The Workshop is in the Mind

Something To Think About Series #94 Thought of the day from Venerable Robina Courtin

At the base of many disturbing emotions lies fear.  Just look at an angry person's face. We must learn the mechanics of these emotions – their causes and effects. 3:41| Extracted from teachings given at Vajrayana Institute, September 22, 2017. Full teaching here.

What has love got to do with it? Love and compassion is what drives most people to a spiritual path, but it is in fact more advanced. If you look at the Lamrim, the packaging of Buddha's teachings, they're in a nice orderly way, according to the capacity of the disciple. I prefer to call it - junior school, high school, and university. Love and compassion are taught in university. That's a big surprise to us. There's the wisdom wing and the compassion wing, a bird needs two wings. The wisdom wing, which is all about you, is like self compassion, self love. Buddha doesn't talk like that, but it's how we talk in the west, it's how you take care of yourself. So of course if you hear about self love, you hear about having a relax and a nice massage, you can do that too, but that's not Buddha's approach. If you don't start working on your mind, then you can never change, you'll never get happy. The Buddha's first teachings - the four noble truths - he's telling us exactly what to do if we want to be happy. Guess what! - it's not to get someone else to make us happy, or to get the nice cake or vacation - but to work on our own mind! That means we have to understand what he means. What he means is that in the mind we have a bunch of neuroses, the voices of ego, attachment, anger, and the rest. Surprisingly to us, they don't come from outside, they're triggered by the outside, but the cause of them is in our own mind. These tendencies are the source of our suffering. So self love for the Buddha is getting rid of these, working on your mind, that's how you get happy. That's how you take care of yourself. Very surprising! Then when you've done that, to the degree that you've done it, is the degree to which you open your eyes and realise we're all in the same boat. So then you're able to understand others, and now you can help them, by giving them love and compassion, kindness and patience. It's very logical. Why is it difficult to have love and compassion for others? If we haven't worked on our own minds, this is the problem, we leap in and make a mess half of the time, because we haven't sorted out our own minds. We haven't identified attachment, we haven't identified the source of our own pain. So we rush out and try to be kind and loving to others and then wonder why things go wrong. Or why you're out there helping others and you feel like you're being abused and misused for being a nice person. Or you help others during difficult times and you get dragged down and depressed by the amount of suffering. So we assume that being kind to others is why we're suffering. No - you are not suffering because you are kind to others, you are suffering because you have attachment. We have to work on the wisdom wing first, really work on our own minds, mind our own business, work on our body, speech, and mind. Buddha's teachings on the four noble truths are addressed to us, this is the inner job, like retreat mode. This is absolutely vital, it's the starting point for practice. On the basis of success at this, you can see others, and now you can begin to be of benefit to others, without making a mess. Questions include - what does His Holiness mean when he says no enemy inside - no enemy outside, compassion for the person who harms another, getting angry at our self, how do we transform love for family into love without attachment, 'good enough dear' by Lama Yeshe, 'this is a pretty cup' is an opinion but is 'this is a cup' also an opinion, sensory and mental consciousness, can a person believe in a creator and also Buddha's teachings, is forgiveness a step on the path or is it just about the I, and techniques to work with strong aversion? Valentine's Day 2024 teaching and Q & A at Tse Chen Ling Center for Tibetan Buddhist Studies in San Francisco.

Something To Think About Series #329 Thought of the day from Venerable Robina Courtin

Something To Think About Series #328 Thought of the day from Venerable Robina Courtin

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Something To Think About Series #325 Thought of the day from Venerable Robina Courtin

Something To Think About Series #324 Thought of the day from Venerable Robina Courtin

Something To Think About Series #323 Thought of the day from Venerable Robina Courtin

