Ep. 01 - Zero Centre of Emptiness

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Hi, this is Raghu Marcus. I want to introduce this talk from Joseph Goldstein. It's really of deep interest for me. Well, it's a... It should be of deep interest for everybody. But it's around the concept of emptiness. And Joseph gave this amazing talk. And I'm actually titling it The Zero Center of Emptiness. which he mentions at some point during the talk. And as he says here, that term, empty, is really not that appealing. to anybody. And how do we understand what that term means? And so...

Of course, Joseph is so great at the practical application of some of these terms, which at times can be very arcane and complex. So he starts with one experience, just touching on experiences of emptiness and the ways that we can experience it and have experienced it. And the starting point of emptiness is a lack of self-centeredness. Right? It's...

It's the notion, our common notion and the way that we live our lives from day to day is that they revolve around this self-center. And we do things like... desire for new experiences even as we know them to be continually changing and he says isn't it amazing that we continue to do this living our lives relying on the next experience to fulfill us even when we know it won't. It's kind of like a junkie, really. So... The idea to counter this, of course, is through the power of mindfulness.

meditative practice, the power of investigation, we begin to leave this self-referential orbit. We begin to enter into the gravitational sphere of the Dharma. of the way of things. We begin to get glimpses of the zero center of emptiness rather than the self-center of I and mine. So this is a basic, critical analyzation of what emptiness is. And it's in reference to the I, me, mine that we live, the movie of me, that Krishnadas calls it.

And he talks about we have an address here, but at the same time we recognize the nowhere that we come from. So it's not that... we have to go ahead and deny our Being here and the subject-object, or he says it best here, the challenge of living on the conventional level, the world of concepts and language, subject and object. of a sense of self and others, at the same time staying connected to the more ultimate truth of emptiness of self. So that is our basic challenge.

And Joseph talks more here about the different ways in which we commonly experience that sense of emptiness that he's speaking of here.

And it can be an ineffable experience through, it could be just after real... length of time of getting one pointed in meditative practice that that experience can happen where there's no subject object there's not that self-referential point of view just for a brief moment and we're talking sometimes seconds but but it's the quality of that and then the trust that you have in that uh that enables you to create the way in which we can live, still staying connected to the ultimate truth.

while living in the world. And he mentions, he talks about another way is, of course, through our teachers. And he talks about this wonderful teacher that I do know about named Deepa Ma. who had come to the center, and she came and was bowing in front of a statue of the Buddha, and he just saw how empty that bow was to the empty. image of Buddha. And he also said, and this to me is the key in which ties together a whole bunch of things in my mind.

But he also said it was love bowing to love. And I'm sure many of you have listened to different podcasts on the MindPod network. And you've heard me talk about our family of low-hanging fruit. I kid around with it. I'm mind rolling with David Silver. These people who have been our family for decades.

the way in which we blend and meaning the we part is my experience, Ram Das, Krishna Das from India and our relationship with Neem Karoli Baba and our relationship with Bhakti Yoga, the yoga devotion. and then Joseph and Sharon and Jack and their relationship with Buddhism, and how it meets in this, absolutely in this phrase, in his experience of seeing his teacher, Deepama, It was love bowing to love, emptiness bowing to emptiness. And I recently had this experience.

this intimation of emptiness, working on a program that Ram Dass did with Roshi Joan Halifax and Frank Ostaseski around death and dying. and at one point ram das was asked about unconditional love and the truth of it and he described and he went into the moment where he first experienced that with with our guru neem karoli baba maharaji And he got very, very into the center of that love. And then he just kept repeating about Maharaji.

He was just empty, he said over and over. He was just empty. And I realized and had this experience, of course, myself with him, that there was... that Maharaji was devoid of any sense of an I, me, mine. There was nothing. He wasn't loving us. He was just being that state, which is described so well. as Shunyata in Buddhism and how Joseph refers to it here with his own teacher, Deepama. So this is a great, great talk from Joseph around this subject of emptiness.

