Okay, everyone, so let's start the talk.
And tonight I thought I was going to talk about identity, a
very important topic in Buddhism.
And the reason why I want to talk about this is because just
under two weeks ago I became an Australian citizen.
So I'm now an Aussie, a fair-income Aussie.
So it's interesting when you kind of become a citizen like
that because obviously I straight away thought, what
actually doesn't make you an Aussie?
Am I supposed to feel like an Aussie now?
What does it mean to feel like an Aussie anyway?
Does it feel different from being a Norwegian or a Sri
Lankan or whatever? Or is it kind of roughly the
same feeling? What does it actually mean?
And it kind of got me thinking about the idea of identity.
What is this thing we call identity?
And it was a very nice ceremony, a kind of Australian ceremony,
and we sang the Australian national anthem, Advance
Australia Fair, and we had these little Australian flags,
everyone was waving little Australian flags.
I felt obliged to wave the Australian flag as well, so I
also waved an Australian flag. It was all very sweet and very
nice. And then that was it.
And then I was Australian after that, and suddenly I had changed
from being Norwegian to being dual citizen after that.
And it made me think again, what does it actually mean, this
thing about identity? How does it relate to the
Buddha's teachings? And one of the ways that
occurred to me straight away, or how to decide what is your
identity, at least as far as nationality is concerned, is
what kind of sports team do you support?
That's kind of the usual how we identify who we are.
So if you see the Australian cricket team, the cricket team
winning, how do you feel about that?
You feel, yay, Australia won. Maybe if you have a Sri Lankan
background, you don't think like that.
Maybe you think you're still holding on to the Sri Lankan
identity, perhaps, if you're born in Sri Lanka.
But for me, when I hear the Australian cricket team winning,
what do I feel? I feel nothing.
I have no relationship to cricket.
I don't know anything about cricket.
Cricket doesn't mean anything to me.
And Australia, okay, Australia is kind of neutral.
It's pretty neutral as far as I'm concerned.
But when I hear some Norwegian person winning in some kind of
sport, sometimes I catch myself thinking, yay, Norwegian won,
won the sport. And that is somehow, that is
kind of one way, or any way, of kind of figuring out what kind
of thing you identify with deep down.
But the reality is, I don't really, when I think of myself
as kind of supporting a Norwegian sports person or
whatever, I'm not really proud of that.
I must admit, when I see that in myself, I feel almost a bit
embarrassed. Because I feel it is so limiting
to kind of narrow yourself down to one nationality, to one
particular person. And I know as soon as you narrow
yourself down, you are excluding others.
All the other people there are kind of out of the equation
because of that. If you're supporting the
Australian cricket team, if the Sri Lankans win, or the English
or the New Zealanders or whatever, if they win, you feel
really bad, but they are really happy.
But if you win, then you are happy, and they are bad.
And if they feel bad, you couldn't care less.
Isn't that right? If your team wins, you don't
care less about whether the other team feels bad or not.
So it makes us become a bit selfish, we become a bit
self-centered when there is the sense of identity.
We forget about this suffering of the other party.
It's very innocent, it's a sport.
It doesn't really matter all that much, it's not so.
But it says something about our identity, and it's just the
beginning of something which can get far, far worse if we allow
that to develop in unwholesome ways.
This became quite clear to me, I could see that when you support
the Norwegian sports person, but you don't care about everyone
else, you feel your mind narrow down, excluding other people,
and you become this kind of slightly chauvinistic person as
a consequence, which obviously is going to be very, very bad in
the long run. It becomes an us and them thing,
us versus them, and prioritizing always the us versus the other
people outside. And if you keep on doing that,
the more you identify with whatever it is, and of course
identity goes far, far beyond nationality.
If you think about all the things that you identify with as
a person, things, obvious things, something like gender,
very obvious, social status, education, how wealthy you are,
your ethnic background that you have, the culture that you
belong to, whatever that is, and many, many more things as well.
These are the things that as a cumulative whole creates our
identities. And the stronger we hold on to
those identities, the more problem actually can arise.
When you have this us and them mentality, very often it ends up
with conflict, it ends up with problems.
And some of the great intractable problems in the
world, political problems, I'll talk about those in a second,
actually arise out of this identity that we have.
That is where it comes from. The interpersonal problems, but
large international scale problems actually come from this
root. So, just to kind of talk a
little bit first of all about the Buddha, how the Buddha
analyzes this. And the Buddha says that any
conflict that we have, it arises from one thing.
The evil in Buddhism which kind of gives rise to all of the bad
things craving, tanha in Pali, desire, this is the thing that
ultimately gives rise to all problems in the world.
And there's two kinds of craving that gives rise to these
problems. When we are aggressive against
others or angry or we go to war or whatever it is, there's two
types of craving, two types of desire that are the problem.
