72 Compassion for Oneself and The Path

Olaso.

So this morning we turn to the second of the four immeasurables, and as I’ve mentioned before, I think there is a very meaningful sequence in terms of the order of the four immeasurables starting with loving kindness, then proceeding to compassion. And then, in a while, we will get to empathetic joy. But it’s quite clear as we cultivate loving kindness, whether for ourselves or for others, that it is visionary. It must be visionary, ‘cause we’re aspiring for something that hasn’t yet occurred, right?. If it had occurred already then it would be empathetic joy. Happy with what’s already taken place. But this cultivation of loving kindness requires imagination, you know; and it requires intelligence, ‘cause it’s not enough simply to wish may we all find happiness and the causes of happiness. I mean that is the standard articulation of loving kindness, boundless loving kindness, as we find it in Buddhism but for that to be meaningful, and for that to be effective, we need to have a mature vision of what happiness is. That it’s not simply hedonic. [01:12]

But also, even more deeply, what are the actual causes of happiness? So if you wish for it you have to know what you are wishing for, have some idea, is it more money, is it more wealth, good looks, greater virtue, wisdom, compassion, what is it! And so this is where this conative intelligence comes in, being wise in our desires. Not simply wishing may everybody be happy, that’s fine, but it’s kind of vacuous, I mean there’s hardly any content at all. What do you mean by happy and how do you mean to go about it, and what are the causes for that to occur? Right. So that’s where the intelligence comes in, wisdom comes in, where there has to be a fusion of skilful means and wisdom. [01:56]

But again coming back to the central point here, the initial point, and that is, it’s visionary. We imagine and we aspire for a degree of well-being, hedonic and eudaimonic, but it’s not yet been realised, whether by ourselves or by others. And so it’s uplifting, this is why very often metta bhavana is taught all by itself in the vipassana tradition, very, very, commonly, if they teach any of the four immeasurables, it’s almost certainly going to be metta. And I know quite a number of vipassana meditators who don’t actually know there are three more, you know. [02:27]

And this is not a criticism, it’s just… if you noticed I mentioned before if you are going to choose only one this would be a really good candidate. But there are more than one, and so… but of course people like doing it as well whether you are religious, non religious, Buddhist, non-Buddhist, it feels nice, it feels good to cultivate loving kindness for oneself, for others; and people like to do what feels good, so that’s all very understandable. It can also lift us up into kind of this realm of possibility where it is possible, almost like sitting into a little carriage, or a little basket under a hot air balloon…. and this kind of drifting off into ‘wouldn’t it be nice if everybody were happy, wouldn’t it be nice if’… and we can start singing and maybe writing poetry about wouldn’t it be nice if everybody lived in harmony (laughter) and it was spring all the time, and, and I were 30 years younger, (laughter) which actually I don’t want at all! [03:31]

And so it can be, it can bring us out of, actually out of touch as we drift off into, with a happy smile, into the realm of possibility, we can actually lift off from the realm of actuality; and of course that’s going to be unbalanced. So we come back and we balance the loving kindness with compassion, because compassion is first of all attending to the realm of the actual, what’s actually taking place. And then we see the meaning of the word samsara, the more deeply we look and we see this really is called an ocean of suffering, you know, with islands of happiness to be sure. But what is, I think it’s something like half the world’s population is living in poverty, isn’t that right? Pretty close? yeah? And 65 people own as much as the poor 3.5 billion. That just brings anguish, (laughs sadly) really just anguish. Why would anybody accumulate that amount of money? Why? Why it? His Holiness the Dalai Lama said that seems like criminal. So in any case we come back and it’s very sobering, sobering to the point of even being overwhelming, and so we come back landing with a heavy thud in the realm of actuality, and here’s a world of suffering. [04:48]

And so then this brings forth, or invites, compassion, the second of the four immeasurables, and as I said before, so very briefly, compassion in the Buddhist understanding is not an emotion. It’s not simply sympathy, or empathy, but is rather an aspiration so once again it’s not an emotional, among the four elements of conative, attentional, cognitive, emotional, it’s not emotional. It brings with it an emotion when one feels very strong compassion, certainly there is an emotion involved. But it itself is not an emotion, it itself is conative, it’s an aspiration. Right. And that’s not so clear in English. [05:26]