That is so very difficult for most of us, that's for sure. So here it is. It's Joseph Goldstein at his best. the zero center of emptiness. And please, we appreciate your support, everybody. These podcasts are only available... and can only be continued because of your support. And so please do go to mindpodnetwork.com, and in this case, slash Joseph, and just help us out.

through the donation button or through our Amazon link or Audible link or even buy a t-shirt or two. Thank you. And here is Joseph.

One of the words in Pali and Sanskrit that has tremendous implications for our practice in our lives is the term bodhicitta. And bodhi... as you know means awakening and jitta is the word for heart or heart mind so we can understand bodhicitta as the heart mind of awakening

So this has two levels of meaning. On the relative level, bodhicitta refers to compassion and compassionate motivation. That is the... aspiration or the motivation to awaken for the benefit or the enlightenment of all beings and if that aspiration inspires you it's helpful to make that kind of dedication at the beginning of each day or the beginning of each sitting at the end of the day

May my practice, may my life be for the benefit of all. Perhaps at the end of a sitting or the end of the day, we can dedicate the merit. May the merit of my practice. be dedicated to the welfare and benefit of all and kind of connects us with that very ennobling aspiration The Dalai Lama spoke of this really beautifully in his typically very humble way. He said speaking of my own experience I sometimes wonder why a lot of people like me.

When I think about it, I cannot find in myself any specially good quality, except for one small thing. That is the kind heart, which I try to explain to others and which I do my best to develop myself. of course there are moments when i do get angry but in the depth of my heart i do not hold a grudge against anyone so just that's an interesting point

You know, although at times I do get angry, in the depth of my heart, I do not hold a grudge against anyone. I cannot pretend that I'm really able to practice bodhicitta, but it does give me tremendous inspiration. deep inside me I realize how valuable and beneficial it is so we should undertake this aspiration I think with a similar humility

But we can plant the seed. We plant the seed of this aspiration and then we gradually water it and nurture it and nourish it. So on the relative level, bodhicitta is compassion and on the more ultimate level it refers to the empty aware nature of the mind itself and it's said that when compassion and emptiness are both present enlightenment is unavoidable so i thought it would be worth exploring these two aspects a bit tonight

I like that word unavoidable. Despite our best efforts to avoid it. So one of the transforming... realizations in practice is to realize that compassion and emptiness are actually not polarities. They're really the expressions of each other. And there's one teaching by a Tibetan Dzogchenmast, I think it was 18th century, his name was Shabkar. There's one teaching of his which beautifully encapsulates.

this union of relative and absolute truth this union of compassion and emptiness he said the mind's nature is vivid as a flawless piece of crystal, intrinsically empty, naturally radiant, ceaselessly responsive. so tonight talk about these three aspects actually what they mean and how we can experience them

So how do we understand or how can we understand the meaning of intrinsically empty? For many people, the word empty or emptiness, Doesn't really seem all that appealing. You know, if you go up to somebody in the street, how about a little emptiness? You know, it kind of conjures up notions of maybe blankness or a gray vacuity. But the Pali word and Sanskrit word for emptiness is shunyata.

And in the Buddhist teachings, this word chunyata has a wealth of profound meanings. So I want to go through just a few ways. that we can actually touch into this experience of emptiness for ourselves perhaps on the simplest level we can understand emptiness to mean A lack of self-centeredness. Usually we think of self-centeredness as being a kind of personality problem. Somebody's quite self-centered.

maybe think they should go to a therapist to address it but it actually has a more profound meaning that is when we create or hold a self a sense of self to be at the center of our lives. Now where the sense of self becomes the reference point for all that we think and sense and feel.

It's the idea that there's someone behind the flow of changing experience to whom it's happening. We've talked about this a lot over these last weeks. It's that... wrong view according to the buddhist teachings of claiming thoughts and feelings and sensations my thoughts my feelings my body And we often, or perhaps even mostly in our lives, live in the gravitational field of this self-center.

