Do not rely upon other conditions. 

In practicing training the mind we rely upon inner strength not external conditions.  We do not need to wait for better conditions because we can transform any situation into the path.  If we waited for the perfect conditions we would never start our practice.  If we wait until we create the perfect conditions we will never have any time to practice because we will be expending all our energy trying to fulfill our insatiable desires.

Because every situation is equally empty, every situation is equally potentially perfect for our practice of Dharma.  It is only our lack of wisdom knowing how to transform certain conditions into the path that makes us prefer some conditions over others.  We grasp at some external conditions as being inherently better than others, and so when we lack those conditions we think we can’t practice Dharma.  Assenting to such a mistaken way of thinking becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.  Because we believe we don’t have the external conditions we need, we don’t practice.  And because we don’t practice, we never gain the wisdom that knows how to practice in all situations.  Practically speaking, we will be right – we can’t practice.  But this is an entirely self-created problem.  If instead, we mentally tell ourself, “all external conditions are equally perfect, just in different ways,” then our mind will open to receiving blessings to see how this is true.

For me, the most powerful way of doing this is to rely upon Dorje Shugden.  Dorje Shugden’s job is to arrange the perfect outer, inner and secret conditions for my practice of Dharma.  These conditions may not be what I would have thought were the perfect ones, but my faith in Dorje Shugden enables me to believe that they in fact are what is best for me.  This faith then opens my mind to receive his powerful blessings helping me realize how the situation is indeed perfect.  Then, I just practice to the best of my ability free from worry.  Our biggest obstacle is our lack of faith that Dorje Shugden is already arranging for us perfect conditions.  With this faith, we want for nothing.

Always meditate on special cases. 

There are some situations that it is more difficult to practice training the mind, with these we need to meditate specifically.  For example, meditating on special cases of developing compassion for our enemies or those with greater fortune than us or being patient with people who always get angry with us.  During the meditation break we should try put our virtuous determination into practice.

At the Toronto festival in 2002, in the lead up to the Iraq war, Geshe-la said what will no doubt go down as one of the most famous things he ever said.  He said, “Love is the real nuclear bomb that destroys all enemies.”  How does this work?  At a superficial level we can say if we love somebody, they no longer see us as a threat, and so they stop feeling the need to defend against or even destroy us before we harm them.

But there is also something deeper at work.  Whether between nations or between children in a sandbox, we perceive enemies everywhere.  Why does somebody become our enemy.  If we check, there is really only one reason:  because our desires are in conflict.  We want one thing, they want something else (or they want the same thing for themselves), and conflict ensues.  Love is a mind that also wants the other person to be happy.  But the function of love is to bestow a special wisdom which sees how everyone can win.  Love does not just mean give the other person whatever they want and deprive yourself of what you want.  Love sees beyond such zero-sum dualities to a deeper level where everyone can have something better than what they even initially desired.  Seeing this, we naturally work towards it.  The more genuine our love, the clearer will be this special wisdom.  The clearer we see how peace and mutual benefit can be achieved, the more effectively we will be able to communicate the possibilities to our “enemy” and the more likely they will go along.  We will then cease to be enemies and instead become partners.

Ultimately, love can destroy all “enemies” because we cease to impute such a term.  An enemy is one who harms us.  But with love, those who seek to harm us are viewed as incredibly precious because through them we can train in purification, patience, giving, the moral discipline of restraint, etc.  Without them, it is incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to train in such things.  Love for all beings actually makes it impossible for anybody to harm us, even if they try.  No matter what they do to us, we receive benefit.  Such is the power of love.

Those who have greater fortune than us normally give rise to jealousy within our mind.  We see all that they have, find ourselves more deserving, and wish we had these things instead.  The cruel truth is jealousy creates the cause to be separated from the object of your jealousy.  For example, if a boyfriend is very jealous every time their girlfriend talks with another guy, the girlfriend will grow tired of it and eventually leave him.  Rejoicing in other’s good fortune, in contrast, creates the karmic causes to obtain whatever good fortune we rejoice in.  So it is precisely because we want these things that we should not be jealous, but instead rejoice in the good fortune of those who have them.

Finally, there are some people in this world who have a unique power of make us upset.  Sadly, it is usually those people who are closest to us, such as our partner, kids, co-workers or extended family.  Because they have bothered us so often in the past, it only takes the slightest thing done by them to throw us completely off balance.  We have an extremely short fuse with these people, and even their laugh annoys us.  All of this comes from the bad habit of inappropriate attention to their faults.  Focusing on the faults of others feeds our anger.  Focusing on the qualities of others starves our anger.  With some people, we have been focusing on their faults for so long it is a deeply ingrained habit.  When we think about them, we get this running internal narrative about how awful they are.  Just as rejoicing in the good qualities of others creates the causes to have those good qualities for ourself, so too criticizing others creates the causes for ourself to have the faults we criticize in others.  So are quite literally transforming ourselves into our own worst enemy.

