The Joy of Refuge

An investigation of Taking Refuge in the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha in the Buddhist tradition. Cultivating devotion and confidence.

Transcript

It is so nice to see so many familiar faces and thank you for being inside here in such a beautiful day outside.

Today I would like to talk about the joy of taking refuge.

In Buddhism,

At the beginning of retreats,

Often at the beginning even of a practice session,

We do what is called taking refuge.

It is done three times.

It is often done rather automatically without much heart or forethought.

We take refuge in three things.

We take refuge in the Buddha,

We take refuge in the Dharma,

We take refuge in the Sangha.

Then we say for the second time,

I take refuge in the Buddha,

I take refuge in the Dharma,

I take refuge in the Sangha.

And then,

Guess what,

For the third time we say I take refuge in the Buddha,

I take refuge in the Dharma,

And I take refuge in the Sangha.

In thinking about what I wanted to talk about here today,

And partly in a conversation I had with Jim,

Who has instantaneously become a dear friend,

I really wanted to find a way to sneak in joy and devotion in this Buddhist establishment that we have here.

Usually when I talk I don't make any notes because I just talk out of my heart and off the top of my head.

But when I talk to Buddhists I think I have to make some notes because I want to talk Buddhist and it's really not my first language.

Buddhism is my second language.

So anyway,

Probably most of you have a rough idea what Buddha,

Dharma,

And Sangha are.

And I'll mention what they are in an outer sense,

But if we really then begin to investigate together what the deeper meaning of Buddha,

Dharma,

And Sangha are,

I think it can lead to a very deep quality of joy and of inspiration and of devotion.

Many people when they're practicing,

Begin practice,

There's a lot of enthusiasm,

While meditation is this wonderful thing,

Look at all that I'm finding out about myself.

But after a few months or a few decades,

Depending on how stubborn you are,

One begins to feel a little bit stale in one's practice.

And practice begins to be something that you do out of habit,

Or maybe you don't do out of habit.

It becomes something that is done in a way that makes you feel calmer,

You have a slightly more efficient personality structure,

Maybe you think you can make a little more money or find a slightly better grade of partners.

But the notion of actually practicing as a way of finding liberation from suffering,

Of actually touching that place that is our intrinsic freedom,

Becomes lost because practice is a long,

Often difficult process.

One of my early teachers,

Trungpa Rinpoche,

Said that until one becomes truly bored with practice,

You haven't gotten very far.

So what is taking refuge in the Buddha,

The Dharma,

And the Sangha?

Taking refuge means finding a place where you feel safe,

Protected,

And secure.

In fact,

In Hawaii,

They used to have refuge temples,

Where if you did some horrible things such as letting your shadow fall upon the king,

Which was a capital offense,

If you could make it to the refuge temple before the guards or the soldiers got to you,

You would be free.

So what we're talking about here is,

Is there a place of that freedom,

A place of safety that we can find in our practice?

So the Buddha,

Taking refuge in the Buddha,

Is taking refuge in an outer sense in the fact that this fellow Gotama Buddha existed a long time ago,

2,

500 years ago.

And he though became the living embodiment of awakeness or awareness.

So what we're really taking refuge in is not this fellow,

But we're taking refuge in awareness.

We're taking refuge in the fact that you and I are intrinsically awake,

And in fact,

All of the spiritual traditions say that enlightenment isn't something that we find or that we create,

But it is in fact who we are already,

We have just forgotten.

But in this moment,

Sunday morning here at a little after 11 o'clock,

We are enlightened,

We are awake.

We may be identified with ego structure in a way that makes it difficult to experience that in a moment to moment way,

But there is nothing to be found.

And as long as we look outside trying to find that,

We're really looking in the wrong direction.

Here are some quotes from some of my favorite enlightened people.

One fellow,

Wei Wuwei said,

What you are looking for is what is looking.

Another teacher,

Swami Nityananda said,

Be peaceful,

I am everywhere.

And my guru Maharaji said,

The best form in which to worship God is every form.

Okay,

So what these people are saying is that that sense of freedom is here right now.

And we can begin to feel that awakeness in our body even at the cellular level.