When we look at our hopes and our fears and our plans and our worries, our work, our relationships, our whole lives are revolving around this self-center. around desires for having ever new experiences, even as we know them, to be continually changing. It's amazing, really, that we continue to do this. You know, that we're living our lives relying on the next experience, the next hit of experience to fulfill us.

even when we know that it won't. So this is kind of startling, that our lives are unfolding based on this kind of desire. But as you also know through your practice, through a sustained and wise attention to the flow of experience, Through the power of mindfulness, through the power of investigation, through the power of wisdom, we begin to leave, at least at times, this self-referential orbit.

We begin to enter into the gravitational field of the Dharma. Now we get glimpses of the zero center of emptiness. rather than the self-center of I and mine. So our whole perspective begins to change. Rumi, who I'm sure most of you are familiar with, Sufi poet. He said, live in the nowhere that you come from, even though you have an address here. And this is a lot of what Brian was talking about last night. We do have an address here, but at the same time, as we're living at our address...

we really are recognizing the nowhere that we come from. So this is the challenge that we all have. And we have it on retreat, but you'll be having it. even more clearly when you leave the retreat, the challenge of living in the conventional level, on the conventional level of the world. or conventional reality of concepts, of language, of subject and object, of some sense of self and other.

And at the same time, even as we're living in that conventional reality, staying connected to the more ultimate truth of emptiness of self. There was one Tibetan teacher who expressed the challenge of doing this very well. He said, It's not that you're not real. We all think we're real. And that's not wrong. But you think you're really real. You exaggerate it. So that kind of captures it. You know, we are real, but not really real.

And somehow we need to hold both. So tonight's talk is going to be following on Brian's beautiful talk last night of kind of the same theme. How we can... how we can hold and work with this understanding we can experience emptiness of self in many different ways

i'd just like to go through a few different ways where we actually already have the experience to some extent we can get an intimation of emptiness of self just in our ordinary lives. You know, sometimes we just enter into an effortless flow of experience and it might happen playing music, it might be in sports.

it might be you know in our work in some way where things seem to be going along all by themselves in a flow without a sense of self present and actually feeling that things are going on quite a bit better without it you know we've kind of gotten out of the way and this there's this spontaneous flow that's unfolding. So many people, I think, have intimations of this in their lives. We can also be reminded of the emptiness of self.

by our teachers, you know, either by their presence or by their words. I think over these weeks, you know, we've mentioned at different times our teacher Deepama. you know amazing woman from india um who's just an extraordinary practitioner and developed you know high stages of realization and deep states of concentration and all kinds of powers of mind

But she was so simple and so empty, empty of self and so loving. What manifests was just this amazing quality of metta. And I remember one time... she was here for a three-month retreat helping to teach and she came in and she bowed down to the Buddha and I was just on the side observing. And it was so striking to me and so vivid. It was like seeing emptiness bowing to emptiness or love bowing to love.

Or wisdom bowing to wisdom. There was no one there. And yet all of these qualities were manifest. And so sometimes we get a transmission just like that from seeing somebody. You know, who embodies that understanding so deeply. Sometimes it's the words of a teacher that can really... cut right to the core of things. There's a story of a woman from Canada who was a student of Kala Rinpoche, one of the great Tibetan teachers.

She had been with him in India and Nepal and then went home to Canada after quite a few years with him. And this goes back many, many years where there was not a lot of Dharma. practice happening in the west so she felt quite isolated and alone so she wrote to him and said the only thing that keeps me going is holding you in my heart And some weeks later, she gets a card. It's just a little card with one line on it. The nature of the heart is emptiness.

I can hear this poor woman. The only thing that's keeping me going is holding you in my heart. The nature of the heart is emptiness. But then, some days later, a week later, she gets another little message. When he wrote, when you practice the noble dharma, Slowly the clouds of sorrow will drift away and the sun of wisdom and great joy will be shining in the clear sky of your mind.

