OK? (Yes.) Eat well? (Yes.) Sleep good? (Yes.) Complain correctly? Does anybody complain here? (No.) You know what to do if you want to complain. Right? Just stick a straw, hand me a glass of tea and drink it. By the way, I have a lot of complaints to make, but since the regulation here is very funny, so I don’t complain. OK, let’s get on with Shiva. Oh, I just look at you and I feel so thirsty. You run around all day and do nothing. Enjoy your honeymoon. Yesterday, I was supposed to come and see the ones who left today, but I couldn’t make it. So I thought, eh, too bad, go to where you know. Anywhere you want, just go anywhere you want. Go home. This is very hot. Wow. It’s too hot! Even for an Enlightened Master, it’s too hot. Are you alright? You don’t feel tired? (No.) Not with the time change and everything? (No.) Really! You’re so great. I suppose I’m the only person that is tired in this whole congregation. I just don’t know why I get tired. Don’t do anything, just hang around, sit around, let people love and admire and clap their hands.
OK, let’s see if we can work further. It’s very difficult. Last time was 20th (way), right? (Yes.) OK. (Twenty-one.) Twenty-one already? (Yes.) Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Now, twenty-two. You remember. (Yes.) Shiva was talking to Devi, His wife, about many different ways to control the wandering mind in order to be one-pointed, so that we can get inner peace, the peace inside our heart that we desire. Now, there were 112 ways. Last time, we made it only to twenty-one. Now, we continue.
Number twenty-two: The method, the way, is to try to “consider any part of your body as limitlessly spacious.” For example, we look at the finger, and we see just a little round stuff here, a very small form, but you should consider, consider, consider, consider, consider again. Why are you laughing? You’re laughing at me! (No!) And then consider until the finger becomes boundless, with no frontier, no limit. And at that time, of course, you have already entered samadhi. It’s not because you consider with your cross-eyes that your finger became spacious, but because you have enlarged your consciousness, you have set free your Real Self. Thus, you have felt everything in the Universe is spacious, limitless. Got it? (Yes.) Actually, whenever you can concentrate on anything, that you have become so spacious like that, that is the samadhi. No problem. There are 84,000 ways of concentrating. In fact, practically everything that we do in this life, or everything that exists in this world, is a method of practice, just because our mind is so very, very hindered by our own prejudices – and our own pattern of habit.
For example, if we sit anywhere, then immediately we begin to notice that our mind [is] wandering all around the world, without airplane tickets. In other words, illegally traversing many countries’ frontiers without a pass. So, whenever we try to do something, our mind never concentrates there. That’s why the world people are very, very busy [working] from eight to five, from ten to six or whatever, and still the world is in chaos. And most of the time when we work in a company or in our house or in the business, our mind is not absolutely there, so we should get paid only half of the wage, or maybe even one-quarter or one-fifth of it, to be honest. That is why since the ancient times, all the Masters have advised us to spend at least one-tenth of our income for charitable purposes, so that we clear the debt of our unintentional incurring sin. For example, when we drink coffee too long, we chat too long over the coffee break and we didn’t realize it, and we didn’t do it on purpose, but still we incur the debt from the company, that we get paid too much for our little time and little effort. Alright?
So anyhow, the Buddha has said that there is no method that is not a Buddhist method. And there is nothing that is defiled in this Universe, except our own mind, our own heart, which has been defiled by our own habit, by our own karma, our own way of life, our incorrect way of thinking, of behaving. And that’s why we perceive everything in such a defiled way, in such an incorrect way. Thus, if we want to get back to the purity of the Kingdom of God, or Buddha Nature, we should by all means always try to be centered, to be concentrated in whatever things we are doing at that moment. In that way, at least we are always concentrated. If we can’t be concentrated on the Holy (Quan Yin) Method that our Master has taught us, at least we are concentrated in some way, so that our self is purified. And not to be thinking of any other useless pursuits, and mundane and defiled ways that make us more and more hindered, and make it harder and harder [for us] to go to the Kingdom within, to find peace and happiness. Because without peace and happiness inside, it’s very difficult to take care of the daily business or to do anything meaningful at all.
Even to play golf, or to play football, or to play basketball, tennis, everything, the player must be absolutely concentrating on what he’s doing. Is that not so? (Yes.) The one who wins is the one who practices well and concentrates, puts all his heart and mind in that practice. That’s how he wins. There’s no secret. There’s no secret or maybe no genius about that. Of course, maybe some are more supple than others, maybe their bodies are more equipped with suppleness, so that he can bend faster and make a swifter response to the opponent. But nevertheless, with practice and concentration, the other can do it as well. Perhaps that person was already born with more concentration and less wandering thoughts as other people do have. And then it happened that he likes football as his only interest in life, or maybe he likes tennis or maybe he likes any other thing. And then with the one-pointedness concentration and no other interfering desire or thought in between, he plays football excellently.
There is a film about a person who plays… what do you call a ball when somebody catches and the other one...? (Baseball.) (Baseball.) Baseball? (Yes.) Oh, yeah, baseball. There was a man named Nebraska. Do you know that film? (In the cornfield where they had a baseball field in the cornfields?) I don’t remember. (Yes, I don’t remember what that’s called.) What’s the title of the film, I forgot. But that young man, he plays ball like nobody has ever seen. And he was a champion of baseball, because after all, they found out that he has nothing else in his mind. He rejected the whole world because he has perhaps an unhappy childhood, or something like that. And then because of his rejection to the world, he closed everything and just thought of the ball. Perhaps by this concentration and through his disadvantage of his unhappy childhood, it turns out that he has the advantage of concentrating. Therefore, he wins in every game and became a superstar – in the film. But perhaps that film was based on a true story of some superstar in baseball.
Photo Caption: “Repair EDEN by All Means”
