Vidyamala explores how a Mahayana approach of cultivating Bodhicitta is a brilliant way to 'flip' our habitual self-centredness and cultivate a new default setting of continually thinking of others. Excepted from the talk Citta and Bodhicitta given at Rivendell as part of the series An Exploration of the Satipatthana Sutta 2018. ***
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[music] Dharma Bites is brought to you by Free Buddhist Audio, the Dharma for Your Life. Our work is funded entirely by donations from our generous listeners. If you would like to help us keep this free, make a contribution at freebuddhistaudio.com/donate. Thank you, and happy listening. So I'm just going to finish with a couple of thoughts on love. Because obviously that is Chitta. Chitta is very associated with love. So we can become aware of our own mind, but how do we bring love into that? I did a little bit when I got onto my siblings, or some of my siblings, and moved from aversion to an intention to try to cultivate forgiveness. That definitely felt quite loving, or potentially loving. But we've been talking a lot about Indra's net, interconnectedness, flow. We take that to its logical conclusion, this idea that there's just me sitting here as an isolated, separate individual, begins to fall apart. It doesn't have any enduring essence. So we are working on clarifying our own mental events and our own minds, because that's a very important part of practice. But as we do that, and we keep on dropping out of these very bound, contracted states of craving and aversion, and we live in this new habit of just noticing it as it arises, and then dropping back into breath and body, we're dropping back into flow, and then things start to open up much more, and we get these glimmerings of an open spacious consciousness, open spacious awareness. So we can do it that way. But in Bodhi Chitta, in Mahayana Buddhism, they do it quite differently. I find very effective when I was on my solid sort of loads of Bodhi Chitta practice. And there, what you do is you just flip the whole thing on its head. And rather than defaulting to being obsessed by the delusion of self, you cultivate the opposite by just thinking of others all the time. So the other day, I think yesterday I talked about Bante's reading on what are all coagulations of the common stream of life. So that's what I am. I'm just this kind of condensation of physical, mental, and emotional process based on my own conditioning. I completely over-identify with that and call it me and get very addicted to all the content of me. But it's all deeply delusional and leads to incredible amount of suffering. So why don't I just think of others as an antidote to that? Because thinking of me all the time is delusional. So why don't I just think of others as a way of overcoming that default setting and continual over-identification with self or self-importance That's one of the Tibetan teachers describes this as self-importance and I think it's really good. So rather than I become an ido, because that can just sound a bit broad, we're overcoming this habituated tendency of self-importance that I am the most important person in the universe. It's quite tricky teaching, we need to prepare care for not to push away from self with a version to think of others, because if it's like what I don't really like me so I'm just going to think of you, that really won't work. But it's more, here I am, I'm whole, I'm present, I'm breathing, I'm in my body, I'm noticing my mind, I'm noticing my bed and I'm dropping back to the midline. And now what I'm going to do is rather than feeding this self as reference point, I'm going to quite actively just continually think of others. And you can do that by whatever I'm experiencing, others are experiencing. So in any given moment, whatever one is experiencing, you can be certain there are millions of people in the world, you're having something almost identical. Find it very powerful in my back pain's bad, because if my back pain's bad I can work on it, I can work on it in terms of softening my reaction, coming to my body, being kind, being gentle, all that kind of stuff, which is effective. But I can also just think of all the other millions of people in the world having back pain in this moment. And they long for freedom from distress, just as much as I do. And I find it very heart opening, and in some ways more effective. So you have to stay with your own experience, so it's not a kind of denial. You stay with your own experience and then you open. We hope you enjoyed today's Dharma Bite. Please help us keep this free. Make a contribution at freebuddhistaudio.com/donny. And thank you. (upbeat music)