And so it's understanding that in one way, emptiness and the understanding of it cuts through our clinging and attachment. And yet what's left... is not grey or empty in the sense we might think the mind the heart is filled with joy

The sun of wisdom and great joy will be shining in the clear sky of your mind. One of the things that I noticed in being with these really extraordinary teachers who just are living or embodying this realization of emptiness, is that in being with them, they also reflect back to us. our own places of attachment and clinging. It becomes so obvious in the mirror of their emptiness.

Okay, so sometimes we get intimations of it just in our ordinary lives in that effortless flow. Sometimes we get intimations or even transmissions of it through these great teachers.

We also can experience emptiness of self and perhaps most profoundly and transformatively. is in our meditation practice. Now, have you had, perhaps even for short times, experiences either in sitting and walking when suddenly things just seem to be going along by themselves? There was a strong enough momentum of mindfulness. And this can happen as we practice. The momentum of mindfulness gets strong enough so that it doesn't need our continual effort.

It's working by itself. And we begin to get a real felt sense of experience as being empty phenomena rolling on. It's all going on by itself. And so we're tasting, even for those short moments, a real sense of emptiness. if we're really looking at this and investigating, we begin to see that there's no existent thing to which self or i refers to and those words are convenient designations and they serve a purpose in the conventional world

So it's not that we get rid of that terminology, but when we look deeply, what does it actually refer to? We see that there's no unchanging element in this process. that's stable enough to be called self. You know, self is a designation. The word self is a designation. As I say, a useful one. But it could be understood in the same way today's weather came in just on time. Because the image I use.

is that of a big winter storm you know so we use that word and we understand what it means but actually there's no thing which is a storm independent of the snow and the wind and the cold these are the elements which when they come together we call storm And it's a useful way to describe it. But there's no self-existing thing which is a storm apart from these changing elements.

And so the sense of self or the idea of self really refers to the changing weather patterns of our experience. Self is like storm. You know, it's a useful understanding and it makes for ease of communication. But as we look, we begin to see our experience in terms of the aggregate, so the sense spheres. We begin to see the momentariness of experience arising and passing so quickly. There's something I call NPMs, which are noticings per minute.

In the beginning of our practice, the NPMs are pretty low. I don't know, maybe 15. 15 NPMs. But as we practice, we just... We're just noticing. And as the mind gets a little more still and quiet, the NPMs go way up. Even within one breath or just hearing a sound, how many different... How many different elements, how many different experiences are arising and passing within a single breath, or a single sound, or a single step? There's so much that's going on. So when we see that,

we see that nothing is lasting long enough to be called to self. And so we are beginning to deepen our understanding of emptiness. Years ago, this goes back maybe 30 or 40 years, there was a woman from Colorado who was a student of Ubakin in Burma, who was Goenka's teacher. Her name was Jocelyn King. And she had just a wonderful little phrase, which stuck with me all these years. She said, it's better to stand on the firm ground of emptiness than on the quicksand of somethingness.

better to stand on the firm ground of emptiness rather than the quicksand of somethingness but when we look at our experience how often do we get lost in the quicksand of emotions and thoughts. You know, all the stories we tell ourselves, we really sink into them, forgetting very often their empty selfless nature. So this is our practice. It's like waking up to this deeper understanding of what's going on.

Another way of understanding emptiness, not only of understanding it, actually experiencing it, is something Brian spoke about last night, and I want to reiterate because... When we pay attention to it, it's so obvious. And that is that things are not subject or amenable to our will. And this is one of the meanings of anatta, selflessness, or shunyata, the ungovernableness of phenomena, that things are following their own laws. And as is completely obvious,

We cannot say with any hope of success, may my body not get old. May my body not get sick. May I have only pleasant thoughts. Just a minute, if you could come into the sitting. May I have no pain, the sitting. How successful will you be? you know at times there's no pain but things happen not because of our will but they're arising out of appropriate causes and conditions

It's not because they belong to us. Experience belongs to us in some way that we can command. So if we want something to happen, if we have the aspiration for something to happen, we need to understand. What are the appropriate conditions for that to arise? Now there's having the thought, may the water boil, may the water boil. We'll never get that cup of tea.

