All right, everyone. So let's get started for the
Dhamma. Tokyo, Are you ready for this?
Yeah. So it was a bit scary because
the Dhamma can be so profound. You never know what you're going
to get. And kind of halfway through, you
think, wow, this is too much. I better, better leave this
place before it's too late, before we get dragged into this
cult. And then I'm finished forever
and after her. But no, the Dhamma is very, I
don't know, very, very, very interesting teaching.
And the Buddha is this extraordinary person.
And there are some very inspiring teachings to be found
in the suit as the suit, as are the word of the Buddha.
And I always like to talk about these suitors.
Has anyone never heard about suitors before?
Everyone heard about suitors. Wow.
OK, that's kind of unheard of in a crowd like this is about
usually, I feel a number of people never heard about any
suitors. If you haven't heard about
suitors, you've missed out. But none of you have missed out.
What the wonderful thing that is.
But still the suitors are very broad and there's many kind of
nooks and crannies to the suitors, many fairly, you might
call them obscure parts that people have never heard about.
Now one of those things that I have always found very
interesting in the suitors is the idea of developing
perception. Did you know that the Buddha has
lots of teachings about developing perception?
Did you know that? No, you didn't know that.
You didn't know that. OK.
So even some of you have been
around for a long time. Didn't know that.
That's OK That's a good sign. That means that to tonight's
talk might broaden your kind of compass on what Buddhism is all
about. That's always a nice thing.
Yeah. So we're going to talk about
perception, how to develop perceptions as the idea tonight.
And it is surprising, although many people haven't really heard
about these teachings, they're quite common in the suitors.
There's a large number of suitors about this particular
topic, but not perhaps the mainstream suitors, but a little
bit more in the kind of corners and tucked away in the Pali
Canon. And to to start out talking
about this, I want to go back to some of the basic ideas and to
show you how it all connects together.
When it connects together nicely, when you understand the
connection between things, it kind of comes together.
You understand what this is about.
So one of the things that I always emphasise in my dama
talks is the importance of kindness.
Yeah, the idea of morality and Buddhism is very, very
foundational. And if kindness or morality or
your habits, if they are developed in a truly good way,
meditation becomes automatic. Yeah.
So I don't know how your meditation was tonight, whether
it was magnificent or simply marvellous or OK, OK, ordinary,
whatever. Right.
But the thing, the reason, if it doesn't really kind of, you
know, really come together here, then one of the main reasons for
that one reason is because you're tired.
You had a long day. OK, that's fair enough.
But one of the main reasons why meditation doesn't come together
is this idea of kindness hasn't been developed enough.
So living immoral life is extremely important in Buddhism.
In fact, it is so important I can all almost summarise the
Buddhist path in terms of morality.
And morality is very profound in Buddhism.
You know, it encompasses the mind as well as body and speech.
It encompasses positive habits, positive morality, in other
words, doing what is right, not just doing, avoiding what is
bad. So it's a very broad kind of
idea. This is why it is so hard to
complete morality and especially the external morality in the
world. Yeah.
The way we treat other people, the way we speak to others, the
way we act depends a lot on our mental state.
Right. Yeah, Eddie.
Yeah. Just checking.
Nice to see you back, Eddie. So it depends a lot on our
mental state because of course the way our mind inclines is the
way things tend to come out in speech and actions.
So if you want to be perfect and morality is very important to
have a mental qualities that also are right.
It's kind of obvious if you have a very positive mind state, if
you feel really happy, you get out of bed on the right side.
Yeah, in the morning, yeah, you have some positive feelings
straight away. You read the verse of Damapada.
Before you went to bed. And then you dream about the
Dhamma during night. Yeah.
And you wake up in the morning. Yeah.
Has that ever happened to you? Dreaming about the Dhamma at
night? Dreaming about meditation?
Right. Dreaming about being kind.
Dreaming about being full of service.
There are people who have such dreams.
You may think I'm just joking. I'm not just joking.
These things come from somewhere.
I don't say these things randomly, so maybe I do, but
actually I don't. Yeah, it's hard.
Hard to know, right? But you hear about people who
dream about Dumber, and they become so happy here during the
dream that they wake up. Bang, so bright and powerful.
Get into meditation. Bang, Go into a deep state of
samadhi. Yeah.
So that is the ideal, yeah. And this is kind of where we
really want to get to. You want to have a mind that is
so positive, that is so powerful, that is so bright,
that has so many good qualities. And meditation is a matter of
course. All you have to do is chillax.
It happens by itself. And even at night you have
dreams that are so powerful that you wake up in the middle of the
night and you're just buzzing with energy.
Beautiful, peaceful, powerful, non agitated, blissful energy
that drives the meditation practice.
But where do those thoughts come from, right?
