<iframe src="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1gqQIY15skZwXqp_zty4VMgJk99TsNZWt/preview" width="100%" height="80" allow="autoplay"></iframe> I'm just recording. Okay. And then we will take two and a half weeks off, okay? At least I will. I don't know about you guys. Because I have those 65 classes. And I really encourage you to come to the classes. I've been preparing for them, and they're awesome. And they will help you with your yoga studies teaching. Okay. So the first, we're on class five, is called the path of preparation dedicated to the path of preparation. I encourage you to read where is that read the essential yoga sutra version of it okay let me see yeah well I'm not going to go there today but read it and it will help you with additional ideas for your presentation. And the first homework question is name and describe the first of the five powers. So at this point the Yoga Sutra verse 20, by the way please don't call them Sutra 20, call them verse 20 okay. Shraddha, Virya, Smriti, Samadhi, Prajna, Puravaka, Ittare-sham. The other ones must first use belief, effort, awareness, meditation, and wisdom. Is Ben Kramer on this call? Yeah boss. What is the other ones? I don't remember. Shradha, Virya, Smriti, Samadhi, Prajna, Purvaka. Yeah, let's see. oh i see i see uh the others is uh the other ones refers to people whose goal is a higher goal uh to figure out how to plant the seeds to change their body and their mind into enlightened being okay that's what other ones means here okay uh all right so these are five powers they're called in tibetan they're called wang bong ma and there are many powers uh in dria right uh there are many powers that are taught in uh in buddhism uh like i don't know the buddha has 10 powers but there are famous five qualities that you should have at the path of preparation. I had recently the Long Rim people finished their finished well they're almost finished with their 25 classes for this last retreat and Tim asked me to do a I don't know like a question answer for the end and somebody several people asked what kind of preparation do you need or what kind of things do you need to to prepare to see emptiness directly like what kinds of activities would be best for preparing to see emptiness directly so we talked about it for like 20 minutes and that's what these five powers are okay so they are five different ways to prepare yourself to to see to see reality directly ultimate reality directly okay in in dci language we didn't want to say it that way so we called it touching the diamond world and there's a whole dci level devoted just to that to how to prepare Okay so the Sanskrit word, the first Sanskrit word here and the first question and the first presenter is śraddha and I like this word, I like it a lot because the śra will come into English as crad like or chrad or hrad so those of you who know the Heart Sutra which by the way this morning let me see if i can find it yeah hang on so i don't know if mr uh if Mr. Kramer saw this yet but but this is the um where is that yeah the this is the second book to come out from the mixed nuts and it's a commentary to the Heart Sutra and the printing was finished yesterday and it's coming to make an offering to Dr. Wu Okay, anyway, herdaya means heart, and shraddha comes from herdaya. So H-I-R-D, herd, means heart, and shraddha comes from that. The word cardiac comes from that, and that's why cardiac is spelled with a C, because words that are a K sound but have a C came from Sanskrit shra or other kinds of sibilance, okay? So shraddha. And it has a long A at the end, okay? Shraddha, which is often true of virtues which you could consider almost feminine. So a lot of the higher virtues in ancient India, like prajna here, they end with a long a which is very very feminine ending so I thought that's cool. Anyway, wait is this, yeah this is the right lady okay. Now the definition of faith here, i i wrote down on the flow chart three kinds of faith that uh are taught in the at this point in the long rim and the first one is called clear faith okay and i think what we the goal in these five powers and the goal of the person who presents the first one which is faith is to explain that it doesn't mean blind faith, you know. And that's a very, I think that's always the first thing you should say about faith when you're teaching the concept of faith, shraddha, shraddha. You should say, well, we're going to talk about faith, but we're not talking about blind faith. And so we have this picture of this lady, and it tells us a bunch of things. First of all, she looks like she has a lot of energy. Secondly, she looks like she's really happy. I don't know, I like to think she read something in the book that made her happy. So she's a thoughtful person, she's thinking, she's a thinker. And those are elements of faith. So I tried to find a photo that reflected these different elements of faith. So clear faith, which is the first of the three traditional kinds of faith, is called tangwa. And that's also the word for clear water, like mountain stream water, really, really pure snow melt water is called tangwa. Okay, so that's supposed to give you a feeling of this kind of faith. And this first thing, clear faith, is most often directed at another person. It's an admiration of the good qualities of another person. It's almost like a constant coffee meditation. You're just constantly admiring the cool things about the people around you. So that's an important part of preparing to see emptiness directly, is to have this kind of admiration for the whole concept, and especially towards people who have got there. The second kind of faith in the Lam Rim is called yiche kidepa. And