain for two days to any human being who has two legs and two arms mostly. They'll get it, because it just makes sense and it explains everything in the world. 

Then you can try it and you get what you want and it's just cool.

Don't be ashamed to use proof stuff. 

I always start with the pen thing, and then ever after that, they can't give me any kind of crap. I can just say, Look. I pull out the pen and I wave it in your face. And they're like, Oh yeah, I agreed to that already. I agreed that it was coming from me. I make them hold up their hand nowadays on the tours. I said, hold up your hand at a certain point, logical guys said, okay, is it coming from you? Is it coming from its own side? 

300 people go, even if they're like Russians, they don't want to be there. They have to go. After that you got them, and they come and they say, I hate my husband. 

I say, why? He is criticizing me all the time.

I just (make a hand gesture)

Then they just shut up and they start having a better marriage. 

You gave them something. So logic is good. Logic is beautiful. 

3. Tell wild stories, funny stories and amazing stories.

You can tell 'em stories about the lady who made a billion dollars, or the lady who found the story about how Jessica Crow found Stefan gets elaborated every time I tell it. Now it's this beautiful thing.

4. Know your scripture and be able to pull it out when you need it. 

ACI course number six, homework number six. Question number three, directly quoted from the Diamond Cutter Sutra. It's right here. 

Are you from Shanghai or not? 

They're like, Yeah.

Okay, so you're Chinese, right? 

Yeah.

So it's Chin kang chin, what do you want? I didn't make it up with the Buddha said it. Then you pull out the scripture and you say, This is it. This is what they said.

The Heart Sutra said it. I didn't say it. What applies to the pen applies to your mortality. I didn't make it up. Buddhai said it. In Sanskrit, Chinese, Tibetan—you got to know your stuff. You got to be able to pull it out when some lady from the restaurant in New York and Chinatown is asking you about the stuff and you just pull out the Heart Sutra. I didn't say it. I didn't make it up. Then you're there, okay? 

But you got to work hard, and at least you got to do the courses. You got to know your stuff.

5. Then he toed it off. He put on the icing on the cake by giving us very private and personal instructions from the oral lineage

Things that were never written down that had been passed on from Lama to Lama. Like stuff that Alistair said to you one day in a class after the class. You had your class in Costa Rica or whatever is in the restaurant. You were all hanging out afterwards and he said some things when we were hanging out in the restaurant after the class one day, and you quote the oral tradition. It's not stuff anyone's ever going to write down. But that means you have to have an oral tradition.

That means you have to have been to a lot of classes. 

GEN means to ornament. Like if you are already dressed up to go out and then you put on a fur coat, that's like GEN

Alankara means ready means to make, Alankara is the Sanskrit GEN. 

Alankara means to doll yourself up before you go out. 

GEN means that it means that the finishing touch is what Alistair said in the restaurant one day when we were all hanging out after class. 

The finishing touch, which is maybe the most important and the sweetest touch, is this is what my teacher told me in Howard Johnson's at the Delaware Bridge in 1982. Like that. You need oral tradition from your teachers.

6. He was careful to fit the teaching to the people in the audience who were beginners 

He was careful to adjust the level to the audience. I was in Singapore and we advertised it as a in depth Heart Sutra. 600 people showed up at the Trade Union Hall and said, I got out there and I saw 300 of them weren't ready. That was the first time they ever came to a class. I'm going to go off on the fine points of emptiness that these 300 people. So I dumped it down, I went straight down in five minutes, I went down. Then all the older students were like, okay, Geshela. Next time you come to Singapore, we need a real hard center class. 

You've got to take it to the level of the people. 

But you're still going to have to satisfy the people who have heard all that stuff before and need something higher.

You have to satisfy both. You have to satisfy the new people. You have to come down to the level of the new people. But you have to keep feeding the older people more stuff that makes their presentation more sophisticated. 

It is difficult if there's 300 new people and 300 people have been studying for five years. But he had that skill. He could do it. 

7. He taught it in such a way that he was constantly asking you to apply it to your own circumstance 

This whole week we're going to be talking mainly about the life of Lord Atisha, who brought the Lam Rim to Tibet. We're going to spend days and days on the history of his life. Like how he took his sea voyage to Indonesia, how the Tibetan king died to try to get out to Tibet, steal him from the abbot of Shikrala? monastery. Like this.

Pabongka Rinpoche teaches something like that in such a way that he is demanding that you apply it to your own life.

So some guy a thousand years ago made a seaboard to Indonesia to pick up a few lines of Lojong. Risked his life many times to get a few lines of Lojong. 

Well, maybe we could put up with some lousy mattresses.

He's always apply it right away. A boat in 1000 AD was eight logs strapped together. He went from India to Indonesia on eight logs strapped together. 

Probably it was a little less comfortable than these mattresses, I would guess. 

I saw the carving in Indonesia of the boat. It's carved on the panel at Borobudur.

I saw Lord Atisha's boat. It was eight blocks strapped together. I'm sure it was a little harder than probably you'd rather have hard than those both. 

8. After listening to him, we found it easy to be inspired to try to do something ourselves

He didn't say anything that he hadn't thought about carefully. 

My heart Lama, I always ask her, what should I do tomorrow? Why should I emphasize?

She's always the same answer. Before you get up there, think about what would help them. That's different, right?

Oh, I wanted to teach this obscure emptiness thing.

She's like, Yeah, well, will that help them?

You're supposed to get up and before you get up to talk, think about what will help those people. What will help their mind, and then say what will help their mind.

Say something that will help their life and continually examine as a teacher if you are saying stuff that helps people's lives. Or are you just repeating some obscure book that you heard?

9. When we started to get sleepy and spacing out, he would tell the joke and make everybody roar with laughter

He would tell a really good joke and get everybody refreshed. 

I think it's so important.

We were in Toronto and this newspaper came. They did almost the full page article about the talk. But what impressed them was that everybody was laughing and smiling. They kept mentioning, everybody in the audience was laughing and smiling, and the teachers were laughing and smiling and this is what they thought was important. The Toronto Star.

I liked that. I was proud of our group. I was proud of our class. Because a newspaper reporter, what struck them was that everyone was having a good time.

If your class is not fun, then… What did ? Richard say? 

No pain, no gain. No fun, no yoga.

He tells it very dramatically. He's got you in some pose and you're dying, and he says, no pain, no gain. Then he waits. He pauses, and then he says, no fun, no yoga. 

Then he does some silly thing. 

If you're not having a good time, I think it's all suspicious. The whole class is suspicious. The teaching is suspicious. The presentation is suspicious.

If we were in ? and the teachers on tour are required to have their own yoga class.

One of the teachers teaches the other teachers. After all the teachers have taught the yoga. Because what happens as a teacher is you start teaching and you stop doing.

You said, did you do your yoga today? I taught a class. 

No, but did you do your yoga today? No. I taught. I was too busy. I taught a class. 

Well, how can you be a teacher and you don't do your yoga? 

How can you teach yoga without teaching, without doing it every day? 

Then we had a yoga class with the teachers. Ningpo taught the class. 

Then there's some really tough Russian guy, you didn't see him. He walked, he wandered into the room and he saw the class and he sat down in the corner. 

Ningpo was up there. He says, a hundred jumping jacks.

We're all like, what?

He said, a hundred jumping jacks. 

We're all like, oh God, this is some Ohio State football team. 

Then we stopped at 60 and started joking around. 

He is like, Okay, karate kicks. Everybody kicked their neighbor and we're all roaring. And this Russian guy, he is really grumpy old guy. Hee felt this thing, he got turned on because he saw we were having fun. 

So if you're not having fun, who wants to study what you know if you're not having fun? 

If you're like this grumpy person and you know the secrets to the universe..

10. Sometimes he made us cry, uncontrollably

The tears flowed, uncontrollably. We couldn't stop.

Then at other times, he scared the poop out of us. He started describing the hell realms or death, or he had this ability to scare of the poop out of you too. 

That's all. 

The special purpose of this retreat, I think you can say it's threefold. You can say there are three things we're trying to accomplish this week. 

1. What is the big picture in your life? What is it you would like to put energy into? What is it that you really want in your whole life to accomplish what that you want on your grave donor or your enlightenment donor? What are they going to write on your gravestone? ‚This person accomplished this in their life.‘ What's the big thing you want do in your life? In this week you got to figure it out. Have some kind of less fuzzy picture about what you want to do with your life in a big way. Where do you want to put your energy? What's the one big thing you want to accomplish in your life? What do you want to do with your life? It can be two, okay, but it's got to be at least something. 

2. What are the short-term things you need to do to get there? I'm going to have to finish my homeworks if I want to be the greatest teacher in Krasnodar. The short term task that you have trouble finishing or getting to. ‚Okay, I know Geshela, you asked me 38 times to finish my homeworks. Since 1998 you've told me to finish my homeworks. But I just can't get around to it. Or I start and I stop and I don't feel the energy to do it. I don't feel the energy. 

What's the big picture? Where are you going to put the energy of your entire life? 

What's the smaller components? 

What kind of energy do you need? 

What short-term stuff do you need to get done? 

I got to feed myself. I need a house. I got to take care of my cat.

I got to finish grading homeworks. 

What are the short term stuff you've got to do then? 

3. The first thing to supply that. Where am I going to get that personal energy? I'm losing energy. I don't have energy. I sleep a lot. I watch tv. I'm on the internet all day. I'm looking at stupid, useless things that I don't really need to look at. I don't have energy. I get tired easily. I start yoga and I feel like I can't do yoga. I eat too much. I feel indolent. I just don't have possess. So how do I get that?

Those are the three goals for this week.

On an immediate level, how do I have more energy, and what's keeping me from having more energy? How can I get more energy? 

Second, what are the immediate things in my life I got to put that energy into? 

Thirdly, how is that all going to contribute to the big goal of my life? And how do I identify that goal? Is it Krasnodar, is it Lisbon? Where am I going to go? What am I supposed to do? Like that.

Short Meditation - Come to the Present Moment

(2:20) We'll do a small meditation.

Sit up straight. Close your eyes, relax your face. Relax your forehead.

Relax the corners of your mouth. Relax your eyelids.

Bring your mind to your breath.

—

Separate a piece of your mind off towards the back. 

Begin to watch your own mind.

Think its thoughts from a distance.

Don't just watch the thoughts, watch the mind and certainly don't be involved in it. 

Don't dig in the thoughts and don't be thinking, I'm just watching someone else thinking. See what comes up.

—

Now stop any thoughts about the future.

Don't let your mind think about the future. Tonight, tomorrow, next week. 

It's like a big clear wall ahead of you. 

—

No thoughts about the past. Block the back of your mind. 

Relax into the present moment, this room, our friends here together and stay in the present moment.

Feel that relief of not having to think about the past in the future.

Just be here.

No plans, no worries about the past, present moment.

—

Come back to your breath. Relax and open your stretch.

Homework Review

(10:10) I like to go through the homework. I'm going to go through and make sure you got anything. 

TSOMBAR SAMGYAL can mean to start a task, to undertake a task, but it can also mean to write a book. 

TSOMBAR = to write a book

SAMGYAL = to swear that you'll write a book.

Every Buddhist book normally starts off with it. The author at the beginning makes a commitment to enlightened being. In this case Trijang Rinpoche committed to write all the notes out from his teacher. 

You swear that you either finish or die and there are books in the Buddhist (?) which I have finished. The guy died in the middle of the sentence. The carving stops in the middle sentence and it means he didn't the book.

It's the idea of choosing a task carefully, deciding what you want to do with your life.

We'll be doing some meditations on what you want to do with your life.

At some point you make a TSOMBAR SAMGYAL, you make a decision of what you want to do in your life and then you make some kind of commitments about it.

The idea is to learn to choose carefully what you would like to do.

We tend to do too many things. Most of us tend to do too many things. The internet is making that worse. It was supposed to save time and it's cutting down on everybody's time. Nobody has any time. They got to check their Facebook and they got to check their email, and they have to update their blog. They got Twitter about doing that.

The idea is to try to cut this down, try to cut down the things you're doing.

Choose a few things that you do every day and that you don't break.

You make a commitment to do everything like that, and then you check your motivation. That was a big key in the opening pages of the text. We talked about it already. 

It's where you just pause from time to time. It's a very, very sweet meditation. 

You pause and you say, why am I doing what I'm doing right now? Why am I here? What do I want to accomplish? 

Why did I come here? What do I expect to get? What do I expect to do here?

That's a very good meditation. Personally I found when you do a motivation check a couple times a day, like What am I doing?

Especially if you get off balance. If you start to get upset at somebody, or you start to get angry at somebody, or you start to feel lost and you don't know what you're doing, or you have a headache, or you're tired, or anything. You feel depressed, sad. Then learn to check your motivation. Just check in with your motivation.

Why am I sitting here right now in my house where I'm depressed? 

When I met the person who irritated me, why was I there?

There's a magic trick. If you can come up with some reason that you were trying to help somebody else, then you just feel better right away.

Check your motivation from time to time. Why am I here?

80% is, you wanted to be with your friends, or you heard that food was very good.

A lot of your motivation is not so great. It's not evil, it's just low level pleasure seeking. But in there, somewhere, there's some kind of motivation for others. There always is and you can find it. You can come up to that. 

When you feel down or you're not sure of what you're doing, or any kind of tiredness or you don't feel energy or whatever, drenge your motivation for anything positive. 

You can come up with some stuff. You can say, I was thinking of learning yoga and teaching it to my mother. You can find something.

Anytime you can look into your motivation and you can come up with a single thing that relates to somebody else, you will feel immediately happier and better and more energy. Have more fun. 

That's like a depression antidote, free. It doesn't cost any therapy or drugs. Just try it. When you feel down, you're not sure what you're doing and you feel a little bit lost, drenge your motivation for why you're here and you'll find some kind of reason why you're trying to help somebody.

(17:02) It says a little bit about Trijang Rinpoche honoring other commitments. 

What big commitment did he honor?

To finish the book. The book took 20 years or something. He worked hard on it. It wasn't like us where he picked it up every few weeks. Like this partner book, it's like five years and I write a chapter every few months. It's not like that. 

But he makes another commitment, especially in contract. We have a commitment to respect our teacher and to show respect to our teacher. There's a specific Tantric vow about how you speak about your teacher, or the words you use to refer to your teacher. How do you use your teacher's name?

If you're careful, your own heart teacher's name, I'm not saying me, I'm saying whoever is your heart teacher, if you're careful and you use their name correctly, it can't become a mantra. You could do a three year retreat and just say you're teacher's name. I did, and to tell you the truth, I didn't do the Vajrayogini mantra. I just said my teacher's name for three years.

We are encouraged, especially in the secret teachings, not to speak of our teachers lightly, but to speak of their name highly.

Here's how he refers to his teacher:

I'm going to write down the record of that being of glory, 

unmatched in the kindnesses (...) 

He didn't say Mark or something. 

He's keeping a higher commitment than he has. In the opening lines he's keeping some higher commitments.

(...)

(21:00) Geshe Michael reciting Tibetan verse and class is repeating it

This is a very famous verse. It's very, very beautiful. 

Guru means a Lama, or yogi, yogini.

They write the story of their personal spiritual life.

It's called the Song of my spiritual life. A hundred thousand songs of (?), a spiritual song. This is Je Tsongkapa‘s.

The last two lines are reframed. 

This is how I, the yogi have practiced.

Those of you who hope for freedom…

You should do the same. So his song of his spiritual life is a bunch of verses. Each ending in the same two lines just said, Hey, that's what I do. Maybe you should try it.

Then this particular verse starts out, (Tibetan)

The body and mind with which we have been blessed in this life is better than a wish giving gem. There's a special jewel, if you hold it in your hand and you can make a wish and you'll get anything you want. 

He said, your own body and your mind is more precious. 

Why? How could that be? How could it be that anything could be more precious than something you could hold your hand and wish for anything?

You don't know what to wish for. Your body and the mind that you were born with were produced for reaching high experiences that you couldn't ask for. You wouldn't know what to ask for. Your mind and body that you have right now are better.

This is the only time you will ever find a body of mind like this. It won't be repeated.

Hard to find, easy to lose—your body.

It stays for the length of a lightning flash. 

It remains in this world for the length of time that it takes lightning to flash. 

You've got to get what you want to get done in the time it takes for lightning to flash, because the body's not going to wait for you. When the body goes, the mind doesn‘t have any place to stay and then you're off of there.

If you understand the situation you are in, how precious it is, the chance you've got. How easy it it's to lose. 

Take all your worldly activities and understand that they are like… Did you ever drive down an Indian highway and see them crushing the grains. They have these old baskets. They stand in the middle of the highway and they turn the grain up. Then the chaff flies off in the wind. They dump the basket back on the highway and come with the clock and they run all away. Then all the big Indian trucks come and they separate the chop from the reef. Then they run out on the highway again and they hope that there's not another truck coming. 

The chop, sometimes a little piece comes off, a piece of popcorn. It looks like that.

He says that's how much your normal activities are worth, that little piece that falls off the popcorn in the movie theater. That's how much all the activities that you do in your life are worth.

You should change the verse, the popcorn movie thing.

You've got to be really careful with this. There are always people of lesser understanding who become fundamentalists in any religion. They start saying, nobody can listen to music, or nobody can go to the movies, because it's all popcorn pop. They start making up rules. That's not what makes something wrong. A lot of tantric teachers that I know, on tantric holidays they ask their students to go to a movie and see if there's any tangible message in the movie. 

I watched the movie my Lama told me and I didn't finish it. I got in trouble for not finishing it, but it's called ‚Ready for Forever‘. 

It's some young man, he's in love with some lady girl since he was a kid and he's following her life without telling her. When she moves to new town, he moved there. But he's just praying to tell her that he is in love with her.

Then her dad gets sick and then he figures out that she's probably going to go see him. So he moves to that town and waits. 

Then they have a scene that's sitting there and she's talking to the dad and there's Vajra and a bell sitting there. There's a buddhist bell there. And I'm like, that's cute. Nobody says anything about it. It's just there. Check it out, it’s by his bed. I thought something was going to happen. It was just there. 

Worldly activity means activity which is not magical, an activity which is not fun and deep and happy and cool. Meditation. An worldly activity is other and also it means ignorant activity.

Trying to be happy without helping other people. 

Try to ignore other people and be happy at the same time. 

Then that's broken. 

You could eat a big piece of chocolate cake and if you only really want to taste it and share it with others, then that's not worldly, right? 

But to put it in your mouth and not offer anybody else any, that becomes worldly.