How, what? What are?
What does the thinking mind arise from?
Why is it sometimes that we have maybe negative thoughts, other
times we have positive thoughts? Sometimes we might be anxious
about something, sometimes we are joyous.
Where do these things come from? The quality of our mind, the
intention that we have, the moral quality of that mental
state, What does it arise from? And what is very interesting, if
you observe your mind very carefully, and this can be quite
difficult to do, but when you become really peaceful.
It is not that hard to see here He has.
So when you observe your mind very carefully here, you will
notice that those thoughts that you have, they arise from
perception here. Perception is there first, and
then the thoughts come from that perception here.
And you will notice that if your perceptions when you start out
are positive, you tend to have positive thoughts.
Yeah, your thinking pattern, a kind of it, it matches the
perception that you have when you start out.
And this is one of the reasons why I said at the beginning of
the meditation, give rise to some positive perceptions.
Yeah. Remember something you have done
that is beautiful there. Remember some positive
experience that made you joyful and happy during the day or
during the last week or at some point in your life.
And as you do that, you bring that positive perception in your
meditation. You create a mental space that
is positive, and in that positive mental space, that is
when meditation becomes possible.
So you can see how your mind and all your thoughts and all these
patterns and everything arises from the perception.
Perception is there first, but to be able to see that, you have
to have fairly sharp mindfulness.
Perception is there, then the thoughts come.
You have negative thoughts. If you look carefully, it arises
out of a negative perception. You have a negative idea about
somebody here. You have maybe an anxiety about
something. Yeah.
You haven't seen something on the news and you think, oh, no,
I shouldn't have watched those blooming news.
Yeah. It's kind of one of the main
causes of, I think, psychological turmoil and
psychological stress in this world.
Is watching the news too much? There is a very interesting,
apparently research on that. Yeah.
The idea that watching the news has a very bad effect on
people's quality, quality of their mind and their mental
life. It's kind of psychologically
damaging to watch too much news. It kind of gradually drags you
down. War here, killed there, climate
change getting worse. You know, the basic everything
looks really, really bad and it makes you really depressed.
Unless you are a Buddhist, of course, in which case you know
how to. Look at these things in the
right way here. Is that true?
Do you know how to look at all these things in the right way?
Do you know how to think about all the difficulties in the
world so as not just to not be negative, but to be something
which actually encourages your practice?
Yeah, this is beautiful when it happens.
And I have spoken about this before.
I'm not going to talk about it tonight.
Maybe another time. Come back later.
I was giving a preview. This is kind of the tricks for
how to get more people in the room because it wasn't that many
here today. So in the future, there will be
more coming in here. So it comes from perception.
Perception is the foundation factor.
Things develop from certain very basic perceptions that we have
in the mind. Yeah.
And so because of that, we want to establish the right
perception at the beginning of meditation.
We want to establish the perception at regular times,
during the day even. Yeah, during life.
So where do these perceptions come from?
And our perceptions essentially come from the habits of the
mind, the views that we have about the world going deep,
deep, deep into the past. This is our conditioning.
Yeah. This is the way we have been
conditioned, you know, through this life, through previous
lives. Yeah.
And going a long, long, long way back.
Yeah. And there's a very beautiful
suitor about this. You can see this.
It's actually. Very fascinating.
You see these things in your own practice in a meditation, just
having come out of the range retreat.
Sometimes it's very obvious when you become quite peaceful, but
then you see it in your own meditation.
And of course, lo and behold, the Buddha says the same thing
in the suitors. And one of the very well known
suitors that talk about this, what you might call the process
of perception and how perception drives kind of the evolution of
the mind and the evolution of the thinking process is called
the Maddopindika suita. You know, the Maddopindika suita
Amita. Heard of it?
OK, good. OK, good start.
It's always good to start with people.
So I have a little bit of Sri Lankan background because they
usually they sometimes they know the suitors really well.
That's kind of that's good. The muddu pindeka, Muddu means
muddu means honey, right. And pinda pindeka is like ball
or lump of food. It's kind of things you eat when
you go on pinda, pinda part. Yeah.
Muddu pindeka, same word. Pindamat is like you go on arms
around as a Buddhist monk. Yeah, I often like to pepper my
talks with a bit of Pali terminology because it gives me
more authority that Y hair. So that's kind of the idea
behind that. So I hope you will forgive me
for a bit of Pali with Alex. Try to explain as we go along
here. So Madi Pindiga suitor, Maji
Manika 18 middle length sayings #18 if you wish to look it up,
please do so. These things are available on
the Internet. If you search on MN 18 and Maji
Manika 18 you will find that suitor straight to Y hair.
And my dependent casuta is about this perceptual process.
And this perceptual process is very significant.
