Author: meditation

Change Your Mind, Change Your World

Today, let’s explore how a simple way of changing our minds can change our experiences. While researching this topic, I discovered that there is a book with the same name. How cool is that? So last session we talked about how Happiness is an inside job and how pain and pleasure are within us. How we let external conditions dictate our mood.

I am sure we all had some kind of problem today. It bothered us. It disturbed our peace. But if you think back, was that an external problem or an internal problem? I would bet a pretty penny it was an external problem. We let our external problems power to make us suffer. But it is all about perception. Say one day is going great. We feel like everything is going our way. Traffic is flowing smoothly, coworkers are on their best behavior, and so forth. The very next day, we feel like the whole world is against us. Someone cuts us off in the traffic, coworkers sound like they are demanding and whatnot. It is the same set of characters but we despise them! Why? Because our internal compass is off that day.

Let me tell you a story. I was driving through rural Mississippi about 20 years ago. I saw a small vendor on the roadside so I stopped. She was an old lady selling boiled peanuts. I bought a few and started talking with her. I asked her how her day was. She said it was an especially good day. I asked her what made that an especially good day. She said, well, I would make $20 today. Think about it! $20 was an especially good day. Granted I was in rural Mississippi in the early 2000s but still. She just had a particularly bright outlook on life you can tell. I bet she hardly had a bad day.

Everything depends upon our mind, including our sense of self. I think I may have talked about this in the past but let’s just reiterate. We all have this strong sense of self. Who we are. We are certain types of people, we do x and not y, and so forth. But if you think about it, this sense of self is not constant. It is ever-changing. Think about your 10-year-old self. I bet when you were ten, your sense of who you were was totally different from who you are today! Your 10-year-old self may not recognize who you have become. I am sure that’s true in my case. And you can say the same thing about your 20-year-old self and so on. So our sense of self is evolving. It is a good thing. And if we know it is constantly changing why are we hanging on to that sense of self? If we realize that our sense of self depends upon our thoughts, it becomes liberating! We are free to change our thoughts and in turn our sense of self. How cool is that?

Our sense of self is always based on our delusions. Our anger, jealousy, pride, attachment, and so on. But as long as it is an imputed sense of self, why not impute a happier state of mind? Because the universe gives us what we want. If we are always identifying ourselves as a tired, frustrated, and angry person then that is what the universe will give us. We do what we intend to do anyway. So why not create the intention to be happy all the time? If we are feeling completely rattled and overwhelmed, rather than identifying with that rattled and frustrated self, why don’t we tell ourselves, we are peaceful? We identify ourselves with our peaceful nature. We are this inherently peaceful person who happens to get rattled or frustrated every now and then. Now, we have changed the basis of our imputation all of a sudden. We are no longer identifying ourselves with the unhappy or angry but recognize that those are just our delusions that flare up from time to time.

We have talked about this before that we have the unlimited potential for peace. We are like this golden nugget that has some dirt on it. We recognize that we are not this dirty rock but actually a golden nugget with some dirt. As soon as we realize and accept that, we begin the work of removing the dirt from our golden nugget so we can be that peaceful person all the time.

Happiness Is An Inside Job

I am here to reveal a secret today. We are going to talk about how happiness is an inside job! Let me ask you first. Where does happiness come from? Where does suffering come from? Let’s look at the real causes and conditions of real happiness. Inner peace is the real cause of happiness.

Buddha said that we have limitless potential for peace, happiness, and joy within ourselves. It is our Buddha nature. We have the potential to be permanently free from suffering. What gets in the way is our nature of trying to fix everything. If we think about it, every day we wake up and we try to fix problems. We are putting out fires we call them. But are they fires? A lot of times in trying to fix things, we lose our inner peace. We get bogged down in these so-called fires and sometimes the fire consumes us! I am sure all of us have experienced these patterns in our lives.

Even though inner peace is the source of our happiness, we keep wanting external conditions to make us happy. I think we talked about this before but I am going to give this example again to drive the point home. We all derive pleasure from some type of food. It gives us joy and satisfaction. For me, that is pizza. But can pizza really make us happy? When I start eating pizza, the first few slices are like heaven. After the third slice, I can hardly eat. Now if I keep eating, I would become uncomfortable. After maybe the 10th slice, I would start to throw up and all of a sudden, I am suffering. There is no joy in continuing to eat pizza. So what does that tell us? It tells us that happiness is not coming from pizza. If pizza could bring happiness, it would not change to suffering.