There is frankly only one way to break this habit:  conscientious effort over a long period of time.  When we find ourselves dwelling on the faults of others, we try recall how we are just feeding our anger and creating the causes to become equally faulty.  We then choose to stop doing that and instead to try appreciate the good qualities of the other person.  We just keep doing this again and again until it becomes our new habit.  My grandmother, who turned 104 this year, said there are two secrets to her long life:  first, she never thinks anything bad about anyone ever; and second, when she plays cards, she “plays for blood!”  You do not want to play cards with my grandmother, but we would be wise to emulate her attitude towards others.

It is important to train deeply and encompass all. 

Here to train deeply means to not just know the words of Buddha, but to practice them deeply to gain profound personal experience of the instructions and their power.  Encompass all means that we should view all phenomena as illusory and empty of existing from their own side.

There are many examples which can illustrate the meaning of training deeply.  If we read about how good mint chocolate chip ice cream is we can develop some appreciation for how good it must be, but it is only by eating it ourself that we will know.  Likewise, we can read about the efficacy of various medical treatments, but it is only when we take the medicine ourself that we can be cured.  It is exactly the same with Dharma practice.  By reading and studying the Dharma, we can generate an appreciation for it, but it is only by putting the instructions into practice ourself that we will know for ourselves the truth of the Dharma.

What does it mean to actually practice the Dharma?  It means to use it to change our habitual reactions to things.  Some people worry that their practice of Dharma seems artificial.  We seem to generate an artificial renunciation, an artificial love, an artificial wisdom, etc, and then we think this is a problem.  In fact, this is entirely normal.  Because we have to apply effort to generate these minds, they are by definition artificial and forced.  The only thing that comes effortlessly to us is delusion.  But by choosing to try respond differently to life’s challenges, we plant the karma on our mind which in the future will ripen in these more positive reactions coming naturally.  Effort now creates the causes for natural later.

There is an important distinction between “artificial” and “fake.”  Artificial means we want to respond in the positive way, but we are currently unable to do so genuinely from the heart.  “Fake” means we don’t really want to respond with virtue, but we are pretending we do.  There is a big difference here.  For example, someone may publicly insult us in some way and it really upsets us inside, but we don’t want to give the other person the satisfaction of knowing they can disturb us so we pretend we are not bothered.  This is being fake.  If instead we think to ourself, “this person insulting me is a karmic echo of my own similarly mean behavior towards others in the past.  This person is giving me an opportunity to purify the negative karmic seeds on my mind, so I should be grateful towards them,” we may still be hurt inside, but we accept it as purification.  We are not genuinely grateful towards them, but we do know gratefulness is the correct internal response, so we try to bring our mind in the direction of gratitude.  We won’t feel it, but we will try move our mind genuinely in that direction.  This effort is what creates the karma we are after.  This karma will ripen in the future in the form of genuine feelings of gratitude when others insult us.

To encompass all means we try again and again to remind ourselves that it’s all a karmic dream.  Nothing is actually happening, there is just the dance of karmic appearance around our sense of perception.  We have never gone anywhere, nobody is doing anything to us, we have never obtained anything.  Ultimately, it doesn’t matter at all what appears, it only matters how we respond to it.  Every situation is like a karmic knot which we must untie by responding correctly with wisdom and compassion.  It is just like untangling the Christmas tree lights when we take them out of storage.  It is a big tangled mess, but if we proceed methodically we will eventually straighten them all out.  We may find ourselves in a real predicament at work.  Untangle it slowly with wisdom and compassion.  We may have troubled relations with the members of our family.  Untangle them slowly with wisdom and compassion.  Wisdom and compassion work, it is only a question of time.

If children are splashing in a pond, it will make all sorts of waves moving in every direction.  Some waves will crash into others and the whole pond will become covered with a wide variety of waves.  But if the children stop splashing, eventually the water calms down until it becomes perfectly still and clear.  It is the same with our mind.  Each time we generate delusions, it kicks up waves of contaminated karmic appearance in our mind.  Some waves appear to crash into one another (nations going to war, for example), and it seems as if the whole world is covered with a wide variety of waves acting independently upon one another.  But if we stop making new waves, and indeed we start to oppose the waves that come towards us by applying the anti-waves of wisdom and compassion, we will soon calm the waters of our mind until our mind becomes completely still and peaceful, and as clear as the clear light.  The Truth Body of a Buddha is not somewhere else, it is all around us, indeed it is the nature of all things.  At present we cannot see it, but when we calm our mind everything will subside into it until eventually we feel all separation between ourself and everything melt away.  The clear light will emerge from within all things and we will see directly that it has always been the nature of all things.