And one of the reasons why it is so significant is because it is
really the engine of. Dependent origination.
Has anyone heard of dependent origination?
Yeah. Anyone not heard of not OK one
over there? Yeah.
OK. So OK, you haven't heard of it.
OK, good. So now we have a we have a
customer over there. Excellent.
So dependent origination is one of the most profound and in many
ways interesting teachings of the Buddha.
And what it does, it shows us how suffering is perpetuated.
Yeah. How suffering keeps on existing
in our life, this life and also in previous lives.
Yeah, this is the idea. So it's for that reason, very,
very interesting if we can show you how suffering comes to
exist, What are the causes of suffering?
It's all we need to know, right? If you know the cause of
suffering, eliminate the 'cause you're in business.
Yeah, that's kind of the idea there here.
So we want to create. Everyone wants to be happy in
the world, and this shows us how suffering is perpetuated,
especially through the process of rebirth.
That is kind of. This is one of the foundational.
Ideas of Buddhism. But the question of this what is
that drives this process? What is the engine that makes
this thing work and this mud? Appendix Asuta can be regarded,
this perceptual process can be regarded as the internal engine
in the process of rebirth, in this process of perpetuating
suffering. Yeah.
So very, very fascinating for this reason.
So how does it work? And this is roughly how it
works. So I'm going to take it in
reverse sequence, am I? Yeah, I take it in reverse
sequence. So the, the the Buddha says,
well, actually it's, it's it's another monk which giving this
particular suit that the Buddha has delegated giving the talk to
this monk, just like Ajambaram delegates to me giving the talk
here on Friday night. It's a similar kind of situation
there. Yes, maybe, maybe not.
I'm just I'm exaggerating a bit. It's these, these monks are some
of the Buddha were really extraordinary.
Yeah. On the nuns as well.
There was some really extraordinary people.
And it's always dangerous to compare yourself to the greatest
masters in Buddhist history. I actually shouldn't do that at
all. That's kind of completely bad
idea, actually. But this is what happened at
that time. Yeah.
So Mahaka, Mahaka Shayana, he was delegated and asked by the
Buddha to give this talk. Yeah.
There was someone who came to the Buddha challenging the
Buddha a little bit. And the Buddha says, OK,
Kashayana, you, you. He gave a kind of a brief,
enigmatic reply and he said to Michael China, OK, you can you
reply to that? So he he then shows this
beautiful sequence and at the last thing he talks about is
something called papancha sanya sanka.
And the idea of papancha in Buddhism is this idea of the
proliferation of the mind. Yeah, the English word
proliferation is usually used about plants.
Plants proliferate, They grow kind of all over the place.
They proliferate out. It's like this unstructured
growth, yeah. You don't know where they're
going to go next. It's kind of random growing
everywhere there. And the mind is a bit like that.
It proliferates, it grows. Yeah.
The mind moves, the thoughts move.
All our ideas, they move and then move in kind of random.
Ways. We don't know where they're
going to go next. Yeah, if you have watched your
mind, it's like suddenly you're thinking about something.
You can look completely different place from where you
started out. One moment you're in Damaloca,
the next thing you are on. I don't know where different
galaxies may be. You know what I mean, how the
mind kind of works in that way. There very kind of unstable
always condition moving all over the place.
And this is kind of the idea of proliferation there.
And this is a problem, right? Because if we proliferate a lot,
we are not mindful, we're not present.
Before you know it, you get upset about something, you have
all kinds of desires, you are restless, and it's not really
satisfying at all. Yeah, this is the problem with
proliferation of the mind. So where does that proliferation
of the mind come come from? OK, so the, the, the, the word
for the proliferation of mind is papancha sanya, sanka.
So part of that is the word sanya, which is perception that
I talked about before. Perceptions and sanka like
reckonings coming from proliferation.
That's what it means something. Like that.
So where does that come from? And the Buddha says that comes
from thinking. Yeah.
The thinking mind is what drives this process.
So first of all, we think, and then before we know it, we kind
of proliferating all over the place.
Where does that thinking come from?
The thinking comes from perception from Sonia, right.
This is exactly what I was saying before.
And now you read the suitors and it says exactly what you what
you actually recognise. Through your own.
Experience that is. I don't know, there's something
very beautiful about that. When you read the suitors and
you see in your own experience these things actually gel.
They come together here. You know the way your teacher
teaches, like Ajambaram, the way the Buddha teaches.
And what you perceive yourself is actually the same thing here.
So perception is the driving force of the thinking mind.
Once you perceive in a certain way, the thoughts take shape
according to that perception. If you have a negative state of
mind, you think you know negatively positive state of
mind, you think positively. If you think someone is an
enemy, you think according. If you think that a friend, you
think accordingly. And so it goes on.
