Are you ready? Yeah, ready or not, it's going
to happen now. So what to do?
So Happy New Year once again. And I think these times when we
kind of go from one thing to another, moving forward from one
year to the next, from one birthday to the next, whatever
it might be, there's always a good time to sort of take stock,
take stock of our meditation practice, our spiritual practice
and all of these kind of things and ask ourselves if maybe we
can do something better. How can we improve?
How can we kind of add an extra kind of extra?
What is it the right term? Is there extra kind of effort or
extra factor for that path to work better or more powerfully
here? So it's always a good way of
thinking about things. It's easy to become a bit
complacent. It's kind of the human mind.
Yeah. It's easy to kind of just follow
the same old routine. But actually we need to
investigate a little bit to figure out what is going on.
If you are stagnating a bit, why might that be?
There's always a reason. The Buddha promised that if you
practice in the right way, there will be results.
If there are no results, it's because maybe you are missing
something here. So a good place to start is
always to kind of look at the world today.
Yeah. Because when you go into the new
year, you kind of think, what is the year ahead going to be like?
And you know, this is what a lot of people do.
If you read the newspapers or something like that, they will
kind of look at the past year and summarize it and tell you
what's ahead. And sometimes when you look
ahead at the world, you think, do I want to be part of this or
do I want to kind of, you know, step aside from the world a
little bit and kind of do my own thing.
It doesn't look kind of very nice right now.
The world is kind of yucky is all kind of things going on,
politics and wars and climate stuff and all kind of things.
And sometimes you wonder what the future holds.
But actually, that is a great opportunity right there.
Yeah. Every every kind of problem has
an opportunity, you know that. Anyone here been to Business
School? Yeah, every, every problem has a
potential opportunity to. It is what it tells you in
Business School, you know, if you get an MBA or whatever,
that's what they say. And then it kind of turns.
But there's some truth to that, especially from a Dumber point
of view. I think more true in the Dumber
than it is in business. Maybe, I don't know.
I think in Dumber it is really, really true.
And the point is that if you see the problems of the world, it
makes the spiritual path even more important, because the
spiritual path is exactly a way of withdrawing from that world.
The spiritual path is a way of going beyond it.
The spiritual path is a way of learning how to deal with those
problems, not being kind of bowled over emotionally or
whatever by all these issues in the world.
Having a stability inside, a sense of independence from all
of these kind of things. Isn't that great to be
independent? Is that a wonderful thing?
Doesn't everyone want to be independent?
You cannot see. The world goes wrong.
The world goes to the dogs. Let the dogs have it right.
That's kind of what you think. And it's OK.
Yeah. Because you have something else.
You have something more powerful.
And so the idea here is that from a Buddhist point of view,
the dangers in the world, the problems in the world are
definitely an opportunity here. It changes your focus.
It turns your mind in a different direction.
It allows you to find something far more meaningful than the
world could ever give you in the 1st place.
So take these things. Yeah.
Don't kind of sorrow too much. Instead, see them as
opportunities. And then you're going to be on
the right track. Yeah.
This is the first thing to remember.
Yeah. And when you remember that, then
it kind of already it lifts your mood a little bit straight away.
The other thing to remember sometimes I think one of the
problems on the spiritual path is that especially if you feel
you are stagnating a bit or I've been meditating for so many
years, where are the lights? Where are these things that I
want to have? You know, everyone talks about
lights all the time of meditation.
Forget those blooming lights, just enjoy what you have.
That's what I say. But everyone, you know, we are,
it's very easy to get a bit frustrated or disappointed or
feeling we haven't done enough progress.
And sometimes we think that, well, maybe that's the way it
has to be in the future, but it doesn't.
This is a really important point.
Don't get stuck in those things. As long as we can go beyond some
of those bad habits and we can think about things in a new way,
we can make remarkable progress. Everyone of us here, every
person here, can become a better version of ourselves.
It's not that you become a completely different person, but
you become kind of the best version of yourself sometimes by
practising the spiritual path. And I sometimes talked about
this amazing experiment that I read about a while ago, and that
was about people's ability to foresee the future and how
incredibly bad they were at foreseeing the future, as what
this experiment has found out. And you may have heard this
before, but what they found out was that when people looked into
the past and they were told, OK, kind of look at your past 10
years from 10 years ago until now and what has happened in
those ten years. Can you see kind of your change
and how you have things are kind of altered.
You are now a different person from when you were then maybe
you are a better person, but maybe you're changed in other
ways. And they could say, yeah, yeah,
I can see the change. It went like this and it went
that way a little bit. And it went kind of down and up
again. And, you know, they could see a
lot of change in their lives and how the personality sometimes
was dramatically altered as a consequence of those changes.
But then they were asked exactly the same thing for the future.
Yeah. So what about the future?
Can you see change for the next? If you look 10 years from now,
2035 or 2036, now actually takes a while to get used to the new
year, 2036. Yeah.
What would you be like then? And they weren't able to see the
same kind of change. Yeah, They weren't able to see
that actually, you know, they could do all of these turns and
go in all of these different directions.
All they could see was basically, it's going to be me,
but maybe, maybe I will have, I don't know, maybe, you know, I
will be a little bit better in this area or whatever.