When we first start training in emptiness, it seems like an intellectual word play (“the body is not the parts, nor the collection of its parts, etc.).  But once we have begun to glimpse its meaning it gives us the power to stop delusions dead in their tracks.  Who is insulting me?  Nobody, no one is even there.  What is being said?  Nothing.  So why be bothered.  All that is really happening is I am watching a karmic echo of how I was towards others in the past.  But it can’t hurt me, it is just a reminder to not continue in such ways again.  If we lose all of our money, what have we lost?  Nothing.  If we realize emptiness, we realize we lack nothing.  Everything is already inseparable from our mind.  It is only our ignorance which stupidly imputes “self” and “other” that creates these fictitious walls of separation.  Enlightened beings are already parts of our mind, we merely need to activate them (and indeed identify with them in our Tantric practice) for them to come alive in our life.  As Nagarjuna says, for whom emptiness is possible, everything is possible.

Train without bias towards the objects. 

The objects of training the mind are not just living beings but also inanimate objects. All objects have pleasant and unpleasant aspects, and these serve as opportunities for training the mind, where we do not develop attachment to their pleasant aspects nor aversion to their unpleasant aspects.  We should use good conditions to encourage us to accumulate merit, and bad conditions to encourage us to purify our negativity.  We can also practice taking and giving with regard to any situation, good or bad.

Many people mistakenly believe that situations that give rise to our delusions are somehow obstacles to our practice of Dharma.  Quite the opposite, such situations are in fact emanated to give us a chance to actually practice the Dharma.  Dharma practice is not an intellectual exercise of playing with interesting concepts, rather it is a practical exercise of creating new, positive habits of mind.  When we encounter pleasant or unpleasant objects in our life, our natural tendency is to develop attachment or aversion.  Gen-la Losang explains that, “what is natural is simply what is familiar.”  Why are our delusions our natural tendencies?  Because that is what we are most familiar with.  If we apply effort over a long enough period of time, we can change our natural tendencies to be virtuous.  The more opportunities we are given to apply such effort, the more we create new habits of mind.  Eventually, these habits become our spontaneous natural reaction to things.

It is very important that we remember all objects are equally empty, so encountering any object is equally transformable into the path.  In the final analysis, there are essentially only two types of objects (pleasant and unpleasant).  Yes, we say that there are neutral objects, but in reality these are just objects that give rise to only minor levels of attachment and aversion.  So if we develop a genuine equanimity towards pleasant and unpleasant objects, viewing them equally as opportunities to train our mind, then nothing will be a problem for us.  We can spend our whole life training our mind.  The world we inhabit, the tasks we do (family, work, etc.) merely become the context in which we train.  We develop a true freedom to be able to go anywhere, with anybody, doing anything, and we are never moved from our practice.

We of course, however, need to be honest with ourselves about our ability to transform.  If we are an alcoholic, for example, our mind might not yet be strong enough to go into a bar and transform the experience into our path to enlightenment.  We might be far more likely to eventually be overwhelmed by our past bad habits and “fall off the wagon.”  For objects that are currently beyond our ability, we should still avoid as a precaution.  But if we train conscientiously, the day will eventually come when we can go into that bar, and the more we feel the urge to drink the more we will develop disgust for delusions.  Disgust for delusions and renunciation are the same mind.  Far from sucking us back into samsara, the arising of deluded tendencies in our mind will propel us out of samsara.

The key lies in making a distinction between the arising of a deluded tendency and the generating of a delusion.  The arising of a deluded tendency is the karmic ripening of a “tendency similar to the cause” of having generated a delusion in the past.  Generating a delusion has two parts (1) the ripening of a deluded tendency, and (2) assenting to the validity of that deluded tendency.  All delusions lie to us.  They promise us happiness if we follow their “advice,” but they deliver to us more suffering.  This is why all delusions are called “deceptive.”  We assent to the validity of the delusion when we believe the lie the delusion is telling us, basically we get duped by the delusion.

I think the best analogy is email spam.  We all have received the emails the Nigerian businessman who needs to hide his millions, and he has reached out to “us” as “someone he can trust” to safeguard his millions if only we give him our bank account numbers so he can transfer the funds.  Receiving this email in our inbox is like the ripening of a deluded tendency in our mind.  If we believe the spam, we may think we are going to get rich, but in the end we get our account stolen from.  But most of us when we receive such spam recognize it as a scam, and the more we receive such spam the more we strengthen our wisdom determination to not be fooled by it.  It is exactly the same with delusions.  The more they arrive in the inbox of our mind, the more we become determined to not once again be fooled by them.  So the arising of these deluded tendencies become a condition of our practice, not a danger to it.  Just as the poor person is an essential condition to our practice of giving, and the annoying person is an essential condition to our practice of patience, so too the arising of any object which gives rise to a deluded tendency within our mind becomes an essential condition for our practice of training the mind.

Possess the three inseparables. 

This precept advises us that our body, speech, and mind should be inseparable from virtue.

