BDW 6 «Алмазный Путь Арьи», занятие 4

Autotranscript · BDW6, Malaysia, Meditation 4

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

Date: 11 July 2026 · Malacca, Malaysia · duration 1 h 06 min

Teacher: Geshe Michael Roach

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

Source audio: ENG Arya's Diamond Way with Geshe Michael Roach - Meditation 4 (July 11, 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.

[]

Host: Hello everyone and welcome to another beautiful day together. We invite you to settle into a comfortable position, silence your phones and allow yourself to fully arrive in this moment. Today's session is a meditation four with Geshe Michael Roach. Whether you join us here in Malaysia or from around the world, thank you for being part of this practice. Let's begin.

Geshe Michael Roach: And the fingers match the smile. It means the fingers are also smiling, relaxed. Push your shoulders back just a little bit. Don't go crazy. And then slowly come to your breath.

And we'll do a hundred breaths together. We'll start the preliminaries. So, please invite a teacher to come and sit with you. Could be historical Buddha or somebody like that. Could be one of the sweetest teachers from your life.

Sometimes I like to meditate with a teacher I haven't met yet. So, get them clear in your mind and feel the presence of them. The warmth and breathing and things like that. So, please make them small and elegant offering. I think the hard work you've done this week and the hard work you did to get here is a beautiful offering for them.

Then think of something you've done in the last few days that was not a good thing and something you are regretting. And tell that to your teacher very openly and almost with joy that you are being honest with yourself. And then you can feel happy. I think specifically about all the hard work you've done here and every minute you are spending here away from your home is extremely powerful karma that will change the rest of your life. And the next preliminary is to ask for teachings today.

The older I get, the more I realize that almost every event of the whole day, I can see it as a teaching. If I have sort of a diamond way attitude, I can see everything that people say to me as a teaching that they intend for me. Then I think this program this week is a chance to connect with all of our friends, from around the world, that sometimes we don't meet very often. I think this program is a good opportunity to connect with all of our friends from around the world. And these friends, we don't have many opportunities to get along with them.

And myself, this week, I found out or I became aware that many of my friends are teaching a lot around the world and helping many people. Then let's make a prayer that all of these teachers and all of us who are learning to be teachers can have a long, long healthy life and help many, many people for many years. Then I would like you again to bring your mind back to your childhood. Think about the people who were around you as a child, probably your mom and your dad. And again, I am talking before the age of 12.

Sometimes we give a name to all of our organizations around the world. And we call it world view. World view means how do you view your world. How do you view where your world came from. Where did the other people in your life come from.

Where did your planet come from. Who made the stars. And this, this is a world view. If you want to see emptiness directly, it's a complete shift in your world view. And it's very helpful if you want to make a profound change in your world view that you investigate who gave you the world view you had when you were growing up.

And I will give you just an example from my own life. And while I talk about it, please think about what was happening in your own life, which was similar. So, I think probably most of my ideas about who made the world or why things are happening, they came from my mom and my dad. And my mom was religious. And she took us to church.

And the main world view that we learned at church was that there was a God. And that God made me and my mom and my dad and my brothers and my whole world. And that God kind of decided what's going to happen to me every day. We even had a prayer when we went to bed. You know, I'm going to sleep now.

If I wake up tomorrow, that's a good thing. But if I don't wake up, I hope God will bring me to his place. In my case, when I was six years old, my parents put me in a public school. Public in America means everybody's school, not private school. And in my school, and in America at that time, the teachers were not allowed to teach religion.

Because at that time, it was a big tradition in the United States that every person should follow their own religion, and they have freedom to do that. And no one, like the school teachers, shouldn't tell them what to think. But there was a religion that they didn't call a religion, and it was science. And they will explain how the galaxy blew up a long time ago and made all the stars and all the planets. And then slowly, life began to spread on some planets.

And from my school teachers, it felt like there was no big person deciding everything about the world. And I don't know about your life or your country, but I guess kids in my country, we developed a capacity to believe two contradictory ideas where the world came from at the same time. And when we go to church, we will comfortably talk about God. And when we get to school, we will talk about science creating the universe comfortably. Then if cause and effect is correct, then the two explanations that I got when I was a little kid about where things come from, they must be coming from some earlier cause.

So I was born into a world where it was natural to talk about God making me and my family at church. But then when I go to school, it felt natural to say just some stars exploded and eventually me and my parents started to exist. It felt comfortable to have two different worldviews. It felt comfortable to have two different worldviews. And then at school, I would naturally accept the science of explosion.

My parents and family's existence came from some earlier explosions on the planet. So for the rest of this morning's meditation, we will go for about 10-15 minutes. So for the rest of this morning's meditation, I'd like you to think about what worldviews you grew up with. And the meditation this morning, I don't want you to decide which worldview is correct or something like that. I just want you to try to remember who taught it to you.

I remember when I was maybe 9 years old, and I was on the playground in the school. And me and my friends were discussing where do babies come from. And one of my friends said, when your mom and your dad take all their clothes off and they get in the bed, that's how they make a baby. Then I remember, I couldn't believe it. I said, no, my parents are good people.