But it was basically themselves with tiny kind of improvement in
certain areas or maybe even decline in certain areas.
And so we don't understand the potential for change.
It is great. Is it massive potential there?
If you get the dumb right to get the practice right, you can
become a very the same person in a deep sense, but a far, far
better version of that person. It is possible to become one who
is truly compassionate, someone who is truly loving, someone who
is truly caring for the world, for everything around you,
someone who maybe even has a lot of bliss and happiness and
meditation. All of these things are
available on this path. And all you have to do is to
kind of move your mind in the right way.
And as you do that, these things will happen.
So how do we make this happen? How can we become far better
people than we are now already? And a lot of it is about the
choices that we make. Yeah.
We have to make good choices, avoid the bad ones, do the good
ones instead. And when I mean say choices,
what I mean, there's many levels of choices.
You have the choices that are very kind of large choices in
life. Yeah.
Where am I going to live? Who is going to be my boyfriend
or girlfriend? What kind of job am I going to
have? What Buddhist society should I
go to? OK, this one is this.
No, I was messing around. Whatever.
Up to you. So all of this kind of big
choices, right, which are kind of your whole life takes a
certain direction when you make those big choices.
But what I'm really referring to here, they are certainly
important, but maybe more important, yeah, even more
important are the choices you make all the time throughout the
day. Yeah.
The little thing is when you meet somebody, how you speak
with them. And sometimes the way we speak
to people, it is as if we're not making a choice at all.
It just comes out of our mouth and before it's out, it takes
you. What happened there?
It came out of my mouth so fast and you have no really sense
that you even made a choice, but you did make a choice.
It just happened so fast you can't even see it.
And these are the kind of choices that are really
important because this is where your morality, your ethics, your
kindness, your compassion, all of these things are developed.
Yeah. Every little thing.
Yeah. Every little word that comes out
of your mouth, every little action that you do.
Yeah. Every little movement, every
thought that you have actually matters.
Imagine to have enough mindfulness that you're able to
actually check every thought. OOP, I'm about to think that.
OK, let me go different direction instead, huh.
Isn't that a nice idea? And very often you can do that.
You may think that sounds impossible, but you can because
you become aware that your mind is kind of heading in a certain
direction. Sometimes the mind, the momentum
is very strong. It's like a freight trend moving
forward at a very fast speed. Yeah.
So the momentum is very strong. Yeah, the mind is certain going.
But then you, you know, you can actually check that momentum of
the mind and you can hold it back and you can wait.
And you can allow a different solution to arise instead.
And so this is the first idea for how to make better choices.
One of the really important things.
And as you may be aware already, obviously you need more
mindfulness. You need to have that awareness
around what you're doing. And when you slow down a little
bit, when you go a little bit more gently and softly in life,
you don't react so quickly. Instead of reacting, you
respond. It's a very nice way of thinking
about how we deal with all situations in life.
Yeah, don't react, Respond. Reaction is this habit.
It's automatic. Response is like, OK, reflect,
how do I respond to the situation?
2 very different ways of dealing with any kind of situation.
So be a responsive person, not a reactive person.
And to do that, you need a bit of mindfulness.
And one way to gain that mindfulness again, slow down.
Yeah, Don't act so fast. Wait.
Give the mind time to sort of consider the situation.
Yeah. So when you kind of slow down,
you think, OK, I want to do this.
This is kind of what my mind impulse or I feel compelled to
act in a certain way. But maybe that's wrong.
Let me hold on a second. Wait, is there a better solution
here? And the moment you stop, what
tends to happen is that something inside of you tells
you what is the right way forward.
Yeah. You have enough knowledge of
Dhamma, you have enough knowledge of what it means to be
ethical and moral person is all there deep inside of you.
You just need to give it time to arise.
You need to give it time to overcome all the habits, all the
compelling thoughts and ideas that kind of force you to do
certain things. Don't go with those compulsions
instead of way, allow the Dhamma to arise and then follow the
Dhamma. This is kind of the ideal way of
doing things. Yeah.
So you wait, you slow down a little bit.
So how can we do that? So because it sounds easy to
say, but in reality, not always easy, right?
So how can we do that? And I'll give you some
incredibly simple tips. They're so simple that you and
you're probably not doing them even though you already know you
should be doing them, right? You know you should be doing
this, but you're not maybe not doing it already here.
And one of the kind of biggest problems in life is how
distracting the modern world, modern world is, especially
mobile phones and Internet and these kind of things.
And so be very careful how you use your mobile phone.
This is kind of very, very simple thing here, but if you
use your mobile phone more wisely and I'll tell you in a
second how to use it wisely. I don't actually, I don't really
know because I haven't got a mobile phone.
But anyway, I'll, I'll, I'll give you I look at I see other
people, I think I've got to do something here.
OK, so I have some idea. So how can we use the mobile
phone more wisely? OK, so I'll give you a few
hints. So number one, turn off the
mobile phone, lock it completely, give it to someone
else. If you can't control yourself to
hideaway after a certain time in the evening here, 8:00 PM, I'm
not going to check my mobile phone at all after 8:00 PM.