How can we keep our body inseparable from virtue.  For me, the best way is to constantly remind myself that I have given my body away to all living beings as a servant.  Everything I do with my body, I try do for others.  We can use our body to help others in many ways, for example we can use our body to cook dinner for others at home, do our jobs at work, or even type something nice on a computer.  We do not have to actually help people with our body to keep in inseparable from virtue, it suffices to not harm any living thing with it.  For example, we can be careful to avoid stepping on insects or drive carefully in a car.  The best way we can keep our body inseparable from virtue is to view it as our emanation sent into this world to benefit living beings.  We are actually the guru deity, and our ordinary self is our first emanation in this world.  Likewise, we can generate the guru deity’s body inside our body, so that when others interact with us they are actually in the presence of the living Heruka.

With our speech, we can adopt a policy of “never saying anything bad about anyone ever.”  Such a policy alone is an all-day endeavor.  The speech of most people most of the time is negative, constantly criticizing others, talking behind their backs, etc.  In today’s world, especially on the internet, it is not at all uncommon for people to be incredibly mean with their words.  Since everyone else is doing it, it is very easy for us to start doing so as well.  When we do speak, we should be very vigilant to have everything we say help the situation in some way.  Since conflict abounds, instead of taking sides, try point out the common ground.  When somebody is being verbally attacked by somebody else, try calm the situation down.  When somebody does something good, make a point of praising it.    It is said that the tone with which we say something often conveys more than the content of our words, so we should always be mindful to speak kindly.  If we have the opportunity to give Dharma teachings or provide others with practical advice, we should do so.  The best way we can keep our speech inseparable from virtue is to always imagine that our speech is mounted on the mantras of our highest yoga tantra deity.  We imagine that as our words enter the other person’s ears, the mantra enters their heart.  And while we may be talking about sports or politics, because our words are mounted on the mantra, we imagine that the meaning understood by the other person is perfect explanations of Dharma.

We generally can keep our mind inseparable from virtue by thinking about the Dharma all of the time.  When we first start practicing, it feels as if the Dharma is on one side and our life is on the other.  To overcome this, when we practice we should use the examples from our own life to demonstrate the truth of Dharma; and during the meditation break we should take the Dharma we have learned and apply it as the solution to our daily problems.  If we practice in this way, the gap between our life and our practice will gradually close until eventually no matter what we encounter and what we do during the day, mentally we are thinking about Dharma all of the time.  The best way we can keep our mind inseparable from virtue is to maintain the recognition that everything that arises is a mere karmic appearance of mind arising from our clear light mind.  All things are equally empty, and emptiness is unchanging, so our mind can be constantly mixed with emptiness while we go about our day.  If we train in this way, soon the appearance of our day will come to resemble karmic clouds passing through the space of our mind.  We will stop getting caught up in samsaric dramas and instead stay focused on responding with wisdom and virtue.

Finally, we can learn to train in Tantric pure view, viewing all forms as manifestations of Buddha’s form body, all sounds as the mantra calling us home to the pure land, and all thoughts as manifestations of clear light Dharmakaya.

We continue with our discussion of the three non-denerations.  The third non-degeneration is not allowing our mindfulness to degenerate.  When Geshe-la first opened the temple in Manjushri, he spent three days teaching only one thing, namely we need to pay attention to what we are doing while we are practicing.  He said the methods we have work perfectly, what is lacking is focus on our part while doing them.  If we do them without distraction, they will swiftly produce all of the results we desire.  If we continue to do them with distraction, they will never work even if we practice for many lifetimes.  In short, we have been given everything, all we need to do is concentrate.

Distractions are like a thief which rob us of our spiritual life.  Distractions are our main enemy.  If we can overcome them, the rest of the path will come easily.  Distractions are like samsara’s front-line defenses.  If we can break through them, the rest of the war is easy.  Geshe-la said in Portugal that distractions are like the clouds which obscure the sun of Dharma from illuminating the sky of our mind.

What is a distraction?  A distraction in general is any thought other than what we have decided to focus on.  If we have decided to focus on our sadhana, a distraction is anything else.  More broadly, though, we can say a distraction is any non-Dharma thought.  If throughout the day we encounter countless different objects, but we respond to them with countless different Dharma minds, then even though our mind did not remain on only one thing throughout the day, our mind was never distracted.  In the meditation session, this would be known a mental wandering – moving from one Dharma object to another as opposed to focusing on our chosen one.  But during the meditation break, we should content ourselves with just keeping our mind focused on the Dharma.

