Let me introduce to you part one of our three part conversation with Kimberly Lafferty, teacher and practitioner with a deep understanding of Tibetan Buddhism as well as integral theory and developmental psychology.

She is a gifted teacher and speaker and as I'm sure you'll see, the Dharma radiates through her.

Welcome to Deep Transformation.

Self, Society, Spirit, Life enhancing, paradigm rattling conversations with cutting edge thinkers, contemplatives and activists.

With Dr.

Roger Walsh and John Dupuy join us in the evolutionary fast lane as we take a deep dive into transformational practice.

Peak experience, profound understanding, powerful contribution.

I'm Roger Walsh and our co host is John Dupuis, author of Integral Recovery.

And our guest today is Kimberly Lafferty, who has lived many lifetimes already in this incarnation.

She has done extensive deep study and practice in the Tibetan Buddhism, more formally Indo Tibetan Buddhism or Vajrayana.

She's a lama in that tradition, roughly meaning among many other things, she's authorized to teach and transmit the tradition.

Kimberly is also an expert on adult development and leads trainings in that area with Terry O'Fallon and she's a board member of the association for Spiritual Integrity.

And we'll probably come back to that later.

But as a way of setting a context here, Kimberly is, by virtue of her deep practice in Tibetan Buddhism, a firsthand knowledge plus a theoretical knowledge.

From a study of this extraordinary tradition.

And by way of context, the religious scholar Houston Smith said that different cultures have different foci.

Western culture is focused on the outside world and its exploration through science.

Chinese culture is focused on relationships as the primary medium for life and well being.

But the Indian and Tibetan cultures focused inwards on the exploration of the psyche and the.

And the discovery of our true nature.

I personally think of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition as having the world's most sophisticated spiritual technology.

So I thought it'd be wonderful, Kimberly, if we started by saying welcome, but then asking you if you could maybe tell us a little bit about this remarkable tradition you've devoted your life to and some of the training it offers and you've been through and perhaps what.

Drew you into this?

I'm always interested in the backstory.

So why did you dedicate your life so for so many years in this study?

Thank you.

Suffering was because of suffering, John.

Yeah.

Anyway, I'm glad, I'm glad to be here and with you two gentlemen, so thank you for having me.

First of all, it's just wonderful to be in your company.

And it was suffering.

You know, I jest, but jest not.

I was drawn into the study of Indo Tibetan Buddhism in particular, after having an awakening experience that was both a temporal state as well as split me into a new sort of stage of awareness that is, you know, some people might call this an enlightenment experience.

Trust me, I was not enlightened after this.

You know, I'd seen something extraordinary.

People think it's less common.

I tend to disagree.

These experiences, I think, happen more often than not where we have something perhaps anomalous or extraordinary occur that is outside of our ontological framework.

And perhaps there's ontological shock.

And ontological just means for listeners, like your belief system gets shook, like what just happened?

This is non ordinary transpersonal.

So I had an experience that really was.

Later I learned in the lineage of Indo Tibetan Buddhism, I'd had, we might say, experience of the clear light of emptiness.

And emptiness is something that evolves.

The evolution and experience and realization of emptiness is something we could spend the whole show on on how it evolves, not just one realization.

It is beyond all thoughts to imagine and all words to describe this sort of experience.

And I feel that you both know what I'm talking about and your listeners also know what I'm talking about, because when we recognize and are unified with our own consciousness, it is beyond the individual and where we all meet, Right?

So I'm trying to find words to explain it, but it really was triggered by suffering.

Without going into too much story, I was in my late 20s, had achieved all of the things I was supposed to achieve, at least in my, you know, social, cultural bubble.

I had was paying off my student loans.

I was.

Had a good education.

I had a fancy corporate job.

I had a fancy boyfriend.

I lived in a nice apartment in Boston.

I had all of the things.

And yet I was very unhappy.

I was somehow felt that I had lost my inner compass and that something was missing.

And for me, it was something, if I had to codify it, it was the meaning of life.

The big questions, why are we here?

What is the purpose if this isn't it?

Having all the things and then what is going on there also is, like most of us humans, you know, I had some small T trauma and my own psychology, you know, that I was working with at the time and trying to struggle and figure it out.

And I, yeah, I had an awakening and then.