Right now,

I'm talking,

You're listening,

We're here together.

But is there also inwardly this sense of awakeness that you can feel vibrating in your body?

There are really three qualities to the awake mind.

If we're coming through the mind channel,

The channel primarily of Buddhism and psychotherapy,

For instance,

The quality of awakeness,

Of awareness is felt as emptiness,

Of spaciousness.

That the mind is as vast as the sky.

Weather will come flying through this part of sky that you're looking at,

But it is only the weather,

It is only the clouds and you are the sky.

If we come through awakeness through the body channel,

Awakeness is experienced as a sense of aliveness in the body.

Right now there is this vibrating sense of aliveness.

And if we really begin to tune into that,

That eventually we can feel it even outside of ourselves,

We can feel it in inanimate objects as well as people that are around us.

And if we come to this awakeness through the heart or this quality of spirit,

Awakeness is experienced as presence.

That there is that radiant presence in each of us that can eventually be experienced as joy.

So there are practices to awaken these qualities.

There is something called Guru Yoga in Tibetan Buddhism,

Where you imagine seated in front of you a form of the deity that appeals to you.

There is the Buddha,

There is Hanuman,

There is Christ,

There is the Mother.

And this being appears to you as radiant golden light.

Out of this being comes from her or his heart a ray of golden light that goes into you and purifies you of any remaining obscuration.

And you then become a being also of the same substance,

Of exactly the same substance,

Of radiant golden light.

And then gradually you merge with this other being.

So even though this is a visualization,

It is also in fact fundamentally the nature of things as they are right now.

Right now you and I and the Buddha are made out of exactly the same substance,

Of pure awareness,

Of consciousness.

There is nothing we can do.

There is no amount of alcohol you can drink or drugs you can take or TV you can watch that will separate you from your identity as pure awareness.

We can certainly forget it.

We can certainly distract ourselves from it because in a way,

And in fact this is what practice is about,

In a way it is difficult and frightening to realize that we are awareness because it means that who we thought we were has to die.

That the fact that I think I am separate from you and I guess I was just told I have a PhD from Stanford so that is who I am in a certain way.

That even though I have those identities that is not fundamentally who I am.

I take refuge in the Buddha.

For the second time I take refuge in the Buddha.

For the third time I take refuge in the Buddha.

So can we do that not in an automatic parenting way but actually remembering that we are that.

Which reminds me of a very lovely story.

Maybe some of you have heard this story.

It is making the rounds these days.

But there was a young boy of about two or three years old and his mother became pregnant with another child.

She was about to go to the hospital to have her baby daughter.

Before she went the little boy said,

When you come back from the hospital can I be alone with the baby and talk to her?

The mother said,

Okay you can do that.

She did not quite know why.

She had her daughter and she came back from the hospital.

The brother was very persistent.

I want to go in and talk to the baby.

So finally the parents said okay.

But they were a little concerned that maybe he was jealous or something and it would harm the baby.

So they decided to leave the door open a crack so they could hear what was going on.

And the little boy came up very close to the baby and said very,

Very quietly,

I am beginning to forget God.

Can you help me remember?

I take refuge in the Buddha.

Okay moving on to the Dharma.

Taking refuge in the Dharma.

The Dharma on the outer level is the body of the Buddha's teaching or the Christ's teaching.

The true teaching of all religions.

The Four Noble Truths,

The facts of karma and impermanence and suffering.

All those things that we can read about in the books.

And taking refuge in the fact that there is this path that so many people have been upon and many people have trod to a point where they found a great deal of freedom.

That's a wonderful thing to take refuge in.

There is this body of teaching,

This body of truth.

So we're not just taking refuge in the Dharma.

We're essentially taking refuge in the truth.

And in fact all religions are starting out by saying I'm taking refuge in the fact there is freedom,

I'm taking refuge in the truth and we'll get to the Sangha in just a second.

So basically taking refuge in the Dharma has a deeper level of taking refuge in the fact that we're living in a lawful universe.

That things are unfolding in a way that can be talked about in terms of there's karma,

There's impermanence,

There's dukkha or suffering.

But there's even a deeper level of taking refuge in the Dharma.