And where do that? And what arises with that
perception, And what comes with the perception is feeling what
you feel, you perceive, says the Buddha.
It's interesting. He uses kind of verb is he
doesn't say you just there is feeling.
He says there you feel, right? There's a kind of process.
There's a verb that is used rather than a noun to describe
this. And where do these feelings come
from? Feelings and perception very
closely related to each other. Where do they arise from?
And they arise from our experiences of the world.
Yeah. The sensory experience of the
world. And the Buddha says when there's
three things to come together, we we make contact with the
world. In contact with the world is
basically experiencing the world.
What are those three things like the eye?
The eye has to be there, the object has to be there.
I see Amita object. Sorry, Ahmed, I didn't mean that
in a bad way. I just, you know, you, you
happen to be very kind of accessible as you're sitting
there. So eye object and based on that
eye and object, eye consciousness arises.
And when you have eye object and eye consciousness.
You have the contact with the world.
You have experience. So as long as we have
experiences, as long as we contact the world, as long as
our senses are operating, yeah, yeah, we will have this process
will happen to us. Our senses operate, we perceive
in a certain way. From that perceptions come the
thinking, whatever it might be. From that thinking comes this
proliferation of the mind is. Going over all over the place in
this particular way, yeah. So that is what the how the
Buddha really explains this here through this other great monk
called Mahakachayana. So what?
How does this help us? How?
How is this useful? And the reason why this is very
useful is that the way we experience the world through the
senses depends on past conditioning here.
If I choose to look at. I'm not going to pick on you
anymore, Amit. I'm sorry.
I'm going to. If I choose to look at someone
in the audience, then that choice is conditioned by
something. Yeah.
How I perceive that person. Yeah, Gary, how I perceive you
will depend on my past experiences with you, right?
Yeah. And so and these are all coming
from past experience. So yes, there is sense
perception, but how that sense perception happens depends on
how conditioning in the past. And so if we develop our mind,
if we change our perceptions through our daily practice, if
we change our views, if we understand what right view is in
accordance with Buddhists, we look at the world in a certain
way, then our sense experience happen according to that right
view, according to that right perception.
So the answer to make this whole process work properly, to make
our perceptions aligned with the way the Buddha taught, to make
our thoughts more positive, more wholesome, more conducive to
Dumber practice is to develop our view and to develop our set
perceptions in such a way that when we contact the world, we
contact in a way which gives rise to this positive process
instead. So This is why the development
of perception is so important because it allows this whole
sense perception process to happen in a far better way.
We choose better objects, we look at better things, we look
at more things that are more conducive to the right to, to,
you know, having a good life, to be more happy, to be more
content, to have better meditation practice, all of
these things. We listen to things that are
more useful instead of listening to heavy metal music.
Anyone here listening to Heaven Metal music?
Yeah, people one at the back there.
OK, One person who is on this, like.
So instead of listening to too much, OK, occasional Heaven
metal is all right, Right. But not too much.
We listen more to Dumma instead because Dumma is conducive to
more peace than Heaven metal. I think that's a fairly kind of
no, no brainer, right? It's kind of obvious one.
And so we change our entire attitude to things.
We do things differently because our view has changed.
When we are with people that previously we felt were
difficult to be with her, suddenly we see them in a new
way. We have compassion, we have
kindness, we have care for the people around us rather having
these negative things instead. So we change things over time,
we do things differently. And this is then, as I mentioned
before, actually a very important part of the Buddhist
practice. You start to read the suitors
and you more you read, the more you understand that this is
found in so many places. And now you can understand why
because it builds up a mental environment that makes
happiness, joy, the negative things, you know, things start
to fall into place because of this.
And it is also very useful. People sometimes ask.
They say, well, you know, OK, I'm a moral person.
I live well. I, you know, do a bit of
meditation. What more can I do?
Should I do more? What can I do in all of those?
You know, I have a long day when I'm at work, when I'm with my
family, when I'm with my friends.
I do my hobbies or whatever. What can I do kind of all the
time? Yeah.
What can I do in those kind of situations?
And what you can do in those situations, apart from living
morally and being kind and these kind of things, is to develop
these perceptions. The development of perception
happen anytime during the day. It should really happen right
now. Yeah, Right at this moment, we
should develop these perceptions because not afterwards,
Afterwards, it's too late. It's only now that we have.
And right now you can develop the perception of kindness,
Yeah, of compassion, of understanding, of overcoming
negativity. Right at this very moment, we
can develop these things. And it's actually right now that
we should develop, develop it because now is the only time we
have. And so now you start to see a
broader idea of what it means to practice the Buddhist teachings,
developing these perceptions. I've talked about this here
before, but I think it's a very important subject.
That's why I like to bring it up again and again and again.