And the first one is the kind of typical craving that we talk
about at the time, the craving for sensual pleasures.
And I'll get back to that in a second, but this is kind of one
of those very, this is probably the most important of these
cravings and quite hard to overcome.
It's very deep seated, the idea of sensual craving.
But there's another kind of craving, that is the craving for
existence. It's called the bhava tanha in
Pali language. I hope you like Pali.
You like Pali? Yeah?
Because when you come to my talks you're always going to
hear a little bit of Pali. So if you don't like Pali, close
your ears. That's what I recommend.
Okay, whatever. So bhava tanha, craving for
existence. And this is the problem I'm
talking about now, the craving, the identity that we have.
Because once you crave to exist, it means you crave to be
somebody, you crave to be here, then the identity emerges from
that. That craving, that identity,
then leads on to the problems in the world where we have
conflicts with each other because of conflicting
identities and all of these kinds of things.
I'll come back to the problems that arise from identity in a
second, but let me just briefly first of all talk a little bit
about the problems that arise from sensual craving, why this
is a problem. I've talked about this here
before, but it's still kind of interesting nonetheless.
The idea of course that if we are attached and interested in
the sensual pleasures of the world, then we are not the only
ones who are interested in sensual pleasures, so is
everyone else. And because everyone is
interested in roughly the same sensual pleasures, we all want a
larger piece of the cake, a larger kind of cutting of the
pie, everyone wants more, it means someone else is going to
get less. And because we all crave
endlessly and we all want more all the time, it is bound to
give rise to conflict in the world.
And the Buddha gives a nice simile about this, one of my
favourite similes that you find in the suttas.
Suttas by the way are discourses of the Buddha.
And the Buddha says it's like a bird, a bird which has got hold
of a piece of meat. If a bird gets hold of a piece
of meat, the bird is very happy. Meat is difficult to find in
bird world. Bird world usually have worms
and you get kind of bugs and things, but a piece of meat is
like prime food in the bird world.
So somehow this bird gets a piece of meat, perhaps because
the monks are feeding the birds. That's possible because that's
what we do as monks. Sometimes when you go back to
your kuti and we have a nice meal, we may have something left
over, oh, the kangaroos might like this.
So we chuck out some chocolate cake to the kangaroo.
The kangaroo brightens up, whoa, chocolate cake.
You can see, kangaroos are just like humans, they also prefer
chocolate cake. There's no difference, animal
realm, human realm, pretty much the same.
So you can see how sometimes these birds get hold of a piece
of meat, because some monk or whoever it is kind of chucks out
something to them. And then this bird flies off
with this piece of meat, really happy, until it looks behind and
behind it there's another big flock of birds in hot pursuit
trying to get hold of that same piece of meat.
And eventually those other birds, because they are bigger
or whatever, they catch up with that small bird and when they
catch up, they try to rip that piece of meat out of its claws,
because that is the nature of the animal world.
The animal world is brutal. It's interesting, when you come
from Norway, you think that kangaroos are kind of cute and
cuddly. That's what you think in Norway.
We don't have any ideas, real ideas about kangaroos, but they
look kind of really cute and cuddly when you see them on
pictures, all the kind of tourist brochures from
Australia, very nice koalas and kangaroos and this kind of
thing. But when you see them in nature,
you actually realise how brutal it all is.
The animal world is a very brutal place, full of desire,
full of ill will, no care or concern for anyone.
That is the reality of the animal world.
And so these birds that are chasing after each other, trying
to rip away the piece of meat from the other ones.
And that, says the Buddha, is a simile for the nature of the
sensual world. As soon as we have something
nice, as soon as we find a nice partner or someone else you have
a relationship with, someone else wants the same partner.
Does that ever happen to you? You find someone nice and then
eventually you get together and you still feel a bit jealous
because your partner might be interested in someone else, you
still want to hold on to them a little bit.
There's this endless problem with relationships, is that
there's never that full, there cannot be that full sense of
security. That's only one of them.
That's one way in which sensual pleasures is problematic.
There are many other ways, how we fight or we compete over
salaries, we compete over promotions in our job as
children, we might fight over a toy, then we fight over the
inheritance when our parents die, and it goes on and on and
on like that. We always want a larger piece of
that pie. The economic pie is only so
large, there's only so much to go around, it doesn't matter how
fast the national product increases, every year it's kind
of irrelevant because we always want more and more regardless.
For that reason, it's always going to be competitive, it's
always going to lead to conflict.
