ACI 11

Vocabulary

Jangchub sempa chupa la jukpa

Bodhisattva charya avatara

Chunjuk

Gyaltsab Je 1364 - 1432

Gyel se jok-ngok   “junyok”

Tu som gom

Supa

Jangchub sempala mikpay kongtro

Chik ki get-sa tsawa ne jom

“Gelte chusu yuna ni

Dela migar chishik yu

Delte chusu mena ni

Dela miga je chipen”

Dukngel dang-du lenpay supa

Chula nyepar semay supa

Nupa chepala ji mi nyampay supa

Okay, welcome back. We are ACI Course 11, Class 1 on January 11, 2026. How auspicious is that? Let's gather our minds here as we usually do.

Please bring your attention to your breath until you hear from me again. Now bring to mind that being who for you is a manifestation of ultimate love, ultimate compassion, ultimate wisdom, and see them there with you. They are gazing at you with their unconditional love for you, smiling at you with their holy great compassion, their wisdom, radiating from them, that beautiful golden glow encompassing you in its light, and then we hear them say, Bring to mind someone you know who's hurting in some way. Feel how much you would like to be able to help them. Recognize how the worldly ways we try fall short, how wonderful it will be when we can also help in some deep and ultimate way, a way through which they will go on to stop their distress forever. Deep down, we know this is possible. Studying, learning the precious Dharma, we glimpse how it's possible. And so I invite you to grow that wish into a longing and that longing into an intention. And with that intention, turn your mind back to your precious holy being. We know that they know what we need to know, what we need to learn yet, what we need to do yet to become one who can help this other in this deep and ultimate way. And so we ask them, please, please teach me that.

And they are so happy that we've asked, of course, we agree. Our gratitude arises, we want to offer them something exquisite and so we think of the pure world they are teaching us how to create. We imagine we can hold it in our hands and we offer it to them, following it with our promise to practice what they teach us, using our refuge prayer to make our promise. 

Here is the great earth filled with fragrant incense and covered with the blanket of flowers. The great mountain, four lands, wearing the jewel of the sun and the moon. In my mind I make them the paradise of a Buddha and offer it all to you. By this deed may every living being experience the pure world. Idam guru ratna mandalakam niryatayami.

I go for refuge until I am enlightened to the Buddha, the Dharma, and the highest community. Through the merit that I do in sharing this class and the rest, may we reach Buddhahood for the sake of every living being. I go for refuge until I am enlightened to the Buddha, the Dharma and the highest community. Through the merit that I do in sharing this class and the rest, may we reach Buddhahood for the sake of every living being. I go for refuge until I am enlightened to the Buddha, the Dharma, and the highest community. Through the merit that I do in sharing this class and the rest, may all beings totally awaken for the benefit of every single other.

Okay, so we are still studying Master Shantideva's Guide to the Bodhisattva's Way of Life. And in this course 11, we will cover the chapter on patience, not getting angry, the chapter on the perfection of effort, joyous effort, having fun, doing our bodhisattva deeds, and the chapter on meditation, that we would think would be a chapter on the five obstacles and the nine levels and how to move ourselves through them. And surprisingly, it's not that.

It's an exquisite study on how to set ourselves up so that we can concentrate. So it's really more about behavior management than meditation instruction. I just find it surprising and extraordinary.

It's an amazing chapter. I can't wait to get there. And then of course, the third part Bodhisattva's Guide to the Bodhisattva's Way of Life is the chapter on wisdom, the perfection of wisdom.

And then the final chapter, which is the chapter on dedication. So that course 12 goes into quite depth in our study of the different levels of understanding of what we mean by the no self nature of something or someone or ourself. So we'll get there.

So and so for this one, he reminded us, you know, the reason we do a class, any the reason we go to anything for ever, is because we're looking for some pleasure, we're looking for some happiness. So when we sign on to a take a class, we think there's something in it that's going to give us some happiness. Otherwise, we wouldn't waste the time.

And most people, that's not fair to say, I remember when in my life, I'd get to the end of my work week. And hooray, I had the weekend to myself. But it really wasn't the weekend to myself, right? I cleaned the house, I did the laundry, and then I had a day to myself.

But then I was all pooped out, you know, and I slapped most of it. And then I started all over again. And it was like, I, I thought that was adult life.

I had a job I liked, I had a home I liked, I had a partner I like. And, and yet, I ended up being, is this really what it's all about? No. And then, you know, as you know, I had an experience that woke me up, or I'm not sure what.

So for some of us, we're, we've reached the point where we want more meaning from our life than that usual, what we do as humans. And so at some point, we went searching. And at some point, we found this particular tradition, and it attracted us, we had the seeds for it to be what caught our interest.

And so for those folks who are looking for greater meaning, this tradition says that there are four activities that we would focus upon in order to create that meaning, right, to find the meaning, but then we find out that actually, by doing those four, we are creating the seeds for that meaning to come to us. So the first of those four is to study, to study spiritual things, whatever that means, right, we know what it means in our tradition, study the pen, study the four laws, study the four powers, study the four steps on the path, right, study, learn, learn the explanations that this tradition shares with us as an explanation and guidelines for where happiness actually comes from, and where unhappiness actually comes from. Because it seems to be such that as ordinary minded humans, even brilliant, ordinary humans, it isn't something we, we are likely to figure out on our own, that the mistake that I'm making is wanting, keeping things for myself that I think will make me happy, instead of giving away the things that I think will make me happy.

It's just counterintuitive, until we get it explained well enough. And we have the tools that we need to think it through for ourselves and go, Oh, that actually makes some sense. So when we study a new topic, it's likely that most of us need to put in some effort to actually learn that new topic.

Now, maybe we could have the seeds that we meet it again and instantly understand and know it and can live by it. But for me, at least, I needed to study it again and again and again and again, even when I was going through the ACI for the first time, you know, we'd listen to the class, we do the homework, we do the quiz, we'd go on, we went through really fast. But I'd take those audios, and I'd put them in my car.

And I listened to those classes, countless times, most of them. And over and over and over again, until I could almost say them word for word at one point. And then to hear a class, this tradition says review it at least three times, in order to strengthen those imprints so that we can get the gist of it and apply it to our life.

So intentionally Geshe Michael made these courses to be hear them, read the material, do the homework, correct the homework, although he didn't do it that way. Read the homework, do the homework, study the homework, do your quiz, so that you get the repetition that's necessary. And that method was the way our education system works in the West or did back then, which is why he chose it that way.

But the purpose was repeat, repeat, repeat. So we see that we need to be willing to give the time to it, rather than just listen to a class and move on to the next. If we want to actually benefit, if we want that result that we're looking for, our commitment to ourselves is to put in the time.

The book that we're studying, we all know was written in the 700s AD in India. And it's still translated and it's still being published and republished now. That tells us that the book must be useful.

Somebody must feel that it's valuable enough to keep publishing. And that's extraordinary. It tells us that it's authentic, or at least it's been used by people.

So then also part of the function of these classes is to receive sufficient training that we can be part of that chain of passing on the Dharma in a way that will still work for people. So part of the intention with Asian Classics Institute was to teach people to teach this stuff, or not so much to teach us to teach it, to provide it in a way that we could provide it for another, whether you have teacher training or not. And that's how I started.

I was not a teacher. I still am not a teacher. But somebody said, you know, would you share what you learned? It's like, all right.

And then I just used handwritten transcripts from the audios of Geshe Michael. And then it evolved from that. But it doesn't mean everybody has to become the teacher in front of the crowd.

Maybe that'll evolve that way for you. Maybe not. But there are still many ways that we can help support and spread the Dharma, the teachings, whether we do it formally in this way or not.

But don't count yourself short. Open your idea. It's like, wow, maybe somebody would ask.

I've asked for teachings. So maybe somebody will ask me someday. And then don't be so quick to say, Oh, no, I can't do that.

Because we are all empowered to do so by taking these classes and getting your certificate, which means you put in the time to do the homework. You don't have to know it. You don't have to know this stuff perfectly.

We just need the ability to say, Oh, I don't know that when they ask a question, which is fine. Okay. Second, of these four activities is we want to have some form of daily practice.

This tradition recommends that daily practice be a meditation practice and on the cushion learning to concentrate deeply, using logic and focus and attention to figure things out, to cultivate those direct experiences through which we actually change. And this tradition suggests that we cultivate a meditation preliminaries practice, those seven limbs, followed by some meditation. Five minutes you start with and build up one minute of meditation a week until your practice is an hour long, which will actually be an hour and a half.

Because your preliminaries and your opening prayers and all that stuff takes 20 minutes plus five more of this plus five more of that at the end. So you end up with an hour, hour and a half practice after a year and a half. That has just fit into your daily schedule so smoothly.

Without a daily commitment in that way. What we are planting the seeds necessary to take the intellectual information deeper. Geshehla says, we find time to eat and bathe and do the dishes.

And it's just silly not to consider our cushion time as important as our bathing, doing the dishes, eating time. Because it actually is. It's, it's life or death situation, they say.

So then the third factor in a spiritual life is, is taking the time out from daily life on a regular basis, in which we pull ourselves into our own mind, our own arena, and work with the things that we've learned to give those realistic experiences. And that gives those organizations a chance to bubble up. So by that, I mean retreat.

And this particular lineage means solo, solitary retreat. Group retreats are great. And we learn a lot and we grow a lot and solitary retreats are different.

We learn how to do a solitary retreat in those group retreats. That's what we did with thousand angels. To do it oneself is a very different experience.

So either whether we're making room in life for regular group retreat in the sense of giving ourselves an immersion experience into the Dharma, or solitary retreat, which is a deeper immersion into the Dharma, just different. Either way, this third factor in the activity that will bring happiness is to build into one's mindset, the possibility of regular solitary retreat in one's future life. It's hard to find the time to do that in modern society.

You don't get enough time off work. But it's karmic ripenings. So think about how you can plant your seeds for regular solitary withdrawal from your worldly life from time to time.

Start with a long weekend. Go to a week. Go to two weeks.

You know, in Diamond Way, they recommend four to six weeks twice a year. The benefits are extraordinary. They really are.

Then the fourth activity, Geshehla calls it laboratory studies. That means being out in life, putting into practice what it is we're learning about. So we can study and get 100 on all the homeworks and all the quizzes, but never use it.

Use what we're learning to behave differently in the arena of my work, my life, my neighborhood, my home, my family. If we never use it, then we've planted some seeds for knowledge, but seeds for knowledge that doesn't get used. And then we die and we're done.

So this workshop activity is where we try on for size these different ideas. No, why shouldn't I yell back at the boss? That's what everybody does. They expect me to do that.

If I don't yell back, they'll walk all over me and it'll just be worse, right? Our old mental afflictions have all these reasons. And so the whole task is try out different responses to that angry yelling boss. Try out different responses in your own mind when you're stuck in traffic and you're going to be late for the doctor's office and they're going to yell at you.

And test it out in life. So then life becomes part of our spiritual training and necessary part. And it's not like here's life.

And here's my Dharma time. And here's life. And here's my Dharma time.

No need to separate them. In fact, better if we don't. My Dharma study, my meditation time, it all helps me be a better in life person.

And my in life work helps my meditation cushion time. Doesn't it? It's supposed to, by way of how we interact with others, it's going to help or hurt our concentration. It's in the space of other beings that our mental afflictions arise.

And that's our mental afflictions that are the source of the unhappiness that we're trying to overcome. So we're not going to get happy as long as we still have mental afflictions that are coming up. We can sit in a cave, be all by ourselves, and read the chapter on Master Shantideva's patience practice and go, Oh, yeah, that's easy.

Until you leave the cave, and you go out, right, and the first person blames you for something that you didn't do. All right, you didn't do that. All the cave work in the world doesn't help.

If we're not out there working with our mental seeds as they ripen, so that we replant different ones off, off, off out of automatic pilot. So that's where Master Shantideva's book comes in. It's this beautiful guidebook on how to be in our world, as this aspiring bodhisattva, who says to themselves, at least, I want to become Buddha for the benefit of all sentient beings, because beings are suffering.

And I see that that suffering is mistaken. And it doesn't have to be. And I don't like my suffering.

And I don't like their suffering. And I need to, I'm the one who needs to do something about it. Because I understand it's all my seeds ripening.

So tell me, what do I need to do? All right. So that said, what book are we studying? Jangchub sempa chupa la jukpa. There's a prenasal inside here, la[n] jukpa. Jangchub sempa means Buddhahood warrior, bodhisattva. 

Chupa la jukpa means learning, learning how to act. Bodhisattva learning how to act. In Sanskrit, bodhisattva charya avatara, bodhisattva charya avatara, it's all rolled into one, learning how to act, Guide to the Bodhisattva's Way of Life, written by Master Shantideva, Shivala in Tibetan, 700 something AD. The Tibetans give it a nickname.

They call it Chunjuk. Chunjuk is this shortened for chupa la jukpa. It means, it means the learning how to act.

If you were to say learn act in English, like a contraction, chunjuk. So you might say to somebody, you know, what are you studying? You go, oh, we're studying chunduk. And everybody would know what you meant, if they'd studied it as well, at least.

Then we are using a commentary because the chunduk itself is written in poetry, which is beautiful, but it means many, much of it is metaphorical and shortened and concise. And so the commentary expands on the meaning when the commentary is written by somebody who has a certain amount of wisdom themselves. So the commentary that we're using is the commentary written by Gyaltsab Je Dharma Rinchen, whose dates are 1364 to 1432.

We know Gyaltsab Je as the right hand main disciple of our hero Je Tsongkhapa. Gyaltsab Je is well known for his instructions on the Guide to the Bodhisattva's Way of Life on his method side teachings, although he's master of both wisdom side and method side. Kedrubje is better known for his mastery of the tantra teachings and the wisdom teachings.

But both are masters of both. So Gyaltsab Je is seen on the right because he's more known for sutra. Kedrup Je is on the left because he's more known for tantra and wisdom, and that's a common designation.

Left side is wisdom, right side is method side, left side tantra, right side sutra. It's not a literal thing so much as a metaphorical, but then we see it in the Tantras in that way. So Gyaltsab Je's text is here, Gyaltsab Je.

So the word in Tibetan is spelled this J-O-K-N-G-O-K. When you hear Geshehla say it, it's Junyok, Junyok, because this G-O-K isn't Jok, it's more the short O-J, and then the prenasal with the G-O-K, it's not Gok, it's Jok, more like Jok maybe, Junyok is how it comes up. So Gyaltsab Je means Buddha child, and Buddha child means Bodhisattva.

Junyok, we learned before, is the easiest place to cross a river or the easiest place to make a crossing. If the river is really wide and fast you can't get across, you walk up and down the side looking for a place where it curves smaller and maybe you can jump, or it's got rocks and you can step across, you're looking for the safest, easiest, quickest way across. The Junyok is that.

So his commentary is this quickest way across to Buddha's child, becoming a Buddha's child. They call it the entry point for children of the victorious Buddhas, how to become a Bodhisattva basically. So by knowing what we're studying, we have some evidence that we're studying authentic information, at least authentic to back to these times.

So what's a Buddhist child, what's a Bodhisattva? It's a long story when you can say, now I'm a Bodhisattva, versus now I am trying to be a Bodhisattva, versus man I'd really like to be a Bodhisattva, versus what the heck is a Bodhisattva? But all of those understands on some level that what we mean is when our heart has heard about the ability to become totally enlightened and what those qualities are, include, and it's like that's attractive. I'd like to be the one who helps everyone become the one who helps everyone become the one, I can never stop saying it, become the one who helps everybody stop suffering. I want to become totally enlightened for the sake of all sentient beings.

There's so much more to it than just those words, but we use those words once we know all the rest of it. And we keep adding to our meaning of those words as we study, as we practice, as we gain realizations. Those words will take on greater and greater meaning for each of us, unique to each of us.

Okay, so this book is about becoming ones who are on the path to reaching our total enlightenment, so that we can help everyone stop their suffering, ultimately, finally, forever, someday. All right, so we have a root text and we have a commentary. The root text is in the commentary.

Geshehla has just given us as our reading the commentary, and then he used that commentary to show us the verses of the root text that he wanted to talk about. So our three courses don't cover every verse in the Guide to the Bodhisattva's Way of Life. Geshehla picked out the ones that have traditionally been taught as the most insightful, meaningful, challenging, and the ones that he feels are most useful to the Western world, modern Western world.

And then if we're inspired by the text, you know, there are great translations into English. I suspect it's in every language. If you want to read it in your own language, you can probably get it.

And then didn't he and Seiji just recently finish translating it again? I thought they were working on it. So anyway, get yourself a complete copy if you like. So I'm going to switch.

Let me see. Okay, so we're starting into the chapter called Patience, the Perfection of Patience, which Geshehla always quickly says, patience doesn't really quite cut it. The word patience, it's really the art of not getting angry when your buttons get pushed.

And we know it's not just a matter of willpower. It means what to do instead when your buttons for anger get pushed. What else can we do so that we burn away having an anger button that could be pushed? It takes time.

So anger, patience, the word patience is supa, the S-U-P-A. There's also a word, Z-O-P-A, which sounds similar, zopa instead of supa. And people often confuse those two because there used to be a llama, zopa, and a geshe, supa, and people would confuse them even though their names are not at all the same.

They're both gone now, but both extraordinary. Anyway, supa means patience. It really is the word for patience.

So it's called the chapter on patience. And what I get to do is show you the verse and then talk about the verse. So I need to go back and forth in my screen share.

I don't know how to do this any differently. See the verses? And they're big enough to see? All right, good. So Geshehla calls these contemplations.

Contemplation means things to think about deeply, which is a little different than meditation as we've learned from Master Kamala Shiva. That was kind of surprising. So just listen.

I am going to read them to you, and then I'll talk to you about them, and then we'll hear them again. So we're talking about the perfection of patience, meaning not getting angry, not acting from our anger so we stop getting angry. These are his opening statements.

I'll show you. This is the first verse. Contemplation one.

So the beginning of his chapter. There. So this is your reading.

A single instance of anger destroys whatever good deeds you may have amassed in thousands of eons spent in practices like giving or making offerings to those who have gone to bliss. There is no kind of deed as evil as the act of anger. There is no spiritual hardship like patience.

Practice it then. Concentrate on patience in many different ways. It's like he lays it out really clearly right at the beginning.

Any goodness that we have already accumulated is the cause of any pleasant experience that we can have in the future. So any pleasant experience we are having is a result of some kind of past kindness. Some kind of past giving or making offering.

And there won't be any goodness that we can experience in the future that won't be a result of some kindness, which means only kindness can make pleasant outcomes. Pleasant outcomes don't come from anything other than kindness. All the different ways that we can say that.

And here he says a single instance of anger destroys thousands of eons of kindness that we've done. EGADS. That should be terrifying because remember what we learned about how long an eon is? 10 to the 60th human years, give or take, depending on how long it takes for our goodness to grow.

Thousands of 10 to the 60th years of goodness made. We can't even wrap our minds around how long that is. So hopefully our mind is saying, well, what kind of anger are you talking about that can destroy that much goodness? You know, that little upset when I stub my toe, is that enough to destroy that much goodness? Or does it take some other kind of anger? You know, please, commentary, please.