This is usually how they've done my work.
So you hear the same thing again and again from slightly
different angles. Yeah.
And so how can we do this practically here?
Now? I have laid, laid the
foundation, and I'm very glad that no one has left so far.
It means that maybe you have some feeling that the foundation
is correct. Do you have that feeling or do
you have a feeling that the foundation is, if you thought it
was nonsense, you probably would have left already, right?
So presumably you are with me at least to some extent.
So having laid kind of the theoretical foundation, the
question is how do we do this in practice?
And the answer to this is that there is many, many different
ways of developing these perceptions.
And when you look at the word of the board of the suit as if his
focus is on really on three things, there's actually three
kind of foundational aspects, 4 characteristics of the world
around us. And these three things are
actually called the three characteristics, the tilakana in
parle 3 characteristics. And these three things are
impermanence, anicha, dukkha, suffering and non self anata.
Yeah. These are the three things.
And a lot of these developmental perceptions revolve around these
three ideas. Yeah.
Things are impermanent, things are problematic.
They're often suffering. Yeah.
Things are non self a bit out of control.
So if these are the perceptions that the Buddha tells us we
should develop, how do we do that in practice?
It's not kind of obvious, right? How do we actually do this in
practice? And I think it will surprise you
how this can be made very concrete and very kind of useful
and very easy to approach this kind of perceptions.
And I will start out with some perceptions about how to develop
kindness and how to develop the idea of compassion in the world.
It's easy to lose our way, lose our compassion, lose our sense
of friendliness and kindness to others, very easy to become a
fault finding. How can we become have less of
these negative things, develop a perception that is more
positive. And I'm going to give you some
very simple ideas on how to do this.
Now, when I was in Norway recently, I was born in Norway.
I'm Australian now. That's what they say anyway.
My passport. My passport says.
Actually I got 2 passports, 1 Norwegian and one Australian.
Some kind of a split personality split right through the middle
Norwegian, Australian. It's kind of scary, isn't it?
But so I I hang out in Norway. That's why I talk about Norway.
I hang out in Norway a bit, Yeah.
I usually go to visit my my mum over there and these kind of
things. And when I was there last time I
heard about this business leader, Yeah, I didn't know
there were any wise business people in Norway.
But it turns out there was this one wise business person in
Norway. And I was kind of very, very
happy about that. Yeah.
Because you, you know, you, you that's kind of how it is when
you see wise people. It's a positive thing.
Yeah. And of course, there is a nice
distribution of wise people across the world, so they can
estimate a certain percentage around the world there.
And this a business person, what I think it was a he, was it a
she or he? I think it was a he.
And this business person, they, what they said there, which was
I think really interesting he said that the way I think about
my employees. Yeah.
Because you can imagine being a manager, right?
It can be difficult to be, it's difficult to be the person who
has to fault to kind of deal with a manager.
It's also very difficult to be a manager because human relations
are always complicated and difficult.
But what this manager said, which really caught my eye, he
said the way I think about my employees is that everyone is
doing their best. Everyone is doing their best.
So what do you think? Is that right?
Is everyone doing their best in a company, or is someone
slacking off and others working really hard?
And I think that was such a profound insight, and it gels so
beautifully with the Buddhist ideas about how human beings
work. Everyone is doing their best,
not only in that company, in the Buddhist society.
Yeah, everyone is doing their best in wherever you work, in
your family, with the people around you.
Everyone is doing their best. This is such a beautiful
Buddhist outlook, and that outlook comes from the idea of
non self. Yeah.
The idea of non self is that we are conditioned as human beings.
What we are is the product, how we have been produced from past
calls and conditions in this life and in previous lives.
That is who we are as human beings.
And if we are the product of all the things that have worked on
us in the past, then we are kind of we are, we are kind of made,
but we are kind of built up from that.
And our ability to do whatever we do in the present is limited
by those past calls and conditions.
Yeah. So in a sense, everyone is doing
their best. They cannot really choose
anything beyond those calls and conditions because those calls
and conditions limit them in their ability here.
And once you start to think about people in this way here,
it actually becomes very beautiful because you start to
think about people instead of getting angry with them and
saying, OK, you are a bad person, you are lazy or
whatever. You understand that they are
trapped by the conditioning. Everyone is doing their best.
It's a beautiful way of thinking about the world.
And so you spread this out. You make this kind of a motto in
your life. Everyone is doing their best.
Yeah. And as you do that, you start to
deal with the world in a different way.
So if you are a business leader, then instead of telling off the
people, telling them off, saying you are bad or you are too lazy
or whatever, instead of getting angry with them, right, because
you think that they can do better if they only put their
mind to it, they're actually lazy by purpose or by intention.
Instead of thinking like that, we understand that there is
cause and conditions behind this behaviour.
