Decreasing Negative Emotions

The supreme accomplishment is the continuing continuous decrease of disturbing emotions. This is also a nice one. The word that they are translating as accomplishment is the word city. Now at that time especially, this is just prior to Milarepa and all the great yogis of that time. Now if you read any of you have read Milarepa or any of the yogis and practitioners of that time both in India and Tibet, you will see there's a lot of emphasis on city and it was understood as being able to fly, walk on water, walk through walls and so forth. These were your cities, you know like nowadays in India with Sai Baba, you know he would manifest jewelry and so forth and this type of thing was regarded as his city and therefore he was worthy of great reverence because he had cities. And so at the time of Atisha, likewise, a lot of people's judgment of your accomplishment was miraculous capabilities such as being able to fly and so forth. That was very common. Everybody was flying around in those days. In fact there is this story of, I don't think it was Milarepa, it was somebody else, but anyway he was sitting at the mouth of his cave and one of his students came flying by and doing loops and you know really and so then the Lama looked at him, the yogi looked at him and said yes yes I see you have some experience now go away and meditate till you get realization, which I thought was brilliant. Anyway Atisha says the Supreme City, the Supreme City is the continuous decrease of our disturbing emotions, our clasia, our greed, anger, jealousy and so forth. That's the real sign of accomplishment, not being able to fly or you walk on water. Are our negative emotions decreasing or increasing? And another place Atisha says that the sign, if you are in retreat for say a year and you come out, the sign of accomplishment, again the sign that you did well, is the decrease of our afflictive emotions. If we are even more sensitive and irritable, you know some people come out of retreat and then they can't live with their family, they find themselves getting very upset by everything because they become so sensitive. So if we end up getting more easily upset and irritable with other people or if we find ourselves getting more greedy because all what we had to eat and retreat all that guck, now we've got the real stuff again and you know so then if we find ourselves becoming more greedy or more irritable or feeling good about ourselves because I did a whole year's retreat and so forth, then Atisha says that retreat was a complete waste of time and they don't care how many visions you got, how much bliss and joy, forget it, it was useless. So he's very strong on that. The real sign of accomplishment is that our ego is diminished. The sign that the ego has diminished is that we are not so negatively reactive as we used to be, in other words we're not so greedy, we don't want things like we used to want, we don't get so upset and angry as we used to get, where things happen for other people that we would have liked to happen for ourselves, we rejoice for them, we're not jealous or envious and we, our sense of self has become much softer and more open and spacious so we are not so me, me, me and we see things with more clarity. Then if that is the case, well done. Yeah, this is a sign. If we are now, our negative emotions have quietened down in the time when otherwise normally we would get very upset or irritable and angry, instead we find ourselves saying, you know, it's okay so what? Or even if somebody is really annoying us to just spontaneously feel love and compassion for that person instead of irritability and annoyance, then that is a sign of accomplishment. Something has shifted, something actually has been accomplished and it's nothing to do with these external signs. I mean somebody can have a lot, the Buddha himself knew this very well, there's a story in the sutras, in the early sutras, where this monk, this Buddhist monk was wandering around, he came to this village square and there was a big flagpole and on top of it was some, I forget, a bowl filled with something desirable and so the person who could get up and take what was in the bowl would get the prize and so this monk who could levitate thought, well for the glory of the Dharma I will get this bowl and show people, look, if you follow the Buddhist path you can levitate, so he did that and then when the Buddha heard about it he was extremely displeased and he made a rule saying that you are not permitted to demonstrate your Siddhis, except in very exceptional cases and he really scolded the monk and he almost said he was going to disrobe him. So the Buddha was very clear that merely having Siddhis is not a sign of genuine realization and accomplishment and people who are very psychic can be completely screwed up, have you noticed? I mean the fact that we have psychic abilities is no, no demonstration of any actual wisdom, so we shouldn't be fooled into thinking just because people are very clairvoyant or have other Siddhis, that that means that they are spiritually evolved, they might be but they might not be, it's actually a separate thing, somebody might be extremely realized and have no Siddhis whatsoever, you know in the sense of miraculous powers and other people may have many many psychic abilities and be totally unrealized, so we shouldn't confuse the two, right? And so as I say at the teacher's time they did confuse the two and so many of these stories of that time are all about the incredible miracles which these practitioners did and and so again I think a teacher was was completely spot-on by saying the greatest city we can possibly have is that our negative emotions decrease, that is a sign that we're getting somewhere, if we're not so greedy, not so angry, not so jealous and so forth, if the ego quietens down.