The two most important mental factors for training in concentration are mindfulness and alertness.  Mindfulness essentially means remembering our Dharma understanding.  If we consider the contemplations on emptiness and our mind is led to a clear conclusion that everything is a dream, then our mindfulness tries to “not forget” that conclusion for as long as possible.  Our mindfulness maintains the continuum of our “not forgetting” or our “remembering.”  The longer we remember this conclusion, the more familiar we become with it, and the more deeply it penetrates into the different levels of our mind.  Venerable Tharchin explains that when we listen to or read Dharma books, we gain an intellectual understanding of somebody else’s wisdom.  When we contemplate this intellectual understanding, we transform what was their wisdom into our own wisdom.  We realize for ourselves, “yes, this is true.”  We then familiarize ourself with this understanding again and again without forgetting until eventually this realization becomes what he calls “an acquisition of our personality.”  Take wishing love for example.  Through listening to and reading Dharma instructions we can gain an intellectual understanding of what it means to purely love others.  Through contemplating this again and again, we can transform our own mind into a state of loving others.  Through familiarizing ourself with this feeling of love through meditation, we make love into an acquisition of our personality – we become a loving person.  All of this progression is essentially a deepening of our mindfulness of love.

Alertness is essentially being aware of what is going on in our mind.  Distractions sneak up on us like a Tiger in tall grass.  We don’t see them coming and then it is too late.  Alertness cuts all of the grass within our mind so we can see distractions coming long before they make it to us.  Distractions usually occur very subtly and slowly, in a way that we don’t even notice.  We thought we were meditating on our precious human life, but we realize five minutes later we have been planning our day.  Alertness protects against that.  Alertness is like a security guard within our mind that is constantly on the lookout for any threats to our mindfulness.  The key to alertness is simple:  we need to want to focus on our object of Dharma more than we want to think about other things.  It is as simple as that.  So everything we become distracted, we should ask ourselves, “what is more beneficial to think about, this object of Dharma of my samsaric object of drama I was thinking about?”  If we do this again and again, we will quickly rewire our focus away from distractions and onto our Dharma objects.  We are desire realm beings, so we do what we want.  We need to want to focus.  If we do, alertness comes easy, and with alertness our mindfulness is left undisturbed.

We continue with our discussion of the three non-degenerations.  The second non-degeneration is effort in our practice of Dharma.  With faith, effort comes naturally.  It is helpful to dig a little deeper to understand what is faith, and what is its relationship to effort.  We can take as an example the instruction to put others first.  It begins with believing faith.  Believing faith is not blind faith, rather it is faith based on a valid reason.  Valid reasons can be logical reasonings or personal experience.  So we contemplate from our own experience all of the different disadvantages of self-cherishing and all of the advantages of cherishing others.  Considering these things, we can then come to a belief that being selfish is the cause of all suffering and cherishing others is the cause of all happiness.  We don’t know this yet with direct wisdom, but we believe it to be true based on valid reasons.  Believing faith then transforms into admiring faith.  Admiring faith is an appreciation of the good qualities we believe in.  We can admire those who cherish only others, and admire how the world would be different if everybody did so.  This admiring faith naturally leads to wishing faith.  Wishing faith is wishing that we ourself possessed the good qualities we are admiring.  We think, “wouldn’t it be great if I could completely abandon my self-cherishing and cherish only others.  I really want this.”  This wishing faith naturally leads to effort.  Wanting this good quality, we then naturally put effort into the practices that lead to such qualities.  We are happy and eager to do so.  On the basis of this joyful effort, we then gain personal experience of the truth of the instructions.  We see for ourself that it works and it is great.  This personal experience then gives us an additional valid reason for reinforcing our believing faith, and so the cycle continues at ever deeper levels.

It is important to remind ourselves again and again that effort, by definition, is taking delight in virtue.  It is enjoying training in virtue.  If we have no enjoyment, but are instead practicing motivated by guilt, then even if we do intense retreat for many years, we actually have no effort.  And without genuine effort, we will have no results.  Many many people practice motivated by feelings of “I really should do this” or guilt thinking, “I took commitments, but I am doing nothing about them.”  In France, for example, the entire educational and cultural model is based on making people feel bad about what they are not doing to encourage them to do more.  This is a real obstacle to the flourishing of genuine effort in France because they carry this cultural norm over into their practice.  They beat themselves up about what a bad practitioner they are, and constantly judge themselves (and others) for what they are not doing instead of being happy about what they are doing.  French teachers likewise can sometimes fall into this trap and use similar negative reinforcement techniques with their students.  On the surface, it seems to work because people “do more Dharma things.”  But the joy is lacking, and without joy, there is no real practice.

Without joy in our practice, we can quickly become depressed, heavy and despondent.  People come to a center, and instead of finding “the happiest place on earth” they find a bunch of spiritual neurotics!  Self-flagellation becomes the norm.  Quite naturally, people leave; and those who do say are the self-haters.  The more they study the Dharma, the more clearly they see all of the different ways in which they are horrible and falling short, so that the more Dharma they study the more depressed and self-loathing they become.  I am not saying all French Sangha are like this, not at all.  What I am saying is anybody who doesn’t know how to practice joyfully, French or not, quickly becomes exactly like this.

