OK, so we can, I think we can start this evening's talk.
I, I, I tend to talk about perception this evening, which
perhaps has never been talked about here before.
I think I'm not sure, at least not maybe in detail.
And the, the thing which sort of started me off to think about
talking, my perception is actually always comes from the
suit. There's always a discourse of
the Buddha that is most of my inspiration in my monastic life.
And this particular suit, I caught my eye a few months ago,
a few years ago. And in this suit, the the Buddha
or Vener Bhosari Puta, there's a couple of different discourses.
The suitors are the discourses of the Buddha.
In this discourse, Vener Bhosari Puta or the Buddha says that it
is to actually the question to the Buddha.
The question is who becomes enlightened in this world and
who does not become enlightened? Or if you like, who awakens in
this world and who does not awaken?
And venerable sorry Puta replies that the person who awakens is
somebody who is able to understand.
These perceptions lead to decline.
These perceptions leads to standing still.
This perception leads to lead to increase or to distinction or to
higher states of mind. And lastly, these perceptions
lead to like knowledge or deep understanding.
Penetration, I think is the word used in this particular Suta, in
other words, penetrate to proper understanding of the Dhamma, of
the teaching of the Buddha. And reversely, conversely, is
that the person who doesn't understand that these particular
perception lead to decline, standing still, to increase and
to penetration will not attain nibhama, will not actually
become awakened. And that's all it says, the
whole suit to her it all. It says that this is all it
takes to actually reach awakening in Buddhism.
And of course, it's not just about awakening.
This is also about practicing the path and actually improving
in good qualities on the path. If you want to actually practice
the path properly and you want to move towards this awakening,
it's exactly the same principle that applies.
Again, you have to again understand the perceptions that
actually move you in the right direction.
If you don't understand these things, there can be no progress
on the path. And I thought when I first read
this, I thought this was very interesting because this is not
usually how the Buddha explains the path to awakening.
Usually the path to awakening is either the eightfold path, it
might be the five spiritual faculties, it might be the
gradual training. There's all these different ways
of explaining the path to Buddhism, but never ever apart
from this suit, apart from a few occasions.
So the Buddha say what all it really takes is to perceive, to
look upon things, look upon the world and yourself in the right
way, and that is actually enough.
It's sufficient to take you all the way to awakening and also to
keep you progressing here on the spiritual path.
It's a very powerful and important saying, I think.
Yeah. And what it means, it doesn't
mean so much that we can sort of set aside the Noble Eightfold
path and set aside all, all these other things and just
focus on our perceptions. That's not that's not really
what it means. What it means is that perception
and the Noble eightfold path, they work together here.
And if you train your perceptions in the right way, if
you understand how to look at the world in the right way,
you're actually, by doing that, you're supporting your practice
of the no plateful path. In fact, I think you can go so
far as to say that if you do use your perceptions wisely, you are
actually practicing the no blightful path by perceiving in
the right way, by thinking about the world in the right way, by
looking at things in the right way.
This is actually leads you and points you in the right
direction. Very interesting.
I never actually when I read this, I thought this was very
profound and very fascinating and I didn't really understand
maybe previously how important it is to cultivate perceptions.
And of course, you find that once you start reading The
Suitors, the Buddha very often talks about this idea of
cultivating perceptions, because implied in this, implied in the
idea that you should know which perceptions lead to decline, to
increase, and to eventual find knowledge of the Dharma.
Implied in that is that perceptions are changeable.
We can choose our perceptions. We can actually decide how we
want to look at things. These things are not fixed.
These things are not something which, you know, is set in
concrete. We can choose ourselves how to
perceive the world. And of course, this is a very
fundamental and important part of the Buddhist teachings, that
things aren't permanent, that they are not set in set in a
certain way, but that they are changeable.
And our choice is paramount to actually how we see the world
and how we look upon the world. So this is sort of one of the
foundation principles of Buddhism.
And because of that, we can actually, that's why we can
develop perception, we can change.
And you may think as a Buddhist, you may think this is pretty
obvious. That is quite clear that we can
change our perceptions. But for most people in the
world, this is not obvious at all.