We need to raise the temperature of the water by some appropriate means, some effective means. That is what is going to create boiling water. So it's the understanding of... What conditions, what causes lead to what? What leads to what? Actually, in some way, I think all of the Buddha's teachings could be condensed into that phrase. He taught. What leads to what? Unwholesome states lead to suffering. Wholesome states lead to happiness. And then he went into ever more detail about that.

This has some practical consequences for us in our lives. Pay attention when you're in some situation where it's obvious things are not conforming to your will.

You know, it might be some condition of the body. Might be difficulties in a relationship. Or being at the airport two hours early and your flight is canceled. But what's interesting in all these situations... how often we personalize them as if we should have been able to control it instead of realizing all of these situations are arising because of a whole array of conditions

which gave rise to that situation. Now the more we see this clearly, the more we experience this particular understanding of emptiness, that things are following their own laws. There is a growing ability to let go of the illusion of control. We stop living in that illusion. And one of the very... amazing consequences of freeing ourselves at least to some extent from this illusion of control is that we are able to see more clearly

What are the actual conditions necessary to accomplish our aims? So clear seeing, letting go of the illusion of control. we come out of all the posturings of self and we actually engage in the activity of wisdom. There's an aspiration, whatever it may be, a worldly one, a spiritual one, there's an aspiration. And we see, oh, what's necessary to accomplish this? Sometimes I think that if governments and politicians

could understand this truth? And how much of political discourse is posturing without any regard for what's actually needed? The world would be a very different place. OK, so certain Buddhist traditions emphasize yet another meaning of emptiness. And this can become a very interesting part of our practice.

And that is recognizing directly the empty, sky-like nature of the mind. Padmasambhava was a great Indian adept. who brought Buddhism to Tibet. So he taught, it's certain that the nature of mind is empty and without any foundation whatsoever. your own mind is insubstantial like the empty sky now this next line is very important your own mind is insubstantial like the empty sky

Look at your own mind to see whether this is so or not. So this takes it outside or the realm of Buddhist philosophy. It's not about that at all. The instruction here is to look into our own minds so that we can actually realize its empty, insubstantial nature. You know, when we look for the mind, there's nothing to find. And in the not finding, as one teacher said, in the not finding, that's the finding.

That's what we want to realize. And it's very powerful and it opens up a whole different way of being with experience. So in this practice, in this looking directly at the empty, insubstantial nature of the mind, this is not a deconstruction of the self. We're not taking the self apart through it. investigation of the aggregates or the sense spheres, but rather this way of looking is a direct, immediate recognition of the mind's empty nature.

Now what keeps us sometimes from this recognition or realization, it was expressed, I don't think she was referring to this, but her... It's from a line of poetry from the Polish Nobel Prize winning poet Wislawa Simborska. And she's quite a remarkable poet. She said, there is so much everything that nothing is hidden quite nicely. It kind of captures, you know, we're so entranced with the somethingness. There's so much everything. You know, there's so much in experience and appearances.

that we miss or we overlook the empty aspect. But also a lot of care is needed here because It might be easier to create some idea of emptiness or get attached to emptiness. You know, even some created experience of it. And I actually fell into that trap for quite a while. When I first kind of was playing with these teachings, you know, look for the emptiness of the mind, not the objects.

I don't know, it was weird. It was like a whole month of practice where I kind of, it's even hard to describe, I kind of backed into a corner, no object, no object, no object. Empty, empty, empty. And then hold on to that. It was ridiculous. And very tension producing. Until I find that, okay, this is clearly not the way. I was just creating some idea, you know, of what emptiness might mean. And it can get even more, that's...

It can get quite a bit more subtle than that. Somebody once came to Sokni Rinpoche, who's a young contemporary Dzogchen teacher. describing a wonderful experience of the mind becoming very spacious. She was describing her experience of the mind, just this great vast spaciousness. and he made a very interesting distinction.