Very often simply being sympathetic and being compassionate are equated, whereas there’s an outstanding neuroscientist Tania Zinger, whose father’s very eminent and now she’s really rising to eminence herself as the director of the Max Planck Institute for Neuroscience in Leipzig I believe. And she has found that in fact neuro correlates, that different parts of the brain are activated, when you are experiencing empathy or sympathy, which is an emotion, in contrast to compassion which is a desire, an aspiration. The desire, aspiration: may you be free of suffering and the causes of suffering. So these two are related but they’re clearly not equivalent in experience and then not surprisingly, different parts of the brain are also activated, when it’s simply sympathy or empathy and when you’re actually aroused in an aspiration. An aspiration has to have a vision. Whether you would like an ice cream cone, whether you would like to achieve enlightenment, whether you’d like to get married, it has to have some vision of what could be, right, as in the case of loving kindness. (06:31)

So compassion here is articulated as the aspiration: may we find freedom from suffering and its causes. And once again, what is being expressed here is something primordial, primal, [inaudible] it’s right there in our fundamental impulse of caring and I think we could get by, we could have days with no happiness and get by and say well that was kind of a boring day, it wasn’t great, it was kind of like got through it. If we can’t have happiness, well, we get by. (07:06)

Suffering on the other hand, that we just always want to be free of. Right. It’s more intense. So this is one reason I understand why the news in the newspapers is almost all bad. There’s plenty of good news. It doesn’t sell as well. That’s just the fact of it. They don’t sell as many newspapers, magazines and so forth if they focus on good news because people want to know first of all what’s threatening to them, and then if that’s kind of under control then ok give us some good news too. It’s very understandable, survival. Survive and procreate by surviving. Not by having happy days, and then getting killed. And so this is a constant: and that is we just never want to suffer in the body or the mind. (07:50)

And then we can ask a very simple question:

From the time we were born, let alone past lives, every single moment of every waking hour, and including in the dreams, in every single moment we want to be free of suffering. Always want to be free of suffering; if possible, both physical and mental. If we could only be free, if it could only be one of the two, we’d rather be free of mental suffering. But physical suffering can really catch your attention, we all know that! So we’d like to be free of both. (08:21)

And so we can ask ok? how’s your track record? This is something you always wanted…. on some occasions you wanted a car, you wanted a girlfriend, you wanted a house, you wanted a job, you wanted this, you wanted to go on vacation. Those desires come up all over the place. Those are the myriad appearances, right? And they shift all over the place, the kind of desires you have now are very different from the kind of desires you had 30 years ago. But what is the constant is, in every waking moment and every dreaming moment, you always want to be free of suffering. That’s a constant. That’s kind of going right down to the root of caring. (08:55)

So then you can check your track record. How’re you doing? ‘Cause we’re very intelligent, you know, this massive frontal cortex we have. Our powers of imagination, of memory, of language, being able to learn from other people’s mistakes and so forth, learning from our own mistakes. If we were simply rational beings, if this were, if we were kinda simply designing humanity or trying to, you know, understand this without actually looking at empirical facts, it would be very easy to assume that an individual over the course of life would just get freer and freer of suffering. Until by the time you are getting into old age and so forth you are pretty much ok, you know. Live longer and you just, you know, live beyond 70, 80 or 90 and you just have less and less suffering ‘cause you’re just learning more and more about, you know, trial and error, like Thomas Edison: what worked, what didn’t work. And so by the time you get to 90 you’d just be so serene and peaceful, you know. Let alone happy too! (09:50)

And so the fact that that’s generally not the case, let alone from lifetime to lifetime, if we learned from lifetime to lifetime, then of course every lifetime we’d be better. It’s kind of like the New Age notion of reincarnation as every life has some lessons to be learned, you know, it’s like school. And you go from this and you learn some lessons, and you go onto the next class and you learn some more lessons, and then every way, in every day, in every lifetime I’m just getting better and better and better. I would love that to be true. (10:18)

And there’s no evidence for it at all. It’s a happy thought. So is Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, you know. But it doesn’t actually turn out to be true at all. And it’s not even true in the course of a lifetime. Some people, indeed, do become freer and freer from suffering, find greater and greater happiness; Gen Losang Gyatso, the yogi, that I mentioned, who was the farmer, the soldier, and then eventually turned himself totally to dharma, when I was translating for him in the mid 80s, he commented, when asked by Bob Thurman about what was it like to be him, and he said well I’m abiding constantly in, constantly both during meditation and post meditation I’m abiding constantly in a state of inexpressible bliss. He said that. His Holiness told him before he came that he had to be very candid if Westerners asked him what was going on. (11:04)

And not just say “oh I’m just a simple Buddhist monk, I have no realisations (laughter), I only aspire for (?inaudible). His Holiness would do that but he told this monk, ‘cause he was going to Harvard to have them examine him, oh, you know and if Herbert Benson had said well what’s it like to be… and he said oh I have no realisations then he’d say what did you do come here for?? (laughter). Why did the Dalai Lama send you here if you are just an ordinary schmuck, not smart You don’t even have a PhD.