And we can use other examples in a similar way, money, cars, and houses. Even relationships cannot make us happy. You fall in love with someone and they can do no wrong. Every little quirk they may have, you find adorable! Some time goes by and now, you find them annoying. The same quirks that you thought were adorable are now disgusting! What happened? Your attachment went away that’s all.

Love, on the other hand, can make you happy. Genuine love has no expectations. It does want anything in return.  

If you think about what makes us unhappy, there is a long list. Traffic makes us unhappy. Someone cuts us off and now our whole day is ruined. Why do we give the power of our happiness to some stranger who does not even know we exist? We seek happiness in social media in all places. We like that we have “friends” and “followers” on social media. How many of these friends genuinely care about our well-being? There are businesses that give you pictures so it looks like you are on vacation in a foreign land! How crazy is that? You put these pictures just to impress some stranger! Where is the happiness in that?

We rearrange our lives just to make sure we remove things that make us unhappy and bring in things that make us happy. But that is just a temporary solution because new things pop up that make us unhappy. If we think our problems come from sorting out external events, we will never be happy.

Let me ask you a question. How many of you have been truly happy for a straight 24-hour period? No sad thoughts, no anger, no jealousy, no uneasiness, just pure happiness. Very few of us can say we have been truly happy for a straight 24 hours. And those of us who had a few of those, how many times? Very few times I am sure.

Because we are so bogged down on external conditions, we are not even able to be truly happy for a straight 24-hour period.

When we go on vacation in paradise, our whole goal is to be happy. We land and the rental car counter has an issue with our reservation. All of a sudden the paradise does not feel like paradise anymore. This story plays out every day at a tourist destination. I had an interesting tour guide last year in Egypt. A young man took us on this old-fashioned boat tour in the river Nile. We were talking about his client base and he said sometimes people come and they get upset about some view or something where he takes them. He said he usually tells them, you paid so much money to come here, just be happy. I thought he had this figured out. He is right. We have the choice to be happy no matter the external conditions.

The true source of our happiness is inner peace. So regardless of what happens out there, let’s try to keep our inner peace.

Developing Compassion – Affectionate Love

We have talked about how it is best to try and develop compassion towards all living beings. It is easy to develop compassion towards people in our immediate circle (our family, our friends, etc.). But it is much harder to develop compassion towards someone we do not know. Ans harder still for someone in a faraway place. It’s like this when we hear about a natural disaster half a world away, we feel bad for sure but not enough to do something about it and help them. It happens in our region, we actually want to do something about it—maybe we send some money or consumables, etc. If that happens in our neighborhood, we roll up our sleeves and help as many people as we can. So how do we develop the same high level of compassion for all living beings?

Well, before we develop compassion toward everyone, we first need to have a love for them. If we have a love for someone in our hearts, developing compassion towards them becomes easy. So how do we develop love towards other random people and even people who do not care for us? Well, let’s start with types of love. There are three types of love. Affectionate love, cherishing love, and wishing love.

Here is from the book Universal Compassion: We can understand these by considering the following example. If a mother is reunited with one of her children after a long separation, she is very happy and feels great affection for her. This special feeling of affection is affectionate love. Out of affection, the mother considers her child to be very precious and wants to take special care of her. This special feeling of caring is cherishing love. Because she has affectionate love and cherishing love for her child, if she sees that she is unhappy she immediately wishes to restore her happiness. This wish for others to be happy and to help them to achieve happiness is wishing love.

So let’s break this down. In simplest terms, affectionate love is to like someone. If we are in a family and we have affection towards each other, life would be much smoother. Similarly, if we have affection towards our community, we will try to make sure that everyone in our community is free from suffering. This affectionate love brings harmony and peace to the community. The easiest way to develop affectionate love is to think about how no one wants to suffer. We know that we don’t want to have any suffering in life. Similarly, no one wishes to suffer for themselves. Once we understand that all beings want to be free from suffering, we will develop affectionate love toward them. A warm feeling in our hearts towards them. It is difficult to practice this by trying to show affectionate love towards everyone at once. So one should start by showing affectionate love towards a select few that would be easier – members of your family or close friends. Then expand the circle once you are comfortable.

