This interview took place at Menla Mountain Retreat, which also is known as The Land of the Healing Buddha, one of the Dalai Lama’s Tibetan medicine healing centers, on August 14, 2010, during a workshop with Dr. Thurman and psychiatrist/author Mark Epstein, M.D., “Integrating Buddhism and Psychotherapy.”

David Bullard: Hello Tenzin Bob! Thank you so much for making time for this interview! To begin, here is a copy of neuropsychologist Richard Hanson’s new book, Buddha’s Brain — which he wanted you to have. Let’s start with some observations from the book: We each have about 1.1 trillion brain cells and 100 billion neurons, each of which fires up to 50 times per second and can possibly can be connected to 5,000 other neurons. Hanson says, doing the math, if you think of all those possible combinations and permutations of connections of 100 billion neurons each possibly connected to 5,000 others, you end up with 10 to the one-millionth different brain state possibilities. In contrast, the number of atoms in the physical universe is 10 to the 80th.

Tenzin Bob Thurman: Whoa — fabulous! That proves one thing — that brain size is equivalent to the universe, the Buddha-verse size. And that proves that our notion of the size of the universe is wrong – the ten to the 80th, is completely wrong. And just because they don’t see further and they think everything is running away – all the stars are red-shifting away – that’s just a mistake.

Beyond that is a barrier of darkness they think they can’t see beyond, so you can’t see all those millions of other universes. So you know the universe surely is the size of the brain, at least. The two are interconnected I’m sure, and the universe is in the brain. They are all interwoven – the Jewel Net of Indra they call it – the interpenetration of all things.

Anyway, that’s certainly the Cosmic Vision. We shouldn’t feel like we’re restricted to one miserable little universe that is only 10 to the 80th power!

DB: Here’s something I’ve been wondering about: can you talk a bit about the difference between a guru in some spiritual traditions and a “spiritual friend” in the Tibetan tradition?

TBT: In most levels of Buddhism the authority and projection level of the mentor or teacher is de-emphasized because the burden is on the students to find things out for themselves, so the basic model of the spiritual teacher is that of a virtuous friend or auspicious friend, one who brings you good luck, and by giving teachings helps you gain knowledge and experience.

As a friend, he or she helps you on your way but you have to do it. It is important to remember the patriarchal context of Indian society. In traditional Indian knowledge fields the guru is a big authority figure – like a father figure – while there is a de-emphasizing of the father figure in most levels of Buddhism. In monastic Buddhism, the abbot is not a big boss, and obedience is not a big virtue for the Buddhist monk or mendicant. In the Mahayana tradition, the spiritual friend is a teacher emphasizing how you have to get out there and do your own bodhisattva deeds and become a Buddha.

But in the Tantric and esoteric teachings, the guru figure – which in Tibetan is translated as the “Lama” – is brought back into play because in Tantra you’re dealing with the unconscious and you need someone upon whom to project different things to help you work out new relationships, like you do in psychotherapy. Also, there’s the initiatory practice of seeing the guru as the living embodiment of the Buddha when the teachings are transmitted to you.

The Tibetans have a proverb: “The best guru is one who lives at least three valleys away,” which means you receive the teaching and some initiatory consecration – and then you don’t hang out with that person to see how ordinary they are!

DB: Kierkegaard said this: “Perfect love means to love the one through whom one became unhappy.”

TBT: “…through whom one became unhappy?” That’s perfect love? Sure… That means “love thine enemy!” as Jesus recommended. For the enemy harms one, and that can make one unhappy. But if one has perfect love, one will want especially that enemy to be happy anyway.

Whether or not one becomes unhappy at first when harmed, perfect love surely does mean complete and unflagging desire for the happiness of the beloved as the Buddha defined it, and that usually doesn’t make one unhappy, even if it’s unrequited. If it’s perfect love then one is happy just in the loving and in seeing and wishing and hoping for the happiness of the beloved. That brings happiness to the one.

The Dalai Lama likes to say, “If you want to be successfully selfish, which means you want to be happy yourself, at least be wisely selfish, which means be unselfish, because being unselfish is what makes yourself happy and therefore fulfills your selfish interests.” It’s very paradoxical. Everything in life is very paradoxical, and that’s one of the most wonderful paradoxes in life.

So Kierkegaard was a Dane and lived in a time of very uptight Scandinavian society – which all Scandinavians can testify to – with the valley of tears, the veil of suffering and sorrow. So naturally, he might feel someone could or would make you unhappy by being your enemy, and he could see that love would need to be perfect to extend itself even to that enemy!
…

In Buddhism, perfect love means Maitreya Buddha, you know; maitreya means love… the loving Buddha… perfect love… The person who loves perfectly is always going to be happy. No matter what happens to that person, that person will be happy.