yiche means, that's faith in the sense of belief. So you could call it belief faith. And I put all these words in your flow document, but belief, this is faith in the sense of belief in principles, you know, certain principles. An obvious example, traditional example, is the belief in the laws of karma and consequences. If you treat what goes around comes around. And I think when you say the laws of karma and consequences, it's always good to say, in the next breath, it's good to say what goes around comes around, you know, make it accessible for people and don't make it too difficult. Somebody asked if they have the flow document, We'll send it out after this class. I like to send it out afterwards because people will look at the flow document and assume what I'm gonna talk about and then I'll change it by then. Okay, so if the first kind of faith, clear faith, is a belief in another person because you've seen amazing things about them, and this is specifically someone who might be teaching you yoga. And the second kind of faith is called believing faith, which is to believe in these principles that if you do good, then good things will happen to you. And the idea of the pen, that we may not have come to the deepest understanding of the pen, but we have a faith that there's something important there. We have a belief in the idea. So belief in ideas is the second one. Belief in exceptional people is the first one. The third kind of faith, which is Ngun Doki Te Pa in Tibetan, is faith about the goal and where you want to go. So I think in yoga, you know, we've been trying to say inner and outer goals. And by the way, Bob Serino made an awesome teaser for your program to sell your guys the online course. And I hope Connie will share it with everybody. But so the third kind of faith is faith in where we want to go. Like the beliefs that physical yoga and inner yoga can take us to a place of total mental health and physical health. So I would cover all those kinds of faith in the first of these five powers, okay? That's the first thing you need to have if you're gonna reach the third path where you see ultimate reality directly. These are shraddha, different kinds of faith in people who personify this goal, faith in the principles that we've been learning about the pen and faith in the goal of where we would like to go. And again, if I was going to be the person to present the first one, which I'm not, I would wrap it up by saying, well, of course, so we've seen how faith is not just blindly believing in things, even blindly believing in what your teacher says. We are encouraged in the ancient tradition to be critical in how we take information from a teacher or teachings from a teacher. We should analyze them and see if they are really, if we really understand that they could be a benefit or else we shouldn't accept them. Okay all right we're on to the second of the homework questions and this will be another episode by Some Brave Soul. So we had Shadbha with a long a at the end and now we have Virya. Okay For $20, who can tell me the long eye we had last time? Varadya? Dirga. Dirga. Yeah, whoever said Dirga, I owe you 20 bucks. Okay, Xiaoping. Is Hu Hu Anji Aisha or Hu? Aisha, yeah. Thank you. Okay. Okay, I'll write it down. Okay. Okay, you can buy another chocolate cake and just torture me with it. Okay. I expect to talk to you every day when I get to Galahara. Okay, Virya. Okay, so Virya. Oh, by the way, for faith, I added a word cardiac. And I also, I think, although I'm not 100% sure, maybe John Campbell can tell us, but I think Sharad, which is Sri Patelby Joyce's grandson, who's running the Ashtanga organization right now, I think. I believe his name is Shraddha. I'm guessing that his real name is Faith. So that's kind of cool. Well, yeah, he named his daughter that. Oh, really? Yeah. Wait, Sharat has a daughter he called Shadda or something? Yeah, yeah. He named his first kid his daughter Shadda. OK, good. OK, good. OK, must be. Can I add a warning here? Yeah, go ahead. Just like Geshe-la saying it with the long ah at the end, do not say shraddha. Shraddha is a death ceremony. You don't want to say that. It also sounds like coleslaw somehow. Okay, shraddha. Okay, shraddha. Okay, the second of the homework questions is, you know, name and describe the second of the five powers. Give the Sanskrit. give us an old Indo-European root and an English cognate. Okay, so next photo. Oh, by the way, that's when you get to the word cardiac as coming from Shraddha or heart. Next photo, next image. Yeah, now the next one is called effort, right? Virya. And these people, and I think whoever presents this one you're going to have fun, right? So and this goes back to Shantideva's definition of effort, you know, Tsunkang Gela Droa O. Yeah, the definition of effort in Buddhism and in the Yoga Sutra, if it's the five powers is to have a good time doing your practice like have a good time enjoying your practice enjoying helping other people those those two specific things okay and if and if you're the person who's going to do this second question i would spend a lot of time on you know the idea of having fun with your practice you know like either people do their practice grumpy or like a kid who was told to clean up his room or something like that like without any joy um but also they're so serious about it I mean a lot of uh serious yoga practitioners I think are too serious about it you know and they just you you get in their class and and they're loading you down with all this kind of stuff and and there's no fun going on you know so i remember i took a class from anna what's her name forest forest yeah anna forest yeah right yeah in hong kong or something