He said, in talking about this empty nature of mind, it's not so much spaciousness as groundlessness. Do you get a sense of the difference? Spaciousness is already a created space. mind state. It's a mind state of spaciousness. Whereas groundless is like this. Nothing created that. That's the empty aspect, the groundlessness of it all. Okay, intrinsically empty, naturally radiant.

So in this understanding, the nature of the mind is not just empty. It is also naturally radiant or luminous. And radiant here... luminous luminosity does not refer to light what it refers to naturally radiant it refers to the innate Knowing capacity, cognizing capacity of the mind. Sometimes we say that the mind is empty like space, but space doesn't know anything. So the mind is not space.

It's space-like or groundless. But it's much more than that because it has this knowing capacity. And this is why we call it mind. Buddha Dasa, the great Thai monk of the last century, he said, we should really call mind emptiness, but because of the awareness faculty, we call it mind. Okay, so the mind is the union, the inseparable union of emptiness and clarity, the knowing aspect. And one way to perhaps feel into this experience is expressed in the first lines of a book.

about the history of the number zero. It's by Robert Kaplan. And the title of the book is The Nothing That Is. And I just saw the title of this book. OK, here it is. That just captures it all, the nothing that is. So I bought the book. And the first lines were great. And then. The math got beyond me. But the opening lines of the book really capture this union of awareness and emptiness. It says, look at zero.

and you see nothing. Look through it and you see the world. So that's a wonderful way of expressing the nature of mind. Now look for zero, you see nothing. Look through it and you see the world. The union of its empty aspect and its knowing aspect. You could call it the cognizing power of emptiness. Now, what's interesting about this particular way of understanding the mind, and as you've probably gathered from...

You know, all the many Dharma talks you've heard over these weeks and months. There are lots of ways to talk about this, and different traditions talk about it in different ways, but it's all pointing to the same thing.

So this union of emptiness and clarity, emptiness and knowing, this is not something that's missing that we have to get. It's not something that we... don't yet have it's already here this is the nature of mind and we simply have to recognize it and come back to it you know as we let go of our various attachments and often subtle attachments. So it's already here. And we're simply coming back to the recognition of it. This is all summed up.

in one teaching of the buddha from the polycanon where he said nothing whatsoever is to be clung to as i or mine that whoever has heard this has heard all the teachings Whoever practices this has practiced all the teachings. Whoever realizes this has realized all the teachings. It's quite remarkable, you know, summed up in one line. Nothing whatsoever is to be clung to as I or mine. Again, this is reflected in a Tibetan teaching.

It says the experience of emptiness is not found outside the world of ordinary appearance, as many people mistakenly assume. In truth we experience emptiness when the mind is free of grasping at appearance. When the mind is free of grasping. When we settle back. not identified with anything as i or mine then this union of emptiness and awareness is so apparent So there's one image which describes this movement from attachment to awareness. From the deluded mind of a self-center.

to the awake mind of zero center. And this is the image of ice and water, appropriate today. You know, what is ice like? Ice is hard. It's solid. It's frozen. It's the experience of the mind When we're lost in thoughts, when we're lost in the stories, when we're lost in the emotions, lost in the past or the future or even fixated on the present, Ice is the experience of mind when it's contracted into an identification with what is arising.

And when we're identified with the body or thoughts or emotions or feelings or whatever it is that's arising, that contraction in the identification with the arising object is like ice. It's solid. So watch how often this contraction happens in the course of a day. This would be an interesting exercise. You know, as you're going through the day of sitting and walking, How often does the mind contract, become ice, when it's caught up or identified in various moments of desire or anger or worry?

or pride or impatience or fear or whatever it may be watch this movement you're just flowing along empty phenomena rolling on what is it that catches the mind where do we get caught and feel the contraction of it. So water represents the nature of awareness. It's naturally radiant. It's that natural knowing. It's consciousness which is free of a self-center. Water is unfrozen. It's the mind unfixated. Now the great discovery...

is that water is none other than melted ice. Now every time we come out from being lost in some mind drama, And realizing, you know, when we come out, oh, that was only a play of thought. Right there, we've gone from ice to water. You know, when we're lost in it, the contraction of self and identification. When we see it, the same phenomena. The thought may still be there, no longer identified. The ice has melted. And it's just part of the ongoing flow.