Venerable Robina is known for her clarity in presenting Buddhist concepts in a straightforward, no-nonsense and compassionate way, and will teach on the topic of dependent origination and emptiness. Lama Tsongkhapa writes lyrically about Lord Buddha's teachings on dependent arising – the "king of logics" to prove emptiness, as Lama Yeshe puts it. With this perfect view, Je Rinpoche says, we can never "fall into the abyss of the great mistake" of nihilism, one of the commonest misconceptions about emptiness. Over two sessions, we will investigate how in his gradual path literature he skillfully leads us to the eradication of ego-grasping, the primordial assumption of a fear-driven, bereft, separate self, which simply doesn't exist. We start by applying the law of karma – an example of the first level of dependent arising: cause and effect -which gradually counteracts our pervasive feelings of hopelessness and self-pity, causing us to realize that we are the source of our own happiness and suffering. Next, we get to the root of the problem by becoming our own therapists: delving deep into our mind and identifying our delusions – attachment, aversion, jealousy and the rest – and recognizing that they are fabrications rooted in ego-grasping. Now, combining our practice with Bodhicitta, we are equipped to understand the subtler levels of dependent arising and to use this logic to uproot ego-grasping itself. Questions include - is there a particular definition for the wrong views, is there a universe or an atom, is the mind the I, what does bringing the two truths together mean, is the mind a random stream of consciousness that is controlled by the ignorance of conditioning if there is no owner, and is the conventional I training my intention?  Mahamudra Centre for Universal Unity, North Island, New Zealand, 10th-11th May 2025.

Something To Think About Series #322 Thought of the day from Venerable Robina Courtin

Something To Think About Series #321 Thought of the day from Venerable Robina Courtin

Something To Think About Series #320 Thought of the day from Venerable Robina Courtin

Something To Think About Series #319 Thought of the day from Venerable Robina Courtin

Something To Think About Series #318 Thought of the day from Venerable Robina Courtin

Something To Think About Series #317 Thought of the day from Venerable Robina Courtin

Venerable Robina is known for her clarity in presenting Buddhist concepts in a straightforward, no-nonsense and compassionate way, and will teach on the topic of dependent origination and emptiness. Lama Tsongkhapa writes lyrically about Lord Buddha's teachings on dependent arising – the "king of logics" to prove emptiness, as Lama Yeshe puts it. With this perfect view, Je Rinpoche says, we can never "fall into the abyss of the great mistake" of nihilism, one of the commonest misconceptions about emptiness. Over two sessions, we will investigate how in his gradual path literature he skillfully leads us to the eradication of ego-grasping, the primordial assumption of a fear-driven, bereft, separate self, which simply doesn't exist. We start by applying the law of karma – an example of the first level of dependent arising: cause and effect -which gradually counteracts our pervasive feelings of hopelessness and self-pity, causing us to realize that we are the source of our own happiness and suffering. Next, we get to the root of the problem by becoming our own therapists: delving deep into our mind and identifying our delusions – attachment, aversion, jealousy and the rest – and recognizing that they are fabrications rooted in ego-grasping. Now, combining our practice with Bodhicitta, we are equipped to understand the subtler levels of dependent arising and to use this logic to uproot ego-grasping itself. Summary of the teaching - The teachings in the first and second scopes of the Lamrim. The first one, Karma is the implicit teaching that we really start to get, it's a brilliant example of dependent arising, so it can help us loosen the grip of ego already. Second, when we get to the middle scope we start studying the mind, how these neuroses, delusions, afflictions, are these conceptual states of mind that distort and exaggerate the status of things; we start to understand emptiness and dependent arising, and how ego grasping is the root misconception. Attachment exaggerates the deliciousness of the cake, aversion exaggerates the ugliness of the cake (after five pieces), and they are both (and all the delusions are) rooted in the deepest assumption, which is ignorance, that imposes upon the delicious cake, intrinsic, inherent delicious cake. Ignorance exaggerates the very ontological status of the delicious cake itself. That's underneath the other delusions, and that's why it's much harder to unpack it. So start with the body and speech, control your body and speech, then begin to control the branch delusions, and now we begin (plus with Bodhichitta) to be prepared to get to the root delusion, to uproot that by realising emptiness and getting the hell out of Samsara and becoming a Buddha. Questions about - eons of practice, defining sentient beings, subtle impermanence not being emptiness, and is ego grasping purely a human form of suffering?  Mahamudra Centre for Universal Unity, North Island, New Zealand, 10th-11th May 2025.

Something To Think About Series #316 Thought of the day from Venerable Robina Courtin

Something To Think About Series #315 Thought of the day from Venerable Robina Courtin