That right now,

In this moment,

The Dharma is unfolding for each one of us.

That whatever appears right in your face or in my face is your Dharma in that moment.

That the absolutely perfect event,

The only possible event in your life that could be appearing now to lead you to the next step on your path to awakening is exactly what's happening.

So that we can begin to let go of the self-improvement project.

We can begin to let go of trying to fix things or manipulate things.

Some of you in the back row are having a hard time doing that.

And I understand why when I look at the two of you.

The Prajnaparamita Sutra says there is neither tainted nor pure.

One time my friend Ram Dass was with our teacher Maharaji and Ram Dass said,

Maharaji I feel so impure.

And Maharaji looked up Ram Dass' sleeve and said,

I don't see any impurity Ram Dass.

So there is in fact no impurity.

That is the Dharma.

There is this teaching,

There is this perfection that we can trust awareness itself.

That just by being present to this moment,

To this simple moment of us being together is absolutely all that we need to move toward full awakening.

So Rumi says things like,

Just this,

Don't turn away.

Payment children says,

Lean into your suffering.

And in a way that is the secret to practice.

That when difficulties arrive,

Which we all know are certain to arise on our path,

We have two choices.

We can harden into aversion or we can let those difficulties inspire us to open our hearts even more.

To open to the difficulty and turn that into the gift that it truly is because it is showing us the place where we are making life difficult.

Cancer does not cause suffering.

One of my dearest and oldest students called two days ago and told me that she has just been diagnosed with cancer in her spine and in her liver.

It's a very difficult diagnosis.

Can she work with that in a way that opens her heart even though fear will arise?

Cancer does not cause suffering.

Resistance to cancer causes suffering.

And if she can work with that resistance,

Can she open her heart to the depth,

To the extent that it gives her immune system,

Her body,

The greatest chance to heal?

When we get a cut on our finger,

We trust that the body will heal.

We trust that eventually the skin will grow back together,

The scab will fall off and will be healed.

Can we trust that also,

That intrinsic movement toward healing in our hearts and in our minds,

In our heart and mind?

The heart is basically just the depth of the mind.

We talk about it as the heart,

But in Chinese there's only a single word for heart and mind,

Sin,

H-S-I-N.

Heart is the depth of the mind,

The mind is the surface of the heart.

So can we trust that our heart will heal?

Can we trust that our mind will heal if we take refuge in the Dharma,

If we keep moving toward being willing to be with what is appearing in front of us moment to moment?

Can you actually begin to have a love affair with the Dharma?

It's easy to have a love affair with a person,

With God,

With music,

With beauty,

With art,

But can we love the truth of the moment?

Can we really begin to say,

Dharma,

I love you,

To feel that in your heart,

The way things are unfolding in your life,

To meet that with openness rather than with resistance?

So then finally there's taking refuge in the Sangha.

And the Sangha could be also called connectedness or love.

So that what we've done so far is we're taking refuge in awareness,

We're taking refuge in truth,

Now we're taking refuge in connectedness.

And if we think about it in those terms rather than these old polyworms,

Worms,

That too are words of Buddha,

Dharma,

And Sangha,

Taking refuge in awareness,

Taking refuge in truth,

Taking refuge in connectedness.

The Sangha in an outer sense are the people in this room.

We're practicing together.

We just sat together.

And this Dharma path is very difficult to do on your own,

Almost impossible.

So people come together in terms of being in the Sangha.

You go to a 12-step meeting.

You come to a Sunday morning meditation.

Not only is the Sangha the people in this room,

But at this moment,

Countless people are practicing all over the world.

If you have a smartphone,

There's something called Insight Timer,

Where you can click onto this thing and see people.

There's little dots of light all over the world where people are having their timer on also,

And you see who's meditating all around the world.

So that there's this whole Sangha of people all over the planet,

And their practice is in a very real sense supporting your practice.

You're not practicing alone.

So that we're taking refuge in the way that we are connected.

When I mentioned my friend who was just diagnosed with cancer,

When I hear that,

When she called me and told me that,

Then in a very natural way,

Love,

Compassion arises in my heart and goes out toward her.

We're loving each other,

And that connectedness in love supports our practice.