It's not the cake. In lower intellects, they screw it all up. They're like, Nobody can eat chocolate cake. Chocolate cake is Samsara, like that.

Do get rid of things in your life that are not magical or happy or special. 

Stop doing things that are just selfish or you don't understand what's going on.

(30:10) Geshe Michael reciting Tibetan

Night and day, think how you can get the most out your time here. Because you don't have much time.

Then the refrain comes. 

That's the verse that the Pabongka Rinpoche chooses as the first words of a thousand page book that takes 10 or 15 years to study.

That's the first line. Those are the opening lines. 

Do something with your life. 

And that's kind of what the theme of this retreat is.

Decide what you want to do with your life. Where do you want it to put you?

Maybe the reason you don't have energy is you don't have anything worthy of your energy. Then find something which is worthy of your efforts. 

I proposed that going to Ukraine and teaching Diamond Cutter to Russian mafiosos. This is fun. This is meaningful and you have a good time.

If you do that kind of thing, your life will be really fun and meaningful.

(31:30) The second question on this homework is: What is samsara?

You want to mispronounce it together. Sansara, no M before an S in Sanskrit language. SAN, it's an N. It has to be an N. M is not allowed before S. It‘s sansara. It's not Samskrit.

When people say, Oh, Geshela what I'm going to go on a three year retreat and leave Sansara. As if sansara were in Bowie or Tuscon. 

You know Asana, yoga. 

ANA means continual. SARA means to flow.

In some languages the S changes the F, the R changes to L and you get the word flow. 

Sansara means the constant flow, or the cycle, like continual flow. 

Sansara means the cycle of life, the wheel of life, the cycle of suffering.

People think it's a place and they say, I'm going to give up watching tv. I'm going to leave Sansara. 

What is Sansara. What does it mean? Why is life called a cycle? 

There's a very simple example of Sanara. It's the person who irritates you the most in this mind, recently. You have your own collection of.

They like baseball cards. The people who have irritated me, I got their picture here. There was some nun from Oregon.

She has a retreat center in Washington. 

I heard her give a talk over there. It was really nice, in Tucson. She said, people have insulted you or hurt you in your life with certain words that you have never forgotten. You have repeated those words over and over for years. If you asked them, they wouldn't even remember saying them. You've been meditating on them for years and the person who harmed you, the person who hurt your feelings wouldn't recall a week later once said. Then years later, 10 years later, you can still recite all the words of what they said to you. Amazing. 

So what is Sansara? 

The person who most irritates you now says something unkind to you, like you're stupid. That's the back end of a sansaric cycle. 

Then you get angry and you say, No you are stupid. That's the front end of a new sansaric cycle. You plant the seed again.

They say, You're stupid—the seed is finished.

If you could keep your mouth shut it would all be over.

But we can't. Then you say, No, you're stupid. Then we planted a new seed and then a week later that seed's going to ripen into what?

They're going to show up again and call you stupid, or somebody else. 

That's Sansara.

It's not a place and it's not an activity. It's not like watching movies or the sunset.

If you go to a movie and you're looking for the vajras and the bells in the guy's bedroom, that's a Tantric exercise.

If you go to a movie to just waste your time with no higher intention, then that‘s Sansara and it will repeat itself. 

Small Sansaras are happening all the time. Someone hurts you, you respond, then they hurt you again, or somebody else hurts you again. Those are sansaric cycles, those are small cycles.

(36:02) Then he gets onto the subject he is doing on the second day, which is what we're reviewing this afternoon. He gives a short Lam Rim. He takes you through the whole Lam Rim. 

Then he starts talking about: you have a beautiful body and you have a beautiful mind. Well what are you going to do with it? What is the worthy goal to do with it? 

He lists three different goals.

The goals of the Lam Rim start beyond what anybody normally wants in their whole life. 

The lowest goal of the Lam Rim is beyond any goal in a normal person who wants to get in their whole life. A normal person's life, in the whole length of the human life, they never reach the desire for the first of the lowest goal in Lam Rim.

Which is: I just don't want to go somewhere bad or die. The worst, the lowest goal of the Lam Rim is to protect ourselves from something after you die, from going somewhere die.

That whole thing gets a little fundamentalist also to me. People are like, you're going to go to the hell realms. 

Geshe Michael, if you eat the ice cream, you're going to be born after you die as a preta. That's not the point. We've said it many times. You can just check in on it. 

You don't die and your spirit leaves your body and your spirit wanders around and finds a new body, a fresh body and then jumps in there. That's not the way it works.

Watch my hand. Are you ready?

You watched my hand go from one side to the other side. My hand didn't move.

65 still images were coming up in your mind. 65 karmic seeds ripen in this much time, 65 seeds are doing something to somebody in the time I did this. There were still photographs. They were here, here, here, here, here. Then there's an illusion of flow because they're happening so fast. So it looked to you like I moved right arm. 

Between here and here, a different picture came up in your mind, from a karmic seed.

Karmic seed opened the mind from here. Another karmic seed opened to here. 

That's all. That's the way the world works. You're just watching seeds open fast one after another.

You could have died between here and here. It could have been that I died between here and here. In that case a different seed ripened in the second moment, in the second millisecond.

A different seed ripened and suddenly I'm seeing a fur. I'm over there in the horse tank and I am looking at the same appendage that I used to look at before. But the seeds are ripening differently. Different seeds are ripening between here and here. In any given person, the perception can change, because it's changing anyway. This is not the same seed as this one. 

It's not weird to say here, a seed opens a seed to see a human arm, and then the next millisecond a seed opens to see it as a horse's leg. It's not a big deal. It's happening every second anyway. It's just another seed opening and your mind has tons of every kind of seed. You've done everything to everybody. 

To be concerned about what you're going to be after you die, it is going to happen as fast as my arm moving from here to here. The arm will stop, the seed to see an arm will finish, and then other seeds will assert themselves. That's what it means to be reborn. It's not like they pull your soul out of your body and they have a discussion, and they go on the internet to see what kind of body you can have. Then they stuff you into some new body. It's not like that.

If you can move your arm right now, you can be reborn in another realm in the same amount of time. Because it's just another seed opening.

That's a goal, not to have it happen to you. That you don't get to be in here, you got to stand over there and get abused by humans. 

We treat our horses well. — Why are you keeping them? — We ride them.

Ask them if they want to be rid around. How about they ride around on you for a while and they give you a caramel apple at the end.

That's the lower goal.

Then the second goal is, even if you could maintain seeds that catch your arm human, there's problems. It gets old, it breaks down. Everybody's arm breaks down, no matter how beautiful you are, how good your yoga is, how thin you are, how attractive you are, how tall you are. It doesn't matter, you have to lose it.

Your seeds wear out. You have to lose it, and it will be hard to lose it. Because losing you is hard.

You watch an old person go to the store. Sometimes the people just ignore them. 

You watch them go to the store and they say, Excuse me, and the guy walks by and then they're like, Could you show me where the…

It's almost like they're not there. Nobody wants to be reminded that they will be this old woman later and they don't like old people. They make people nervous. Because deep down they know that this is what they will become.

It's not enough to just continue in this life.

That's the second goal of the Lam Rim: Could I stop the process altogether?

Could I not be born like this? Could I not continue like this? 

Then the highest goal would be: Could I help others escape that pain also? Could I help everybody escape that pain? 

If you traveled with us, it's fun, great fun, especially the jetlag. 

If you've traveled with us around the world constantly, you can start to see patterns in the world. You can see global patterns and global shifts of patterns, and you can sense potential for major shifts in the world. But if you had gone to Kiev and Paris before that, and Vancouver before that, your hand is on the pulse of the planet and you start to feel patterns.

Then the patterns are such right now that this world could become an enlightened place in our lifetimes. You've sensed the movements, you get clues here and there. Some Russian guy says 30,000 people in our country are reading the Diamond Cutter. 

Then you go to some other country and they're like (the same)

In Detroit, there was one yoga center with some beautiful teacher there a long time ago. Now I swear to God there's a yoga center on every block, every single block. 

It's really weird. It's bizarre. But you can go from Ty's house in a car, not drive from more than five minutes and have a different yoga class in a different studio every day for a week. Things are changing. 

Detroit. All these ex auto workers are opening yoga studio. I told them, don't be shy, you can export yoga instead of the cars. We can export that consciousness. And we are, that's what we're doing overseas. It's coming. The patterns are out there, it is very interesting. If you really travel constantly and you're not unconscious, you can see these patterns.

(45:57) Then naturally, as soon as you recognize that something is valuable, what's the next thing that comes to your mind? Like you're dating some girl or some guy and then you finally fall deeply in love and you're finally seeing all their beauty. For the first time you really see all of the beauty in there. 

Then what's the next thought in your head? 

I might lose them.

Yeah, and that's encouraged in the Lam Rim. As soon as you figure out that you have a unique body and mind, which is historically positioned in a time of flux in which the world you live in could become an enlightened mandala in the next 10 years. Then you're like, God, I don't want to lose this. I got to hang in here. This is going to be cool. 

The next natural thought should be, yeah, but I don't want to lose this chance.

I want to be here when it happens. I want to be part of it. 

That's the next natural thing in the Lam Rim. You're encouraged to understand that you could lose it.

As soon as you know how valuable it is, the next natural thought is that I could lose it. Same with your girlfriend, your boyfriend.

In the case of death, in the case we mentioned I am in a historical cusp.

It could well happen that people all around the world, every country, are meditating, doing yoga. We were Bulgaria. I mean we went to teach them (Kirten?). 

We sang all our songs and I thought they'd be really impressed. Then they said, well we know some songs too. I said, okay, you can sing the song. 

Then this lady got up and she ripped this song, one of the songs we did, this Bulgarian lady, and she got up and she ripped this song. 

Things are changing. Things are really changing. 

You go from, I'm in a very incredible times in history and in my life and I could be part of a very beautiful thing. 

Then the minute the body is worth something, then you're afraid of losing him. Then you're like, boy, I could lose it too. 

But in the Lam Rim you have to go one step more. What would that be? 

I'm in an extraordinary time of my life and in the world. I could lose it anymore. 

What would be the next natural thought?

If I said, You're going to die tomorrow, what would you be thinking?

Where do I go after I die? What happens to me after that?

I heard this thing. In England during World War II, all the cathedrals were filled with thousands of people all day long during the bombing of London. 

The minute, they called off the war, the next day there was nobody in the churches. Because nobody was worried about they're going to get blown up tonight and what's going to happen to me afterwards? Maybe I got to make my peace with God just in case. The next day they're all gone.

The next natural thought is, where will I go? What will happen to me?

How does it translate to the boyfriend?

Well where am I going to find the next one?

He's precious. I could lose him and then I'd have to start looking at the internet again. I'm going to clubs, which is special suffering. 

I just reviewed this second class of this course. Let's do an open mic.

Q&A

(51:42) Student:

When seeds are ripening in my mind all the time, why do I keep ripening the same seeds, like to see my husband and my job over and over and again? How come sometimes my seeds don't ripen course, than building, than something crazy. It's totally different, random thing. Why do they seem like they go together?

Geshe Michael:

Together in pattern? In small flows, at least. There are realms where they don't ripen in themes. You just skip from realm to realm, moment to moment. Like you're in aerospace, suddenly you're born in between stars. You die within two seconds when you're in a hell realm, somebody lifts an ax, chops your head off, then you're in another realm. Doesn't have a theme. We're kind of lucky, but not like if you've had a car accident or a stroke or your boyfriend walks in and says he just found some other lady this morning. Sudden massive changes.

But the reason they sustain, the reason you can have the same boyfriend for a couple of years or something is that you planted similar seeds. 

There's an argument in the Abhidharmakosha about, is it possible to plant a single seed which has multiple results over a period of time that would sustain a flow?

And then, is it possible that a single moment our ripening seed could require multiple actions to produce it? Can it be that multiple actions are required to produce a single impression and can it be that a single seed can split off into the sustained perception of a boyfriend over six years or something. The Abhidharma says both are possible. 

It's like sports. I have certain plants in my garden.

They're like a thistle. They're around and then they open up like that and there's thousands of seeds in there. It's like a dandelion, but it's some kind of special, it's called Niger seed. Anyway, it's a kind of thistle and they make these little opium poppy balls and then they open and then so make a thousand seeds. 

It's possible that one action committed with intense emotion could sustain a boyfriend for six years. 

It's also possible that it would take three years of reciting your Lamas name to finally get to be with him or something like that.

How can we help the world all by our daily work?

Personally, I think, you read Buddhist scriptures, you went to Buddhist teachings, you heard Lamas talk and that the scenario that you formed in your mind was that somehow you would keep meditating occasionally, and doing your three times book. At some point you would turn into Buddha. Then you would save the world or something like that.

But it happens gradually. It all happens gradually and it's organic in a way. It just happens. Things start to happen in your world, things start to shift in your world. You practice your yoga, your meditation, keeping your six time, those seeds start to ripen and it's not like there's a big revolution or something—just slowly people in Bulgaria are learning (Kartak?) and Russian mafiosos are reading the Diamond Cutter at work. Small things start to happen because of your daily practice.

It's not that the whole mandala and enlightened world pops up in the day. It's that it slowly slides there and nobody notices that they are in. 

Suddenly you're in Detroit, Bloomfield Mill or wherever, and suddenly there's Yoga studios on every block and sincere devoted people there in every studio. 

But because you live there, you don't notice it. Because you're in it, you don't notice it. 

Can you help all being with your daily work? That's the only thing you can do. That's what you're supposed to do. You just keep doing your daily practice. 

If it's a decent practice and a well-informed practice, then they start putting yoga studios everywhere in Detroit. That just happens. You get used to it and you don't reflect that it's enlightened.

Sooner or later you have to admit it's enlightened. It's like that.

Of course you're going to work. That's what creates it and it's happening, because you're in it, you don't notice it. You have to get some distance from it. You have to realize how far we've gone. I couldn't use the word yoga in the Diamond Cutter in 1999. The editor told me to take it out. He said, Put golf. Put that people can do golf. He thought people wouldn't buy the book if I mentioned yoga. And now it's like cool. You should see the mafia doing Yoga. It‘s really sweet.

(58:14) Student:

Could you possibly review something? There's a meditation you can do where you can prove to yourself that you're not your physical body. Like, I am not my body because…

Then you could take this step and say, I'm not my mind by similar proofs, like the disconnection between your body, then the mind also breaking down. 

Can you review then if I'm not my body and I'm not my mind, then what am I?

Geshe Michael:

I think it's very, very confusing. It's an old proof in Buddhist literature. You are not one and you are not many, you are not singular and you are not combination.

It‘s just confusing. 

I heard it recently, I heard somebody talking about it recently, it was one of my own students. It was bad and it wasn't helpful. They were telling somebody, You're not your mind. 

The person just looked confused and they're like, But I have a mind.

They're like, Yeah, you have a mind but you're not your mind.

The guy said, Well, I never thought I was my mind, I just have my mind. 

Then they said, Well, you're not your body either. 

He was like, I knew that. Because I have my body. 

Then they jumped on me and they said, Well who do you think you are if you're not your mind or your mind. 

He is thinking, Well I'm just Joe. They call me Joe. Somebody calls my body-mind together Joe, and Joe has the body, and Joe has the mind, and that's okay. That's the way it is.

You're not owning your mind. Or you couldn't say, I'm thinking.

You're not only your body, or you cut your finger, then suddenly you'd be Gehse Michael. 

I think the point in the scriptures is that, are you any one of your parts? 

Just for thoroughness, they ask the question, Are you any one of your parts?

Are you your ear?

After much thought he said, I'm not only my ear. 

We can eliminate the: Are you one or are you many? We can eliminate the word one. You're not just your ear.

But then the tough question, the point of the exercise and the answer to your question is, when you get to the combination of all your parts.

I'm not owning my ear, but if you had two ears and two eyes and two mouths and a mouth and all the stuff I got and you add a mind and a couple other stuff like my name, then you have a person. Then you have the person.

That's not true, because there are people who don't recognize where a car is. You could have tires, and you can have a hood, and you can have the top of the car, you can have the two bumpers and they can even be put together in the right way. 

If an Eskimo from the 17th century walks by, they don't see a car, you can't see it as a car. You can have all the parts of the thing together and it still isn't that paper. 

Probably there are objects in this room that we ourselves in 2011 are incapable of tying together properly. There are probably many objects in this room that people 10 years from now will reassemble mentally and they'll see things in this room that we don't see, in the same way that an Eskimo from the 17th century wouldn't see the air conditioner as an air conditioner. They would just see it as a pretty box with a smooth front. 

There are many objects in our own lives that we don't recognize that would help us, like the internet 20 years ago, optic fiber cable made from sand to transmit the world's information on sand, on little pieces of sand, thinner than a human hair.

We didn't ever tie it together until three years ago. We didn't get it. 

There's probably lots of other stuff like that sitting around us that we can't piece together. We can't synthesize.

Discovery means new synthesizer. 

Take two arms, take two legs, take a head, take a torso, take a mind, give it a name. Geshe Michael. But it's still not Geshe Michael yet until karmic seeds opening your mind that force you to synthesize it together as a person. 

The last ingredient of all conglomerates is the karmic seed opening and you perceiving it all together as a thing, because without that it's just a pile of parts.

That's all they mean when they talk about all that. That's all they mean. 

Are you only your ear? No.

Are you only your body? No. 

Are you only your mind? No.

But are you your body and mind put together and then you have to say, No. 

Well then what are you?

I'm my body and mind put together, and then a karmic seeds opens in my mind and causes me to piece it together. Without that karmic seeds opening you're the Eskimo from the 17th century who can't see a car when he is standing next to the car, or he is driving a car.

Then it gets so messed up and people are trying to convince people.

You now who taught me this? A nun from New Jersey, she had a daughter. Her mother named her Carmen. Her mother named her after the opera. 

In retaliation she named her daughter Janice, from Janice Choplin, just to irritate her mom. 

Janice used to hang out in the classroom, in the kitchen when we were having class from Rinpoche. He would teach us all this stuff and then we would go into the kitchen and Janice would be there. She was like 10 years old. We just came out of that discussion of one or many, and I walk in the kitchen and I look at her and I say, Janice. She says, What? 

I said, Are you your mind? 

No. 

Are you your body? 

No. 

Are you all of you together? 

Then she goes, yeah, I am. 

I was like stumped. I didn't have to say, because I misunderstood it. 

Are you everything altogether? 