And that's a story in itself and is beautiful to talk about.

But the important part of it was I went looking after that for those who could, yes, put in a frame, explain what had happened.

I didn't doubt it.

I didn't think I was crazy.

I knew I wasn't crazy.

And I also knew I wasn't alone.

I was not special.

We're all special.

And I hadn't searching in academia, searching in Western education as I'd had up to then, even searching growing up in the 41 5, growing up in the Bay Area in the 70s and 80s, I had access to a lot of New Age culture.

I didn't find the conversation I wanted to have and how I knew I could really integrate this clear light, this profound experience I'd had until I found Tibetan Buddhism.

So this was the very end of the last century, and the Dalai Lama had a bestseller at the time, the Art of Happiness.

And fortunately, due to finding those teachings, I found the conversation that I was looking for.

And in a way, my path began there.

And yes, I agree, Roger, and I know you have extensive knowledge in this as well.

Tibetan Buddhism is just had centuries.

And Indo Tibetan Buddhism, not just Tibet, but Indo Tibetan Buddhism, has had centuries focused on what we might call our spiritual evolution and dedicated to that journey.

And so I spent the next 20, 25 years deeply practicing in that lineage, in the lineage of the Dalai Lama, in particular, the Galukpa lineage, doing retreat, studying, and also keeping one foot in my studies of integral Theory.

I found Ken Wilber's work in 99 about the same time.

And though I was so deeply immersed in my teachings and path, and also running nonprofits and being in the world and teaching and getting psychology degrees over time, all of this, but the Integral theory and Ken's work, and following Ken's work and making some friendships there, also kept me grounded in modernity, which I am forever grateful for.

So, yeah, I'll pause there.

Kimberly, can I ask you.

You're the only female lama that I've ever met.

Are you an exception?

Are there others around?

There are quite a few, yes.

And a lot of them are secret also.

And quiet, especially in Vajrayana, where things can get very hushed and very quiet for good reason and sometimes for not so good reason.

But.

Yeah, thank you.

The secret schools.

Yeah, that's good.

Yeah.

Perhaps since you've immersed yourself so deeply in this tradition, might be beautiful.

You know, I'm going to ask you an impossible question, kind of given.

Give your take as an overview of this path.

And of course, there have been libraries written about this.

But how do you see this path?

What do you see as the foundational practices, the core concepts?

It's an open question.

Take it where you'd like.

Oh, thanks, Roger.

You know, it's very simple.

As you know, there are many different schools and many different paths and many different ways to go about this, which was part of my attraction to Tibetan Buddhism, is it is, in essence, an evolutionary model.

It's.

There's not just one way.

And that involves.

That applies to both our stages of realization that we go through and our age, you know, what's appropriate at different stages and ages and all of that.

But the essence of Tibetan Buddhism and its gift, I think it's real gift to us as humanity.

You know, it's this rare, precious, in my opinion, this rare, precious jewel of humanity that, you know, the Himalayas, the Himalayan plateau, we can say has generated.

And we want to replicate it and save it and pass it on.

So.

But the.

So that I think you'd say are in Tibetan.

It's called Lamso Namsum, the three principal paths.

And I say the Tibetan just to.

It's a dying language and just to send it out as a prayer for the world.

So lam so.

Or the three principal paths.

And the three principal paths really rely on each other and then they go together.

So think of it more like a triad, right?

And the first is ethics, the practice of ethics.

The second is bodhichitta, or the path of the warrior heart, the spiritual heart, the warrior saint, is how the Bodhisattva is translated.

These are the codes of how to live from a place of heart and wisdom.

And then the third is wisdom itself.

And they really intersect and rely on each other.

And the gifts of Buddhism are to understand wisdom, I think, which leads to bodhicitta, which leads to ethics.

And more ethics leads to more wisdom, which leads to more bodhichitta, which leads to ethics.

So it's this, you know, interpenetrative, interdependent relationship.

The other gift.

I mean, there's so many.

Right.

Of Tibetan Buddhism in particular, just that applied to my life and speaking just as Kimberly, you know, in my life life, I'm for your listeners.

I am also, more recently, after much of my spiritual study, I became a wife, I became a mother, I'm a householder.

I did that after my training.

I sort of flipped it.

Some people do.