So Buddha said,

Don't believe what I'm telling you.

Investigate it yourself.

But even though he's saying don't believe,

He's not saying don't keep your heart open.

That we can have faith.

We can have faith in the Buddha,

The Dharma,

And the Sangha.

We can have faith in refuge as an inner experience.

Once again,

Trungpa,

Who's one of the most quotable people that was ever on the planet,

Somebody asked him,

What is it that we're really taking refuge in?

He said,

Well,

From yourself,

Of course.

So it's not faith in something outside of ourself.

It's really faith in this quality of the awareness,

The truth,

The love that we each have.

When we begin to deepen this faith,

Then out of that comes joy.

Out of that comes a certain joy in practice.

So that we're not practicing because we're suffering,

We're trying to make suffering go away,

But there is a certain joyfulness.

There's a joyfulness in being quiet.

There's a joyfulness in movement.

There's a joyfulness in being with other people on the path.

There are levels of devotion and levels of joy,

If you will.

In Buddhism,

There are what are called the three turnings of the wheel.

Hinayana,

Mahayana,

Vajrayana Buddhism.

Hinayana is essentially Vipassana practice.

Mahayana is Zen practice.

Vajrayana is Tibetan Buddhist practice.

Beyond those three turnings is the non-practice of non-duality,

Of Dzogchen or Mahamudra or Mahātthi.

But if we're talking about this joy of practice,

This sense of devotion to the triple gem,

It goes through stages of development.

The first stage,

The invocation stage of actually taking refuge,

Beginning to take refuge,

Is in hoping for or asking for a relationship.

I'm taking refuge in the Buddha,

In the Dharma,

In the Sangha.

I don't really completely feel it right now,

But I have some faith that it exists out there.

Maybe I felt it in the past.

So that I would,

I'm taking refuge hoping I'm beginning to feel that relationship.

Hinayana or Theravada practice.

Moving on then to Mahayana practice,

Which brings in the quality of compassion.

Mahayana means great vehicle,

A vehicle big enough not just to get you or me across the ocean of suffering,

But all beings.

We're practicing for all beings.

It brings in the quality of heart,

The heart of compassion.

So in this level of taking refuge or practice itself,

We're beginning to feel that relationship.

There is a heartfelt relationship between us and the Buddha,

And the Dharma,

And the Sangha,

And the mother,

And the Christ.

Then coming to Vajrayana practice,

Where we begin to find out that that which we're in relationship to is not something outside.

I am the Buddha,

The Dharma,

And the Sangha.

It is not something separate at all.

And then finally,

Non-dual,

Non-practice,

The teachings of Ramana Maharshi or Eckhart Tolle,

Ajay Shanti,

Many other wonderful teachers.

That that which we're taking refuge in is the nature of everything.

It's all of one taste,

Cancer and non-cancer,

Living and dying,

Happiness and sadness.

There is a joy that goes beyond happiness and sadness.

So that one can be sad,

And that can be part of your path of Dharma.

There's a difference between being sad and being lost in sadness.

There's a difference between having cancer and being lost and having cancer.

There is this joy that is inherent in every moment when we have that faith in being fully present.

So right now there is this joy.

I've been talking for about half an hour.

There's a lot of ideas that maybe you agree with or don't agree with or trying to remember.

But beyond all of that mental activity,

Is there a joy?

Is there a joy in this moment?

Is there that God that that two or three year old boy was trying to remember and talk to his little baby sibling about?

So to the extent that we can practice with faith and with confidence,

Confidence in the triple gem,

In the Buddha,

The Dharma and the Sangha,

Then this joy will begin to arise.

And one can make a practice out of that.

In this moment,

Can one be 75% with the joy,

This quiet joy that is intrinsically part of each moment?

And then there's 25% of you that's out here.

We're in this room together.

There's a whole bunch of people in the room listening,

Talking,

Understanding.

But most of our being is focused on that joy.

And in fact,

We're connected in that joy.

And in fact,

We're one in that sense of joy.

Ramana Maharishi said,

Devotion is nothing more than knowing oneself.

So your Rinpoche said,

Devotion is unbroken receptivity to the truth.