It seems like that. But then it's the karma that ripens in your mind to see you altogether. That's all. 

It just frustrates me because you go to some teaching and somebody talks for two hours about, You're not your ear. We knew that.

(66:45) Ven Gyelse:

The ACI voices that are online and the ACI 3, there's two courses actually. One was recorded later and at the very end I've been emailing people about this, but no one knows, at the very end it's you say, oh, I'm going to give you this talk where you can take the entire Lam Rim and meditate on it as it relates to the emptiness of each step. But I can't find it.

Geshe Michael:

Maybe I never did it. Maybe this is it. This is what I'm trying to do. 

The traditional way to teach death meditation is just kind of get heavy on people and kind of threaten them. You're going to die and you're going to go to hell realms… 

Meditate on that.

It's unsatisfying. It doesn't really work. I haven't seen it work.

I think you need to explain to somebody why they're dying.

Why dying is a perception, and why aging is a perception.

You have to explain to somebody what we just talked about.

To really get someone to appreciate that they could be a horse by tomorrow, any one of us, you have to understand how seeds ripen in the mind and how there is no human there and there is no horse there without the seed. Even if you had all the parts, it wouldn't be a horse. Something has to synthesize them together. 

For me, it would be preferable to go through the last steps of the Lam Rim, which are meditation and emptiness and then go back to the front. 

What's the first great Lam Rim, what's the first and greatest of all the Lam Rim?

Find your heart teacher.

You can take somebody. If you don't explain emptiness to them, then you're having this—in the middle of this week, it'll be, ‚Which energy pep up do you want?‘

Then you get into these long discussions of should we go to India to look for a Lama, or is Nepal better, or maybe dumb fallen has somebody there. That's an unenlightened way to teach and study the Lam Rim. 

If you study the emptiness part first, you study the meditation part first, then when you come back to the first and greatest of all Lam Rims, which is to find your teacher, you grasp that you don't find them. You create them. They are coming from you. 

I have friends who are very uncomfortable with that. ‚No, my Lama can't be coming from me.‘ — Why? — They're too perfect.

It's not logical. It doesn't logically follow that. You can create somebody who's better than you if you create the seeds. That's the whole idea because seeds grow, karma grows. 

You share with somebody else what little Dharma knowledge you have. That plants a seed and it creates a Lama who is omniscient. Because seeds grow. 

It's bad thinking to say that you can't create a person who's infinitely wiser than you. 

That's like saying you can't grow an apple tree from the seed. The apple tree's bigger than the seed. The Lama that you've created by sharing what you know with others in a gentle and sweet way is that you create your heart Lama. That's cool.

But if you attack the Lam Rim without that knowledge, then you'd get into these discussions of… You get into decisions.

Should I go to Nepal? Should I go, I heard there's a good Lama over there. 

We have shirts, I'll wear it tomorrow. They were printed up by our Ukrainian team. It says in English on the back: Just stop making decisions. 

They got it.

If you start the Lam Rim without understanding it, then you're trying to decide: 

Which Lama should I go to? Which country should I go to? Which Indian town are they staying in? Then you go round looking for them.

If you understand emptiness, you plant seeds consciously at the first of the Lam Rim and you plant to teach them by helping others consciously. 

Then they just show up. They just come into your life. In fact, you can't avoid that. Lama Aura met her teacher just by leaning out her window in the lower east side of New York and looking through her window across the way and seeing some purple flash. Then went over to investigate. I mean she didn't have to got in there.

That's the way it works if you know your stuff.

Short Meditation on Personal Motivation for the Retreat

(74:27) 

Watch your breath.

—

Why did you come to this retreat? What motivations? 

Usually it's a combination of motivations like a financing package. 

There's 40% this motivation and 10% this motivation. 

Go through different motivations you have for coming here, and be honest and don't judgemental. 

—

Come back to your breath.

Review Lam Rim Class 2 - What Makes Our Seeds Stronger

(80:52) I'd like to read the text from class two.

(Reading the Tibetan text) 

The subject of what would happen when we pass away. 

He says, in our mind we have good seeds and bad seeds. In the human mind there are large collections of good seeds and bad seeds. They are all mixed up. 

Whichever seeds are more powerful (Reading Tibetan), at the moment of death (Reading the Tibetan text) the seeds are triggered. 

The seeds are like a bomb that hasn't gone off. 

At the moment of death, some emotion within us triggers them. It would be useful to talk about what triggers them, because then maybe you could not trigger the ones that cause problems.

In the end, what triggers a karma is not understanding.

Let's say you had a seed in your mind from getting angry with somebody. That seed was planted by misunderstanding that person. They did something to hurt you, and then you got angry at them because you didn't understand that they were coming from you. The reason that you can reach nirvana, the end of your negative emotions is understanding. 

If you understand that the person is coming from you, then it's almost impossible to get angry with them. You might get angry with yourself somehow, but if you realize that this person is saying something bad to you because you said something bad to somebody last week, your anger would get less and less. 

It would be less and less possible to be angry, and then you would reach nirvana. Nirvana means the permanent ending of your negative emotions.

Misunderstanding where angry people come from is required to plant a seed.

Because to get angry, you have to misunderstand where they're coming from.

It's also required for a seed to be triggered for a seed to open.

If you don't misunderstand what's going on, then it is not possible for those seeds to go off. 

As you die, they say for example, you might remember someone that you had been angry at or something like that. You have a seed in your mind, the anger starts to come up again. If you trigger the seed, then that would cause you to take a lower birth. It's not taking lower birth. It cause you to see the realm differently, like as a horse. It's not possible for that seed to be triggered or open unless you misunderstand what's happening to you.

If you are aware as you die that the process of death is coming from you, it's not possible to trigger a bad seed.

(Reading the Tibetan text) 

If we look at what seeds in us are stronger, it's the negative seeds. Negative emotions seem to be stronger than positive emotions. 

We dwell more on ex partners than on current partners that you're having a good time with. You dwell on things in the past that hurt you.

Negative experiences we seem to dwell on more than positive experiences and that we have more negative seeds than positive sees.

(Reading the Tibetan text)

Whether or not a karma is strong or not, whether a seed is strong or not, powerful or not, it depends on, he says SAMPA, JORWA, TARTUK. 

What could those be?

Three of the four things that make a seed stronger.

We go around the world, we teach people about karma and then we get to a point where they say, How can I make it happen faster?

Because if you can't make karma ripen faster, my big deal is that if I can't show somebody how to make karma ripen fast, they will never draw a connection between what they did and what came. 

I can try to talk somebody into giving money to poor people. If they don't get some kind of return before they forget that they gave the money, then they'll never draw a connection between them. If it takes a year for them to get something back, then they'll never believe in the principles. 

My job as we travel around the world is to try to give people a method that will make seeds ripen fast. Because if I don't and they do something nice in 2011 and it takes out 2015 for it to come back, then they won't draw a connection and they won't follow the system. 

He says something interesting here. 

Whether the power of the seed is strong or not depends on, he calls it SAMPA, JORWA, TARTUK. 

SAMPA = motivation, JORWA = how you actually do the thing and TARTUK. It makes the tail, the conclusion. How do you wrap it up. 

What's he missing?

Student:

The person you're going to do it to.

Geshe Michael:

Yeah, SHI, he didn't mention SHI.

Classically, there are four ways to make a karma ripen fast: SHI, SAMPA, JORWA, TARTUK.

(88:42-89:21 not to understand from the audio)

It's called DUCHE, (?) and (?) I think there's only three.

He didn't mention all the ways to make a seed ripen fast.

SHI means you commit the karma towards a heavy karmic object, such as your parents, your teacher, someone who's having a serious emergency, someone helping many others,

He didn't mention SHI here. 

Nowadays we talk a lot about Harry and Sally (an american movie) on the tours.

We got a clip of it. You know that story?

It's a part in Harry and Sally where she had dinner in a restaurant and she starts having orgasm. She starts very (making aroused voices).

Then some rich lady walks in the restaurant and she's all dressed up really fancy. 

She has a white suit and all this gold pearl necklace. She sits down and then the waiter is standing next to her with a menu and she's staring, everybody else is staring at this lady making these sounds in the middle of restaurant, in the middle of a meal. She's like everybody else staring at this lady and then the waiter is finally tapped up the show and says, Here is the menu, what would you like?

She says, I don't need a menu. Whatever she is having, give me that. 

The idea is that, part of your motivation, the second way to make a karma ripen fast would be in the back of your mind: If this works for me, then other people will see me and they'll imitate me.

If you don’t tell somebody I'm doing Anatole’s salad thing and you look great. You were overweight last week and this week you look great. They say, What happened?

I'm doing Anatole‘s salad thing. Everybody will do Anatole‘s salad thing.

You don't have to run around trying to convince people to do Anatole‘s salad thing. 

You just do it yourself and if you look obviously really good and everyone's going to go to Anatole and ask him to teach them the salad thing. 

It's the power of an example. 

In my mind, motivation, one of your motivations can be:

I want to save the world. I want to help other people.

The way you help people is they watch you and they see what you're doing. If it looks good, they try it. You can talk all day about Anatole‘s salad thing. But if you don't eat the salad and then you don't look better, then it doesn't matter. No one's going to do it anyway. 

You can give Dharma talks one after the other for 20 years and nobody will do anything.

If you look better, then somebody will ask you, What are you doing? And you say, I'm doing Anatole‘s salad thing.

In my mind, motivation would be like:

I'm going to learn these practices. I'm going to get good at them. 

People will see how happy I am, how well adjusted Iam and how successful I am. Then naturally they'll ask me, How did you do that?

That's a better way of teaching than trying to go door to door and convince people. 

For me, that's motivation.

JORWA means that you actually do the good deed.

TUK means how you think about it afterwards. 

(Reading the Tibetan text)

Whether a karma is powerful or not depends on those factors.

What was your motivation? 

Who did you do it towards? 

How did you do it 

How did you think about it after you did it? 

(Reading the Tibetan text)

People, most of us think that the bad days we've done are not so big and that the good deeds we've done are really big.

Let's take the example of (Tibetan?) a child, it's usually the child of an animal. 

PAKCHUK is a pig baby. OKCHUK is a baby sheep. NAKCHUK is a baby fish.

What's a (Tibetan?) It's a child of virtue. That's the tibetan word for disciple. 

It's a nice word. It's a child of goodness, a goodness child.

He says, (reading Tibatan), let's say you just say a single word to them out of anger, you're angry and you say something to your student out of anger. A single word.

The motivation is anger. Extreme anger.

You choose the word that you are most MARMAHARTA.

In Tantra it means to strike like the middle of a chakra or something. Like you do a certain pose in yoga and it's meant to, it strikes the middle of a chakra.

But here it's a single word that you insult your spirit with, and you MAMAHARTA. 

You try to strike a nerve.

Then afterwards you say, Yeah, I'm really cool. I really hurt you, a single word and I cut him and you (…?) 

Arrogance. You think afterwards you don't regret it. I hurt them and nobody could hurt someone else so much with a single word. I'm really good at it.

The preparation for the wording. 

You got angry and you planned it. Then you said the word, afterwards you relished it. POTAPLE means is a very, very colloquial word. It means perfect, absolutely perfect. 

How was the dinner? Absolutely perfect.

In this case, all three parts.

He's talking about how to make a karma powerful, but he's talking about a negative karma. 

(Reading the Tibetan text)

He wants to give an example of how you could make an almost insignificant action, significant. How you could make a small virtue and turn it into a huge result or how you could do a small non virtue and turn it into a big result.

He takes the example of a (Tibetan?). It means a bed bug.

If you've spent any time in India or Tibet, they are important someday. 

Once you get 'em, can't get rid of them and many foreigners in Dharamsala spend their time figure out how to get rid of them. 

Let's say you want to kill a bed bug. You're killing a bed bug. You find them.

If you really want to know, you sleep all night in those wooden beds, they hide inside the knots in the wood. You can't get 'em out. They come out at night and they crawl over you and they suck your blood. Then I don't know why, but they walk over to the wall and they crawl up on the wall and they hang out there until they digest. 

You get up in the morning and there are these bed bugs hanging on the wall and they're like this big and they're filled with your blood.

They're all like ruby color and it's really disgusting. 

It is this pleasure you've taking in smashing one of them who is hanging on the wall with your blood in there. 

(Reading the tibetan) You're angry, you couldn't sleep. They crawl on you. When they start crawling, they wait until you're almost asleep and then they go up to the warmest parts of your body, which is your crotch usually. It is really icky. It is really scary. You get upset and you get really angry and you're scratching it from you.

That’s the SHI.

Then the JORWA is to smash them and how you smashed them. If you're good at it, you make them suffer. You put the thumb down and you break their leg.

He's talking about that. He's talking about a bad deed.

You make them suffer for as long as you can. Then finally you kill them.

Afterwards you think, Now everything's better.

You've got three elements in the bad deed.

1. You were very angry and upset that they were crawling all over you.

2. Then you killed them with the most possible pain

3. Afterwards you thought, Now everything's better.

(Reading the Tibetan text)

That single action with those three elements complete is an extremely powerful karma. Almost like killing a person.

People keep asking me, oh, I just did a small karma. How could I get such a big results? 

It's those three elements. 

1. How angry were you? 

2. How much pain did you wish to inflict? 

3. And then how did you feel about it afterwards? 

The good deeds that you and I do are not powerful.

If we wanted them to be powerful, we would need same ones. 

After you do the good deed, you say, I dedicate that all the people who are corrupt in the government and Ukraine should suddenly see the (?). You send karma.

(Reading the Tibetan text)

At best, when you do a good action, like coming to Friendly Pines camp, putting up with the beds for seven days.

Even coming here, your dream of coming here should be, I hope I can contribute to changing the world. You don't need to think you're going to have some Kung Fu Panda realizations.

It's not going to be some big breakthrough like that. The love for everyone in the world, it doesn't have to be that you're on a mountain top and there's a shining, the clouds break open and light comes down on you.

It's not going to be like that.

You're going to be in Bulgaria and you're going to turn on the hot water after four days without a shower. It's going to be all cold and rusty color, and then you're going to pour yourself together from the jet lag and go give a Dharma talk somewhere. 

That’s Bodhichitta and you're going to change the world that way, through little tiny inconveniences. 

It's available to you. You have it. That motivation, even while you came here, should be: I will learn something that I can change the world. You can and we do.

(105:36)

(Reading the Tibetan text) 

Medium motivation would be: I hope I can get out of Sansara altogether.

Minimum motivation would be: I hope I don't go to a bad place after my death. 

Then he says (reading Tibetan), It seems to me that anyone with even those motivations is extremely rare. 

If you say, My good deeds are better than my bad deeds. I'm not afraid of dying, because I got so many good seeds and I don't have so many bad seeds.

He says, But just to have any of those three attitudes is minimum, and nobody has them. 

Where are you going to go after that? 

He's like, what do you think? 

(Reading the Tibetan text)

Most people's dreams are limited to food and sex in this life. 

What it really comes down to their whole life‘s effort is house, food,sex and what you have to do to get those things.

We believe that we have to hurt people to get them.

(Reading the Tibetan text)

Even if you do decide to do some good deed, and then he gives an example of the OM MANI PADME HUM prayer.

They say MANI in a monastery, short. You want to do one rosary of MANI. All you're trying to do is get through 108 MANI PADME HUMs.

He says, You can't concentrate on it. You start thinking about everything else except the prayer. You start getting sleepy and you're just thinking about everything else. 

We can't even recite a minute and a half of MANI PADME HUMs without thinking about other stuff and getting sleepy and bored.

(Reading the Tibetan text)

Even if all you want to do is read, it's very difficult to concentrate on.

MIKME TSERWAY, it's a prayer to Je Tsongkapa. It's very famous. Everybody does it. It's going to take you an hour to get through an extended meditation on it.

If you spend 10 minutes thinking about it, you'd be lucky. Then 15 minutes will be spent thinking about dinner or what you're going to do after the class. 

That's what he says. 

(Reading the Tibetan text)

Also, after you finish, most people they say, Oh, I did a good karma. I hope I can get croissants tomorrow. 

Like what they want, their dream of what the good karma will produce is kind of limited.

Therefore, the good things we do are not very strong

(Reading the Tibetan text)

Some people do the rest ok, but when it gets to the actual execution of the good deed, they're not so strong. They have good plans and they have good dedication afterward.

Some people are okay with the actual deed, but before they do it, they don't have much motivation to do it, and after they do it, they don't think much about it.

Some people manage to make them all impure.

Therefore, the negative karmas in our mind are well planned, well executed and well appreciated. Absolutely, they're stronger, they're more powerful. 

At the moment of death, the karma which you get activated at the moment of death are probably going to be negative ones.

If a negative karma is activated as you die, it must create a form which is worse than human. If a negative karma is activated as you die, it cannot create a human form. You must create a lower form, like an animal form or worse than that.

Pabongka Rinpoche says, therefore it's a wrong conclusion that we're all safe. 

Nowadays you see people running around, they go to some big Lama and they say, Can you tell me what I'm going to be born as in my next life? Can you do a Mo? 

Can you predict? Can you open a holy book and tell me what's my future?

If that Lama says, Don't worry, after you die, you're going to have nice birth, we feel relieved

If they say you're going to go to a worse place after you die, we get all scared.

But who can tell and who knows for sure?

You don't have to do fortune telling to figure out where you're going to go after this. 

Your future has already been foretold in countless scriptures by Lord Buddha and the great sages of the past.

For example, even just Arya Nagarjuna said in the String of Jewels, he says, 

If you hurt other people, you'll suffer and all pain comes from hurting other people. 

All bad rebirths come from hurting other people. 

If you help other people, they're not come. You'll go to a higher place after you die and you'll be happy there.

You don't need more predictions than that. 

You don't need somebody to tell you what's going to happen to you after death. They're always lying. They don't know. They have no idea what they are talking about. Psychics just want $12 or whatever. Forget it. You don't need them. You really don't need them. 

You can design your future yourself. Just study this, learn it. 

You can make stuff happen. 

You want to make a million dollars, make a million dollars. 

You want to find a partner. You can make a partner.

You want to cure cancer, you can cure cancer. 

You don't need them, they're not for real.

You can make your own future. You don't need them. They're just taking your money. 

You don't need that. Your future has already been foretold. 

If you treat other people well, you'll be happy. 

If you hurt other people, you'll suffer. That's it.

(Reading the Tibetan text)

He says, we are not at a stage in our life where we can see our future.

