The “five powers” are five supports for your practice  •  they are: determination, familiarization, seed of virtue, remorse, and aspiration  •  with determination, you're willing to do what it takes to get from here to there; it is connected with having some sense of why we're doing this all together; with determination, we just keep going  •  familiarization is becoming familiar with our own potential of awakened heart, becoming familiar with our patterns of confusion and awake  •  it is getting to know yourself, peeling away levels of deception and confusion to reveal something real and solid  •  the third power is called seed of virtue; every time we do something beneficial, every time we overcome our hesitation to act in the right way, it plants a seed  •  we can recognize that our practice is not separate from virtuous and moral engagement in the troubles of our world  •  the fourth power is remorse, being willing to face our mistakes and to learn from them  •  remorse teaches us what to let go of, what to learn from, and what to stop doing  •  aspiration is what we might take up instead  •  as we aspire to let go of harm and take up actions that are beneficial, we create a strong underpinning for the quality of virtue  •  these five are called powers because they provide force and power and energy for our practice. 

All beings truly want to be happy and content; so why do we continually and repeatedly create situations for ourselves and others that only lead to greater suffering?  •  so many large-scale problems in the world, such as warfare, famine, hatred, injustice, poverty, can be traced back to just four simple patterns: grasping, greed, hatred and ignorance  • they are tricky, because they start out so simply and innocently  •  for instance, with grasping, maybe we're window shopping and we see a beautiful pen; we admire this beautiful pen, and then we buy it  •   the pen is now our property, and we get really pissed off if someone takes it or damages it  •  along with that grasping comes its companion, greed:  you think, that's really nice, but look at that other beautiful pen  •  I could have two pens, three pens... I could have a pen factory  •  then we can feel justified about destroying anything that gets in our way, which is where aggression and hatred come in  •  and then there's ignorance, which is our tendency to pretend we don't know what we are doing  •  ignorance also has the quality of stubbornly holding certain ideas, and closing our minds to other possibilities  •  we can see the workings of these four patterns in ourselves and in all around us  •  but we also see the four counteracting forces that are also deep within us  •  we don't have to be caught in the force of greed, but we can cultivate generosity  •  we can let loose of grasping  •  we don't have to cling to hatred; we can cultivate love  •  and in response to ignorance, we can apply insight and learning and curiosity  •  by seeing the force of these poisonous habits and emotions, we also are opening to the force of their counterparts.

Many classical Buddhist texts on meditation say that the best place to meditate or to practice is a quiet place in the forest, free from distractions, pleasant and refreshing  •  but what if you're a busy mother? what if you're struggling to pay the bills by taking on three jobs? what if you're dealing with a chronic illness? what then?  •  if we spend all of our time resenting the circumstances we're in, we will be frozen and unable to do anything  •  at some point we simply have to surrender to the circumstances we are in  •  we might not have the time to go on retreat, or to practice, or even have a moment when we're not dealing with our life as it is  •  but we can always practice kindness to ourselves and others; that takes no time  •  we can also apply mindfulness and awareness to whatever we are dealing with  •  and we always have the possibility of opening our mind out beyond our particular personal suffering, to place our suffering in the context of the countless things other beings are going through  •  when we notice our mind freezing or imploding, we can find little openings, little breaks in the momentum  •  we can glimpse little gaps in the solidity of what we're experiencing, little rays of possibility  •  and from those little rays, we can reconnect ourselves over and over when we lose it in the harshness of the circumstances of our life.

In Buddhist psychology, even large scale events and large emotional upheavals can be traced back step-by-step to simple little things  •  just a thought, just an idea, just a memory, just a little emotional undertone can quickly expand and expand until it's out of control  •  you could view this as bad news in seeing how quickly things escalate beyond our control, or you could think of this as good news in that even difficult and intense situations can be traced back and we can unravel them, get to the source, and thereby undercut their power  •  mindfulness practice is a way to observe this process in some detail  •  we can begin to discern what we're actually reacting to when we have our various reactions  •  is it something that’s actually happening? Is it a thought, a preexisting emotion? Are we reacting to what's actually going on, or are we reacting to this knotty mix of thoughts and emotions we carry around with us all the time?  •  it's worth exploring; instead of being caught in a world of preexisting conditions, we could begin to engage directly with what is actually going on here and now.

The Mahayana path, the path of the Bodhisattva warrior of wisdom and compassion, has a great deal to do with how we relate to ourselves and to one another  •  what kind of others do we include in our world?  •  what kind of underlying feelings do we honestly have about the people in our lives and the people we encounter?  •  everybody is worthy of our attention, but usually we engage in a lot of picking and choosing: who is worthy of our attention and who is not  •  the practice I want to briefly introduce is the practice of exchanging oneself for others, which is the basis of tonglen practice — the practice of taking and sending  •  this practice is very simple: it's putting yourself in the shoes of another   •  you can do this for all sorts of possible scenarios, but a very common one is looking at how we relate to people we consider to be our superiors; how we relate to people we consider to be our inferior to us; and how we relate to those we view more or less as equal  •  when we can see situations from different perspectives, we can cultivate the ability to treat others respectfully and with the same regard, whether they're more powerful than us, whether they're less powerful than us, whether they're intimate friends, or whether they're strangers.