And because there are cause and conditions behind this
behaviour, you ask yourself what are the causes that make people
work well. And very often you find that
people, the causes are you treat people well, they will actually
behave well back in return. Yeah, this is usually the way
things are. I just look at Bodinana
Monastery. We have Ajahbrahm in the
monastery. And I know for a fact that when
I see Ajam Rama, very large part of why Bodhinana Monastery
functions very well and there's very little, barely any
arguments and problems or anything like that.
It's because you have a leader kind of who leads by example in
this way and the world is off like that.
So you look instead, you stand back, you don't get angry and
upset because that's usually counterproductive.
It makes them worse in the long run.
You stand back and ask yourself, well, what are the cause and
conditions that make people really productive?
Because everyone runs according to cause and conditions, not by
ill will or by negative will in relation to the company or
towards the management or whatever.
Or maybe they have that, but that is another cause and
condition in their life and this changes our outlook.
So beautiful in the world and we start to have compassion for
people. We start to have a kindness in
an entirely new way because we understand how people really
work. Everyone is doing their best.
And so this is one of these beautiful Buddhist ways of using
a profound idea of non self in a very, very practical way here.
And I thought it's wonderful that we have people in the
world. Yeah, This person was probably
not a Buddhist. If you live in Norway, the
chance of being a Buddhist are zilch.
Yeah. They are very, very small, but
not not 0, but you know, very very.
Small more greater chance you will worship Thor and Odin and
these kind of things So actually I think Thor and Odin are pretty
cool yeah, I you know, I wish I had kind of discovered them
before Buddhist, but I never really got got there.
I was. I was more like an atheist
before I was a Buddhist, but. This is a secret.
Yeah. So I, I actually have more faith
in Thor and Odin than I have in the creator God.
You know, the kind of universal God.
I just had to be careful with saying the thing that's actually
true. That's kind of that's kind of
where where I'm at. I'm not sure if I'm kind of
really backwards or whether there's some truth or that, but
that's kind of how I think about the world.
If you want the secret to that, ask me later, I'll tell you the
secrets behind that. But so anyway, so, yeah, so
people discover these things kind of through their own ways
in in many ways. And what a wonderful thing that
is. But of course, we need to take
that a bit further. Yeah, Yes, that is kind of
kindness. How can we develop even more
compassion in the world? And compassion comes from two
things, really. Compassion comes from
understanding the suffering in the world.
Yeah. You see suffering in other
people, and then compassion arises and it's interesting.
I really would recommend you to try to see suffering in other
people. It's so easy to be judge,
mental. It's so easy to focus on my
suffering. This is my problem, but not
seeing it in other people in the same way.
But everyone in this world has suffering.
Yeah, everyone has suffering. And it's very, very similar to
yours because as human beings, we're basically the same.
Yeah. We have the same kind of things
that we have to deal with, the same kind of people problem, the
same kind of family problem, the same kind of issues with
politics and the world and climate and what have you.
We are in the same boat. So basically we perceive the
world in very similar kind of ways.
So remember to see that suffering in other people.
And when you start to see the suffering in the world, the
suffering in others, then you start to understand.
No wonder people do bad things sometimes.
No wonder they say stupid things no matter what do they act out
of this frustration with the suffering in their life?
So when you see someone doing something bad, instead of
judging them for their vadnais, instead of thinking that they
are an evil person, understand that in all likelihood they are
suffering here. There's a problem inside of
them. And when you see that, it
becomes a beautiful feeling of compassion instead of this
judgement and the harsh kind of qualities that we have towards
other people. Always see the suffering behind
the facade. And sometimes it can be kind of
hard to see the suffering. Yeah, some people, they put up a
facade, they may look like they have their act together and they
pretend that they have this super duper and wonderful life.
Yeah, but look behind the facade.
And when you look behind the facade, you will see something
else often that hard shell that we have showing ourselves to the
world in a certain way. That self is an expression of
suffering because it shows that we are trying to be someone we
cannot actually be, pretending to be something which actually
is impossible. That itself is often expression
of suffering. And as you the more you see
this, the more you start to feel compassion for the world, not
only suffering, but the other aspect that also is a very
important. And the other aspect is the idea
again of non self. Yeah, the idea that people
aren't really responsible for the suffering, not responsible
for the condition they're in there.
They have been formed and shaped by society, by the world around
them, by causing conditions. And they have come to be the way
they are because of this cause and conditions in the world
around them. To see the world in this way
here. So this gives rise to
compassion. But don't focus too much on the
pure suffering. Yeah.
Because if you focus too much on the pure suffering, yeah, you
may end up becoming depressed. Oh, no.
So much suffering can't stand any longer.
It's true, right? If you see suffering all the
time, after a while you kind of give up.