And so there are people like that, you know. It’s not alone, it still happens and he started really a serious dharma practice when he was 48, not too, not too late. At least for some of you. Not too late. And that was after just being a farmer and a military man, a soldier. So coming back, clearly if this cultivation, this arousal of compassion is to be effective, which is the whole point why have an aspiration if it is never fulfilled. It has to be imbued with wisdom, yeah. To envision what would freedom from suffering would be like, well that’s pretty much an absence of what we’re familiar with, so that would be nice. That’s not too hard. But then what are the actual causes, what are the actual causes? And when it comes to the physical, the hedonic, I pretty much leave that to people who are expert at it: doctors, nurses, investment counsellors, dentists and so forth, realtors… help you find a good home. (12.43)

So that’s taken care of, there’s a lot of money to be made in helping people find hedonic well-being and help them alleviate their stimulus driven suffering. That’s good, it’s wonderful. But when it comes to the alleviation of what I call genuine unhappiness, where there’s unhappiness, there’s dukkha, that is not stimulus driven. It’s not just an episode, or a spike, something rotten happened and therefore I’m unhappy, you know. So then try to avoid rotten things happening to you, right. But this genuine unhappiness, that is kind of like this underlying current of dissatisfaction, of restlessness, feeling ill at ease, anxious, for very good reason… you’re in samsara, be anxious, you know. A lot of bad things happen here. (13.30)

To free ourselves, especially from this lingering, this underlying current of dukkha but also the myriad manifestations of it, of disappointment, of grief, of anguish and so forth. To be free of suffering and its causes we have to identify the causes, we have to be smart, we have to be observant and it happens so so often, even among people otherwise intelligent. They find themselves really unhappy, and then they find someone to blame, find someone else to blame. Poor Adolf, who was a moderately gifted artist, not bad… I saw some of his art…. he wasn’t bad, pretty kind of good. He failed as an artist, didn’t make it. So he found something else, the suffering of the German people, and there was a lot of suffering, a lot of it was unjust, He drew on that and then found individuals, groups and so forth to blame. A lot of people agreed with him and then 20 million people died. More than that actually, but it was a lot. We do that individually, we do that collectively and we just perpetuate samsara. We look at our own unhappiness and we find someone else to blame. Somebody else, someplace, something outside of ourselves. (15:09.6)

It’s called conative unintelligence, conative foolishness. So the Buddha’s insight here, I think it was quite revolutionary, is, it’s most obvious with mental suffering but it’s actually not confined to that, but most often with the mental. If we really would like to be free of mental suffering, and that includes depression and anxiety and the whole range of dukkha. Then he pointed to three internal elements and that is of course the three poisons, craving, hostility, delusion. And he said this, if you trace, if you really observe carefully and this is where it keeps on becoming radically empirical, if you observe carefully, your mental suffering at any time, see whether or not is this true? It’s not just dogma, this is empirically investigatable. (16:03)

Whenever you experience some unhappiness, dukkha, depression, anxiety and so forth and so on. Can you see the underlying cause, the primary cause, the indispensable cause in either delusion, where you simply, it’s a misapprehension of reality, you got it wrong. For example, reification of self, reification of others, but also on a very practical level grasping onto that which is by nature impermanent, fleeting, not abiding, subject to cessation, and grasping onto that as a refuge, something stable, enduring, something you can count on, like a relationship. Comes up in popular songs all the time, eternal love, eternal love, my soulmate, eternal love, and all the others, and we fall into it generation after generation, like as if nobody has ever fallen in love before, and nobody has ever reified that relationship and think it will be enduring and absolutely forever. (17:03)