And the reason it's not one way of looking at this, of
understanding this, is to think of people sometimes you get very
depressed, even to the point where they commit suicide.
And now why is it that somebody commits suicide because they're
depressed or because they are sad, because they're grieving
for something? And the reason is because they
think that that particular perception that they have, they
cannot see it changing. They think they're struck with
that. They see no way out.
And because they don't see a way out, that's why they think that
they can annihilate this, destroy this perception by
actually taking their own life. So the general feeling that we
have in life is very often that we are stuck with the
perceptions that we have, that we are set in a certain way and
that we can't get away from that.
That is very the exact opposite of what the Buddha said.
We're not struck with perception.
Perception is something we can develop and that we can change.
And this is like one of the cornerstones of the teaching of
Buddhism. So before I discuss in greater
detail the actual how we go about changing our perceptions,
some ideas of how to develop these things, I want first of
all to define what perception actually means.
And this is very important, obviously know what we're
talking about, first of all. And perception is one of the
factors of what we call in Buddhas, the five aggregates.
So the five khandas in the Pali language, the five kundas is
like, I, I don't really like the word aggregate because the word
aggregate to me is a rather strange word.
But kunda means like a group. It's a grouping of something.
It's these are like five groups of phenomena put together.
And these five groups put together on how we tend to
divide a human being, how to understand a human being.
Here. Now, when in Buddhism we talk
about understanding a human being, we don't mean a kind of
analytical process whereby we divide a human being, a third
person, into kind of five separate groups.
This is not an analysis like a medical analysis or a scientific
analysis. This is an experiential
analysis. So how do we perceive ourselves?
And we perceive ourselves according to Buddhism, into
these five categories, these five khandas.
And the main reason why the Buddha talks about these five
khandas is because this is where we have to investigate.
This is where we have to look to be able to grasp, understand
ourselves and also understand the reality that we are immersed
in. So this is kind of the ground of
investigation the the things that we understand and when we
understand those, that is when we gain insight into the nature
of reality here. So the five kundas, these five
groupings are basically these are a complete totality of the
things of how we experience the world, in particular how we
experience ourselves as persons. That is what the five kundas are
here. So these five condas, the first
one is usually known as form. And form of course includes the
physical body. The physical body is like a
form. And of course we all know that
we tend to take the physical body as belonging to us.
This is part of us. And because of that, this is a
thing. The main, the kind of the most
basic thing here that we need to investigate is actually the
physical body here, because this is the simplest thing of these
five condas, the most basic one form also includes like external
things such as, you know, things that we see through the eyes.
We see forms, things that we hear that we get through the
senses. Any any which way.
All of this is part of the form group.
And this is like the first of these five kandas.
The second one is known as a feeling.
Sometimes not feeling is not a very good word for the second
kanda, because really what it means is how we experience the
world in terms of whether it's pleasant, whether it's painful
there or whether it's neither pleasant nor painful.
In other words, neutral there. It's not really feeling.
It's more like a kind of basic sensation of the world, how we
actually experience the world there.
This is the second one. Veda now is called in Pali
language. The third one is perception
there. I will leave that for now.
The 4th 1 is known as Sankara in Pali.
Sankara literally means like putting together, it means
creating, it means making something here.
And the maker in Buddhism is always the will, the volition,
the doer inside of us, the one that drives us around from here
to there. This is the creator in Buddhism
and this is what creates like future lives from a Buddhist
point of view. This is what creates a reality
pretty much at any particular time, is this doer inside of us
that pushes, pushes us around and makes us run around doing
this and that in life. And the last of these five
aggregates is consciousness itself.
And my consciousness here just means awareness, the ability to
know, to be aware that things are happening around us.
That basic ability to know, that is the consciousness, the fifth
of these groupings. So here you are.
This is supposed to constitute everything, our entirety of
experience. And you will have noticed I
talked about 3 different aspect. I've talked about first of all
physical things, which is like the rupa, the form, and then
three different aspects of mind, feeling, sensation.