So I'm also very, very much in the world.

But the gifts of Buddhism really are how to understand and penetrate the mind and how the mind works and how our reality works.

Buddhism would say that there's one main problem that we somehow have to figure out and solve, and we need to do it ourselves.

Nobody can do it for us.

And this main problem is self cherishing and self cherishing doesn't mean we're bad people, and it doesn't mean there's something wrong with us.

But somehow we're getting it wrong.

We're doing something that is based on an illusion, that is based on a dream.

And by doing that, we hurt ourselves and others.

And so we create suffering in our individual world and suffering on a larger scale in our collective.

And so somehow understanding that is where ethics, bodhichitta and wisdom come together.

And the more we can kind of solve that problem for ourselves of what is going on.

This is what I was doing in my late 20s.

What am I doing wrong?

I'm doing everything I'm supposed to be doing, but what am I doing wrong?

I'm not a bad person.

No one's a bad person.

But somehow we have to penetrate this particular self cherishing is what the gift of Buddhism has for us, I think.

And Kimberly, you've mentioned several times this triad of ethics, wisdom and bodhicitta.

So maybe it'd be nice to unpack the.

This, this bottomless concept of bodhicitta for us.

Yes.

Well, you know, bodhicitta is also something that evolves and changes over time.

I'd love to hear your understanding of it too, Roger, if you would gift us with that.

And how you experience bodhichitta, it's connected deeply with wisdom.

And I have realized and that any sign that we've had a real satori, a realization with a capital R in Sanskrit is called pramana vartika, that we've had a wisdom insight in some way, it should automatically lead us to bodhichitta.

It should automatically lead us to this awakening of, oh, my gosh, I need to change how I do things.

I need to do something different.

You know, I need to be kinder to myself and be kinder to others.

I need to step into my callings.

You know, I have a deep responsibility and a personal responsibility.

In Tibetan, there's a beautiful word that's like a synonym for cheetah.

It's.

It means personal responsibility.

I have a personal responsibility because each moment, each thought, each word and each deed that I am individually observing myself doing is painting the next moments into existence for me.

And for me, not just Kimberly, but me, the big me, and rippling out to impact other beings.

So bodhichitta is this deep realization of reality.

You know, it's called the perfection of wisdom.

And so it's again interpenetrated with wisdom and then with action, with ethics, with, I've got to be More patient, not only with my husband, but with myself.

That's the most difficult.

The most difficult.

Yeah.

You know, we've had a realization of wisdom.

I'm going to say it again.

When we get up and we're bugged less, we're bothered less, and we want to do something for all of us.

Right, all of us.

And.

And then that leads to ethics.

Right.

So that's how they go together.

Well, let me ask, because you've pointed to a lot of possible outcomes from any deep opening insight awakening, and you've implied that some of those are kind of automatic.

And I wonder about that.

Are they automatic or are they.

Do these realizations come online as a result of subsequent reflection teaching?

What's your take on that?

Yeah, I think both.

I am right now observing what seems to be.

If we're switching to the more developmental psychology side too.

And what we're observing in terms of how ego development happens, there does seem to be states, you know, realization or states that are precursors of our next stage.

So, for example, metacognition itself, which is something that we grow into, say in our late teens or I'm speaking very generally, but late teens or maybe in our 20s.

Some people, it seems, maybe, perhaps describe.

Metacognition for those of us who may not know what that means.

Metacognition is the capacity to think about your thinking, think about your feeling or feel about your behavior.

It's this cognitive capacity that happens at the end of third person perspective for listeners out there following perspective taking.

And it's something that can be taught and is important to be taught, for example, in cognitive behavioral therapy and other sorts of therapies that train us to develop this capacity.

So that metacognition can happen with training.

But I think it can happen naturally through, you could argue, the exposure of our culture or difficulties, or it is something that people can grow into.

How and when that happens is still a mystery.

So it can be both natural, I think, and automatic for some, under the right conditions and something that's trained, both of those things can happen.

What we're finding in the later stages of ego development is that spiritual training, I'm using the word spiritual, it might not be codified that way for some sort of consciousness training, awareness training, I'm not going to say necessary, but pretty darn close of necessary in order to help in a healthy way access and embrace what seemed to be the later stages of consciousness and ego identity, we can say of our identity.

