able to succeed. I come here to practice in order to improve my ego.” That attitude is not spiritual.
Here’s another attitude: “My ego works so hard. I must take care of my ego. I must relax. I come here to practice and become relaxed, so that my ego gets healthier and I can do my job.” That type of attitude is okay, but merely okay; it’s just one drop of a very small motivation.
We can, in fact, have a much larger perspective. As long as we harbor and perpetuate the negative emotions of attachment, anger, closed-mindedness, pride, and jealousy, they will continue to give us a hard time, and they will make it difficult for others to be with us as well. We need to be free of them. We need to have this attitude: “I must be free of these emotions.”
When you leave this retreat at Gomde, I want you to go home naked. You can think that you left your negative emotions there as a donation! Honestly, that is the purpose of such a place. It is not right to go on retreat or hear teachings with the attitude, “I must go there in order to get something; I must achieve something.” Instead, have this attitude: “I am practicing a spiritual path in order to lose something—to get rid of my attachment, my anger, my closed-mindedness, my conceit, my competitive jealousy.”
Next, I would like to suggest that you practice in such a way that you are at ease with the whole process. Gradually expand that attitude of ease to encompass more and more. Once you’ve freed yourself of all these annoying emotions and become naked, it’s not like you can just lean back and take it easy. That is not sufficient. You can awaken a sense of responsibility for all the other sentient beings who are exactly the way you used to be, tormented by negative emotions. You can begin helping them—first one, then two, then three, and finally all sentient beings.
Otherwise, what Gampopa said may come true: If you do not practice the Dharma correctly, it could become a cause for rebirth in the lower realms. That may happen for many people. In fact, it happens more frequently among old practitioners than with beginners.
Someone may relate to Dharma merely as a kind of remedy to be used when confused or upset. This of course is not the real purpose of spiritual practice. In this kind of situation, you do some practice till you have settled down, and then you set it aside and forget all about it. The next time you get upset, you do some more practice in order to feel good again. Of course, reestablishing one’s equilibrium in this way is one of the minor purposes of practice, but it’s not the real goal. Doing this is a way of using the Dharma as if it were a type of therapy. You may of course choose to do this, but I do not think it will get you enlightened. Feel a little bit unhappy, do some Dharma, get happy. Feel a little bit upset, then feel fine, then again feel unhappy. If you just continue like this, holding this very short-term view in mind, then there is no progress. “Last night I didn’t sleep—my mind was disturbed, and the dog was barking next door. Now my mind is a little upside down, so I need to do a session to cure it. Okay, this morning I’ll meditate.”
Do not practice in this way. Dharma practice is not meant merely to make oneself feel better. The whole point of spiritual practice is to liberate oneself through realization and also to liberate others through compassionate capacity. To practice in order to feel better only brings one back up to that same level—one never makes any real progress. At the end of one’s life, one just happens to feel good till the end of one’s last session and then that’s it—nothing happens beyond that. With this attitude of merely feeling good becoming the type of Buddhism that spreads in the West, we may see a huge scarcity of enlightened masters in the future. They will become an endangered species.
Please understand that the pursuit of “feeling better” is a samsaric goal. It is a totally mundane pursuit that borrows from the Dharma and uses all its special methods in order to fine-tune ego into a fit and workable entity. The definition of a worldly aim is to try to achieve something for oneself with a goal-oriented frame of mind—“so that I feel good.” We may use spiritual practice to achieve this, one good reason being that it works much better than other methods. If we’re on this path, we do a little spiritual practice and pretend to be doing it sincerely. This kind of deception, hiding the ego-oriented, materialistic aim under the tablecloth, might include something like “I take refuge in the Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha, so I must be pure.” Gradually, as we become more astute at spiritual practice, we may bring our materialistic aim out into the open. This is quite possible: people definitely do it. But if this is how you practice, you won’t get anywhere in the end. How could one ever become liberated through selfishness?
There comes a point when we start to lose faith in the illusions of this world: our level of trust in illusions begins to weaken, and we become disappointed. Using spiritual practice to nurture our ego back into good health while still retaining trust in these illusory aims does not set us free. True freedom does not mean having a healthy faith in illusions; rather, it means going completely beyond delusion. This may not sound particularly comforting, but it is true. It may be an unpleasant piece of news, especially if we have to admit to ourselves, “I have really been fooling myself all along. Why did I do all this practice? Am I completely wrong?” What can you do to pretend this isn’t true? Facing the truth is not pleasant.
The real help here lies in continually correcting and improving our motivation: understanding why we are practicing and where we are ultimately heading. Work on this and bring forth the noble motivation of bodhichitta. Then all methods and practices can be used to help you progress in that direction.
Again I must emphasize this point: if we want to approach ultimate truth, we must form a true motivation. This includes compassion for all other sentient beings who delude themselves continuously with the contents of whatever arises in their minds. Compassionate motivation says, “How sad that they believe so strongly in their thoughts, that they take them to be so real.” This deluded belief in one’s own thoughts is what I call the “granddad concept.” First, we hold our thought as true. Next, we accept that delusion, and it becomes our granddad. You know what it’s like to suffer from this delusion yourself, in your own experience. Bring to mind all other sentient beings who let themselves get caught up in their granddad delusion and, with compassion, form the wish to free them all. That’s the true motivation: please generate it.
Unless we have completely pure and true motivation, the practice of Vajrayana and Dzogchen doesn’t turn out well. Paltrul Rinpoche was a great Dzogchen master. He did not have any major monastery, but he had an encampment of thousands of practitioners that was called Paltrul Gar, Paltrul’s Camp. Over and over again, he taught those gathered around him the importance of having pure motivation. He created a situation named the Three Opportunities to improve the motivation of these practitioners. The first opportunity was at the sound of the wake-up gong in the early morning. Upon hearing the sound, people had the opportunity to think, “Yes, I must improve my motivation. I must put myself into the service of others; I must get rid of negative emotions and assist all sentient beings.” They would repeatedly bring that to mind in order to adjust their aim.
The second opportunity arose at Paltrul Rinpoche’s main tent. To get into it, you had to pass by a stupa, and at the opening to the enclosure, you had to squeeze yourself by to get through. The entranceway was deliberately made narrow so that you paused for a moment and thought, “This is the second opportunity to adjust my motivation.”
The third one occurred in Paltrul Rinpoche’s teaching itself, at the times when he would say directly, “You must correct and improve your motivation”—just like I am telling you now.
If these Three Opportunities did not work, then for the most part, Paltrul Rinpoche would kick you out of the encampment. He would say, “You are just fooling me and I am just fooling you. There is no point in that, so get out. Go away and become a businessman, get married, have children, get out of here! What’s the use of being neither a spiritual practitioner nor a worldly person? Go and be a worldly person! Just have a good heart occasionally.” What he meant was, it is not all right to dress up as a Dharma practitioner and merely pretend to be one. To act in this way is not being honest with others, and especially not with oneself.
Motivation is easy to talk about yet sometimes hard to have. We always forget the simplest things, partly because we don’t take them seriously. We would rather learn the more advanced,