she was killing us uh and she had us in uh what do you call that thing uh on your hands yeah urvadhana which is my the pose i hate the most and then she said walk around in Urdhva-dhanurasana. You know, and I could barely get up anyway. That was when my yoga was better. And I tried to walk around, but every time I took a step on my hands, I had to put my head down. And then she came over and yelled at me, and she was laughing really loud, and she said, you know, Geshe Michael, you're just going to scrape more hair off the top of your head. You know, you got to get all the way up there, you know. And so I think you can be an intense yoga teacher. I don't know if there's any more intense yoga teacher than her. But you can also be having fun in the class. And I think she does. So I think this would be a good place to advertise the idea. And by the way, I wouldn't follow the homework answer so, you know, so literally because it's kind of dull. It was written 20 years ago or 17 years ago. so I would make it more engaging and more fun and the people you see here it's an older couple you know and people who meditate they have this habit of being super serious about it almost dull you know they they're almost dull when they teach meditation so you know that if you do question two here your job is to make sure that your students online students they come away from question two they come away from virya thinking oh it means I should I should be a hardcore yogi but I should have fun I should really have fun okay okay so that's the and don't forget that the classic definition of virya is to have fun working hard on your practice have fun working hard on serving other people you know I just read some guy from Princeton just finished serving 50,000 meals to poor people during the COVID and it's so cool you know so he's working I don't know 12 14 hours a day but he's having fun you know okay English the Indo European you know this is kind of you could sell it as a the mother of Sanskrit but it's is the Indo-European root is weiro which means man and English cognates are virile virtue and werewolf. So the wer in werewolf comes from vir which means man, male, okay. So viria. Okay so I kind of like the werewolves. The next image is yeah I had an image of a real werewolf and it was kind of scary and it was way too serious and Here you got a cutie dressed up as a werewolf. And that's the playful feeling of Virya, okay? So yeah, this guy is a man-wolf, a weir-wolf, but he's also having fun, okay? So by the time you finish question number two. Now, it's very difficult to see emptiness directly. Very, very few people in the world ever see emptiness directly. And your odds are better if you have fun, okay? If you're having fun with your practice, you know, if your practice becomes fun, then you have a better chance of seeing, a much, much better chance of seeing emptiness. I guess the people who do number one and number two, you're going to have to talk up seeing emptiness directly, like some kind of, you know, transition, what do you call it, totally changes your way of being and you become extremely, you just reach a much much higher level of happiness and ability to serve the world. Okay so you got to sell the path of seeing, the third path, which you get there by using these five powers okay otherwise just talking of the five powers for what okay all right third episode name and describe the third of the five powers again give the Sanskrit word its root and some English cognates and in the image here you see a lady cooking okay and the Sanskrit here is smurti okay please say smurti okay you're not going to say smriti smriti okay smurti and literally it means to remember okay and the word the root smr is obviously related to myrrh like in memory or memorial or words like that mourn someone sadly remember someone sadly so the Sanskrit word is smrti and the challenge for for the person doing number three I think is to distinguish smirti from samadhi, which is the next one. Okay, we're going to get samadhi, D, is going to be the fourth of the five powers. So I think your job, if you're going to take smirti, is to distinguish it from samadhi. You know, what's the difference between almost mindfulness or awareness and meditation. And why I chose this lady, I'll give, I'm just going to say 100 bucks to anybody who can tell me two things going on in this picture. She's happy. Wait, wait, wait. She's what? Beautiful effort. She's following the recipe. Path of patience. She's got a lot of prep going on there. Nice guess. Okay, cancel the bet. Cancel the bet. that was a lot of money anyway uh smirti means uh awareness mindfulness you know keeping your mind on what you're doing you see so that's different from meditation we're going to get to samadhi next and then we're going to do prasnya which is wisdom but what she's doing here and you cannot cook you know uh with i was trying to find a picture of a guy balancing a bowl of water and walking across the room and I couldn't find one. But then it occurred to me that when you're cooking, it's the same kind of thing. I wouldn't call it, you know, on your mat meditation, on your cushion meditation, but I would call it, you got to be mindful. You have to be aware. You cannot let your mind wander. You know, you have to be focused, okay? And so if you take this one, which the Tibetan is Temba, right? you're going to have to try to convey a kind of all-day mindfulness or all-day awareness of what you're doing what are you saying what are you doing and specifically what are you thinking are you remembering the pen or you're not remembering the pen so this is smirti okay this is remembering what you're doing in the sense of staying aware