First one, the will and then consciousness and everything
that remains. Everything apart from that is
perception. That's how we can know the
world, how we can differentiate the world.
This is what perception is about South to give you some ideas
what perception is then it is as I said that the remainder what
remains in the mind. So for example, if you your
ability to distinguish colours, for example to distinguish red
from blue-green from yellow, your ability to see any kind of
perception that comes through your eyes is a son here.
It is perception. You can distinguish, you can
understand the world in terms of these perceptions.
Same thing with the ear. When you hear something, your
ability to distinguish, to understand what is going on,
what is happening in your life is perception.
You can hear 1 sound from another one.
You can understand the distinction between these
things. Again, this is perception and
the same thing with the other senses with a sense of smell,
the sense of taste, the sense of touch.
Your ability to distinguish and understand what is happening is
this aspect of perception that discriminates and distinguishes
thing here. There's some interesting medical
procedures that have been done quite recently.
And I, I can't remember, I read about this a few years ago.
And this was somebody who was born blind and they had some
kind of defect, very, kind of very basic defect with the site.
And when they reached mature age, they were 20, maybe 30
years old, they went to the doctor and the doctor told them
that actually we have found a way of curing, curing the
problem that you were born with. We can actually restore your
site. And what happened is that they
restored this person's sight, and once they started to see,
they couldn't really see anything.
All they saw was this blur of colors, this blur of shapes,
this blur of light and darkness, and they couldn't really
distinguish anything in the world.
And the reason for that was because their ability to
perceive had not been developed through those 1st 20 or 30 years
of life. They basically were.
They could see, but they were still blind in a certain way
because they couldn't actually distinguish things.
And that is the difference between like the mature
perception that we have, ordinary people have the ability
to distinguish and somebody who hasn't actually developed that
function very much at all. So that is, this is how we
perceive. This is the very basic sense
perception, how we can actually distinguish things that come
through our senses. But perception is also about
concepts. All the concepts that we have in
our minds are essentially perceptions.
And for example, how do we relate to ourselves?
How who do you take yourself to be?
What kind of person are you? And of course, very often we, we
think of ourselves as maybe male or female.
We think ourselves as having a certain education.
We think ourselves maybe as a cultural person.
We think ourselves as a spiritual person.
We think ourselves as wealthy or perhaps average or poor even.
And all of these things define us.
And these things are just perceptions.
These are creations of the mind. Perhaps more importantly, we
think ourselves as in terms of psychology, as a caring person,
as a kind person, perhaps as an irritable person, as a peaceful
person, and all of these things are perceptions in our minds.
And one of the things that you will notice when you think about
this is that these perceptions are changeable.
The person that we are changes all the time.
It is not something that stands still, not something which is
stuck here. It changes.
The person you feel that you are today is probably quite
different from the person that you felt you were 10 years ago,
20 years ago, or even yesterday here.
And because that person you are is changeable, it doesn't have
to be random change. This change can be guided, and
this is what Buddhism is all about.
It's about guiding the change, guiding the change of perception
of who you are. So it actually creates greater
sense of peace, happiness, compassion and goodness in your
life. And this is really the whole of
the path. It's this guiding of the change,
and this is the guiding of the change of the perception of who
you are. And then of course, there is the
perceptions of who we are in relation to other people there,
who you know who, who are our friends, For example, who do you
consider your friends? Who do you consider your
enemies? Now, this is just a perception.
There's no real reality to that because friends come and friends
go, enemies come, enemies go, neutral people come and go.
There's no solidity behind those things.
And again, you can see how these things, because they are
changing here, always evolving here, they're also something
that we can actually develop deliberately here.
And very interestingly, one place, the Buddha said that
perception is like a mirage. It's a mirage because it doesn't
have any solidity here. It is always changing, It is
always mutating into something else because it has this
ability, this sense of being a mirage, something which changes
before. And there's nothing there behind
the change, behind the surface appearance.
And that's why, again, we can use it to develop our minds, to
develop perceptions, because of that lack of solidness in these
things. And once you start to look at
your mind in this way in terms of perception, you realize that
there's so much of what we have in our minds actually is just
these types of perceptions. What about your memories?
