Thầy begins with a familiar moment: someone says something unkind, and in a millisecond we travel an old pathway toward anger and the wish to punish. “‘I am angry’ and ‘I know that I am angry’ are two different things.” Thầy shows how mindfulness and insight—remembering that the other person suffers too—can open a new pathway in the brain, and he offers the kind of loving speech that can restore communication and bring reconciliation.

Thầy also offers the practice of appropriate attention—turning the mind toward what leads to understanding and compassion rather than anger and craving—and shows how we can gently help a loved one do the same.

Thầy then draws a parallel with Freudian psychology: manas, the will to live, resembles the id, driven by pleasure-seeking and avoidance of suffering; mind consciousness resembles the ego; and the super-ego points toward sublimation—channeling that energy into art, humanitarian work, and the path.

Drawing on the Manifestation Only school, Thầy questions the view, still held by many scientists, of consciousness as something inside reaching out to an objective world. He explores how subject and object manifest together, just as a father and a son do, and looks at what we really see when we fall in love.

Thầy also speaks of the cosmos as the masterpiece of God, and of God as its true nature, as inseparable from it as water from the wave. With the cloud and Lavoisier’s law of conservation, he points to the nature of no-birth and no-death—in ourselves and in those we love. God, Thầy says, is available in every pebble and every tiny flower.

Through mindfulness and concentration, Thầy teaches, mind consciousness can cultivate the wisdom of nondiscrimination—drawn on the board as a lotus growing from the mud. The Kingdom of God, he says, is a place where people know how to make good use of suffering.

This the fourth talk in a series of twelve given during the What happens When We Die?, twenty-one-day retreat in the year 2014. Thầy offered this talk at the Lower Hamlet, Plum Village. France.