keeping a high awareness and I think cooking is a good example because if you if you get distracted in cooking then you will ruin the dinner in a few minutes you know and and your spiritual life is very similar okay I made a list of things you could be keeping your mind on in the you know in the answer those of you who yeah if you're gonna you could reference the Tibetan. And the Tibetan is temba, which is an interesting word because it means to pull a rope. Like, I don't know, when you tie a rope around a, I don't know, tie a rope around a wagon and pull it after you, that's called temba. And a person who takes another person's hand and guides them along a path, that's also called temba. Different spelling, but same root. And then when you interpret a passage of scripture or you interpret something the Buddha said it's called tongue which is again is related to Temba. So and then in this case specifically the word for smirti in Tibetan means pull your mind back to, somebody asked what's the difference between power of mindfulness and the power of recollection. You can say the same. You can say it's pretty much the same. I think recollection is more narrow and mindfulness is more broad. So recollection is you lost the meditation object, Shishin detects it, that you lost it, and then Drenba pulls your mind back. So Drenba has all these meanings of pulling or drawing something with a rope back to where it was supposed to be. So the emphasis in the path of preparation, when we say smurti, it is tremble or pulling your mind back, recollection, but only in the sense if you got distracted, if your phone rang while you're cooking dinner for Thaylee and Allison, and then you get distracted and you lose your smirti, and then you will burn the dinner. So that's called, it's not exactly, in this case, exactly the same as Sheshin and Jemba, where you detect that your mind went off the object and you pull it back to the object. That's also called smirti, okay? What it means here is keep your mind on the principles that you have learned, you know, keep your mind, especially on the principle of the pen, and don't let your mind day to day alter the actions of your life, don't let your mind get distracted too far from the pen, because then you, then many things will go wrong, you'll have many car accidents, okay. Okay, it's not uncommon for an has to drop off of a root, so smirti becomes memory. Memory itself is a cool Sanskrit principle called reduplication, and when you're supposed to do something repeatedly, then the root gets repeated. So mer mer means remember remember, keep bringing it back to mind, mer mer, and that's why memory has two m's and and the memorial has two Ms. It means bring it back, bring it back. Okay, so it's kind of sexy, I like that. All right. Let's go to number four. Homework question number four. What is the fourth power? Give the Sanskrit word, roots, uncognite. So it's Samadhi. And the image is a guy balancing, okay. I tried to do a couple of things with this image, you know. I started out with a circus guy. And then I said, you know, that just doesn't feel like a guy who does yoga, you know. And our clientele, the people we want to watch our videos, and the people that we want to invite you guys to go to their yoga studios and teach yoga studies, you know, I think they're going to be like this guy. They're going to be young entrepreneurs or young business people. They're going to be engaged people, people who are, what do you call it, conscious, who want to take care of their health. They want to take care of their mind. So I think when we choose pictures, I've been choosing a lot of pictures. And also, but frankly, to do yoga regularly, you have to have a decent income. You know, if you're working all day in construction, or you're working in a restaurant all day, it's difficult to keep up a meditation practice or yoga practice. You're just too exhausted by the end of the day. So it's really people, I don't know, yuppies who are the best yoga students, because they have money to come to class. They are interested to come to your lectures. you know and by the way we had this whole YSI resurrection somebody called it which is true it started with this idea with Angela Anjali and with Lydia to donate 500 books to yoga studios and so those books I think arrived today in Sedona and some old man is paying for them and we're going to donate them to 500 yoga studios and and we're going to put in an advertisement for you guys online course and for you guys speakers bureau to go out and teach at people's teacher training so that's my long-term goal with you guys and the survivors the people who stay in this program my goal is send out these 500 books for free and you know Lydia's gonna and Bob are gonna talk the owners of the studios into inviting you guys there. Okay so we're on samadhi and it's called meditation okay in the translation it's called meditation and it's described in the homework as the ability to keep the mind on a single meaningful object. Okay so you know say chikpa single pointed you know it was a big big deal in my life when some lama said oh single pointed means single object you know. I always thought my mind had to be somehow sharp like a like a panda hat or something you know and it's that's what single pointed mean and it doesn't mean that. It means that your just mind is focused on one thing and you're not thinking about other things. Okay so now you find the object right it should be meaningful okay your mind can be focused all day on something you're somebody said to you yesterday you can take that as your object to focus it and you will be single pointed but it doesn't help you it's not meaningful and And then if you