Karmapa

And Ibrouni.

So Ediahim Kamapa.

Bono Kita.

Curtis Jones.

That's some perfect poetry.

A mud hut wolf.

And a, a producer to media, Kamapa.

I say, and I'm producing all the two.

So it's very beautiful.

And we have the mantra of His Holiness Karmapa, Karmapa Cheno, along the walls, you know.

And it's very nice, you know.

It's very nice.

I mean, can you feel there's actually a deep intimacy in the room right now? So the practice, the refuge, the refuge of sangha, the refuge of these truths.

The 16th Karmapa is like my grandfather in the lineage.

He was the head of the Karmakagyu lineage.

And he became sick with cancer in the 1980s and died in 1981 in Zion, Illinois.

And they asked him, do you feel pain? And he just kept saying no.

And they're like, how is it? How is it that your body is riddled with cancer and you're not feeling this pain? And he looked at, this is my teacher who was there.

My teacher says this 16th Karmapa had this kind of gaze, you know, that felt so piercing, like he could look directly into you.

And he just said with so much conviction, he said, nothing dies.

He says, "This is not a paramita of discipline.

It is a paramita of pride." In the Mahamudra Aspirational Prayer of the Third Karmapa, it says, "May we realize the natural state free from any notions of something to be maintained or someone maintaining it.

May our conduct be unstained by hypocrisy, and may we dwell in the effortless purity of the mind's own nature." We'll talk a little bit more about that.

That's a mouthful, so [laughs] I'll talk a little bit more about that in a minute.

But what the Karmapa here is doing, he's pointing out, he's targeting arrogant and spiritual pride.

We reach true discipline when there is no longer any pride striving to be good, but rather an effortless flow of the mind's nature of goodness.

That's the ideal we strive for.

Al- a- another thing that you made me think of, uh, just before I forget.

In my sort of survey research around Gezhig literature, I encountered a really fascinating text within the lineage of the Karmapas.

Uh, and, uh, it was a Gezhig text that was entirely devoted to what y- how yogis can understand the experience of, of catching lice in the context of retreat.

Um, and this text explains like, look, on one level, lice are a parasite that you can see with your physical eye.