BDW 6 «Алмазный Путь Арьи», занятие 2

Autotranscript · BDW6, Malaysia, Meditation 2

03.08.2026 / processed with Claude (AI) for Irra / Dharma · Malaysia · BDW6

Date: 9 July 2026 · Malacca, Malaysia · duration 1 h 09 min

Teacher: Geshe Michael Roach

Translation into Chinese: Stanley (consecutive; the Chinese translation was not captured in this recording)

Source audio: ENG/CH Arya's Diamond Way with Geshe Michael Roach - Meditation 2 (July 9, 2026)

⚠ Warning

This is an automatic transcript of the audio recording, roughly processed with Claude on 3 August 2026 by Irra Dzhabali. It is not an authorised record of the teaching. Speech recognition and speaker attribution may contain errors. Please check against the original recording.

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Host: Hello, hello everyone, welcome back, good morning, good afternoon, good evening. So, we will now begin Arya's Diamond Way Meditation 2 with Geshe Michael Roach. Take this opportunity to slow down, settle your mind, and reconnect with your practice. Find a comfortable posture, take deep breaths, and enjoy the meditation.

Geshe Michael Roach: Okay, good morning. You guys look sleepy. Or maybe I'm projecting, I'm projecting. Probably. All right.

Okay, so, today after the first philosophy class, Jasmine has worked very hard, and we have the preface, the 125 page description about seeing emptiness. It's ready to give you. Okay, then just teachers should know, never hand out something at the beginning of class. Then everybody's like this, and they don't listen. Okay, good.

So, I'd like to continue meditations that would help you in the flow of seeing emptiness directly. And my idea is to kind of go in order, but when you do it at home after this program, I would spend maybe two weeks on each one. And do them in order like that. Yeah, like spend two weeks on the one I did yesterday, and then spend two weeks on the one I did today. Okay, so, please get ready to meditate.

So, do your last coughing. When you meditate in a group, then obviously it's important to try to be more quiet than usual. So, we don't bother the persons next to us. And it seems like every time we meditate in a group, some new coughs will come right away. So, be patient with the people next to you.

They are living in a human body. And a human body is a changing thing. And sometimes it has to cough. So, be patient with each other. And don't spend much time worrying about the person next to you.

I think if you're going to have a good meditation practice, you have to learn to ignore the problems that come up in your life and your world. So, sit up straight. I had a yoga teacher, David Life, he used to say your backbone is not a straight thing. It has several natural curves in it. Personally, I found it useful to pull in my lower stomach.

And then the backbone down near the bottom doesn't cave in. Relax your hands. Here's a big fight. Which hand should go on top? Should you touch your fingers?

Which fingers should you touch? If you meditate for many years, I think you will find a comfortable way to keep your own hands. And it may not be the same way that the person next to you does. Personally, I like to almost touch the first finger and the thumb, but not quite touching. Relax your eyes.

I found it helpful not to try to shut them too hard. Try to relax your forehead, all the wrinkles in your forehead. I like a small smile, but not too much effort. And then slowly and naturally come to watching your breath. And as you go through the meditation, sometimes check in with your forehead and the corners of your mouth to make sure they didn't get tight.

And we're going to do a hundred breaths again. Gently and slowly start to focus on the breath. It might be 10 or 20 breaths before you really come to the breath. Exhale is first half. Inhale is second half.

If the exhale is a little longer than the inhale, that's nice. Then please bring one of your teachers to come and sit with you. I'd like to say knee to knee, but not quite touching. There's a way that your mother looks at you and your teacher looks at you with the same expression of warmth. People often ask me how to stay close to their teacher or how to get the teacher to stay close to them.

And my own experience is even if you're far away from your teacher, if you keep inviting them to sit with you in meditation morning after morning, then because they are coming from your seeds, it helps you to be with them in the future. And then offer them some small beautiful thing. Almost a private thing that other people can't see. Then bring to mind some mistake you made in the last few days. Maybe you hurt someone else or you tried to hurt someone else.