They would never do that. So I think maybe there's a third source of your worldview. One is your parents and your school. And then there's the religious beliefs in your country. And then there's the beliefs of your third grade friends.

And in my life, the authority of each of those is almost equal. Okay, here we go. Where did you get your worldviews from when you were younger than 12? And we'll go for about 10 minutes. No right or wrong, just where did you get them from?

Okay, then we can dedicate the good karma of this morning. Then everybody in our world should find a worldview which makes sense. And they should feel the freedom to find a worldview which makes sense. Then dedicate the karma. Be happy.

And take a good stretch. Basically, we don't have room for more than, I think, one and a half worldviews in your brain. And basically there's three competing worldviews in our life. There's a big tradition in our planet of a big guy who made the whole world. There's a big tradition in our planet of a big guy who made the whole world.

And logically, this guy makes all life and kills all life. And then we have another worldview that rocks flying through black space bump into each other and here we are. One of those worldviews is more than enough to fill your mind. Two worldviews, religion and science, it's almost too much to put in your head. And now we're trying to put a third one.

And there's no room. The third one says everything's coming from how you treat other people. The same way that gravity says that a lighter thing falls to a heavier thing. And it's truly difficult to fit a third competing worldview into our small head. But you can't help people until you find room for the third one.

And because we grew up with it, it's much harder than you think. When we take the airplane from America to Asia and the plane's going like ... Then I'm like, oh Jesus! Suddenly I become Christian again. Because that was put in my mind when I was a child.

So, you don't have to worry too much about changing your worldview. In the beginning, you just have to realize you have a worldview and someone gave it to you. I remember when I first met the people from the Himalayas. When they grow up, when they are little kids, their parents tell them all the people in the world came from a sex between a monkey and a witch. So, when they were little kids, they really believed that.

Then I was in India. When I went to the Himalayas, I went through India. Those people, when they were little kids, their parents told them the whole world is sitting on the back of a big turtle. If the turtle eats some bad food in the morning, then there's earthquake in the country. That's what their parents taught them.

So, I think if you travel, if you meet other countries people when you are young, and you hear turtle worldview and monkey sex worldview, then you can start to question what you were taught when you were young. And that will help you to see emptiness. You have to think about these things. We need shamatha. And we need to question what we learned in the grade school.

Otherwise, you won't be able to see emptiness. You have to have an open mind to see emptiness. You have to have an open mind to see emptiness. Okay, we have time for one good question.

Question from the audience: Thank you. Here. Thank you, Geshe-la. Thank you. Oh, I speak Chinese.

I have a question. For example, we entered the Diamond Way. But my family, they think the story of the pen makes sense. But they don't know, they can't come here yet. Okay.

Okay. Thank you.

Stanley (translator): Do you want to speak English?

Question from the audience: No, thank you. Okay. So my question is, so we are going into the Diamond Way. At the same time, where my family members are, they kind of believe that the pen works. But that's it.

So I want to understand, after I got the Diamond Way transmission, is there a way that I can help them? I believe there's one. If I can know ahead of the time, then I don't really have to be crazily about dragging them into the wisdom right now.

Geshe Michael Roach: Okay, good question. And here's a difficult answer. But it is Diamond Way. So, we call revising the history of your life. It means, as you are trained in Diamond Way, you have to rewrite the story of your early life.

And I think it's important to say, you don't have to make a decision. You don't have to say, my mom was a Buddha, but my dad was not. You don't have to decide like that. Because logically, you cannot prove either one. You can't really prove whether grandpa saw emptiness or not.

You can't really prove it. You can like me, and you can believe me, but you can't prove it. But as your Diamond Way practice gets more strong, you will wake up some days with a, I call it a beautiful paranoia. Maybe, it always starts with maybe. When my mom took me to the church, she was trying to prepare me for my Lama.

She was actually trying to prepare me to see my Lama in the future. Is it true? We can't prove it. But is it helpful? Very helpful.

——— Slide 1 · V and Nijinsky ———

[]

Geshe Michael Roach: Somebody called, Sugeng, you are so stupid. Then, oh, you must be a Buddha. You are making me a better person. There was a famous dancer, ballet dancer from Peterburg named Nijinsky. And he was the greatest dancer of his time.

And during World War I, I think it was World War I, he ended up in Switzerland. And he was so sensitive, that when he thought about countries killing thousands of each other, he went crazy. And you should read his autobiography, written down by his wife. And he disappeared. And his wife couldn't find him.

And she searched for him. They sent the police, they checked everywhere. And he was sitting in a playground, night and day, he just sit there in a children's playground. And they said, you know, you are here for two, three days, what are you doing here? He said, those children are all God.

I want to be with God. So, I come to sit with the children. Because they are God. And he never got cured. He died like that.

I think that's a pretty good place to die. Okay? Alright, see you soon.

Host: Thank you, Teacher Stanley. Okay, let's thank for our teacher's beautiful teaching again. Thank you. And for online students, bye for now. See you later.

Host: Thank you, thank you, dear teacher. And thank you for practice with us. We hope this meditation brings clarity and peace. We'll have a 15-minute break. Up next is Arya's Diamond Way, Class 7, with Geshe Michael Roach.

Please stretch, hydrate and return on time for our next session. See you soon.