I think the typical way we live our lives, and the thing we think about most, from the moment we wake up in the morning until we go to sleep, is the outside world, what’s out there, the people, the things. I think we pay very little attention to what goes on in the mind. We pay a lot of attention to our mind when we study something, it’s all about the mind learning all these new thoughts, new concepts. So there we really do concentrate on the contents of the mind. But when it comes to our emotions, maybe we don’t have many methods. We don’t even notice our emotions until they are exploding out of the mouth, or until you can’t get out of bed one morning because you’re so depressed.

The Buddhist approach is quite practical, contrary to our usual views, actually what goes on in our mind is the main player in our life, not the external events. So with that in mind, it’s necessary to pay attention and to work with what’s in our mind, to be able to become familiar with our emotions and feelings.

So the Buddhist approach has this very practical little technique that everybody hears about these days, people are using it, it’s called mindfulness meditation. A very practical technique, and it’s based on this technique that the Indians invented. The Dalai Lama said, it was these amazing Indians, more than 3000 years ago, who were the ones who began this incredible investigation into the nature of self. They cultivated this technique that mindfulness meditation is based on, it’s actually called concentration meditation. It’s a really sophisticated psychological skill that enables a person to access these much more subtle levels of our own mind. Levels of mind that we don’t even posit as existing in our modern psychological models.

The trouble is as soon as we say the word meditation, we get all kind of mystical. This technique enables you to develop this really subtle powerful concentration. What these Indians did was basically unpack, unravel, and deeply understand the contents of the human mind. They mapped the mind. When we talk like that these days in the modern world, we’re imagining a person with a microscope mapping the brain. But that’s not what we’re discussing here, it’s an internal process.

This technique that these people invented is one of the central techniques still in Buddhism today. This psychological skill that enables us to get this really refined concentration to subdue the grosser, more berserk levels of our thoughts in our mind, to make it more subdued. This technique, it’s not religious in it’s nature, it’s the mind. Buddha doesn’t have a word like soul or spirit. Why would you want to learn to concentrate, what’s the benefit? This is Buddha’s expertise, on the basis of getting this subtle focus, you become super familiar with the contents of your own thoughts, feelings, emotions, unconscious, subconscious.

Buddha is not a creator, he doesn’t assert a creator, he is talking about his own experience. His methodology, he says anyone can do it. So what he’s found is that we’ve all got this extraordinary potential in our own mind, based upon the familiarity with it’s contents, this introspective technique, not looking at the brain, but listening to your own elaborate thoughts, feelings, and emotions. Every being has this marvellous potential to radically change the contents of our mind. To become familiar with your own mind, learning to recognise and distinguish all the neurotic, unhappy emotions we have, and be able to distinguish them from the positive ones. It’s not a moralistic issue at all, it’s practical.

Buddha’s main point, we can prove it, it’s not complicated, is that anger, depression, stress, etcetera - first of all they are miserable for us! The very having of them is not comfortable, it's disturbing. Look at how we feel when we’re more kind, more confident, more generous, more patient - it’s not surprising, we are feeling more happy. It’s really down to earth you know.

In our culture, we take for granted all these unhappy emotions, we just think it’s normal. To be a normal human being you’ve got have stress, you’ve got to get angry, you’ve got to get depressed, what to do! It’s normal. We think like this. But the Buddhist approach is that they are not at the core of our being. They’re the cause of our own suffering, and therefore the cause of why things go wrong in our life. The positive qualities are at the core of our being, actually define who we really are, and these we can develop hugely.

Speaking really simply, what stress is, in our busy busy days, all our jobs to do, things to get, to buy, do this, go here, get that, fix this, we’re not going to get everything we want all day, it’s not going to work all the time. It’s the coming together of the wanting of something and then not getting it, that’s the moment the stress hits.

Longku Zentrum, Bern, Switzerland, May 2017.