Because Master Shantideva just says anger is this destructive. And so patience is like the hardest spiritual practice to do. And it's like the most powerful.

It's the way we protect all those eons of goodness that we've made. So what really constitutes anger? And what kind of anger is it that can destroy this much goodness? So now we want to water it down. We want to say that can't be literal.

And then in the commentary, Gyaltsab Je quotes from various sutras to show that it is quite literal. And to show that it's talking about a specific kind of anger, which gives us a little bit of relief, but is also pointing out that any amount of anger does in fact negate goodness that we have, because we'll see why. So he goes on to describe how the little irritations, angers that we have are not the ones that destroy this great big bad stuff, destroy us so badly, is what I mean.

The anger that can destroy that much goodness has to be a really strong anger that's focused towards a Bodhisattva. So it's like, oh, phew, I don't know that I've ever been really angry with the Bodhisattva. But if I think about it further, it's like, well, wait a minute, I'm not sure I've ever known a Bodhisattva.

Is that protective? Or is that dangerous? Dangerous. But wait a minute, if there are Bodhisattva from their side and not from my side, are they not a Bodhisattva at all? Do I have to see them as a Bodhisattva? No, they're a Bodhisattva in order to get the karmic seed of them being a Bodhisattva that I've planted my seed in. I haven't actually come to the clear conclusion personally.

If the being is empty of being Bodhisattva or not Bodhisattva, how can them being a Bodhisattva from their side impact my mind if I don't see them as a Bodhisattva? But if I use that as the argument, that means Buddhas can't help me. Because I'd be saying the same thing for a Buddha. If a Buddha is not a Buddha until I see them as a Buddha, I'm stuck.

Because until I see one, I have to have the goodness to see another as a Buddha, I need to be close to being one. How do I become close to being one if I can't interact with somebody as if they're one in order to plant the seed strong enough to become one? Same for Bodhisattva. The argument is, have you ever gotten really, really angry at anybody? Yes.

How do you know that wasn't a Bodhisattva? I don't know. So how do I know I haven't destroyed all of my goodness? I don't really know. Except that pleasant things do still happen to me.

So I couldn't have destroyed it all. Or I would be in that situation like it's happening in some places of the world where it just seems like awful, awful, awful, and more awful is happening to people. So like on surface level, we hear these words and that's like, okay, I understand anger is a bad thing.

As we understand more and we dig deeper into these words, we reach these gray areas where the grayness isn't meant to like, oh, it's too confusing. I can't deal with it. It's meant for us to dig in deeper into our understanding of karmic emptiness so that we can understand the power of our own behavior choices.

The better we understand the gray areas of these teachings, the more powerful our practice gets, not the less powerful, hopefully. Okay. So the single instance of anger needs to be strong anger, sustained anger at a Bodhisattva.

Whether they're really a Bodhisattva or not, if I believe they're a Bodhisattva or that they could be a Bodhisattva, that's enough for a sustained anger to damage this much goodness. Why? Because to have that strong a sustained anger at somebody means that we perceive that they've done something to me that caused me pain of some kind, and I'm blaming them so strongly that I'm letting this reaction to harm them back go on and go on and go on. And the reason I let it go on is because I still believe so clearly they did that to me.

And that means my ignorance is so strong that it's coloring my emotion, my feeling, my mental state that's sustaining this anger. Yes, they did that to me. Yes, they're supposed to be a high level Bodhisattva.

Why would they do that to me if they love me so much? The blame factor is the strength of our mental affliction that makes that state of mind so dangerous. We're doing our practice of giving and are making offerings to gather goodness because we understand we're doing it to imprint our mind because we're trying to understand things don't have their own and that's how I create goodness in my world. And then I blame somebody for my discomfort strongly enough to get mad and act badly towards them.

Do you see why it damages so much goodness? Because the strength of our ignorance is so strong. That's what damages the goodness, the strength of the ignorance. And so he says, there's no kind of deed as evil as an act of anger.

So anger comes up and we act from it. The anger coming up is still being replanted, just the feeling that we call anger. But to act from it means we believe that that anger is in it, from it, and the action I'm going to do is going to solve the problem, which of course it's not even if it seems like it does.

So to act from our anger reinforces our misunderstanding. To have an episode of anger feeling, I'm feeling angry, but I'm not going to let myself act from it. That's the spiritual hardship that they say is one of the hardest to not do.

It becomes less and less difficult to not do as our wisdom grows. And our wisdom can grow in the moment as our mindfulness grows, that, oh, this sensation, this anger that I'm feeling, that feeling itself doesn't have to be interpreted as anger. It always has.

I think it always will, but it doesn't have to be. Can I reinterpret it and use the strength of that feeling for something different? So our efforts in mindfulness, both on and off the cushion, help us grow our spiritual hardship practice of growing our patience, of not acting from the anger when it comes up, because we understand so clearly that it's seeds ripening from past blaming others. And it's an opportunity to burn those off and stop blaming the one who's behaving so badly towards me.

And then it's dangerous. So do I just let them beat me up? Maybe, not necessarily, however. But do I hurt them before I let them hurt me? Right, hard, difficult.

Okay. Geshehla says, reaching the point where we can be joyful as the screaming boss blames you for everything that's going wrong. That spiritual Superman, that superpower to, okay, I understand you're upset, but see how we can solve this.

Okay. You're blaming me, even though in your heart, you're going, I didn't do any of that. Don't blame me.

You're outer, right? Your choice in behavior is, yeah, yeah, I get it. I understand. I understand.

I understand, like deeply understand takes practice. It does not mean suppressing your anger. It does not mean trying to hold it back.

That will make us sick. Ulcers, rupture, heart attacks happen, strokes happen from retained anger, thinking we're doing something good. The feeling can be transformed into something else and then burned off so that it doesn't happen at all.

Remember King of Kalinka's story? And the yogi who's hurting so badly, you would think you'd have been mad at that King. You know, I wasn't horsing around with your wife for crying out loud. I was teaching her the Dharma.

None of that. All right. So I'll read it again.

A single instance of anger destroys whatever good deeds you may have amassed in thousands of eons spent in practices like giving or making offerings to those who have gone to bliss. There is no kind of deed as evil as the act of anger. There is no spiritual hardship like patience.

Practice it then. Concentrate on patience in many different ways. Next, he will point out that there are results of anger that we are aware of, and results of anger that we're not aware of.

In case that that first stanza, set of stanzas, did not inspire us to care about our anger, he points out how it affects us even in worldly ways. So he says, if you hold to the sharp pain of thoughts of anger, your mind can know no peace. You find no happiness, no pleasure.

Sleep stays away and the mind becomes unsettled. So remember when they use the term peace in the scriptures, they mean nirvana, reaching nirvana, not just being peaceful, which of course will come along the way to nirvana. But nirvana is freedom from any mental afflictions and seeds for more because of the individual analysis.

Remember what that means. So while we're angry, of course, we're not at peace because we're struggling with why they do that to me. What should I do? How do I protect myself? How do I act? But we're also planting seeds that prevent us from moving towards nirvana.

Then he says, secondly, you'll have no happiness, like no mental happiness at the time. And one could make a case, aren't there people who are very happy being angry? And it's like, maybe it seems like they're happy being angry in the moment, but what's going to happen to their seeds as they continue to think they're happy from the anger? Even if they can feel happy in the moment of being angry, it's not the anger feeling that's making them happy. It's some kind of past kindness they did that's ripening that they think their anger makes them happy.

And unfortunately, the more they act from their anger because they think it makes them happy to do so, the worse their experience in life is going to get at some point when those seeds ripen, because to act from anger blames another and hurts another. And it's going to come back to us of somebody being happy to hurt me. Yikes.

Might be seeing some of that in my world right now. Not me personally, but others. So we'll find no happiness, we'll find no pleasure.

So we know that when we're angry, it doesn't feel good. And if we stay angry for a long time, it does end up affecting our digestion, our breathing, our very sensation of our physical being. More subtly, they say that an angry state of mind will prevent our meditation practice from reaching the level of concentration where those appliances can occur, the Shin Jangs, that the negativity of anger blocks that ripening of that kind of pleasure.

It's interesting to think about. He says in another verse, angry thoughts ruin meditation. And it's like, of course, in your meditation, angry thoughts are going to ruin that meditation.

But it also means angry thoughts off the cushion, ruin your meditation on the cushion, even when you're not angry during the time of the meditation. Because of the negative influence on all of our seeds of blaming others for something unpleasant that's happened to us. It's like a stain in our mind.

The fourth one is anger prevents sleep. And of course, insufficient sleep is stressful and puts us on edge and makes us more easily irritated and angry. And then the last one, the mind remains unsettled, means this angry state of mind, we're always off balance and easily pushed into another state of irritation and anger.

So these are results of anger that we can be aware of. Now that we've heard them, we can recognize Oh, yeah, I see how that works. Then he says, anger also affects our relationships.

Suppose there were a master who bestowed upon all those within his care, both wealth and honor as they wished. Still, they would rise to kill him if he lived in fury. It leaves your friends and family tired of being with you.

They refuse to stay on even though you may entice them with gifts. So he's saying that someone who is either prone to fits of an anger, like generally speaking, they're nice, but they have a temper problem, a rage problem, and they fly off the handle. They become unpredictable in their behavior.

At some point, no matter how well they care for people otherwise, the people they care for always have to be on edge because you never know when they're going to fly off the handle. They may fly off the handle one too many times, and maybe in a dangerous way, and those people they cared for, they say will even rise up to kill them. And it's like, hopefully that never happens to us and our families if we have a family member who's prone to these rages.

But he points out that even if we don't rise up to kill that person, it becomes tiresome and we leave them. So if we're the one with the rage problem, we'll find ourselves being left out, being avoided, being even left alone. No matter how much I still were to entice them with gifts and beg them to come back, it's like at some point that anger pushes people away.

And you can't blame them, can you? So that his purpose here is to talk about our own level of anger and how it's impacting our mind by way of how it's impacting others. So anger destroys our own peace of mind and it destroys our relationships with others. And those are things that we can, we could figure it out ourselves if we bothered to do so.

He goes on to say, to put it simply, there is no one with anger who can be happy. Anger, our enemy, brings us these and other pains as well. If we have chronic anger issues, we don't think of it as an enemy so much.

In fact, we tend to think of it as our friend, it's our protector. It's how we have enough power to stand up for ourselves or to make sure that things go right for us. And it's mistaken when we understand about mental seeds and what we're planting, when we're relying upon our anger to be able to get what we want in our world.

It seems to work, unfortunately, a lot of times. But he's pointing out that even if it seems to work, it still harms us in these many ways. Let's take our break.

Are we back? I see two thumbs, two thumbs, three thumbs, three people. There they come. Okay.

So Master Shantideva has pointed out the negative effects of anger that we can be aware of how it causes mental unhappiness, physical unhappiness and relationship unhappinesses. And he is also pointing out in the first set of verses, how the negative effects of anger affect us in ways that we don't see, that we don't know. And that's held within that verse about a single moment of anger at a Bodhisattva destroys our eons of good virtue.

But there's a little more explanation to that about anger, even if it's not directed at a Bodhisattva. So this verse, Geshehla wanted us to memorize it. He gives us a couple of different ones to memorize from this chapter.

It's like, I memorized it back then, but I don't have it still. That means I didn't memorize it. So do the best you can.

Jangchub sempala mikpay kongtro, please say. Jangchub sempala mikpay kongtro, chik gi get-sa tsawa ne jom. chik gi get-sa tsawa ne jom

Jangchub sempala mikpay kongtro, chik gi get-sa tsawa ne jom. It means a single instant of anger (kongtro), mikpay, at a Jangchub sempala (Bodhisattva). Get-sa is our store of good virtue. Tsawa ne jom (destroys the entire thing). Chik ki is the single instant. So this is the verse that says a single instant of anger directed towards a Bodhisattva destroys our entire store of good virtue from the root, getsa. Tsawa (from the root). So, okay, don't get really, really angry at a Bodhisattva or if you ever had, do your four powers of purification. But then more subtle instances of getting really angry and sustaining anger at anybody, or not, it damages our goodness karma such that we have less goodness karma to ripen.

You know, not even necessarily a long time coming because we've got a certain amount of goodness now. And this sustained anger now is lessening that goodness. Maybe it's not the big kind of anger that could destroy it altogether, but it's damaging it.

And if we damage our good karma and it still goes off, it's goodness is less than it would have been. And that means our experiences in our world are getting less and less pleasant, less and less nice. And so it's typical in an aging human for things to get harder, for things to seem to get worse.

You know, I remember parents, grandparents sitting around, you know, complaining about politics, complaining about the economy, complaining. And, you know, I was a kid. It's like, really? Is stuff really that bad? Seems pretty nice to me.

And then I'm their age, older, even, and it's like, oh my gosh, like I'm saying the same kind of stuff that I used to hear them say, only now, you know, mine's real before it wasn't. Anyway, you get my mind. And we think, well, that's just what it is to get older.

But we get older and things get worse because we've been angry when we were younger. And that angrier we get, the more our goodness gets damaged, the harder things are going to get for us. Like not five lifetimes later, just later in this life, even soon later in this life, because our ongoing anger hurts our goodness.

So even when we're being kind and then we're irritated and angry and blaming others, it's still, do you see how it's just going to constantly keep things getting worse and worse and worse? And it's really not something that we recognize. We think the grumpy old man, you know, is grumpy old man now, but he's a grumpy old man now because the things in his world are rotten because he was angry before. And we don't get that.

We especially don't get it when we're young and we get angry. We don't realize that we're making a grumpy old man future for ourselves soon. So when our world is getting lousier and lousier, it's because of the destruction of good karma that's happening because of anger.

And sooner or later, if we stay angry enough, longer enough, we'll destroy all of our goodness and there'll be nothing but negative karma. And then we die with nothing but negative karma and then what? Disaster, right? So he's very harsh in this chapter, both the commentary and Master Shantideva himself. It's like, don't pamper yourself with allowing anger to go on.

Recognize its danger. And until we recognize how dangerous it is, we don't have the strength to fight it. Life gets hard.

Our blame factor gets strong. And that takes over. And we make these wrong decisions and think that feeling of anger is justified and continue to act from it.

Okay. So where does all that anger come from in the first place? Are we even allowed to say in the first place in Buddhism? No. If we can know where it comes from, and we can grow the awareness at that level of where it's starting, we can head it off at the path.

Right? So can we recognize where anger actually comes from? And then what do we do about it once we do? Okay, let me just switch again. There we are. Anger feeds on the food of feeling upset, then strengthen turns to smash me.

And so then I will smash the sustenance that feeds this enemy of mine. My foe knows no other kind of work at all, except to cause me pain. No matter what happens, I will never allow my joy to be disturbed.

Easier said than done. Feeling upset cannot accomplish my hopes, and only makes me lose the goodness that I have. So he's pointing out that that full on anger builds from having something having upset us in the first place.

The upset means there's something's wrong with this picture. Something is happening that's not going my way. Some level of aversion.

We're learning to recognize it at its earliest. Sorry, time out. Wanting to recognize our upset at its early, early, early moment.

NBA being able to say, oh, that's this ignorant disliking happening. And then from that, turn on whatever power we have to turn it the other way to not let it grow into the full on blaming them for that unpleasantness. Whether it's the cobbly road that's too hard to walk on, or it's too windy, it's too cold, angry, all the way to that person being outright mean to us.

It starts with a, this isn't what I want. And that resistance that has already in it, the blame factor, the unpleasantness is coming from them. And that's what makes it allows it to escalate.

So the sooner we can recognize, oh, my seeds ripening, they're burned off. By the time we've had that thought, how we're going to react, plants new, whether it changes the situation with the thought or not, we, if it doesn't, we have the thought again, still my seeds ripening. I'm not going to react in that way.

He's going to say later, if the best you can do is be like a bump on a log, then do that. If you can do better to act with some level of kindness, maybe the kindness is run away fast. That's still kindness.

The earlier we find the, what's making me feel upset and recognize it's my seeds ripening, the greater our power over that enemy anger. But we've probably all tried to just be in a situation of anger and change our mind. And it doesn't work.

It doesn't work for me anyway, because the anger has already gotten too strong, which means the ignorance is too strong to just decide I'm going to change my mind. So what do we do? He says, in the moment we do our best. And when that moment's passed, we plan out how to face a similar moment in the future in a different way.

And we look for those moments of the little irritations and work with them. To recognize how they are manifestations of little blames, little ignorant dislikes that we can use to burn off and not react badly to even react positively to in order to grow the habit of being able to not perpetuate the upset when it starts so that it won't go on to full on anger. He's going to say there is nothing we can't learn to do if we make a habit of it, because there is nothing we have learned to do that hasn't become a habit.

So we have habits that we don't want. We replace them with habits that we do want. Rather than just trying to stop an old habit, we replace it with something new.

How do we do that? He gives us these two beautiful verses and I'm going to give them to you in Tibetan as well. His Holiness the Dalai Lama quotes these so frequently. They're so beautiful.

In any given situation, if there's something you can do about it, why should you feel upset? If there's nothing you can do about it, what use is being upset? I'll say it again. If in any situation there's something you can do about it, just go do it. There's no need to be upset.

And if there's nothing you can do about it, then what good is being upset? It's not going to help. It's only going to harm my own karmic seed. It's not going to help the situation because there's nothing I can do about it.

It really is profound, these two verses. And Master Shantideva is saying, learn them, use them, work with them to recognize, no, they're the dirty dishes. I don't want to stand there and do the dishes.

The water is cold. It makes my hands hurt. It takes too much water to run it, to get it to be hot and that's wasting water in the desert.

I can't do that. So I'll leave the dishes until there's a whole lot of dishes so that it's worth doing. But I know Sumati doesn't like the dirty dishes in the sink.

What do I do? If there's something I can do about it, why feel upset? I can leave the dishes and be upset with myself for upsetting Sumati. Or I could do the dishes and just take care of it because I can do something about that. But suppose, I don't know, there's nothing I can do about the water being cold and it taking too long to get hot.

Reasonably, there's nothing I can do. So why be upset with that? Just deal with it, Sarahni. And it really is that simple, mostly, right? Once we get to the deeper piece of whatever issue we're looking at, can I do something about it? What? Do it.

If I can't do anything about it, well, then I guess move on. Why cogitate about it and get upset about it and have that upset affect me in other ways? It really is profound. So here's the verses we're supposed to memorize in Tibetan, which I did and probably forgot, which means I didn't memorize them.

Come on. Come on. There they are.

They are fun to say though. So please say after me. And then the reading is the Tibetan squiggles, Janet.

So you can check the words yourself. So, if there's something I can do about it, what need is there to be upset? If there's nothing I can do about it, what use is getting upset? It's not going to change anything to get upset. Just going to damage my future karmas.

So when we apply these to the more and more subtle irritations in life, we build the habit of applying these to the stronger irritations in life so that we can apply them when the main events, big events of anger come up. These are already habitual. If I can fix it, fix it.

If I can't, no need to be upset about it. Just deal with whatever it is I can deal with. All right.

Change you back again. Maybe over here. I see the verses again.

There's nothing in the world which does not come easily if you make a habit of it. Make then a habit of bearing the small pains and thus endure the greater. The practice of not getting angry when the situation would otherwise trigger it.