This is one of those really awful things, when you reflect
on this and you realise that this is true, it kind of makes
you very wary of the whole world around us, the whole sensual
world seems so unpleasant suddenly because it's always
involved in conflict and problems and violence and a lack
of peace for that reason. It's inherent to that world, it
can't be otherwise. We try to create institutions
that create stability in the world, that create a sense of
harmony, a way of mediating between people and nations, we
don't go to war with each other, at least less often than we used
to, still it happens. Many of the large wars in the
world are based on the idea that we want to secure products for
our country, secure resources that our economy can grow and
whatever it is. Ultimately it comes back to
sensual pleasures. That is one craving and why it
leads to problems. But the other one I was just
talking about is the identity, the craving for existence and
what our identity actually is. Again, it is fairly obvious on
the surface that when you have the sense of identity you will
have a little, it will have an othering feeling, an othering
result, other people will feel a bit more other, different, there
will be a distance there between yourself and others when you
have a sense of identity. But sometimes when you look at
some of the great problems in the world, some of the very
large problems that are still going on, some of them have been
going on for hundreds and thousands of years, actually
they too are based on that idea of identity.
One of those problems of course that is very well known for
being sourced in identity is the conflict in Northern Ireland.
In Northern Ireland you have the Catholics on the one side and
the Protestants on the other side trying to kind of live
together, not very well at all, really messing it up, and the
sense of identity, and this is really an identity conflict.
We are Catholics, Irish, we are Protestants, Unionists, we want
to be part of the UK. And that identity conflict has
caused, I read this somewhere recently, over three thousand
deaths over a few decades. Three thousand deaths in a tiny
community. Ireland has something like one
and a half million inhabitants, it's tiny, it's smaller than the
city of Perth. Perth has, I don't know how
much, it's more than that I think, a couple of million or
something, tiny little place, over three thousand deaths,
fifty thousand people injured. Due to what?
Due to this conflict between people because of identity, and
identity is all there is to it. From this point of view, if you
look at the Catholic religion or the Protestants, the Church of
England, or whatever it is that they are, it seems so marginal,
what's the difference anyway? You have the same God, Christian
God, you have the same scriptures for goodness sake,
the same Bible, so what is the difference?
If I were to ask you how many here would even be able to tell
the difference between a Catholic and a Protestant, I
probably couldn't to be honest with you, but there's probably
something to do with how you practice it, the external
rituals and a few things like that, and I don't know,
transubstantiation and these kind of things, some sort of
theology behind it, but the difference is tiny, compared to
from a Buddhist point of view, it seems so ridiculous.
Sometimes when the smallest kind of differences are the ones that
make us the most fundamentalist, that lead to the greatest
problems. The people we argue with most as
Theravadan monks, we try to avoid arguments, but if we ever
argue, it's other Theravadan monks, if I ever argue with
people like Venerable Jayako is the one I probably, actually we
never really argue, but that's what happens, because if you
have a tiny difference in view, but you are the same tradition,
that is somehow, that threatens your identity probably more than
anything else. Christians, okay we kind of
write them off, because they are so far away anyway, Muslims
doesn't matter, but those are very close to you, that is where
the problems often arise. Another of these great identity
conflicts in the world, I think is the conflict in Israel
between the Palestinians and the Jews.
The Jewish identity is probably very strong because of long
terms of oppression and problems for the Jewish people, and that
creates a very strong identity. And then you have the
Palestinians on the other side who have also a fairly strong
identity probably through Islam and all of that.
And that also is a conflict that has been going on for how long?
Three thousand years or something like that.
It kind of goes back almost to the beginning of history, at
least in the Western world, it's kind of ridiculous.
And they are still fighting over it after three and a half
thousand years, because of very strongly felt sense of identity.
We are Jews, we are Muslims, and there is no way that we are
going to be able to cooperate. And of course, then it doesn't
happen. Maybe the way to resolve the
conflict in Israel is to try to reduce that sense of identity a
little bit, to actually instead of looking at the differences
between people, start to see, look at those things that we
have in common as human beings. It's kind of crazy, because what
we have in common as human beings is far more than what
differentiates us. What differentiates us is only
superficial things, marginal things.
But if we look inside our mind and hearts, what we actually
want in life, we all want to have a reduction in problems, we
all want more contentment and satisfaction and peace and all
these kind of things. What we want, what we are aiming
for, where we want to go, we are very similar in so many ways.
The defilements in our hearts are pretty much the same.
It's only the superficial stuff that is different.
So why do we make so much out of these differences?
This is how pernicious the idea of identity is, the reality of
identity is very pernicious. It divides us, where actually
there is a lot of grounds for unifying us instead.
But the third one, because I like to kind of bring out also
Buddhist problems as well, not kind of blame everyone else and
kind of think that Buddhists are always better, because we are
not. Sometimes Buddhists also make
similar kind of mistakes. And of course the Buddhist kind
of paramount conflict, where identity has also been a
problem, has probably been in Burma in recent years.