I'm going to give it I'm going to give it to the dog to eat.
He can swallow the mobile phone and hopefully it's out again by
tomorrow morning. No, I'm messing around, but you
know what I mean. There's something was very was
very, very hard to get hold of that mobile phone, right.
And this is and then in the morning the same thing again.
I will not use it until a certain time in the morning.
I don't know, 789 whatever. I don't know how, how, what your
life is like. And so you have that kind of gap
and the evening time is a very important time.
It's very important because a time where you want to relax,
you want to be at ease, you want to have a sense of meta, because
if you have meta kindness and love, when you fall asleep,
you're going to sleep really well.
And if you sleep well, you're going to wake up in the morning
full of energy straight away. So you can get that mobile phone
right away. No, not that kind of energy.
The energy which doesn't want to see the mobile phone.
Yeah, the energy of peace, the quiet kind of energy, the non
restless energy. So, yeah.
So this is a very simple way and most people don't do that.
I hear most people, the last thing they do at night check the
mobile phone. The first thing they do when I
wake up is check the mobile phone.
It's a very bad idea and it's going to it's kind of a very
addictive thing, right? It's incredibly addictive when
you think about it like that. So don't fall for this stupid
addictions. This is number one.
Number two, Yeah, when you go for a walk somewhere.
I was just in Singapore. I came back from Singapore a few
days ago, two or three days ago, and I went for some walks in the
city and I was horrified. Everyone was walking with a
mobile phone everywhere. I don't know what they're doing
on that mobile phone, but everyone was glued to their
mobile phone as they were walking around.
And I've seen similar things here in Perth, by the way, on
previous occasions. I wasn't too surprised when I
saw it. It was very rare.
And I kind of like to walk. I don't have, I don't have a
mobile phone with me at all. But so I walk around and I kind
of see is it can I get contact with anyone really hard, right?
No one makes eye contact. Everyone is kind of in their own
little world. And so I said to myself, OK, I'm
going to just kind of do probably what is really taboo
here in Singapore because no one says anything to each other.
I'm going to start saying hello to people.
Yeah. And that was really good fun.
I really enjoyed that. I was walking around and I
started saying hello, people, what's going on with this widow
over here saying hello to me? And.
And sometimes they would just turn away.
They wouldn't respond. But other times they would
respond. And you can see they were almost
delighted. Yeah.
It's like a human touch, someone saying hello, but in a nice kind
of way. I try not to do it in a harsh
way. Obviously say it in a nice way.
And they go, oh, hello. And some people really engage,
right. And oh, hello.
Good morning. Yeah, nice to meet you.
And they kind of go angerly and all these kind of things.
And so it was actually very interesting here.
And sometimes I would see people who were really kind of in a bad
way, sleeping under a bridge or something.
And I was there during Christmas.
And so I would go to this poor person sitting on the bridge,
say Merry Christmas to them, and they would look up, oh, Merry
Christmas. Yeah.
It's like, it's nice. And I feel in the modern world,
we're losing so much on that human connection.
We need a human connection. It's so important.
We should bring it back again into our society.
So when you go for a walk, leave the mobile phone at home.
Don't take it with you, especially when you go in
nature. Just enjoy the walk.
Observe what is happening around you.
Observe how the rest of the world is completely engulfed,
engrossed in the mobile phone whereas you have let it go.
Yay me. Yeah, be happy about yourself.
Not kind of a big ego, but feeling good about yourself
because you are moving in the right direction in a positive
way. What a marvellous thing that is
when you have a meal with your family.
No mobile phones, right? Tell your children.
Or maybe if you are the children and your parents are naughty,
tell your parents. Dad, mom, I demand no more
mobile phones at the dinner table.
It's bad for the family. That's the time when you're
supposed to meet, have a chat, get to know each other.
Shouldn't have any mobile phones at that time so these are some
of the ideas yeah. Already, if you do that much,
you will find there is more space in your mind.
It will open up something inside of you which gives you greater
opportunity to respond rather than react in the world.
Yeah. And you will feel that
throughout the day if you live in this way and you do a bit of
meditation on the top of that, that it will change kind of your
outlook, the way you're able to deal with the situations in
life. So simple.
Yeah. But most people don't do this.
And that is why simple things can also be very, very useful.
So you. So.
Yeah. So do this.
This is kind of the beginning of the thing.
Yeah. And but one of the things that I
should really talk about, even before I talk about the mobile
phone, yeah, which is kind of even more fundamental in a
certain way, I come back a little bit more to the mobile
phone later on, is the importance in the spiritual path
of the idea of being around the right kind of people.
When I was in Singapore, I was just doing a long retreat, 9 day
retreat and we were looking at the suitor called the
Mahamangala suitor. And those of you with a Buddhist
background and those of you who don't have it, who are a bit
knowledge about about the Dhamma, you will know about the
Mahamangala Suta. Mahamangala means like great
blessings and those is a is a kind of a series of 11
blessings. Yeah, one after the others like
each one is a verse. And the first of these verses
goes as follows. Asevana chabala nang pandita nan
shasevana puja chapud janya nang ETA mangala muta manga.
Pretty good, right? So what does it mean?