If you haven't reached that (?), then you can't see what's going to happen to you in the future. You can't see what's going to happen to you a hundred years from now or 200 years from now. You can't see it.

Is it therefore not possible for people like that to see their future?

Can we say that if you can't see your future, you can't see your future? 

Is that a correct statement?

You can look at the seeds you planted and you can figure it out. 

It's in the first chapter of the yoga sutra.

You see things directly, or you can figure it out, or you can trust somebody who knows. 

You can figure it out. How are you acting towards other people? 

You don't need somebody to tell your future or what's going to happen to you after you die. You can just look at how you've been conducting your life and that's what will come.

Meditation to Come to the Present Moment

Relax your face.

Especially pay attention to the corners of your mouth and your eyelids.

—

You start to count your breath. Keep your mind up against your breath as if you're pushing it against the breath.

—

Step back from your mind.

Take a small piece out of your mind in the back. Step back and watch your mind and watch your thinking thoughts, like another person thinking thoughts. 

We're going to spend a little longer each day on this.

Observe your thoughts, see what comes up naturally. 

Don't try to change them. Just see where you're at tonight.

—

Please begin to block any thoughts of the future, any thoughts after the present moment. Thoughts about the past are okay for a while.

Thoughts about the future are not allowed. 

—

Now, block thoughts about the past.

Try to get in touch with a sense of relief that you are permitted not to worry about the past or the future.

Just be here in this room meditating with all of us together. 

No other thoughts. 

Relax into it, don't struggle.

— 

Now please bring your mind to life plans. What would you like to do the rest of your life?

What other things you would most like to do?

They don't have to be spiritual, but there could be anything.

What would you like to accomplish with the rest of your life?

What would you like to see happen during the rest of your life?

The large goal, the Uber goal, what is it? Two or three goals.

What would you like to happen with your life?

—

Slowly come back to your breath and then open your eyes. Stretch.

Review Lam Rim Class 3

(11:25) I will read you some of the text of class three. This is a review of the class we did in three weeks in April. 

I think it‘s a blessing to hear the Tibetan.

(Reading the Tibetan text)

This is discussing our goals which are directed only at ourselves.

Is it enough in life that your goals should only relate to yourself?

He says, until such time as you are devoting much of your life to helping others achieve their goals, you can't achieve your goals. It won't happen.

We're going to talk about it later. I need the karma, to achieve your own goal is to help others achieve their goals. 

It's not even possible to ignore other people and just worry about your own goals. 

Because it won't work. You won't get them.

If it worked, it might be okay. But it doesn't work. 

As I said earlier, it's just so pleasant. We all have hard days. We all have days when we have doubts. We all have sad days. We all have days when we don't feel very inspired. If you just do that exercise of watching your own mind and then try to think of somebody else, everything goes away. Everything gets nice. It's really weird.

Just think about somebody else's needs.

It can be very artificial and unfeeling. Just force your mind to think about somebody else's need for five minutes, and suddenly you feel really happy. 

(Reading the Tibetan text)

Even if you achieve nirvana in a lower path, he says, you don't achieve your own goals. You can't achieve if you ignore other people. 

You can reach nirvana and you haven't helped yourself.

(Reading the Tibetan text)

Achieving Nirvana without caring about other people. People keep asking us on these international tours, they'll say, if I just use your principles to plant seeds to make money for myself, does it work? If I don't care about other people, will it still work? 

We had that question at Diamond Mountain. I remember three years ago it came up. Master Chandrakirti asked the question. Is it possible to, for example, get financial success by giving others money and not care about them at all? 

What did Chandrakirti say? 

If you help other people achieve their financial goals, you'll get money. You can't avoid it, it will come.

He is asking the same question here. 

It says, even if you achieve Nirvana, which is what? You use the principles of mental seeds. You take advantage of the principles, you manipulate them.

You say, I don't want to have anger anymore. I'd like to be free of anger. 

Then they say, Okay, then just understand that the people who make you upset are coming from your seeds. You're responsible for the people who make you upset. They are a reflection of your behavior in the last six months. Which is very frustrating. Then you won't get angry at them, because you realize it's not their fault. 

Whatever they say to you is coming from you. It's not coming from them.

Then you don't get so upset. 

You can reach Nirvana that way. Meaning you reach a point where you never get upset in your life again. You're not capable of getting upset. 

Then he says, you're not helping yourself and you're not helping others much. 

Your own goals are not completed and the help you give to others is very little.

(because you can‘t see emptiness directly)

(18:08) He says, you haven't eliminated the obstacles in your mind, which prevents you from being omniscient, knowing all things.

What he's saying is, until you can see the future pretty clearly, and until you can read other people's minds, until you can see what they did 20 years ago to cause the seeds in their mind that right now cause the problems that they're having, you can't really help them. You're not like a big help to them.

You have to meditate, you have to work on seeing emptiness and then you're like a doctor who can‘t diagnose people. 

The doctor says, I want to help people, but I don't have an x-ray machine.

You don't have the tools to help you.

He says, you have to reach full enlightenment in order to be able to help them. 

(Reading the Tibetan text)

I don't know if you remember the four ways we were talking about crossing the river.

If you could figure out a way, you've got a backpack, but you're also trying to cross a river, which is very common in Tibet because there's lots of rivers and streams everywhere and there's no bridges. 

When you come to a river on the way here, you would've had to get out and wade through three rivers already. 

If you could figure out a way to hold up your robes and hold your stuff with the same, you put your robes up on your arms and then you hold your stuff on top of that, it's more efficient. You don't have to go two times back, drop your robes off on the other side or something.

If you're going to go through the process of saving all living beings, you might as well reach Nirvana on the Greater Way with love. 

As you are removing your anger at other people by understanding that they come from you, you might as well at the same time do it for everybody to save the world. 

I don't think it takes much more effort.

It doesn't take any more effort to say, I'm going to learn to put up with my husband who criticizes me constantly. I'm going to learn how to see that he's coming from me and that will involve not criticizing people at work. Then it doesn't take much more effort to say, And I'll thereby become an example.

Everybody will say, What's with you? You seem to be really happy and you're relaxed and your husband, he grumbles at you and you're just like Teflon. You're untouchable. He can just blah blah at you and you're just smiling and you're having a good time, and he's grumbling almost by himself now.

People are going to take notice. People are going to say, What are you taking?

What kind of antidepressants are you on? 

Then you can say emptiness and karma. 

It doesn't take much more effort to do it for others. So you can be an example for others and you don't have to do anything bigger than that. 

Just be an example and want to be an example.

You start a movement. Start a fab. 

One friend will ask you, how do you do that? And you'll teach them the trick with their husband and then they have two friends. They'll ask them, how do you do that? 

You start this whole little (movement). 

We've got women in Bulgaria and they were so happy the third day they're all like, Oh, is this going to be a new revolution. This better than the old revolution. 

We're like, yeah, that's cool. We keep getting letters from them, New revolution in progress.

(Reading the Tibetan text)

(24:33) There's a position in the monastery called LAG DE. 

You've got to have tea in the monastery days. Everybody has to have 20 cups a day. The way they make the tea, they have a pot that's bigger than a Volkswagen. 

You could fit a Volkswagen in the pot. You make tea for, in Sera Mey it is 1500 people. That's 20 times 15, 30,000 cups of tea. It's a big pot.

Somebody has to clean it afterwards and you're talking a wood fire.

It takes like six (?) to scrub the pot and then three guys have to get in the pot. They are just walking around scrubbing it. That's a LAG DE. 

They say you enter the monastery, you become the LAG DE. That's the first job you have. You work your way up. 

Then what? You're going to go to a new monastery and start over again?

Why waste your time? 

While you are in the process of fixing your husband? 

Why not do it with the conscious intention that other people will watch you and they'll Harry & Sally you. They'll start doing what you're doing. 

Why not just have that extra intention? It doesn't cost you anything. You're still fixing your husband.

Just have that little extra thought that, Oh, people will see how cool I am and they'll see my husband change, they'll see our relationship change and then everybody will start doing it around you. We'll start a new revelation.

That's Mahayana. That's Higher Way. 

Why not just do the extra thought? It doesn't cost you anything. It's spreading. 

(Reading the Tibetan text)

(27:20) He is calling (?), it's a letter to a student, or a gardener. It's not a letter to the king. He wrote several epistles. It's one of his epistles.

This is this cool thing. I saw it on Google the other day. I was looking at surfing movies, big wave. There was a natural thing in the ocean. It's like a whirlpool and some of them last for years or something and they suck you in and the water is pouring over like that into this huge whirlpool and ships, oil tankers just drop off and you never find them. 

Arya Nagarjuna is saying, the ones you love have fallen into the ocean and they've been caught in a whirlpool. They've gotten spun around to the other side of the whirlpool and then you are still over here. You were with them, they fell in and then they spun around to the other side. You can see them, you can watch them, but you don't remember that they used to be with you.

Meaning you meet people in your life who were your mom.

Even in this life, like when I met (?). Now they said this lady's name Elizabeth and that's my mother's name. I counted up the years and I'm like, oh my God, this could be my mother. Maybe it's my mother. It would be likely right?

Then I'm like, but I wasn't sure. You can't be sure.

You meet people in your life and they have been your mother. If not in this life, they've been your mother in your life before.

Then you say, I don't believe in past lives. That's dumb because you have a mind. Mind cannot be born, no matter what science. Science is dumb. I'm going to write a better history of time and send it to Steven Hawkins. 

The idea that the mind rests in the brain, it's just silly. You could go home right now and look in your refrigerator and there's still that apple pie there, maybe. Your brain stops here, but your mind can travel everywhere. The mind is not dependent on the brain. It may rest on the brain or it may not, but it is not in the brain. It can go anywhere. You can't destroy the mind. You could put a nuclear weapon here and set it off and all the bodies would burn up and the minds would just sit there because the minds, they're independent. You can't cut them and you can't weigh them. They don't have a physical substance. 

It had to come from somewhere. It came from another ineffable thing before that.

You have been everything to everybody, and everybody in this room has been everything to everybody else. Everybody in this room has been your mom, then they fell into the ocean and they got twisted around a few times in the whirlpool. You can see them passing by, but you can‘t recognize that that was the person who was standing next to you a couple hours before. You just don't recognize who they are.

(Reading the Tibetan text)

(31:51) It being logical that everyone has been your mom, everybody sitting around you has been your mother, everybody sitting around you has had their guts ripped out giving you birth, you just don't remember.

To not go the extra step and think, I would like to start a little revolution, or I would like to be an example for other people. 

He said, shameless.

I take of this elderly lady, very, very beautiful elderly lady. She's 86. She came out of the door the other day, I walked up the other day and she meets me at the door and she walks out. She's reeling and I'm like, what's wrong? She is very graceful. She's like a princess in Spain, then she's like, I can't believe it. 

I'm like, what's wrong?

My neighbor's kids, I can't believe it. They're stealing her pension money and spending all her retire money and rent the house. 

I said, how old are these kids? 

She says, well, one is 62 and one's 61.

I said, how long has this been going on?

She said, since they were born, they still live in their mom's house and they got through 60 years of life without doing anything. Now they're eating on her pension. That's shameless. 

(Reading the Tibetan text)

(34:15) There's nobody who hasn't been like that.

The previous lives you have lived are countless. So the mothers you have had are also countless. 

(Reading the Tibetan text)

(34:48) There's no difference in the amount of kindness that the people sitting around you right now, have been your mom. 

All the kindness that your mother showed you in this life, she also showed you in that past life. You're not different. It's not like in the old days they paid less attention to their kids. It's the same. 

(Reading the Tibetan text)

(35:40) Some people say it is not true that everybody in this room has been my mother, because if they had been my mother, I would recognize them. I would know. 

Then he says, there's a lot of people in the current lifetime who don't know who their own mother is. 

I have a niece, an adopted niece. She's 21 now, and she just found her real mother on the internet. She went on the internet and figured it out. 

She could have walked by her mother or she could have sat next to her mother and she wouldn't have known who she was. 

Pabongka Rinpoche is like, it's not logically necessary that if someone's been your mother that you would know they had been your mother, even in this life—much less in your past life.

(Reading the Tibetan text)

(37:21) Then somebody comes up with another argument.

I don't have to consider all of the potential candidates from my past mothers with respect and love, because that was that life and this is this life. 

In this life they bugged me, or they hurt me.

Maybe they were my mother in my past life, but I don't see why I should be pay their kindness because now we're talking about this life. Now we're in a different life. 

(Reading the Tibetan text)

(38:18) In this life, if someone helped you in 2010, and then they didn't help you in 2011, then would you consider them to be kind to you? 

Would you think they have been kind to you?

If you would, then you can't draw the distinction between this life and last life. Someone's been kind to you. It doesn't matter if it was last year, or this year, or last life, or this life—the same.

(Reading the Tibetan text)

(38:58) If you were to ignore their needs. We've been talking about Eastern Europe. On my mind a big empty place as far as Dharma, a big desert, huge desert stretching across thousands and thousands of miles and you just ignore them. 

The feeling of what it feels like to go to a place where people have nothing, absolutely nothing, spiritually. The Orthodox church was good and it's gone.

Communism had a pretty good code of ethics, and it's gone.

Now there's nothing. They live like (Carol Pats?), they don't know any better. 

I was in Mongolia and we were walking down the street (…) 

It was dark and I was kind of scared. Then five 6-year-old kids run out and they are a little pack. They run up to tourists and rip their laptop away from them, or they steal their purses and then they run to their manhole cover and they get back into the sewers they live in. They're feral. Their parents left them and they're exactly like cats. They'll bite you. They're weird and there's thousands of them. 

It felt the same. The government steals everybody's money and then if you complain to the police, they steal your money. If you hire a lawyer, they steal your money. You can't do anything. You can call the judge, he wants a bribe. If the other guy pays more, you lose the case. So everyone's just sitting like this and not doing anything, because they are afraid to lose everything. 

What are you going to do?

When you go there and you feel the vacuum and then you feel what could happen if they learn something good? 

They're like feral cats and if you train them, or if you gave them something beautiful, they would get it and they get it right away. They like it, they taste it and they get all excited. Or you're just going to ignore them. Or you just going to let them suffer. It doesn't matter. I don't care. Just ignore them.

They also have the second largest nuclear arsenal leftover from Russia that they're sitting on. I don't think we should ignore them.

Take some responsibility. They have been your mother. 

You feel so good when you go to a place like that and you bring them some kind of hope. You feel so happy. They're so grateful anyway,

(Reading the Tibetan text)

(42:36) You don't need anybody in your life who hasn't been kind to you shown you great kindness. It doesn't cost anything to make the leap to wanting to be an example for them. I'm talking about Bodhichitta.

All that is, I want to start a little revolution. You're going to do nice stuff anyway. Then you think to yourself, Well, if I can become a good person and a happy person, other people will watch me and other people will try it.

That's Bodhichitta and that's all you have to do.

You don't have to go out and be a missionary.

Just think, I would like to be a happy person and then other people will see me and they'll say, I want whatever she has had.

(Reading the Tibetan text)

(43:42) If you think someone has brought you up and taken care of you so that you aren't feral, someone spent the time to make you civilized, then you would want to pay them back. You wanted to do something for them. They saved you from being a feral cat in the sewers, and then you would want to do something for them. You would want to pay them back.

(Reading the Tibetan text)

(44:26) You could feed them when they were hungry. You could give them water when they were thirsty. You could give them money if they were poor.

But that doesn't help them much. It wears out. 

I was in the business and giving away all my money for many years. It's frustrating, because you go to some poor village and you give everybody money and then you leave, and then two weeks later everybody's hungry. 

(Reading the Tibetan text)

(45:05) If you want to give them something valuable, if you want to repay them in reality, teach them what we're talking about here.

You have the best gift you can give anybody already. Once you understand about seeds, you already have the best thing you can give anybody.

It‘s so cool. When we travel, it's so beautiful. I go to China and people say, Geshela, if you go to meet big people in China, you're going to have to bring some gifts. 

I meet Lamas and they give me gold boxes. They gave me a gold Buddha. I don't know how much money it was worth. It's a kilo of gold, 56,000 $. 

They said, Geshela you better bring something with you when you go to China. You can't just go to China empty handed. 

I'm like, but I can't think of anything better to give.

We were in Ukraine and I'm like, I would like to offer them something, but I can't think of anything better than just what you're learning. Because it would make their whole life happy. That's the most precious thing you can give anybody. 

To give them a gold Buddha along with that, it just seems cheap. 

Here, have a gold Buddha along with the keys to the universe. It just feels stupid. I can't do it. The nicest thing you can do for anybody is to explain to them how their husband is coming from them. Then they can be happy. What greater gift than to fix their husband?

Teach somebody how the problems in their life are coming from themselves, and then they just shut the valve off and they fixed it.

What more could you give somebody? What greater way to repay someone who for countless lifetimes held you to their breast and gave him milk? 

What better way to pay them back? There's nothing better.

You sense it when you go to a place like Kiev or something, you sense that that's enough. I gave them everything. You feel so happy. 

To learn this stuff well, work hard.

Somebody gave me a hassle, like an hour ago. ‚Geshela, yesterday I didn't finish all the homework, but I wanted to and I kind of did, but I didn't really, but I was thinking about it but I didn't really write it all down or remember.‘

I'm like, Just stop it. I don't care if you finished it eight times. She didn't remember to write it down. Just finish it again. It's not going to hurt you. It's not like some terrible thing. You just take it again, and do homework again. Then you'll be qualified to give someone a gift, which is more precious than anything you can give.

I don't give gifts to anybody anymore. I don't send any birthday presents, almost. Because there's nothing better to give than the ability to be happy.

What better gift could you give? 

(Reading the Tibetan text)

(49:02) You can just think of those four infinite thoughts.

I wish everyone could be happy. It's cool, because you go to a foreign country on one of the tours and you can do it. You can live out the foreign infinite thought. It's not some kind of prayer you're doing at home.

You go there and you're giving them some way to be happy for the rest of life.

You are taking away their suffering. Their husband improves. That's suffering. What do you think suffering was?

Was it something more bigger than their husband? I mean that's serious suffering. Take it away.

Treat them all equally. Go everywhere.

Somebody paid for us to go to the Ukraine. We lost $20,000 to go to the Ukraine. You've got to treat everybody equally. You go everywhere, you teach everybody. 

Personal responsibility. I'll do it myself. If nobody helps me. If I have to raise all the money. Somebody's telling me today, I wanted to go on a DCI tour.

I said, well, Jigme was on the tour.

They say, What do you mean?

