Where is Your Heart?

An excerpt from a teaching called Bodhicitta by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

What makes you a deep practitioner?  What makes you a deep practitioner is really having renounced cyclic existence.   Those of you that are casual practitioners are practicing, but your mind is still a mind of distraction.  You are still running hither and yon, doing this thing and that thing, and you’re superficial.  You have to do this activity over here that is so important, so you go to the meat market. And you have to do this thing over here with your family.  All these have-tos have to happen. There is nothing wrong with going to the meat market, and I want you to have a wonderful family, but it’s that life of distraction that I am arguing with.  It’s that distracted mind that keeps you practicing superficially and keeps you a casual practitioner.

After having received all this teaching, all this loving, after all that you have felt and known in your own heart to be truth, if you are still doing that after all this time, then somehow you have not fully taken refuge in the Three Precious Jewels.  You are not a renunciate.  In your mind, there is still something in the world out there to be accomplished, something that you feel is going to meet your need or answer your problem.  In other words, you still believe in the world of appearances.  You still believe that this apparent reality has some solution or has some basis in realness. You still believe that something is there and you haven’t let go of it.  You haven’t really turned your mind away from it.

When I say turn your mind away from the world, I don’t mean that you have to become a monk or a nun necessarily.  I don’t mean that you have become a nerd or a dead person.  I don’t mean that you are limp and you just don’t have any fun anymore.  That’s not what I am talking about. You can engage in any activity that you feel to engage in, but you simply don’t take refuge in it.  It’s not something that you get tense about.  It’s not something that you get compulsive about. This is Nyingma philosophy.

Right now your mind is all divided.  You are off here and off there.  As you are running off in any of those directions, if someone were to say to you, “Where is your heart?”  You’d have to feel around for it, because you don’t know where it is.  You’re not thinking about the teachings of Lord Buddha.  You’re not thinking about the precious Dharma.  You’re not thinking about the Sangha, you’re not thinking about the Lama, you’re not thinking about the Buddha.  You’re not thinking about clear mind.  You’re not relating to that at all.  You’re all over the place.  You are all over the map.  You want this and you want that.

The reason why you haven’t renounced apparent reality, even though you know it’s going to kill you – this is a fatal condition we have here, even though it’s never answered your problems – never in the past and it never will, even though you know that, you still have one problem.  It’s a big problem and that problem is desire.  You have not overcome desire.  You have desire for this and that, and they are baubles.  This is one of the first teachings of Lord Buddha.  And if you listen to the teachings, after you get that bauble, even if you can get it, it is impermanent and if it doesn’t break apart or destroy itself in some way, you will die clutching it and then you can’t take it with you.  It’s all impermanent.  Even if you attain this bauble that you probably won’t attain in the first place, because it’s nothing but a conceptualization and has no basis in reality, after you’ve wasted all your time going over this desire, you have no guarantee.  Even though you were practicing the Dharma, that even though you’ve completed Ngondro, if you still have desire and you have not completely become a renunciate – a person who has renounced cyclic existence – you have no guarantee that you will not be reborn as a hungry ghost.  Hear what I am saying?

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