What are your memories apart from just being perceptions of
the past? It's a certain way of looking at
the past. Now that way of looking at the
past again is not solid. It changes all the time.
We think of things in a different way, at another, at a
later stage. Again, it is just perception.
Or you think about the future. The future again is just a
particular way of looking. The way you look at the
perception of the future is just a particular way of looking at
the future. There's no solidity there.
There isn't any real future in the mind.
It's just how we relate to this idea of the future, and the same
is also true of the present, even the present right here and
now. Whatever you perceive here and
now is basically a choice. It is something that we can
change. It's something we can develop.
You may feel that sitting in this room right here and now is
a very solid and very clear experience, but it can be
experienced very differently here.
Part of that experience that you have when you're sitting in this
room right here is a sense of me.
I am here. I'm sitting in this group of
people, and that sense of me has a certain solidity to it.
But of course, that sense of me that you have right here and now
is itself just another illusion. From a Buddhist point of view,
it is possible to perceive this room in terms of just you are
here, but without having the sense of me as compared to
everybody else in this room. And this is the idea of non self
whereby you no longer have that sense of solid identity that you
otherwise would have. So even this present moment can
be seen very differently here from the way it actually is
right here and right now. So because of this, this is what
perception is. And you can see here that this
perception is basically our entire worldview is built up of
perceptions, how we look at things.
And because of that, it becomes very useful, a very useful
ground for spiritual development.
Now, some of these perceptions are much more important from a
Buddhist point of view here. And one such perception is the
perception of impermanence. This is a very important one.
Now we're moving into the area of Buddhist perceptions.
Now, the perception of impermanence is always with us
to some extent. We can see how the world is
always changing. We can see how we are changing.
But sometimes we need to remind ourselves of this perception of
impermanence. We need to actually reflect on
it. We need to contemplate it.
And only when we contemplate this kind of perception does it
actually lead to spiritual growth for ourselves.
This is actually very important, and it is very important because
despite the obvious fact that things are impermanent, we tend
not to see this, we tend to forget it.
So how do we contemplate impermanence?
This is a very foundational contemplation in Buddhist
teachings, contemplation of impermanence.
When you read the sutas, you see it in place after place.
So you see, the Buddha says you should contemplate impermanence
because it leads to spiritual growth.
And of course, a very obvious way of talking about
impermanence is to remember that everything that you have in this
world that is dear and pleasing, pleasing to you, things like
your personal possessions, for example, are impermanent.
One day you're going to have to lose these things.
One day they will go, and sometimes they go when you least
expect it. And certainly when you die,
these things will have to disappear from you here.
That is 1 very basic and very, very simple way of reminding
yourself of impermanence, that your possessions, all you have
in this life will change, will become otherwise.
Another way of looking at it is to think about your
relationships, your friends, and even your family.
All of these things again are impermanent.
They will change, they will become otherwise.
Your physical body is eventually going to die, is eventually
going to disappear again. It is not something you can hold
on to. It is impermanent.
It will change. And this is a foundational
perception in Buddhism. It is a very powerful
perception. It means if you understand how
it works, it actually means that you start to let go of things in
the world. You let go because you
understand you cannot hold on to these things.
These things actually are impermanent.
It's not up to you whether these things are going to stay or not.
They will eventually have to disappear.
And the more you understand that, the deeper it sinks in,
sinks into your consciousness, the more you will tend to let go
of things outside of you, including also your own
personal, your own body. And of course, people often ask,
well, how do we let go in meditation practice?
I want to let go. I want to be able to enter some
deep states with samadhi and I want to have peace and bliss and
all these kind of things. And this is how you let go.
You let go by understanding the reality of things.
And the deeper you understand the reality, the more you can
let go of the world outside. But like all things, it's not
just a matter of doing things once and trying to sort of hit
the trigger of impermanence and then having let go forever
after. This is a development.
All of these things have to be developed.
And so it is with the perception of impermanence.