So what's important here to see is that awareness is not some far-off state that we have to look for or get. It's rather this very mind that's simply unfrozen. It's not caught in attachment, not caught in identification. Now, one little subtlety here. You need to be a little careful. Because sometimes we think that we're in the free flow of water and it's really slush. You know, where there are subtle attachments or subtle fixations.

perhaps even an identification with awareness itself. So then it's not quite the free flowing of water. So in this open, unobstructed nature of awareness, empty of self, we experience the third aspect of the nature of mind. So it's intrinsically empty. in the different ways we talked about, naturally radiant, it has this innate wakeful aware quality, this capacity to know.

And the third aspect is ceaselessly responsive. So this now gets very interesting because it's the way our understanding manifests. There is a great spontaneity and responsiveness to situations. It's like water flowing down a mountain and it's... Finding the shortest way, water will find the shortest way down the mountain, depending on the particular topography. So one of the elements of bodhicitta, of ultimate bodhicitta, is that compassion or responsiveness is the very activity of emptiness.

For a long time, in certain Buddhist traditions, there's a lot of emphasis given to the bodhisattva vows. People take the vows to save all beings. It's expressed in different ways. And I would read that and hear it and be inspired by it, but it just seemed impossible to me. You know, how am I ever?

gonna save all beings so it seemed like a nice idea but it was something for myself a little hard to connect with but then when i heard these teachings on bodhicitta and compassion and emptiness and realize that compassion is the activity of emptiness i understood these bodhisattva vows in a completely different way you know if they're resting on the shoulders of a self

It just seems impossible, much too daunting. But if we realize that this compassionate activity... of wanting to awaken or help or benefit all beings, if that's resting or coming forth from an understanding of emptiness, selflessness, then this is just the Dharma unfolding. It's not an I, it's not a self who's going to be doing this. And so then everything seemed to be possible.

intrinsically empty, naturally radiant, ceaselessly responsive. And when we're in that empty, aware space, then the mind is naturally responsive. to the world. We begin to get engaged with the world in a very spontaneous way. And it manifests. In lots of different ways. There's not just one way it's going to show itself. We basically become responsive to the needs of beings.

in whatever way is possible in a particular situation. Sometimes it's simply a shift of attitude. I read an interview with Aung San Suu Kyi, the democracy leader in Burma, an amazing woman. She had been under house arrest, I think, for close to 17 years or something like that. You know, some years ago she was released from house arrest, and the political situation in Burma has changed somewhat. But in the interview, it was with an Australian newspaper, and they were asking her...

The generals, the military, are just a brutal regime. And for her, she was under this house arrest for so long. And they asked her, don't you want to bring the generals down?

You know, these people who were doing terrible things. And her response was, no, I want to bring them up. And I thought... quite a quite a different attitude than many people might have no it's not it's not for revenge and it's not can i help to bring them up can i help to awaken them from ignorance Now sometimes this responsiveness, the nature of mind being ceaselessly responsive, sometimes it takes the form simply

small unregarded ways. Maybe it's just an act of friendliness or an act of generosity, no big thing, but it's a responsiveness to the moment. We shouldn't overlook these little opportunities to allow that to manifest. The Dalai Lama said, I try to treat whoever I meet as an old friend. This gives me a genuine feeling of happiness. It is the practice of compassion. Such a simple thing, but very difficult to do.

How would it be to go through life treating everyone we meet as an old friend? To be so... back in this experience of empty, aware responsiveness. We're outside of our stories and we treat everyone as an old friend. be a very different way of going through the world. Sometimes compassion manifests as the willingness to learn.