DB: I’m feeling perfectly happy and loving this discussion, Bob! But I’m going to close with one more quote: This one is from the renowned Canadian novelist and poet Margaret Atwood that goes back to your suggestions about positive psychology and increasing our capacity for growth. She said “the Eskimos have 52 names for snow because it was important to them: there ought to be as many for love.”

TBT: That’s very true… I think that’s absolutely true…

DB: …and you’ve spoken of the many aspects of Tibetan Buddhism that speak deeply of love and relationships.

TBT: There’s a wonderful passage in the Vimalakirti Sutra where he talks about the love of the bodhisattva and the love of the Buddha. To have perfect love, you actually have to be perfectly happy yourself. You have to be happy, since love is what wills the happiness of the beloved. If you don’t know yourself what happiness is, then how can you really be willing their happiness? You may be willing them to do something that you think might make them happy, but that won’t necessarily be what does make them happy.

When you yourself have a kind of reliable type of inner bliss awareness, a sense of connectedness to the universe where you feel the bliss of life flowing up and bubbling up within you, the bliss of freedom coming up within you, then you want others to have that. And that naturally overflows in the love that wants the beloved to be happy, because you realize happiness is everyone’s birthright.

If you are really blissed-out like a Buddha, you see the bliss in the cells of the beloved and you realize it’s trapped from their own experience by some notion that they have: that bliss is not theirs, that they don’t have it, or someone is chasing them, and they live in fear. So your whole drive becomes to try to help them remove the blinders that have been placed on them by their experience, by their fear, by their culture, whatever notions they have that they are not allowed to be happy, not allowed to feel unreasoned and unreasonable bliss, and you then would do whatever it takes to free them.

It doesn’t mean you would stare at them or smile at them or behave weirdly with them because that might freak them out even more. For a paranoiac – you can’t give him a hug or he’ll think you’re trying to smother him – you have to do a different kind of dance for a different type of person. But the person who is moved by bliss toward perfect love will come up with an effective dance, like mothers do with children. They will figure out that they’re hungry and what they need. For a mother who loves her child, that love will provide her with the intelligence and the skill to find out how to stop the problem.

The Bob Thurman Podcast – Episode 79

It also coincides with the twenty-fifth anniversary of the New Zealand Nuclear Free Zone, Disarmament, and Arms Control Act 1987, which I had the privilege of celebrating at NZ’s Parliament. Not only did the legislation prohibit nuclear ships from entering New Zealand waters, it committed New Zealand to “promote and encourage and active and effective contribution by New Zealand to the essential process of disarmament and international arms control.”

But what is an effective strategy to promote international disarmament in a world of accelerated weapons development and production and the proliferation of militarism in everyday life?

Thurman proposes that the most powerful way to demilitarize society is through inner revolution, disarming internally, and that’s what Buddhist education is about:

As to the second question: Why look to Bhutan to study Tibetan or Vajarayana Buddhism?

In Episode #76, Bob answers a question from Bhutan’s first psychiatrist, explaining why he’s a self-proclaimed ‘Buddhaholic’ and how a plan for the continuity of consciousness after death is a no-lose situation.
The Bob Thurman Podcast – Episode 76

In Episode #77, Bob explains why Western materialist economics is ultimately doomed and how Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness could evolve into Gross Planetary Happiness.
The Bob Thurman Podcast – Episode 77

In Episode #78, Bob answers a question about the Buddhist view of suicide.
The Bob Thurman Podcast – Episode 78

The popularity of the phallus for waving in good luck and dispelling evil spirits dates back to Lama Drukpa Kunley (1455-1529) who was known as the divine monk or divine madman for fighting demons with his Flaming Thunderbolt (penis). A new ibook, Drukpa Kunley, Madcap Lama of the Himalayas, by Russ and Blyth Carpenter, explains how it became depicted in this particular manner in the story of Drukpa Kunley introducing himself to Tsongkhapa, the great teacher, at the temple of Ramoche near Lhasa in Tibet.

When Kunley first went to visit Tsongkhapa, he was turned away by the attendant monks for not bringing an offering. Arriving without one, he offered his testicles on the spot, but that was not accepted. The next time, he returned with a box of gold and was able to see Tsongkhapa right away. Kunley prostrated before Tsongkhapa and presented his gift along with a sarcastic song (that was lost on Tsongkhapa). Tsongkhapa, pleased, offered a protective thread to Kunley. Traditionally these protective threads are worn around necks and wrists, but Kunley wrapped the thread around his Flaming Thunderbolt and went to the market.