You have to develop it. You have to reflect on it again
and again and again until it becomes like a spiritual power
inside of you. Something can turn on, turn on
particularly when you meditate and you will find that when you
hit the right trigger and it actually works, it makes you
very, very peaceful That because it helps you to let go.
That's why it is so powerful here.
And even if you can do just that much, if you can help you to let
go of all the physical things in the world, then you're already
doing extremely well in your, in your practice as somebody
practicing the spiritual life, because this will be very, very
beneficial for your meditation practice.
Of course, the idea of contemplating impermanence goes
much deeper than that. This is just, this may sound
difficult enough to sort of let go of your body and let go of
all the physical things around you.
It may sound hard enough, but of course it goes much, much deeper
than that because Buddhism is an extraordinarily profound
teaching and profound spiritual practice.
And it goes to the point where you actually all these mental
content that I was talking about before, the feelings, the
perceptions, the will, and even the consciousness, even these
things are eventually ultimately seen as impermanent, something
that you have to let go of, something you cannot hold onto.
But that is a very, very deep practice.
And if you can start off with just the physical things of the
world, you're already doing extremely, extremely well here.
So this is one example of a Buddhist development of
perception. And when you read the sutras of
the Buddha, you find out there are so many types of perceptions
that you can develop so many things.
He talks about it again and again and one another classic
example is the breath, for example, breath meditation.
Breath meditation is really just the development of perception.
You are developing the watching of the breath, and as you watch
the breath, the breath starts to change, and that changing of the
breath is actually itself a development of perception.
As you practice the breath meditation, the Buddha talks
about some very profound development of perception, like
the development, the perception of cessation, the ending of
things. And of course, here we're
talking about things such as understanding the nature of
Nirvana, the ending of the ordinary things of the world,
very, very profound things. So these perceptions are things,
the development of reception is something that you take with you
from the very beginning of the path all the way to the very end
to actually the attainment of Nirvana itself.
But the I want to talk about more about the basic
perceptions, the ones that are really important in life, the
ones that are going to make a difference for you in your daily
life, the ones that are going to make a difference in your
practice of meditation. And one place to look for this
basic types of perception that we need to develop is to look at
the very beginning here of the Noble 8 full path.
Now the second factor of the Noble 8 full path is right
intention and right intention is divided into the intention of
renunciation, but more importantly the intention of non
harming, which is the same as intention of compassion and the
intention of non ill will which is the same as the intention of
matter of loving kindness. So this is the second factor of
no blade full path, intention of loving kindness and intention of
compassion. How can you have the intention
of compassion in your life? And the answer is the only way
that you can have the intention of compassion.
Now, a real intention of compassion has to come from the
heart. The only way you can really have
an intention of compassion is it you must really feel a sense of
compassion inside of you. If you try to meditate and you
say, Oh my, all beings be happy and well, you have to mean it.
It has to come from inside of you, from deep inside of you.
You really have to mean this. If you don't mean it, it's not
going to work. So you have to find a skillful
means by which you can mean these things.
It has to really come from the heart.
So how do we do that? And the way we do this is by
changing our perception of the world around us, of the people
around us, and also of ourselves.
So understanding and developing perception there is extremely is
foundational for being able to do such a thing as meta
meditation, to have compassion for the people around you.
Here you can only have that compassion if you first of all
develop perceptions. So how do we do this?
How do we develop these perceptions?
Now, the, the first thing if you're going to have compassion
and meta for the people around you is to overcome anger,
negativity and irritation. And I just want to explain
briefly, there's a few strategies and how to do this,
how to overcome irritation, anger, negativity in life,
because this is very, very important.
But again, I want to say that if you're going to do this, you
have to stick at it. You have to try it, develop it
again and again and again over a long period of time.
And only then does it start to bite.
This is the unfortunate thing about spiritual practice.
It's not a magic pill you can just take and it's all done.
You have to actually apply yourself and you have to apply
yourself regularly over time, month after month, year after
year. And that is when the results
really start to come. So take anger, take irritation
with people around us. This is something everybody has
to experience. It's impossible to have a life
where we never get irritated by anybody.