Modern neuroscience has been finding that our brains are programmed over many,

Many centuries to be like Teflon to positive experience and Velcro to negative experience.

Think about a long time ago,

You were out there on the plane and you were being chased by a tiger.

That one bad experience could ruin your day.

So that if you go on a vacation,

Say,

And you have 900 wonderful experiences,

But you lost your wallet,

You're really going to remember that one bad experience that we tend to really grab on to and identify with the one negative experience.

But neuroscience has been finding that if you take a positive experience and amplify it and be with it for only 20 seconds,

That it stays with you.

It goes into the part of the brain that retains things.

Whereas usually the positive things just go sliding right through.

So when you feel those moments of joy,

Can you be with it?

Can you amplify it?

Can you just hold on to it?

Not hold in a squeezing way,

But rest with it,

Embrace it for 20 seconds,

10 seconds.

I think it's 10,

12 seconds,

A certain amount of time.

If you do that,

It stays with you.

Many of us focus on solving problems rather than on joy.

Many of us have a career that is focused on solving problems.

We get paid for solving problems.

So the mind gets in this rut of whatever appears,

Here's a problem to be solved,

Rather than resting in the joy that is possible in each moment.

The Sioux Indian have a quote,

Sometimes I go about pitying myself while all the time I'm being carried by great winds across the sky.

Sometimes I go about pitying myself while all the while I'm being carried by great winds across the sky.

We are carried by those great winds,

Those winds of joy,

Those winds of the inner Buddha,

Dharma and Sangha of awareness,

Truth and connectedness.

And finally,

I'd like to read a lovely poem by one of my favorite poets,

Mary Oliver.

Every day,

In fact the poem is called mindful,

Every day I see or hear something that more or less kills me with delight,

That leaves me like a needle in the haystack of light.

It was what I was born for,

To look,

To listen,

To lose myself inside this soft world,

To obstruct myself over and over in joy and acclamation.

Nor am I talking about the exceptional,

The fearful,

The dreadful,

The very extravagant,

But of the ordinary,

The common,

The very drab,

The daily presentations.

Oh,

Good scholar,

I say to myself,

How can you help but grow wise with such teachings as these,

The untrimmable light of the world,

The oceans shine,

The prayers that are made out of grass.

I take refuge in the Buddha,

I take refuge in the Dharma,

I take refuge in the Sangha.

And in the joy that this taking refuge cultivates in each one of us.

Are there questions or comments?

Tom?

Thank you,

Dale.

You're welcome.

What you said about sort of maintaining 75% of your awareness to the internal state,

To whatever we want to label that,

25% outwards.

I like that,

I strive for that,

I go on retreats and hope to cultivate that.

And yet,

As you said in the past,

You come back and you're still 99% as neurotic as you were in the start.

But on a day-to-day basis,

How can we move more towards that?

Because I'll get to doing it,

I mean I'll walk out of here right now and be busy putting stuff away and whatever,

And I will lose that focus on this incident.

How can we cultivate that?

I don't know if this is a question where you're asking me to advertise my groups or not.

Please be still.

But it does seem like a perfect setup here.

These ancient teachings of Buddhism and Hinduism were developed thousands of years ago by and for people who were grounded,

Centered,

Unneurotic,

And loved their mommy and daddy.

Is that anybody in this room?

Okay.

So,

In these groups that Tom and Jim and previously Roy and some other people in the room attended,

We investigate that question.

I find for myself that I get a lot of my information about how I can't stay in a joyful place by being with what it is that's going on in my body.

The Dalai Lama on his third visit to America said,

Now I'm beginning to understand,

You Americans don't like yourselves.

It's assumed in a lot of these practices that we like ourselves,

That we can begin this great project of letting go of identification with our separate ego structures that we have constructed perfectly to avoid our deepest woundedness and fears,

And begin instead to identify with joy or with true nature or Buddha nature or Christ consciousness.

When we begin that big project from the standpoint of being ungrounded and uncentered and neurotic,

Things get very messy pretty quickly for most people.

Practice becomes stale,

It becomes frustrating,

And this joy that I'm talking about,

Although we experience it occasionally,

Maybe a perfect moment at the beach or through serendipity a wonderful meditation or you're with your best friend and had a perfect meal or something,

But it's not an easy quality or experience to awaken in the moment on cue.