And this is one of the reasons why I feel so terrible.
So you also need to focus on something else to find that
balance. That balance is what we call
compassion. If all you do is if you have
empathy for other people, if all you do is feel other people's
suffering, then it can get you down.
So remember that there's many beautiful qualities and people
as well. Yeah.
You come to a place like the Buddha Society, you come down to
a monastery. You look at people, many
ordinary people in the world, and very often you see beautiful
qualities in them. Despite the suffering, despite
the problems, they have beautiful hearts, they are kind,
they are generous, They have all of these wonderful qualities.
And what a wonderful thing that is in the world.
That means that there is hope, because if you develop those
good qualities inside of yourself, that kindness, that
care and all of those things, it means that you will also
ultimately be able to transcend the suffering, to go beyond it,
because that is precisely what is got.
Good qualities are about to see the suffering but also see the
goodness. And you know that if you help
out in the world, if you do good actions, if you're part, if you
are a blessing for the world rather becoming part of the
problem for the world, you will be able to help out and you will
be able to help other people develop good qualities and
reduce the suffering in the world.
And that is what real compassion is about.
When we see the hope and we see the potential for reducing
suffering ultimately coming out of it all together, then that is
what real compassion is about, the willingness to help out and
sort out the issues. Yeah, on a small scale.
Yeah. With our people around us.
That is kind of when it all comes together in a beautiful
way here. So this is the idea of
compassion and kindness. They're developing these
beautiful perceptions. That kind of then feedback into
our general kindness in our behaviour ultimately feeds back
in meditation practice. But there's one more perception
I want to talk to you about because these perceptions,
especially the ones I talk about now, they come in a, in a, in
three in the group of three things together.
And one of them is the kindness, the meta, if you like, or the
loving kindness. Sometimes The other one is the
compassion. And the third one, which is a
little bit more challenging, Yeah.
Is the idea of renunciation there.
So I'd give you one minute to leave before you start talking
about renunciation because this is kind of, this is, I told you
it's going to be scary, right? Everything in Buddhism is not
everything. Some things in Buddhism are kind
of scary. Renunciation is one of these
words, especially in the English language.
Yeah, renouncing sounds like you're giving something up and
getting nothing in return, right?
You just give up getting nothing in return.
That is not what it means in Buddhism.
That's kind of very important. Yeah, starting point.
If you give something up in Buddhism, it is always because
you're looking for something higher.
Yeah, it is always going for something higher.
That is the purpose. So renunciation is not really
scary if you think about it in the right way.
Actually, it is something very beautiful there.
We are aiming for something more.
That is why we renounce the law. We start off by renouncing
immorality, moving towards morality.
Yeah, this is what I have in mind there.
But to start it off, I want to tell another little story.
This is from another person I know quite well, someone who
this person is actually a Buddhist, but he was also a very
successful business person before he was a Buddhist
already, but before he kind of before.
Yeah, before something. Anyways, there's always
something before something else. So before.
Before something, so at some point he was a very successful
business. They built up this company from
scratch. It was an information company
that sold information about carbon markets or something like
that around the world. He built it up from nothing into
this big company and then it got sold off to this one of these
large information companies, Thomson Reuter or something like
that. And he became a very wealthy
person in the process, right. As as what happens when you sell
off a business like that. And then he was interviewed and
I saw this interview with him in a in a newspaper, right.
This was also in happens also to have been in Norway, actually in
the Norwegian newspaper. And he was interviewed by this
business newspaper. And they asked him the question.
They said to him, well, it must be very satisfactory to have
made so much money out of out of a good idea.
Yeah. So is it satisfactory to make a
lot of money out of a good idea? Yeah, maybe, But what?
He replied. And this was kind of what I
thought was really cool, he replied.
Well, actually making the money, yeah, that was just a
consequence. That was just like an arbitrary
result that would look like an additional thing that happened,
right? That was not what this was
about. This was about pursuing an idea
I was passionate about. This was about building up a
company to create something positive in the world.
It was not about making money. That was not what this was
about. That was just a consequence.
That was just an effect of doing the right thing here.
And I thought, wow, I'm so proud of this person.
Right here is a Buddhist showing for once that they have
understood a little bit about renunciation.
They're not doing things in the world to accumulate stuff, more
of the worldly things. All of this which is so
impermanent, unstable, unsatisfactory in the end in the
world. Why accumulate so much of that?
He did it for a heartfelt reason, because he knew it was
good to work hard, to build up a beautiful idea and to do
something positive in the world. I thought, wow, what a beautiful
thing. And then when the company was
sold, he made lots of money here.
And what did he use that money on?
Well, a large part of that money he set aside to build up a
Buddhist monastery here. Yeah.