There are two keys to maintaining joy in our practice.  The first is to completely and totally forget about results.  Ghandi said, “full effort [itself] is full victory.”  The meaning is trying alone is success.  Why?  Because it is our trying that creates karmic causes, regardless of whether or not we succeed.  We need to mentally forget about this life, and use what little time we have left exclusively for the sake of storing up good karmic seeds for the long road ahead in our future lives.  I mentioned before that I have a dear friend in a psychiatric hospital who struggles daily with psychotic and harmful thoughts.  He can’t stop himself, such thoughts just keep coming.  At first, he would work himself up into quite a panic thinking, “moment by moment I am creating causes to be reborn in hell due to these psychotic thoughts, and I can’t stop myself.  Surely, it would be better if were dead.”  But here, we need to make a very clear distinction between “effects that are ripening” and “causes I am creating.”  The psychotic tendency is an effect that is ripening.  How one responds to that tendency is what causes we are creating.  Far from creating countless causes to be reborn in hell, because he was applying opponents and resisting such tendencies (moral discipline of restraint), he was actually creating countless causes for future precious human rebirths!  If he had 50 psychotic thoughts in an hour and he applied effort to oppose all 50 of them, then in that hour he created the causes for 50 precious human lives with which he can continue with his practice.  When he understood things in this way, he would think, “I am the luckiest person alive.  My psychotic tendencies are actually a spiritual jackpot that keeps paying out!”  This is perfect.

The second key is to remind ourselves that in the Dharma, there is no bad, there is only good and even better.  Instead of being unhappy about what we are not doing, we need to choose to be happy about what we are doing.  The glass is never half-empty, or even mostly empty, it is always at least partially full.  Just because we could do better doesn’t mean what we are doing is somehow bad.  If we judge what we do do as being worthless and inadequate, we create the causes to abandon even that.  If instead we rejoice in what we are doing as the foundation for everything that follows, then we create the causes to do more.  This is crucially important to realize.

Taken together, just being happy to create good causes irrespective of results and always choosing to be happy with what we are doing, not unhappy about what we are not doing, we will easily be able to maintain joy in our practice.  With joy comes effort, with effort comes attainments.

Become acquainted with the three non-degenerations.  

The three non-degenerations are:  faith in Dharma, effort in our practice of Dharma, and not allowing our mindfulness to degenerate.

Many people come into Buddhism motivated by a rejection of faith-based forms of religion.  For the modern, scientific mind, Buddhism can easily be understand as an inner science.  Indeed, we are encouraged to practice in this way, testing the instructions for their validity and usefulness in our life.  Blind faith is rejected, and we are encouraged to develop our own wisdom realizing the truth of the instructions for ourselves.  We are explicitly told to not believe somebody just because they are called a Buddha, but instead to examine things for ourselves.  Many people think of Buddhism more as a philosophy of life, or a time-tested form of auto-psycho-therapy.  All of these things are true, and such an approach very much appeals to the modern mind.  I remember when I first started practicing, I told my teacher, “I agree with and have no problem with basically everything in the Dharma, except this whole faith thing.”  For me, faith was for people who didn’t know how to think for themselves.  It was a convenient means of avoiding having good answers to the hard questions.  In fact, faith, to my understanding was where any religion was weakest, and wherever we were told to have faith is exactly where we should worry.  When we hear people talking about “faith” and “blessings” and “Geshe-la said this and Geshe-la said that” we quickly become very critical and we wonder whether we have found ourself in some crazed cult!

Many people come into the Dharma with similar attitudes.  But there comes a point in our practice where faith and reliance become the giant elephant in the room we can no longer avoid.  I had been practicing for many years without really relying or having much faith at all.  I was then doing a retreat, everything was going quite nicely, and then all of a sudden I came to a screeching halt.  Nothing was working.  I was dead in the water.  I didn’t know what to do.  I then called up my teacher and explained what had happened, and she laughed at me.  She said, “you don’t know what to do, do you?”  And I said no.  She said, “you can’t do anything can you?”  And I said no.  She then said, “well I don’t know either nor can I help you.  You need to start your practice completely over from scratch.”  I asked, “how?”  And she said, “go sit down on your cushion, generate a wish to rebuild your practice from scratch and then with faith request blessings for guidance as to what you should do.  When you get an answer, do that.  When you need clarification, ask for guidance again.  Continue in this way until you have rebuilt your practice.”

Feeling like I had tried everything else, I then gave it a go.  At first, nothing.  But then, an “idea” popped into my head, so I started running with that.  Then another, then another.  I felt like I was being guided by the hand, step by step, being shown how I should rebuild my practice.  But this time, the fundamental difference was, I was being shown how to practice through reliance, not through my own effort with my own mind.  Instead of reciting the words of the sadhana in my mind myself, I request that the guru practice in my mind for me.  Instead of trying to understand the meaning, I request blessings that the meaning be revealed.  Instead of trying to understand the points of contemplation myself, I request the guru to explain it to me in a way I can understand.  What used to be just me with my mind turned into me with my guru.  I realized what still to this day is the single most important thing I have realized on the path:  If I am truly intelligent, I will rely upon my guru’s mind alone.