Try to get the feeling that when you hurt another person, you're actually hurting yourself. And then think about something you did to help another person in the last day or two and be happy. Now make a small prayer that today we should learn something that will help us spiritually. And then think about your spiritual friends, especially those around you today, and make a prayer. Think of one or two special ones and make a prayer for their long life and health.

Now we'll start the real meditation. In this tradition, in the tradition of the Lord Buddha, logic is very important. Because there's many things we cannot see with our eyes and our ears, which are very, very important. So we have our physical senses, we have our eyes, ears, we have our hands. But there are very, very important things we cannot see with our physical senses.

And then we have to develop the muscle of our logic. I think we would all like to develop our yoga muscles. And if you just do a little yoga every day, naturally your body's muscles get stronger. In the same way, we have to develop the muscle of our own logic. We cannot help other people, really, if we don't see emptiness.

And we cannot see emptiness if we don't develop the muscle of our logic. And just like yoga, that's a daily process. You can't develop your logic muscle once a week or something like that. You have to do it every day. Even in your family life or in your business life, if you have a strong logical muscle, you can achieve many things that other people cannot.

And especially today, we're going to try to look backwards from the beginning of our life. And use our logic muscle to see where we came from before this life. If we can expand our perception of me past the beginning of this life and past the end of this life, we can achieve much greater things to help people. On the day that we do see emptiness directly, after that experience, and I would say from my understanding that during the direct perception of emptiness, our central channel is full of prana for the first time. And then after we come down out of that experience, which we'll talk more about this week, we have some very important experiences called je tob yeshe (?).

It means the wisdom that comes after the direct perception of emptiness but on the same day. And again, I would say that we have those amazing understandings all the rest of that day because prana is left over in the central channel. And my own experience is that after you sleep that night and also the next day, most of that prana is already gone back to normal. Then one of the most striking experiences in the hours after you see emptiness directly, is you can observe your own death. And I don't think anyone who ever saw emptiness directly was hoping to see their death at the same time.

I don't think so. But it is one of the sixteen experiences of emptiness. Those je tob yeshe, those experiences after you come down, they are not very long. They take a few minutes each. They come unexpectedly, they go unexpectedly pretty soon and you may not be sitting in meditation.

You may be standing at that time or walking. So that perception of death comes and you see yourself die and then that perception goes away. And then like a separate wave, there comes to you the perception of the first few years of your next life. And so it only lasts a few minutes and then that wave also passes. But during those few minutes, something very important happens.

Like you are looking through a window briefly, you can see yourself as a baby and then you can see ... In my case, it was several people taking care of the baby who were my future teachers. And in this way an Arya becomes aware. It reminds them that the people who taught them in the beginning of this life were coming from the same place. Every person in your childhood who helped you and taught you was planted logically in the lifetimes before.

So if you would like to have that experience in this life in the coming months and years, you would like to have this experience where you see your future birth and your future teachers, it is important to think about the teachers you had in this life when you were very young. And I would say the teachers you had starting from your birth, it means your parents, starting with the teachers you had when you were born, which is your parents, so I would say the teachers you had up until you were about 12. These teachers especially are connected logically to what happened in your past lives. They are not the beginning of a new life, they are the leftovers from the last life. So I would like you to spend maybe the next 10 minutes, and just think about the people who were your teachers up to the age of 12.

Some teachers, what they did, you can remember directly. Some teachers, what they did, we can only see logically. Logically, I know my mother gave me mother's milk. Personally, I can't remember the actual drinking the milk. But you can push back the curtain of your childhood if you meditate on it regularly.

And if you spend some time on it, you can remember things about your early early childhood that you didn't remember lately. And my experience is you can push back beyond the beginning of this life. And you can learn a lot about where you came from. So, let's spend just a few minutes. And when we meditate together, I'm just doing a short version that you can continue for the next few weeks.