Look! Look! he shouted. If you have fifty pieces of gold, you can gain audience with the Buddha Tsongkhapa himself. He may even give you one of these! And he waved his member with thread around it in the air.

And now you know why the friendly phalluses painted on houses and buildings throughout Bhutan have a thread tied around the center.

In the video above, from the Share Your Story feature on My Reincarnation’s website, Robert Thurman shares his understanding of reincarnation.

…It’s not like a religious belief in something mystical, it’s acceptance of causation. Acceptance of causation means that everything has a cause, and every cause has an effect. And therefore, there’s no something coming from nothing, and there’s no something going into nothing. That is an incoherent expression, something going into nothing. It’s not possible.

Modern physics recognizes it as the law of thermodynamics. No energy is ever created or destroyed. They talk about entropy, but that’s just people lying around lazily. So rebirth is actually the common sense, natural thing to expect, that consciousness will go on past the death of a physical body.

The belief that consciousness is just a byproduct of brain complexity, and the minute the brain is destroyed it becomes nothing, is an incoherent belief actually. And I consider it the worst kind of blind faith. Because there’s no evidence for nothing. Nobody ever discovered it, nobody ever reported on it. Technically it’s not a place something can go into, it’s not a foundation, it simply isn’t there, nothing. So therefore, you can’t be in it. And the continuum of consciousness which is a form of energy, a very subtle energy at its deepest level, it must continue.

The “Share Your Story” online campaign to engage people in the themes of the film is co-presented with the Tibet House US, the Tibet Fund, Interdependence Project and The International Dzogchen Community in North America.

The video below features highlights from the New York premeire at Cinema Village and after party at Tibet House US with Jennifer Fox, Khyentse Yeshe and Robert Thurman.

Highlights from the NYC Premiere of MY REINCARNATION! from Zohe Films on Vimeo.

I love Jennifer’s words about making the film:

I’m lucky to be able to make films because it’s such an incredible way to be in the world. That I can do something in the world, but also learn as I’m doing it, and that’s what this film is about. Clearly I’m a student, observing my teachers, trying to interact and trying also to express what I think is very important.

Related articles of note:
• First Person on IndieWIRE: “My Reincarnation” Director on Her 20 Years in the Making Spiritual Doc
• Jennifer Fox’s Reincarnation as an Artist Entrepreneur including 5 lessons Jennifer learned from the campaign by Jon Reiss
• Review of My Reincarnation at Wildmind Buddhist Meditation

Inspired by one of the first photo essays about Bhutan, “Castles in the Air,” from the April 1914 issue of National Geographic, Kathleen Worrell, wife of the dean of the Texas State School of Mines and Metallurgy (now UTEP), thought the images of the Himalayan kingdom resembled their setting in the Chihuahuan Desert and decided the Bhutanese dzong would be the perfect architectural style for the buildings of the school.

Since then, most of the UTEP buildings have been built in the Dzong style, creating visual harmony throughout the campus. Even the shelter housing an ATM, the guard kiosks and a Hilton Garden Inn on the edge of campus are designed à la Bhutan.

Two things that separate the Texas dzongs from the Bhutanese originals are the blueprints and nails — the 17th century originals were built on a massive scale without a single nail or drawing.

Now, UTEP will be home to an authentic Bhutanese Buddhist lhakhang (temple), originally constructed for the 2008 Smithsonian Folklife Festival in Washington, D.C., and given as a gift to the people of the United States. UTEP was given the privilege of showcasing the 40 ft by 40 ft temple permanently where it will serve as a center for Bhutanese culture. (See this video on Building the Bhutanese Temple by Smithsonian Folklife Festival.)

If you’re yearning to travel in Bhutan, but can’t quite make it just yet, you might well enjoy a visit to El Paso, Texas!

How nonviolence – cool revolution – is key, and how meditation on compassion can help bring this about.

Bob explores Bhutan’s concept of Gross National Happiness vs GDP around 34:09 and points out (around 53:45) that capitalism is not the problem. That in fact, true capitalism traces back to European monasteries where monks and nuns made beautiful paintings, champagne, crops, beer and manuscripts exemplifying work as a spiritual practice.

Amplification is not allowed in the park, so his words are repeated by everyone, forming a “human microphone,” and listeners make “twinkles” with their hands to signal they agree with the speaker.

Thank you Erric Solomon for recording and sharing this at What Meditation Really Is.