So that I find by going back to the very beginning of practice,

Actually taking refuge in the body,

What would it mean to take refuge in the body?

It would mean getting grounded and centered.

The earliest stages,

The earliest developmental stages that a child goes through from zero to two is getting grounded,

Three to five or six maybe is learning to be down in your belly being centered in the heart of the place from which martial arts are done.

So what we're talking about here is doing the martial art of life.

Can we right now be,

Rather than up in the head and off balance,

Top heavy,

Can we be down in the lower part of the body as a way of then supporting eventually the open heart.

So the lower part of the body feels like a mountain,

It's stable,

It's unmoved by the winds of change,

And then the sky-like heart,

The vast heart can have clouds of emotion coming through it,

Clouds of activity of going out into the outer room and having to do Tom's activity after the talk here,

But you're the sky,

You're not the clouds going through the sky.

So your question is a wonderful question,

But the answer is more practice.

I mean it is,

And it is cultivating a couple of qualities that I find are very important and rarely talked about.

The qualities of humility and flexibility,

That we have to be humble enough to admit that we're stuck,

That we're caught,

That we're lost,

And flexible enough to keep turning our practice back to what it is that's going on now rather than what we think it should be.

So like for instance,

If I start doing a compassion practice for my friend who just found out that she has cancer,

And as I'm doing this practice I'm noticing that my mind is agitated or I'm bored or whatever it is and I'm not really able to do this compassion practice for her,

I need to have enough humility to notice that and then enough flexibility to start doing that practice for myself so that I can get present enough so that I can then be there for her.

But if I keep butting my practice up against this wall of trying to do something that I'm not able to do,

I'll get frustrated and I'll probably quit.

Other comments or questions?

Yes?

Thank you so much for sharing your teachings and your lessons.

You're most welcome.

Of the joy of everything.

I'd like something that's been coming up for me,

People I've been involved with,

Of someone,

For people who are happy to practice and are trying to live consciously and look forward to dying consciously and having joy in all the fears and disease.

How does something like when someone is diagnosed with Alzheimer's and they sort of know that their consciousness is going to be gone and they're not going to be able to have it and the support system may be not even there,

How does that losing the ability to have a practice and to have consciousness going through the rest of life,

How does that factor in?

That's a wonderful question.

I would suggest first of all that they don't lose consciousness.

That consciousness possibly dramatically changes,

But it is not lost.

So that if the same person,

Instead of having Alzheimer's disease,

Had a brain aneurysm and suddenly died,

The transition from being alive,

In control,

Vital human being to being a dead person would be so subtle,

So sudden,

So unsubtle,

So sudden that very possibly the shock of that,

They might not be able to carry all their practice through to the spiritual opportunity that the dying process presents.

But here's somebody who is gradually losing the ability to be in control,

To understand,

To take care of themselves in certain ways.

And as they are losing those qualities,

Those abilities,

Consciousness is learning something.

It might be expensive for the people that are taking care of them,

It might be very emotionally frustrating for people that love them,

But from the standpoint of consciousness,

The function of consciousness is to grow and change.

It doesn't care how long it takes or how much it hurts.

So that as this person is going through this process,

They are learning qualities that they were not probably very,

They are learning qualities that they didn't necessarily cultivate in their lives.

I have a PhD in mathematics,

So I'm very attached to understanding,

To being able to analyze things,

To solve problems.

If I got Alzheimer's and if I were to die being still Dr.

Dale the mathematician,

That might limit the way I could go through the dying process in a spiritual sense.

On the other hand,

If I had Alzheimer's disease for a few years before I died,

Those that need to,

That addiction if you will,

To understanding would be slowly ripped away from me and from the standpoint of consciousness it would be a good thing.

Now one has to have a great deal of faith in practice to fully embody what I've just said,

But we are all addicted.

I'm addicted to excitement,

I'm addicted to understanding,

And we don't even have to start talking about the things we put into our mouths or do with our bodies,

But just the addictions in our minds will also interfere with our spiritual process in terms of living and in terms of dying.