This is where Geshehla speaks to that. Contemplation five. Master Shantideva is using the metaphor of warfare against our mental afflictions.

And I apologize to those of us who are sensitive to the violence. His point is, however, that these mental afflictions, they truly are powerful enemies that we think are actually friends, many of them. And that it takes some harshness in order to wake ourselves up enough to recognize the need to really struggle against these mental afflictions.

So he does use this harsh metaphor of being the Bodhisattva warrior, you know, out to slay our enemy. But those enemies are always our mental afflictions, not some outer enemy, as we'll see very quickly. So he points out at this point that some of us have the constitution that, you know, if we're struggling with someone, like a warrior who's in battle, and they get wounded, and they see their own blood, and they just get more ferocious as a warrior against their enemy.

And then there are others with the constitution that the instant they see somebody else bleeding a little bit, you know, they faint dead away, let alone taking on their own pain and getting more ferocious. He says, some when they catch sight of their own blood rise to a greater ferocity. Some when they see another person's blood faint and fall unconscious.

All of this derives from either steadfastness or cowardice in the mind. He says both of those situations and everything in between is simply a state of mind. It's not, oh, just some people have the quality of getting fierce, and some people have the quality of fainting dead away.

It's simply a state of mind, and any state of mind can be changed if we make the effort and the habit. So it's saying, no, to what extent can we be ferocious against our mental affliction, or to what extent do we have one and we just let it take over? And any of us will be in any swing therein, depending upon what mental affliction, what the situation, etc. So he's just bringing it up that our task as our growing Bodhisattva warrior hood is to recognize our own mental affliction is the dangerous enemy here, and as it shows its ugly head, take it on and struggle with it instead of, oh me, oh my, my jealousy again, and give into it.

Learn then to disregard harms and never allow any pain to touch you. Hurt may come, but the wise never let suffering cloud their clarity of mind. You know, we hear in samsara pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional.

Not so much I can choose to suffer or not, but meaning when the more we understand where the pain is coming from, the less we actually suffer from it. And I can't say in my own experience, through those multiple migraines that I had, you know, the pain was always terrible, but I really was able to get to the point where the suffering was much less from it. Never not, but surprisingly less.

I still had to stay in bed. It's not that I could go and carry on, but while I was laying there in bed with those pains, it went from, oh my, why me? How long is this going to last? Am I going to die? Okay, I'm burning it off. What does it feel like there? I could use it.

I could investigate it. It showed me a lot about emptiness and karma. It really did.

So in a way, I'm grateful to them now that I don't have them like that anymore. Suffering and pain are two different things, and it's quite an aha to recognize that. He says, don't let any pain touch you.

Come on, pain's going to touch us all. But the suffering doesn't have to perpetuate when we apply our understanding of where it's really coming from. Right, right, right.

We can reach the state of mind where the more things go wrong, the stronger we get. Wouldn't that be nice? The more inspired we get. He says, we are locked in combat with mental afflictions, and in war, many wounds are sustained.

Ignore then any pains that might come. Smash the foes of anger and such. Conquering these is the thing that makes a warrior.

The rest are killing only corpses. He's saying in a war where you're fighting a battle with other human beings, he says that's really useless because those other human beings, they're going to die eventually. All you really have to do is outlive them, and you've won the war.

But our mental afflictions, they grow on themselves. They perpetuate themselves. So if you want to fight a battle, fight the battle of our own mental afflictions.

When we're in the midst of a mental affliction, we are so sure that we are right about that feeling, and what it means, and what it reveals about the situation, and what we think we should do as a result. We are so sure we are right. And that replant seeds for more of that same situation happening, and more of our own reaction to other situations in that same way.

And that's the real foe. And of all of those mental affliction foes, anger is apparently the worst one. I would argue ignorance is the worst one.

But ignorance underlies all of them. So it's the anger that causes the greatest damage because of how dangerous it is against our goodness. Apparently the others are not so dangerous against goodness.

All right. Lastly, there are three kinds of patience that we want to develop. Here they are down here.

Dukngel dang-du lenpay supa. Supa being patience. Dukngel being suffering, we know that word. Dang-du lenpay means to take it on gladly. Gladly, the cross-eyed bear. To take suffering on gladly. Patience. It's like who wants that? But suffering, we're in samsara. Suffering is happening. Obvious suffering, the suffering of change, pervasive suffering. We can struggle against it, or we can use it.

Dukngel dang-du lenpay supa is this patience that uses the suffering of our samsaric world. Doesn't just lay over and die from it. ‘Okay, let it all happen to me. Woe is me. I can't do anything.’ But it's like, all right, burned that one off, burned that one off, burned that one off’. Take it on gladly. As opposed to avoiding. Avoiding, avoiding, avoiding. We can't avoid samsaric suffering.

Why bother trying? Doesn't mean step into suffering, right? More suffering than happening. But recognize it and use it to choose the opposite reaction to what we want to do or some similar kindness. And in doing so, know we've burned off however many 64 moments worth of seeds as we had that unpleasantness and didn't perpetuate it.

Yay. Add some rejoicing to it, and you've got a powerful practice. Second one, chula nyepar semay supa.

chula nyepar means to concentrate on the dharma patience. That one's not so clear. It means the patience that comes when our reliance on our growing dharma wisdom can be turned on earlier and earlier in our circumstances that we're reacting to.

It builds a kind of patience, a kind of tolerance, a kind of forbearance of our experiences when we've got ourselves tuned into, I'm using all of this as my path. Pleasant things, I will share them and offer them. Unpleasant things, I will burn them off and be kind.

Purify and make merit. That's all there is to do. And when we have that really strongly as our focus in mind as we're going through our day, the big if, is to have this patience that comes from our practice, holding our practice in mind patience.

Okay. Then the third one, nupa chepala ji mi nyampay supa. Nupa chepala, I don't know how the words break up, but it means when somebody hurts me in any way.

Ji mi nyampay means I could care less. Supa, patience. When my reaction to someone hurting me in any way is I could care less.

That's a level of patience, of not getting angry. So we're wanting to grow this attitude of they hurt me, I could care less. It's counterintuitive.

It sounds like that means we would put ourselves in harm's way and let the person go ahead and beat us up or steal from us. And that's not what it means. But that attitude of resist, reject and hurt before they can hurt me is what we're trying to stop.

And this attitude of understanding, no matter what's happening, it's coming from my own seeds ripening. I really can't blame anybody. I don't want them to continue hurting me because it hurts them as much as me, probably more.

And so the fact that they're hurting me, it's like I could care less and I'm going to be kind to stop it. I'm going to run away fast to stop it. Not because I'm trying to protect myself so much, but because I want these seeds to burn off and I don't want to replant them in the old ignorant way.

That I could care less about them hurting me. Patience. It's dangerous to misunderstand, but it's a powerful kind of patience.

We become independent of what's actually happening to us. I'm not there yet. But we could imagine like King of Kalingka guy, that yogi, right? He still loved the king.

He was hurting. He was bleeding to death. And great.

This is the last of my negative karmas. Like I am on my way. So he's loving the king more and more, even as he's hurting.

He had probably all three of these patients is happening at the same time. And then you remember at the end of the story that we didn't hear from in ACI 6, the king says, prove it that you're the lord of patience. If it's true, right, that I have not had a hint of anger in the last 500 years, then may my limbs reattach and they jump up and reattach and you know, and the king goes, I've made a big mistake like that.

Suffering pain will happen. Anger does not have to go with it. When blame doesn't go with it, anger won't come up.

But it's not a matter of just, okay, I'll stop blaming everybody because it needs to come out of our seeds to stop blaming everybody. So every time we do recognize I'm blaming, but I am not going to believe it. And I'm going to act differently.

We're chipping away of that old wrong belief. And it's just a numbers game to be able to plant more with our growing wisdom as our ignorance is ripening. And sooner or later, we get ahead of all that old yuck that we've planted, all the old selfishness and things start to spiral upward and we can get there and this text helps us to do it.

All right, I think I covered all your homework with seven minutes to spare. I gave you all of this. In which case, are there questions? Are you scared about this chapter? We're going to do more about patience.

I don't want to leave anybody scared. No, you do not have to put yourself in harm's way. No, you don't have to hate yourself for any time you've been angry before.

We know what to do to fix it. We know what to do moving forward. Fix it moving forward, the accountant tells me when I had a mistake.

[Student: Lama Sarani? I had an interesting experience when I went on retreat in Phoenix and it was a Dharma practitioner. They were having a lot of anguish and issues and it was a very, very complicated situation. It was quite scary for me and I was there as a support to try and help this person and I wasn't able to help them and I just did my best. I did everything I could and there was one time where I was in a vehicle with them and it was very scary and I just took and I took and I took and I stayed patient and I was seeing also. I know that it's still like sometimes when you're in a situation where it's coming from you, but it was very all too much overwhelming for me and I'm almost terrified now to go to retreat because where I saw there was a hundred plus people there and I saw how it was handled. I also saw that the retreat maybe didn't have access to have the ability to handle a situation like this and so my question to you is, I was exposed to something like this kind of recently where I didn't get angry, I did my best, but at some point I had to protect myself and so I walked away from this person and had to make different arrangements and I've been suffering with a lot of anguish and guilt over it because I went there as a support and to try and help but I didn't feel I was able to. Is there anything you could share on this type of thing because it was a rare situation especially with somebody who had so much dharma training and then maybe sometimes there's times where people need to seek help for mental health and things like that where I can't take that all on upon myself?] 

Right, right, right, right. So the effort we make to help someone and whether or not we see the result of our effort actually helping them are two different karmas happening. So to have tried and then seen that nothing that you had to offer was really gonna fit, it is appropriate when you yourself is feeling like you have nothing more to share to remove yourself from that situation as long as the person in the situation isn't left all by themselves and I'm assuming you had already handled that or they were in in the presence of someone else even if that other person also wasn't able to help them.

It is not your responsibility to stay in what feels like your own harm's way in the event where you're feeling threatened in any way. So I'm trying to help you be able to release the guilt and the self-disappointment that the fact that you tried is a huge power. I think the part where I get stumped is when you're somebody who's very empathetic and care too deeply, it's to be able to walk away and feel that you did your best and care and not feel bad about it.

Right, it's very difficult and in your empathy you're feeling them and we don't think so much that they're feeling you because in their turmoil they're not but they are being influenced by your higher vibration that you're carrying. So even if it seemed like you did nothing, your vibe there actually protected them from everything going worse than it did. In a sense as you step away and think back, recognize that just you being there gave them some support on an energetic level that you weren't aware of.

And then that was because their seeds was there that you could be there and give in that way and then those seeds for both of you shifted and it was time for you to remove. Okay, thank you. Yeah, on this different level.

It is difficult in these situations around where the vibration is so elevated and it's not uncommon that people will have a mental emotional break of some kind and it's difficult when you're in that high vibe situation of the dharma seeds and nothing but seeds to know when to say yes in the seed ripening situation right now needs worldly professional help. And then to be able to have the strength to take that person and get them there when the person themselves is probably saying no, no, you know, I'm a wisdom being whatever this circumstance, I have seen it happen. And it does take a person who's grounded in the worldly solution, and in the Carmen emptiness solution to be the one to step in and say, right, worldly need is needed right now for everybody's safety.

Yeah, I think you rely upon the program administrators to be that. Yes, thank you. I think that that's where I'm at with what I had to do.

And it was a very painful process for me, because I feel like I had to come to that on my own to have that awareness. And it felt more like strength and resilience of leaning in on instead of just sticking with seeds, because it was all too much for me to bear. And then when I stepped away from it all, and I did eventually get a little bit of support when I got home, which felt like a better closure for me.

But thank you. I appreciate you sharing just especially with what we're learning right now to know that there's nothing really I could have done differently. Right.

Okay, thank you. Good. Nice job.

Okay. So remember that person we wanted to be able to help at the beginning of class. We've learned a lot that we will use sooner or later to help them in that deep and ultimate way.

And that's a great, great goodness. So please be happy with yourself. And think of this goodness like a beautiful glowing gemstone that you can hold in your hands.

Recall your own precious holy being. See how happy they are with you. Ask them to please, please stay close to continue to guide you and help you and support you.

And then offer them this gemstone of goodness. See them accepted and blessed. And they carry it with them right back into your heart.

See them there, feel them there. Their love, their compassion, their wisdom. It feels so good.

We want to keep it forever. And so we know to share it by the power of the goodness that we've just done. May all beings complete the collection of merit and wisdom, and thus gain the two ultimate bodies that merit and wisdom.

So use those three long exhales to share this goodness with that one person to share it with everyone you love, to share it with every existing being everywhere. See them all filled with happiness, filled with wisdom, and may it be so. All right.

So thank you very much for the opportunity to share.

Tsowo                        The Primal One, ancient Indian belief

Dak or Atman            The Self-Existent Being, the oversoul

sherik gi kyebu          "The original Mental Being," the primal mind.

chiba                          little kid

ngupo                        A functioning thing; a thing that does something.

mitakpa                     A changing thing (sometimes poorly translated as "impermanent").

dujepa                        A caused thing, which is produced by the convening of causes.

jepa                            A produced thing, something which is made.

All right, welcome back. We are ACI Course 11, Class 2. It is January 15th, 2023. Let's gather our minds here as we usually do.

[Usual opening]

All right, so last class, we learned what root text and commentary we're studying to learn about the perfection, the practices through which we reach the perfection of patience, joyous effort, and meditation. Right? Right.

And somebody can tell us what's the root text we are studying. Going once, going twice, I'm going to call on somebody. The Guide to the Bodhisattva's Way of Life.

Yeah, how do you say that in Sanskrit? Bodhisattva, that's a good place to start. Bodhisattva Sharya. Guide to the Bodhisattva's Way of Life.

And then we have a commentary that Je Tsongkapa wrote, right? No, good. Somebody else wrote it. Yeah, as soon as you say yes, you get to be the one who answers.

So, who wrote it, Nati? 

[Nati: Gyaltsab Je.]

Right, Gyaltsab Je Dharma Rinchen. And he wrote a text called the Root Text on Wisdom, right? No, he wrote some other text that's the commentary on the Guide to the Bodhisattva's Way of Life, right? Nati, you win again. What's the name of that one? 

[Nati: It's a commentary. The Entryway for the Children of Victorious Buddhas.]

Perfect. Perfect. Too hard to say in Tibetan.

We'll leave it for English. So, now in the chapter on the perfection of patience that Geshe-la calls perfection of not getting angry, the first thing we learned was there's a main problem of anger that we cannot see directly. And that main problem of anger that we can't see directly is the fact that a single instant of anger focused at a bodhisattva destroys thousands of eons of good karma that we have previously amassed.

And then there's that like parenthesis that says, and we don't really know who is and who isn't a bodhisattva. And once upon a time, Sumati, before he was Sumati, he goes, oh my gosh, that means I can't even get mad at myself. Yikers.

But really the point of that is that what we don't understand about anger is that when we learn to stop getting angry, we stop destroying our goodness and then our reality changes for the better. It starts to get better. So, if we're practicing, practicing, practicing, and we're just not seeing any part of our life get better, maybe we need to look more carefully at our mental affliction that maybe is some kind of anger, not the full-fledged anger directed at a bodhisattva, but enough of the anger negativity that it's chewing away at our goodness as fast as we can make the goodness.

And so we're not seeing the results of our practice because there's some, I don't know, maybe it's just chronic irritation or chronic frustration or chronic something else that we're not lumping into the mental affliction anger because it's not, I'm mad at you. It's something more subtle. So that's the point of this whole chapter is that Master Shantideva and then Gyaltsab Je is going to point out all these little ways in which we are still blaming things that are unpleasant on other things and so are in some way upset with the things that cause the unpleasant things.

And as long as we keep doing that, the likelihood of our world getting better and better and better is remote or smaller, not completely not possible. So then your quiz asks to quote the lines that describe the immediate cause of anger and the usefulness of it, which is, to me those words don't actually describe what those two verses are, but the two verses are, in the situation of something unpleasant, if there's something you can do about it, why should I feel upset? If there's something I can do about it, why should I feel upset? And if there's nothing I can do about it, what use is feeling upset? Makes sense, doesn't it? Easier said than done, but only because of our mental habit and the belief that stays because of mental habit. No, no, no, they did that to me.

The more I agitate about blaming them, about doing that thing to me, somehow that's going to solve a problem and it doesn't, it just destroys our goodness. And if we understood that, would we let ourselves have the luxury of about them doing that to me? We wouldn't. If we could see directly that every time I go back through that again, I'm making my future less pleasant.

If I really saw that, I'd quit doing it, I think, right? If I really knew that pounding my big toe with a hammer was the reason why my toe hurt, I'd go, Oh, I'll stop doing that. Unfortunately, it's not that obvious that I lose you. Okay.

So what logic supports the idea that we can develop patience even towards great suffering? He didn't really give us a logical syllogism. He gave us an explanation, which is Master Shantideva's recurring theme that the way we react to anything is based upon our habit of reacting that way. And the way that we are viewing where things come from is based on a habit of viewing them that way, having never before sufficiently checked to see if that habit is consistent with reality, I guess.

So he says, all of our experiences and how we respond to those experiences are simply mental habits. And there's no quality of mind we can't change. And when we change enough, we have this new habit.

So training in a new habit is what cultivates the change we're trying to make. If things had some nature of their own, they weren't simply habits, we wouldn't be able to change them. But because they're just habits, we can change, we can make new habits is the point.

He doesn't say stop all your bad habits, make new good habits, and they'll replace the bad habits is the idea. So then lastly, on your quiz, name and describe those three types of patience that we're working on. So the first one, the patience, which takes on suffering willingly, so that we can grow the skill of being able to use discomfort, displeasure as part of our path.

Instead of working so hard to avoid it. And it's not really something we can just decide, okay, I'm going to use all my suffering on my path. It's like, we'll, we'll do okay, and then we'll fail.

So so it takes, it takes time to grow this new attitude. And it takes wisdom to grow the new attitude as well. But just to have the goodness to hear the suggestion, look, suffering, suffering is not necessarily something to be avoided at all costs, especially at the cost of our the mental seeds that we're planting, trying to avoid it.

So instead, we can use it as the path to burn it off and plant something new, plant something different. Second one, the patience, which concentrates on the Dharma, meaning our, our, our Dharma practice is so important to us. That difficulties and obstacles won't, won't drag us away from our practice.

And then the third one is the patience in which we don't mind that someone else has done me harm. It's different than the first one. The first one we still mind.

We're just trying to work on our willingness to be harmful to avoid it. And this last one is our understanding of karma and emptiness and our practice of that understanding is getting so strong that we understand well enough where the unpleasant where the person hurting me is really coming from, that our reaction is, is not anger, actually. And again, it doesn't just turn on all of a sudden, it grows in little bits.

But it's, it's something to think about whether we really aspire to growing our perfection of patience, or are we just saying, yeah, I'll do that someday. But meanwhile, I'm going to do everything I can to avoid that discomfort. It's not saying walk into dangerous situations, painful situations, not at all.

We don't have to go find them. Enough happened in life. But we spend a whole lot of effort trying to avoid and deflect and make excuses.

And that's where using it as an opportunity to grow our dharma practice is so helpful. So next in this chapter, Master Shantideva goes into some very sophisticated arguments, explanations, why our anger is in fact, unreasonable. Like it's just not logical.

