ALWAYS MAINTAIN ONLY A JOYFUL MIND

"The point of this slogan is continuously to maintain joyful satisfaction. That means that every mishap is good, because it is encouragement for you to practice the dharma. Other people's mishaps are good also: you should share them and bring them into yourself as the continuity of their practice or discipline. So you should include that also. It is very nice to feel that way, actually.

"For myself, there is a sense of actual joy. You feel so good and so high. I suppose I was converted into Buddhism. Although I am not sticking bumper stickers on my car saying, 'Jesus saved me,' I was doing that mentally. Mentally I was putting on bumper stickers saying, 'I'm glad that my ego has been converted into Buddhism and that I've been accepted and realized as a Buddhist citizen, a compassionate person.' I used to feel extraordinarily good and so rewarded. Where that came from was no question: I felt so strong and strengthened by the whole thing. In fact, I began to feel that if I didn't have that kind of encouragement in myself, I would have a lot of difficulty studying vajrayana. I felt so grateful, so good. So this slogan means to maintain a sense of satisfaction and joyfulness in spite of all the little problems and hassles in one's life.

"This slogan is connected to the previous one ('Of the two witnesses, hold the principle one.') If you have been raised in the Judeo-Christian tradition of discipline, the idea of watching yourself is based purely on guilt. But in this case, it is not that way. We do not have any logic that acknowledges, understands, or presents a concept like original sin. From our point of view, you are not basically condemned. Your naughtiness is not necessarily regarded as your problem — although it is witnessed, obviously. You are not fundamentally condemned; your temporary naughtinesses are regarded as coming from temporary problems only. Therefore, to follow up on that, this slogan says, 'Always maintain only a joyful mind.' It is a joyful mind because you do not have to be startled by any situation of wretchedness or, for that matter, sudden upliftedness. Instead you can maintain a sense of cheerfulness all along.

"To start with, you maintain a sense of cheerfulness because you are on the path; you are actually doing something about yourself. While most sentient beings have no idea what should be done with themselves, at least you have some lead on it, which is fantastic. If you step out into Brooklyn or the black hole of Calcutta, you will realize that what we are trying to do with ourselves is incredible. Generally, nobody has the first idea about anything like this at all. It is incredible, fantastic. You should be tremendously excited and feel wonderful that somebody even thought of such an idea.

"There is a sense of joy from that point of view, a sense of celebration which you can refer to whenever you are depressed, whenever you feel that you do not have enough in the environment to cheer you up, or whenever you feel that you do not have the kind of feedback you need in order to practice. The idea is that whether it is a rainy day, a stormy day, a sunny day, a very hot day, or a very cold day, whether you are hungry, thirsty, very full or very sick — you can maintain a sense of cheerfulness. I do not think I have to explain that too much. There is a sense of basic cheerfulness that allows you to wake yourself up.

"That joy seems to be the beginning of compassion. We could say that this slogan is based on how to go about maintaining your awareness of the practice of Mahayana — literally and fully. You might feel uptight about somebody's terrible job, that his or her particular shittiness has been transferred onto you and has fucked up the whole environment. But in this case, you don't blame such a person, you blame yourself. And blaming yourself is a delightful thing to do. You begin to take a very cheerful attitude toward the whole thing. So you are transcending oy vey — getting out of Brooklyn, metaphorically speaking. You could do that. It is possible to do that.

"This kind of cheerfulness has a lot of guts. It is founded in buddha nature, tathatgatagarbha. It is founded in the basic compassion of people who have already done such a thing themselves . . . So we could do it too. It is founded on a real situation.

"If someone punches you in the mouth and says, 'You are terrible,' you should be grateful that such a person has actually acknowledged you and said so. You should, in fact, respond with tremendous dignity by saying, 'Thank you, I appreciate your concern.' In that way his neurosis is taken over by you, taken into you, much as is done in tonglen practice. There is an immense sacrifice taking place here. If you think this is ridiculously trippy, you are right. In some sense the whole thing is ridiculously trippy. But if somebody doesn't begin to provide some kind of harmony, we will not be able to develop sanity in this world at all. Somebody has to plant the seed so that sanity can happen on this earth.”