The Workshop is in the Mind

Something To Think About Series #244

Thought of the day from Venerable Robina Courtin

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.

Something To Think About Series #243

Thought of the day from Venerable Robina Courtin

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Thought of the day from Venerable Robina Courtin

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Thought of the day from Venerable Robina Courtin

Ven. Robina leads the purification practice of the Four Opponent Powers.

Lawudo Trek | March 30, 2019 | Lawudo Main Gompa, Solu Khumbu

Something To Think About Series #240

Thought of the day from Venerable Robina Courtin

Something To Think About Series #239

Thought of the day from Venerable Robina Courtin

All sentient beings are caught in the trap of suffering in the realms of existence. Bodhicitta is a mind that wishes to free beings from suffering and bring them to the state of enlightenment. A bodhisattva is a person who has that bodhicitta mind, is a practitioner of the enlightenment thought which is the aspiration to achieve complete enlightenment as a perfect Buddha for the benefit of oneself and all other sentient beings. Love and compassion are the forces that motivated all activities of Bodhisattvas. Love is a strong wish that aspires to attain happiness for all sentient beings and compassion is the state of mind that wishes each being to be freed from all sufferings or sorrows, great compassion is the root wisdom.

We're talking about the compassion wing, how to cultivate Bodhichitta. This outrageous attitude really, that's based upon incredible compassion and love, that is the thought never to give up, being of benefit to sentient beings, whoever is in front of you, it's your job to help them. Never to give up long term, on working life after life perfecting all these qualities, and the final piece, the six perfections, the final stages of the Bodhisattva path. To never give up on sentient beings.

What I keep emphasising is the necessity to have done some work on yourself first. Before you can really establish and develop this outrageous levels of compassion that the Mahayana teachings of the Buddha tell us that we're capable of. It's not possible if you still are caught up in your own misery, it's literally impossible to have compassion for anybody because you can't see past your own nose. It's fairly logical. Forget yourself, think of people you know who are really suffering mentally, they're absolutely absorbed in themself. Suffering could be in front of them, they can't even see it.

This is the whole point about the wisdom wing work. All the fundamental teachings of the Buddha, about karma and the mind, he's addressing that to us, that's the work we have to do to see our own suffering, to work on our own self, to see our own amazing potential. Then the consequence of that is two things, one - you become more content, fulfilled, and self respectful; but two - inevitably because you're removing your own neuroses, you're removing the barriers that ego has constructed between self and other. So the more you work on your own mind, the more content you become and the more connected to others. It's just a logical process psychologically but we need to understand it, we need to see it.

So the starting point in these outrageous levels of love and compassion that culminate in Bodhichitta, is the cultivation of equanimity. This heartfelt recognition that the friend, enemy, and stranger are equal to each other from one point of view; they each want to be happy and each don't want to suffer. Why do we want that? Well because love is an expression of - may you be happy. That's the definition, the thought may you be happy. Compassion - may you not suffer. Right now we only have love and compassion for our beloveds. But if we step aside, get ourselves out of the equation, and we see these three people separately from us, we're going to see that friend, enemy, and stranger are just projections of our own delusions. We see the universe in terms of how they fulfil our needs. We should be embarrassed how self centred it is! We're trying to step out of that and get to see people from their own point of view. Like your mother would say - put yourself in their shoes. It's a very powerful statement.

The brave attitude of the Bodhisattva is the sense of responsibility, what can I do to help? It's like a mother, the mother's sitting on the beach and her child is drowning, of course she's going to have compassion, instantaneously there's going to be compassion. Oh my god look at that suffering, but she's not looking around behind her to see who's going to save her baby, even if she can't swim, this is the point - she knows it's her job. That's a Bodhisattva, they know it's their job. That's what we're trying to cultivate. So it's a very brave attitude, a very courageous attitude, a very big attitude, to think that you want to feel this sense of responsibility as if everybody in the universe is your child. That's pretty profound!

Centrul Budist White Mahakala, Romania, 15th September 2021.

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Something To Think About Series #238

Thought of the day from Venerable Robina Courtin