Now, we need to be careful because a lot of times what people call love is more like attachment. For these people more the “love” increases, the more desirous attachment they develop. If the object of their “love” even talks to someone else, they get jealous or angry. This is not love. This is the attachment. Real love does not make one angry. So what is affectionate love? In the book How To Transform Your Life, Geshe Kelsang Gyatso outlines: when from the depths of our heart, without attachment, we feel very close, warm, and happy towards someone, this is affectionate love. It makes our mind peaceful and balanced, free from anger and attachment. Thus it is called “equanimity”.

Developing equanimity is like plowing a field—clearing our minds of the rocks and weeds of anger and attachment. That will make it possible for true love to grow. So how do learn to develop affectionate love? One way to develop this is to make an effort to be happy to see everyone. Whenever we see someone, we should be happy to meet them and try to generate a warm feeling towards them. If we are starting a meeting just before we get into the meeting room, we imagine all the people who are going to be in the meeting and try and generate a smile on our faces.

There are many benefits of meditating on affectionate love. Nagarjuna a great Indian scholar said that the biggest benefit of meditating on affectionate love for just one moment is that we accumulate greater merit than giving food three times to all the hungry people in this world! How wonderful!

Purifying Negative Karma

We had a request for this teaching so today, we want to discuss how to purify our negative Karma. Now, when we talk about past negative Karma, we are not only talking about this lifetime but all previous lives. By that standard, we have created enormous negative Karma. It is impossible to remove the fact that a negative action has been created. However, we can do something to prevent our negative actions to produce suffering. Every negative action can ripen in one of four possible ways: 1) the ripened effect; 2) the environmental effect; 3) the effect that is experience similar to the cause; and 4) the effect that is tendency similar to cause

What does that mean? Well, the ripened effect is when we end up as an animal. The environmental effect is we are born in a war zone. The effect that is experience similar to the cause is when we experience in our life similar pain. And effect that is a tendency similar to cause puts us in situations where we tend to create similar negative actions over and over again.

The first step in the preparation of purification is that when we are experiencing consequences of our negative Karma, in whatever form that may be in, we should realize that these consequences are due to our past negative Karma and we need to do whatever it takes to purify past negative Karma so we do not end up in this situations again and again.

Here is from the book Universal Compassion by Geshe Kelsang: Strong purification made every day over a long period of time will completely purify even the heaviest negative Karma; less powerful purification will slightly reduce our negativities, and a small amount of purification will prevent the power of the negative Karma from increasing. So any amount of effort we make is helpful.

There are four so-called opponent powers that help us purify negative Karma. They are 1) the power of regret; 2) the power of reliance; 3) the power of the opponent force, and 4) the power of promise.

Let’s look at each one. First is the power of reliance. The power of reliance purifies the environmental effect of negative action. It also subdues our negative karma in general. Most of the objects of our negative actions are other living beings. But at the same time, we have created negative actions against objects of refuge. The objects of our refuge whatever higher authority that we may believe in. Sometimes, we talk down the object of refuge or ridicule these objects. To remove these negative actions or purify these previous negative Karma, we need to develop a reliance on objects of refuge—whatever that may mean to us. This will allow us to generate compassion toward all living beings and that in turn will purify our negative Karma.

The next is the power of the opponent force. The power of the opponent force purifies the ripened effect of the negative karma. It is the direct opponent of negative karma. When we have remorse for a specific negative Karma, and if we apply the opponent to that negative action (antidote of sorts); it helps us purify our negative Karma. What is the opponent force you may ask? It is actually any virtuous action performed to purify a specific negative Karma. Similar to paying a fine for a traffic violation if you will!

The next is the power of regret. It purifies the effect that is experience similar to the cause. It also prevents the effects of negative karma from increasing. If we understand the dangers of suffering created by negative actions, we will develop sincere regret for having committed these actions. If we contemplate that we have created enormous amounts of negative Karma over our lifetimes and we will eventually have to suffer the consequences of that. By contemplating this way, we will develop remorse for our past negative Karma. If our remorse is sincere, we will be determined to prevent future negative Karma. This remorse is what is known as the power of regret. The more regret we generate, the more powerful our purification will be.