It's not justifiable. But it takes some thinking carefully. Because of course, deep and not deep in our hearts, but in our ignorance, absolutely anger is reasonable in certain circumstances, of course, we would say.

And he's going to show us that our tenacious hold to that belief is based on a tenacious hold, on a misunderstanding of where things really come from. And so to let go of that tenacious hold on the wrong belief, we show ourselves what's wrong with the wrong belief, because we don't believe it's wrong, or we'd let go. And so this chapter is part of this chapter.

Let me see if I can learn this new thing. All right. Are you seeing two things? Because Natty taught me that.

And you know what? I'm seeing all of you. And I'm seeing my two things. So Natty did that for me kicking and screaming, but I'm very happy that he made me do it.

Okay. So here we go. Are you using the wings? I'm using one wing.

Okay, that's nice. Thank you. One wing of the two wings.

I have two wings, but I'm only using one. Oh, I just thought of something. The wisdom one or the compassion one? I do need to have both wings.

Oh man, they're both here. I have to think about that. All right.

So Master Shantideva is building up his argument for why we get angry in the first place and why we justify it. And he's pointing out to us how foolish we are to do that. So in his first there, in the next verse that Geshe-la shares with us, he says, you fail to feel anger for violence such these three major sources of pain.

Why then are you angry at those minds? They are all impelled by influences. So in Tibetan medical theory, they say we have these three basic elements that maintain our health, which is bile and phlegm and wind, these energies. And they're supposed to be in a balance, not meaning like all the same, but meaning shifting in according to the current need and according to what the others are doing, but always in such a way that there's this fluid addressing the need of the organism.

And that manifests as health. Actual health, that state where these are in this fluid changing balance is quite rare. And that you mostly one or the other or more than one of these three is too strong and overriding this one.

And then that weak one has symptoms and the over strong one has other symptoms. And this one reacts to fix that one and it can't completely fix it because that one's overriding this one and it just gets all mixed up. And when it's all mixed up, we the organism, you know, get headaches and chronic coughs and back pain and all these different things.

So Master Shanti Davis says, if we are blaming somebody, we're blaming the yelling boss for making me angry, giving me that distress. And then I get angry at the yelling boss. And we're just feel justified in our anger because they're blaming me for something I didn't even do.

He says to be consistent, then in our thinking and our reaction, we should get angry at our liver. When it's affected by too much bile, we should get angry with our lungs. When they're getting insufficient wind, we should be angry with those elements of our body that are causing us distress.

He says, it's no different than the boss upsetting me or anything that's upsetting me. And the Kachik says, well, why do you say that? And he says, well, because the liver made you sick. And if you say the boss made you angry, you have to say the liver made me sick.

You do say the liver made me sick, but you don't get mad at the liver. You say, we say, I say, the boss made me angry, but I get mad at the boss. And probably everybody else who I interact with for the next half an hour or so, I'll be mad at all of them just because I'm mad at the boss.

He goes, let's be consistent, shall we? And then Fall Guy says, yeah, but the body doesn't hurt me intentionally. You know, the elements get out of whack, and then that affects the organ and the organ affects me. I understand where that's coming from.

I don't get mad at the elements. You know, yeah, it's unpleasant, but they're not doing so intentionally. But people, you know, my boss, that boss, they know they're going to upset me when they're blaming me for that thing.

And they don't care. In fact, maybe they want to upset me, because then they think they'll get my attention or something. I don't know.

They set out to do it. And Master Shanti Davis says, no, you're being illogical. That person who upsets me, they didn't lay in bed the night before trying to figure out how can I push Sarani's buttons and make her really angry today? You know, and Archa Chikos, no, but they were laying in bed thinking about what they thought I did that was wrong, and they're planning how to address it.

And they don't care whether I get upset or not. But Master Shanti Davis still says, but they're not laying in bed saying, how can I upset Sarani? When somebody is having behavior that does upset me, and my anger comes up, it comes up uncontrollably. And their mental affliction that they're acting from, it comes up just as uncontrollably.

That other has a mental upset, and they react to it. And I seem to be the brunt of that reaction. And then I have a mental affliction, and I react to it.

So if they are not in control of their mental affliction and their reaction to it, then they're not in control of the suffering you think they are causing you, are they? In the same way that my liver is not in control of being affected by the bile such that it's causing me sickness. And it's really hard. It's like, no, there's a huge difference between my annoying, awful boss and my liver.

And he says, well, actually not. They are not hurting you intentionally. They are acting in the way that they are forced to act by their own mental affliction.

And nobody wants to have mental afflictions. They happen. And then we react to them.

So that one who's acting from their mental affliction, apparently seemingly causing me upset, they're as out of control of that circumstance as my liver is not having control over how it responds to the imbalance of bile, wind, and phlegm. Yeah. So it's not logical to get angry with those people who are operating under the control of their own mental afflictions.

It's like, okay, I hear that in my head. In my heart goes, not so much, which is why we take these as contemplations. We think about them.

We chew on it. We think about what we know about imprints, imprints in and imprints out for growing our future, gardening our futures. And we keep in mind those pieces about there are effects of anger that we don't recognize, and there are effects of anger that we do recognize.

And so we're building. So Master Shantideva goes on to say, look, it's important for us to investigate deeply who in fact makes the things that make us angry. And that requires looking deeply at our beliefs of where anything comes from, what creates things.

And so he actually goes much deeper than simply where does anger come from in his next number of verses, number of pages, because he wants to address where anything comes from in order for us to be able to address where anger comes from, which apparently is necessary before we'll be able to stop reacting to it, from it enough, often enough to stop replanting it so that we can get ahead of having enough seeds for it even to ripen anymore. It's an episode of anger that we have the anger but we don't react to it in the old habitual way. Burns off some moments of anger that we would have reacted in that way.

We plant something different. More anger comes up later. We react differently again.

That's a little less anger that we have in us as long as we're not going around seeing ourselves willing to make other people angry. We can burn off our own anger seeds by not reacting. But if we continue to make other people angry, willingness to not check our behavior, we'll be doing the one step forward, one step back thing for a long time.

He wants us to check our own belief. Where does anything come from? Geshe-la said in this next half an hour of class, listen carefully. The first 20 times I listened to it, I don't quite get it.

But listen carefully, listen to it again and again if you need to. I hope it's obvious at the beginning. We're talking about anything that we believe is the cause of any level of getting upset from full-on horrible anger to just the teeny little irritation that's starting anger.

If we know where it comes from, if we know its cause, we should be able to stop it. Stop creating the causes for it. If we don't know its cause, we won't ever be able to stop it.

So who made traffic jams? Who made yelling buses? Who made you fill in the thing that ticks you off the most? Who made it? Where did it come from? We know the party line. My seeds are ripening. But go back to old you.

Like deep down, even as we say that, there's a part of us that's still saying, no, they did that to me. In which case, where did the they come from in the first place? Master Shantideva goes all the way back to who created reality? Who created the world? What created the world? And that's where he goes next in this chapter on don't get angry. Figure out your belief in where the world comes from.

God? Big Bang? Who cares? What answer did you grow up with in this lifetime? Because that belief is probably still in there. So Master Shantideva giving this lesson apparently was a public forum, not just Buddhists. And so he's addressing the other religions of his time as well.

In those days, one of the primary religions believed in something called so-wo. So I'm over here in the vocabulary list. So the word means the primal one, the primal being.

And this particular belief system says the primal one, so-wo, made the world. They'd say so-wo makes things, does things. Everything in the world is an expression of so-wo.

So-wo is expressing itself constantly. And it looks like me and my world. It looks like you and your world.

Everything that happens is this primal one. Geshe-la said like a huge invisible energy that's expressing itself by way of all things. So-wo is apparently continually creating things.

But when you ask them, well, where did so-wo come from? They say no one made so-wo. He or it, I don't know what pronoun they use, is beginningless, uncreated, unchanging, and permanent. And continually creating things.

What's wrong with that picture? Beginningless and uncreated, that's fine. Unchanging, that's fine. Permanent, if we agree with them what's meant by permanent, that might be fine as well.

But then also continually creating things. Is that possible? Why? Because to create something, something that wasn't there is now there, you had to have changed by being the one who hadn't made that before. And now you have it.

You had to have changed. So he's not saying, look, that's all that you're talking about. No, no, it can't be.

He's saying, look, it's just not consistent. Not reject it. Although we do.

It's just, let's be consistent here in our explanation of what so-wo is. In that belief that so-wo creates and is everything, then anything we don't like must be an expression of so-wo. That's what made the boss angry, that made me angry.

Thank you, so-wo. I have somebody to blame. I can blame so-wo.

Good. Takes it off me. I didn't even do that, boss.

So-wo did it. Phew, I'm off the hook. Second group, they say, dak.

Dak with a capital D. We have the word dak that we talk about a lot in terms of a self-existent me. And here it's the same idea, but here the dak is like a self-existent, original being thing. In Sanskrit, atman.

But again, not the atman that they apply to any individual, but atman with a capital A. The Atman. Like the original. Like the self-existent being.

The being that really exists. From which everything else arises. So it's only subtly different than so-wo.

Although apparently those who believe in dak versus those who believe in so-wo, they don't see them as only subtly different. So dak, qualities, characteristics of dak is that dak has been forever. No one made him or it.

Dak makes everything. He or it is the oneness which experiences all things. And its qualities are unchanging, permanent, eternal, and responsible for everything that happens in the world.

So the Tibetans give another word for dak, which is this one, sherab kikebu, sherik kikebu, which they define as the original mental being. Like the original mind. So for both of them, says Master Shantideva, they are these two vast things that were thought to have created the world in Master Shantideva's time.

And he says, let's look at these ideas critically, logically. So currently, people favor our world was created by God, or they favor our world was created by the Big Bang. Or maybe we're in the category of, I don't care.

No, it's not an answerable question, so I don't care. But Master Shantideva says, if we truly want to reach nirvana or Buddhahood, we need to get a good grasp on the answer to this question. Because we want to be able to find those old beliefs, like from lifetimes, maybe, of beliefs that colored our behavior, that planted our seeds even before we knew about seed planting behavior, that are still coloring the way we react to things and believe in things, even when intellectually we're saying, no, I believe in seeds planting, seed ripening.

But deep down, we've got these powerful, many, many powerful seeds from a belief in God or Big Bang, that we don't even realize maybe that they're in there. So, Geshe-la said, if we stay with some vague idea of where things come from, then we'll just stay in this crashing airplane that we are in. So, let's go through the possibilities.

You know, as little kids, we ask, who made God, Mom? You know, and she goes, nobody made God. Nobody needed to make God. And then, I don't know, that doesn't, it's not logical to the little kid.

And finally, Mom says, look, quit asking. You know, why? Why did that guy die in the bus accident and not the other guy? Well, he was sitting on the right side. The right side got smashed.

Yeah, but why was he on the right side, not the left side? Yeah, but why wasn't he wearing his seatbelt? Yeah, but why, Mom? And finally, we grow out of that because we don't get satisfactory answers, right? And we finally quit asking and just go to church or just do whatever. And we grow up and we learn to, we learn to play along, right? So, Soho is beginningless, eternal, uncreated, and unchanging, and recreates all things as an expression of, Geshe-la kept saying himself, Dach is also beginningless, eternal, uncreated, and unchanging, and experiences all things on his own accord without relying on anything else. Like, none, it doesn't make sense, does it? We hear the English words and it's like, okay, okay, okay, but wait a minute.

How is that possible? Because of our study, our level of study. So, that means either one of these beings is, is all of existence creating itself, not meaning both of them together are creating. This one for that group, this one for that group.

Master Shantideva says, if that's true, that's a result of a cause, isn't it? If current experience is, this is Soho, that's a result of some cause. Soho's cause from Soho's side, my cause from my side, we know. But even if we didn't know that, every, every moment of existence, every experience has to have a cause, or it can't happen.

So, who made Soho? Who made Dach? What made Soho? What made Dach? What is the cause of either one of them as the result? And if we ask someone who believes in Soho or Dach, God, they'll say, you know, we don't know. Maybe they made themselves. It really, it's beyond, it's beyond my knowing.

It's part of the mystery. And Master Shantideva says, you know, it has to be a knowable thing, because they are a knowable thing as a result. We should be able to find the cause for them.

And he says, look, it isn't possible that they have these qualities of being eternal, unchanging, permanent, and either experiencing or creating experiences that are themselves changing. They can't have created themselves, because you can't go from not existing to having the thought, I will exist, I will create, and then create. Non-existence means non-existence.

And where does that first thought come from? I need to exist, if there's not the being existing. And if the being is already existing, even before it created itself, well, what was it that was there before it created itself that it could create itself? And again, you know, the believers would say, those are unanswerables. It's okay.

I can believe in this force that creates things without needing to know what caused it, where it came from. And you know, Master Shantideva's point is, yes, that's fine. We can rely on dak, we can rely on soul, but not if we profess to want to be part of the end of the suffering.

Because we are saying that the only one that can stop suffering is soul or dak, not me. So let's be consistent here. You're welcome to believe in soul, you're welcome to believe in dak.

But then you can't at the same time say, I'm working to bring about my Buddhahood because other beings suffering is so unacceptable to me, I have to do something. Because ultimately, we wouldn't be able to do it, because only soul and dak can. Because of our belief that they are what creates things, even though they themselves are not created.

So we have these terms in English, eternal, permanent, impermanent, and changing. And they're important terms for when we get to Course 13, actually. So by eternal, we mean no beginning, no end.

By permanent, we mean it will always be there. It won't end, it won't break. And yet, with permanent, it does not necessarily mean eternal.

And that's a little bit slippery. To be permanent is not necessarily to be beginningless. We'll see why later.

Then impermanent means something that will break, will end. And changing means something that's fluctuating constantly. Like it's almost never the same.

And that would make a good debate. Don't you have to be the same for the fraction of an instant that you experience in the moment? And yet, when you try to pin down just exactly what is that moment, that I'm experiencing something or myself, we can always cut that moment smaller, smaller pieces. So any changing thing is changing so constantly that when we delve into it deeply, it's like, whoa, I can't even find the thing that's changing so constantly, because it's changed by the time I think I've found it.

That's one of the ways we find our not-self-existent me. Is you go looking for the one that's there long enough to say, found it. And by the time you do, it's gone.

And when we can like step into that and go without fear of disappearing, we're getting close. So Geshe-la posed some questions to us, like riddles. Give me something that is changing and eternal.

Changing and eternal. Eternal is no beginning, no end. Changing is never the same two moments in a row.

A lot of exciting things. No, no humans. Minds.

Mindstreams. Minds. Mindstreams.

Right. The mind. Your mind, my mind, anybody's mind has always been, will always be, but is constantly changing.

Constantly perceiving and every perception changes it. We can't have a perception without our mind changing, just by having the perception. Right.

Now, if we apply wisdom to that, oh no, perceptions aren't perceptions, they're projections. Same argument. With every projection, the mind has changed in projecting that.

With every imprint, the mind has changed with that imprint. Every moment of mind has come from the moment before, which I don't know. I'm not sure that I agree with that, that it's this moment to that moment to that moment in my mind versus that moment and this moment and this moment.

Why is there not a gap? But later, later. Every moment of mind had a moment of mind before it that pushes. No, that's not right.

That we know because we have the moment of mind now. And that means every now moment of mind, there will be one that comes next. So now give me something that's eternal, but not changing.

Unchanging. Eternal and unchanging. No beginning, no end, no change.

Space. Space. Space.

Is that what you said? Space? Space or faith? I heard faith. Space. Space.

Space. Not so much outer space. But space as in the place where material things are or can be.

What if there are no material things to occupy a space? Must there still be space because there are material things occupying space now? That's a hard one. It's like, wait, how could there have been space with no material things that define it as space? But the material things don't define it as space. They either occupy it.

Technically, they either occupy it here or they occupy it over there or over there. Material things don't have the option to not occupy space somewhere. To have a material thing means it is in a location and that location is the empty space.

Does the empty space change when something is in it? Is the empty space no longer empty when something is in it? Yes. But has the space changed to something else? No. Because if it changes when the pen occupies the space, then the pen's not in the space for the pen anymore and it would be pushed out.

Here's space. No pen. Here's space with the pen in it.

The space is unchanged. Pen in it or pen out of it. Now it's over here.

That one didn't move over there. The pen is now occupying this space. It really is tricky because our mind wants to say, no, no.

With the pen in it, it's different than it was before. But it can't be. Unchanging.

Unchanging and eternal. No beginning, no end. Empty space.

What? There wasn't ever a time when there was nonexistence, annihilation, nothing at all. Is it possible to have existence now and having had absolute nonexistence? No. No.

How do we define an existing thing? That which is perceived with valid perception. So if nonexistence were, it could only be established by some perception. Which means there was something or somebody perceiving it, which means nonexistence wasn't nonexistence after all.

Impossible. Which means if we have material reality now that requires this space to be in, then there has always been space. Did it always look like our space? I don't know.

Eternal and unchanging. Empty space. So, sorry, one question.

Why is changing from empty space to occupied space not a change? Because the space itself doesn't push the object out, which it would if it changed by being occupied. Okay. We're at break time already.

Eee, Gads. Let's take our break. Then we'll do another one of these.

Okay, are we back? We need to be back. So, give me something that's permanent and changing. Everything.

I know. Permanent and changing. Mind again, mind.

Here they're using permanent and eternal similarly, although they are different. Give me something that's impermanent and changing. Now, Chiyo.

Impermanent and changing. Everything else. Every experience we can have.

Our bodies, our relationships, our dreams, our hopes, our feelings, our emotions, even our thoughts. Now give me something unchanging that can do something. Unchanging that can function.

Give me something unchanging that functions. I wouldn't say emptiness. Emptiness, no.

No, it doesn't function. How can an unchanging thing do anything? In order to bring something else about, it must change. So, impossible.

I'll say it again. Give me something that's unchanging and functions. Impossible.

No such thing. But, Soul and Doc are unchanging things that create the world. They create our experiences that are the deep down cause for why the boss got mad at me and why I got mad back at the boss.

Karma is logical, says Master Shantideva. And then we go, yeah, well, God's not logical. Religion's not logical.

It's faith based. Come on. And Master Shantideva, again, is making his point.

Fine. But then don't begin to believe that we can stop suffering. That we'll even do what needs to be done in order to stop our own suffering, let alone all of it.

And how do you use that argument with God? I mean, the Catholic, because in that case, they don't believe that they can stop the suffering of everybody else. They just believe it's God. Right.

If they're not interested in becoming one that stops the suffering of everybody else, there's no reason to have this conversation. Okay. Yeah.

The perception of emptiness. What about it? That is functional. And we can change everything.

Yeah, right. It's a long debate, actually, to say that emptiness functions because to perceive it directly changes us inexplorably. It's not the emptiness that does the changing.

It's the direct perception of it, which is a changing thing. Emptiness is unchanging, and is eternal, but is not permanent. Because you don't have an emptiness.

You have the emptiness of this and the emptiness of that. And when this or that stop existing, which is possible, my pen will go out of existence someday. The emptiness of the pen goes out of existence also.

