Taking care of things before they arise – a new Dharma talk from Daehaeng Kun Sunim

Here’s a great Dharma talk from Kun Sunim about how the intentions we give rise to give direction everything. They give direction to the lives that make up our body, and they give direction to this whole that we are part of. The only “catch” here, is that we have to completely entrust those, and we have to work at letting go of “me” and “I” as we do this, otherwise those intentions would be no more than a reflection of our dualistic desires and thoughts. Because these are one-sided, even if we were able to entrust them them to this foundation of ours, the results would be fairly limited, because we’d be trying to use this non-dualistic whole to achieve a dualistic result.

I’m posting the text and a recording of me reading it today, and will post a Dharma talk on this in a few days after people have had a chance to go over this first. If you have any questions, post them in the comments and I’ll go over them in the talk.

There’s quite a bit of nuance to this topic, (and I’ll try to go over some of it later,) but to sum up, when the situation is urgent and it feels like something bad is coming, completely entrust that to your foundation, knowing that since it arose from there, your foundation can take care of it and turn it around into something that doesn’t cause harm. More on this later!

Taking Care Problems Before They Arise

Whatever kind of problem arises, whether it’s in your family or something in the larger society, whether it’s crime, or some issue that keeps persisting, then, so that the problem won’t arise, you have to firmly entrust it inside, with the thought, “Hey! You’re the one that can solve this! You’re the one that can cause this to not arise!”

          When you do this, you’re setting up a shield. It’s as if you’ve set up a radar or a defense network. All the lives within your body are part the Dharma Realm, and all function together in your body like the Dharma Net. Their consciousnesses continuously leave your body and return, working like a radar net, detecting whatever might be coming your way, and now you’ve told them how to respond to it. They respond as the Dharma Realm, and take negative or harmful things, and turn them into good things.

With a bit of wisdom, you can set things up ahead of time to take care of all this stuff. Then later, even though you aren’t fussing over every little thing, this network responds to it all, and keeps things from becoming problems. Each of you are capable of experiencing how this works and protects you. Though, it doesn’t just happen by accident.

          Nothing in our world just happens. Not even little, tiny things. Not even things that flash into existence, and are gone in that moment. None of it is random. None of it happens by chance. Something had to go forth in order for something to come back. So don’t let yourself think that things just happen. It all starts from you, yourself. That said, the fact that something has begun with you also means that you have the capacity to solve it. You’re the one who can make it into something clear and bright.

          What do I mean about clear and bright? The whole. I’m talking about the whole. Regardless of whatever you face, of whatever you need, return it to the whole. Entrust it all to your foundation, your one mind.

Pain, loneliness, desire, genetics, ghosts, and so on, cause so many difficulties in people’s lives. They cause problems to arise from the outside, as well as from the inside. They arise within and lead people astray. They distort people’s perspective, and cause them to do things that lead them towards hellish states of existence. They cause people to stumble, and they cause them to be easy marks for con artists.

In order to avoid being hurt by these things, entrust them all to your Juingong, your foundation. Do this and make your mind bright again. Then your eyes will become clear, and you won’t be led down dark paths.

You have to give rise to an intention in order for that to manifest. If you don’t raise a thought like this and entrust it, then there’s nothing for your foundation to respond to. It just remains calm and quiet. To put it another way, when no thoughts arise, it’s the “father, ” when thoughts arise, it becomes the “son.” When no intentions are raised, the son, your present consciousness, joins with and becomes one with the calm, quiet father, the foundation. But when an intention is raised, the foundation joins with your present consciousness. That is to say, your intention is energized by the foundation, which works as one with that intention. As one.

This unseen realm, this unseen foundation, is the source of all life, and because it exists, we can give rise to intentions, and because we can give rise to intentions, we can move our bodies, and so create things, and explore and affect the world around us. This is how we’ve existed, and why nothing’s random, why what we experience is the result of our own actions. Some kind of input went into this unseen essence, where it functioned with the whole, and then produced a result.

Thus if you sense a problem coming, you can take that feeling and entrust it, thinking, “Okay, true self, foundation, work to keep these things from happening” and trust it to work that way. If you input the intention that those problems shouldn’t arise, then this whole will work towards that end. But this has to be accompanied by real, unconditional trust. Trust where you turn this over to your foundation and walk away without looking back, without constantly worrying about whether it will really work or turn out well.

If your faith is indecisive, then even though you entrust something, it’s like you submitted the paperwork for something, but then pulled it back at the last moment. And then pushed it forward, but pulled it back again. If you’re doing this, it’ll never get processed and there will be no result.

Thus, everything depends upon how much you trust your foundation. However, instead of decisively entrusting this, sometimes people only mess around on the edges, and so they don’t see any results. Then they come to me and beg me to solve the problem, saying “Letting go and entrusting never seems to work for me.”

But, how you use your own mind is what everything depends upon. Truly. The kinds of results you eventually experience depend upon your faith in your own foundation. There’s no one else to blame or depend upon. It’s all up to you and the unseen source of all life you’re endowed with.

– Daehaeng Kun Sunim, October 31, 1993