Some of you know what it means already.
But So what it means is that you should not associate with fools.
You should associate with the wise.
You should have respect for that which is worthy of respect.
This is the greatest blessing. Yeah.
This is where it starts out. This is the beginning of the
whole thing. And then it goes through all
other things, and it ends up kind of with enlightenment at
the end. But this is where it starts.
That's always incredibly interesting that it starts with
the idea of who you should hang out with, who you should
associate with, who should be your friends, who you should
deal with in this life. It's incredibly interesting
here. And because one of the things
that the Buddha says, please come in here, please enter her.
Oh, OK, this is, this is now there's a chance to practice
Dhamma here. This is kind of the good thing
about these things. So just do it in the right way.
Yeah. OK.
So probably people usually have some problems, you know, and
then they kind of have some suffering in their life and then
these things happen. So.
Yeah. OK.
Being escorted away. OK, That's good.
OK, let's let's carry on. Are you ready to carry on?
Yeah. OK.
Good.
It's a little intermessor that's kind of always makes things
interesting. Yeah.
So I was just saying about the importance of following the good
kind of people, not following the fools, but following the
wise ones. And yeah, so here this person,
he had an opportunity to hear some wisdom, but he left too
early. So it was unfortunate.
Maybe next time he will come back.
If we treat him nicely, maybe he will come back again in the
future. Yeah, but it matters enormously.
And one of the things that you find in the suitors, in the Word
of the Buddha, he talks about the wise and the fools, and he
talks about the danger of following the fools.
And he says specifically that if you, all the dangers in the
world, all the kind of upheavals in the world, all the calamities
in the world, they are a result of fools, not of wise people.
Yeah. So if there are problems in your
life or problems in Perth or problems in politics or problems
in war or whatever, it comes from the fools in the world.
That's where the problems arise. And your own life also tends to
get very problematic. Yeah, if you hang out with fools
all the time, the same kind of issue.
So for that reason, know the danger of fools, understand that
it leads you in the wrong way. And of course, the wise people
is the exactly the opposite. Yeah, that leads to all the
happiness in the world. The wise people lead you to do
the good thing. And the wise people ultimately,
if you hang out with them long enough, leads you all the way to
awakening itself. And so this is kind of what
wisdom does. Wisdom leads you to the best
things in the world, and foolishness leads you in the
exact opposite direction. And so This is why the company
that we choose in life, where we go, whether we go to the Buddha
society or what we do, who we have as our friends, who we work
with, all of these kind of things actually matter.
Yeah. What are the influences on our
life matters enormously. So this is one of the things I
recommend you. One of the things I recommend to
you is to be very careful with these things.
Yeah. What?
How do you, who do you hang out with?
Who do you kind of take as your friends?
Who do you make as a, you know, important part of your life?
This actually matters a lot. So think about this in a new
year. Yeah.
Can you spend more time, more quality time with wise people?
Yeah. And then actually, you will find
that it actually helps you live to take a different direction as
a consequence. So how do you know who is wise?
How do you know who is foolish? And the Buddha gave us, of
course, advice. He gives advice on everything.
Yeah. One of the things I'd like to
say is that everything is found in the suitors.
If you want to find the answer to any question at all, pretty
much it's there in the suitors. How do you recognise the fools
by the way they speak, act and think?
Yeah, kind of obvious, because that's the external conduct is
really how we see these things. They speak in ways that are
unskillful, in the ways that are unwholesome, in ways that are
immoral. They act like that, they think
like that. And so that's why they are
problematic. The wise people in the world are
the ones who speak with wholesomeness in a moral way.
They act morally. They think moral good thoughts,
Yeah. They tend to see the good in
other people, all of these kind of things.
So it's quite simple really, to decide who are the fools in the
world and who are the wise people there.
Of course, you can argue that maybe you don't know all the
way, it's very hard to know whether someone is fully
enlightened or not. But you have some idea of
measure of where you should go, and in the long run, you will be
able to kind of see fairly clearly who are the really wise
people in the world and who are the foolish people in the world.
And they can make much better choices.
Yeah, some move towards the wise people there.
So to give you an another idea around this, there's some.
It was a little suitor. I was reading out to the monks
at the monastery here on Wednesday.
We have a Dharma talk every Wednesday.
Ajahn Brahm was here at Amaloca. You got Ajahn Brahm.
The monks had to deal with me here.
Isn't that's pretty? You see how lucky you are.
That's pretty, pretty good deal, right?
So you get you get the kind of very lucky.
So. So I thought I was going to say
something about this suit that I was really because it was kind
of interesting. Yeah.
It has some details to it that you may not normally hear.
And so this suit, I was talking about 7 things that lead to
improvement in your life or not, not actually, sorry.
It lead to the long lasting longevity of the Dumber in the
world. Seven things lead to the
longevity of the Dhamma. And if you don't do them, then
obviously it leads to the short life of the Dhamma in
comparison. So what are the seven things?
And some of them are quite obvious, yeah.
But all of them are around the idea of respect and reverence or
respect and deference. Yeah.
So respect means that you you kind of look up to something in
a certain way because of the good qualities.
And so you listen a bit more. Yeah.
