Every Sunday, I do a talk for about an hour. So yesterday, I said clearly that if you don’t need money, if you really become a true practitioner who lives a very simple life, just surviving and managing, it is great, no doubt. But most of us are not in that category. We can’t. Even if we pretend to be, it will be artificial. We won’t do it nicely. So there is no point. Yes, you do have to make money. But you also need the spiritual path.
Whichever spiritual path you take, that doesn’t matter. There are great spiritual traditions, such as the Judeo-Christian tradition, which is very familiar here, as well as the eastern traditions like Buddhism, Hinduism or anything else. As long as they are great and good ones, it doesn’t matter, honestly.
But it has to be good. What I don’t want you to do is a little bit of black magic and a little bit of white magic and all that, disguised as a great spiritual tradition. That will be a waste of your life. Yes, you may become a powerful black or white magician or whatever. You may be able to do something, like hurt some people, harm somebody.
People who you don’t like you can put down a little bit; people who you love you can bring up a little bit. So that’s magic does, especially black magic. But every politician knows how to do that!
Honestly. Everybody, even business people, will also know how to do it and every one of us really knows how to do that. So for that you don’t need a spiritual path. You do need a spiritual path to have this little gap between you and suffering. When the suffering is really taking place within you, you will be above the suffering and watching it, rather than being completely subject to that torture. Particularly mental sufferings and emotional sufferings are definitely something you can take care of by yourself, very particularly the emotional and mental sufferings.
Physical sufferings come because the physical body is by its own nature, perishable and will go bad. I am sorry. No matter how fresh the greens are that you put inside the refrigerator and do whatever you do, they will gradually become yellow and crumble. That’s what the physical body is. But you can take care of the mind and the emotions. We are tortured now – particularly you younger ones – more by the emotional and mental sufferings than physical ones. Of course, we are all tortured by money anyway, because we don’t have enough. No matter how much we have, it is never enough anyway. So we are tortured by that all the time. But we are tortured more mentally and emotionally. That you can take care of. Tibetan Buddhism shows you how you can take care of it. That’s what you do the meditations for. You really do it yourself in such a way – I don’t know how much I should say. That’s really what it is.
We do have something called sadhana and self-generation. When you look into those sadhanas, those of us who do sadhanas, we generate ourselves into a completely different physical body form to the one we have. We pretend to be switching between our physical body and the one we created, a beautiful, youthful form. We pretend to be switching. We may not be able to switch at the beginning, but there will be a time that you will be able to switch. That is the whole purpose to do that category of meditation, so that when this suffering and torture comes, it will be only the body that is taken and not you. These are the vajrayana special qualities. That opportunity is really actually in front of you. It is not very easy to come in but with a little effort and a little difficulty you will get through. That is, I think, what we offer ultimately in Jewel Heart, not at the beginning.
At the beginning, we show you how to keep your mind calm and it’s a little easy, simple, the usual breathing in and out, and generate a little compassion and a little love and all that. The whole purpose is that at the end you will be able to do that – not only for yourself, but for everybody else. That is the purpose of the vajrayana dharma practice.
You need to know a little bit about mind and about emotions. The Jewel Heart courses are around for that and designed for that and ultimately geared to enlightenment, giving you a little road map how to get there. That is the main thing you will see within Jewel Heart after a number of years that you put in. It is not going to be overnight. It is not going to be one cause or two causes, or one year or two years, but those of you who are in Jewel Heart, many have been doing this for 25, 30 years. Still, we are struggling. It will be there, but it’s not instant. In other words, it’s not an instant tv dinner. It’s not available that way. You need to put in a lot of efforts.
So it sounds like I am here to discourage you, rather than encourage. But better to know that it is not going to be instant, because it is true. It gradually develops.