The Mahayana, or open path, is the path of the Bodhisattva — the enlightened warrior of wisdom and compassion  •  at the core of the Mahayana path is an outrageous vow, called the Bodhisattva vow, where we vow to emulate the great Bodhisattvas of wisdom and compassionate action  •  the Bodhisattva vow, conventionally speaking, makes no sense at all  •  you vow to save all sentient beings as vast as they are throughout space and time  •  you might think, that's pretty darn presumptuous to make a vow like that; you might even call it absurd, impossible  •  nonetheless, you do it  •  it's crazy to think that you could save all sentient beings, or even hold that thought at all  •  but you keep going, and if you're fortunate, you might be able to save at least someone, or some being, from some level of suffering  •  the vow of the Bodhisattva is not dreamy or romantic; it is grounded in very gritty reality of life for sentient beings of all kinds who suffer greatly  •  but because you see this pattern so clearly, you also see the flip side  •  instead of saying, “Wherever there are sentient beings, there are conflicting emotions,” you could say, “And wherever there are sentient beings, there's wisdom, there's intelligence; there's love and kindness and compassion. There are efforts to help. There is a lessening of pain, sorrow, and suffering.” In approaching the Bodhisattva path, you recognize that both of these patterns are true.

This period of history has been marked by incredible leaps in efficiency: things that used to take a great deal of time and effort can get done more quickly and easily than ever  •  but there are whole areas of reality that can't be accessed by efficiency, no matter how quick or clever or speedy we are  •  in fact, the harder we try and the speedier we get, the further away we are  •  there's a value, at least once in a while, of taking a break from trying to be efficient, from trying to get somewhere faster  •  I’m not talking about rejecting the idea of efficiency, replacing it with some other approach; it's more about recognizing the limits of that attitude and that approach, and our tendency to apply it where it doesn't really fit  •  I have an old dog who I take on “walks,” although they're very, very slow, and he's very, very stubborn  •  if I think of these walks as walks, as exercise, or as trying to get somewhere, accomplish something, I just get more and more frustrated and impatient  •  but when I just drop that whole concept and just relate to the dog sniff by sniff, it's actually quite enjoyable.

In Buddhist psychology, a lot of emphasis is placed on the process of perception because the way we perceive —and misperceive — has tremendous consequences  •  in grade school we are taught an oversimplified view of what it means to have a sense perception: there's an object out there, and there's the eyeball, and the brain, and boom, just like that, a perception  •  you might say, I saw an apple, but of course you never just see an apple — you see everything around the apple as well  •  all of that came into your little eyeball, and you just decided to say, I saw an apple  •  you made a choice; that’s an example of a filter  •  in addition to filtering, we engage in framing: we place things within a particular frame — a frame of assumptions, a frame of agendas, biases, and prejudices, simple associations, or memories  •  and finally there are blind spots, which is when we just don't see things at all, and we don't realize we don't see them  •  as we look into patterns of perception and misperception, we can see how many of our troubles start out just on a simple level of how we first see things  •  by recognizing and seeing through such patterns, there's a chance that our perceptions might begin to be a bit more free and open.

The phrase, “When you lose your mind, come back” describes a lot of what happens in meditation: repeatedly losing our minds, and repeatedly bringing ourselves back  •  the moment we’ve noticed we’ve lost it is the moment we can return  •  what are we returning to? the simplicity of the present moment  •  another phrase Trungpa Rinpoche used quite a lot was, “Don’t think too much”  •  what are the benefits and what are the limits of thinking and conceptual understanding?  •  in the Buddhist tradition scholarship is highly valued  •  however, to be a realized person, to live a dharmic lifestyle, you don’t need to be a scholar; you don’t need to be all that clever  •  “coming back” in this context could mean coming back from the tangle of conceptual notes and fascinations to something immediate and basic and close to the heart  •  Trungpa Rinpoche used the term “intellect and intuition” when referring to these two streams  •  they are not in opposition or at war; there’s a sense of sophistication in the interplay between these two. 

In the dharma a great deal of emphasis is placed on integrating meditation practice and study  •  interwoven throughout is the need for discipline, the need to apply our training to the real challenges of life  •  if you look at the role of discipline in terms of meditation practice and study, it’s very simple: you have to do it  •  it takes effort and commitment to stick with study, to stick with practice  •  even when we are not studying or practicing, discipline is the thread that ties it all together  •  it’s a long-term vision, not a short-term bandage or a magic pill  • discipline in the Buddhist understanding is not a heavy-handed thing—there isn’t a set of commandments or rules; there is no particular punishment and no particular reward  •  all we have is our actions, our ability to notice the results of our actions, and our ability to learn from them and make decisions based on what we observe.