Difference means that you kind of take after what they say.
You follow good advice on these kind of things.
Yeah. Respect and difference.
So what are the seven things that you have respect and
difference for? So the first ones will not be
very surprising. So the first one is the Buddha.
Yeah. So do you like to hang around
the Buddha? Where is the Buddha?
Is that the Buddha? Not, Not really.
Yeah. It's kind of, I think this is a
fake Buddha that is not very unexpressive Buddha, but it
represents the Buddha. And that's kind of the nice
thing about this Buddha. It represents the Buddha.
It represents some of the qualities of the Buddha.
And that's why we bow down to these images, because they
represent something. Yeah.
And then by bowing down to them, we're kind of growing those
qualities within, within ourselves.
But you can still hang around the Buddha.
And the way to hang or hang out with the Buddha is the second
thing that you should have respect and deference for, which
is the Dhamma, the teachings of the Buddha.
When you read these teachings, when you hear them here at the
Buddha Society, it's like the Buddha is talking to you.
Yeah. These are the real teachings of
the Buddha. You may think that when you come
here you hear Ajambram talk and that is a teaching, or you may
think that you hear a teaching from some other monk or Nan.
But the sutas, the word, the Dhamma teachings that are given
when we read the sutas, are the teachings of the Buddha in
exactly the same way. And sometimes you need to kind
of live, kind of make them come alive.
Yeah, to make them more real. So remember when the Buddha gave
these teachings 2500 years ago, he wasn't just teaching the
people there and then, he was also teaching people in the
future. The Buddha from the very
beginning had this idea that he was teaching.
He was setting in motion the wheel of the Dhamma for future
generations and future cultures. And so this wheel sort of rolls
out into the world, rolls out from culture to culture, from
era to era. Yeah.
And so the Buddha had this grand vision, this big kind of vision
about what the Dhamma was supposed to do in the world.
So we are also the disciples of that Buddha.
Yeah, in the same way. So think about that when you
read the Suta, Sir. Think about that.
When someone actually teaches from the Suta, Sir, Now it is
the Buddha talking to you. You are in the presence of this
enlightened mind, because these are the words of someone who is
enlightened, someone who has seen the deepest truth of what
it means to be a human being here.
Yes, someone who has developed compassion and kindness to the
very highest level there. This is what the Buddha is.
It's something extraordinary in the world.
And to be in the presence of the greatest spiritual master here
in human history here is something extraordinary here.
Yeah, you, everyone of us, little me can be the disciple of
this wah, this awe inspiring person.
It's like, great. Isn't that kind of something
astonishing? And it's something we don't
often take on board properly. But that is what it means to
read the suitors, read the word of the Buddha, and to engage
with that word, those words in the right way.
And what I'm talking about right now is actually one of those
suitors. And then so you respect the
Buddha, her difference to the Buddha, to the suitors, and then
the Sangha. The Sangha means usually the
Aryan Sangha, the noble Sangha, and usually they are represented
by monastics. Sometimes you find lay people
who also are part of the Aryans, but usually it's represented by
the monastics because usually it is among the monastics that the
spiritual path is taken the furthest.
Not always, it depends on where you are, but usually.
And that's why that's kind of representation there, especially
those members of the Sanga who really are special.
Yeah. You can feel that they have some
special things to add. Like my favorite monk, it's not
me, you know, my favorite monk is Ajam Bram.
Yeah. Ajam Bram is kind of, for me,
always been my kind of hero. That's why I came to Perth.
I came all the way, all the way to Australia just to come meet
Ajam Bram got nothing to do with Australia.
I apologise. I don't mean to say anything bad
about Australia. I think Australia is great, but
I actually came here for Ajam Brahm.
That's why I came here. And so anyway, there you are
here. It's a pretty good choice
anyway, right? You would agree with that.
It wasn't a bad idea. And so, and then, so once you
respect these three things, then the 4th one you're supposed to
respect is the training here, because the training that comes
out of the Dhamma, out of the teachings of the Buddha, that is
what leads you to become an Aryan, a noble person, the
person who is part of the Sangha, if you like.
Yeah. The you become one of these
enlightened people. So you have great respect for
that training. Yeah.
The fifth one, and this is kind of where it gets really
interesting. Yeah.
Are you ready for the fifth one? The fifth one is samadhi,
stillness, deep meditation. This is kind of really
important. If you don't respect and have
difference or reverence for deep meditation, you're actually
contributing to the short life of Buddhism, of the dhammaha.
And this is kind of really interesting because you will
find that in many parts of the Buddhist world that is kind of
what is happening here. There's too much focus.
I mean, it's good to focus on other things in the dama, but
not at the exclusion of samadhi here, because it, samadhi is
what actually brings the whole training together.
Yeah. Samadhi is the final factor of
the noble at full path. Samadhi is the culmination of
practising all of these factors. Samadhi contains within it all
the other factors. And that's why it is kind of a
point picked out in this way as something special, as a thing,
we should have reference difference for her.
So Samadhi here, what is the 6th 1?
The 6th 1 is called Appamada in Pali here.
This is going to be a little bit of a Pali course for you.
So I hope you are ready to learn some Pali words.