I said, Jigme doesn't have money and we don't pay anybody, mostly. 

Then she's like, what do you mean? Jigmeis going around and she gets miles around the country. She gets a hundred miles here, a thousand miles here. Then she pieces together a 4:00 AM flight from the blue flight, then she gets on the bus…

Anybody can do that.

This trip is kind of unusual connections. You could do that. 

It says here, HLAKSAM.

It means, I'm going to do it. I don't care if anybody helps me. I'm just going to get it done. I am not waiting for someone to pay me to go on onto the next tour. I'll work it out, by hook and by crook. I'll get there. That's HLAKSAM. If you do HLAKSAM, they   start paying for it.

Open Discussion about How to Find the Passion for Your Life

(53:56) It's a custom, to sit together and talk about cool stuff. 

I want to propose a question.

We go on these tours, we do two days of open talks in the city. Anybody can come, like in Kiev, 350 people came. We just did open talks. We say, okay, there'll be a retreat on the weekend and during that we retreat on the weekend you get to break out into small discussion groups, and you can talk about your personal issues.

People love that. Especially on this last tour, over a third of the people asked the same question. It was: What the hell should I do with my life? How do I find out what I really wanted to do with my life all along? How do I find my passion in life?

I heard this word over and over. People were saying, How do I know it's my talent in life? How am I going to find what I really want to do in my life? What am I supposed to be doing?

Those of you who have found it, you know what it feels like to have it.

If you find it, it is so pleasant. I found it when I was 17 or 18. I knew forever what I wanted to do. Then I (was) just happy my whole life doing exactly what I wanted to do. I wouldn't change anything. 

But to meet people who are 40, 50, 60 and they're like, I'm not sure I did the right thing in my life. I'm not sure what I want to do in my life.

On the tours in the breakout groups, maybe almost half the people sometimes, they have the same question. How can I find what I was supposed to do with my life? Because it is running out. It's getting late and I still don't know exactly what I was supposed to do, or what I would be really good at, or what I would want to do. 

I'm asking you a question: What do you think would be the karmic seed that I should advise them to do to find their passion in life? What should I say to them? Anybody?

Student:

Rejoice in other people's endeavors.

Geshe Michael:

I think that would be one. He said rejoice in other people. If you meet somebody who has a passion, that's really cool. Sometimes you meet a musician who's know what they want to do and they're awesome. Then just be happy that someone else has found that passion.

Rob:

Help people. I guess identifying people's dreams and help them achieve 'em. Any big ways or small ways.

Geshe Michael:

Help people identify their belief.

Student:

Ask them what their values are, what they value in life.

Geshe Michael:

I like the idea of conversation. I was telling people in Kiev, Take people out and just talk. Everybody has friends who don't know what they want to do. Take 'em out and just talk. Sometimes when you talk about what you think you might want to do, it becomes clear, right?

Student:

I know what it feels like and it feels like you're in a stream paddling with the water instead of paddling against the current. I just picture that sometimes I try so hard to be something when I work hard and I realize I'm paddling uphill. And when I find that feeling where it's just flow, I know that's probably a good sign.

Geshe Michael:

Yeah, it's not a struggle. Sometimes I define it as what you would stay up until three the morning doing not being forced by your father.

Student:

It was in the yoga sutra of love and passion, joy and equanimity. And then the results of this practice will lead you to love everything that you do. So then maybe a person who was doing this might find out that they loved what they were doing or that they were drawn to.

Geshe Michael: 

Yeah, I think it's an option. I like that. Sometimes I tell people maybe what you're doing you could love, but you don't have the seed for that.

A lot of people come to me and say, I used to love my work and now I don't like it anymore. I'm an architect and it got old and I don't feel happy with it anymore. I used to love my work and now I don't love it anymore. The love for my profession has worn off. 

They want me to tell them which new profession to do. Sometimes I think maybe they just need to recover the love for their own profession.

Which raises the idea of decision. I want to go back to the idea of decisions. 

A lot of people now, because of the economy et cetera, they are faced with decisions. 

Should I give up what I was doing? We don't need, right?

He owned a tile company and it just wasn't working financially. He just went to nursing school. He is collapsing this week from his final exam. He decided to go to a different profession and then people are asking me, Should I be a nurse or should I hang in there with the tile company? 

In this system you would help somebody else who was having trouble identifying their passion. 

It would strike you in the face. Your new profession will come and hit you in the face. You won't have to make a decision.

When you're trying to help, if you have to deflect the idea of a decision, they'll try to say, should I stick with my old job or should I start a new job?

The question is defective. You should help someone else find what they want to do and then relax. Someone will walk up to you and offer you a new thing, and you don't have to.

I have a lot of trouble teaching this to people because they don't get it.

In Taiwan, they get it. I don't know why. It's the only place they really get it.

Try to imagine a life where you don't have to make any decisions anymore.

You're faced with two courses of action, just help somebody else figure it out and relax. The decision will be made for you. Something will come.

You don't decide to breathe. It's decided for you. Everything else will be the same. 

Just learn how to plant it. It's very beautiful.

The whole idea of struggling with what you want to do is you will never know until you help somebody else figure out what they want to do. Then it will come and you won't have to decide.

Student:

So kind of like a domino effect because you're teaching us to teach, you're asking us to help someone find their goal by helping them. So we have to tell them, well help someone find their goal.

Geshe Michael:

I like it. I like it. It's a good question. This is called the Guang Jo computer geek asking question. It's classic. It's in all the scriptures.

We went to Guang Jo, which is just on the other side of Hong Kong, and this was the first talk to this group in Guang Jo in China. They weren't allowed to read these things for 50 years. They tried to stamp out these ideas and it was illegal to own the scripture. 

We're trying to explain, look, aspirin doesn't really work. 

If you've helped someone else with a headache before, the aspirin will work.

If you haven't helped someone else with a headache, it won't work. 

That's why aspirin sometimes work and sometimes they don't work. Because they don't have anything in them that works. 

Then they ask you, What's the active ingredient? 

You say, it's not active because some people take it and it doesn't work. So the active ingredient needs to be activated. Then they get it.

This young man, he raises his hand and he says, okay, let me get this straight. I'm supposed to have somebody else with a headache and then that will make my aspirin work. 

We're like, yeah, you got it. 

He said, well how am I supposed to help them with their headache? 

We said, you can give them an aspirin. He's like, wow.

What's the problem?

He said, you think that you're going to plant a karmic seed by handing somebody something that doesn't work, is going to make your aspirin work for you?

I'm like, (nodding)  No one asked me this question in 20 years. 

He's like, any help you render to someone else which is not explaining this stuff to them is defective. Even teaching dDharma, it's defective. There's nothing in it. 

He said, Let me get this straight. You're going to give somebody an aspirin to help them with their headache. The aspirin may or may not work, and then you expect that seed to make your aspirin work.

I'm like, God, I didn't think about that. 

What Anna's saying that, logically you would have to explain to them. The only way to really help someone else's headache is to explain to them that they should help someone else who has a headache. She's saying it would be a domino effect, or I would say it's a pyramid scheme.

It's a Dharma cricket scheme. Nobody can stop. It's one of those letters they say you have to send it to seven, chain letters. It's not going to work unless seven people help other people. 

I told the guy, Look. your intention. Somebody's getting mugged on the street, so whatcha going to do? Watch them? You have to try to help. You have to run up and try to stop the guy. You don't know that your action is not going to make things worse within your limits of your knowledge of the situation. You have to try. You can't just let the guy stand there and punch some lady. You have to go try. Maybe he'll pull out a gun and shoot both of you, which he wouldn't have pulled out if you just let him beat up quietly. But you have to try.

The intention to be of assistance is what makes the Aspirin work, mostly.

I think if you really want your Aspirins to work a thousand percent of the time you'd have to explain them about emptiness. But sometimes they're not ready to hear it. Many times they're not ready to hear it. 

That's like you get up and give a business seminar in China and people say, What's the karma to make money?

You say, You have to give money to somebody else.

Then some guy raises hand and says, Would that include you Geshe Michael?

They don't trust it. You can't just pop it on people. You got to wait until they're ready. You can't tell 'em you should give your money away to get more money until they're ready. 

Any other ideas about how to help someone find their passion, because that's going to flow in the energy.

Student:

I think learning to meditate well.

Geshe Michael:

Yeah, would help them find their passion. Yeah, they would clarify their thinking.

Meditative intensity would be personal intensity.

Student:

It seems like a life force when I feel the passion, it feels like it's coming from almost a second chakra. This idea of, so I'm thinking morality be true to yourself. So when you're true to yourself and you're keeping those morality opposite your liking and disliking, it seems like your passion and inspiration just so be congruent with your own to yourself.

Geshe Michael:

There's a big thing about it in China and I really like it. 

As long as you think your husband is complaining at you because he wants to complain at you, you're working upstream. You're going against the natural flow of truth. That's harder and it feels wrong, you don't feel passion and you're exhausted because fighting against truth. 

When you turn it around and you say, okay, he's coming from me and I have to change myself, that will change him, then you're flowing with the truth. They say the way, the path. Then you are flowing with the natural way of things and you feel passion. 

I think that's what you're saying. 

Then you feel passion and inspiration. You're not struggling anymore. It flows and you do cool stuff. You just keep doing cool stuff because you are flowing with the proper…, you're not fighting it.

I think though that ultimately to flow with the way would be to understand that your husband's coming from you, that's all. That would be enough. Then you would do the right thing. You wouldn't respond with anger. Then you'd be flowing with the way and then your whole life would be easier. You'd feel more inspired and you would find your passion in life. Something like that. I like that. Anybody else?

Student:

Provide people the resources that you know they need to develop their passions. (…)

Geshe Michael:

I like that. Just look for those kind of things. 

She is talking about people who are already exhibiting some of their passion but they don't have the material means to live out their passion. You would find your passion, like if some guy wanted to be an artist but didn't have money for canvas and paints. He knows he wants to be an artist, or he wants to go to art school and doesn't have the money. Then you supply the money to fulfill their passion rather than just helping them find their passion, because they already know what they're passionate about. You help them actualize their passion. That's cool. Anybody else?

Student:

I think it would be interesting to find people who already had a really strong passion for something and then to do the same thing that you said about the husband. Convince them that something good that was happening is not out there, but also coming from them because there's already a tremendous amount of energy when you really love something, but then it kind of goes into something small rather than sharing that with more people.

Geshe Michael:

Anatole is talking about someone already had a passion and they were manifesting their passion. They were already an intense musician or something like that.

They had found their passion and they were already living their passion, but those seeds will die. They will lose their passion. Something will happen, they they'll get tired, they'll get old. It won't be so much fun to play saxophone. 

Something will happen. The seeds will wear off. 

The sad thing is that those people don't know why they have the seeds in the first place. They don't know that it's coming from their past seeds. So they don't have any instinct that, like it‘s the people's third album. It is always that.

Because their seeds are wearing out and then no typical musician would think, I better teach saxophone to three kids, or I'm not going to be able to make a fourth album. It won't come. I want to, you're talking about sustaining passion. 

If I want to sustain my passion, I have to keep reinvesting the seeds.

Whatever passion I have, rather than narrowing it and just concentrating my own next album or worrying about why my last album wasn't so good well received, even though it was great, then their focus tends to get narrow and narrow on himself. 

If you could do the opposite.

The guy in Singapore, he makes a cartoon, Johnny something. He is a very famous cartoonist. 

I said, how famous are you? 

He said, Do you know the Simpsons?

I said, yeah.

He says, I'm the Simpsons of Singapore.

I said, you're famous. 

He said, yeah, I'm famous. 

Then he started to get less famous and he didn't know what to do.

I said, teach other animators. 

He did this thing, he arranged this thing at his house once a week and all the young animators in Singapore came and he trained them for free. Then the governour of Singapore made him the animator of the country or something. He oversees all animation for all projects of the government now. Which is a lot of animation.

He did that. Rather than narrow it to himself, he expanded it, helping other people get their passion.

Student:

(75:30) If you want to find your own passion and you are having a hard time, then you could work on the seeds by doing Tonglen on somebody who can't find a passion, thus manipulating the seed that you have for not being able to find your passion. Then if you want to show somebody else you want to help somebody else find their passion, you can just teach them how to do that.

Geshe Michael:

Yeah. Naomi said a good way to plant seeds to find your own passion would be doing Tonglen, take away the suffering from somebody else who doesn't know how to find their own passion. Then you could teach tonglen on passion to people who had trouble finding their passion. Then that would be better than an aspirin, because you would be giving them the means, the real means to find their own passion. Teach people to learn about how to find their passion. That's good.

Student:

I was going to say pray after the Lama Chupa.

But I also have a question. There's a lot of people, kids especially, that have their passion and I feel this now too, the young transitioning where you know what you want to do, but you feel like you're not good enough or it's too hard. Like my little girl wants to be an actor. I was an actor. It's a really hard way to live. How do you work with that kind of rational awareness of what it's really like without being negative?

Geshe Michael:

I'll just phrase it shorter. 

Uma Thurman came to my company before she went the dangerous path with her father. They asked me to hire her as a secretary. Every time he sees me, thanks me for not hiring her. 

What she's saying is that, suppose the person knows what they really want to do, but it's a little bit of a dangerous path. Like actor. It's not likely to be very easy or successful. 

They have the karmic seeds for their passion, but they also have other seeds for fear or hesitation about jumping into their passion. 

What would you do? I'm saying all this because hopefully I would like most of you to go on tours with us. Somebody's going to ask you these questions. You're going to be in a group in Buenos Aires or Santiago, or I don't know where, and somebody's going to ask you. I know what I want to be, but I'm a little bit afraid. Because it's not exactly practical and it's difficult path.

Student:

It seems to me that based on what you've been saying, that the best thing you could do is to teach them the real causes for them making their career successful, in spite of any sort of construct that's in their mind, that it's potentially dangerous or futile in any way. Just teach 'em how to plant the correct seeds to make successful.

Geshe Michael:

There's certain seeds to find a passion, but then there's other seeds to make it practical.

Student:

If you're experiencing fear, find somebody else who is experiencing fear and help that person get over their fear. Whatever you're experiencing yourself that you don't want, do the opposite to somebody else.

Geshe Michael:

I'd say that too. Help them remove the seeds for fear. 

Your question got a little bit into the practicality of fear and the usefulness of fear, but we won't talk about that.

Student:

Sometimes people might be entering a work that's not necessarily…, like my mother was very nervous when I decided I was going to be a yoga teacher. She's still nervous actually. I don't make a lot of money as a yoga teacher, but I'm very, very happy. So what I've learned over the years through the kindness of my Lamas is that I can turn anything I do if you ask yourself why you're doing whatever you're doing. Then you find a good reason why it can be for somebody else. Even acting can be like that, anything can be like that. So do whatever you're doing for somebody else and then you'll be satisfied even if you're not making a million dollars as a yoga teacher or as an actor.

Student:

(81:25) This whole idea about doing something, knowing that other people are going to see it. So say you had a fear of if it was acting, then maybe what if you picked another fear that may not be so difficult and faced it and just went for it, knowing that other people would watch you try to get through it. Face the fear and you just went for it and did it, even though you were a little scared. Knowing that other people would watch you attempt that.

Geshe Michael:

I think what might be useful there, rather than focusing on how it would affect you to be an actor, you think about how many other people would be inspired if they knew that acting scared you, and you did it. That would plant seeds for you to not be afraid. You've be an example for all the people who are afraid to do what you want to do by trying to do it, bravely. Then other people would see you, they would see the movie. 

They want to make a Hollywood film out one of my books and he was the actor, so he got all this pure from acting.

Tonglen Meditation of Someone Searching for Their Passion

(85:10)

Sit up straight. Close your eyes.

Start to track your breath.

—

Bring to mind someone you know who's having a transition in life.

I think the most typical cases are college students graduating from college, people who just got laid off of their jobs. People whose company just closed. People just lost their spouse. 

Bring someone to mind who's not sure of what to do next.

—

Come and sit with them in their room.

They're sitting alone in their own bedroom. Come and sit with them, invisible.

Try to feel their uncertainty about what to do, desire to find a passion in their life for something that they really can devote themselves to something meaningful.

Then we'll do a Tonglen meditation for that. 

Try to imagine that all their uncertainty about what to do with their life, their inability to find their passion in life, all of those feelings, all that uncertainty and seeking what they should be doing with their life begins to gather at their heart as a small pool of light, like ink. 

—

You make a decision that you would rather bring that uncertainty to yourself and destroy it than to see them continue without finding the great love of their life.

Having made that decision, then with each inhale of breath, bring that cloud of darkness out of their heart, rising up out of their throat into their nostrils. 

Then it begins to flow through the sky, through the air between you, towards you.

Let it stop just in front of your own nose. 

All their doubts, all their uncertainty, all their desperate desire to find what they were meant to do in this life, we draw out of them with each inhalation that we take.

—

On the count of three, we'll take a deep inhale.

The darkness will come into our own chest, our own heart, and then in a split second before you take your exhale, all that darkness is destroyed by bursted light. 

1, 2, 3.

There's nothing left of the darkness except some smoke, like cigarette smoke just disappearing into the air.

—

Maybe the most important step is to look at them sitting on their bed in their bedroom and suddenly they feel a great burden is lifted from them.

They suddenly feel some clear insight into what they would like to do with their life. 

Just sit and enjoy how it feels to watch another person be happy because of your efforts to take away their hurt. 

Just sit with them quietly and enjoy how it feels to have helped them and to see their happiness in their face.

—

Slowly come back to your own breath. 

Then when you're ready, open your eyes.

Meditation to Come to the Present Moment

Sit up straight. 

Relax your face, forehead, eyes, the corners of your mouth.

Bring your mind to your breath.

—

You are asking your heart teacher to come.

I like to picture them in front of me. I try to make them alive, and not a photograph.

I can feel the warmth of their body, I can smell the fragrance on their skin and see their eyes moving and thinking.

Most of all, feel that comfort of having a teacher in your presence.

—

Bow down to your teacher by thinking about one quality that they have that you would like to have, and admiring that quality. 

That's a real Namaste. 

—

Make an offering to your teacher. Something sweet you've done for somebody else.

—

Tell your teacher the most negative thing you've done in the last 24 hours. 

Maybe it was just a thought towards somebody. 

Make some kind of commitment to try not to do it again today.

—

Then think of the nicest thing you've done.

Could be recently or it could be long ago. 

Think of something you're really proud of. Maybe it is trying to get along with someone that you had trouble getting along. 