The conflict between the Muslims and the Rohingyas.
That has been essentially, the Buddhists have been saying the
reason why we are afraid of the Rohingya Muslims is basically
because of identity. They are destroying Buddhism.
This is our religion. We want to be Buddhist.
We don't want someone from the outside to destroy what we have.
So instead of practicing the Buddhist teachings, they have
made Buddhism into another identity.
They take pride in that identity and then when they feel that
that identity is threatened, it is as if they themselves are
threatened and then they can't let go.
Again, even Buddhists, we make the same mistake.
Even when the Buddha specifically said this is a
dangerous area, maybe because we are not educated well enough
about the Buddhist teachings, we also make that same mistake.
And all of these things are really related a little bit to,
you can see here, this is all politics.
Politics and identity coming together.
And this is where it becomes very bad.
And in recent years there is one of these kind of politics that
has been promoted around the world, which is called identity
politics. And you may have heard about
that. It has been probably started in
the United States. Many things start in the US and
spread around the world afterwards.
I don't want to blame the Americans, but often it starts
there. It spreads around afterwards.
But to me, straight away, when you talk about identity
politics, to me it reminds me a little bit of Northern Ireland.
It reminds me a little bit of what's happening in Israel,
because these are very powerful examples of identity politics.
It makes it kind of scary to me when I hear the term identity
politics. You have to use it very
carefully. If you take it too far, it leads
to division, it leads to conflict.
So you have to be very, very careful with these kind of
tools. And I must admit, I'm always a
little bit concerned about these things, precisely because they
can go in the wrong direction. So, what are we to do?
What can we do about this? How can we reduce the sense of
identity? Or how can we change it in such
a way that we reduce the problem and we actually make a world
that is less conflict-filled, that is more stable, and where
we can have more harmony between each other?
How can we do this? The first thing is to realize
that the sense of identity is something we cannot choose not
to have. We cannot wish it away or sweep
it away under the carpet and no longer have an identity.
You have to have some kind of identity.
The reason for that is because, from a Buddhist point of view,
we all have a sense of self. We all feel that we exist in a
certain way. And that sense of self needs to
express itself. It needs some kind of
identification by which it can actually make sense.
It doesn't make sense to have a self unless it has certain
characteristics, certain things that it actually relates to.
So once that sense of self is there, and for the vast
majority, unless you are fully enlightened, and usually at this
point I usually ask how many fully enlightened people there
are in the audience, but I've given up on that because usually
people are too shy to say if they are.
Maybe there are some Arahants at the back, but they never raise
their hands, those Arahants. So it is an aspect of almost all
human beings. And Arahants are very few and
far between. So because of that we have no
choice but to have an identity of some sort.
And this is the first thing to remember.
You cannot choose these things away.
So what we have to do instead, what we have to do, we have to
redirect our sense of identity into such a way that it is
supportive of harmony, supportive of the spiritual
practice, supportive of a better world.
And if we redirect our sense of identity in that way, then it
becomes far less pernicious, far less problematic, and then
actually it can become useful and even supportive of how we
live our life. So how do we do that?
And instead of identifying with all these superficial things
like, I've just been talking about before, especially
nationality, whether you are Norwegian or Aussie, who cares
whether you are Norwegian or Aussie, who cares anyway, and so
it's irrelevant. Forget about that, forget about
that particular thing. Instead we identify with
something, an aspect of the Buddhist practice, the Buddhist
path. So all of you here are already
good people. If you weren't a good person you
wouldn't be here. You already have the right
inclination. You already have some of the
right attitude. You are already heading in the
right direction. So count the good things in your
life. Count the number of precepts you
are keeping. Many of you here will be keeping
the five precepts pretty much all the time.
What a wonderful thing that is, to have that aspiration to live
a life of moral purity. You may not think of yourself as
any kind of super-duper spiritual person, but you are
probably far better than you think sometimes, because you are
already doing many of the right things.
When you think like that, when you think, yeah, actually I am
doing quite a few good things, I am kind, I am supportive, I am
generous, I am living a life of kindness and moral purity as far
as I am able to. Don't expect perfection, because
if you expect perfection you are just going to let yourself down.
Don't put the bar too high, instead of rejoice, instead in
the few things that you are able to do.
And then when you start to look at your spiritual life in that
way, and you rejoice quietly within yourself, without making
too much ego out of it, then you start to feel good about
yourself. And when you feel good about
yourself, because how you live, because of your spiritual
qualities, then it is easy to identify with that.
Because any identity we have is about feeling good about
ourselves. That's why you feel good about
being whatever it is. I am educated, I am whatever it
is that you identify with, you feel good about it.
So you find something to make you happy in the spiritual
practice, to make you feel content and satisfied with
yourself, and that is what you identify with.
