Notes from Liz talks
Fire day.
working with mantra and seed syllable - Mantra is a group of seed syllables. Every deity has its own seed syllable. The buddha arises from the seed syllable. Mantra is an instrument of the breath. Don’t have to say it out loud for it to work. Man = mind tra = protection.
Vajrayana was originally called Mantrayana
Powerful tool to stay grounded and present in a healthier more beneficial state of mind.
Because mantra rides on the breath, it activates the subtle body and reharmonizes it with the energy of the buddha whose seed syllable you are chanting.
Calling the primordial energy of the wisdom deity you are evoking.
Six Realms
Could consider them real places, but it definitely makes sense to think of them as states of mind.
God Realm - Buddha family. Ignorant bliss
Asura or Jealous Gods Realm - Karma
Human Realm - Padma. Desire
Animal Realm - Buddha also. Ignorance
Hungry Ghost Preta Realm - Poverty and greed. Ratna
Hell Realm - Vajra. Anger and Aggression. Hot and Cold
There’s a Buddha in each of these realms
Padma means lotus. Desire. Passion. Heat. Fire. Longing in our hearts. Longing for union, connection, loved, appreciated.
Clarified Padma - attractive, wholesome, friendly. Fun, funny. Can be yourself. Compassion and empathy. Responding and speaking from the heart. Like a bonfire you want to get close to. Enlightened action of Padma is magnetizing.
Time of day is dusk. Spring. Soft rolling hills. Mossy glens, wildflowers. In love the beauty of the world. Appreciation of the transitory-ness. Wistful quality. Energy of falling in love. Sensual, sexuality, entertainment and entertaining.
Neurotic Padma
Seductive craving passion. Pull the world in and unify with it. Don’t care about others feelings and needs. All about me. Urge to possess, but not too close. Don’t have to give any thing up or actually connect. Very manipulative.
Passionate clinging to another person, situation, idea. Without awareness of anything else or how that affects other people in your life. A couple so enamored with each other they can’t see anything else. Desire for fusing, uniting.
Wreckless hedonism. Bored and disillusioned with normal life. One entertainment, meal, after another. Endless entertainment. Las Vegas. I want to be high all the time.
Codependence. People who have poor boundaries. Staying in harmful relationships even though you know it’s not healthy. Having affairs. Taking pleasure in the secret. Sex addiction. Finding commitment difficult. Always looking for the next hot thing. “Your so vain” song.
Peacock.
Clinging to what we think is going to make us happy.
Wisdom - Discriminating Awareness Wisdom. Passion transforms into compassion. Deep intuition of ones own needs and openness. Idea of discrimination - the ability to see very clearly all the details of our existence. What should be discarded and cultivated.
Very creative. Connecting to intuitive flow. Communicating without words. World of the artist.
Able to love everyone without expecting anything in return. Falling in love with the beauty and endless creativity of the world. Mahasukha - great bliss.
The fire of awareness itself - burns up the obscurations of ego. Burns up me, mine, you, yours, so we can connect with the world.
Afternoon Talk
Funny I never really thought of myself as padma until this morning…
Moving through the families in stages of life: babies have everything, vajra in school, padma in 20s, karma in 30s-40s, ratna in 50s-60s, Buddha in old age
Ah Padma. This is familiar ground for all of us. Padma is associated with the human realm - the realm of desire. We want.
We want. We yearn. We desire. We are continually unsatisfied with what we have.
We are too hot. We are too cold. We are bored so we want to eat, or get up and walk around. But then we do that and we don’t feel any relief.
We want a new class, a new job, a new apartment, new clothes. We want more money so we can buy those things. We want to be famous, or at least recognized. We want to be invited to all the parties. We want likes and follows. We want shares.
Scrolling as Padma. Endless entertainment. Titillation but no connection. Porn. Dopamine hits.
We do this with meditation too - grasping on to the good feelings, pushing away the uncomfortable ones. We grasp onto meaning, definitions, understanding, recognition as a defense against the smallness of our existence compared to the sky and the sun.
We want important things too.
We want some time away from the grind so we can actually look for meaning in our lives.
We want to be happy. We want our family and friends to be happy. We want people to have houses and food - to not have to sleep on the streets. We want healthcare for everyone. We want the strong to stop picking on the weak.
We want art and music everywhere. We want to be able to express ourselves, create crazy wonderful provocative things.
This yearning creates suffering, but it’s also created our world. People wanted to stop walking to the outhouse once, so we made toilets. People wanted to bathe indoors, so we made hot water tanks and showers. People wanted to land on the moon, so we did. People wanted to look at cat videos all day, so we made the internet.
[canvassing as a Padma job. Startup CEO as padma job.]
The confused behavior or thought patterns of padma is grasping, desire, the wisdom of padma is discrimination - the ability to tell the difference between grasping for something to reinforce your confused beliefs and something that expands your experience of life.
How do we tell the difference?
I bet each of you can remember some time when you were crushing on someone, wanting them so badly, and then you realized that your grasping was more about your loneliness.
Instead of running from that realization, you paused for a moment to explore it. You acknowledged your loneliness.