Pali is one of these ancient Indian languages.
Yeah, but the Buddha talks something like that.
Appamada means something like heatfulness.
Heatfulness means you are careful.
It means you are diligent. Yeah, it means that you keep on
practising in a smart way. Yeah, you can see why that is
important. There is a pamada is very
similar to another famous party word called Yoniso manasikara,
which means like wise attention or wise application of the mind
is a very closely related to each other.
So to be able to reach samadhi, to be able to practice the path
properly, one of the most important factors is this idea
of being diligent and being hateful, being careful in your
practice. Now we come to the 7th factor
here, and This is why. This is really why I'm talking
about this. Yeah, there's a 7 factor here.
This is kind of the most interesting one of all, in my
opinion here. So we have Buddha Damasanga.
Yeah, you had training, you had samadhi, the stillness of the
mind, you had Appamada, the heatfulness.
All of those kind of make good sense.
You can see why they would be there, but factor #7 always
baffled me. I remember reading the sort of
the WAH. Surely here someone made a
mistake. This kind of doesn't make any
sense because the 7th factor is hospitality.
Yeah. It's like, you know, straight
away you think about hospitality.
You think like going to a hotel or going to a bar, getting a
drink or something like that, but that's obviously not what
it's meant, right? That cannot be what is meant
here because, you know, fly precepts and all that.
So it's not about drinking. Yeah, or whatever.
I know. So.
So what is it? What does it mean?
And what it means? I think and the way it fits in
with the rest of the suitors is that we are hospitable towards
those people in the world who have a special spiritual
qualities. Yeah, we're hospitable to be
those so that they can stay with us for a long time.
We look after them so we don't lose them again in the future.
There's a beautiful part in the famous Mahapanibhana Suta, which
is the great Suta on the Buddha's passing away, where the
Buddha says that the Dhamma will last a long time.
The monks and everyone will grow in good qualities.
As long as you welcome the Arahans to your country here.
Yeah, you're welcome, the enlightened ones, to your
country. And when they come, you look
after them. Yeah.
And so you're hospitable towards those people who lift every one
of us up spiritually because they have this incredibly
ability to express the Dhamma through words, but also through
the very action, through how they live their lives.
So hospitality, yeah, it's a beautiful idea.
So, yeah, look after we all. And also I think it is about the
Sangha as well. The Sangha is a monastic
community that should live in harmony.
We should be hospitable. When there are monks and nuns
who come from outside maybe, and they want to stay with us for a
while, it's also about that because that creates a sense of
harmony or whatever. But the primary reason, I think,
is to enable those people who are really special there to stay
for a long time. Yeah, to ensure that they will
last for a long time. And I sometimes think about
this. Yeah.
Slightly selfish, perhaps. I often think, how can I make
Ajambraam last as long as possible?
So. And it's true.
Yeah. I, I don't know about you, but
I've known Ajambraam now for, what is it, 31 years plus.
Yeah. This is how long it began.
I knew about it even before that, but I didn't really meet
him until 31 years ago. And, you know, he's one of these
kind of, to my mind, one of these treasures in the world.
Yeah, this kind of person with very special qualities, very
difficult to find. And so more and more I try to
look out for how I can be of assistance.
And so, you know, if you have a chance to be of assistance to
Ajah Brahm, take the opportunity anyway.
It's really good merit. Yeah.
You help Ajah Brahm a little bit.
It's a very positive thing, very nice thing to do.
So regardless, so this is the idea of hospitality.
And when you have that hospitality, you get to be
around wise people because you invite them.
Yeah, please come. Yeah.
Sometimes you can invite someone to your house.
You know, actually, sometimes you can't because it's just too,
too, too difficult to arrange. But you can come to the
monastery. You can look after a little bit,
you can support a little bit. You can bring maybe some nice
food that, as you know, as in Brahm likes.
Maybe I have to be careful what I say because sometimes these
things kind of become become kind of sort of backfire in a
very strange way. But yeah, you know what I mean.
And then you get this beautiful relationship with someone like
Azam Brahm, who is very, very interesting and extraordinary
person. And there are other monks and
nuns as well who are developing really well and have really good
qualities. Yeah.
It's not just Ajah Bram. Ajah Bram is kind of
exceptional, but there are others as well.
Yeah. And so this is one of those
wonderful things that here in Perth, we have this take, this
opportunity. Yeah.
You have a chance to be around the wise.
You have a chance to get that basic support in your life that
enables the whole path to work for you without the wise.
When you are just surrounded with fools, it makes it very
difficult. But the wiser the people are,
the more this path kind of takes off by itself and it just works.
So this is number one. Yeah.
So make sure you hang around fewer fools and more wise people
in your life. Yeah, See if you can make a
little bit of a shift. Don't do anything drastic.
Don't throw people out of your life.
Be compassionate to everyone. But just, you know, make gentle
shifts in your life and see what happens.
Maybe you're already very wise in the way you are with other
people. That's great.
But most of us can probably do better.
So that is point #1 The second point I wanted to make is how to
again develop this idea of actually being more kind.
Yeah, it's hard to be kind all the time.
It's hard to develop this. Once you have the input of the
wise people, you're already on the right track.