And so in that case, it's these spiritual realizations or states or we might even say ethical implications of are required.

Now, how you get there is, you know, there's obviously not one way.

But training, certainly we are seeing is common for those who have access and stabilized these later stages of ego development.

So I don't know if that completely answers the question or thought process, Roger.

Well, it certainly gives us a lot of rich ideas to work with.

Yeah.

And you're talking about the process in many ways, integration that we tend to think of insights happening and automatic responses.

But it does seem that there is an integration process that often is necessary.

And I haven't seen that really laid out clearly.

Maybe it is somewhere in your tradition, but I haven't seen even Dan Brown, who was brilliant, one of my teachers, he pointed to several steps.

But I'm just intrigued to have you lay that out.

And you make the important point that multiple capacities, including particular later developmental stages, and maybe at some stage you want to dive into your knowledge of adult development, but that many of those later developmental stages and capacities don't just come online automatically, at least in our culture where the conventional level is clearly suboptimal.

As Abraham Maslow said, what we call normality is a form of unrecognized collective developmental arrest, but they can be fostered by individual practice and of course, in a group context.

So, yeah, thanks for bringing that in.

Yeah, you've mentioned that some kinds of practice is essential.

Could you just give an overview of the varieties of practice that are available in this tradition?

Because as far as I can see, there's a broader array of practices than in any other tradition.

This culture for a thousand years didn't create any decent science or architecture or art.

But wow, did they explore the human mind like no other culture has.

So love to hear you talk about the richness of practices that this tradition bring, offers and is gifting us and.

The world now so much.

So, yes, yes.

Well, yes, it was, you know, hundreds, thousands of years of study with the great schools of Northern India, Nalanda.

And these great tradition, Tibetan Buddhism and Indo Tibetan Buddhism, produce these four schools which are developmental.

And each one of them define reality in a different way and define practice in a different way.

And they really start with the hinayana approach of just the basic wisdom of things change.

So and I want the listeners to be able to walk away with something and just the basic wisdom, which is not so basic really.

Right.

That everything is changing, everything is insubstantial, everything comes and goes.

And this itself is a certain sort of refuge and a certain sort of Understanding of the world.

You know, things come, things go.

It's like grandma said, this too shall pass.

And that's the foundational school of wisdom.

And then also including in that and that understanding of that foundation, you start to see that things also are out of my control.

You know, things change and I can't control them.

And so this foundational school says, okay, then focus on your next life, focus on your future.

Right?

Focus on the activities that are going to create a happy life for you and a happy life for those around you into the future.

And these are good things because to throw it back to Maslow a bit, we do need training.

We need to teach our children, we need to teach our inner child parts.

We need to understand that the actions that we do are going to have an effect.

And so we want to be loving, be wise, not lie.

Most major religious traditions that we have have just begged us to be good to each other.

And Indo Tibetan Buddhism is no different in that way.

We have the 10 non virtues of Buddhism.

You find them also in Patanjali's Yoga Sutra of the Yamas and the Niyamas.

You find them in the great traditions as your listeners know.

So that's the foundation and also meditative concentration, the ability to just still the mind and start to move our awareness from outside in to a place of stillness.

Yeah.

And then the schools evolved and another turning of the wheel came.

This was really the first turning of the wheel in general.

The second turning of the wheel came and the Buddha taught Shakyamuni, historical Buddha plus other pandits are credited with that, taught something else and evolved and taught us about the mind in a very profound way.

And classically, the sutra that's most pointed to for this school is the Heart Sutra, which is the most studied, the most debated, the most conversed about sutra that we have.

I just taught it in the spring.

It's a beautiful sutra.

And this is where you get the famous phrase form is emptiness, emptiness is form.

There is nothing to hear, nothing to see, nothing to taste, you know, nothing to smell, nothing to feel, nothing to think of.

And what that all means is a big topic that is really pointing to the trans, dual, let's say nature of reality.

Not just non dual, but transdual.

I have a question.

Yeah, it's always kind of been a mystery to me about Buddhism and definitely as an outsider, but how does the realization of emptiness, like your first awakening experience and then the clear light, how does ethics follow from that?

I mean, it could be just nothingness, existential void in a Western Sense, just nothing.

