Yoga, Business, and Love (part 1)

June 19, 2008 (Dalian, China)

Languages: English, Mandarin

Audio: http://www.dmes.org/audiofiles/Dalian-19-06-08.mp3

Readings: http://www.dmes.org/pdfs/Dalian-19-06-08.pdf

The first teaching, on June 19th, was an introduction to karma and emptiness, using a pen and a 100-yuan note as props to demonstrate how you create your world. The time was too short to go into much detail about how to change your karma, so the lamas settled on teaching about the two simplest ways.

The two fastest and easiest ways to speed up karma:

  1. Coffee meditation. Geshe Michael spoke of the four hour commute that he made every day for 15 years--when he got home, he was tired and wanted to relax. Instead of sitting for formal meditation, he used the principle that any time you see someone do something good and feel happy, you get 10% of the good karma. So you can just relax and rejoice, and in that way you collect positive karma in a very easy way.
  2. If you do coffee meditation you can do it anywhere, because it's just being happy when other people do good things, like giving away money. But then you have to have a plan what you are going to do with the money you make. If you use it for yourself, you kill the karma. So you have to "reinvest" it. If you do a good coffee meditation the karma comes back and stops. If you give money and then get more as a result, you have to give some of it, say 25%, to someone else. Look for a poor or hungry or unhappy person. Wealthy people are often the most unhappy, so they take them to dinner and pay for it, and don't ask for anything in return. So any time money comes to you, take some and give to other people. If you're wondering if it really works, the company he helped to start is the fastest growing in the history of NYC because they shared the profit with poor people.
 
"...Knowing how it all works, keeping your mind on how it all works, makes it all work a lot faster and a lot more powerfully. This also explains why some people who appear to have a lot of integrity in business don't seem to be doing so well at any given time. It's not enough to live your business life even by a strict code of ethics if you're only doing so by instinct, or under duress imposed by the law, the custom in your industry, the behavior of your peers, or just strong advice from another person who can't explain to you how it all works. Your ethical way of living and doing business must be driven by a clear and conscious awareness of what kind of imprints this behavior will plant in your subconscious, and how this will determine the very reality of the rest of your business career." — Geshe Michael Roach, The Diamond Cutter