Of course it never is, and so it’s just amazing, Einstein said the human capacity for delusion seems to be infinite, and it really does. That somehow we fail to understand and we keep on doing the same thing over and over again. So grasping to the impermanent, that which by nature definitely is going to terminate and is always in the process of change, and think somehow it is going to be stable and enduring. To call that delusion is simply an accurate statement. And then seeing how our mental suffering stems in many cases from craving, from attachment, viewing someone, something or something abstract like reputation and so forth as a source of happiness and then grasping onto that, clinging to that, craving that, having attachment for that if we acquire it. And then lo and behold it doesn’t turn out well, surprise!! you know! and then of course there’s hostility, aggression, hatred, anger, and of course that feels rotten from the very beginning. So just see, there it is… but he’s saying that’s it. (18:07)

That other people, outside situations, may or may not give rise to mental suffering. Yangten Rinpoche, how many people could do this, live in a concentration camp for 18 years and say I was happier in a concentration camp than most people are outside. And he just used that for an 18 year retreat. (18:32)

There was another, was it Chochi Rinpoche? Who stayed in somebody’s basement for like 18 years… was it Chochi? Choden Rinpoche….Choden Rinpoche, yeah, something like that, I mean my precise details here… Choden Rinpoche Gelugpa lama. You know during the hell years, the cultural revolution, then he just stayed in somebody’s basement and pretended to be a crazy man, you know. ‘Cause if they saw he was a tulku then they would have killed him, or imprisoned him, so he pretended to be a crazy man, like you know like mentally unbalanced, or you know mentally impaired. He lived in the basement for 18 years, pretending whenever any Chinese came by, you know, he was kind of like the simpleton… that’s why they kept him in the basement. And he turned that into an 18 year retreat, he came out a magnificent human being, you know. (19:25)

Or Palyan Gyatso, I translated for him about 20 years ago. Thirty years in concentration camp, he did not enjoy it. He was a simple monk, an ordinary monk, it was horrendously awful, he was starved, he was tortured, he was worked almost to death and so forth. Finally released. So that was, he suffered, he suffered mentally a lot. He wanted to commit suicide, but he wouldn’t because he was a monk. But when he was released, when I was with him in the mid 90s, twice I translated for him, we had long conversations he said, and I saw no reason to disbelieve what he said. I feel no hatred, no resentment, no hatred, no resentment towards those who incarcerated me, and of course he didn’t do anything at all. None. And he would speak passionately, I would be by his side translating, passionately for human rights for Tibetan people, but never a note of anger, of resentment, of hostility, towards the Chinese communists. Not a note of that! (20:20)

Just may we be free, may we be free. So if there’s ever a man who should have been suffering from intense post traumatic stress disorder, intense hatred, intense depression and so forth, he would be a really good candidate and yet he was robust, he was lively, he was warm, vigorous, passionate, but passionate simply for freedom. (20:44)

And then I know a woman who was like living in a deva realm, she was attractive, she had a marvellous husband, happy family, lots of wealth, oodles of wealth, and family had excellent reputation. Her husband died and she just fell into suicidal depression as if her husband wasn’t supposed to die or that was unexpected; he was an elderly man. But when he died, she just only wanted to commit suicide, everything for her, and she had a supportive family, loving family, it was really a very wholesome situation, and her husband was a very very good man. I knew him. But she was suicidally depressed because her husband died, and a man who was in a concentration camp for 30 years wasn’t depressed. So all this should shout at us, reality is screaming at us that what really makes us unhappy is not your plush mansion on a hillside overlooking the pacific, and what really makes you miserable is not being in a concentration camp. So may we be free, may we be free.

So I’d like to wrap this up but to bring wisdom to this is imperative, otherwise it is just a sentiment, or an empty, vacuous, going nowhere desire. If we are wishing may we be free of suffering and we don’t really have a clue what causes it, what causes it, why is there so much discord in the Middle East. Is it just because those fanatic Muslims are bad people, that would be easy. You know. Bad people, good people, we suffer ‘cause of bad people, there’s a good moronic response to it. (22:20)