Nothing, nothing matters.

Nothing, everything is nothing.

How does that follow in Buddhist thought, in the Buddhist tradition, that kindness and compassion and ethical behavior and helping the world and others and being kind to yourself, how does that follow from the realization of emptiness?

Oh, thank you.

Well, it's.

Thank you for the question.

Because the third turning of the wheel really gets to that and to that particular thing.

Which is what?

You know, the breadth.

If we were to talk about the breadth of Tibetan Indo, Tibetan Buddhism, this would be it.

Emptiness doesn't mean nothing exists.

Let's just say that and underline that a bunch of times for everybody.

Emptiness means things don't exist the way you thought they did.

That helps.

They exist.

Yeah.

Just remember that, yeah, things exist, just not the way you thought.

And that's very important to understand.

And when we perceive what yes, Buddhists call emptiness and there's emptiness and then there's the clear light and they're different things.

One school, for example, the Middle Way Mahayana Prasangika school, the Middle Way schools would argue about this and they would say, okay, emptiness, you can't even really talk about it.

As soon as you talk about it, you're not talking about it because you're using words.

And it's this thing that we think is there that's not there.

Let me put it this way.

We realize emptiness when we go looking for the thing that we think is there that is not there, okay?

And we come up empty and that's emptiness.

And the realization of that particular flavor of emptiness feels like I thought something was there or something.

I thought I had a self.

The way like some self existent thing that there was a Kimberly somewhere that was unchanging and that I can control and somehow was like this thing that existed out of time and I see that's not there and I come up empty.

And it's kind of like, you know, going to a dinner with your friends and you're going to pay for the meal, right?

And you have this nice dinner and you eat with your friends and you drink with your friends and it's expensive and you're planning on it and you budgeted for it and you get to the end of the meal and everybody's happy and they're going out the door and you reach into your pocket and you realize your wallet's not there.

And that feeling of oh my goodness is what emptiness is pointing to, okay?

And the thing that it's gotcha in Tibetan, it's a great onomatopoeia word.

It's like Gotcha.

You know, the thing that we think is there, that is self existent in real terms, is that political figure that I just can't stand, who exists as terrible from their own side.

Okay, so I'll say it again.

The terribleness in the person, political figure, neighbor, even in a part of myself that I think is so real, is so true, that I'm gonna hurt somebody, I'm gonna argue about it, I'm gonna blame, I'm gonna give myself an ulcer, I'm gonna do all of this that I.

Because I think that that terribleness is somehow the one self existent thing, like it comes from its own side.

It's not something that somehow I'm participated in seeing.

Right?

It's somehow not coming from me.

So there's a recognition that our experience is in significant and usually unrecognized ways, constructed again.

How does ethics follow from this realization?

How do we become better, more compassionate people?

And how do we save our planet?

Through the realization of the clear light and emptiness and this awakening.

Correct?

Yes, Roger.

This particular emptiness realization I'm talking about is that deep realization that things are constructed.

Yes, yes.

It's the mind only school realization.

It's essential.

And if things are constructed, if that terribleness is somehow arising in me, in the big me, and that's what I'm looking at.

I'm looking at my thought.

I'm not actually looking at the person, I'm looking at my thought.

Okay, so if I realize that I'm looking at my thought and not actually the person, then how do I change my thought?

How do I change my political figure?

How could I possibly begin to reconstruct?

And we'd say in Buddhism, weed out, purify everything we're experiencing.

This is another gift of Buddhism, is how karma and emptiness interpenetrate and relate the mind.

You know, think of it like the canvas.

Emptiness is a blank canvas.

What we'd say our karma or our seeds or our constructs are the paint.

And if I realize that I'm looking at the paint, whether it came from my past lives, whether it came from my genetic history, whether it came from my early trauma, whether it came from a collective karma and cultural agreements and social construction or individual construction.

All four quadrants?

Yeah, all four quadrants.

Once I realized I'm looking at all eight zones, I'm looking at the paint, how do I repaint?

How do I repaint for the future?

And this is where ethics comes in.

It's like, it's this deep personal responsibility and not in a solid way.

And this is why it's important to have a teacher.

It's easy to fall off.

It's easy to get into megalomania, or it's easy to think Kimberly somehow is creating her world when Kimberly is just another thought, another idea.

