And the second step, is then, when you gradually minimize all this, the normal behavior, habit, externally, when you dissolve externally, then you naturally look inward. And when you naturally look inward, and then, such as devotion, such as compassion, such as generosity, and wisdom, and kindness, and then slowly develops. And then, that is very important to understand.
And that’s why doing three years retreat is important. It doesn’t matter whether you do some kind of emptiness yogi practice. It doesn’t matter whether you’re doing a Chenrezig for three years and three months. Basically, for three years, is necessary.
People they think that three years retreat is only something to do with a great yoga practice. It’s not. The retreat is about creating a new habit. Like right now, when you look into the Facebook. You have all this “sponsored”, “sponsors”, “subscribe to this”, “subscribe to that”, “sponsored by this”, “sponsor to this”. You have all this advertisement, and then the conclusion of this fast paced advertisement, is giving us the impression that you can learn quickly! And you can achieve quickly! And then you can be a teacher quickly! You can have a student quickly! You can become famous quickly! Become a meditation master quickly!
And everything is like blowing the balloon of the ego, and blowing the balloon of the pride, and that is what our current social media is doing. We get all this “sponsored” on the spiritual journey, spiritual apps, spiritual this, spiritual that. So the bottom line is it’s feeding our ego by thinking that if we just simply learn this one, then you can succeed! If you succeed, then you be a teacher! You’ll become a great human being! You can help so many people!
But in reality, it doesn’t function like that. You need one year. Whether you live in the olden times, whether you live in the modern times. The ignorance has been remain the same. Yeah the world has been overpopulated with human beings, but with sentient beings, with all the different insect and animals, has been overpopulated since the beginning of the time. So our ignorance has not changed, the society, civilization, and some religion, and some culture perspective, and the way of thinking in life has changed throughout the time. But the ignorance has not changed.
So therefore in order to overcome our ignorance, we have to overcome our ego. In order to overcome our ego, we have to have a clear judgement. That clear judgement should not come from the self-righteousness attitude that “I am right and everybody is wrong“. So that’s that. And in order to have that clear judgement and then also having that, and also having that impact on the other side, to your mind, is to develop a sense of solitary retreat.
So it doesn’t matter whether you do a yoga practice, or, like the Six Yogas of Niguma, and the Five Golden Practice of Shangpa lineage, which is coming from the Niguma herself. Whether you do that, or whether you simply do one Chenrezig practice or Green Tara practice for three years and three months, or six months, it’s totally fine. These are completely equal, I would say completely equal. Because you need to have some kind of a, build a habit. You need to build a habit.
The mind is little bit like a watchtower. In order to have a watchtower, you need to have an external, internal, strong foundation. And then, slowly you need a human being that looks inside and outside at the same time. So the mind is like that. You need to build a strong foundation, externally, internally, but eventually you need a human being who does, systematically manage certain things. So that’s something I want to explain in the first place.
Kalu Rinpoche
FB Livestream 4 July 2020
To be continued…
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