—

Then think of the sweetest thing you've seen someone else do, maybe here at the camp since you got here. 

Take pleasure in that.

—

Think again about that goal we talked about yesterday.

Something, the main thing that you would like to do with your life, the main dream or hope that you have about what you would like to be, become in your life.

Ask your teacher to help you guide you, become that thing. 

Most importantly, try to get a clear picture of what you would be like afterwards, after you achieved that goal. Try to envision what it would look like, what it would be like.

—

Ask your teacher to guide you, stay with you all day, all life. 

—

Come back to your breath.

Try to keep the mind sliding against the breath. Try not to think of anything else. 

Then we'll start into deeper meditation.

Keep your mind at your breath, try not to move.

—

Now separate a part of your mind off of the main mind. 

Get that part of your mind step back away from your mind.

Watch the main mind thinking thoughts. 

Don't try to control your thoughts. Just watch them.

Watch the mind as the subject watching the thoughts.

See where your mind is at this moment. 

—

Now put up the wall in front of your mind, clear wall. It stops any thoughts about the future., keeps you here in this room.

Try not to move.

—

Block any thoughts of the past. Put a crystal wall behind your mind. 

No thoughts in the past. The only place is now in this room, in this present moment, with the people here.

Relax into the present day, present moment, this morning.

Feel the relief of surrendering into the present, not worrying about the past or the future. 

—

Try not to stay here in the present. When you move it, it means you're thinking of something, how you feel after. That's the future.

—

Ask your Lama to come into your heart. 

Slowly open your eyes, stretch.

Review Class 4

The Correct Motivation

(23:18) We're going to do class four and in the afternoon we do class five. 

Then in the evening we'll start the new stuff, which for me is more fun. But I think it's good that we do a review.

I'm just going to go through the homework for the fourth class.

The first question is about motivation (Tibetan)

KUNGLONG means you're motivation to bring anything, means to fix or to repair something. But I feel like that's sort of a negative to say that you have to start by motivation. 

I think it should just be more, you want to set a good motivation. I don't think you have to translate it as repair. I think it could be just to set your motivation or wish.

It is easy in my own context. I think for most of you who've taken some courses or who've been taking courses for 20 years, for me it doesn't take any great leap of imagination to imagine how I'm going to use this stuff. 

It's not difficult for me to imagine changing the world or making an enlightened world. We were already very actively doing it. Sometimes we can't remember what country we're in. Turn to me and say what country we in. I'm like what day of the week is it?

We have a very sweet karma. It is not a big leap to have some Bodhichitta motivation and saying, I'm going to save the world with this thing. I could help a lot of people in the world. We already are, many, many countries and many more are waiting. We have many, many invitations. We need you, we need more help, many more people and it's a lot of fun. You can't imagine how much fun it is until I go for an hour to find a croissant in Paris and then the next day you're in Ukraine looking at you're in a thousand year old church looking for icons, or your grandmother or something and it is a beautiful life. I don't think it's difficult to imagine that as you take these teachings about the Lam Rim that you could fairly quickly turn them around and start serving people wherever you are in the world.

The world is a small place now with the internet and airplanes. Bodhichitta is not such a difficult thing to imagine helping the whole world. You can, and the information here is unique. It special. 

(I met) one of my publishers and we have meetings in their big offices, mostly 57th street and 8th Avenue. We're way up in the sky and we're sitting there and the guy, he says, What new ideas do you have for a book?

I'll say, I'm thinking about writing a better book than Steven Hawkins, correcting Steven Hawkins. 

Then he's like, Okay?

Then I say, I have eight other ideas, and he says, Okay, let's do all of them.

He says he gets 1500 manuscripts a week. He chooses one. 

He did the Post book, he did Mother Teresa's book and he's like, You guys have content. You guys have something valuable and anything you want to print I print.

What you're learning here is something really valuable for people.

I'm saying outside of the Buddhist context, okay? I'm very careful. The DCI thing is we don't even mention Buddhism and I don't think there's any need to. It is not in my interest to make sure everybody has a picture of a certain six armed blue guy on their wall. It doesn't matter to me. I don't know if it's even helpful.

If you meet a six armed blue eye blue guy, that's okay. But I don't have any interest to see the paraphernalia spread in the world. That's cultural.

It's not the same in India as Tibet or China or Japan. It's all different. That's just cultural stuff.

The ideas can be used by Russian mafiosos and anybody (to) be more successful and make a better world. It's not difficult. 

The first question in the homework is:

What's the motivation with which you should come to this teaching?

I think in the back of your mind you should see yourself like Amin came on her first tour. She was nervous at first days. By the end of the day she's surrounded by a crowd of Ukrainians and they're asking her questions about how to plant seeds. She flowered herself in the experience. On the tour big groups of people just start forming around. You can't walk through the hallways and just people who crowd around you and ask you beautiful questions and you can help their life.

I don't think it's difficult as you sit here to imagine yourself like me going on a tour or starting, like Jeff just showed up from Detroit. Now he's running the whole thing in Phoenix. Stuff like that, it's not difficult to imagine yourself doing that in your own way according to your own life, what availability you have.

Then Pabongka Rinpoche says, 

How do we deal with the lesser motivations that come up?

When you sit down in the class in the morning and you think, Why am I here?

Then some miscellaneous motivations will come up. 

I heard the food was really good. Frankly, I just wanted to get out in the pines away from Phoenix and walk around in less than 110 degrees temperature. Or I needed a break from the airports and my Facebook page. I just wanted a couple days off.

Then Pabongka Rinpoche says, Latch onto those lower motivations.

Say okay, hook up with, connect with your lower motivation.

I just wanted to get away from pollution and I wanted to be in the Pines for 10 days.

He says, Follow that motivation to it's logical end. 

Then you say, okay, what do you mean? 

Say, well okay, I'll spend my 10 days in the Pines then I'll have to go back to—it was that movie Back to Reality. The kid who takes over the house for a week, the parents leave. Home Alone, and the last one of the movie is back to reality, back to all the screaming family and then you got to go back to your screaming family. 

How many trips to the Pines can we make in one lifetime? 

This course itself, I used to tell people at Diamond Mountain, this is going to end one day. They're all like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Really, we're going to reach the last page of the 10 teachings and then that's it. You're going to have to do a job.

They're all like, No, no, this will go forever.

No, it finishes and this too shall pass. 

This 10 years sounds like a long time. It's not a long time. You'll be looking back and say, I was on the first teaching back in 2011 and then the Bulgarian will be sending Yoga teachers here. Everything passes. Then what?

You will come to your last Lam Rim Gift of Liberation class and you'll make your last trip to the Pines, and then there will come a day when…

I have this old lady I take care of. We are in heavy negotiations to take away her car, because she was in six accidents this year and we're afraid she's going to kill somebody. She's so intent on not giving up her freedom and she's a very compassionate person, but she can't really grasp that she could kill somebody. She almost has. But she's so intent on her freedom and her life. 

Then it got down a couple of weeks ago before the judge. We had to go before the judge to decide whether she should keep her license. 

She's like, You're all going to support me, right?

We're all like, yeah.

Then we wrote a note to the judge that said, Don't believe anything we are saying. Take away her license, please. 

We sent it to him and when we were meeting him we're like, She's a good driver. 

Because she'll hate us for the rest of her life. We had to do that. 

Then the judge checked it down and he didn't want her hand on a wheel.

It'll come for us too. You won't be able to get the friendly Pines again. You won't be able to get here. My walker won't work on the ground.

It's going to happen. Now you're laughing like those people at Diamond Mountain. 

Any lower motivation you could have follow its logical consequences to the last trip to Friendly Pines to get away from the pollution in Phoenix. 

You'll end up at the right motivation anyway. You can't escape the right motivation, just follow the logical things.

I'm going to make my last trip. I get old. I got to do something about it, and I got to help other people do something about it. I don't want to see others live like that.

Then the whole motivation gets twisted back to what it was supposed to be. 

It is automatic. You can't escape it.

Follow the logical consequences of the desire to serve your own small pleasures, and you'll reach Bodhichitta. Because there is nowhere else to go.

That's beautiful.

A Genuine Spiritual Path

(35:43) Then he's going to start talking about the Lam Rim as a kind of spiritual path. 

He says, What are three things you should look for in a spiritual path?

1. Who founded the tradition

The first one is, you should look at who founded it. Who founded this path?

In our case it's the Lord Buddha. 

Then you try to get to know more about the founder of the path, because then you can establish whether you're going to buy it or not.

Establishing the authenticity of the founder is important. 

Is the founder someone who's going to stand up to scrutiny over a long period of time? Like His Holiness, he stands up to scrutiny very nicely. The way he lives is good. What he's teaching is good. His whole life is an example.

Then you're not making excuses for the founder of your path. It's a good path.

It was founded by someone for real. 

In the case of the Buddha, most people don't know much about the Buddha.

Historical information is as if you just had the stories about Jesus' childhood exploits, but none of the New Testament. People are not aware of the teachings of the Buddha. They know about the movies like Little Buddha.

But they don't know much about what he taught.

The more you learn, the more you love the founder. 

The more you study what the Buddha said, he taught for 51 years, he taught 1500 Sutras and Tantras, and they're extraordinary. Every page and every one is extraordinary. 

Then you start to feel this is special, this is a special path.

The founder was great.

2. The accuracy of the information, yet presented in a modern way

Then in the interim between then and now, 2,500 and what, 30 years ago, during that time the people had passed it on sweetly. People have passed it on responsibly. 

You can pick up this scripture which was written in 1920s, and you can pick up a sutra from 500 BC and they read the same.

It's like Wednesday's edition of the New York Times versus Tuesday's edition of New York Times. It's not any different than that. It's extraordinary.

The language, if you can read this book, you can read all of the Buddha's own teachings, because it hasn't changed. Even the language hasn't changed.

In the debate in the monasteries, if you could hear what they're saying, they're like Thou are wrong because thou does believe.. 

There's even debate in the ancient language. It hasn't changed. It's been kept very pure.In fact, with this Buddhist path, I don't even like to say Buddhist anymore. This particular path, it has been refined in every generation, rather than getting more corrupt. 

Usually it corrupts. You do that thing where I whisper something to Ash and then he whispers it to Adriana, and then by the time it gets back here, it's (corrupted).

It's not like that. In this particular lineage, which we'll talk about later, they're so careful about how they pass on a transmission that it has become more refined. It has become more clear and more sweet the more time has gone by.

The Buddha spoke in very cryptic words, because his audience was more intelligent. 

They could memorize what he said on the spot. The Heart Sutra wasn't written down for generations. 

His own words are difficult, they're decipherable, but they're difficult to say.

Each generation up to Khen Rinpoche, who's the third Lama from the left, he's my direct teacher. Up to him it has been clarified more and more sweetly. 

Each Lama has taken it to their own generation. 

We're not allowed to change the information. You can't say there's seven perfections or three noble truths. But you present it in your own world. 

In this tradition is considered a corruption not to present it in modern terms. 

If I try to force you to learn it the way it's taught in a Tibetan monastery, it would corrupt it, because you wouldn't get it, and you wouldn't appreciate it.

It wouldn't feel beautiful to you. 

If I forced you to do syllogisms with me all day, then you would tire and you would leave it. 

It's more pure and it's more accurate if you update it to your present times. 

You got to talk about Harry meet Sally. It's your responsibility when you teach your students in even more obscure eastern European cities that you'll have to pull out the movies from 2015, movies from 2020. You can't freeze it. 

Freezing is corruption. That's interesting.

It has stayed living but precise. Precise and living. It has changed with each generation. The language, the presentation has stayed modern and the information has stayed the original information. That's your challenge as you teach in LA, in Spanish in a Yoga studio to your younger students, you've got to be there and you've got to be up to date. You’ve got to present it to them in their own way. But the information hasn't changed. 

So the second requirement of a good spiritual path is that it's current, but it's ancient. My boss used to say—in the jewelry business—Mike, the best advertisements: put contradictions in the advertising. For some reason people love it. Like modern, traditional. People buy more, because half the people are traditional, half the people are modern. You don't say ‚modern line‘ or ‚traditional line‘, you say ‚modern, traditional‘. That's what we got here. This is updated ancient.

3. Living examples for the teachings to work

(43:33) Number three, there should be real examples of people who use that path and got some cool stuff happened to them. 

Which puts pressure on the elder students here. If there's nothing special about you, we go to somewhere new that are waiting for us.Three cities in Columbia are waiting. We don't have enough staff to send in. You go there and you present something. They're going to look at you and they're going to say, Do I want to be?

You're going to say, I've been doing this for 15 years, and your hands are shaking when you hold your coffee cup. 

Then they are like, Yeah, it's okay, I'll try something else.

Very reasonably people want to see if anything magical happened to you. 

If it didn't then they'll say, no thanks, I'll try something else.

It should be that way.

The third requirement of a nice spiritual path is that people have tried it and people have gotten results from it. 

The big selling point for the Lam Rim, one of the big selling points, although it doesn't make as much impact in a country where people don't worry much about their future lives, is that you can reach enlightenment in one lifetime. 

You can try to imagine the universe, try to imagine billions and billions of stars and billions of planets and normally to become an enlightened being, to evolve into an enlightened being, it takes visits to billions of those planets. It takes many lifetimes of evolution on countless planets to become a Buddha.

Try to sometimes go out and look at the stars. I heard that in a visible quarter inch of stars there are trillions of stars that we can't see. Just imagine the normal journey to enlightenment requires lifetimes spent on billions of the stars you see in the sky.

If you study the Lam Rim, if you learn it, you can do it in one lifetime here in Friendly Pines. It is not unreasonable and it's not impossible.

What's it feel like when you get close?

He starts talking about Vajrayana, which means Diamond Way. It means secret teachings. You can say Tantra, I don't like the word Tantra because even in Bulgaria there's magazines about Tantra and it's not Tantra. 

It means secret teachings. What makes them secret? 

Secret means you do your Lam Rim, you meditate nicely, you relax, you help out in the kitchen, you do your yoga almost every day. You do your five times book and then (…) you just do your practices sweetly, calmly as well as you can. 

No dramas or beating yourself up. I'm not good enough. I didn't do my six times book. 

Just relax, do your practices mildly, sweetly, semi regularly. 

Then Tantra happens to you.

How does it happen to you?

You're sitting in your discussion group and you're having a problem with your boyfriend. But you don't want to say anything because it's kind of an embarrassing part. 

Then the person next to you says, I have a problem with my boyfriend. They say, I want him to kiss me but he won't kiss me. Even if he kisses me he just gives me his crack on the cheek thing and I was kind of hoping for some slobber.

Then you're like, that's exactly the question I wanted to ask. You start getting suspicious of this person next to you. That's kind of weird. 

Next time you sit with them and dinner and they're like, I hate Tofu, don't you?

You're like, yeah, I didn't want to say it. How can we sneak a coffee into this place?

Then this person keeps saying all the things you're thinking and then that's tantra. 

Tantra is not cutting chicken's heads off. 

It’s you're sitting next to somebody and you think Je Tsongkapa, you have this flash.

This is this lady from Guadalajara sitting next to me is Tsongkapa.

Then you're already into Tantra. Then you are close to enlightenment here in Friendly Pines.

(49:31) I think we do another meditation. I like to talk too much. I keep imagining Lama Christie here (…).

Meditation on Energy Flowing from Muladara Chakra

(50:10) Close your eyes. 

Breathe deeply.

Slightly tighten your stomach, your abdomen, especially lower abdomen.

Don't make a big effort, but just sort of find a line of balance where there's a slight tension in the lower stomach and in lower abdomen. It loosens the muscles of the lower spine.

—

Now put your mind into the middle of the Muladara chakra.

Muladara chakra is like a knot, which is at the place where your legs meet in your perineum, in your groin.

Put your mind to the place where your legs meet and then put your mind about an inch into your body from that point.

Try to focus your mind. You don't have to do anything special or mystical. Just try to keep your mind here gently, softly. See if you can feel some kind of a center there.

This center, which you can almost feel it like a small ball, is actually a knot.

Certain channels are twisted here, forming a knot.

What we're going to try is to open that knot slightly. That knot is responsible for feeling tired, getting older, not having the energy that you would like to have.

It's also responsible for not being able to achieve the things you want in your life.

The knots along the spine in the body, which are called chakras, are responsible for not feeling energy, not feeling youthful, bigger, and they're also responsible for not having the willpower or the discipline to do the things we would like to do. 

We're going to try to subvert those knots.

We're going to take the mind inside of that chakra. 

Now, imagine that the little ball you feel or imagine a ball, you are going deeper inside the ball to the middle of the chakra.

Put your mind there in the middle of the chakra between your legs about an inch into the body.

It's important not to go back towards the anus. Then that will cause some problems with your poo poo. You have to stay towards the front of the place between your legs. But not as far back as your anus.

Try to focus the mind inside that chakra.

Try comfortably sweetly. Try to keep it there. The longer you can keep it there, the more prana will collect there, and the more energy you will feel during the day.

—

Now I'd like you to imagine a special kind of prana there, in the middle of that ball. Like those geodes where it's like a ball of stone and then inside there's crystals.

So inside the ball, almost like a stone, I had like you to picture this beautiful crystalline clear, like water. But crystalline like glass, and it's a liquid or it's between a liquid and air, but it's crystalline. 

It's a tiny, tiny amount trying to crack through the chakra, move up and down through the chakra like a vein of crystal through a stone.

Just imagine a tiny, tiny flow trying to crack through the chakra of liquid glass.

Keep your mind lightly on that liquid glass. Your mind will wander. Bring it back calmly, carefully. Don't stress, don't string. Think about lunch, think about your laptop, and then slowly come back to the liquid glass.

Try not to move.

Then slowly come back to your breath. 

Release the meditation.

You can open your eyes, stretch.

The Origins of the Lam Rim

(51:55) Pabongka Rinpoche begins to discuss where the teaching of the Lam Rim came from. When did Lam Rim start?

Those of you who've been consorting with Buddhists for a while, you've kind of get this impression that Lam Rim started with Tsongkapa. Tsongkapa wrote the Lem Rim Chenmo, the great Lam Rim, very famous, thousand pages about Lam Rim.

You will come to learn in this week the story of Lord Atisha who brought the Lam Rim to Tibet.

True amazing swashbuckling adventures, which we're going to talk about.

That's the main subject of the later part of the week.

You're going to learn the whole story of how it got from India to Tibet and in fact how it got to India from Indonesia. 