So those Buddhists in Burma who identify as Buddhists, and then
they go to war almost, or they do bad things, or whatever it is
to the Rohingyas, they should identify as Buddhists, they
should identify as Buddhist practitioners, as people who are
kind, as people who are caring, as people who support others.
And if you identify with those things, it is almost impossible
to have come into conflict and trouble with other people.
Because those very qualities are those that undermine conflict
and problems in the world. And then you keep on practicing
in this way, you keep on identifying as you practice the
spiritual path, you identify more and more with the beautiful
qualities in your heart. The growing sense of compassion
and care, the growing sense of loving kindness for the people
around you, the growing sense of peace that is arising inside of
you. And as you do that, the idea of
harmony and ability to live with others increases all along until
eventually there is no distinction anymore between you
and other people. It's just one mass of beings,
and you can no longer discriminate or even
differentiate between yourself or others.
I'll come back to this in a second, because this is such an
important part of this whole Buddhist path, ending up in a
place where there is absolutely no discrimination or even
distinction between people. Everyone is seen roughly as the
same. So this is the first step that
we can do. Start to identify in a different
way, identify with the good qualities of our heart, rather
than all the superficial identities that we tend to have
as human beings. And then everything gets better
from that. But before I come back to the
idea of meditation practice, and how this supports this feeling
of non-identity, I want to look at this from a slightly
different angle as well. This is one of my kind of
favourite suttas. I've got so many favourite
suttas, but anyway, actually the whole Tipitaka is my favourite,
so whatever sutta in the Tipitaka, I quote, is always my
favourite sutta. How many suttas in the Tipitaka?
People count in different ways, but one rough estimate is
10,000. I got 10,000 favourite
discourses by the Buddha. It doesn't mean all that much
when I say favourite, but anyway, it is one of my
favourites. According to this sutta, it
shows you how the mind is refined, how the spiritual path
goes. It starts off from the very
basic, the very beginning of the spiritual path, and it takes it
all the way to the very end. It shows the gradual movement of
the spiritual practice from the beginning to the very end.
It has a very beautiful simile in the sutta, the simile of the
refinement of gold. How gold is refined is similar
to how we refine the mind. The first thing you will notice
here, which is very nice, is the idea of gold being compared to
the mind. You may not be aware that you
have a big lump of gold in here. Can you feel the gold?
They say it's a grey mass, it's a gold that we have in here,
that's what I say. Do you agree with that?
Why does the Buddha compare the mind to gold?
Actually it's nothing to do with the brain, it's the mind anyway,
I'm just messing around a bit, but why does the Buddha compare
the mind to gold? The reason is because gold, if
it is not purified, if it is full of impurities, it doesn't
look very nice. It doesn't shine, it's not
bright, it's just whatever, it looks pretty much like dust,
like everything else. And it's exactly the same thing
with the mind. If the mind is full of
defilements, not so craving and ill-will or whatever, it's not
very nice, it's not very beautiful.
But gold, when you refine it, you get rid of all the
impurities, when it shines and is powerful and bright and
brilliant, it becomes very beautiful.
And the Buddha said the mind is just like that.
When you purify the mind in the right way, following this
gradual stages that we are talking about, it becomes
brilliant and pure and bright, just like gold.
You have a lump of gold in your heart or in your mind, whatever
you want to say, it's there, it's just waiting to be shined
up. And when it gets shined up, it
becomes so valuable, it becomes the most valuable thing that you
can possibly have in your whole life.
Far, far, far more valuable of course than gold itself.
So gold is just the closest we get to an idea how valuable the
mind is. It's super-duper valuable.
Why? Because it is the ultimate
source of happiness in our life. If we do things in the right
way, if we purify it in the right way, we can create this
inner gold in our heart. This is what the Buddha is
talking about. So how do we do that?
And the way we do that, it is through a gradual process.
And the point of this gradual process is that it has to happen
through certain stages. You have to get the process
right. If you get the process wrong,
it's not going to work. If you have gold, and it's
coming straight out of the ground, you have just been
rinsing it, getting the nuggets out of the river or whatever it
is, you have to get the defilements out.
You have to start with the coarse defilements.
You can't start with the most refined sand or whatever, you
have to start with the gravel and the big things.
If you do it in this way, then it might work out.
But if you start to try to get the sand out first, or the very
refined things out first, it's not going to work.
So you start out getting the gravel out, then you get the
coarse sand out, then you get the dust particles out, and
eventually you heat the gold in the furnace, and you kind of
blow out the remnant of dust or whatever is left in that gold.
It's a gradual process, and you have to do it in those
particular steps, otherwise it doesn't work.
And the Buddha says it's exactly the same thing with the mind.
You have to start with the very coarse aspects of the mind.