And there's no emptiness of the pen other than the emptiness of this pen. Now there's the emptiness of the pencil and this other pen that will disappear when the pens disappear, and remains unchanged. Which is a little bit hard to grasp.

If the emptiness of the pen goes out of existence, hasn't the emptiness of the pen changed? No, it didn't change to go out of existence. There's just nothing to be empty anymore. Just poof.

But there's still the emptiness of me and my glasses and my hair and my you and my this. There's still plenty of emptinesses around that are equally unchanging, but not permanent. So can an uncreated, unchanging being be the cause of my upset? Chiyo still goes, maybe.

It's like, no, I just showed you. That's impossible. Can so or dot come from nothing? No, nothing comes from nothing.

If either of those beings is changing, they had to have a cause. Changes are caused by changes. Caused things affect other things.

The reason something's as a result wears out is because the cause for it wears out, and so now there's no more result. As the cause is creating the result, the cause is changing. When there's not enough cause for that result anymore, there's no more result.

Things change because their causes change. All things change that come from causes because the result coming out of a change, out of a cause, changes the cause. So if so, Doc, God can do anything or has awareness of anything, then they had to have a cause.

They have to have an original cause, and they have to have continuing causes to be able to have those experiences, to be creating those things. So Keshava says these arguments are airtight logic, and if we react to resist them or react to go, that doesn't make sense. We should go back and chew on them, work on them, explore them more and more, because our mind and our culture will fight us on this.

Not that we need to prove it to everybody. We need to prove it to ourselves. All right, so same argument for Big Bang.

Okay, forget soul, forget doc, our world came from the Big Bang. All of a sudden, kablooey, and it started everything. Yeah, but like, don't you remember wondering about that? Yeah, well, what was there before the Big Bang? What caused the Big Bang to bang? Was there something already there? And the scientists do the same thing.

We can't know. Yeah, it had to have a cause, but we can't know what it is. And no, I don't know if that's what they say now.

I've recently heard them say, no, no, there was a Big Bang before this one. Yeah, but where'd that one come from? So the moral to the story is, can we blame anything technically pleasant or unpleasant that happens to us on a creator being? If we do, we are blaming our experience on the horns on the head of a rabbit. They use that term to mean on an impossible thing, a non-existent thing.

The reason he's pointing it out is that it won't help us in the long run to continue to blame our mental upset on the boss, on God, on random Big Bang. It doesn't help us to find blame anywhere other than my own past behavior. He doesn't go into proving it's our own past behavior to this audience.

I mean, he's going to talk about it in wisdom chapter a little bit. Thank goodness we've had the punchline explained to us enough that we can even explain it to somebody else. But deep down in our heart, if we're mad at the boss for making me upset, we are not believing.

We are not colored by that wisdom yet. What does it take to get fully colored? The direct experience of the seeds ripening, and then the nothing but, and then the four Arya Truths that come after. That series of experiences is finally our proof that changes our mind, but doesn't change all of the seeds for the habit of blaming the boss.

So we'll still blame the boss, but we'll go, ah, stop doing that and be able to react differently. So does all this mean that there are no pure holy beings trying to help us learn to get happy? By disproving God, does that disprove Buddhas? Do we say that Buddhas are unchanging, eternal, and create everything and cause everything? No. We say as a result of a mindstream's extraordinary love, compassion, and wisdom, and so the deeds that they do, colored by those growing states of mind, they create their perception of their own mind as omniscient love emanating, ultimate pleasure, ultimate appearing to be what can help everybody reach that same state too.

Not omnipotent. They actually can't do anything but teach us, share with us what they did. They can't reach in and take our karma.

We know that. They are omniscient. They are not omnipotent.

And that's the main difference. Did they create the world? No. Well, wait a minute.

Didn't they create their own world? Aren't I part of their world? So didn't they create my world? Not for me. Who created my world? Me. But not me Sarani.

Some original me? Wait, no. Right? It's slippery. And rather than going, oh, I can't know, this tradition says, no, keep digging at it and reach that, like, oh, I just can't quite get it right.

And take that deeply into meditation to experience that extraordinary thing called absence of self-existence that's so impactful. What we're hearing about is seeds that will grow into that, help grow into that experience. Hooray.

Fully enlightened beings have been created by causes and they perpetuate themselves with causes. We don't become Buddha and then done. That starts our career.

It needs to be perpetuated and it will effortlessly be perpetuated. Okay. So when I do this, that needs to go over there.

That needs to go down. I'm going to go by these other verses. You will read them, right? You're there in your reading.

Please do your readings. There's his verses about who created the world. Now, when you read them, hopefully they'll make a little more sense.

Cannot be with a thing that never grew itself. How can it grow something else? Come on, come on, come on. There's the one I'm looking for.

All right. So then we might say, well, if so doc, big bang don't cause the things that make me angry. What does cause the things that make me angry? Because things do make me angry.

And I'm justified in that anger, because what they did to me, hurt me. And master Shanti Davis says, there are those who having lost their senses, hurt themselves by themselves with thorns and such, or to get a woman or the like, they become obsessed and then do things like refusing to eat food. Some go and hang themselves or leap from cliffs or swallow poison or other harmful things.

Others go and hurt themselves by living in a way against virtuous life. If people driven to it, meaning all this terrible stuff because of their mental afflictions, even kill their own dear selves, then what surprise could it ever be to see that they also act in ways that harm the bodies of other people? Hey, if we recognize that people's mental afflictions will cause them to hurt themselves, why do we get upset that their mental afflictions could cause them to hurt me? Do you see, it's like worse to hurt yourself. Archaic has said, no, I'm right to be angry.

They did wrong by me. And you see master Shanti Davis answer, this poor person under the influence of their mental affliction does wrong to themselves. It's no surprise they do wrong to you.

Come on, don't hurt them because of it. He goes on to say, if it is the very nature of those who are children to do harm to others, then being angry with them is wrong as wrong as hating fire for the fact that it burns. So when we use the word children, Shiva, here it is in the vocabulary, you can see it means like a three to six year old, a little kid before they really know any better about how to behave.

Maybe at six years old, they're starting to get some idea, but as a really little kid, parents, you're still like on alert to ward off the mistake they're about to make because they're going to hurt themselves if they carry on. You know, I don't know. Finally, at some age, you can loosen up a little bit, but he's saying anyone who is still under the operation of our belief in things, having their identities and qualities in them, we are like those little kids that we behave towards things in ways that we just don't have any concept of how they could or will hurt us.

We're just on some kind of automatic pilot. So if the other is in that boat, they're just like a little kid reacting to their environment without any awareness of the impact it will have on anybody. Why blame them? It would be like blaming fire for burning my hand when I reach into it.

That's silly. We don't blame fire. Fire's nature is to be hot and to burn.

When I know better, I don't reach into fire to avoid getting burned. He goes, right. Same with the two year old that looks like you're yelling angry boss.

They're just like fire. It's like, no, they're not. They're an adult.

They should know better and they don't know better and they're hurting me. Yeah, well, I do know a little bit better. Right.

So I can blame them. No wrong, says Master Shantideva. Recognize that they don't know any better.

Just like a little kid who's reaching into fire. Ah, don't do that. Right.

We would react like that to our yelling boss, upsetting us. No, don't do that. Instead of letting fly at them.

It's hard to follow these arguments. Intellectually, we get it. Put yourself in the circumstance where your anger gets triggered and that all goes out the window.

So we work on it, work on it, work on it, on our cushion, in our imagination, in our contemplations, we think about it. And then someday you'll surprise yourself and understand better where the circumstance is coming from. And so we respond differently.

And that's a big rejoicable when you find one of those like, ah, yay. Okay. Hopefully because of these classes.

So Master Shantideva goes on. You got to get going here. He says, do you believe that beings are basically ugly, awful and mean? If you do, if that's what you believe people really are, then what's surprise that that ugly, awful, mean person hurts you have compassion for them.

If we believe that no, basically people are good. Then when one of those basically good people is being mean to me, well, it means there must be having a really bad day. Something must be really off for them that they're acting like this.

Cause deep down, they're good. You know, Geshe-la says like every mom whose son has been found to, you know, be an ax murderer. It's like, oh no, you know, my son, he's a good boy.

He just slipped up, cut him some slack and everybody else is going, ah, right. So what's our belief? Do we believe beings are basically good or we believe that they're basically rotten. Either way, if we're being consistent with our belief, we wouldn't act badly towards them because we expect it from one.

And we feel that the other one's having a hard time. If the nature of living beings is to be thoughtful, then all their faults are occasional and being angry with them is wrong too. Wrong as hating the puff of smoke in the sky.

We'd know it'll just come back to hurt us. The other, the other guy, no, Master Shantideva says to the other guy, look, if somebody's beating you with the stick, how come you're not upset? How come you're not angry with the stick? Cause it's the stick that's causing you the pain. And what does the guy say? Yeah, the stick is the one that actually hurts, but the person wielding the stick, that's what I'm mad at.

Cause the stick won't rise up all by itself and make me hurt. Somebody has to be wielding the stick. And Master Shantideva says, yeah, but the person who's wielding the stick, they're being wielded by their mental affliction in the same way that the stick is being wielded by them.

You say you can blame them for the stick hurting you, but you should blame their mental affliction. For making them use the stick to hurt you. And he says, and if you can see them with a mental affliction, are you mental affliction free? Like who are you to judge them, to blame them and their mental affliction when I have plenty of my own as evidenced by the fact that their behavior towards me is triggering my mental affliction of blaming them and wanting to hurt them before they can hurt me more.

It's a subtle argument really to blame their mental affliction. He says is foolish because it's our mental affliction to see them with a mental affliction. That's a hard one.

The stick, it's the sticker, whatever that delivers directly. If you're angry at what impels it, then get mad if you really must at anger itself, since it's the force that sets the other into motion. Get angry at the other's anger.

But then what do we do? What am I doing for time here? So now Master Shantideva is saying to us, if I can see another acting from their mental affliction of anger in order to harm, acting from their mental affliction of anger to harm others as if that will stop the anger, I had to have done that before. He's calling up the tradition, he's in Mayana, the party line, that I can only see it this way because I've done it to somebody else. So is it right that I should justify harming them to protect myself? Is that really going to stop the harm? Their weapons and this body of mine, both of them provide the causes for the pain to come.

They produce the weapons, I produce the body, at which should I be angry? Hmm. So in the example of the yelling boss, the boss's nature is empty, meaning empty of self-existence, meaning lacking being what I perceive as actually being in it, from it, the way I'm perceiving it. So what is it that I'm in fact experiencing at the moments that I'm believing I'm experiencing angry yelling boss yelling at me? If I deconstruct all of that story, I would come down to colors and shapes and decibels, triggering feeling, triggering mental affliction, triggering an urge to act.

If I'm breaking that down, there's color, shapes, decibels happening. Yesterday, I saw color, pale white, curvy line. I heard decibels, pleasant.

Today, I'm seeing red, round, loud, harsh, unpleasant. My story about it is yesterday, the boss was nice. Today, they're all bent out of shape yelling at me.

I didn't do that. Why are they hurting me? I should write whatever my habit of response to getting yelled at is, and I'm reacting before I have the ability to stop it. Usually, as we're growing our practice, our mindfulness practice, we can be more keenly aware of the circumstance happening and hopefully hold our wits about us long enough to struggle and act differently if we can.

Although the struggle to not let fly is a goodness, even if we end up letting fly in the usual way. We try again next time whenever it shows up. Then we also are careful to see where is it in my life, not with this one person, I'm not pointing at anybody, I mean the angry yelling boss.

Where is it that I am continuing to recreate angry yelling boss in smaller ways in my life away from work? Where can I do the opposite in order to break this cycle with this one that I'm calling the boss who gets angry and blames me for stuff? In and of itself, themself, there's just color, shape, and sound until my mind takes that information and makes it into an identity and a story. If that boss were speaking some other language that I didn't know, I couldn't be sure that they were really angry with me. I wouldn't know if they were blaming me for something or not.

If I could act towards just the colors and shapes, my action would be very different. Our wisdom conclusion we're trying to grow is this ability to recognize that there is no loud angry forceful yelling at me boss other than the one my mind is forcing me to interpret in that way. When that's the case, who do I blame? My own mind that's forced to experience that as ripening results of where I acted before.

Now, maybe with that wisdom, I'd be able to say, okay, let's ripen these seeds. Let's just bring them on. Keep yelling.

Keep blaming. I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna do it. I'm not gonna yell back.

I'm not gonna blame. I'm not. And then maybe from our side, we just let them yell it out so that we've burned off all of those seeds.

On the other hand, while they are yelling at us, if they are not aware that they are making terrible seeds for themselves, damaging their goodness, if we were aware of that, we would want to do something that would hopefully stop them from yelling in order to protect their good seeds that they're damaging by yelling. In which case we don't sit there and take it. We do something that will help them stop yelling, not something that will help them stop yelling that we see if we do to them, will come back to us as something unpleasant, but something that we do to them that when it comes back to us, we will experience as pleasant.

That's how we decide. How do we respond with wisdom to the angry yelling boss? But in order to do that, we need to be able to overcome the blame factor. No, they are them.

They are doing that to me. Where did that come from? God? Big bang? Nothing? No, no and no. My own personal experience, ripening result of some way in which I did something similar.

I'm having a result of a cause. If it's my result, it can only be my cause. If I'm experiencing something, that's my personal experience, my result.

Nobody else experiences things in the way I do. Even if we are twins and have never been apart, we're still experiencing things unique to each other. So everything has to be my cause for my result.

Everything. Oh, so hard. Yikers.

So when we are experiencing those colors, shapes, and decibels, and our story is forming about what they're blaming me for. And with that forming story is the feeling, right? Probably this. And from the feeling goes, I want to avoid, I want to push away, I want to stop.

And from that comes all the other factors that make me up, which at that moment is going to be, I don't like you, right? I need to stop this. And I yell, or I cry, or I blame, or I, you know, whatever I do. What's compelling all of that? The process that's compelling all of that results from causes is what we mean by karma.

That's what the word karma refers to. Karma is not a thing that imposes itself on us and makes us do stuff. It is the name for the process, seeds ripening, seeds planting, and that's me and my world.

So is there anything we experience, pleasant or unpleasant, that's not a result unique to the experience-er? No. So is there anything the experience-er can experience that's not something created by their own cause? No. Not God, not Big Bang, not Angry Boss, not anything but karma.

One's own karma. Subject side. Subject side karma.

So the only way to get the angry yelling boss to come back is to be like the angry yelling boss to somebody else, whether it's the angry yelling boss, or the dog, or the neighbor, or the bus driver, or the traffic, or the anybody. Get angry at anybody else and we make more beings angry at us. This life, future life, growing, those seeds growing.

So Master Shantideva says, come on, wake up. Our very world is created by the way we react to everything in our world. So who's the creator of your world? You.

You, Nati, you, Ketcha. No, you, the subject side of every moment of existence, which happens to be Nati, Ketcha, Dhanara, Silani, right now. But in some past life was, you know, Joe, or Barbara, or, you know, whatever a dog calls itself, I don't know.

The subject side. Subject side, always. You are the creator of your world.

So as long as we keep reacting negatively to anything we experience, we are creating a world that it will get uglier and uglier. Stop reacting negatively and watch your world get nicer. So he goes on still in this chapter about who put our body here.

It's like, what? I created my own body? No, my parents did. And to understand that, Geshe-la said, we need to understand about the three realms of existence. We've studied them in Course 8, form realm, formless realm, and desire realm.

We understand that as humans, ignorant humans, if you are, and I don't know for sure. We, we create a desire realm. The desire realms nature is nothing but suffering.

And it's like, no, it's not. Mostly my life is good, right? A child smiled, strawberries. No, we had raspberries and yogurt last night.

It was delicious. There's all kinds of pleasant things in my world. But as we know, they wear out, they turn moldy, right? The yogurt spoils after a really long time.

Things go wrong, or it stays extraordinary and beautiful for 102 years. And then I die. And then what? A desire realm, human level of desire realm is the perfect circumstance for transforming that desire realm into a pure realm that's beyond form and formless realm.

It's not even included in those three realities. The reality that we learn to create your Buddha paradise, you is not form realm. It's not formless realm.

So we're learning to transform all of those so that all existence that's now form formless desire realm is instead pure reality for all beings. That's what we say our intention is our goal is. So we have just the right amount of displeasure.

We have the right amount of intelligence. We have the right amount of leisure time. We have the right amount of interest.

How do I know? Because here you are. That's proof that you have the seeds for this path. Otherwise you wouldn't be here.

And there are many people who aren't. So on the day we experience ultimate reality directly, we will perceive these three realms. And so we'll know that they are actual, that they are true.

And we will know that it's true that there's nothing in them that's anything but suffering. The truth of suffering by way of those realms. And we know from direct experience that these are all projections created by the mental afflictions from which we made those projections in the first place.

We will know directly how mental afflictions are karmic seeds ripening and planting new ones. That all of those realms are made by negative karma. Karma made in an attempt to get happy, but made in the wrong way.

So they can't bring the happiness that we made them for. So Master Shantideva is pointing out it's our own karma, our own past deeds that is the cause for our mind putting us in the desire realm. Good karma to be human in the desire realm.

Bad karma for it to be the desire realm. Nothing but suffering. So we can't blame anybody for any part of it.

All we can blame is our own past deeds, our own misunderstanding. And the lamas point out that in fact we must like it here. Especially after we've heard the Dharma in at the level that we have in this life.

And if we are still reacting negatively to anything that we experience, it's some clue that there's some part of us deep down that really doesn't want to do the things we can do to get the cycle to stop. It's harsh. Master Shantideva is not a nice guy.

He wants to show us where our resistances are. And it's hard. There's this joke.

There's these two flies living in Tibet, I guess. And they're sitting on a pile of yak poo talking about the Dharma. They're near this temple.

And the one fly says to the other fly, you know, they say there's this place, Buddha Paradise, that you can get to. And it's so extraordinary, beautiful and amazing. And the other fly goes, well, is there yak poop in paradise? And the first fly goes, oh, I don't think so.

And the other fly goes, well, then why would I want to go there? Like we do that to ourselves. Is there raspberries and yogurt in Buddha Paradise? Ah, probably not, because it's all amrita. It's all, you know, well, why would I want to go there if there's no raspberries and yogurt? It's silly, but kind of true.

Like we're looking at it in Master Kamalashila's class too, right? He called it doubt. What part of us is resisting the change? It really isn't funny because there is a part of us. Like technically, do we meditate in a state such that if while we're in that session, the holy being were to appear to you and say, take my hand, it's time to go.

Would we be able to go, okay, take me? Or would our mind go, no, no, I have to tell David. No, no, I didn't. Right? No, no.

What about my kids? No, no. Right? The fraction of an instant of a no-no is like, poof, gone. We have those disbeliefs inside.

Okay. Last thing, I've got to do this, so sorry. On your vocabulary list, there are these four words, nupo, mitakpa, dujepa, and jepa.

Nupo means a functioning thing, something that makes something else happen. Mitakpa means a changing thing, often imprecisely translated as impermanent, but that is not precise enough. Changing, mitakpa, technically not unchanging, which is significant.

Dujepa, a caused thing, and jepa, a produced thing. So Geshe-la's pointing out importantly that a functioning thing, a changing thing, a caused thing, and a produced thing, these are all synonyms. You can't be one without being all three.