Wow I’m lonely. We felt it. Touched it.
All of the activity aimed at papering over the hole in our hearts can rest for a minute. We can turn our attention towards the heart and the hole itself.
We feel lonely. We want to connect. And we feel tender towards that, like we’ve looked under a wet cardboard box and found a little grey kitten. We want to pick it up and warm it with our body heat.
Suddenly, the burning desire to seduce the world turns into curiosity and interest for this simple, tender heart.
That flip - from externalizing our desires to feeling compassion for ourselves - is one of the most human moments in our lives.
A person who has connected with that compassion, who feels compassion for herself, her struggles, and therefore feels compassion for others too, blossoms like a lotus flower.
She is willing to demonstrate who she is and what she brings to the world. She is full of potential and full of promise. She draws people to her naturally, with no effort at all, because she is authentic.
She sees pleasure without grasping for it, so it’s not addictive anymore - it doesn’t draw her automatically. There’s a choice. And same with pain… it’s not immediately, instinctively repulsive. She sees things for what they really are.
“Pain and pleasure alike have become ornaments which it is pleasant to wear.”
So instead of grasping at the next shiny thing in her path, she sees everything in its own distinct way. Everything is unique, with its own particular qualities and characteristics. That’s the wisdom aspect of Padma - discriminating awareness.
[go into what to cultivate and what to leave behind - growing up stories. Learning what not to do as well as what brings joy and connection. Appreciating how far we’ve come… ok we have all kinds of flaws etc and we’re facing new challenges with aging, but we have made a lot of progress too. At least we aren’t making the same mistakes again!]
[lying in my bed after brunch. Belly full. Warm. Cold and rainy outside. I should go for a run. I should work on my talk…
what would encourage waking up? What would open my heart? What would help me connect with you all this afternoon?
I went for a run.
Was cold and wet. But I got to catch up with Talia and Peter the amazing cooks here. Their son was asleep sadly but it was great to connect with them.
Got to see the bare spring trees, the snow slowly melting in the 45 degree temps. Imagining those little H2O molecules becoming unstuck as the air warms them to 33 degrees.
Got to connect with the inner fire. The inner heat of my body. Breath. Sweat. Warmth. So Good!
Increasing loyalty to the things that connect us with the world. Virtuous circle.
Encouraging exercise, movement, being outside as a daily part of your path.
Four karmas:
Pacifying - Vajra
Enriching - Ratna
Magnitizing - Padma
Destroying - Karma
Where is the Buddha?
On Confusion and Wisdom
I want to close with a few words on “confusion” and “wisdom”. We’ve mentioned this before, but I don’t think we can hear it enough.
Confusion creates suffering. Wisdom creates joy. In our daily, normal, conventional framework of understanding, confusion is bad - we should get rid of it. And wisdom is good - we should cultivate it.
But ultimately, there are not two different things, one wisdom and one confusion. We are looking at, we are experiencing the same thing - call it reality, is-ness, being, etc. from two different perspectives. So confusion and wisdom are not fundamentally different.
At least as important, it really doesn’t help to think “Confusion is bad. I should get rid of it” or “Wisdom is good. I should get more of it.” Because the normal ways we would go about doing those things end up producing the opposite.
What’s the normal way of getting rid of confusion? Pretending to know everything. Pretending that we’re not confused. That we have our act together. Being decisive, boldly opinionated, or whatever your personal style dictates. But that makes us more solid, determined, separate, and confused.
What’s the normal way of cultivating wisdom? Acting wise. Accumulating quotes from wise people. Distancing ourselves from the mundane, the ordinary, the humdrum. But that only makes us more aloof, more separate, less connected from our heart and the hearts of those around us.
So not only are wisdom and confusion not fundamentally different, our normal way of dealing with confusion and wisdom don’t really work.
Instead, what we teach here is embrace your confusion. Or at least open up to it. Give it space. Connect to it. Be patient with it, and realistic with it, but don’t try to get rid of it. We are going through all these different types of confusion not because they are bad but because they are real. They are parts of our experience.
this is kind of what I heard from lama Liz yesterday when she was defending the self.
Confusion is the path. These experiences are workable. We can get to know our patterns and our tendencies.
“Those are workable situations, but they’re not just workable…. all kinds of things that we might experience in our daily lives… contain messages that push us into situations in which we can work on ourselves… We have to read the symbolism connected with our life situation. What we do, where we live, how we live - all these living situations have messages that we can read…”
from CTR The Lion’s Roar p 163 Chapter “The Five Buddha Families and Mahamudra”
ok happy to have a discussion.
Oh there’s been a request to get the two of us together up here again. I totally agree. That’s what we’ll do all tomorrow for the talks.
Notes From Liz’s Talk
2025
Six Realms comes from the Abhidharma teaching
God Realm is Ratna? Pride?
Animal - Buddha
Our mind creates our reality
Buddha Amitabha
Very intense. Seeking heightened experiences. Psychedelics!
Precious human birth
Heart Chakra
Bewitched song by Laufe
Talking about teachers: Three kinds