teach this one, I would like you to talk about the quality of the single pointedness. You see what I mean? So you can stay kind of on one thought. It's possible to stay on one thought all day. That is possible. But it's also possible that the quality of the meditation or the quality of the focus is not very good. So you kind of when you if you do number four I'd like you to separate the idea of staying on the object from what's the quality of your staying on the object. Is it high quality focus or is it low quality focus? And low quality focus has two different versions right And I like to use a hamburger, maybe I should have had a hamburger image, but to me a hamburger is a perfect image you could use to describe the two qualities of focus. You know one is if you, you know, if you're supposed to be meditating on something and you keep thinking about lunch, okay, then we can say that's an example of agitation. So in 2003, I was calling it agitation. Nowadays, I would call it just distracted, okay? So our mind, our normal attention quality is either we are thinking about a lot of different stuff that we have to do today, or we're thinking about the hamburger we're going to have for lunch, or we just ate a hamburger and our mind is dull and sleepy. So these are the two faults in the quality of the meditation, two extremes. Either you can go to the extreme of thinking about too many things during meditation, or you can go to the extreme of not clearly thinking about anything because you're sleepy or you're tired. okay and the Sanskrit words for meditation include the word balance, sama, sama, okay, samadhi, sama means equal, okay, on each side, left side, right side, you are not out of balance, you are not going towards a hamburger as a distraction before lunch and you're not going on the other extreme of a hamburger of the tired feeling after lunch okay post lunch hamburger and pre-lunch hamburger okay so the da which is what the di comes from samadhi just means to set something down okay and there's a lot of words that come from that same comes from samadhi the word doom which means written down your fate written down in stone or a deed which is something written down set in stone or to do even come from Tao. Okay so what it means is to conduct your life in a meditative focus in good quality. You are not day to day, hour to hour, five minutes to five minutes, your mind is not too distracted by many different things and it's not dull and sleepy okay. And I think if you do this fourth, you know if you do this fourth one here, the fourth power, I think it would be nice to emphasize that it's a state of mind you could have all day. You know it's a state of mind you could be trying to have all day and then you'd have to go into the difference, you know as we we talked about smirti and samadhi. So smirti might detect that your mind's getting sleepy or you're forgetting where you are or you're thinking about something else. And then samadhi would be, bring your mind back and stay in balance, okay? So meditation can also happen at work. It can happen, you know, at the dinner table with your family and that's important. you take number four, samadhi in the sense of one of the qualities you need to reach the direct perception of higher reality, higher truth, then it also specifically means a certain amount of time spent on your cushion every day and I would say an hour and I wouldn't be shy to repeat the advice to start with 10 minutes and add a minute every Sunday until you get up to it and then quickly you will get up to an hour okay all right fifth power and you can see they are building up pretty natural flow. And by the way, these are taught in all the books on, in all the great books in Buddhism. Abhidharma, for example, teaches these five as parts of the path of preparation. So this is in fact one of the sections of the Yoga Sutra that most make it feel like it came from Buddhist sources or was influenced by Buddhist sources. So okay, the fifth power, because they're also called powers in Buddhism and in the Yoga Sutra. Okay the fifth power is obviously prajna which means wisdom. You will hear it pronounced prajna in India but that's corruption. Okay it should be prajna. The Russian pronunciation is correct, Znya. And yeah, my Sanskrit teacher was a very, he was the chairman of the Linguistics Department, of the Ancient Languages Department at Princeton, and he he was a great scholar of Sanskrit, Greek, Tocharian, Aramaic, and he was very excited when he found out that tibetans had chosen to to use yeah for for jnya he was very excited he said that's exactly perfect okay anyway the next picture i'm sorry to interrupt uh can you say it again uh it's almost like a dz and the Tibetans chose dz and they had a j and they didn't choose the j they chose the dz and and I remember when I was sitting with my Sanskrit professor he got so excited about it because he it it proved some theories he had had about it so it's cool anyway the Tibetans had a ja and the Tibetans had a za and when they write prasnya in Tibetan letters they used sa and it's correct okay and it's cool okay and it came into russian more directly all right it's yeah okay and the fifth of the five powers is wisdom and the picture is yeah now i almost chose a guy yelling at his wife you know and she's supposed to remember that he's coming from her. And then I decided, let's make it more positive. You know, these guys have passed the two husbands in the kitchen test examination. And they have gotten to the point where they're smirti. They are constantly remembering that things are coming from them. And if you constantly remember the pen and you constantly remember how things are coming from you