Podcast

The True Nature of Mind (part 2) -
by Lama Tsering Everest

Buddha was not mean, but he taught that life is suffering. He wasn't trying to be mean saying that. The Buddha was pointing out that if you search for happiness in impermanent phenomena you are sure to be disappointed. And, as a result of not understanding the way that our mind works, not understanding that what we rely on in our mind as a great truth, is really just a short term truth. That we suffer, we suffer birth, if any of you can remember it, was not easy, we suffer sickness, we age and die. These are forces that we are not really able to avoid, we try, we have huge industries to try to avoid these things, to relieve these things -and still we die.

And if you look , that is sort of natural, seems to happen again and again and we are so surprised. "Ah, so and so died" -so surprised! Yes, yes, that is what is going to happen to all of us, and that does not mean that that is perfect, because what is perfect isn't born and doesn't die, what is perfect is not improvable or reducible nor is it constructed; whatever is constructed will fall apart, what is truly perfect, what is truly refuge, what is truly safety is that which cannot be cut, it cannot be interrupted, it is completely victorious and absolutely true -nd that is the nature of things, the essence of things, that is the nature of mind and we call that Buddha.

You see, there is something going on here: what is true is true, it's not really possible for truth to be absent. If it were absent, it could not be true, it has to be present. So truth is present, and yet we don't notice it because we are so busy doing I, me , my, mine, my children, my home, my family, my country, my aspirations, my expectations, my hopes, my fears -those totally dominate our mind, all the while, that perfect absolute nature never moved, was never gone, it is not something you have to win.

You don't have to please perfection. You are completely inseparable with perfection as is all. But we do not experience it, and in not experiencing our absolute nature and relying on this intellectual ground as if it were true, we become very disappointed, actually quite brokenhearted and lonely, bereft: "Where did perfection go?" This is like the ice cube who cries to the sky: “Where did the water go? How could the water leave me here, cold, frozen, hard and brittle and alone?” And it is wrong crying, it's really wrong crying. The water is not gone from the ice cube, it is water, it is water under an influence and that influence is the cold, cold is removable, the water is not removable from an ice cube.

What Lord Buddha was saying is that we are frozen, we are under the cold and what is causing the cold is the way that our mind is working, the way that our mind is working within the intellectual assumption of “I” and obviously it's extension which is other.

Because “I” am what knows you, “I” am is what calls you, you.“I” am who assumes who you are; you can go to great lengths to try to explain who you are to me, but I only have my understanding of you, that's all I have.

But you are a Buddha, you are a perfect essence, that's the truth of you. That's not necessarily your experience of you, nor my experience of you though that's the truth of me too.

And we think: but I am more important than you, obviously, it's instinct. I am, and I am important, you are maybe very nice people, that's very nice, we could probably get along fine, as long push doesn't come to shove and you don't get in my way. And this is what we do with “I”, we coming through.

"Maybe you could make me happy, specially if you are charming and handsome; we could be friends, of course as long as you fit my criteria, if you change too much, I am sorry, but you are just going to drop off the friend list; used to be a friend, but they got so strange, you know? Started doing things I just couldn't get along with anymore..."

We accept and we reject: this is what “I” does, and what happens. The tragedy is it wouldn't be so bad if it worked, but it doesn't work because what “I” do can only fall back on “I”, because there is actually not two, there is just the sensation of two and we don't understand that you only get your mind -that's the world you get, is the mind, what your mind can give you.

And if your mind is narrow, small, judgmental, critical, superior, you are going to experience a world that is small, judgmental, superior, critical. And the more you experience a world like that, the more justified you are in being narrow, critical, judgmental and small and think that you have a handle on this, I know what is happening here.

And we are shadowboxing with our mind. What Lord Buddha presented was that we don't understand our mind, we don't understand what our mind makes, we don't understand who is really in charge; we think that other people cause us our suffering, when actually our mind causes us our suffering.

Lord Buddha said first,“Life is suffering”, and then he said: “There is a reason” -this is the second point. Something is creating suffering, so if you can isolate what's creating suffering you can (third point) change suffering because you have discovered what is causing it, and you can change that and finally, fourth point, suffering can end. That's the Buddha's teaching.

And basically we don't really believe the Buddha that life is suffering, we still think that it's a pleasure to go to Starbucks, we still think that there is something that is really fun, and it's worth it. But Buddha wasn't saying that you can't have fun, he was saying that you can't keep it. You will experience the end of it and that's not fun at all, and then we agree with the Buddha basically that there is a cause of suffering. Usually the cause is my husband, or my mother-in-law, or maybe some high political figure, taxation, viruses, it's too hot, it's too cold, most anything.

The only time that we really sort of recognize we are the cause of our own suffering is if we bite the side of our own mouth -ou know, that one we really get it; almost everything else we can blame on somebody. We are a blaming culture, and Buddha says: there is nobody to blame, there's absolutely no one else to blame.

Well, that's a little bit hard for us, it's easier to blame but it doesn't work, because when you blame you exercise negative emotions. This person is the reason I am suffering and Buddha said: No, that's not the reason that you are suffering. That person, at best, delivered your suffering, but they are not the reason for your suffering, there is another cause. That person is really more of the result -there is a cause that is producing suffering. It's the cause that has gotten with that husband, it's not the husband. The husband is just a guy, he's a guy who wants to be happy, he is a guy who doesn't want to be unhappy, he is trying his very best to figure out how to make this work; for him, having to do the dishes is in the suffering side of things, and so should be avoided at most cost.

That‘s what people do, we all do that. We are not actually so different, we are all trying to be happy, we just go about it differently. For someone else having those dishes in the sink is a pleasure, that's different. Both are in the search for happiness and the avoidance of suffering, both are serving “I” and both are going to suffer the failure of expectations.

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