Functioning, changing, caused by something else, produced by something else, producing something else. Cause-result, cause-result, cause-result, cause-result. No cause without its result, no result without its cause, no changing without producing something, no producing something without changing something.

It's important because it shows us the impossibility of a dzo, a dak, a big bang, and anything being the cause of my anger, other than a way in which I caused another to be angry in the past. So the real path to freedom, says Geshe Michael, starts with the realization that the only thing that created our world was our me. Your me for your world and my me for my world.

And once we deeply accept that, we can finally learn to create the world that we would like to create. That's why we're doing these classes. So hooray, be happy with yourself, that you are on the path to creating your world in a way that you will not suffer.

And that's a great, great goodness. So please think of this goodness like a beautiful glowing gemstone that you can hold in your hands. Recall your own precious holy being.

See how happy they are with you. Feel your devotion to them, your reliance upon them. Ask them to please stay close, to continue to teach and guide us and inspire us, and then offer them this gemstone of goodness.

See them accept it and bless it, and they carry it with them right back into our hearts. See them there, feel them there. Their love, their compassion, their wisdom.

It feels so good. We want to keep it forever, and so we know to share it by the power of the goodness that we've just done. May all beings complete the collection of merit and wisdom, and thus gain the two ultimate bodies that merit and wisdom make.

So use those three long exhales to share this goodness with that one person, to share it with everyone you love, to share it with every existing being everywhere. See them all filled with loving kindness, filled with the wisdom of where things come from. And may it be so, please, soon.

All right. Thank you for letting me go on.

You know, a lot of folks are doing one minute for peace at 6 p.m. Want to do it? All right. Think peace for a whole minute. May there be peace on earth and may it begin with me.

All right, so for the recording, welcome back. We are ACI Course 11, Class 3. It is January 18th, 2026. Let's gather our minds here as we usually do.

Please bring your attention to your breath until you hear from me again. And now bring to mind that being who for you is a manifestation of ultimate love, ultimate compassion, ultimate wisdom. And see them there with you.

They are gazing at you with their unconditional love for you, smiling at you with their holy great compassion, their wisdom radiating from them, that beautiful golden glow encompassing you in its light. And then we hear them say, bring to mind someone you know who's hurting in some way. Feel how much you would like to be able to help them.

Recognize how the worldly ways we try fall short, how wonderful it will be when we can also help in some deep and ultimate way, a way through which they will go on to stop their distress forever. Deep down, we know this is possible. Learning about karma and emptiness, we glimpse how it's possible.

And so I invite you to grow your wish into a longing, and that longing into an intention. And with that intention, turn your mind back to your precious holy being. We know that they know what we need to know, what we need to learn yet, what we need to do yet to become one who can help this other in this deep and ultimate way.

And so we ask them, please, please, please teach me that, show me that. Help me. And they are so happy that we've asked, of course they agree.

Our gratitude arises. We want to offer them something exquisite. And so we think of the pure world they are teaching us how to create.

We imagine we can hold it in our hands, and we offer it to them, following it with our promise to practice what they teach us, using our refuge prayer to make our promise. Here is the great earth, filled with fragrant incense and covered with a blanket of flowers, the great mountain, four lands, wearing the jewel of the sun and the moon. In my mind, I make them the paradise of a Buddha and offer it all to you.

By this deed, may every living being experience the pure world. I go for refuge until I am enlightened to the Buddha and the Dharma and the highest community, to the merit that I do in sharing this class and the rest. May we reach Buddhahood for the sake of every living being.

I go for refuge until I am enlightened to the Buddha, the Dharma, and the highest community, to the merit that I do in sharing this class and the rest. May we reach Buddhahood for the sake of every living being. I go for refuge until I am enlightened to the Buddha, the Dharma, and the highest community, to the merit that I do in sharing this class and the rest.

May all beings totally awaken for the benefit of every single other. Geshehla pointed out that that last class, class two, is really deeply important about where do any unpleasant things, experiences, come from? Where do we believe they come from? Like deep, deep down, where do we believe things come from? Good things, bad things, everything, anything. He just went all the way down to where does anything come from and can our belief really explain our experience? So when we understand that any experience has to have a cause, if we're having experiences we don't like and we can find out the cause, we can stop making the cause, we'll stop having the experience.

It's logic, it's physics, it's just the way things work. But if things happen for no reason or by accident or by way of somebody else deciding they're going to do something to me, you know, some cause that I can't have an impact on, then I'm just stuck, you know, and there's no point in doing all of this, any of this, if the causes that are causing the results are not somehow under my power to change. So it's not just that we want to come to understand everything I experience has a cause.

We already know that. We want to figure out how to figure out what the cause is and then what to do about it. So Master Shantideva is trying to help us break through these deep-seated beliefs that are on top of the deepest belief, which is the belief in the things having their own identities.

Which technically even includes that that jerk yelling boss is something unpleasant. Like, we're not going to go there. Whether being yelled at is really pleasant or not pleasant, that's for some other course, some other class.

But to meet up with a belief that does not give us the power to change the cause, we can see whether or not that belief actually serves us or even whether it actually explains our experience. So that's what we were trying to do in last week's class. Give ourselves the tools to really look and see who am I blaming for those unpleasant things.

So your quiz says, describe the example that Master Shantideva uses to refute the idea that we are justified being angry at a person who harms us, who appears to be doing so in an intentional way. Yeah, they intended to hurt me and they did it. It is so their fault.

So I can to justify being angry with them. And he says, well, then. Be angry with your liver when it gives you hepatitis.

The other person didn't sit there thinking, how can I upset surrounding today? But now, wait, yes, they did. I believe they did. But Master Shantideva still said, even if they were doing that, they were under the power of some terrible mental affliction, especially the mental affliction that thinks that they can get something better.

They can get a good result out of getting upset with me. Out of causing me to get upset or not caring whether I get upset from what they are planning to do. So Master Shantideva says, yeah, it looks like they intended to hurt me.

But they were operating under a mental affliction. Blame the mental affliction or be consistent and get mad at your liver when it makes you sick. It seems like a silly argument.

But it's important to dig into it, to see how is it that we are doing these things. Master Shantideva is talking to us as humans who make these mistakes. That's why he's talking to us about them.

He's been there, done that, I would guess. So if whoever is upsetting us is acting the way they are under the power of their mental affliction, there's no more reason to get angry at them than there is to get angry at your wind, bile or phlegm when you get sick. It's like, okay, I guess, okay.

Because I don't get mad at wind, bile or phlegm. Next one, name the principal qualities of the primal one and the self-existent being, which were believed in by early non-Buddhist religious religions of India. So the primal one creates all things as an expression of themselves.

And dak, the self-existent one, experiences all objects on their own accord without relying on any other influences. There's nothing wrong with those two explanations, really. But if you ask, well, what are the qualities of those beings? They are uncreated and so unchanging.

And yet they cause things to happen. They cause effects and they are affected. And that just is impossible for something to be uncreated itself and then being able to affect something else in such a way that it changes to something else but doesn't change itself.

Because it gets changed by changing something else, doesn't it? Even if you say, well, they never actually touch. But if you see a tree with 10,000 leaves and the next time you look at that tree, one leaf has dropped, the tree is different. But that means I'm different too because I'm perceiving a different tree.

So same with dak, same with so. If they can experience anything that changes, they must themselves be changing. And if they are changing, they are results of causes.

And how can they be uncreated if they are results of causes? It's like one or the other, pick one or the other. So your quiz went on to say, what causes a thing to ever change? The fluctuation of the energy of the cause. Because as the cause changes, its result changes.

As the result happens from the cause, the cause changes. And then as the cause changes, the result changes. So it's not a one-time deal.

It's this constant happening until the power of the cause is completely done. And then the whole thing fizzles. You can't say, well, the result wears out first and then the cause wears out.

Or you couldn't say the cause wears out and then the result wears out. It's like they're happening and then they're not. When the power of the cause has run out.

And it doesn't happen until the power of the cause has run in. Do you say that, run out, run in? I don't ever hear that, but start. So then we learned that the words changing thing, caused thing, produced thing, functioning thing, are all synonyms, meaning all words for the same thing.

That doesn't sound quite right. To be one is to be the others. So then could or can an uncreated, unchanging being ever produce something or someone else? No, because by definition it would change in doing so.

So then explain the role of perception in the true cause of objects and people that make us angry. Remember that one from your homework? Really, it's basically karma, right? You could give a one word answer, but karma is the word that we use to mean the imprint made in our mind by what that mind experiences, subject, thinking, doing, saying to object. And that imprint, when it gathers, that's not quite right, when its power is such that it starts bringing about a result, forces us to perceive whatever it is we are perceiving.

So if the imprints had been kinder, wiser, we would be forced to perceive information in a way that we find pleasant. And when we are forced to perceive information in ways that we find unpleasant, that's ripening results of imprints we made by some form of similar, causing similar unpleasantness to another, being aware of being willing, at least. Yes, Dinara.

Sorry, Lama. I wanted to clarify a question, the one before about what causes a thing to ever change. Can you give an example of this? Because I'm not quite understanding when the, as you explained it, everything changes because the causes fluctuate.

So the result fluctuates because the cause fluctuates, right? And the cause fluctuates because the result is happening. So let's use the example of an actual little seed, a tomato seed. And suppose we could watch the little seed swelling and then starting to open up.

And then the little shoot starts to come out of it and the little shoot wiggles and it goes up and it finally penetrates the ground. So the karmic seed that's happening here is that there's an imprint that's first the imprint of the little seed and then the imprint of the little seed swelling and then the imprint shifts. And that's all pushed by, could we say the original karmic imprint? And then as that imprint ripens into that result, the causes energy shifts and then the result shifts and then it shifts again and shifts again.

They're both happening together. It's not like here's a cause and here's a result and then they come together and then you have them, right? The shape shift is happening. But in this example, we are talking about the lower school or we are talking about the higher school? No, you know, I think both schools would say what pushes change is the changing cause, right? Like our imprints, our seed imprints are never the same two moments in a row.

It's not like the seed goes in and it sits there. Unaffected until, oh, now it's ready to come across and make its result. It's being influenced by the next 65 in and the next 65 out is influencing all of them.

And so they're all changing, changing, changing constantly, constantly, constantly. Exactly what pushes this one over the manifestation window and that one not, I don't, I know intellectually, but I don't, right, I don't get it experientially. But it's this, the cause changes by the result happening and the result happening, of course, changes because the cause is changing and the two are happening together as a coin versus something with two sides.

Yeah, I need to think about it. Yeah, you know, it's not clear to me if it's one seed that's changing, changing, changing or if it's the series of seeds. I, my preference is that it's the series of seeds and that by this one going off to make that result, it influences the one that hasn't gone off yet and it either drags it along or it uses it up, depending.

But no, no result will become a result and stay the same because it's cause is still pushing it. There has to still be a cause to push a result. And when there's no more cause, there can be no more result.

And that's why results stop. That's why experiences stop. Because this cause runs out.

Tricky. Tricky, yeah. Lots of hands, we won't finish class.

Yes, Natalie. Thank you. I just, what I explained to myself and I wanted to see if this is correct, is that because my seeds are creating the entire experience of seeing the tree and the causes that are causing the tree to grow and me experiencing this.

And that's why the whole, you said that the whole experience that is changing, it's a fact that I am changing because I am the whole thing. And that's why if it's something is created, then the whole energy is changing. Is this? Yeah.

Okay. The energy can never be the same two moments in a row. Can it? Right.

Thank you. Yeah, good. Yes, Tom.

I wanted to clarify what you said, like the seed to the next step of the seed. So let's take like very physical seed. The next step will be like a sprout, right? So like the term and condition of like what it is now will affect the end result.

Meaning like you're saying it's keep shifting. I understand energy shift, but let's say I planted this seed of a tomato. I'm giving it all the love, all the care, right? It's going to have to grow into different stages.

So in the stages, does the intention change? That's what you're referring to? No, the actual seed is changing. The cause, the result is changing, changing. So then the result will change by the different stages or by the original seed? I don't know.

Does that make sense, my question? Like I planted a tomato seed, I put love. Yeah, it's not ever going to turn into a banana plant. No, but let's say I put love into it and positive thoughts and all this kind of stuff, but now you're saying those are different causes, different results.

Okay, so let's choose one cause or one thing. You would slap it into a tomato. It goes through stages, and those stages are pushed by causes.

The original seed set it all in motion, but then the original seed is not the original seed in the next instant. So you can't say it's still the original seed pushing it, but it's not all of a sudden a banana seed pushing it. It's still tomato karma pushing it.

Either we're going to get tomato plant with tomatoes or we're not, and it's this constant pushing of the cause into the result, and the result from the cause changes the cause, and eventually it all wears out, and then your tomato plant dies. It's been really rough being a tomato. So is it in the motion of change? It's always in the motion of change.

You can't find the moment something actually changes. Okay. Thank you.

Why are we talking about it? In the context of, that guy did that to me. I hate them. I'm going to hurt them when I get a chance.

Belief. How does understanding about tomato seeds into tomato plants help me stop doing that? It's not so direct. So what we learned was from last class, can we justify ourselves in blaming another person for the unpleasantness that we are experiencing? Do we do it? Yes.

But can we justify it when we think of it logically? No. Can we blame God? We can, but not if we apply ourselves. Not if we want to stop having the bad experiences.

Let's put it that way. Can we decide, oh, it just came from nothing. Will it help us to decide it just came from nothing? No, because then we can't do anything about it.

All of these. We can't do anything about it if either of them are true. Could it be that it has come from our own mind? Yeah.

Is it an experience that's unique to me? Yeah. Even if there's 50 people there, when the boss is yelling at all of us, we're all having different experience. Different result.

Result unique to me. My result is my experience. My experience has to come out of my cause.

Doesn't it? If your cause tries to make my experience, my experience would have to be your experience. But I can't do that yet. So if everything's coming out of my mind, how come I can't decide what happens? Because it's not by choice.

Doggone it. Anyway, it's forced. So there's nobody to blame.

But ourselves, how is that helpful? Well, I'm just going to pull the covers over my head and knock it out of bed because I just can't do anything right. If I'm blaming myself for everything. It's not me.

I didn't do all that stuff. I haven't really lived long enough for the things that I've done to come back to me. It's going to take a lifetime or so maybe for most of that stuff.

I can't really even blame me, the me I mean when I say me. But my subject side, right, the me that was me before, before, before, before, those are the ones that were where the mental imprints that made the causes happened. They were the one who were reacting to circumstances pleasant or unpleasant in mistaken ways because they were still being driven by survival mode, whether I was a bug or a hell being or a human, whatever I was, I was being driven by the misunderstanding.

They are doing that to me. And so that perspective was I did right. I acted to protect my family.

I acted to protect me. I acted to get food. I acted in ways that were right.

And now somehow by some miracle, I met up with an explanation of how that actually perpetuates the whole cycle of being born aging, getting sick and dying or worse. If I'm animal, right? Being born aging, getting eaten. That's a little worse.

Whatever our different possibility was by some miracle. I met an, I went searching and I met a teaching that made sense. And here I am trying to share it with others.

Well, you know, however, that's going, got myself distracted. So when we say, look, all I can blame is me. Don't beat yourself up and say, oh my gosh, this life I've been so terrible, but recognize the me we're talking about is this continuum of your subject side that just didn't know any better before.

And now we do. And now we are experiencing the results of all those mistakes. And now we have the power to fix it.

Yay. Right. That's master Shanti Davis.

Hope that we'll take home is not like, oh my gosh, I'm so bad. I'm never going to be able to fix it. But it's like, oh, now I get it.

What was I thinking? But those seeds are already planted. We can do something about it now. Hooray.

All right, then. I need to screen share. Let's see how I can do this.

You see? And how come you guys have all gotten little again. Thank you, big. There we go.

I'm so proud of myself. Can't stand it. You guys encouraged me.

Thank you so much. So we're still in master Shanti Davis explanation for. Looking at all the ways that we still insist.

That those unpleasant things that happened to us. Are caused by. The object.

Of the experience. And. He addresses our, our minds argument.

He does a pretty good job. Thinking it through for us. So in English, as kids, we had that old, that little saying sticks and stones can break my bones, but words can never hurt me.

You'd say that. At your friend who was slinging insults at you. In order to, you know, show how strong you were.

Even though you run home crying, I would, because they hurt my feelings so bad. But so master Shanti Davis addresses the same thing. Like we.

We get upset. We get so upset. With people's harsh words towards us.

It's like, that's human. We're not bad, stupid, wrong. There's nothing wrong with us.

But he's pointing out. That. The fact that we get mad at the person who's doing it.

Rather than recognizing my hurt feelings because of what they've just done is ripening results of how I've heard others feelings in the floor. Me. Maybe.

But for sure. Past lives me when I didn't know any better. And now I do.

So. He says. The mind is not a thing with a body.

So it could not be overcome. By anyone at any point at all. It's like, wait a minute.

Is it my mind something with a body? This body. But the mind doesn't have its own body. That you could cut or slice or hit or hurt.

Is what he's trying to say. Gashula gave us the Tibetan because. You know, Tibetan needs to be saved.

So. I wanted to show it to you, but I already gave you the punchline. It says.

You need Luton. My face. Young.

Do. Show me. The.

It. The refers to the. The mind.

Luton is. Has a body. My impact.

It doesn't. The mind doesn't have its own body. sukhyang ganggyuang means anyone at all, anywhere at all, shominyu means couldn't overcome it.

So the mind is not a thing that anybody could overcome either with words or physically. Our mind is this ineffable, constantly changing, that which is clear and aware. Can you take a stick to it and bruise it? No.

Can you yell at it and make it explode? No. Technically, says Geshe Michael, a bomb could go off and your body and home and everything around you for a billion miles could be blown to smithereens and your mind would be untouched. Now it's like, come on, if I was aware of that my mind would be clearly upset.

But the thing, the mind, has no tangibility so it cannot be damaged, injured, pushed, shoved, hurt in any way. And it seems like a funny argument. Do we think our mind gets hurt by somebody who beats us up or insults us or, you know, whatever it is that our button is that gets pushed? And it's like, I never really thought of it.

I get hurt. My me gets my feelings hurt or my, you know, me gets hurt. I don't blame them for hurting my mind necessarily.

He says, well then, why? The second verse you can see down there at the bottom. When someone criticizes me or says some harsh things to me, their words with their unpleasant sound can do no physical harm to me. So why is it then, mind, that you feel such fury? So Master Shantideva is, he turns the, he turns it on us a little bit.

It's like, no, we're not really thinking anybody can hurt my mind. But he's saying, mind, you're thinking you're, you've been hurt by somebody. He's talking to his own mind here.

Those words that you're so upset about, mind, they can't hurt you. So why are you so upset? Does that help us? I'm not so sure yet. We'll see where he's gonna go.

Wow, that's all he went. That's all he had to say. If those words can't hurt my mind, why does my mind get so upset? We can work on that.

Our, our Mr. Critique says, I know my mind can't be hurt, but it just happens automatically. That when somebody yells at me, I don't like it, and I, my mind gets upset. And Master Shantideva says, well, that's just habit.