Then this is what it's gonna look like in the kitchen every night, you know, he's she's looking at him in a sort of intense way And he's looking at her in a sort of intense way and They're obviously having a pretty nice time together. There's lots of sunlight, which is also to me very Auspicious I almost bet a thousand dollars if someone could find a famous Sanskrit principle in this picture but I don't have that much money right now. Anyway you got hatha here you have the ha coming through the window and my teacher used to say that the pizza was the moon and so you got hatha yoga going on here in this picture. Anyway, I think I would like the person who, the person who takes the fifth one, if they could focus on wisdom in the sense of, you know, stopping how the mind turns things around, okay? Wisdom is stopping how the mind turns things around. And these guys have finished stopping how the mind turns things around and now their mind is seeing everything the right way, you know, unturned around. And because of that they are happy. And again, I like this idea that if we can convey that yoga and meditation is not something that you do in an ashram only or that you have to go to a cave in the Himalayas or you have to join a monastery. I like to think these people are meditating and they have reached wisdom and because of that they're having a pleasant life and they're they are happy towards each other they're happy they're having happiness with each other okay. So that's going to be a challenge by the way again the homework was written 17 years ago I think it's too complicated it's too it's too school scholarly and I really encourage you to bring it to the kitchen if you can if you take this one the way I would love to hear you talk about it is that these these two guys are happy and they're having a good time in their life because they understand that anytime they have a problem it's coming from their sign and they just stop it you know so i think that would be cool uh the word is easily pra again means up front the word front comes from pra forward comes from pra proud comes from pra probable comes from pro we already had it and then means to know uh and i i think it's cool to say that the k in the english word i know comes from the j in prajna okay so that's why there's a k hanging out there in english before the n okay the word can actually comes from the word snya and the word diagnosis which is the greek gnosis which also reflects again the j in the Sanskrit or the "za" in the Sanskrit, okay? So those, that's easy, that, that, it'll be easy for you to do the Sanskrit there. But again, by the time you finish the fifth episode, whoever does the fifth episode, and maybe it'd be good for a couple to do the fifth episode, I don't know, but I think it'd be really important to get people to feel that that prajna is going on in the kitchen right now between these two people okay all right number six okay number six now I should have put the I have to put the Sanskrit verse in here Let me get it for you. Yeah, in the verses 21 and 22 Master Patanjali talks about, you know, moving up through these five. So each of the five has different levels, okay? Each of these five has a different intensity, four different intensities. You can dial up faith, shraddha, birya, you can dial up effort, you know, smirti, you can dial up awareness, you can dial up meditation, you can dial up your wisdom. Four different settings in the second path. Inside the second path there's four settings for each of those five and in fact in the Buddhist scriptures they have different names okay and I think that you know that's the last question here and I think it's gonna be I don't know if it's not too much for people but we'll get to it later anyway you can dial up each of these five personal qualities can be dialed to a different setting a different intensity okay now to move up to those settings you need Tivra Sambega okay Tivra Sambega which is we translated it as an intense urgency I think something like that let me see Yeah, dedication and urgency. Okay, so here's this question that we're doing right now is dedicated to the idea of samvega, urgency and intense dedication. Okay. you have to be intense. I think at the second path to see emptiness directly, you have to put some real intensity into your practice and it has to be dedicated, okay. Even if it's in the kitchen, you know, even if the practice is in the kitchen, it has to be intense, okay. all right so this whole question six is about the the idea of urgency and the picture I chose you ready you guys it's a lightning hitting a tree and I wanted an image that that gave an idea of fire so if I were gonna do number six if I was to do question six about samvega, tivara samvega. I would talk about this famous instruction that you should act as if your hair or your clothing were on fire, okay? And you should act with that kind of urgency. And in my three-year retreat, we had candles and we didn't have any electricity and it happened three or four times and people caught their clothes on fire and and man you have to move fast you know you have to knock them down roll them over and uh and so I think it would be a nice image if you do number six there has to be some sense of urgency and you could bring up impermanence at this point you could say look you know uh we never know when when we're gonna die. We never know if we're gonna have time or not. So we have to act with some kind of urgency. It doesn't mean get anxious and it doesn't mean to get nervous and it doesn't mean to get too busy. It just means put some real effort into it because we don't have time. We really don't have time. Time is going by fast. And if you want to move