If we have a choice of using a bicycle or a Ferrari, which do we pick?  If our choice is between a hammer or a nail gun, which do we use?  In the same way, if our choice is relying upon our ordinary mind or relying upon the guru’s mind, which do we do?  I consider myself pretty intelligent, but I am a fool compared to the guru.  His powers of reasoning and concentration far surpass my own; his heart of love and compassion warm the entire universe; his wisdom illuminates all.  In our Tantric practice in particular, the inner engine which makes it work is faith.  The guru-deity is already enlightened, all we need to do is impute our I onto his body and mind, and the rest happens effortlessly.  Once we have a taste for reliance, we can’t help but ask ourselves, “why would we practice any other way?”

Gen-la Losang said, “at the end of the day, there is really only one practice, and that is faith.”  One of my other teachers said, “we normally pray as a last resort after we have tried everything else, but we are spiritual people.  Praying should be our first response, not our last.”  I cannot speak to other religions, but in Kadampa Buddhism, with our teachings on the wisdom realizing emptiness, faith is best understood as emptiness in action.  Venerable Tharchin said, “what is true or not is not important, what matters is what is most beneficial to believe.”  It is because things are empty that we can believe in different ways and actually reconstruct a new, pure reality.  If things were not empty, we could not do this, and faith, frankly, makes no sense.  But it is because things are empty that faith works.  We have faith in things not because they are somehow objectively true, but rather because by believing in them we rewire our minds and karmically reconstruct our world.

We continue with our discussion of the three main causes of our Dharma practice.  The second main cause necessary for our Dharma practice is to rely upon a Spiritual Guide who teaches the Dharma.  When we have a legal problem, what do we do?  We rely upon a lawyer.  When we have a dental problem, what do we do?  We rely upon a dentist.  In exactly the same way, when we have an inner problem of delusions, what do we do?  We rely upon a Spiritual Guide.  If we don’t know how to get to where we want to go, we stop and ask for directions.  If our wish to get to the pure land, we quite naturally need to stop and ask for instructions.

Many people think they don’t need a spiritual guide.  They may think, “I will rely upon Dharma books.”  But who wrote the Dharma books?  A Spiritual Guide.  If there are some points that we don’t understand, what are we to do?  Other people think, “Buddha Shakyamuni did it on his own, so will I.”  Besides this being an incredibly arrogant thing equating ourselves to Buddha Shakyamuni, from a purely practical point of view isn’t it far easier to rely upon somebody who has already travelled the path than to forge out on our own.  Even if we were successful in the end, surely it would take us longer to get there.  And during that time, we would suffer more and all those who we would otherwise have been helping if we had already attained enlightenment earlier will be left to suffer for longer.  Why should they be made to suffer just so we can prove we can do it on our own?  But the reality is we most likely couldn’t succeed in the end.  We would become lost or discouraged.  We might be able to make some progress, but it is far more likely we would get stuck somewhere.  There is nothing in samsara that points to it being all a dream.  We can look everywhere within the dream and not have a clue we are dreaming, much less have any indication for how to wake up.  Only the Spiritual Guide, a being who abides beyond the dream but who nonetheless has the power to enter our dream, can lead us out.

The Spiritual Guide helps us in more ways that just giving us flawless instructions of what we need to do.  He also blesses, or inspires, our mind to put them into practice.  His blessings encourage our effort, and his blessings ripen previously planted seeds within our mind in such a way that the light of wisdom begins to dawn within our mind.  If truth be told, it is impossible for us to engage in any virtue without the blessings and inspiration of the Spiritual Guide.  The tendencies within our mind are almost all negative.  We know this because we know what a struggle it is to do the right things.  Absent the Spiritual Guide’s blessings, we wouldn’t stand a chance.  All virtue arises in dependence upon blessings.  Absent these blessings, we would never have engaged in any virtue.  Without virtue, we would know no happiness.

When we start practicing the Tantric path, reliance upon the spiritual guide becomes almost the totality of our practice.  The logic here is simple:  the Spiritual Guide’s mind already possesses all of the realizations and qualities of a Buddha.  We merely need to download them into our mind and then we will too.  Having access to a source from which we can download these realizations is essential.

The third and final main cause for our Dharma practice is having all of the necessary conditions for our practice.  Externally, these include access to teachings or books, time to practice, adequate food, clothing and shelter, and that’s about it!  Internally, these include the wish to practice, faith in our teacher’s instructions, and the wisdom which knows how to use any circumstance as an opportunity to practice.  Since everything is equally empty, everything is equally potentially perfect for our Dharma practice.  The problem is not the circumstance, it is our lack of wisdom which sees how the circumstances we have are in fact perfect for us.  To assemble this third main cause, externally of course we need do whatever it takes to gain access to teachings, make time to practice, and have enough money for food, clothing and shelter.  But internally, our main task is to rely upon our Dharma protector, Dorje Shugden.  Dorje Shugden’s main job is to arrange all of the necessary outer, inner and secret conditions we need for our swiftest possible enlightenment.  In dependence upon our reliance upon him, he will activate the karmic potentials on our mind to have the necessary outer conditions and he will bless our mind with the wisdom to see how what has been emanated is in fact perfect.  He attained enlightenment to do this for us.  All we need to do is ask for his help.  If we do, he will be by our side forever.