The next and final power is the power of promise. It purifies the effect that is a tendency similar to the cause. It also prevents us from repeating the negative karma. This is very important. In this phase, we are promising not to repeat past negative Karma. Without this promise, none of the other powers really work as well. This one power if applied effectively and regularly helps purify our negative Karma. There are types of negative Karma we can give up and promise never to commit again. There may be some negative Karma that we are not ready to give up and we can promise not to commit for a short period of time say a week or a month. We have talked about this before. If you are a fisherman, it is understandable not to promise to kill all living beings. But you can start with every living being except fish. Then later expand to no-killing fish for one day a week and so forth.

After learning all the consequences of our negative Karma, I think it is only appropriate for us to begin to apply these opponent powers to begin purifying our negative Karma. Hope this helps and that you can begin your purification practice in some small way.

Wisdom

As you may recall, we were discussing the six perfections before the holiday break. Today we will wrap up our discussion on the six perfections. The last perfection we are looking at is wisdom also known as judgment. It is our ability to discern what is real and what is not.

Wisdom is not same as the day to day intelligence. It is possible to have great intelligence but lack wisdom. What do I mean by that? Let’s look at some of the biggest weapons of war for example. People who develop these are for sure intelligent people but one could question their wisdom in developing those. I am sure you have heard about the biggest fraudsters in the world like the Madoff and the SBFs of the world. They sure are intelligent people but they certainly lack wisdom and as a result are challenged in discerning what is right and what is wrong.

There are three fundamental aspects of discernment: we must accept conventional reality; accept ultimate reality; recognize non-duality. Let’s look at this one at a time.

Conventional reality is a day-to-day reality. It is completely an internal mental representation. Meaning it is all playing out in our minds. For example, when we see something, actually our eyes see the image and that image is then inverted in the retina and then our mind interprets the image. This is true for all of our senses. Our mind interprets our sensations of touch, smell, etc. Human senses are limited. The human eye is capable of seeing only 1% of the light spectrum. So what we see is limited. Similarly, we cannot hear all the frequencies of sound. In addition, we are bound by emotional distortion that limits our ability to perceive. For example, when we are afraid, we see things that are not there and when we are distracted we don’t see things that are there. That is why eyewitnesses are notoriously unreliable.  

Conventional reality depends upon cultural agreements if you will. We all agree on a set of rules that allows us to accept certain things as long as perception meets the function.

Part of conventional reality is to recognize that every cause produces similar effects in nature. The second assumption is that all effects have multiple causes and conditions. It is never a one-to-one relationship. There are multiple causes and conditions that have to come into place to manifest a particular effect. For example, when you buy a seed it does not create a plant. You need to plant it, put fertilizer in the soil, it needs rain or watering, sunlight, and so on. All of these causes and conditions must come into play for the seed to become a plant.

Ultimate reality is just like it says, the real truth. We don’t have direct access to ultimate reality but there are principles that we can understand. 1. There are no inherent characteristics. For example, being beautiful to one person would be different to someone else. As they say, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. What one person finds attractive another person finds repulsive. It is always subjective. So the characteristics do not exist from its own side. All characteristics are imputed. Long, short, far, near, strong, weak, good, bad, large, small, all of these are subjective and are imputed. We should also however apply a functionality test on it. For example, killing is bad or good are both imputed but functionally, killing is bad because it is bad for the one who gets killed. 2. Interdependence of all beings and equality of all beings is a fact. Interdependence is the basis of all science. Without pollination, for example, there is no agriculture. So interdependence is a fact. Equality is a fact because each being feels they are important. So this makes us all equal. We all want to be happy. There is no question about it.

Non-duality means that ultimate reality is the basis of conventional reality – meaning they are not separate from each other. These are not separate concepts. We must have a basis for everything. Without basis, we cannot even have distortion. All beings share the same essence. Science tells us this. We all have at our core the same basic atomic structure. In the spiritual realm, we say all beings have the same soul or a very subtle mind.

Once we have these three basic components in mind, it becomes easy to discern. We accept what needs to be accepted, assume what needs to be assumed, and respect what needs to be respected. The combination of this wisdom is what gives us true perception. As we discussed in the past, the function of our mind is to perceive. Once we understand these basic principles, our perception becomes clear. Our judgment becomes clear and our decisions are better.

It is good to promote discernment in today’s world because people are susceptible to believing anything and everything without reason. One can choose to believe what one wants as long as one understands that it is just a belief and not based on truth.