That's just being on automatic pilot. And we can let it continue, if you want to continue suffering in that way. Or you can decide, are those words really doing harm to my mind? Can I instead recognize that it's my own karmic imprints ripening, making this happen, that are also driving my feeling hurt by it? But that doesn't mean I have to act the way my habit says to act.

I can say no to the old habit and replace it with a new one. Well, we'll only want to do that or believe that we can be empowered to do that. When we understand that, although it feels very much that we're under the power of the other, we are under the power of our own mental seeds ripening our own habit patterns.

And with mindful awareness of the situation, we can cultivate the ability to choose a different response. If we are successful in choosing a different response, that will be a karmic ripening of helping other people choose a different response. We can try to choose different responses and not be successful.

That happens a lot. Don't get upset with yourself. Just keep trying.

Keep helping others make different choices, if you can, right? However, we might do that. Geshehla suggested that this habit pattern of reacting in certain ways to negative situations, it happens most commonly around the people that we are most familiar with. That when we are with people that we don't know so well, then we tend to put ourselves on a little heightened behavior control, right? Because we don't know how they're going to react and we want to make a good impression, etc.

So we're careful. Samanti and I were having this conversation about somebody during Diamond Mountain days, and they had anger issues, big ones. And one day, Samanti was the brunt of it.

And this fellow, he was a small but really, really powerful guy, you know, and David's huge in comparison. But David was terrified by this kid in his rage, you know, and we were all of us there thought that David was going to get beat up right in front of us. It didn't go that way.

But once that happened, this person who had been a friend, you know, still a friend, not well, sort of, but both of us tiptoed on eggshells around him, do you know that term? Just really, really, really careful in our behavior around him, because you never knew then what might trigger that rage. Because it was the night it triggered, it was such a small, seemingly small thing. But it had built up whatever it was going on in his heart had built up.

And then David's comment just popped it. And it was scary, actually. And then ever after that, right around that particular person.

It's like, we have this other term where you let your hair down. They never talk about putting your hair up. But you put your hair up, you go to Sunday school.

And you act really good at Sunday school. And then you get home and you let your hair down. And then you go back to being you.

Right? Is that familiar? And he's talking about that kind of behavior. And we, we think, you know, no, I should really be the let my hair down me with everybody, technically. And that would be true, if the let my hair down me has enough wisdom and self control to never say or do something that would plant a seed that would come back to hurt me.

And until I have that level of wisdom, technically, I want to keep my hair up all the time. I want to have my behavior careful, I carefully observed, carefully chosen, so that I can make fewer and fewer negative seeds and more and more kindness seeds for the benefit of everybody, not just me. And I want to be able to do that, not just with people I don't know so well.

Or people that I need to influence, but also with the people that I usually let myself be more sloppy, because I know they'll love me anyway. And it's like, oh, that's wonderful to be loved anyway. But it's not wonderful.

By what I let myself think, say and do because it Yeah, do you see, we have it backwards. We really do have it backwards. So he's pointing this out like Geshehla took us a little more deeply into this.

Can my mind be hurt? Can other people's minds be hurt? No, not directly. But can we hurt other people's feelings? Yes. And do we want to let ourselves do that? If we don't like it when our feelings get hurt? Okay, I'm checking my notes, make sure I didn't miss anything there.

I didn't say it all, but I didn't miss it. Okay, let's go on. Come on, come on, come on.

Let's come out of here. So again, remember that Geshehla is not going on the text, he's not going through all the verses, because this seems like it's out of context from what we just talked about. And it is, because it, it comes some, some verses later in the actual text.

But he, he addresses our kajik, looking for circumstances where it seems it would be correct, it would be right to get angry and act harshly towards somebody. So our kajik is looking for these different possibilities. And one of the possibilities is, what if somebody's trying on to hurt the Dharma? What if somebody's trying to smash our temple Buddha statue? What if somebody's being harmful to my teacher? Those are reasons to get angry.

Come on, those are important things. And that will make me angry. And I should be angry, as if the only way to respond appropriately to somebody doing such things would be with anger.

He's going to show that it's, it's, it's not that to not get angry means to not act, to not do something. It means to motivate ourselves for a different reason than anger, trying to use anger to protect something, especially something like the Three Jewels. So his verses, it's completely wrong for me to feel anger, even at those who speak against or try to destroy sacred images, shrines, or else the holy Dharma, since the Buddhas and such cannot be hurt.

And even to when harm is done to lamas or relatives or the like, and those who are our friends, turn back your anger by seeing the fact that as the way before it all comes from causes. So Geshehla had said, one of the things that Buddhism and Buddhists could be really proud about is that the Buddhist tradition doesn't fight over differences with other religions, at least a well-educated Buddhist doesn't do that. They don't fight about where to build their temples.

They don't build their temple on top of somebody else's. They don't try to override somebody else's sacred things. And Buddhism teaches that if someone's attacking a temple or the books or the teachers, it is a terrible karmic seed for the attacker.

But there's nothing that that attack can do to harm the Three Jewels that those things represent, but are not the Three Jewels. So we could have this very, very favorite, favorite, favorite, favorite Buddhist statue. And along comes somebody with a great big axe and they're cutting it into toothpicks.

And I would be like, ah, so angry at them. But I would have to admit that my anger at them would be because they're damaging something that's my favorite. Rather than, oh my gosh, the karma you're making for yourself is that something that's sacred to you is going to get damaged someday.

And you're going to hate it because this feels really terrible. And if I had that attitude, I would try to do something to distract them or something to convince them that maybe they should stop. But it would not be out of that anger that I'm actually feeling, which is how dare you do that to my favorite statue.

And in that two scenarios, it hasn't even crossed my mind that, well, this Buddha statue is not the Buddha Jewel. And it's not the Dharma Jewel. And it's not the Sangha Jewel.

It's just a thing that for me reminded me of those Three Jewels, the Quanzhou Xun. So my attachment to it would lessen if I had been thinking about it accurately. And then maybe my ability to have compassion for the seeds that the other person is making for themselves could probably grow bigger and color my ability to make a wiser decision.

So Geshehla used the opportunity to review what is the Three Jewels, Quanzhou Xun. You see it in the vocabulary. That word Quanzhou, it's K-O-N-S-H-O-K when you do the from the squiggles to the letter.

But the way it's pronounced is like there's a Y before the N. And so I put it in English. Quanzhou is what it sounds like when Geshehla says it. And without hearing it and seeing it, I could never read K-O-N-S-H-O-K as Quanzhou until I wrote down Quanzhou.

So hopefully that helps you. Quanzhou Xun means the Three Jewels. We've learned that the Buddha Jewel is not Shakyamuni Buddha or Maitreya Buddha.

It is the Dharmakaya, the lack of self-existence of that omniscient being's mind, which is the availability of that mind to perceive itself as omniscient and perpetuate that. Which tells us that that mind perceiving itself as omniscient is results of causes that that being had to have created the causes for. And that means if somebody could do it, then I can do it, right? My own mind is empty too.

So if they learned how to do it, I can learn how to do it. If there's one who did it from a human life, Shakyamuni Buddha, then he really knows how to do it. And maybe if I ask really nicely, he'd tell me what mistakes he made and what successes he had, and maybe he'd help me learn how to do it.

The power of the Buddha Jewel is to inspire us, teach us, guide us, because I want to say it did it, right? That mind changed its perception of itself. Buddha Jewel, the emptiness of the mind. And that being who is the Buddha Jewel does actually have a physical body, body made of light in its own paradise, and its emanations that are pushed forth by the compassion with which it gained its omniscience.

So there are physical emanations of that being that we may or may not be able to see depending on our own level of goodness. So there is a physical component to the Buddha Jewel. But when we say Buddha Jewel that can protect us, it's the emptiness of the mind of the Buddha that can protect us.

Well, wait a minute, how can that protect me in any way at all? Like at least a physical emanation might serve as a rock between me and the bullet, but that's not the kind of protection we're going for to our Three Jewels, is it? The protection the Three Jewels gives us is the protection from creating the causes for more suffering, teaching us how to change our behavior so that we stop perpetuating our selfishness born of ignorance so that we can grow the goodness to be able to stop our very ignorance. And that's our protection by how we create what we create, learning how to plant what to plant. So then the Dharma Jewel, the Dharma Jewel is the realizations in the mind of a being who has seen emptiness directly, which once that being has those realizations, there's not anything anybody can do to damage those realizations.

They aren't a thing. They aren't in a place. They are a belief that's gone.

And once it's gone, it's gone. So the Dharma Jewel cannot be damaged. Can the books be damaged? Can the apparent Dharma Jewel be damaged? Yes.

But does it damage the Dharma Jewel? No. So no, no, it's not helpful to get angry at somebody who's destroying the books. And they can't destroy the Dharma Jewel.

So no need to get angry because even if they try, they couldn't do it. Then that's the last one, Sangha Jewel. The apparent Sangha Jewel is the group of Sangha members.

The Sangha Jewel is the person who has seen emptiness directly. Can they be hurt? Yes, their physical body can be hurt. But can they be hurt? Like their physical body, we see it as them, but how they're perceiving their own physical body, once you're Arya, it's going to be different.

Your identity is not limited to this me anymore because of one of the things that you recognize that you've experienced is your own death and the fact that you go on, right? Not you, your personality, but your subject side is the word I use. So yes, someone who is Sangha Jewel who is also then Dharma Jewel could be physically injured, but you can't injure their Jewelness, their wisdom in any way. So the reason he goes through that is that our tendency could be that we would get angry if we were in a position of witnessing somebody harming our teacher or our temple, etc.

And he's pointing out that if we stop and use our reasoning for where that's coming from, then we find that whoever is wielding the damage against those things, again, they're being impacted by their own mental affliction. They're not under control. They don't really know what they're doing.

They don't realize what a terrible damage they're doing to themselves. Instead of getting angry, let's have compassion and interfere in some safe way. To help them, instead of acting from anger, willing to hurt them before they hurt what's precious to me.

That's human nature, right? This is a terrible situation. I'm going to protect my temple. I will hurt you before you can hurt it.

And then we think I'm the hero. And it's like, no, thank you. Because of the wrong view going through that whole event.

Okay, I realize I've yacked through our break and I need to go turn my laundry around. I will be right back. Could I make a question? Yes, please.

Do you know about because I do recognize that I have to work with anger as well. But I think that for me, my main mental affliction is anxiety and things like that. Do you know if the scriptures talk about these other mental afflictions and how they harm us? Like worry or this like fear? Um, yes, they do.

The chapters in the Lojong Course 14 talks about them to some extent. There's a there's a text that ACI doesn't study much and I'm escaping me on the title of it. That is a text about all those different mental afflictions.

And their technical descriptions and then monastic explanations. And frankly, I, you know, they're wonderful. But for for a modern person, they, I couldn't relate so much.

And then where is it? There's a class in the main 20 mental afflictions. What's Natty holding up all the kinds of karma? Yeah, that's a good one. And really, probably the karma of love as well goes into all different kinds of circumstances.

And then, you know, in terms of emotional management, my own preference for working with that is, is the emotional tapping technique. That if you've learned that, or have access to that, I find it, I have the karma for it to be really effective of an effective tool that we can learn to use on ourselves, which is the beauty of it, in my opinion, that you don't have to rely on an appointment with somebody else. And then, right, you learn, you learn how to talk yourself through the tapping script, in order to reset your central nervous system, and its ability to experience certain experiences without having the old reaction triggered, you know.

So there are a number of different websites. I learned from EFT Universe. And it has, it has a lot of information there.

YouTube videos that can guide you. Thanks for asking. Thank you.

Yeah. All right. Are we back? The second half of this particular set of verses is, well, what about somebody hurting my Lama? So we have that term heart Lama, we have the term Lama that people use for their teacher, then there's the heart Lama, which is the really special one.

And that really what makes them special is that we have the seeds to see them as extra super special, meaning really close to being Buddha, or maybe even Buddha for us. In which case, everything they do is designed to get us totally enlightened, totally enlightened as quickly as possible. And we may or may not actually see that and behave correctly with that.

But we try and that's their power with us. And because they are so special to us. If we see somebody hurting them in any way, of course, we get upset.

Because they're such a special being, how dare you do that to the special being. And what we are, of course, forgetting is that yes, they are special to us. And that doesn't make them special to everybody.

Which doesn't mean it's okay for them to be hurt by anybody, because it's not okay for anybody to hurt anybody. But the trigger, which was how dare you do that to my heart teacher, right can can dial down a little bit. And our reaction can be oh my gosh, you're hurting somebody who for me is really important and maybe for you too.

And so again, we're trying to show ourselves that if we can see somebody trying to hurt my teacher, first attempt would be I understand they don't see them as special, but still they shouldn't hurt anybody. And can I help them in some way to prevent them from hurting themselves by hurting my teacher? Second thought is, if my teacher is a Buddha, they can't be hurt anyway. So even if the person is shooting arrows at them, my Lama is going to experience flowers.

Again, it doesn't mean sit there and let the arrows be shot. It means can you justify your anger? Like anger is up already. But can I let it keep going? I'm justifying letting it go? Or am I really working with my reasoning to say no, no, no, I don't want to act from this.

I don't want to act from this anger. It's already happening. What can I do differently? Thirdly, we don't know what the one we're calling Lama Buddha Lama sees themselves as.

If they see themselves as Buddha, they know what to do. They know if they don't see themselves as Buddha yet, and they see themselves as a teacher. Well, they know where stuff's coming from.

They know what to do. They don't want us getting angry, trying to hurt somebody to protect them. They don't need our help.

Buddhas don't need our help. Teachers don't need our help. Don't need our angry help.

That's the important thing. And they don't need our angry help. Can they benefit from our compassionate attempt to help the other person not get bad seeds? Yes.

Can you feel the difference? It's not a matter of willpower. I'm not going to be angry. I'm not going to be angry.

That doesn't work. It's oh man, I'm angry right now because I'm blaming the wrong thing. I understand now.

I understand I don't have to react the way anger is wanting me to react. That's just habit. We can act differently.

There is this thing called wrath, love in harsh action, but it feels really different than anger. Okay, let's go down. Geshehla picks this one out for us.

Suppose that any person derives some kind of joy from praising the qualities of another. Why, my mind then, don't you sing the praises of this person yourself and find the very same joy? The happiness of taking this joy has been admitted by all of those who possess high qualities to provide an irreproachable source of happiness. It's also best for gathering others.

I think he has more to say about this. When someone praises my own good qualities, it's my hope that this other person finds some happiness too, but I have no hope that I myself should ever find the happiness that comes from praising others. So what this is describing is a circumstance where suppose this fellow named Joe really admires this lady named Jane, a co-worker.

That's not any other attraction. Joe so easily points out Jane's good qualities to other people. Joe seems so pleased to point out Jane's good qualities.

Whether Jane is there or not doesn't matter. Joe just enjoys Jane's good qualities so much that he tells everybody about her. Like when we've seen a good movie, we tell everybody about the good movie and we're happy doing so and we're hoping the one we're telling it to will be getting a little pleasure and might be inspired to go see the movie.

We'd be thinking, Joe would be thinking, you know, may they like Jane as much as I admire and like Jane. He has this good attitude and seems happy. Master Shantideva is pointing out that there I might be listening to Joe sing Jane's praises and that my own mind might be going, you know, because maybe I don't like Jane so much.

Maybe I'm a little jealous of Jane, but I don't want to admit it. And I hear Joe thinking Jane's so wonderful. My own mind's going to go, yeah, but yeah, but right.

And I'm even going to try to say, yeah, but Joe, don't you know that Jane did da da da? Or don't you know, right? My jealousy is going to push me to actually get a little angry with Joe because he doesn't see Jane the way I see Jane. And instead of questioning my own way, I see Jane, I get upset with Joe. Right.

And that's where the anger piece comes in. It starts with jealousy and then somebody likes the person I'm jealous of. And I don't like them because they don't agree with me.

We are such complicated creatures and we hurt ourselves in the process, don't we? So Master Shantideva is pointing out that karmically speaking to praise another's good qualities and enjoy doing so is the karmic ripening of having done so before and the karmic seed planting for your own happiness and for others singing your praises. Like that's maybe not why you do it, but when you get that result, it is pleasant to hear people think highly of you is a pleasant thing. So to be in a position of hearing somebody taking pleasure in somebody else's good qualities and then take displeasure in that, heck, especially if I'm professing to be growing my bodhicitta, wanting to be a bodhisattva.

It's like, well, I just got upset with somebody's happiness when I'm supposed to be in the happiness making business. And look how easy it was for Joe. Just happy pointing out Jane's good qualities.

Why don't I do that? Point out others good quality. You know, and we look into our own heart. So we're doing that self comparing thing all the time.

Because if I point out their good qualities, it's going to make me point out that I don't have those good qualities and oh, woe is me. But then when we think about how come I'm seeing somebody with those good qualities, where is that coming from? Right? To be able to see someone with good qualities means we either have them more subtly, or we are soon to get them if we want them. So to sing somebody else's praises is one of those causes for happiness points out Master Shantideva.

And to be upset, hearing about somebody else's good qualities is the causes for unhappiness. We do the opposite of what is happiness generating. He's pointing out, Geshehla said, probably the best treatment for depression would be making the habit of noticing and pointing out to somebody else, the good qualities of somebody else.

Now, we've also heard him say, gratitude practice is a good management for depression. Because it might be a little bit easier to do than finding good qualities in other people when you can't see anything but black. But to be able to get a crack in that black and find a good quality in somebody and tell somebody else about it, and then rejoice that you did would be a pretty quick game changer for always seeing black.

He says further, that that positive attitude attracts people to the Dharma. Your homework is going to say, what are the four benefits of taking joy in others good qualities? Let me make sure I give you the answer. Number one, in the short run, you feel joy yourself, because it feels good immediately to think of another's good qualities, whether or not you like the person.

So try it on for size. Our minds feel good when they concentrate on good things. Second one, it's karmically the cause for happiness.

So to be happy about other's successes, and their good qualities, plants the seeds for our own successes and good qualities called happiness. Then the third one, that positive attitude attracts people to the Dharma. How come you're so happy all the time? How come you're always pointing out somebody's good qualities? What's the matter with you? Are you not human? Let me tell you this thing that I know.

Then last one, fourth one, is to not point out happiness, to not recognize happiness and be happy with other's goodnesses, is the cause for being unhappy in the future. So if we're unhappy now, you know, there were past lives where we were unhappy with other people's successes. That's human nature.

We probably had multiple lifetimes doing that. So something to include in our purification practice. All that time I was critical or judgmental.

Even if I was smart enough to keep my mouth shut, like that was my MO. I never said anything to anybody, but my mind was going, those colors don't match. Why did you wear your hair like that? Right? My own mind is... And it's like, yuck.

No wonder it's hard. Okay. What am I doing here? 16.

He then flips the, flips the, whatever you call that, flips it over from singing the praises of somebody, somebody's goodness. Now, what do we do with our enemies? Towards our enemies. So even should your enemy become upset, how then could you feel glad about it? It's not that some kind of harm has come to him or her because of your hopes and wishes.

Even should the suffering you wished on them come to pass, what's there to be glad about? And if you say it satisfies me when I see it, what could better ruin you? The iron hook that's jabbed in us by the fishermen of affliction is merciless and unbearable. Should it catch me, it is, it's a certainty that hell guards keep me captive in their hell realm cauldrons. So the first one was about jealousy.