So you have to ask yourself what are the problems that you have?
What is the biggest problem in your life?
So you start off by keeping some precepts, some basic things of
morality that make you a better person.
This is the first step. So once you have those five
precepts in place, then you ask yourself, can I do something
more? Can I be more kind in the way I
speak to other people? Can I be more kind in the way I
think about other people? That is the next step.
And then the third step then is how to purify your mind even
further. Purify your mind from all
thoughts of ill will and anger. That is the third step.
But you have to get these things in the right order.
And this is a big problem in Buddhism.
Very often people don't understand this.
And because they don't understand this, they get things
in the wrong order, they are really upset and angry, and they
sit down to meditate straight away, think that meditation is
going to help them overcome the anger.
It's not. Meditation is not going to help
you overcome the anger. The anger is overcome by
thinking in the right way. Then when your anger or ill will
or your strong desires or whatever it is, subsides through
reflecting and thinking in the right way, then meditation
becomes possible. Then you can meditate.
Remember there is a sequence here.
Know what your problem is. Deal with that big problem first
of all, then you can move on to the next step.
These things happen in the right way.
So eventually, if you keep on practicing in this way, then
eventually there comes a point when your mind is very pure,
very nice, but still you don't kind of have that absolute sense
of stillness and peace that we are aiming for on the Buddhist
path. And what is it that stops us
from achieving that very last stillness?
And the Buddha says very interestingly, the very most
refined of these defilements that stop us from achieving the
full peace, he says, is our nationality.
Thoughts about nationality, thoughts about our family,
thoughts about our reputation. In other words, thinking about
our identity. That is in a sense the last
problem, the most subtle of all the defilements that stops you
from actually entering deep meditation states.
Of course, the identity problems arise long before that, but it
also is the most subtle things that stop us from meditation
practice. So, very interesting how far
this goes and how it stops us at the very end of the Buddhist
path from achieving deep states of meditation.
So, what does this mean in practice?
And what it means in practice is that if you do follow this path
in the right way, if you do purify yourself gradually, and
then one day you come to the Dhammaloka center, you take part
in the meditation practices that we do here, and maybe you follow
Ajahn Brahm's way of doing meditation, which really is just
the Buddha's way really, he is just following what you find in
the suttas, we are watching the breath and all of these kind of
things. One of the interesting things
that you will find in your meditation is of course that
sometimes the mind wants to think about things, often
sometimes it wants to think about things, sometimes it
doesn't want to be quiet at all. And if you start to analyze and
look at the kind of things that the mind is thinking about, you
will see that a substantial portion of the thinking mind has
to do with your identity, has to do with who you are.
You are thinking about yourself in terms of these relationships
that you have to the external world, who you are.
In fact, one of the things that you will find is that as the
mind becomes peaceful, sometimes it's almost as if the mind
rebels against the peace, because when the peace becomes
too much, you are losing a large part of your sense of identity.
The identity is no longer there, identity is built up by thinking
about these things, thinking, yeah, I am an Aussie now, I got
an Aussie passport, yeah, I got my Aussie passport today.
I did actually, it's true, not joking.
So now I am an Aussie, yeah, and I kind of think, oh, Aussie,
this is really good, now I can do all these kind of things that
Aussies can do. Somebody said to me, oh yeah,
you are going to come down to the pub now and have a beer,
someone said to me, that's what Aussies do.
And I said, oh yeah, I'll think about it, I said.
So, but these things actually happen in your meditation
practice, yeah, your mind becomes peaceful, that sense of
identity is subdued, and sometimes the mind doesn't like
that, because it just loses a sense of self, loses a sense of
who you think you are, and the mind rebels, and it will think
about it after all, and it will kind of ruminate about all of
these kind of things. This is part of the problem in
meditation practice. But after a while, you start to
become peaceful anyway. And what I would ask you to
notice in your meditation practice is that when you
actually do overcome that sense of identity, when you don't
think about anything anymore, when the mind is peaceful, what
does it feel like? Does it feel nice?
It feels beautiful, doesn't it? It feels so nice when you can
leave the whole world to the side, forget about the entire
world, and all you do is have a sense of peace, and have nothing
else, no thoughts going through your mind.
And when you realise that, when you see the problem with all
this thinking, all of these things, you understand that
identity actually is a big problem, because identity is
something that hinders the peace inside of you.
If you look at the world in this way, if you enjoy the peace of
meditation practice, you get a very high incentive to let go of
your sense of identity. Who cares if I'm Australian,
Norwegian, Sri Lankan, whatever it is, it's kind of utterly
irrelevant. And the more deeper you go in
the meditation, the less sense of your identity there is.
Actually, you stop feeling like any of these things.