But how can we add something more about kindness?
And this is where all the things I was talking about before about
mobile phones and it's going more slowly, all of that comes
in. Yeah.
It allows the mindfulness to expand, which allows you to
respond rather than react. This makes you already a more
kinder person because that ability to respond actually
allows you to do what is right rather than what is wrong.
Yeah. So already you are very much on
the right track when you do that, but you want to take it a
bit further and one of the things that I would recommend
all of you to do a little bit, do a little bit of meta
meditation in your life. Meta is like love or kindness.
Yeah, love and kindness mean largely the same thing.
Love is maybe a bit more stronger, but they are kind of
similar kind of words. So meta is a kindness meditation
or loving kindness meditation. Do a bit of that because it can
have a very transforming effect on you.
It's very simple. Yeah, very easy to do.
You can just be like a mantra, like a sentence that you repeat
in your mind, like may all beings be well and you can say
that for 10 minutes, but you have to mean it.
It has to come from your heart. And then as you do that, it can
sometimes, over time, give rise to a transformation in your
mind. And at certain times, you will
feel a powerful sense of joy and happiness, even if that kindness
and that matter really comes up in your mind.
Yeah. Very, very powerful thing.
Yeah. And the great thing about that
is that sometimes it can be hard.
Even if you are mindful, it can be difficult to do the right
thing. Yeah.
You can sometimes mindfully do
the wrong thing. Yeah, yeah.
Sometimes you think that something is right, you're
mindful, but there's some deep, deeper delusion in your mind.
So yeah. Oh, I'm mindful.
I actually, I need to tell this person of.
Yeah. And this has to be done.
I will do it very mindfully and carefully.
And actually, you're getting it really kind of messed up because
you don't really know what is still, there is an underlying
problem there. Yeah.
And so because of that, sometimes mindfulness isn't
enough. And what we have to do then is
to purify the mind at a deeper level.
And that deeper kind of purification happens when you do
things like meta meditation. You can do it few times a week.
It doesn't have to be very long, 10 or 15 minutes, sometimes
enough. Yeah, if you can do 20, even
better. But just a little bit to get you
going, maybe at the beginning of the day here or at night before
you go to bed. So you have a good night's rest
and all of these kind of things. And you build up a certain
reserve inside of you of goodwill towards the world
around you. And then when you have built up
this kind of reserve of goodwill inside of you.
Yeah, especially in the morning. Yeah, you don't You, you.
When you go out into the streets, you want to say hello
to everyone? Yeah.
You want to kind of be. You want to say good morning,
have Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, whatever.
Yeah. And it all those bad things
don't even come to your mind anymore.
And gradually that whole development of the mind within
in this way starts to express itself in what you are like as a
human being. The way you speak is different.
You speak more gently, you speak more carefully.
You become more sensitive to other people around you.
You start to act in a different way.
You actually want to help. You want to be of service to the
world. This is one of those wonderful
things is to be of service. It's far better to be of service
than it is to be served. Yeah, usually it depends on a
little bit, depends a little bit on the circumstances, I suppose.
But usually it is better. And I think if we in the
Buddhist community, we should all think of ourselves as being
of service to each other. And when we are of service to
each other, we build a very harmonious and beautiful
community. Everyone coming from kindness,
everyone acting from Meta. Yeah.
What can I do today to help the Buddhist society, the people
around me? What do you think?
Can I help? OK.
I my job today is to talk. Even though someone tried to
stop me, I So I that is my service, right?
I do this. I don't get any salary for this.
And then I go back to the monastery.
And then people come to the monastery every day.
Lots of people. Meals on Wheels, as Abraham
calls it. Yeah.
Come into the monastery every day and I just.
I'm amazed. Yeah.
This is kind of the mutual support we have between the
monastic community and the lake. It's a very, very beautiful
thing that we have built up. And this was all laid down by
the Buddha and laid down by the ancient Indians 2 1/2 thousand
years ago. A Samana culture, culture of
ascetics and this relationship between householders and
ascetics. So be of service in your life.
Being of service is such a beautiful thing.
Yeah, yeah. This is where you start to feel
real meaning. Now you are contributing and the
greatest beneficiary of all that service that you're doing is
you. You will eventually gain joy and
happiness because of that service.
You will eventually, if you go round saying good morning to the
poor person under the bridge and kind of give them a little thing
because they obviously seem desperate.
If you do random acts of kindness and generosity here in
your life in this way here, what will happen is that gradually,
gradually, gradually, something inside of you grows.
You become a more happy, contented, joyful person as a
consequence. And then eventually, when you
come to Jhana Grove, when you do a meditation retreat, wherever
it is, that benefit will really ripen you.
Close your eyes. You feel good about yourself.
Not in a kind of egocentric kind of way, but it's the natural
way. You know that you are a good
person, so why shouldn't you feel good about yourself?
There's nothing wrong with that. You feel good about yourself.
The joy starts to bubble up. You start watching the breath,
and it's so easy to watch the breath.
How come I've been fighting with the breath for so long?
It's actually so easy. Why?
Because your mind isn't ready. The mind is clear of the clutter
and you have the joy and happiness instead.