But it never of course cuts to the source. And so this is where wisdom really comes in. And so, in Buddhist teaching compassion is always directed outwards, I’ve never seen any reference to self directed compassion, never seen it, it just doesn’t come up. You know, feel compassion for yourself. ‘Cause they would say, you already want to be free of suffering, what are we even talking about, you don’t need to cultivate that, you know. Except they didn’t see us coming. (laughter) Where we can be so harsh with ourselves, you know, literally. When I was, I’ve told this story many times, I’m running on I’m afraid, but when I was a monk in the monastery back in India in early 70s and our teacher Gen Losang Gyatso the abbot was saying you know we always find fault in others in this but we think we’re good, the other side is bad, but we’re good. And I went to him afterwards and said Genla actually I do a lot of fault finding in myself too, I don’t think I’m that good, I do a lot of, you know, quite harsh and critical of myself. (23:23)

And he looked at me with this incredibly sweet face, and he just so, like a mother, he looked at me with this incredibly sweet face and said ‘no you don’t’. (laughter) He couldn’t believe it, that anyone would be so crazy as to be harsh and unkind to yourself, and harshly critical and judgemental, he didn’t even know what that could mean, says “Nooo, that’s not true”. (laughter) And he [?inaudible].

So I think here we have to do a remedial course and it’s not just Westerners, right? It’s now global!

Let’s start this session of compassion for ourselves, it’s much better than self recrimination, self hostility, low self esteem, all of that, and attending to the person, the person that we are always wishes to be free of suffering, has the capacity to be free of suffering. So two points to make really quickly and then we’ll jump in. We go back to this brilliant analysis by Buddhaghosa, it’s in his Visuddhimagga or Path of Purification. You’ll find it eminently worth reading. And so in terms of the immediate cause, ok, you’ll remember it for Loving Kindness, you remember that, lovable qualities, seeing it. (24:40)

Here, the immediate cause, that which catalyses or triggers, this aspiration of compassion, and of course, he is referring to compassion towards other people. It’s seeing others in a situation where they are helpless, they’re suffering, and they’re helpless. They’re not in a position to relieve themselves from suffering. If they were, you’d just kind of standby and (say) oh good. If a person fell into the river but as a strong swimmer could swim right to the side… bravo, good, …. no compassion there. Carry on, jolly good.

But if a person is dropped into the river like a baby, and doesn’t know how to swim, and you’re a strong swimmer, then just about everybody right, even if it’s quite cold, many people would jump into the river. Right. That’s the impulse of caring again. But that highlights something, and I’m going to highlight it just briefly, enormously important though. And that is if you saw the baby just about to go over, like in 2 seconds it’ll go over a waterfall, like the Niagara falls, and you see that. Well you’d just be very sad. But how would you authentically have any aspiration, the baby’s right on the edge right, it’s going to drop what 200 feet or whatever, and there’s just no question it’s going to die and it’s way too late, you just notice it now… what would you feel? Sad…. but may you be free, may you be free, come on! who would do that… it’s not going to happen. The baby’s going to die and it’s really sad but may you not fall, may you hover in the air when you go over the, well nobody is going to be wishing for that, ‘cause you know it’s not going to happen, so we’re not idiots here, and so there needs to be another element there. On the one hand we see someone or all sentient beings, or in this case we refer to ourselves as well, we see we’re suffering, we see we’re not, we don’t have the capacity to free ourselves from the suffering, but a crucial element and that is we must see the possibility that freedom is possible, at least alleviation, at least alleviation of suffering is possible. (26:50)

And if we’re aspiring may you be free of suffering and its causes, there must be a vision that freedom from suffering and its causes is actually possible. If it’s not, everything’s not going to fly. It’s too heavily burdened with reality, it’s not going to get off the ground, right? We’re not going to aspire for something that deep down we think that’s never going to happen! Impossible! There has to be that vision of possibility, and we aspire for it!

But this means we have to know what the causes of suffering are, if we don’t have a clue, then we don’t have a clue whether freedom is possible. So those two elements, and that is seeing that the person that we are attending to is suffering and not capable of freeing him or herself, all by themselves. But there is a possibility, they could be freed, they could be freed and then may it be so. (27:49)

So we direct this inwardly and we can see for ourselves how successful we’ve been thus far in taking refuge in our own intelligence, our own creativity, our memory and so forth, analytical abilities and see for ourselves. How’s it been going, from year to year, decade to decade. Happier and happier? Less and less prone to suffering? If taking refuge in our own intelligence really worked then we’d find this very widespread, we’d find just human beings, atheists, materialists, Muslims, Christians, Jews and so forth, we’d just find as people get old, just a generalisation of human race, when people get older they just suffer less and they’re happier. On occasion that’s true, as a generalisation I think it’s obviously not true.

