If anybody is interested in how to reduce and even cure AIDS, here are some discoveries and some experiences to do with AIDS. A lot depends on mental strength. It makes a huge difference if your mind is happy—even if your body is sick, if your mind is happy then you enjoy life. It definitely makes so much difference; it gives you a lot of strength and you are able to do things.
It seems it is extremely important to live the life quite strongly in practice. I guess this means a disciplined life—no question about physical discipline, but also away from nonvirtue, immoral actions, no question about that. That also helps to support the mind to be happy, strong and emotionally stable. It helps to not have depression at that time —sadness, ups and downs; maybe not so much up, more downs.
There is one student in Queensland, Australia, at Chenrezig Institute, the original center in FPMT. After that, Tara Institute in Melbourne started. It is quite large and has been extremely successful in giving Dharma education and Buddha’s teachings, basically education and practice; showing how to achieve not only temporal peace and happiness for ourselves immediately, right away, but also ultimate happiness, liberation, the cessation of all sufferings and disturbing thought obscurations, emotional thoughts and their actions, karma, including the negative imprints left on the mental continuum—how to clean that away from the mental continuum, and cease that from the mental continuum by actualizing the remedy, the path.
The Dharma is like taking medicine; it is the real medicine. The realizations are the spiritual medicine; only then are we able to be totally free from AIDS and all the rest of the sicknesses, old age, suffering and death, and the suffering of rebirth. We are able to stop the cycle of death and rebirth forever; not only the suffering of pain but also other types of suffering —the suffering of change and other feelings that are suffering but appear as pleasure to the hallucinated mind, so we believe in and grasp at, or become attached to that pleasure. So, total liberation from that. We can be free from the two kinds of suffering by total liberation.
The third type of suffering is all-pervasive suffering. That is when the body and mind nature are pervaded by suffering, because they are created by karma and delusion, the impure thoughts. The desire realm, the aggregates of the body and mind, as well as the form and formless realm aggregates, which are only the consciousness—all these are the contaminated seed of disturbing thoughts, the delusion seed nature, the negative imprints, therefore, all these realms are contaminated.
They are pervaded by suffering because the seed of disturbing thought can compound the suffering of this life and of future lives at any time. Therefore, those who are seeking liberation, ultimate happiness; who would like to achieve ultimate happiness, everlasting happiness, should aim to be liberated forever from these three sufferings. This is the unmistaken liberation, with this objective realization of the ultimate nature of suffering; not only of the two previous sufferings but also the third one, all-pervasive suffering, which includes the top [or peak] of samsara, the fourth level of the formless realm.
In the Hindu religion there is renunciation and detachment to the desire realm, the form and formless realms, up to the third level. There is no higher samsaric realm than the fourth level of the formless realm, the tip of samsara, which is also in the nature of suffering. The tip of samsara is not explained and also right view, emptiness, is not explained [in Hinduism]. The direct realization of emptiness, which directly ceases the disturbing thought obscurations, the seed of disturbing thoughts—that education is not there and that hasn’t happened.
[We should aim] to achieve ultimate everlasting happiness, total liberation from suffering and its causes, and to help others achieve liberation from the oceans of samsaric sufferings—from the problems of human beings, the suffering of rebirth and death, old age and sickness, as well as all the rest of the relationship problems and all the suffering of being unable to find desire object or having found it, being separated from it.
Not only rescuing others from the oceans of human beings’ sufferings, but also from the oceans of hell beings’ sufferings, the oceans of animal realm sufferings, the oceans of preta realm sufferings, the oceans of asura realm sufferings, the oceans of sura realm sufferings and the oceans of intermediate realm sufferings. Not only bringing them to liberation—not just merely liberation from the sufferings of circling in samsara, and the continuity of all the contaminated sufferings of the aggregates—but bringing them into the peerless happiness of full enlightenment, the cessation of all the gross and subtle defilements and the completion of all the realizations. That is the highest benefit to sentient beings; that is the objective of our life. Our objective as human beings, the purpose of our life is to benefit others and to offer the highest benefit to others.
For so many years a highly beneficial education program was offered at Tara Institute to so many sentient beings in this universal spiritual path. It is universal because even sentient beings do not know about such an opportunity; they do not know what can be achieved, but this is what they need to actualize, to liberate themselves and others, when they come to know it and to have the realization. Those who are suffering need to actualize the path, so they need this universal spiritual path in life and they need to see Dharma as their food and medicine.