There's nothing inside of you, there's no sign they're saying,
or Aussie or whatever, it kind of disappears.
Your gender starts to disappear, because in the peace of the mind
it's genderless. And all of these other signs as
well of identity that we have, they don't exist anymore
anymore. The deeper the meditation is,
the less these things actually exist.
Identity is gradually disappearing and it's so
marvellous, it is so beautiful, it's such a happy state of mind.
All of this self-business, all of this identity that we're
holding onto, clinging onto, it's just dukkha, it's problem,
it's suffering. The less we have of that, the
better it is. And of course, it has the added
advantage as we reduce our sense of identity, as we identify more
with just being kind, with just being good-hearted, with being
compassionate we identify with these beautiful states of peace
inside of us it also means that when we come out of the
meditation afterwards we look at people in a different way.
Because we understand that all people, in fact all beings,
whatever they are have these internal states of peace
available inside of them if they practise in the right way.
So you start to see a unity in humanity, you start to see a
unity which goes beyond all the superficial identity business.
And this is one of those beautiful things that you find
in meditation practice. And eventually you keep on, you
take it even deeper, you go deeper and deeper and deeper,
and the deeper you go, the less identity there is.
In fact the deepest stages of meditation there are stages
where all the barriers in the world are removed.
There's no barriers between you and other people anymore there's
an expanse of loving kindness, of compassion of peace, or
whatever it is, just radiating across the entire world without
boundary, without limits, without anything.
And you can imagine that kind of state.
Some of you may already have experienced some of these
states, at least a little bit, and you know how powerful it is,
how non-discriminative it is how you bring everyone together into
one feeling, and there's no longer any us and them, me and
other, suddenly you are actually really embracing the whole world
with compassion and loving kindness.
And what a wonderful thing that is at that point there is no
identity anymore, or identity is universalized, everything is
brought into one identity almost at that point, of course, no
harm can happen anymore no discrimination, no more wars
based on identity in fact all of those qualities are the exact
opposite they are qualities that unite, bring us together, create
harmony and happiness, contentment and peace in the
world and this is where that is heading here.
So, just to very briefly summarize the point of this
talk, and the point of this talk is just to show that the usual
sense of identity that we have in the world is problematic,
intense, to lead to conflict and what we need to do on the
Buddhist path is to shift that sense of identity and shift it
towards qualities that align with the Buddhist path,
qualities of kindness, of care of generosity and compassion,
and take that deeper and deeper and deeper in our practice until
eventually identity is almost eliminated entirely, you go into
a deep state of meditation and the world is just one, there is
loving kindness for all beings, wherever they may be, whatever
they are and eventually you go even beyond that, eventually on
the Buddhist path you destroy, you do not really destroy, you
eliminate you overcome the sense of identity once and for all and
this is one of the meanings of being fully awakened or
enlightened on the Buddhist path, that the identity is
eliminated once and for all and it never comes back again.
When you are in the presence of people like that, who have
eliminated identity once and for all, it's very beautiful because
you feel, they treat everybody the same, everyone is the same
to them, they have kindness for everyone and occasionally you
may meet people like that and I have met a few people like that
in my life who are very special there is a beautiful sense of
acceptance in the presence, there is a feeling that they
will never really discriminate or harm you in any way
regardless of who you are, regardless of where you come
from, regardless of your superficial identity.
Okay, enough for tonight Okay, so that is a little talk on
identity for you Is there any questions from anyone?
Ajahn Brahmami, me again. Thanks for the really wonderful
talk The Buddha was telling us that one of the characteristics
of human existence is that every human being is a human being and
that every human being is a human being The other
characteristic of human existence is that there is no
self and also things are impermanent Now coming back to
identity, what you are saying, it's okay to have identity, but
do you think sometimes if the identity goes to be too much
self-cherishing then that's where the problem comes in Yeah,
exactly It is impossible not to have an identity, so identity is
always going to be there, it's always going to be in the
background and for that reason you can't just eliminate it, so
we try to have a positive identity, you identify with your
positive traits as a person, and of course we are going to have
other identities as well but we try to move in that direction,
and as we do that we are moving away from the problematic
identity and moving towards a more accepting and positive
identity Also, for us to be great again, our country to be
great again we have to put the others down, you know We are up
in this, that, and they are down Why can't we all be together up
instead of that self-cherishing thing and could this have come
from religions too, Jan Pramali? Absolutely, that's a very good
point How do you say, it's only us, the others are down I fully
agree, religion has part of the problem and that's why I
mentioned Buddhism before, sometimes Buddhists have the
same problem as well, and other religions have the same problem
because religion is a very powerful identity, a very strong
one, and I should have mentioned that in my talk, so thank you
for bringing it up, very strong identity, and if we use that in
the wrong way, it can become very destructive, so we have to
use that identity in religion in a positive way to make it work
To a point where it comes true, mistrust in the world now,
mistrust we have to learn the world to trust each other, to
make the world a better place to live Good, yep There's one
question over here So, I was I grew up 35 years in Israel as
you know So, in a way I have an Israeli identity However if you
push a knife through my body, through my head, and you push a
knife imagine you push it, it's pretty cruel I promise not to do
that Where is Israeli? You're not going to find any
Israeli You're going to find neurons, synapses in my brain,
organs in my body veins So, where is Israeli?