Let alone from lifetime to lifetime, there we’re beyond the scope of what we can directly observe. And so in this regard, as we cultivate compassion for ourselves, and that will be the meditation for this morning. As we arouse the aspiration may I be free of suffering and its causes, I mean free, not may I just feel a little bit better, but may I be free, it just occurred to me this morning that just naturally evokes taking refuge if there’s any chance of being successful. How with your deluded mind can you wish to be free of delusion, when you’re taking refuge in the deluded mind to get you free of delusion. That’s going to be a difficult one, right? Difficult. (29:27)

So for some time then to take refuge in someone outside of your matrix of delusion, craving and hostility, whose free of all of those, whose found the path, come to the culmination of the path, has gotten a clean bill of health, freedom from all mental afflictions and can report on what it’s like and how to get there. Well analogies abound, that’s the person you rely upon, right. And right there is the fundamental rationale for taking refuge in Buddha, Dharma and Sangha. So that I think is part of compassion for those who are drawn to this path, taking refuge is really part of compassion toward oneself. ‘Cause there’s some possibility, there’s some hope, there has to be hope right? And if you look to the Buddha himself and then the great adepts, in the multiple traditions Theravada, Chan, Indian Buddhism, Tibetan Buddhism, Mongolian and so forth. We see there’s enormous grounds for hope, and in fact the Buddha was not just all by himself as the only one but myriad of his own disciples, personal disciples had gained such freedom and then myriad disciples over the last 2500 years have found such freedom in the multiple, how to say, ways the Buddha dharma has been assimilated in different cultures.

And now is being assimilated into modernity, so that would be part of compassion. And then the final point, again we don’t even call this self directed compassion but we have another word for it. It’s called renunciation. Renunciation is not simply being fed up with samsara, fed up with delusion, fed up with suffering. Renunciation is being fed up, disillusioned with the single minded fixation on hedonic pleasure, think that’s going to fix, I can massage reality into shape and it’s going to come out really well, despite aging, sickness and death. One grows out of that delusional fantasy and becomes completely disillusioned with finding freedom from suffering by finding the perfect spouse, the perfect job, the perfect look, the perfect health, the perfect location and so forth and so on, the perfect health plan and so forth. And see that’s just stupid, it’s just stupid, you know. (31:41)

There are people who have marvellous spouses, I know some, marvellous spouses like boy you couldn’t ask for better than that, and they’re miserable. A spouse can’t make them happy, a spouse can’t free them from suffering, even if it’s an arya bodhisattva spouse. Really! And I don’t think they’re very common [laughter] maybe more common than I know you know my vision is all controlled by my delusions; but even if we had an Arya Bodhisattva spouse, that’s no guarantee you’re going to be happy, you’re so goody, goody…. can’t stand you good goody people, you’re all so nice [laughter] you make me feel guilty, you give me a sense of low self esteem I’ll never be as good as you. Why don’t you just take a hike, I can’t stand being around you any more, you just make me feel rotten because I compare my behaviour to yours and I always come out lower [laughter]!! (32:39) Write a book on the disadvantages of having a saint for a spouse….

So it’s called renunciation and renunciation is two pronged: it’s disillusion with samsara, disillusion with just carrying on in this field of mental afflictions and thinking somehow it’s going to turn out well. Total radical complete disillusionment. Basta [brazilian/italian word which means enough] is the word of renunciation but that’s not enough, that’s enough to commit suicide if you thought that would work, but it’s not enough to set you out on the path to liberation, there has to be a vision, there has to be a vision of freedom. It has to seem possible that the whole of reality is not just samsara, there is also nirvana, There’s not only mental afflictions, there’s freedom. There are not only obscurations, there is the brightly shining mind, that is adventitiously covered by these defilements. We call that renunciation. We also call it just being smart, call that conative intelligence. So one can say this practice we’re about to begin is simply an exercise in intelligence, self directed compassion as a basis for developing compassion for everyone else. ok.

Find a comfortable position.

Bell. (34:10)

[34:23] As an expression of compassion for yourself temporarily, withdraw your attention from the field of the 8 mundane concerns, all your worldly affairs. Draw your awareness inwards, gently and kindly, settle your body speech and mind in their natural states. Come to a place of peace, of serenity, of stillness.