And then from that, you gain kind of the deep samadhi and all
of these kind of things, and then you can start practicing
the meta in an even deeper way. Then when you do meta
meditation, you will find that your mind kind of starts to
expand. Your mind starts to encompass
larger and larger areas until eventually there is no one in
the whole universe that you do not have meta for her.
Yeah, it is this beautiful expansion of the mind.
And then when you go back into society after that, you are not
unable to do anything wrong. Yeah.
Then your kindness will be grounded in a deep experience of
something that is very different from what you ever had before.
Now you know what kindness is, and you become a real blessing
for the world and a real blessing for yourself as a
consequence. So these are my little words for
you on the second day of the New Year, just to wish you all Happy
New Year in the Buddhist kind of way.
So once again, Happy New Year and if you wish, now we can take
some questions and things. Well done.
OK, great. So my question when it comes to
the Dharma, in particular when practising the Dharma in life,
once you've gone through those steps, is the outlook and
attitude to have when it bubbles up that wisdom that you talk
about and how to act on the Dharma and how to bring that
more into practice. So for example, with you in that
instance of just someone coming and walking in and you showing
kindness to that person even though that person was quite
rude, and where do you find that faith and that confidence to
practice that? OK, Yeah, I, I think for me now,
it's just so ingrained. I cannot know that, you know,
responding to someone like that with ill will, with negativity
is just going to backfire. I know that straight away.
Yeah. And that's the reason, number
one reason #2 I do it because I feel bad if I get upset, right?
It does for me. It feels bad if I can have
compassion for that person. I feel good all the time, even
while he is saying these things. And thirdly, I think it's true.
It is true that that person deserves compassion there.
Yeah. It is a troubled person, Yeah.
You don't do that in an assembly like this unless you have some
trouble in your life. There's some deep suffering
there. And so that is kind of the
ultimate reason why you do it, because it's true.
Yeah. So when it comes to starting
that practice on the level, and let's say when you were
beginning to become a monk and developing that capacity and
faith, how did you start that journey?
And in the micro where you would be asked to do a talk, for
example, for your first talk and where you had that confidence to
speak in front of people, I'd ask.
Right. OK, so the so it's just a, it's
a gradual kind of thing, but it basically a lot of it comes
from, it comes from the teachings of a Jean Bram,
obviously, but it comes from the word of the Buddha.
And so I've read the word of the Buddha a lot.
I've translated from parley into English.
I've done kind of a lot of work with ITA, and there is so much
good information there in how to deal with these kind of things.
And one of the suitors in there, it talks precisely about, you
know, when someone has bad conduct by body, speech and
mind. Well, we saw speech conduct
wasn't great. Yeah.
And then you should have that kind of person.
You should regard them as a sick person.
Yeah. That's what it says in that
suitor. Why are they sick?
Because they haven't meant there's something mentally wrong
with them. There's a problem in there in
the mind. Yeah.
And when you regard them as sick, but then you have sympathy
for them, then you have compassion for them.
Because that's what we have for sick people.
We don't blame sick people for their illness, right?
But we have compassion for them instead.
And if I might ask a second and final question, when it comes to
our own conduct, in particular of past actions that we've done
that we're not according to these seven factors and
forgiving ourselves of these particular sicknesses, as you
say with Meta, for example, what is the outlook and attitude that
we can have whether it be from our past wrong speech or wrong
action or wrong perspectives of the past to people?
And how do you forgive that self of the past, but also view how
you've treated other people? Yeah.
So what you do is that you understand that every human
being is trapped by the conditioning.
Yeah. Trapped by the habits, trapped
by the pastor. Yeah.
It feels like we have free will. It feels like we can never get
our life. But the Buddha says basically
that's largely an illusion. We are basically conditioned by
the pastor. And so you, the person you are
and the actions you do is because of that past, that past
maybe in this life, it may be in previous lives, it may go a
long, long way back. And so very hard to understand
all those calls and conditions that work on you.
And once you understand that, then you can forgive yourself
completely because you realise actually I couldn't have done
anything else. These are the calls and
conditions made me do that. But lo and behold, I found
something else. Yeah, now I can do that.
And then you make a determination.
Or you try your very best and aspiration or whatever to do
better in the future. Yeah.
And you kind of move forward and after a while, those bad
actions, they don't trouble you anymore.
They become diluted. But all the good actions that
you do. And after a while you kind of
forget about them completely. And a final, final question, how
do you give a blessing to that person that you have felt that
you have done wrong by, or give them something of gratitude and
love? Go and go and ask for
forgiveness first. OK.
And once you have asked for forgiveness, and asking for
forgiveness is a very beautiful thing to do, sometimes you can
do it even if you are not necessarily all that guilty.
Yeah, because it actually tends to, it dissolves something.
It breaks the eyes. Yeah, because it shows that you
are very sincere about moving forward.
Go and ask for forgiveness and bring a little gift as you, as
you suggest as well. At the same time.
It's a nice thing to do. Yeah.
Thank you very much, Sir. Yeah.
Thank you. By some coincidence, you were
just talking about hospitality just before he came in and you
offered him a seat so that he's hospitality, isn't it?
Yes, yes, absolutely.