up through these five practices at four different settings, you're gonna have to do it with some urgency. You're gonna have to try hard, okay, some Vega. The roots here are obvious, some comes from Sam, okay. Some, by the way, in the translator class, I'm gonna, I think in Nick's class, we'll talk about how to write the pronunciation of Sanskrit in normal letters, okay? Like English doesn't have any word with two A's together except aardvark or so, I don't know. You know, in normal English pronunciation, you know, like Moscow instead of Moskva, we're gonna write things in normal pronunciation. So it's before a V, an M always changes to N, okay? San Vega, we don't say Sam Vega. An M was used for transcription, transliteration. It was not used for pronunciation, okay? And there's a big difference between those two. And it's one of my pet peeves and you all know about it. Okay, the root is Sam, but in combination is San Vega. Okay, and the root for vega is vij. And I like vij. It comes in the lion's dance, which is called singha vijambita. And it's like, sorry, that's probably not. But anyway, vij means to vibrate or to tremble quickly. Okay, and by extension, it means to be very alive, very powerful and very strong. So Vega, and by the way, the car name Vega does come from this route. It's supposed to be a powerful car, right? And so com means very much, sam means very much. It came into English with com and con. Those are the soft C's that used to be S's. And cognates for Vega are vegan or vegetable. And, you know, this is one of those cases where I think it was Earl who used his question as an excuse to talk about how much damage is done to your yoga practice by alcohol. And I like those little, you know, when you get a chance to go off on another subject that would help everybody, I think this is a great example right here. so vega means power but it's interesting that it came into english in the word vegan and in the word vegetable and i was reading sources that said that the ancient indians believed that vegetables were extremely effective in giving you power or giving you strength you know so be I don't know like eating Viagra or something that or some kind of super vitamin that vegetables even in ancient India and if you we're gonna study the Hatha Yoga Padibhika and we're gonna study the dietary recommendations there but vegetables are really high on the list different kinds of vegetables so if you do this question number six about urgency and dedication and your hair on fire, then I think it'd be good to bring up that the only words, well, the words in English that use vega are words for vegetables, which were considered in ancient times to be like the elixir of health, like amurta, like the elixir of good health, okay, elixir, deathless elixir, okay. It's a good advertisement for not eating meat. Okay, and then we talk about the word vajra, which also comes from the same root, vij. And that's because the ancient meaning of vajra was not so much diamond, but it was considered that lightning bolts had a little diamond on the tip, and when they hit a tree, they could break a tree because they had this diamond tip on them, powerful as a diamond, so they called them vajra. And so I tried to pick a lightning bolt hitting a, hitting a tree, but I also would like you guys, if you take this one, to talk about power, you know. This is all about power, intensity of your effort. It doesn't mean be unhappy and intense. It doesn't mean be impolite to other people and be intense. It means you are intensely funny, you're intensely happy, you're intensely interested in where things come from and some kind of very high sense of intensity here. Okay, last question then we're done and I'm gonna let you guys go home early, yay. Name the four levels of the second path. And you see at the beginning of the second path, called the five powers. And as you move up the names change to the five peaks and then the names change to the five strengths and then the names change to the five highest objects. So it's very very interesting that as your understanding of seeds and where the pen comes from increases at the second path, the five practices that you're supposed to be focusing on are given different names. Okay, in the first quarter of the second path they're called the five powers. In the second quarter of the of the second path they're called the five peaks. In the third quarter of the five paths of the five parts of the second path they're called the five strengths And you guys know that these four stages in the second path have four different names, which is called tru, tsemo, sopa, chuchok. Tru means warmth, ushma. Peak means murdana, like tip of a mountain, mastery, sopa. What is that? Kshanti, I guess. and then the highest object of all, the highest thing in the universe. So these five practices can be done in four different ways. Okay. Now, what I didn't put in the homework and what I'd like you to talk about, if somebody takes number seven, it's going to be a challenge not to get people confused with four divisions which makes 20 and then four more divisions which makes 40. You know, I wouldn't spend too much on this 2003 answer. I would more emphasize the progress through the second path is a progress from things to yourself. Okay, making progress, moving up with urgency, san vega, tivra san vega, moving up with urgency through the second path. The steps of progress are measured by how well do you apply the pen to yourself, to Michael, or to Connie, or to Jacqueline, you see, how how well do you apply these principles to yourself? You see, so if I was going to do number seven, I would almost, I would mention this, the different information in the homework