[36:30] And from this perspective as if viewing your own being, your own personhood. From the perspective of this brightly shining mind, this transpersonal perspective, a subtler basis of designation if you like, for I am; view your life, view your history, your personal history. Fully aware of your constant desire to be free of suffering and its causes, never a moment do you deviate from that aspiration. But take note over the years and decades of your life thus far, again, let alone past lives, which you can’t remember, how much suffering have you endured?

[37:40] And this is a real question, not a rhetorical one. How successful have you been thus far in freeing yourself from suffering and its causes; such that given the same circumstances, adversity, felicity, adversity, you suffer less in response to adversity. How capable do you feel on your own that you are intelligent enough to find your way to freedom, without looking to those who successfully have gone before you.

[39:14] So as if you’d found a wish fulfilling jewel that can grant every wish. If you have the trust, the confidence, well informed, in the freedom of the Buddha, in the efficacy of the medicine of the Dharma, and the wise benevolence of the Sangha, your spiritual friends, those who have gained profound realisations, realised nirvana. And out of compassion for yourself, the sincere wish may I be free of suffering, forever completely free, of suffering and its causes.

[40:11] I entrust myself to those who are fully awakened, to the dharma they revealed, and those who followed that dharma and found their own freedom. And by setting out on that same path of ethics, samadhi, wisdom, may I too be free of suffering, forever free, however long it may take, one lifetime or many, may I too be free of suffering and its causes.

[41:30] Like an addict whether for alcohol or drugs or other objects of addiction, who finally comes to the point that it’s unbearable; an absolute shift must take place, seeing with total clarity the catastrophic effects of continuing to act upon that addiction. As Dromtonpa, the great disciple of Atisha said, give up all attachment to this life.

[42:24] Basta, hopeless, never a chance of freedom, not there. Give up all attachment to this life, and the other side, let your mind become dharma, dwell in dharma, be dharma, take refuge in dharma at all times. And by so doing may I be free of suffering and its causes completely and forever.

[43:37] For this aspiration to be realised there must be a path. It’s not just a technique or some good advice or practice here or there. There must be the fourth Noble Truth, there must be a path. What’s the strategy? So as you envision your own freedom, as you venture into the realm of possibility, envision it, envision it clearly, your own complete freedom. Then as you arouse this aspiration for such freedom, arouse also your understanding of the path in which you feel trust, confidence, commitment, dedication, that you could devote this and all future lifetimes to. What comes to mind? How does the path come to light? Have you encountered it? Do you see the way from here to there?

[45:57] Then breath by breath, with working memory, holding in mind the vision of freedom and holding in mind the path to such freedom, the means by which you may actually be free, not only of suffering but the causes of suffering. And be free whatever your circumstances, whatever happens to you, wherever you may be, always free. Holding this in mind, freedom and the path to freedom.

When you see it’s possible…. then breath by breath arouse the aspiration, may it be so, may I be truly free of suffering and its causes.

Breath by breath, again symbolically imagine the very epitome of your own freedom, your own Buddha nature, your pristine awareness, primordially pure and free, the wellspring of all genuine happiness. Imagine this once again as an orb of light at you heart, and breath by breath with each inhalation, imagine the darkness of all that obscures your mind, all mental afflictions, all obscurations, all impediments, symbolically in the form of darkness imagine syphoning these off, drawing them in as if with a gravitational field, drawing in this darkness that shrouds your mind, shrouds this brightly shining mind. Dissolve that darkness into the light at your heart and let it be extinguished there without trace, breath by breath.

Banish the darkness, and let your mind become Dharma, the brightly shining mind of Dharma…

[51:52] And breath by breath imagine becoming free….

[52:35] And here and now imagine being free, drawing the wisdom, the wisdom that Panchen Rinpoche shared with us yesterday, let the basis of designation of yourself, be not your ordinary body, your ordinary mind or even your substrate consciousness; let it be that very subtle energy mind, pristine awareness, primordial consciousness, and the flow of energy, the energy of primordial consciousness. With this as a basis of designation, here and now regard yourself, designate yourself, as already free, because there is a perspective from which that is true right now….

[56:24] Then release all imagining, all aspirations and objects of the mind and simply rest your awareness in its own place, knowing itself….

Bell. (58:10)

(58:16) Olaso. So as always be come back to the theme of path, if there’s a path, compassion is possible. So enjoy your day!

Transcribed by Sally Dudgeon

Revised by Rafael Carlos Giusti

Final edition by Kriss Sprinkle

Discussion

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