So the personal responsibility comes with, wow, I can do something different.

I can paint a new future and contribute that to the world in a very profound way.

It's my responsibility to do that.

And this feels like you're giving us a deep foundation for a topic that we wanted to dive into more deeply and has actually been a recurrent theme you've introduced, which is not surprising since it's so central, as you said, to Indo Tibetan Buddhism and to major religions on this topic of ethics, maybe we can dive in more deeply here because not only is it such a central spiritual practice and theme and contemplative practice and theme, it's also something you have worked with in ways that an intensity that.

I'm not sure I know anyone else who's quite done it as fully as you have.

So maybe we can maybe how to bring.

How to get into this.

Maybe.

First off, just how do you define ethics?

Thank you.

Well, based on everything we've talked about, based on this understanding of realization and emptiness, and we can come back to the clear light.

Maybe later.

John, then is you get up off your cushion, you have this realization, you have this impulse, and then what do we do?

Right?

What do we do?

So ethics is what we deeply related to karma.

And I'll stay with my Buddhist frame here.

And karma is a word that means.

It comes from the Sanskrit root cur, which means to make or to do.

So when I'm using the word ethics, I'm going to tie it to everything we think, everything we say and everything we do right?

And somehow these things that we say, that we think and that we do are turning into the wordness neurologue.

They're the material cause for the next moments of our reality.

So ethical training is beautiful.

I mean, I have a young son.

I think about this all the time, about how what is developmentally appropriate in terms of how I teach them about ethics, how I teach him about wisdom, how I teach him about compassion.

And when we're young and say before five, in many cultures, we see that we train our younger children to just be good to each other.

Ethics starts with this, hopefully training.

A lot of it has been washed out in our modern culture.

Sadly, we don't have ethical training so much anymore.

But of don't hurt, you know, don't lie, don't be violent, don't be mean.

And when we're starting out with our ethical training, at first it's like, well, why, you know, do it because Santa might see you, and do it because God might see you.

God's always watching.

Santa's always watching.

You need to be a good boy or a good girl, and that's why it's important that you do these things.

And you know, that has its limitations, certainly.

And yet we don't find much ethical training and the importance of ethical training in modernity.

I didn't have a lot of it even growing up in the 70s and 80s in the Bay Area.

And so I just want to acknowledge that a lot of that basic training of the Ten Commandments and do, you know, don't hurt yourself and others, don't be violent, don't lie, is something we need to look at as a culture and see where is it important and where have we maybe applied our postmodern ideology inappropriately at certain ages of our development?

So it starts there with just do no harm, don't be violent, and don't hurt each other.

But ethics is so much more profound and complex than that.

As we know, as we evolve, our ethics becomes more subtle as we grow out of concrete or, you know, physical stages of development where we're just focused on what we can see as we evolve in our adult lifespan and we start to be able to look at our thoughts and look at our feelings and be aware of other people's thoughts and be aware of other people's feelings, then ethics becomes don't hurt people's feelings.

Right?

Ethics becomes more than just what's important to me or important to my family.

It becomes what's important to, at first, people who are like me or think like me.

But then it expands to people who don't think like me and are different from me.

And that's important too.

Your listeners are likely familiar with the world centric ideology.

And our ethics expands as we evolve to include people who don't look like me and people who I can't even see, and people who live around the world and their happiness and lack of suffering and value of being a human is just as important to me.

And this continues to expand.

And then it keeps going.

You know, our ethics shifts as connected to what we've talked about before, our realization and our wisdom expands where we realize the importance of living an ethical way of life just for the beginning of our own happiness, that there is a connection to when I have not worked on my own reactions or I've not worked on my own shadow issues and my own happiness.

And we see the responsibility we have to even be happy and to be a light in the world.

Later, as our capacities expand, our ethics really becomes much more about what we might call the four immeasurables or the four infinite thoughts.

Sometimes it's translated of deep infinite compassion and love and equanimity and joy and thinking of the future.

Right.

Thinking of is what we're doing going to do no harm in the moment and going to impact the future in a way that's going to be helpful for us.

Yeah, so.

Yeah.

So pulling, just pointing to some of the things you've pointed to that I can believe.

You've spoken as ethics as coming out of being an expression of an insight into the.