This is the nature of being in existence or having a life that
we sometimes get irritated. So what can we do now?
The first strategy that I like to do and remember that this is
a strategy in developing our perceptions, in changing our
perception of things. But the first strategy is to
remember that when somebody does something to you which is
unpleasant, they say something or they do something or they
even think something which is not nice, then anger is not
really going to be helpful. Remember that it is not a
personal issue. When something do something bad
towards you, it's never personal.
The reason people get angry and upset with other people is
because we tend to take things personally here.
We have a feeling that in a sense that it is this person
against us. They are doing something towards
us and that's why we get upset with the other person.
But remember that the reason why people do whatever they do is
not because they have anything against us as a person.
It's because they are just reacting to causes and
conditions in their own life. They are a slave, if you like,
to their own causes and conditions in their own life and
they act in a certain way because of those cause and
condition. Their behavior is never ever
personal. If this person had been in a
similar situation with the same cause and conditioning
influencing them, and another person had been there in your
place, they would have reacted in exactly the same way.
It is never ever personal. And when you look at it at that
way, when you change the, the perception of what the person
does away from being something personal between you and them,
and it's just the person reacting to their own cause and
conditions, you realize that anger is absolutely, completely,
not only unnecessary, but it's counterproductive.
It has no place in that kind of situation here.
But try to remember this. Try to remember that it's always
impersonal. It's never ever personal, even
though it might feel that way. It's not personal here.
The second way of another way of overcoming anger is just to
remember that the world is the way the world is.
People are the way the way people are here.
A lot of the times we get upset and irritated and angry at
things. It is towards things that we're
not going to be able to change anyway here.
And it's a bit like, as I'm Brahm, similarly, an opening
door of your heart where it talks about the man who gets
angry at the red traffic light. That doesn't make any sense to
get angry at the red traffic light because the red traffic
light just does its own thing. And whether you get angry or
not, it's not going to change that red traffic light.
And almost everything in the world is like red traffic
lights. Things are just the way they
are. And whether we get angry or not
is not really going to change the situation.
And if you reflect on that deeply, it actually is not so
hard to understand. Actually let go of the anger and
realize that as a matter of fact, the anger, not only is it
going to not change the situation, it's going to make
matters worse, very often going to make matters worse, and it's
also going to lead to our own misery because we feel miserable
when we get angry. It's an unpleasant state of the
mind. So it is completely most of the
time it doesn't make any sense whatsoever to get angry and
upset at things around us in the world.
A third way of looking at anger and irritation and that is to
change the focus of what is happening in the moment.
So instead of focusing on the other person doing something,
saying something, acting in the in a bad way, place the focus on
yourself instead. How does it feel when this other
person does something which is not nice?
And what you what you, what happens then is that you feel a
sense of suffering inside of you.
It feels painful. They said something to me which
is not nice, or they did something which isn't right.
And look at the pain inside of yourself.
Focus on yourself rather than focusing on the other person.
And this has a lot of wonderful consequences when you do that.
Because when you focus on that pain in yourself, first of all,
you can have a sense of compassion on yourself.
You understand this is painful. This is the way the world is.
It's not I can't change this. This is the way things are.
When I have to interact with other human beings, pain is
there. Pain is necessary.
This is part of life. And just focus on that pain and
what you're doing there is contemplating suffering.
You're contemplating coming to understand what suffering is
about in this world. If you react to the other person
instead, if you become angry because of the way they are
behaving or what they're saying, you are no longer contemplating
suffering. You are reacting in an
unskillful way and you're moving away from the Dhamma.
You're moving away from something useful on on this
path. But when you understand the
suffering instead, you're actually creating insight into
what this life is all about. It's a very powerful and
skillful means to use in these situations.
And then you have compassion for yourself because you realize
this is suffering, this is difficult, and this is the way
the world is. It's not something that I can
possibly escape. And then once you rise to
compassion in yourself, then of course that compassion can also
be extended to other people, including the perpetrator of the
action, which you don't like. Because once compassion is
there, it tends to go out also to other people.