This one's about ill will. When somebody we don't like has something unpleasant happen to them. Come on, we have to be superhuman not to think.

I don't even want to say it. Good. Right.

They had it coming. Like even just the little feeling we can catch. It's so fast.

It's so automatic. And I don't know, there are circumstances in my world right now where I'm really struggling against that ill will that comes up in these different, just in my new circumstance, not my immediate life at all, at all, but out in that world beyond. It's like, I, and it's the last thing that's helpful is to wish all this ugliness on somebody who's doing ugly, ugliness, right? Apparently doing ugliness to wish it on them.

So Master Shanti Deva gives these four logics for why, how, why, and how to struggle against our natural reaction towards somebody we don't like having something bad happen to them. Someone we like when something bad happens to them, we rush to help. That's not what we're talking about.

It's the ill will. So his first argument is, look, when something bad happens to your enemy, it doesn't help you one bit. So whether you were wishing that bad thing on them before they got it or not, just because they're having a bad time, you can't take credit for it, and it doesn't make you better.

So suppose there was some awful situation where somebody you didn't like, you were wishing something bad happened to them, and then, oh my gosh, they got cancer. Your body doesn't all of a sudden get healthier because they got cancer, right? You don't get any benefit from that wishing. Second, you can't take any credit for it anyway.

Like all the wishing in the world doesn't make their cancer come on them. If it could, we would wish, you know, we would wish, wish, wish ourselves into Buddhahood. And it's like, I've tried.

Either it takes more than I could do, or it doesn't work. Third, that for our own karma, it ruins our happiness in this life. Because the more we take joy in others' misfortune, the more misfortune we see in our world, right? The more degenerative things become, and the more unhappy we become.

You know, that could go on in the debate ground for a while. If I'm happy with others' misfortune, and people get more and more misfortune, I would get happier and happier. Until all that misfortune that I was happy about starts ripening on me.

Then, what happens to me? It's not pleasurable. Or would it be? Because I took pleasure in when it was happening to somebody else. It's like, oh, I don't know.

I'm not sure I even want the seeds for following the train of thought. Geshehla says, do we want a regenerating life? Then rejoice in others' goodnesses, and have compassion for those who have unpleasantnesses, whether you like them or not. Technically, for both.

Rejoice in others' goodnesses, whether you like them or not. Have compassion, try to help for others' misfortunes, whether you like the person or not. If we want the seeds to see our own selves as happy and more fortunate, happy and more fortunate.

The last argument is that karmically, in the long run, rejoicing in others' problems is an effective way to plant the karmic imprints that will project cruelty, hardship, and unpleasantness in your next life, called the Hell Guards keeping me captive in their Hell Realm cauldrons, or something similar. So don't give in to ill will, no matter what. Oh, I don't need to have that.

Next one. The world may be full of beggars, but finding someone to do me harm is truly a rare occurrence, since there could never be a person who hurt me any way at all, if I did not hurt them first. Wait, I read that wrong.

The world may be full of beggars, but finding someone to do me harm is truly a rare occurrence, since there could never be a person who hurt me any way at all, if I did not them first, if I did not hurt them first. Not meaning my neighbor won't hurt me unless I've hurt them, but if I've hurt somebody else, I have the seeds for anybody being the one who hurts me. Seeds for seeds.

Suppose that without an ounce of effort, you came across a hidden treasure chest, a treasure chest hidden in your house. You should thus feel grateful for your enemies who aid you in your Bodhisattva practice. This is hard.

It sounds like he's saying to have somebody in your life who hurts you is a rare and special occurrence. We should value them and treasure them, because there they are. My ticket to Buddhahood.

It's like, oh man, if I could do that, I'd already be Buddha, I think. And so it's not saying wish yourself a nasty person in your life. It is saying that as we work with these ideas, and we make these little progresses in not acting in the same old way when that anger arises, every time we do that, we've burnt off a series of those anger seeds and replanted something different.

More anger, plant different, more anger, plant different. The anger, the volume, the experience of the anger is going to be lessening because the old habitual way of replanting it has changed, has shifted. The more and more kind the reaction to the anger gets, the bigger the change in that angry making situation that happens.

And what will come sooner or later, I wish I could say in two weeks, but stay with it persistently. And you will come to find that the circumstances where you need to apply yourself to not act from your anger are getting fewer and fewer, and fewer and fewer, until in order to know whether or not you still have anger seeds, you actually need to go and find somebody who could push your button to see if your button can be pushed. And maybe you can't even find anybody to do that.

Wouldn't that be a pleasure? Is it possible? Logically, is it possible? Yes, very possible. With just little shifts, don't set yourself up to say, the next person that gives me that look, I'm not going to feel anger because that just won't be true. We're going to feel it.

But make this promise to yourself, when I feel that sensation, I'm going to count to three, or I'm going to drop my keys, or I'm going to do something to just shake me out of my habit pattern. And then I'm going to think, say, or do have it already planned out, you know, the feeling that comes up, tag that feeling to some distraction, to buy yourself a little time, and then already have a pre planned. What you'll say what you'll do, maybe it's turn your back and walk away.

Maybe it's, I know you're upset, how can I help? Maybe it's, this is unacceptable. I'm leaving. Right, you decide, pre decide something.

And then even if it doesn't seem like it's appropriate, like it doesn't quite fit the situation, use it anyway, at least once. And then, and then leave. And then at some point soon thereafter, think, wow, I really did it different.

I really did it differently. Maybe not perfect. Maybe, you know, I can do better.

But wow, I really did it. Pat yourself on the back. All of this anger is seeds and nothing but seeds.

And so it's powerful. And so it's real. And so it's changeable.

That same feeling actually does not have to get the label anger. It doesn't have to get the label. I'm unsafe.

Hey, it does now. Don't decide to change it. But there'll be a time when that sensation isn't doesn't give you the same reaction.

It gives you a reaction. I know that's protective or that's superpower of what to do. Or that's right.

Here's my strength. Instead of here's my diminishment. Here's my failure.

Here's my broken part. It's like, no, here's my right, how I take care of this circumstance. It's not that we're suppressing anger.

It's not that we're denying anger. And we're learning how to use it. Use that force in a way that doesn't perpetuate anger.

As we do so, situations that trigger your anger will get fewer and fewer, more and more rare. Here's why he calls it rare. At first, they're not rare at all.

They're happening all the time. But they are still rare in the sense of precious. If we're truly on this path, and we're in it, right, for the long haul, then these terrible mental afflictions, they're exactly what we want to be dealing with.

In which case somebody who's your button pusher, they they are like your ticket to paradise. And Geshehla goes so far to say that. He says you got somebody in your life who does that.

Make an agreement between you and them in your mind. Not with them, but in your mind with them. Joe, you push my I'm inadequate button so well.

So you keep doing that. I'm going to bring myself to the party. And I'm going to use you to get me enlightened as quickly as possible.

And I'm doing it all for you to get happy, ultimately happy. I'm reaching my Buddhahood for your benefit, your job, push this button, go on. Right? Do it.

That's your job. And my job is to use every time to respond differently, in order to reach my Buddhahood as quickly as possible. Very likely what will happen is, darn it, Joe will stop pushing my button before I reach Buddhahood.

Come on, Joe, push my button. And, you know, Joe just he never did know he was doing it. And now my seeds have changed Joe so much that Joe doesn't do that thing anymore.

Do you see how rare and special Joe is or was? Not until we've got the method down, though, don't make your agreement with Joe prematurely. But, but notice, it makes sense. Rather than running away and avoiding all the Joe's in the world.

We have these tools that we can use, use those mental afflictions to change ourselves. We can change Joe, because Joe is our ripening seeds. We are Joe's ripening seeds.

What's going on in Joe's mind? I have no idea. Hmm. Ghashula gave us a Dharma guarantee.

He called it that. But he didn't put a time frame. He was wise.

If we practice even a little of these teachings of this chapter, the chapter on not getting angry, sincerely and consciously, conscientiously, we will meet less bad people, fewer and fewer lousy, annoying, irritating people, because our karma to see them will be being used up. We're not reacting to them in the same old ways. We're not being them to others in the same old way.

Right? So we can't not yell back at the boss, and then go home and yell at the dog and expect the boss to stop yelling at us. Right? We have to also change our initiating behavior towards others. If I take my anger, I don't act from my anger at work, but I take it home and I act from it at home.

I'm perpetuating anger at work. Maybe working with the anger at work is too hard, too vulnerable, too dangerous. Maybe working with the anger at home is even worse.

So maybe I need to go to the grocery store and work with it at the grocery store. And when the person, you know, cuts me off, stands there in front of the soup aisle, staring at the stoop, can I just get in front of you? Right? Practice our patience where we're not so bigly triggered and watch the other circumstances where we are triggered, easing up a little bit, and then step into those places as you're feeling stronger about your ability to not get mad at the old person staring at the soup. Right? When you're in a hurry, we work in the place where we can feel successful before we work in the places that are harder.

And by working in the place where we can be successful, we change our seeds. So the hard places are not as hard. Okay.

All right. We're not done yet. Oh, there's more about the making your agreement with Joe.

I'll let you read it. So this is why the able one described the field of living beings and the field of the victorious. Many who succeeded in pleasing them were able in this way to reach the perfection of the ultimate.

The qualities of an enlightened one are attained by means of living beings and the victorious Buddhas alike. Why then do you act this way, refusing to honor other beings in the way that you do the victors? So we have this thing called the, the field, it's called the field of merit, usually. And typically what, who are, who is in our field of merit is our, our Lama, our heart Lama, our parents, the Buddhas, the Bodhisattvas, all those powerful karmic objects.

And we imagine them before us. And then we do our practices of making offerings, making prostrations, doing our confession with them there before us. And it plants powerful seeds in our mind with beings who are there before us in our mind, which is still powerful.

And then we do our best to interact with our powerful karmic objects who are in the flesh, parents, teachers, right? Those who have helped us. And we are training ourselves to honor them and help them and, you know, bring them nice offerings and do our practice in a way that will please them because of the seeds that we plant in our minds by doing so not because they need any of it, but they want us to use them to get to gather goodness, to grow our wisdom, to grow our bodhicitta. And then we tend to get good at treating our powerful karmic objects really well.

Great respect. We learn how to behave. We, we do it.

And then we turn around and those that we don't see as holy beings, like we see them as code students or not any student whatsoever. And we go right back to our usual personality interaction with them. And Master Shantideva in his patience chapter is saying, look, even Buddha said the field of living beings is our field of merit.

They are the fertile soil within. No, that's not quite. Our mind is the fertile soil.

They are the, where's the analogy I need? They are the opportunity to plant. They are, they are the bags of corn seed that you're wanting to put into your field. Other beings, plain old other beings, the ones we like, the ones we don't like, the ones that get in our way, the ones that help us.

We're with so many other beings so much more than we are with our precious holy lamas or our deity on our cushion time that to treat our high holy beings differently than our ordinary beings is karmically nuts. He's Master Shantideva is pointing out, you know, humanly it's obvious. They are ordinary like me.

They have mental afflictions like me. My holy llama, you know, doesn't, they're so amazing. I want to be like them.

Of course, we're going to treat the holy llama differently than our fellow people. And Master Shantideva says, big mistake. Buddha said that's a big mistake because what's it, what seeds are we planting? Even if it's just volume related, there are so many more ordinary beings that we interact with.

Every one of which is an opportunity to treat with respect and kindness and concern and care, just like we do our holy llamas. Like how many ordinary being kindnesses does it take to equal one kindness towards our llama and equal one kindness towards a Buddha? It's like, I don't know, but his point is, let's be consistent. If you would never get angry with your holy heart teacher or never act from your anger from towards your holy heart teacher, why would we justify getting angry with the traffic drivers? And it's like, I don't, my own mind says, well, of course they're different, but karmically speaking where it's suicide to act differently.

And Buddha says, Buddha says, so not just Master Shantideva, but Buddha says, so let me see if we're almost done here. I think I hope it's kind of class. Yeah.

One more. Moreover, what better method could there be to repay the kindness of those who act unimpelled as closest friends and help to an infinite degree than to please all living beings. So in the previous verse about treating our others with the same kind of respect and caring concern as we do our holy beings.

Sorry, I lost my train of thought. When we make offerings to our Buddhas, what they like best is for us to offer them how we've applied what they've taught us, which means I wanted to be nasty, but I said something nice and said, and they go, you're amazing, right? Better than all the chocolate in the world. Here he's saying it like there's no better offering to make.

There's no better imprint for us to make. Then to try to be pleasing to other beings, right? Try to please all living beings. We can't please anybody.

We can only try. We can try to avoid hurting their feelings. How do I know what will hurt your feelings? Because I know what will hurt mine.

So I'll try really hard to avoid doing that to you. Maybe your feelings get hurt by something else that doesn't hurt my feelings, right? I'd have to learn that. We had people at Diamond Mountain that were New Yorkers.

I grew up in Southern California. I don't know. I was supposed to be laid back and kind of fluffy and sensitive in New York, right? I just found those personalities just harsh and abrasive and scary.

It's like when I got to know them better, it's like, no, they're loving and they're kind and it just comes across in a really weird way. But once I knew that, I quit wanting to run away because I found them to be scary. Then it was just like, I don't know, when I say that's the way they were.

Do you see? So I had to figure that out in order to figure out how to interact with them so I wouldn't insult them or like I avoided them. I was hurting their feelings because I was avoiding them because I found them unpleasant and scary until I figured it out. They were yelling at me because they liked me.

Nobody in my world does that except them. But now I know. Do you see? So it's not a given that this hurts somebody's feelings, but we know by way of us.

We know by way of us what triggers anger. So don't do that to other people carefully. That's what this chapter is all about.

It's talking directly about our response and we want to take it the next step. Where are we doing that to someone else? Just stop. All right.

I think you have everything you need for your homework. I did not give you the Tibetan, but you'll have it. So remember that person we wanted to be able to help.

Again, another really powerful class to help us see how to help them and all a result of our own past efforts to learn and grow. So our own great goodness. So please be happy with yourself and think of this goodness like a beautiful glowing gemstone you can hold in your hand.

Recall your own precious holy being. See how happy they are with you. Feel your gratitude to them, your reliance upon them.

Ask them to please, please stay close to continue to help you and guide you. Specifically ask them to help you grow new habits related to those angry situations and then offer them this gemstone of goodness. See them accepted and blessed and they carry it with them right back into your heart.

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

It feels so good. We want to keep it forever. And so we know to share it by the power of the goodness that we've just done.

May all beings complete the collection of merit and wisdom and thus gain the two ultimate bodies that merit and wisdom may. So use those three long exhales to share this goodness with that one person, to share it with everyone you love, to share it with every existing being everywhere, everywhere, everywhere. See them all filled with loving kindness, filled with patience towards their anger, their hurts, filled with wisdom.

And may it be so. All right. Thanks so much for listening.

Yes, Mike. May I ask a question? You may. Do you want me to stop the recording? No, no, this is related.

So I think you've said this before, but I just wanted to clarify it because we're talking like directly about it right now. So all right, like I'm sitting, I'm sitting down and something makes me angry or something that makes me jealous. Well, something makes me, but like I experience anger, I experience jealousy.

There's time in between anger ripening in my experience and me replanting bad seeds with ignorance, right? So where I get tripped up a lot is that I start experiencing anger and I go, Oh no, I'm having anger. That's bad. And then I go into this whole shame cycle of like, Oh, I'm, I must've done something bad.

And now I'm experiencing the bad results of my bad actions. And I'm just so bad. And meanwhile, like, you know, now it's completely taken over.

So I'm just trying to figure out, I know there's something about, it takes a minute for the seeds to be planted once you start following the anger. So can you just talk a little bit about the difference between feeling anger and knowing where it's coming from and choosing not to respond in ways that cause it to happen again. And the difference between that and like feeling shame for feeling anger.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I see that. But let me, let me ask first, is there a difference in the feeling between shame and regret? Can you feel those differently? I see. So they feel similar though.

I feel great. And, but, but what one kicks you into the negative cycle that you talked about and the other one is a, is a goodness. Regret is a negative sensation.

It's an unpleasant sensation. That's a goodness that plants a good seed. So when we're in somewhere in this timeline of the event and the feeling, which just is this, and then next comes the discriminating anger.

Anger because of this. It's not just the word anger. It's anger, hurt, anger, put down anger, jelly, right? It's discriminated.

It's turned into something complete. This first, then the identity, and then comes the, all the other factors, all the other influences. The consciousness is happening through all of it.

And then comes our reaction. But the reaction is tagged with the old pattern. When this pattern has happened before, I've acted like this.

And then I've been safe. It maybe hasn't been what I wanted, but I'm still alive. So it worked.

I'm safe. So the, the momentum of the seed is wanting to go in that same direction. But we have each one of these different places where we could head it off at the path.

So that our mindfulness, right, which is going because of our Mahamudra practice, we're being able to be more aware of where we are along that path. And that what you could try to feed into it is that in the, from here to the discriminating, which is, oh, there's anger to trigger the, the regret. You could call it like, oh shoot, or, or right.

Something that gets you off automatic pilot that goes into the spiral. That is take this discriminating that also causes a thumbs up or a thumbs down and turn it into a thumbs up, which is regret. Not there's the pattern again, not right.

That's regret. And it's a positive thing. So then from there, you can go, wow, I noticed it.

I changed my reaction. Yay. Okay.

And then you're distracted from the old pattern, but then we need something that will end up with you in the safe space that you got from the old pattern. And that's what needs to be pre-planned. How do you respond to this old situation in some new way and just like brainstorm with yourself and see what you can come up with and go from the, oh, regret.

There it is again. Opportunity to do this other thing, which if it can become opportunity, then we're even a little bit eager to try it on for size. And you're out of that downward cycle for this, for this one.

And then it'll come again. So as long as I'm catching the anger, the whatever, whatever negative emotion, as long as I'm catching the emotion and do doing some sort of interaction with it where it's empty and it's coming, you know, I know where it's coming from, identifying that it's not coming at me from this person situation. And I'm, as long as I have that recognition, I stopped planning bad seats.

Yes. Okay. All right.

So as long as I'm not just like feeling the anger and then responding and then, you know, with misunderstanding or ignorance and making more negative thoughts or doing actions or saying words that are bad. Right. Anywhere along the way you disrupt that pattern and apply your regret, you've stopped the process of the seeds that were being imprinted along the way from getting hard enough to stay.

Okay. Cause I think, I think my confusion comes where it's like, cause it still feels, Oh my God, it still feels awful. Like it doesn't, it doesn't help.

Like, I mean, it doesn't make it go away. No, it's like, Oh, like this doesn't feel like it's helping. Like it feel, you know what I mean? And I think I'm just, I, I haven't like re-narrativized pain yet.

There's that part of the patience, right? Unpleasantness doesn't have to be something that we avoid at all costs. It's hard. It's hard.

Thank you. Good. Great question.

Thanks. I think we all benefited from that one. Anything else since we're here, Daria, this is your specialty.

You have anything to add? Not that you're angry specialty. I don't mean that. I mean the mental health stuff.

Good. All right. Thanks everybody.

May we all benefit truly. We have the strength. We have the power.

We have the wisdom. We have each other. We can do it.