So, this identity is, I think, is an illusion An illusion we
get maybe by evolution, maybe by conditioning, indoctrination I
don't know if I find the right words Conditioning, maybe?
So, for me, I understand that it doesn't exist really, maybe it
exists in the stream of thoughts that are ever changing anyway
And we can, with the right conditioning, we can change that
but not anywhere in the body But thinking about the
Israeli-Palestinian context the identity over there in the
Middle East is so powerful so strong So, I don't think, if I
need to be practical I'm reducing that sense of identity
I don't see that happening But I do, what I do, for someone that
experienced that conflict on my flesh What I do see happening is
changing the narrative So, in a way I'm the Jewish-Israeli,
right, if I need to wear that hat for a second I respect your
identity over the fence I acknowledge your needs, or I
care, but that sort of language I would hope that will happen.
I don't think you will ever Yeah, I largely agree with that
I think the thing is that the reason I just brought up those
points is not so much that I intend to resolve the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict I have no ambition or even thought
that I could possibly make any impact, but I think the point is
more that when we see the problem, it gives rise to it, it
gives us a spur in our own practice to avoid the same
problem in our own personal life That's really what I'm talking
about, I'm talking to individual people rather than trying to
resolve large scale conflicts, but by understanding where those
large scale conflicts come from we can actually enhance our own
ability to ensure that we don't make the same mistakes in our
private practice Okay Okay, so this is from outside the center,
thank you very much So, only two questions tonight This is from
D.Y. from the USA Do you think identity craving for self-image
is the same or lesser or more since the time of the Buddha
with the progress of science technology?
Has identity become stronger over time and the craving for
identity become stronger over time perhaps?
Is that the case? That's a good question It may
very well be, and maybe kind of the way we kind of communicate
on the internet now, I'm not really with all the kind of
arguments people have on the internet or whatever maybe that
strengthens a sense of self, you know, the idea that you're
always kind of playing to an audience when you write
something on Facebook or whatever a lot of people would
see what you write, so it's not like you're communicating with a
person it's like you're performing for an audience
instead and of course the more we perform for an audience, the
more sense of self will always be involved.
So perhaps all this internet stuff is actually increasing our
sense of self in that way, that of course can be problematic So,
I think you may have a point, but really the point is that
wherever you are in the world, sometimes, you know, kind of
certain societies are regarded as more individualistic perhaps
than others etc. but these are small differences.
In the end every society, every person has an identity and every
person will tend to satisfy that demand for an identity through
all of these external things like social position or wealth
or education or intelligence or whatever it is, we will try to
satisfy through those things unless we have something more
profound that we can satisfy that sense of identity with
eventually overcoming that sense of identity completely So, you
may be right that it is getting worse, but I don't think it
really matters all that much. It's the same process that we
have to get through. Second question is from Pam from
Scotland Do you think that sometimes people can use
cultural identity as an excuse for bad behaviour?
And I would say absolutely certainly that is the case and
very often the cultural identity, because we want to
preserve our culture culture is often elevated in our society as
being something very important and everyone should be proud of
the culture the moment you are proud of the culture, you are
going to identify with the culture So, I would say all of
this idea of being proud of ourselves proud of our identity,
proud of our culture I don't know how wise that actually is.
I'm not saying we should be kind of the opposite of proud, what
is that, looking down upon our culture, but we should just kind
of try to be neutral without being too puffed up nor being
too depressed about things, but find that middle way whereby
culture, culture is nice, but it's no big deal that is I think
the ideal thing. As long as you are proud about
it or you feel bad about it, eventually you will also fight
for it and maybe do bad things in the name of that culture.
So best to leave all that aside a little bit.
Anyway that is all for tonight. Everyone happy?
Anyone not happy? No?
You're not happy? Yeah, please.
On a nice note, little lighter, now you are an Aussie.
You know what you're supposed to go and do?
What is that? Have a front and a bottom.
Okay, no, yeah, okay. That's what they make you do so
you can belong. Are you a Kiwi by any chance?
No, no. I'm an Aussie too.
Yours as well, okay. Very good.
Okay, very good. So let's just pay respect to the
Buddha Dhamma Sangha to finish off the day. . . . . . . . . . .
. . . .