And you understand that this other person, he himself or she
is also under the influence of condition and causes which they
are not really in charge of. And because of that, they do
this particular kinds of actions.
So these are some of the skillful ways of overcoming
negativity and anger. And again, if you apply these
things regularly, consistently in your daily life and you try
it and you actually do it right, you'll find that something
starts to happen inside of you. You start to look at the world
in a new way. You start to see people in a
different way here. And gradually, gradually you
start to emerge from your previous bad habits and you get
into a new, new way of looking at the world.
And it's very powerful and very beautiful as time goes by here.
And of course, it has a great effect not only on your general
level of happiness in life, but also has a profound effect on
your meditation practice. You find you become more
peaceful, you become more happy in your meditation, and
meditation takes off in a way that it has never done before
here. So that is one side of the coin.
If you want to develop the second factor, no blade for path
of loving kindness, we have to develop the perception which
underlies the ability to have loving kindness.
Because loving kindness is really the ability to focus on
the positive qualities of other people and on the suffering of
other people. This is what gives rise to
compassion and loving kindness. When we see the suffering, it
give rise to compassion. When we see the good qualities,
it gives rise to loving kindness and and matter.
So once we have sort of undermined the negative states
of the mind, then we can start applying the mind instead to
perceptions of loving kindness. So what are these perceptions of
loving kindness? These perceptions of loving
kindness is basically to remind ourselves of the good qualities
in the people around us. And you will have noticed
before, during the meditation before I started off by
reminding everybody to remember the people around you and to
focus on the good qualities in the people around you.
And the reason for that is because if you don't have that
perception in your mind of the goodness in the people that you
want to have loving kindness towards, that perception isn't
there. It's impossible to have loving
kindness. You have to give rise to the
perception of goodness, first of all.
And that is why in our meditation practice, it is so
important to choose the kind of object, the kind of person, the
kind of people who we regard in a positive way to be able to
have loving kindness. And this is something we develop
through practice. So remind yourself, think what
is it about these people? What is so special about them?
They may not be perfect, but they have an intention to be
good. They have an intention to be
kind. If you meet somebody who keeps
the five precepts, what a wonderful thing that is that
somebody is willing to do something in their life to
actually create a better world, a better life for themselves,
for the family, and even for society.
Outside of that, the Buddha said some very beautiful things about
keeping the five precepts. Instead of keeping the five
precepts is like giving a gift to the world.
You give a gift of trust and fearlessness to the people and
the animals around you because they know that they can trust
you. They know that you want take
advantage of them. And that is a beautiful feeling
of fearlessness and trust that you're providing to the world
around you. Very powerful way.
And if you think about that, this is what people who keep the
five precepts do. They give this gift to the
world. Isn't that a wonderful thing
here? Isn't that beautiful here?
And when you start to think of the people around you like that
as beautiful individuals who are trying to do something good for
the world, who have good intentions, who want to support
themselves and support others, then you can actually, it
becomes very easy to actually wish them well.
A beautiful person is somebody you want to wish well, is
somebody want to be happy is somebody you want not to have
suffering in their life. So develop that perception.
Remind yourself of the good qualities of the people around
you. Remind yourself also of the good
qualities in yourself. Don't be down on yourself.
It's good to be happy with yourself if you keep the fine
precepts. It's good to be happy with
yourself. When you do an act of kindness
and generosity in the world. It's important and it will give
rise to a sense of matter inside of you when you do it properly
here. So this is just some basic
pointers on how to develop perception in life and how
important it is to develop perception.
And as I said at the beginning of the talk, if you don't
develop perception, if you don't take this as part of your
spiritual practice, the path is not going to work.
It is part and parcel. It is indispensable part of the
path that you develop your own personal perceptions.
And in particular, I think one of the most important things is
precisely this, to develop the perceptions whereby you overcome
the negativities, anger, irritations, all these petty
states in life, and instead you develop the beautiful
perceptions of kindness, compassion, loving kindness
towards the people around you. This is one of the most
important things you can do because this is a foundation
stone of the Buddhist path. And then as you grow, you can
also gradually start to remember things like perceptions of
impermanence particular maybe when you go on meditation
retreats, you find that these things might be very powerful.