And consequently then,

Learning to deal with these addictions,

Whether it's through spiritual practice or through Alzheimer's disease or having a cancer diagnosis,

Is part of the spiritual path.

Speaking of the other end of life,

The beginning,

And one of the things you mentioned early on about the young boy trying to talk to the baby and the question that he asked,

Something that rung a few bells in my mind that I think there was a poem by the horse or something about intimations of immortality,

I don't know,

It reminded me of something I took,

Of course it took long ago,

But something that I have experienced in a fuzzy way.

Early on in my life there were moments when I was like,

Wow,

What is this life all about?

That's a very young child.

And that sense that it's something that I've known all along and I don't know how to articulate.

So I was wondering if you could say a few more things about that particular aspect of that,

That kid talking to the baby and asking,

Was it asking the baby,

Remind me,

Help me not forget God or something like that?

I'm beginning to forget God,

Please help me to remember.

I think we all have an inner innate sense that there is something much vaster and greater than the way the mind and the body are unfolding moment to moment.

We've had that experience,

We've had that direct transmission and whether that's from meditation or a drug experience or a sexual experience or being with a pet or being in nature doesn't make any difference.

That consciousness doesn't care how you get there.

At the same time,

In going back to the question about Alzheimer's disease,

It's clear that we've created a personality that for most of us,

A lot of the time,

Tends to dampen that feeling of total aliveness.

And opening to that feeling of total aliveness,

As wonderful as it is,

Is frightening because it means that who we identify with has to die.

Suppose you're somebody who's almost really successful and your friends say to you,

You seem to be self-sabotaging and you think to yourself,

But I want to be successful,

Why would I do that?

But if you look more deeply,

Becoming totally successful means not being who you think you are.

And even though part of you says,

I'd like to be that,

Another part of you says,

Wow,

That's a really scary thing to be not who all along I've been thinking I am.

So that in some very real way,

Practice is about slowly learning to trust that we can dive into this not knowing,

Into that relationship with presence,

With joy.

Ram Dass has a very wonderful metaphor that spiritual practice is like jumping out of an airplane and part way down realizing you don't have on a parachute.

And a little further the way down realizing it's okay because there's no ground.

But in that time between realizing there's no parachute and realizing there's no ground,

There's a great deal of fear that there are big rocks coming at you very quickly.

Okay,

So Mayor Baba,

Great Indian sage said,

Love is contagious,

Those who haven't got it,

Catch it from those who do.

And anything,

Any wisdom that I am sharing with you today is coming right through me from teachers that I've been with.

There are teachers in India and Tibet and places like that.

There's also my son.

There's also people I meet on the street.

That this quality you're talking about is something that really is a direct result of truly taking refuge.

If I take refuge in the sangha,

Then that aliveness I get from looking into your eyes,

Those of you that I know and those of you that I don't know.

Okay,

So I could talk about that and we could talk about that together for days and it would be quite lovely,

But let's move on.

You seem to be an expert on.

.

.

Next question.

Could you start over on having experience with people as they're dying or being around a lot of people that are facing death.

If there was a political ballot in California on physician assisted suicide,

How would you vote on it?

I would have to read the ballot initiative.

I have been around a lot of people who were approaching death and they were having a very difficult time with their body.

They were in pain or had other very distressing symptoms and or they had a lot of emotional issues going on.

They said,

I want to die now.

Do you have some pills that I could take so I could die today?

I said to these people,

I don't have those pills.

That's not the end of the business I'm in.

There are places you can go for those things,

But that's not what I do.

A certain percentage of these people,

I haven't kept track,

But a good percentage of these people would contact me then a few months later and say,

Do you remember when I asked you if you could help me die?

I said,

Of course I do.

They said,

Well,

I didn't die and my life has been very difficult these last two months,

But it has been the best two months of my life.

I'm so glad that I didn't take my life as a way of trying to avoid suffering.

Any action done with the motivation of avoiding suffering will create suffering.

If you want to avoid suffering by taking your life and you have really thought about this and meditated upon it and you're not doing this in a totally reactive way and have made this choice consciously and then choose to do it in a way where you're doing it with great care,

I don't think the government should have the right to say,

No,

You can't do that.