A lot of people, they start to form this idea in their mind, Lam Rim was taught…

(Showing a picture of Lamas) By the way you got to know the casting characters, on the left is Pabongka Rinpoche and you can't imagine how lucky you are to see his face. You can't imagine how lucky you are to read his teaching. Unbelievable being on this planet. 

Then next is Trijang Rinpoche, second from the left. He's the disciple who wrote the testimony. The teacher of His Holiness, one of the two tutors of His Holiness the current dialogue.

I just like his face. I just want to sit there and stare in his face. My mother came to India when she was dying. I was studying near the Dalai Lama and the Lamas taught her how to die. She was dying. Then we got to see His Holiness. 

It was a beautiful time.

She bought me this really beautiful little photo thing of His Holiness and his two tutors, and I used to just stare at it. Some Tibetan guy had painted it with watercolors because they didn't have any money. They made color photos with water colors, and I used to just stare. I love that particular photo. 

Then the next Lama is Khen Rinpoche who looks very cheerful, just before he hits you on head. But I guess that's what I needed at the time. 

I stayed with him for 25 years. We lived together for 25 years. Really tough old fashioned Lama. Trijang Rinpoche was his heart teacher. He met Pabongka Rinpoche as a young boy. Not a young boy. He was about in his teens and he was a bad boy. My teacher was a naughty boy. 

Monasteries have gangs, okay? A western friend of mine was stabbed in a monastery, a monk. There are rough kids, rough young men in the monastery. 

He was really naughty.

Pabongka Rinpoche came to give a similar series of teachings. It wasn't this series, but he came to Sera to give a series of teachings and then my Lama was supposed to be the person that ran out and got the breakfast food. It is kind of a tradition. People who get stuck with the food oftentimes end up being the big Lama later.

I guess it's karma.

My Lama was the Nyepa, means the quartermaster of the college. He had to run out to Prescott and get all the food and missed a lot of the teaching. Then one day he came in and Pabongka Rinpoche paid a surprise visit to the kitchen. Which happened to me with his Holiness but that's another story. 

He saw my teacher and he came over to him and grabbed his head and he says, Oh, this one's going to be a really good one. This one looks like a good boy.

Rinpoche said something happened to him in that moment that Pabongka Rinpoche touched his head. His whole mind changed and now he started actually studying.

He told his house teacher, Pabongka Rinpoche touched me. Now I'm going to be a first Lharampa Geshe. And the teacher said, When you become a Geshe, I'm going to become the Dalai Lama. 

He did, he beat 10,000 monks in debate in 1956 or something and they got invited to the Dalai Lama‘s personal quarters. The Dalai Lama was a child. He was in his early teens and then he got the alternate award from the Dalai Lama, which is a block of old Chinese tee.

Why did I get into that?

(68:48) We tend to think it all started with the Tibetans. 

We equate the Lam Rim with somebody who lived in the 1920s, or maybe Tsongkapa who lived in the 14 hundreds, or maybe back as far as Atisha who lived in the 1000s.

Pabongka Rinpoche says that's not how it started. 

He said the original Lam Rim is the perfection of wisdom sutras. There's a huge body of literature there, 20 volumes of scriptures that were taught by Lord Buddha called the Perfection of Wisdom.

They are extremely difficult and extremely beautiful. They teach the subject of emptiness.

We call (Tibetan)

(Tibetan) means the direct subject matter. Their explicit subject matter is emptiness. 

Their implicit subject matter is compassion, love. 

Because what are you going to do with the emptiness? 

You figure out that everything's coming from you. You figure out that your complaining girlfriend is coming from you. You undertake steps to change the seeds that will make her change—whether she wants to or not. You change her and you don't have any negotiations and you don't discuss anything. You save so much time. You stop complaining about people at work and then that changes the seeds in your mind and then she stops criticizing you.

That's wisdom.

By making your girlfriend stop criticizing you, you have just performed in its ultimate fashion the perfection of wisdom. That's all it's for, and that's all it means.

You understand she's coming you, she's empty of coming from herself. 

You changed the seeds that made her criticize you and you have just fulfilled the purpose of the perfection of wisdom scriptures to 20,000 pages taught by the Buddha. Because what else did you think it was for?

You change her and then you start to get these ideas that maybe you could change the world that way. You say, if they can work on my girlfriend or could work on anybody. I could change the whole world. I could change everybody in the world. I could stop Iraq, I could fix big problems. Because they're also coming from me. 

Then necessarily and always the perfection of wisdom slides into compassion, Bodhichitta and the wish to save the world. It always does.

You fix your complaining girlfriend and then you're like, God damn, I could fix Afghanistan. That's easier than her.

It always slides into compassion. 

You always get this idea pops up, ding. I could use this on the whole world. So the direct subject matter of the ancient teachings of the perfection of wisdom is emptiness and seeds and how to change things. 

That always slides into compassion, because you start to get these ideas like maybe I could change the budget, or maybe I could change the mafia in Russia. 

Weird stuff starts to happen and you could change anything. 

That's what Bodhichitta is. 

That's how the Lam Rim started. It started with the perfection. 

The Buddha invented the Lam Rim. Don't think it's some Tibetan thing. 

It's not Pabongka Rinpoche, or Khen Rinpoche, or Trijang Rinpoche. It's the Buddha.

And it's not the Buddha. He's just a kid. There were billions of Buddhas before that. We can't even imagine where it started, who started it. Billions of planets, billions of enlightened beings. It's not some Tibetan take.

(73:41) The Lam Rim has come down historically from the Buddha in two great streams. The emptiness stream fixing your girlfriends criticizing comes down to Arya Nagarjuna. He lived in 200 AD. Sometimes he's called the second Buddha.

Teachings on emptiness have kind of gotten lost. 

It happens through history. From time to time ideas, they start to wander off a little bit, people start explaining things wrong or they don't get it.

When you have a lineage which is a hundred generations old, then stuff gets confused. Between the time of the Buddha and Nagarjuna, which was 700 years, things got a little weird on the emptiness part. Which happens, which happened in the last couple hundred years and then you have to clarify it again.

Nagarjuna did that and we traced our lineage on emptiness back to Nagarjuna.

That stream of knowledge has come down to the Lam Rim through Nagarjuna. The emptiness side of things—the complaining girlfriend fix it methods have come down through Nagarjuna.

The compassion side has come down through Asanga and Maitreya from the middle of the 4th century, maybe three 350 AD. 

Asanga was taking dictation from Maitreya, who is the next Buddha in this world. The 4th Buddha of this eon. 

Those are the two great streams.

The Lam Rim teachings are considered to have come down to us in two great streams. 

1. The emptiness stream coming down through Arya Nagarjuna, which is sometimes called the profound stream. 

2. Then there is the stream on: What do you do after you fix your girlfriend? You naturally start to want to fix big stuff like the world, like war or poverty or hunger in the world and that's Bodhichitta, that‘s love. That stream has come down through Asanga and Maitreya from the 4th century.

We trace our current practice of the Lam Rim to those two great streams. They were united in Tibet by Lord Atisha—which is going to be the subject of a lot of the coming. 

It's good to know where your stuff comes from. You think maybe it's a little boring now. I'm about to hit you with a lot of dates. Hopefully 10 o'clock will come before that and it seems a little boring. You're like, I don't care who wrote that commentary on that commentary. But later you will appreciate it. 

You go to many classes. 

My first yoga teachers, lady Ruth and David Life and Sharon Dening, they told me, whenever you travel, take a class. Just take a yoga class.

Wherever you are, take a class. Some of them will be a disaster, some guy will hurt you. Some of them you'll discover some beautiful magic guy teacher. 

When we travel, we really try hard to go to a class wherever we are. 

We were in Ukraine, we were in Kiev, we walked by yoga studio

We're like, let's go there tomorrow. We got the schedule and we went the next day and we struggled. We went to one class. Everybody was like, we don't speak English. That's okay, we'll just watch what you do.

The guy says you cannot watch what I do. He says, you'll never get it.

Then we said, yeah, yeah, just try it. I'm like speaking broken Russian to this guy.

He's like, okay, you can try.

We go to the class and he's awesome, totally awesome. 

He's like, you cannot not understand what I'm about to do here. Walk behind me, put your arms around my stomach, hold my stomach, feel what the organs are doing. His muscles are going Bing, bing, bing.

He's like, I show you article.

Then we did this really weird thing and it was beautiful. He was incredible. His name is Vadim. If you ever get there, they are on Ukranky Street. 

They had these books on the wall and they were, oh my god, they were so messed up. They had every weird book you could imagine. Because they don't have anything to compare with yet. There haven't been enough teachers come to Ukraine yet for them to distinguish between what's cuckoo and what's not cuckoo. 

There's everything, there's something on cosmic sex and it is all mixed up. 

You are not like that.

You have a real lineage. You have a 2,500 years old lineage, which is tight. It was passed on in time and it's strong and alive. 

The Dalai Lama is just the most recent guy. It goes back for a hundred generations. You should know a little bit about it. You shouldn't be lazy. 

Someone shows up to your class and you're like, I don't know. There is some Tibetan guy before that.

You can be proud of your lineage. It's not like you're just shopping and you have all these weird book stuff on the wall that nobody needs.

Like someone made up something this month or this year and then next year it's going to be somebody else. It's not like that.

The 3 Main Ways to Study Lam Rim

(80:26) There are three main ways of studying these subjects you should know.

We talked about two streams of content, but there are three streams of style.

The content has come down in two streams. The way of teaching that content has three manifestations and you should know the three. 

You should be able to replicate them at will. That's what a good teacher is. 

Some people will meet style number 1, some people will meet style number 3. You should be a master of all three styles. 

Here are the three styles.

1. SHIM BOWA

First one is called SHIM BOWA, a person who follows x.

SHIM means the five great classics of Buddhism.

There are five great books of Buddhism that we studied in the monastery, five great classics.

SHIM BOWA means someone who goes through the Geshe course.

The 18 ACI courses are SHIM BOWA.

These are meant for people of greater capacity. They can handle 18 courses of study for 25 years study. They're greater capacity, they get more detail and they go through the five great books.

What are the five great books?

1. It's what we study in the monastery for 25 years. We spent the first 12 years on the Jewel of realizations by Asanga, 4th century. Subject matter is, you can say Lower Middle Way.

2. Then we spend four years on Madhyamika, Middle Way. We studied that according to Master Chandrakirti, who was descending of the (?). 

3. Then we spent two years on Abhidharma, which comes from the 4th century. It was taught by Vasubandhu. My Lama taught it to us for almost 10 years. 

4. Then the fourth book is Vinaya Sutra, which is not a Sutra, it's a commentary by (?) from about the 6th century.

5. Then every year during your studies you spend three months on perceptual theory. How do we perceive things and formal logic thinking. How do you think straight, and we debate for three months straight. That's based on the Pranamavartika, the commentary on correct reception by Master Dharmakirti from the 6th century, 7th century.

Those are the five grade books and we spend in the monastery 20 to 25 years on it.

That's a SHIM BOWA. 

(84:10) That kind of person has a huge toolkit.

They go to Ukraine, somebody ask them a weird question. 

Somebody asked me back in Ukraine: So what you say means everybody's living in their head. The people around me also coming from me. I'm so lonely. I'm living by myself. I'm living in my head. 

Then I said, no, no. No problem. Dharmakirti said 6th century… Then you can pull out DUCHEN DRUPA. He wrote a book called Other People Exist and it is not true. They're coming from you, but as other people.

You can relate to them, you can have an interaction with them, you can argue with them. You can make love to them. They're separate from you. You're not living in your head.

But a SHIM BOWA can pull that out of the hat. They can say, oh yeah, I remember we got taught that back in 2012. That's over here in my toolkit. A SHIM BOWA has all that stuff already. 

2. LAM RIM PA

Lam Rim, technically speaking is a synthesis of all the five great books. Without mentioning the five great books much.

It is a simplified version of the five great books.

What we're doing now in the next 10 years is a simplified version of what we did in New York in the 1990s. This is a simplification of the ACI courses. 

They're all in here in a single book. The five great books are in the Lam Rim. They are regurgitated to be comfortable for the common man. 

You should know how to teach that also. 

You might get into situations where, 

I estimate that one in 10,000 people can study the ACI courses. 

Lam Rim, you go up to about one in 5,000.

Lam Rim is more comfortable for people. It's more user friendly. 

Lam Rm is a style of teaching where you synthesize the great books and you don't overwhelm people. It's maybe more appropriate.

You should be able to do both. 

3. DAM LAK PA

(86:50) DAM LAK PA means teachings which are passed on through personal interaction with your heart Lama or your other Lamas.

They are teachings which are passed on from the heart to the heart, oftentimes in personal situations. 

I always think of the Howard Johnson's just before he did the Delaware Bridge.

I had to drive Rinpoche to Washington DC once a month for 15, 20 years.

That was great. I had him trapped, and I could ask him questions in the car.

He would fall asleep on the New Jersey turnpike, then he wouldn't let me ask any questions. But when we hit Howard Johnsons, I would get one good hour. I could ask him anything and he couldn't get away and there was nobody else there.

A lot of my knowledge comes from Howard Johnsons, probably we should make a Stupa there.

That's DAM LAK PA, that’s special. There's nothing like that.

What happens between you and you and Lama in private, or the things that are passed on by osmosis when you're in the airport and Oslo and you're all exhausted and somebody gets upset—magic happens.

That's DAM LAK PA, the private advice of your personal teachers.

It doesn't have to be your heart teacher. It could be any teacher.

Those are irreplaceable. Those are obviously the heart changing ones.

Those cannot be done without. Irreplaceable. You can't do without.

They give meaning to the other two approaches, the SHIM BOWA and the LAM RIM PA. 

It's your Lama's experience and how it rubs off on you personally. 

You also have to learn that and you have to learn to grant that.

If you're going to be a teacher, you've got to be able to pull out Dharmakirti's proof of other people, then you've got to be able to sit down with a new audience and do some Lam Rim together. You also have to be able to take somebody into a room and in five minutes do a download of the heart essence of all the Lamas of history in a hotel room in Kiev when you've got Jetlag and you want to eat. 

You got to be able to do that. 

Those three things you've got to learn.

You've got to learn how to pass on the lineage in those three ways. 

Then you're really useful to the world, then you're really valuable, then you're valuable goods. If you could do all three.

The first one takes some time. The third one takes some luck. The middle one takes some consideration for others who might get overwhelmed by first and third.

Mandala & Refuge

sashi pukyi jukshing metok tram

rirab lingshi nyinde gyenpa di,  

sangye shingdu mikte ulwar gyi,

drokun namdak shingla chupar shok.

Idam guru ratna mandalakam niryatayami.

sangye chudang tsokyi choknam la,

jangchub bardu dakni kyabsu chi,

dakki jinsok gyipay sunam kyi,

drola penchir sangye druppar shok (3x)

Meditation - Open Up Energy from Chakra

We'll do some meditation.

(2:37) Relax your face and begin to watch your breath.

—

Step back and watch your thoughts.

See the condition of your mind, watch your mind thinking its thoughts. 

Try to block all thoughts of past or future. 

Try to settle down, relax, be happy. Be here in this room now. 

Don't worry about tomorrow or tonight. Don't worry about last week. You're here now. If a nuclear war broke out, you had to stay here, this is where you'd be. 

You are here. Just be here. 

We're going to do some work at the svadhisthana chakra at the base of your spine, just above the crack in your bottom.

Then work into the body in front of the vertebra there. 

Park your mind just at the front of your spine, down towards the very bottom, below your waist.

Stay there, put your mind there. See if you can feel something, like a bump or a ball just in front of the spine.

Then relax there, don't go anywhere. If you think of something else, bring your mind back. Find the little ball there. Keep your mind on it.

Come inside the ball. Bring your mind inside the chakra. 

See some small vein of liquid glass cracking through the chara from top to bottom, clear gleaming liquid glass.

Focus on that glass for a while. See it dripping slowly through the crack in the chakra, up to down, seeping through a crack in the chakra in the middle.

Then I'd like you to follow that seeping liquid glass from this chakra, the very fine vein of liquid glass flowing down to the chakra that we did before, the muladhara—between your legs and in about an inch. 

Follow the flow of the glass trickling down from the base of your spine—svadhisthana chakra—down to the chakra between your legs. Follow that trickle of liquid glass down. When you reach the bottom, bring your mind up to the higher chakra and follow it down again.

You're just watching the trickle of liquid glass down from the svadhisthana chakra to the muladhara chakra. When you reach the lower chakra, you bring your mind back up and follow more flow down. 

Do it visually, but also try to feel what it feels like in your body. 

What's the physical sensation of the liquid glass trickling down the lower part of your spine, your body.

In Tibetan this flow is called [tsok?]. One of the translations of prana. But it means life force, life energy, like the sap flowing through a tree.

Try to time the flows down with your exhales.

Then when you're ready, come back to your breath. And slowly open your eyes. Stretch.

Review the Opening Lines of Lam Rim

(16:50) Figure it out..the earlier you get it...,my best students are the students whose parents died in some horrible way, or they saw somebody fall off a building

They got their eyes opened early. 

The very first line of the Lam Rim—because the Three Principal Paths is a Lam Rim—is

How long will it take you to figure it out? 

You can buy clothes, you can go to Sephora, buy makeup, you can get famous at your job, you can be vice president, you can be a star athlete, you can be the best yoga guy in the room.

Then everybody loses it, and they lose it in a bad way. It's not like they come someday and they say it's time to check out and they give you an injection or something. It's like they stretch it out year after year. Slowly you lose your strength, you lose your friends, you lose your family, and then you lose your mind.

Everybody goes through that. 

So he (Pabongka Rinpoche) is like, the first principal path is just figure out what's going on. How long will it take you before you realize what's going on here? 

(18:17) Step number two [Tibetan]. The path which is praised or recommended by the bodhisattvas, which is what? 

Bodhichitta. The second principle path.

It's nothing more than taking the tiny step of saying, „I'm in trouble and so is everybody else“. That's all. 

My mom died a horrible death and so is everybody else's mom. It's like making that little leap. It takes like 30 seconds: Oh, this is happening to everybody else also and we need to get out of here together. We need to help everybody. Everybody needs some help. 

Then one day you have that happen to you.

I was on that plane, the people know the story. I was on a plane, it was going to crash. Suddenly everybody who was complaining about the peanuts in the movie, they were hugging each other, and crying, and kissing each other, and then the plane landed. It didn't crash. Everybody was fighting to get off. They said they had to make their connection. 