So use this. And if you use this
appropriately, you will find that it actually has a very, it
empowers your path. It's like giving a bit of rocket
fuel to the noble a full path to sort of improve your meditation
and everything else. OK, so that is all I want to say
about perception. Does anybody have any questions
or anything they want to mention before we move on?
Yes, in the context of your talk about compassion bounds to.
OK, yeah, I, I think again, it depends on, I guess it depends
on where you're coming from and why you're doing it.
And I think if you do it out of anger negativity because you're
angry either with the regime or you're angry with yourself or
whatever, it's not a very good thing to do.
Because anything which is done out of anger is always a, it
always has a negative consequence in terms of karma,
in terms of the future. And this is one of the great
things about Buddhism. You can always, almost anything
in life, you can always go back to one basic thing.
What is the motivation? Why are you doing it?
And from the motivation, you can always decide whether an act is
good or bad. So it really, it's impossible to
tell. But if they do it with a sense
that they want to, maybe they have even a sense of compassion
or love and kindness. I don't know if it's possible to
emulate yourself out of compassion or kindness, but if
it is possible because you want to maybe show some kind of
injustice to the world, if you can do it, it is at least
conceivable that it might be might be a good act, it might be
a positive act. It is conceivable, but I think
it is an area where you have to be very careful because it's I
think it's very easy to come from the wrong kind of
motivation in those kind of things.
It's really a matter of motivation and intention when
you do these things. Yes, with the talk.
On perception. How does the?
Perception talk about trying to in that right view because it.
Seems very similar to me. Yeah, Yeah, that's a very,
that's a very good point actually.
And that's something I, I had intended to talk about, which I
didn't mention in the part in the talk, is that perception and
view are very closely related to each other here.
And you'll find that in the, the way the Buddha teaches it says
that view, your view you have will tend to condition your
perception. If you have a certain way of
looking at the world, if this is my view, you will see the world
in terms of that view. And also vice versa, if you have
a certain perception of things, then that will call your view.
So these things kind of they revolve around each other.
And this for that reason, because, and of course, you
know, that view is the foundation stone of the, of the
nobletful path. The right view comes first.
So because of that, it actually changing your perceptions also
tends to change your view. It changes your view over time.
Your view gradually comes around as well here.
So because of that, the changing of perceptions actually
reinforces also the very first factor of the Noble 8 full path
as well here. So these things go together
here. So the.
View would be more complete picture and.
Yeah, a view is like a is like a.
It's, it's actually a kind of decision about what the world
looks like. It's like, for example, you
know, in Buddhism we're talking about like eternalist view, for
example. It's the idea that things last
forever. And this is based on your
perception, because you have a perception of a self of I exist,
I am. Because of that, you create a
view that things are eternal. And then because you have
eternal, because you have this view that things are eternal, or
maybe you think that your consciousness is eternal or your
mind is eternal or whatever. Because you have that view, you
tend to perceive the world in the in that way.
So they go around each other. So perception is more immediate
and view is more, as you say, more a kind of you sit back and
you have a certain idea about how the world actually works.
So yeah, but that doesn't mean that views are just ideas.
Views themselves are also very solid and very kind of are, are
things which are not something you can necessarily see straight
away. And a classic example of that is
the view of self. Now people in the world will say
that there is no self. There is, you know, you can ask
a psychologist is there anything inside a human being which is a
self? And a psychologist will say, no,
there is no self inside a human being.
And yet, despite the fact that we can have the intellectual
idea that there is no self, still there is a kind of
underlying feeling inside of you that there's something solid
there. And that underlying feeling is,
is also a kind of view. It's a view which is so deep
that you can't even access it intellectually.
It's beyond your intellectual abilities.
And that is what you actually, it's that kind of view that you
are challenging in, in deep meditation practice.
It's a very deep thing. Yeah.
OK. Any other questions or comments?
Anybody here? Everybody happy here?
Yeah, happy perception here.