We've experienced this a lot here at IMS, and I think we've mentioned this over the last months. For the past five or six years, IMS has been committed in a significant way. to just the whole issue and question of diversity and inclusion. And when we started I mean, one of the most amazing realizations for me personally and for a lot of us who were working on this was just how clueless

We were with respect to so many issues of exclusion. You know, whether it's around race or gender or sexual preference or... a lot of the things Brian mentioned last night and so over these last five or six years there's been a huge learning curve you know of just opening to what is so obvious, and yet because it's so easy to live in the comfort zone of what's familiar to us, we often are just unaware.

of the magnitude of suffering that exists in our society and in many societies, because of racism, or because of homophobia, or because of whatever the particular... form of exclusion is. And so compassion, this responsiveness, is really manifest just as a willingness. Just to learn, to open to what we don't know. And this actually will bring us close, will open us and bring us closer to the suffering that is existing in the world.

this openness and willingness to come close to suffering, which is the condition for compassion to arise. So it's all interrelated here. So this has been a very personally rewarding endeavor, both myself and also just for IMS as an institution. And sometimes compassion... This responsiveness manifests in acts of tremendous determination and courage. And there are striking examples of this.

We think of people like Nelson Mandela or Martin Luther King Jr. where in the face of tremendous anger and hatred and hostility, somehow they manage to keep their hearts open. So this is quite remarkable. There's a doctor by the name of Paul Farmer. Perhaps some of you, there's a book written about him by Tracy Kitter called Mountains Beyond Mountains. He's done a lot of work. He's done a lot of work in Haiti and in many other countries now around the world.

working with AIDS and TB and he really puts himself out there. And this was a story from that book, the book about his life. We had set up a clinic in Haiti and a lot of people you know we're coming and then he took a few days to go off into the mountains to treat just two families you know who needed help And his colleagues criticized him for that, said, you know, you're going to spend all this time for two families and so many people are coming here who need you. And this is what he wrote.

If you say that seven hours walk is too long to walk for two families of patients, you're saying that their lives matter less than some others. And the idea that some lives matter less is the root of all that's wrong in the world. That's such a beautiful encapsulation. The idea that some lives matter less is the root of all that's wrong in the world. And so it's this compassionate responsiveness.

which is in the nature of the mind intrinsically empty naturally radiant ceaselessly responsive the more we operate from this empty selfless place

the more this responsiveness manifests. Now what's important... i think is to understand that there is no hierarchy of compassionate action there's no particular prescription for how we manifest this in the world The field of compassion is limitless because it's the field of suffering beings. And in this realm, we each find our own way, based on our interests, our talents, our capabilities.

There's no one way to be compassionate. It's the responsiveness to suffering. It will show itself in so many ways. It may take the form of an active engagement in the world. It could also take the form of sitting in a mountain cave for lifetimes. If the motivation, if the aspiration is to awaken to benefit all. And just think of the bodhisattva, the Buddha before his enlightenment, as the stories go, countless lifetimes as a renunciate, you know, living by himself.

And I could just hear his family saying, what are you doing? You're not helping anyone. What are you doing in that cave? Have you heard that from anyone? and yet it was all that work that he did for her. perhaps countless lifetimes, which finally flowered in the hugely compassionate energy of his awakening, which we are benefiting from 2,600 years later. The power of that. So it's not to judge, not to think, oh, there's one way that we have to manifest this.

We need a really great humility as we walk on this path. Dalai Lama said, changes in attitudes never come easily. the development of love and compassion is a wide round curve that can be negotiated only slowly not a sharp corner that can be turned all at once it comes with daily practice And so even as we're inspired by the idea of bodhicitta, may my life, may my practice be for the benefit of all.

And this can be a powerful source of energy for us in our practice and in our lives. We need to undertake it with a huge amount of humility, without grandiosity. We're just planting this seed, we're watering this seed. Just to close. another of the really great tibetan masters of the last century he taught when you recognize the empty selfless nature of phenomena

The energy to bring about the good of others dawns uncontrived and effortless. So this is how the different levels of reality the relative level the ultimate level emptiness and compassion this is how they all come together when we recognize the empty selfless nature of phenomena The energy to bring about the good of others dawns uncontrived and effortless. So this is really the great work that we're all doing here together.