But for like 30 minutes we had bodhichitta in the airplane, and the true nature of a human being came out, which is concern for the other people and love for each other. 

It takes some kind of life-threatening thing for it to come out.

I see the movie of the Titanic. I imagine that there were a lot of noble acts that night, like a lot of people sacrificing themselves for other people. That's real human nature. 

So step number two is just realize everybody else is in the same boat, all the time. 

(20:08) [Tibetan] What's the best way to help people? What's the easiest place to enter the fort? What's the key place where you could help people?

What's the third of the path? 

Just understand reality. Understand where things are coming from. 

I'm going to do the pen thing. If you saw it before, you have to have 3000 of them. That's the doctor's prescription. If you're on the DCI tours, you get like eight every tour or something. It's good for you. I'm just going to do it very quick. Then if you're new or you haven't seen it before, you can catch up in five minutes. 

What's this thing? It's a pen. 

If a dog came in to the room and sat there and it was a puppy dog and it was playful and I waved this thing in front of it, what would it do? 

Students: Chew on it

Geshe Michael: Yeah, it would grab the thing in his mouth. 

Does the dog see this as a pen for writing? 

No. 

What do they see it as? 

A chew toy. 

Then the next question is…—you should learn to teach it if you've heard it, just in case you've heard it before—Who's right, the dog or the human? 

Both are right. You can't say that it's more a pen than a chew toy. It just depends on who's looking at it.

Next question: If I took the pen and I left it here, and then all the humans left the room and all the dogs left the room, then which one would it be at that time? 

Then your natural thought is correct. You'd have to say neither. At that time it's sort of potential.

If a person walks in the room, it will become a pen.

If a dog trots in the room, it will become a chew toy.

But until they trot in or walk in, it's just kind of waiting to be something. 

That's the meaning of emptiness.

Emptiness doesn't mean close your eyes and everything's black. 

Emptiness doesn't mean try not to think about anything. 

Emptiness doesn't mean everything's an illusion and the breakfast, the oatmeal, you had today was not really there. 

It doesn't mean any of the above. Those are all useless. They don't help you. You can't do anything with that. Okay, oatmeal's not there, but tomorrow can you make some?

It doesn't help anything. 

Then this kind of emptiness, how does this help you?

The pen until anybody walks in is nothing yet. You can say ‘nothing yet’, maybe that's better than emptiness.

I keep trying to find new words for emptiness, because emptiness is so confusing. Let's say ‘nothing yet’. 

Then you come in and you pick it up and you see it as a pen. 

Raise your right hand. 

This is how I teach it nowadays, it works. Because then later you can go like this to people. Is the pen coming from you or is the pen coming from the pen? 

Show me with your hand. Is it coming this way [towards you] or is it coming this way [away from you]?

It's coming from me. If it was coming from the pen side, the dog would see it as a pen. That's just simple. You don't need to be an Einstein, although Hawkins didn't figure it out yet, but I'm going to fix it.

It's coming from me. 

In Tibetan, people who don't understand reality, there's an unusual word. They're called [tsortong?] 

It's a very strange word. [Tsor?] means this way. [Tong?] means they see.

Like tonglam, path of seeing. 

[Tsortong?] means a person who goes around thinking that stuff is coming this way [towards them].

My girlfriend criticized me yesterday because she wanted to. It's coming from her. 

A person who has studied reality correctly, their first reaction to getting criticized by their girlfriend is like, ‚I got to fix this. I got to fix her and I don't have to talk to her. I just have to criticize people at work less.‘ 

That's their first reaction. They don't get angry and they don't get upset, and they don't try to convince her that they're not stupid. They just say in their mind..—they kind of just don't even pay attention to her. They're like, ‚okay, honey‘. 

They're thinking, ‚who did I criticize last week? Who should I stop criticizing?‘ 

They don't even pay much attention to her criticizing them, because they know where it's flowing from. They know where it's coming from, and they don't get upset at her. It's like she's not under her own control. She's doing that because you're forcing her to do that. She doesn't want to do that. The criticism is not coming from her at will. It's coming because you said something to somebody else last week, it's your fault. Then you're just like, ‚okay honey‘.

We don't react much because it's not worth it. There's no reason. She's not [tsortong?], she’s not coming from her.

I’d like to go here next because of all this people teaching positive thinking. 

Like, ‚oh, if it's coming from me, then I could make it into a piece of gold‘.

If it's coming this way [from me], then let me make it something else.

Which begs the question: If it's coming from you, is it a result of your will? 

As an act of will, could you make it something else? 

It's important to address that to somebody new.

If I was super positive thinker and someone called me poop head, could I just turn it around by wishing, by thinking positive thoughts of them? 

‚I'm not really a poop head‘. 

I go through this exercise on tour. I say, „Close your eyes“. Three hundred people close their eyes, Ukrainian tough guys. 

Then I say, let's all wish it was a diamond, a big diamond, and then we'll sell that and we'll split the money after we pay the government their bribes.

Everybody closes their eyes, and then we all wish, wish, wish, wish.

I say [in Russian] I want, I wish, and I pray. 

Then I like to make it dramatic. I go like this (peeping eye) and it's still a pen.

Which means it's coming from you, but not from your conscious desires and you can't pray it into a diamond. You can't wish it into a diamond. It doesn't matter how much you want. You could pray that your girlfriend would stop criticizing you. You can want it and you can wish it, but so didn't everybody else who ever had anything bad happen to them. It doesn't work. 

Nobody wants to have their girlfriend criticize them unless you're into S&M or something. 

Then I stop asking questions and I just start lecturing them. 

I haven't figured out a way to make the rest interactive. 

I'm like, okay, we think you have a seed in your mind and that seed opens, and that makes you see a pen. The dog has a different seed. They have a seed for something to chew, and when the seed opens in their mind, they see a chew toy. 

So if the human and the dog look at this thing at the same time, two different seeds are opening, and two different creatures see two different things.

Everybody can handle that. You kind of have to sneak it in without asking. The seed thing.

Then you say.. then here's the end of the story. How do you plant the seed? 

Then you get somebody up on the stage next to you—hopefully it's like a handsome guy or a pretty girl—and you say, „Okay, watch, I'm going to plant a seed“. 

You have them hold out their hand and then you go down real slow and then you say, „Your mind is like Jigme’s video camera, and through the lens of your eyes, your mind is recording this event.“

The eyes are like a lens. The mind is like a movie camera. The mind records this event. Then you took it down slowly. You hold it in their hand and you say, „Everybody look, everybody look, pay attention. You can sleep in a few minutes.“

Then you let go of the pen, you go, [daing]. 

You say, „Right then the seed was planted. Right then at that moment the seed was planted. You just saw a pen seed planted“. 

Later you have to explain that when you plant one pen seed, you get 10 pens out of it because otherwise, to give a pen, to get a pen, it's kind of stupid. 

You might as well just keep your pen.

I mean, if you don't collect interest, there's not much point to it. 

I just told you the third principal path in like four minutes.

I saved you 24 years, 11 months, 29 days. You don't have to be a geshe now.

You probably understand it better than most geshes, honestly. They know the wording and they know the quotations. They don't really get the pen thing. Which is why they're all struggling to get food and stuff like that. 

That's it.

You just entered the fort at the easiest place. You know how reality works.

The rest is pretty much self-explanatory: Anything you want, plant the seed. Anything you don't like, cut the seed out of your mental continuum and then your girlfriend shapes up and your credit card is paid off, and you can go to Cecile's class, and it makes you feel like high. Because your body's strong and you have good prana. 

That's it. That's the opening lines of the class.

Meditation on Energy Flow from the Chakras 

(33:36) Start by following your breath. 

Place the mind on the breath and keep it on the breath. 

—

Now I’d like you to bring your mind to the chakra at your navel, manipura chakra. Locate your belly button, go straight backwards towards the spine. 

Try to place your mind at a spot in the front of your spine at the level of your belly button. 

Just relax there, place the mind there. 

Try to feel a bump or a ball of energy just in front of the spine, just above your waist. 

Just play around there for a while, see if you can find it.

As much as you can, keep your mind there. 

—

Now go inside the chakra, bring your mind inside that small ball. Try to pierce it. 

Bring the mind into the middle of it, in front of your spine, just above your waist. 

Now try to picture in the middle of the chakra that liquid glass. 

Like a crystalline flowing energy, like glass, in the middle of the ball.

Like a vein of gold through a stone behind your navel, in front of the spine. 

Now as you exhale, feel a flow of liquid glass from the naval chakra in front of your spine, down to between your legs, and then bring it back up with your inhale.

Watch, more feel than watch energy flowing down from behind your navel along the spine, down to the place between your legs on your exhale.

Then coming back on the inhale.

I'd like you to just follow that flow of a very subtle trickle, a vein of liquid glass, for a few minutes. 

—

A liquid flow of glass up and down the lower half of your spine.

Feel the sensation more than you watch it. 

—

Bring your mind back to your breath.

Then slowly come out of the meditation.

Stretch, knock your neighbor. 

Review of the Four Divisions of the Lam Rim

(43:11) In talking about the Lam Rim, or the steps of the path, Pabongka Rinpoche… I'm reading your homework questions.

Pabongka Rinpoche starts talking about Tibetan tea.

I went to the monastery, I sat down, Rinpoche interviewed me. That was an experience. Then he gave me a cup of tea. 

I had had it before, but it tastes like chicken soup. You use Chinese black tea, milk, half and half cream, salt, baking powder, and nutmeg. You have to add them in the pot in a certain order. You put the tea in and then it has to boil until it's super black, like Coca-Cola syrup or something. And then you have to add some of the milk, and then you have to add the salt. Then you have to put it into a churn. It's a big tube. The first lama I ever met was Sakya in Rajpur in India. I think he was a very high, he was like Sakya Trizin’s assistant or something. He gave me a Tibetan tea churn. It was a really auspicious thing. It was a travel churn. It's like this big, and you could put one cup in there and you can churn it. 

You have to churn it for like 10 minutes, then it gets mixed in somehow. 

Then you have to strain the tea out, you add the nutmeg and then it has to sit. You have to cover the pot and sit for a while.

It's a whole thing. It tastes like kefir or something. It's thick. 

Tibetans drink 20 cups a day, so I got addicted to it. 

Then I went traveling for business and I got these terrible headaches in Thailand, I remember, and I didn't know what was wrong, and then I realized I was addicted to Tibetan tea. 

Anyway, it's a whole art. 

In the monastery, if you have tsampa.. tsampa means you take barley grain, you go out at night on a campfire, you have a big metal thing and then you throw the barley grain in, and then you have these huge spatulas and you roast it, and then you sing barley roasting songs in Tibetan. 

That's how they work in Tibet. They are putting-mud-on-your-roof songs because it's like an eight hour job. You sing and you go, ‘first we slap the first, then we slap the second’, and everybody's dancing, it's fun.

Then you grind the roasted barley powder. 

Monks have a bag that they tie to their belt and they keep tsampa. 

In the monastery you get free tea, but you don't get free tsampa. So you bring your own tsampa to the prayers, they hand out tea, everybody mixes some tsampa into their tea, and that's what you live on. They don't eat much else. 

It's really good, it's like Jolt, if you're a computer programmer? 

You can live on it and you don't disturb your studies. It takes five minutes to make tsampa, and you just eat it like this, and then you keep reading. 

It's a big deal in a Tibetan teaching to talk about tea. 

In talking about the Lam Rim, Pabongka Rinpoche says, you would be insane to buy one big pot and keep all your tea ingredients in one big pot. Like melted soft butter, Chinese tea leaves, nutmeg, salt, cream, and dump it all into one pot and keep it like that. You'd be crazy. 

You have to keep them separately and then you have to use them in the right order. 

When I'm teaching it—and then maybe you could do it yourselves—when you're teaching Lam Rim I like to use the example of a car engine. 

When I first went to the monastery, we were really poor and we didn't have any money. We had one Volkswagen that had 200,000 miles on it, Beetle. 

It broke one day and Rinpoche looked at me and he said, „You're American.“

I said, yeah.

He said, „You invented the car in America.“

I said, „Where's this going to, Rinpoche?“

He's like, „You fix the car.“

I was like, „I don't know anything about cars.“

He said, „I'm your Lama.“

That was his thing. He'd look at you, you'd say, „I don't know how to fix the car.“ And he'd say, „I'm your Lama.“ And then you go to the library and you get a Volkswagen Repair for Idiots. It's a good book. 

I screwed up the engine, I ruined it. But anyway, what I realized [while] ruining it was that there's a certain order to the parts. If you finish fixing the car and there's a bunch of bolts left over, that's not good. Every part has a purpose. You can't just leave out bolts. You got to take it apart again and find out where the bolt goes to. 

Every part has a meaning and they have to fire in the right order. The spark plug goes off, the injector sends in the fuel, the piston explodes, it turns the crank shaft—there's an order to everything. The carburetor has to work. 

The Lam Rim is the same. Your spiritual path is the same. The Tibetans say, the Lam Rim says, Lord, Buddha said, you need certain parts to your path or it won't work. If one of those parts is missing, it's not going to work. 

You could spend your whole lifetime trying that spiritual path and it won't work. 

You need every Lam Rim. You need every part. It's like an engine. 

And you can't mix them up. You can't learn them in the wrong order or they don't work so good. 

There's a logical order to your spiritual journey, and you save a lot of time if someone tells you that, and tells you which things you need and which things you don't need. 

So the Lam Rim is said to be all of the parts are essential and they're in the right order. Don't mix them up. Don't put all your tea ingredients in a single can and think the tea is going to come out good next week.

Don't mix up the topics, don't mix up the meditations. 

Do them in a certain order and you will save yourself decades of hard work. 

I propose you… I'm with this mafioso guy in Kiev and he says, „Geshe Michael, I have to talk to you after the class.“

I'm like, okay. 

He comes to my hotel room, he says, „I have a big company, I make $500 million a year.“ 

I'm like, okay. 

He says, „But I'm thinking maybe what you say is correct.“

I'm like, yeah, maybe. 

And he's like, „Maybe I pay government too much money, maybe I bribe too many people.“

I'm like, maybe. 

Then he is looking at me, „Could we do experiment?“

I'm like, „What do you mean?“

He says, „I give you a hundred of my workers. I give you one division of my company. We try to run it clean. Just a hundred people, not all 5,000. You come to Ukraine, we need you more than other countries. We have more problems here.“

He's like, „Let's do an experiment. You can bring your people, you can have a hundred, you can have a division of my company, you run it clean, you run it according to karmic seeds, and let's see. If it works, we will change the rest of the company. If it doesn't, you leave Ukraine.“ 

It was really a lot of pressure, but that's what I'm saying with the Lam Rim: Just try it. 

Try it for a couple of weeks or something.

Try learning things in a certain order, try doing certain meditations in a certain order, and see if it works or not.

It is like somebody tells you, I have a yoga series that's better. 

Okay, I'll try it for a couple of weeks and if it seems to work, then I'll keep going on it. If it doesn't, then you leave Ukraine. 

So we'll try it in a certain order and there are certain essential components and you’ve got to have all of them. 

(52:40) All Lam Rims have four basic parts. It's like the transmission, engine, cooling system. All Lam Rims have four parts.They always go through four parts. 

1. Founder of the Lineage

Number one, you study the person who brought it to you. 

In this case, we're going to study Lord Atisha, who brought it to Tibet. 

You study the life of the people who are selling this path. In this case we're going to do Lord Atisha who lived a thousand years ago. 

If he seems like this person had special realizations or this person got to special stages, then maybe the Lam Rim is worth your time. 

In Buddhism, in Lam Rim we say your mental space, your mental real estate is very precious. They say, you waste your first 20 years of life fooling around, you waste your last 20 years of life you're too old to do anything, and then you’ve got 20 years left in between. 

Half of that time you're asleep, you're cooking for a quarter of that time. 

The time you have to do your spiritual stuff is very limited. Don't waste the time. 

Don't expose your mind to stuff which is dumb. Because you don't have time. 

Don't waste your mental space. Find a path where the person who started it seems to have gotten to some extraordinary results. 

Therefore we must study the life of the person who started it. That's what we're going to do next. That's step number one. 

2. Uniqueness of the Instructions

Step number two, if you see that this person turned out special, or the people that they taught turned out special, such as the Dalai Lama—he's a product of Atisha’s training. Then you can think, well, maybe the instructions are special. 

So step two is come to appreciate that the instructions themselves are special. 

The first step was the founder should be special. Second part should be, if they're so special and all the people they affected even down to the current Dalai Lama are so special, maybe the instructions are special. 

3. Proper Way to Teach it

Number three—supposing the founder was special and supposing the teaching is special, what's the proper way to teach it? So in this tradition, in this lineage, the process of the interaction between the teacher and the disciple, it should be done right. There's a certain way to do it, and if you don't do it right, it's not going to work. 

It involves respecting the teacher to a high degree, the teacher respecting the disciple to a high degree.

In Tibet, a teacher is required to pay for their disciples‘ needs. In Sera, in my monastery, the teacher feeds their student, they clothe them and they find them a place to stay. Then the student treats the teacher with great respect. It's a respect born of affection, not from some kind of rules. 

There's a respect that you feel throughout the monastery, which is born from a true affection between the disciple and their teachers. 

Kids, they start at seven. A lot of the kids are brought there at seven. I watched countless kids come there at seven. They're crying and they want to see mommy. I don't know if it's a good custom. In the old days, you couldn't become a monk until you were 21. You still can't make a person a full monk until they're 21. You're not allowed to give full vows to anyone under 21.

At 21 in the monastery you make a decision whether to stay or not, and that has to be your own decision. 

Your parents can stick you there at 7, but at 21 you're required to make a decision whether you're going to stay or not. I never saw anybody not stay—out of thousands of monks, I never saw anybody not stay. After a couple of years they're like, this is what I want to do. It's really cool. 

There's this love. There's a whole culture of grace and affection, and toughness and discipline, and love between the teachers and their students. It's beautiful.

It's not enforced by anybody, it's just there. We need to retain that. We need to keep that. It's not a false respect where in front of people, you are very respectful to Lama, and then you get home and you're not like that. It's really from love. 

4. Learn the Lam Rim

Number four, you actually learn the Lam Rim. 

But step number three is very important - What's the etiquette for passing it on? 

Step number two - respect the teaching itself.

Step number one - establish that the people who are propagating this teaching are respectable and have integrity. 

Those are the four traditional divisions of the Lam Rim. They come historically from a tradition at a monastery in India called Vikramashila.