Into reality, the fundamental nature of our nature of nature itself.

And you've implied that ethics is a way of living that makes sense when one sees deeply so that you've also pointed to the fact that something not so appreciated in our culture that ethics develops, matures or can develop and mature.

And you've particularly pointed to an expanding scope of care and concern as one of the hallmarks of that development.

You've also spoken to a recognition that ethics is not separate from our own well being.

And I think our culture has this tragic misunderstanding of ethics as self sacrifice.

Whereas actually what you're pointing to is that ethics can be enlightened self interest.

Yes, absolutely.

And you know the.

I'm a Vajrayana practitioner and Vajrayana is just a school of spiritual study and education that takes traditionally many years of preparation to get into.

And I can speak about it generally without not specifically, but ethics in this more later.

Spiritual evolution really has become too for me and in the school I practice with and in the community I practice with our ethics there it's so dear to my heart so I want to share it with you has become.

Yes, it's do no harm, don't lie, learn, understand and apply modern psychological concepts of how to attune to our nervous systems, how to be trauma aware, how to have repair.

These are conversations that you're not going to find and pointing out instructions you're not going to find in the 1500 year old text I was teaching last weekend.

We always apply modernity as well.

But the essence of Vajrayana and the gift we can give humanity in terms of our ethical life is to each one of us step into our own divine light, let's say.

And that's what the clear light is, John, you know, step into our own nature and gifts and knowing whatever that way that is for us to be, you know, this divine light in whatever way is appropriate in our lifestyle, whether it's being kind to our neighbors or publishing an extraordinary book that helps, you know, thousands of people that in the gifts of Buddhism and Vajrayana, you know, stepping into our divinity, ourselves as in our gifts and our creativity is really one of the most profound ethical things we can do as well.

And I think that's where the answer to my question is.

Where do these ethics from the realization of clear light, our true nature that you're talking about right now, that ethics just comes from that place because.

Because that's the way it is.

Is that.

Is that correct?

Yes.

And the gifts of Buddhist I want to impart to.

It's mechanistic.

It's this understanding that what I put out there literally is being ref.

I'm reflecting it in the mirror of my mind.

So, for example, I can give you a cup of coffee, right?

So I've got a nice cup of coffee here, right?

And I can.

I really do, actually.

I wish I could reach through the screen and give it to you.

But for your listeners, imagine I have a cup of coffee here and I can give you a cup of coffee.

And if you like coffee, right?

That's a nice thing to do.

And the theory is karmic theory and Tibetan Buddhist theory and even maybe construct activation theory, even might say, I'm reaching there a little bit, okay?

So that means I'm going to get.

If I do this to you, do unto others as you would have them do unto you, somehow that's going to create a future where a traditional Buddhist might say, you're going to have somebody give you a nice thing that you need sometime in the future.

Okay?

That's kind of a kindergarten way to think about Karma.

But it's not incorrect.

It's not incorrect.

You do this, good things are going to come back to you.

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you with Vajrayana ethics, however, and that's all good and true, right?

And there's actually been some interesting studies done on Karma as well.

But Vajrayana is different.

Vajrayana invites us to first think about who's doing the giving first.

Kimberly.

To feel into my most ultimate nature, right?

Kimberly.

The one I am the one who sees.

Kimberly.

I am the one who is timeless, boundless, radiant, luminous awareness that has never died and was never born.

I look at you While being Kimberly too, I'm also Kimberly.

Right.

I look at you, the receiver of the coffee, I see your divinity in that way.

I look at the coffee, I'm grateful, I'm appreciative of this luscious thing.

And then I do the act that's going to create a very different future.

Right.

A very different outcome for the future is the theory that I invite you all to experiment with.

And so we're actively co creating this reality through these actions.

Right.

For our future.

There's a proverb in the Bible that says, cast your bread upon the waters or in many years it will come back to you.

I mean, that's.

That's pretty ancient Jewish karma statement there, isn't it?

It's beautiful.

I love it.

I love it.

Yeah.

Stay tuned to part two of our conversation with this amazing human being, Kimberly Lafferty, who is, by the way, one of the first ever female llamas, Buddhist teachers of her lineage in the United States.

Thank you very much for being a part of this conversation.

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Very simple.

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Sa.