And you can go deeper on your own after this retreat. So, think about your earliest teachers. What do you remember about your earliest school teachers? And what do you remember before that when your parents were teaching you things like learning to talk or how to put your clothes on? Things like that.

Try to get more and more detail. It's okay to use logic. It will turn into direct perception. And when you do this meditation, it's always with a feeling of gratitude. We wouldn't be alive.

We wouldn't know how to speak. We wouldn't know how to put our clothes on without those teachers. Here we go. And have fun and enjoy. We're not going to do very long.

And then dedicate the good deed of this meditation to helping other people. If you don't meditate almost every day, there's no possibility you will see emptiness. Then open your eyes. Take a stretch. We have time for one question.

Question from the audience: My question is that in March, He Xi (?) said that he only heard of Vajrayana two years later. We are very lucky to have heard of Vajrayana in this lifetime. And I believe that through my study, I have completed my five D.W. preparatory courses.

Okay. A short introduction of myself. A short introduction of myself. I heard the pen stories in 2018. And before that, I had eight years of practicing Zen.

So after that, I had some moment of satori. And I made a prayer that I should spread the pen story to eight billion people. And since that, I did 900 online sections about the pen story. you become a Buddha next lifetime, right away. That's one thing.

Is it correct? Number two is, in the next two years of your teaching, by the way, and I have myself prepared, finished all my Diamond Way preparation course in five times in total before, so I'm very excited for the coming two years. As I understand logically, if you teach us for two years, the goal is not only for us to see emptiness directly. In Diamond Way, we're supposed to be able to become a Buddha in one lifetime. And I want to ask you, if you can only become Buddha next lifetime, but we can become Buddha this lifetime, will you be jealous of us?

Is it a correct logic?

Geshe Michael Roach: Yeah, I think it is. I saw directly what will happen to me. And I will become a Buddha within, after seven lifetimes. The next Buddha. So, of course, Diamond Way goal is to reach enlightenment in one lifetime.

And the method is to recognize the Buddhahood in the people around us now. And I propose that if your Diamond Way study is successful, there will be days when you think you are the only person in this room who's not a Buddha. And I often feel like that when I'm teaching 900 people. That they have a plan to let me teach until I figure out who they are. But I agree.

I have those two perceptions. I believe what I saw when I saw emptiness is correct. And I have had days when I meet people and see them as a Buddha. Without trying. It is the promise of Diamond Way teachings that you can become a Buddha in this life.

And there are many different tantras. There are survived from India 990 sutras and tantras. About half of those books are tantra. Mr. Bin from Vietnam, our organizer in Vietnam, DCI.

He once wrote me, he said, in my country, a lot of people don't believe in the Diamond Way. And they don't believe Buddha ever taught any Diamond Way. They don't believe Buddha taught any Diamond Way. And honestly, I got a little bit irritated. And I printed the 550 tantras.

And I mailed it to him. And I said, ask them where this came from. So, to be honest, I'm going to leave the question like that. About becoming Buddha in one lifetime. Those parts of the tantric writings which talk about that.

There's a debate. Even in those books, there's a debate. Sixteen is not an uncommon number. They will say it takes, fastest is sixteen lives. I believe one lifetime is possible.

And we should try.

Question from the audience: That's all I can say. Okay. Thank you.

Host: Thank you. Thank you, Geshe Michael. Thank you, Stanley. Yeah, it's time to take a break. Yes, okay.

The next class will start at 8.15. So we only have around 10 minutes break time. If you don't need to go to toilet, please stay on your seat to enjoy the meditations which Geshe-la lead to us. Please make sure to come back at 8.

12. Thank you very much. Thank you.

Host: Thank you. Thank you, dear teacher. Thank you for so great meditation. And thank you for practicing with us here. So now we will have 10 minutes, just 10 minutes break.

And up next is Arya's Diamond Way, class 6, sorry, 3, with Geshe Michael. Please stretch, hydrate and return on time for our next session. See you soon after 10 minutes.