At the same time,

I don't think that people should just be able to go into the neighborhood store and buy poison because they're not feeling quite so happy that day.

It's a cloudy day and the giant's lost or something like that.

So it really depends on what you want.

If you want freedom,

If you want liberation,

Then any situation,

Any situation is open to awareness and compassion.

If you want to have happiness,

Then a lot of situations aren't going to work too well for you.

Most of us in this room want both.

We want to have our cake and eat it too.

We want to have freedom,

But we don't want it to hurt too much along the way.

Good luck to us.

I mean,

There are choices that are going to have to be made.

And again and again,

We're going to have to look at the places where we're not wanting to look at the truth of the moment,

That it's too bright.

Not only are we talking about looking at suffering,

But we're talking about looking at love.

We're talking about looking at joy.

You felt that pure,

Deep love so many times in your life,

I am sure.

And yet,

Again and again after we die into love,

20 seconds later we're thinking about what's for lunch.

The Tibetans say that when you die,

The light of your true nature appears,

But it is as bright as a thousand suns.

And if you have not gotten a bit used to looking at the bright light of joy,

Of love,

Of our true nature,

Then that light will be too bright,

As it often is in our daily life,

And we turn away from it.

And that turning away,

Just as turning away from suffering,

Turning away from joy,

Creates further karma.

Once again,

There's no rush.

Any other remarks or questions?

There would have been time for one more.

Right here.

Oh,

Please.

So,

When we're working with people who are in great despair or sadness or fear as they're facing death or going through a very serious terminal illness,

It's one thing for us to do our practice and prepare ourselves,

But what can we do to help them in remembering and reconnecting to that joy amidst their emotional states?

So I have two minutes to answer that.

Come to the group.

No.

There are levels of practice.

There are certain dualistic practices.

There's the ah-breath,

There's tonglen,

There's awareness and compassion practices that can be taught,

But there is also non-practice.

There is the quality of being that you bring to the bedside or the table side of this person that you're talking to.

And I can,

I was accused just recently of being an expert in doing this work,

And I try not to be,

Because as soon as I'm an expert,

As soon as I'm Dr.

Dale,

The executive director of the Living Dying Project,

And I'm here to help you,

Then it profoundly limits the way that you and I can connect.

And if I can come in and be,

Let me start that sentence over again.

The Dalai Lama says that one of the defining qualities of compassion is the ability to equalize and switch yourself with another human being.

And if in any way I feel less than or greater than you,

Then in that moment compassion becomes impossible.

And the mind creates the abyss,

The heart crosses the abyss.

The heart of compassion is what crosses the abyss.

So for me to be with this hypothetical person that we're talking about means being there in a heartfelt way,

And a heartfelt way that leads then to going even beyond dualistic heart,

But non-dualistic heart,

Where you and I are in this together.

And in that way then,

The place in you and I that does not die,

That is beyond suffering,

Is being awakened between us.

Can we do that right now?

Do we have to wait until we get that diagnosis?

Do we have to wait until it's a really,

Really,

Really bad day,

Where there's pain in your body and or in your heart and mind?

In this moment,

Can we meet together in that place that doesn't die?

And if we can,

Then yes,

All of the vicissitudes of life will continue to arise,

But we take refuge in the Sangha.

We take refuge in the Dharma.

We take refuge in the Buddha.

Thank you all very much.

Reviews

🙏

Perhaps the very best dharma teaching I’ve experienced on Insight Timer!

Loved hearing the laughter and trust in the room, and the many insights about the path. Thank you.

Wonderful talk. Namaste 🙏🏼
Deep bows and blessings to you. 🙂

🙏🏽Amazing perspectives. Thank you for helping me to see the simplicity once again. Awareness. Truth. Connectedness. 💖

I really love your talks. I hope you upload more soon. <3

I will listen to this many times I think. Thank you.

This is beautiful, powerful and very accessible. A ton of wisdom packed in here.

Thank you, Dale, for your willingness to be vulnerable, human even, as you share the depths of your wisdom! I love you!

Interesting and I will return to this as I dropped off before reaching the end. Thanks. 🙏