answer, but what will really help people is that your understanding of the pen begins to move inside. So when we first teach people the pen, which you can say happens at the beginning of the second pop, we're talking about the pen as a thing which is coming from me and which is not coming from its own side. Oh yeah, that's a good picture. She's got a pen, but she's also thinking, you see. So if you use this image, which I think would be very cool, emphasized that her thoughts have shifted from the pen to who she is. You see what I mean? So right now she's getting close to the top of the second path. Her attention is no longer on the pen. She has the pen in her hand, but her attention is not on it. Her attention is focused inward. Who am I? She got a teaching on the pen, and now she's starting to apply it to herself. And by the way, which I don't know if we can say it in this course, but the point at which on the second path you reach a cessation where you can never again be born in a lower birth, okay? The point on the second path at which you reach a cessation where you can no longer be born in a lower birth is as you transition from pen to me. Okay so just a perfect understanding of the pen technically is not enough to keep you out of the lower realms but if you do what this lady in the image is doing and it shifts from an understanding of an object to an understanding of yourself, specifically yourself, during that shift from understanding where pens come from to understanding where me comes from, that's the shift that when that shifts you cannot be born in the lower realm. If you want to get fancy, it's a shift from objects to subjects which is also a shift from pingala to ida in your pranic body okay it's a shift from one it's cleansing one channel and then cleansing another channel inside of you so i don't know if you want to go there briefly without confusing everybody good luck okay and so that's all that's all you could take it to the channels you see and when the two channels are pretty open up the right hand channel the red one connected more to objects and the left hand channel connected more to subjects or subject state of mind when these two channels are emptied out, the prana is forced into the central channel, then you see emptiness directly. You see physically speaking, on a subtle physical level, this picture represents that she's cleaning out the other channel, the ida channel, the sheep channel, the white channel. And clean out means prana is being released into the central channel, four sores, four finger widths below the table, okay, like the plumbing below a sink. So if you're brave, you could go there in this number seven. Seven is sexy. Seven has too much information. Seven might take two people maybe. Might be cool to have two people in on that. And that's it. I'm going to let you guys go 20 minutes early. Connie, unless you have anything to say. Oh, we have some folks staying on afterwards, or actually we're going to switch over to a webinar to do some Chinese final takes today. Please join us there if you wish. And otherwise, Jack, what else have we got? Everybody has seen the yoga schedule for the next two weeks. And it goes, we're doing yoga now at 10.15 a.m. to 11.30 a.m. Mountain Standard Time. Yeah, and again, I really invite everyone to come to the translation courses. It will cause, it will put seeds in your mind that will grow in the next 10 years, and you'll be a much better yoga teacher. That's what I do. Thank you for that invitation, Geshe. I'm pretty excited about it. Okay, that's, oh, the asana sign-up sheet. I think Lydia put, oh, we have the episode sign-up sheet as well. But if everybody wants to see who's on the schedule for the yoga, Lydia's put it up there already. And yes, the episode sign-up sheet for two weeks from now, Jacqueline has put it up. When will we do the gauntlet? Yeah, we're going to wait until after the Mixed Nuts translation term to do the gauntlets for this. And also the gauntlets to finish up number four. There are a few people who haven't finished up four, but we'll hold all that off until after the Mixed Nuts translation with Geshe Michael and the team. We do have a few things going on, so please keep looking in every once in a while to the chat for the yoga studies group. We have some things that we need to take care of to hopefully get the whole coursework done that we would like to present for like a wider audience like they did with the Lombra. So keep an eye out. Thank you Geshehla, that's it. Connie, when are we meeting for the next gauntlet? The next gauntlet won't happen till about June 4th because the Mix Nuts translation term doesn't finish till June 2nd and we won't do any gauntlets before that but we could always practice with one another that would be awesome we could do some videos cell phone videos okay any other questions yeah what's for dinner oh well for that you'd have to ask Stanley and Allison or John Brady. Okay. See you guys. Okay. Thank you. Thanks for doing this. You guys, I'm having a lot of fun. I think it's going to, I got a lot of input by email. People are really excited about when this comes out. Awesome. Geshla is really wonderful, really wonderful listening to these things online. And I got to say, Bob has done some awesome things. I don't know if he's still with us but yeah I'm really excited Jacqueline and Lydia and working hard everybody but hopefully we'll we'll meet meet your expectations with that course that you would like us to get up and running yeah the you know the big challenge is going to be to get it out as quick as we can in drips and drops it's fine yeah okay okay bye bye thank you bye bye so we're going to end this meeting right now.