Practice the three main causes. 

There are three main causes that are essential for successful Dharma practice:  the wish to practice Dharma, relying upon a spiritual guide who teaches Dharma, and having the necessary conditions to practice Dharma.  Each of these is fairly self-explanatory, if we do not wish to practice Dharma, we won’t do it.  If we don’t rely upon a Spiritual Guide to who teaches the Dharma, we won’t know what to practice.  And if we do not have the necessary conditions to practice Dharma, we won’t be able to even if we want to.  If we have these three main causes, then there is nothing that can stop us.  We will continue to practice and progress until enlightenment is attained.  So the relevant question is how do we assemble these three main causes.

We assemble the first cause, the wish to practice Dharma, by correctly identifying what our problem is.  Normally we think our problem is a lack of money, the annoying people in our life and our government.  Geshe-la says we need to distinguish between out outer problem and our inner problem.  To illustrate this, he uses the example of our car breaking down.  If our car breaks down, we normally say, “I have a problem.”  This is not correct.  Our car has a problem, we do not.  Our problem is our deluded mental reaction to our car breaking down.  This deluded reaction creates an unpleasant feeling within our mind which leaves us unhappy.  Dharma has no power whatsoever to fix our car, we need a mechanic for that.  But Dharma practice can solve our inner problem of our unhappy mind.  If we solve our inner problem, we have no more problem.  We still need to get our car fixed, but it will not be a problem for us.  The same reasoning applies to all of our other outer and inner problems.

The lamrim meditations are, if we check, nothing more than a series of meditations helping us identify what exactly is our problem.  If we correctly diagnose the problem, then the solution becomes self-evident.  It is because we are confused about the nature of our problem that we apply the wrong solutions, and despite considerable effort on our part, we remain unhappy.  In this life, our problem is our deluded reaction to what happens in our life.  Looking beyond this life, we realize our problem is we will eventually die and, due to all of the negative karma on our mind, we will quite likely fall into the lower realms.  If we die with a negative state of mind, a common reaction we have to unpleasant circumstances, of which death is the most unpleasant, then it will activate negative karma, which will propel us into a lower rebirth where we can remain trapped for incalculably long periods of time.

Looking deeper, even if we manage to avoid a lower rebirth in our next life, since our mind is still controlled by delusions, in particular by self-grasping ignorance, we have no freedom or control to choose our next rebirth.  Without choice, at the time of our death we will spin the roulette wheel of samsara, and no matter where we land we lose.  For as long as we are in samsara, we are, for all practical purposes, in a perpetual slaughterhouse where we are born only to be tormented and eventually slaughtered, only to be revived again to start the whole process over again.  Such a situation is completely intolerable and we must break free.  In reality, we are trapped in a perpetual nightmare from which we can’t wake up.  This is our situation, and we must escape from it.

But we are not alone.  All of our friends, family and loved ones – indeed all living beings – are likewise trapped in the same nightmarish slaughterhouse.  It is not enough for us to escape, but we must help everyone break free.  Noone need suffer.  Everyone can abide in the eternal bliss of enlightenment.  At present we lack the ability to help others escape.  This is our problem.

If we understand our problem, then we naturally look for a solution.  There is nothing in samsara that can help us solve the problems of being in samsara.  Samsaric solutions, such as mechanics, dentists, lawyers, etc., can help us with our outer problems, but they can do nothing for our inner problems of delusions, negative karma and so forth.  What can help us?  If our problem is our mind, we need something that can help us change our mind.  The Dharma is exactly such a method.  It teaches us how to maintain inner peace in this life; it teaches us how to purify our negative karma, accumulate merit and receive the special blessings of the Buddhas at the time of our death; it teaches us how to gain complete control over our mind by permanently eradicating all of our delusions, thus enabling us to wake up from the nightmare of samsara; it teaches us how we can develop within ourselves all of the qualities of a Buddha, such as the minds of great compassion, love, generosity, patient acceptance, moral discipline, effort, concentration and wisdom.  It teaches us how to acquire these qualities quickly by explaining how we can effectively download them into our mind from our highest yoga tantra deities.  In short, the Dharma provides us with a solution to all of our problems in this and all our future lives, and it gives us the ability to help others do the same.  It is the solution to all our inner problems.  Seeing this, we will naturally be very motivated to practice Dharma and we will have assembled within our mind the first of the three main causes.