He knew there was no real Buddhist monastery in Norway, at
least not in the kind of traditional sense of the idea of
the forest tradition with monks or nuns who meditate properly
and practice the part properly. So he wanted to establish a
monastery, for goodness sake. Yeah, it's like kind of
extraordinary. How many people in the world do
you find who are wealthy and they want to establish
monasteries all over the place? Yeah, it's not that many.
It's rare. You can count them on.
I don't know how many hands you need, but not that many hands,
right. And more than one hand,
probably. But anyway, so.
And so then he did that, and he established a monastery in
Norway. And that monastery is now
thriving. Yeah.
And he's doing very well. And he continues to support it,
establishing it, feeding it with a requisite amount of financial
support, but also other support. He's this kind of person with
endless support, endless giving all the time.
And this is a beautiful idea of renunciation.
Pronunciation begins with the idea of generosity here, of
giving to other people, giving to the world.
We forget the power of generosity.
And this is the start of renunciation here and of course,
generosity here. The reason why it is so powerful
is because it gives rise to so much joy if you do it in the
right way. Yeah.
And many of you know that. I know that a lot of people here
in the Buddha society are very, very generous people.
Because I know you, yeah, I've seen you in practice.
I know how you do these things. And what a beautiful thing it is
to watch people who are generous and you get genuine joy out of
the generosity. This is what it is about.
And the idea of generosity, one of the reason why it is so
closely related to renunciation, one of the ways you can see that
in the suitors. And I'll come back to the suit
as again come back to the word of the Buddha.
One of the things that is said about generosity in the suit as
it is explained in terms of certain words and one of the
words that is used. Some of these words are the same
as the words that you find for the third noble truth, which is
the noble truth of awakening. The Four Noble truths in
Buddhism suffering it's cause the ending of suffering in the
path leading to the end of the The third noble truth is about
awakening itself, and awakening is the highest thing that we're
looking for in Buddhism. If you compare that awakening
the way it is described in the third Noble Truth, you compare
that with how generosity is described in the suit as a it is
a similar kind of vocabulary that is used.
Isn't that kind of extraordinary?
What is that vocabulary? That vocabulary is a word called
Chaga. Chaga.
We have a monk called Chaga, by the way, actually, is he
generous? Yeah, he's pretty good.
But so we have a monk called Chaga.
Yeah, very nice monk. He's kind of very he's like a
teddy bear monk. But so he's very, very nice.
And actually all the monks are very nice.
Yeah. We have a bit of metagy.
We have so many nice monks. I don't, I don't think we have.
Do we have any non nice monks and metagy?
I don't think so. I think they're all I don't.
I'm not sure if we could say that anyway, but but actually
it's true, right? We don't really have any kind of
bad or evil monks or anything like that.
If you see an evil monk, let me know.
So don't tell me it's me. I would be really scary.
I think you so the words used, one of the words is chaga.
Chaga means like letting go, right?
Giving something up. Yeah.
It's a beautiful word. And so, charga, when you let go,
you give up. That is like giving, right?
Giving up. Quite literally giving.
Yeah. And of course, when you become
enlightened, you also give up. Yeah, except that you give up in
a deeper way. But the general movement of the
mind is the same. You give up something because
you're generous, or you give up something completely because of
awakening. The general idea is the same,
man. Another word for the idea of
generosity is mutti. Mutti means like freeing.
Yeah, you're freeing things by giving them away.
Mutti. In the Third Noble Truth
awakening, also you find the word mutti, you are freeing.
But now the freedom is at a higher stage.
But the general idea, again is the same.
Then you have the word pattinisanga.
Pattinisanga also means like letting go.
Yeah, it's the highest kind of letting go in Buddhism, in the
generosity. You find the word botsanga.
This is like a course in Pali, for goodness sake.
And then I'm using too many Pali words, botsanga, pattinisanga,
same root, same basic word. Yeah, means to let go, to give
up again. And so you find, and this is no
coincidence, you find that many of the same words are used for
generosity as you find for the awakening thing itself.
Isn't that extraordinary? Isn't that really interesting
here? It means that if you have a
feeling of generosity, if you really want to give, if you
really want to be part of this in the right way and you feel
you want to be generalized, it's a wonderful thing.
It means that you have a small taste of the idea of awakening
itself because the awakening itself is precisely this idea of
giving up, giving out, letting go of everything.
Yeah, yeah. So please don't underestimate
the idea of generosity on this part.
It is so foundational for everything in Buddhism.
Please practice it as much as you possibly can, but try to
make it come naturally. Make it something joyful, make
it something positive, because you know that doing something
beautiful by practising this generosity.
So for those of you who are already practising this, please
carry on. And for those of you who feel we
can do better, see if we can do better in this area, and it
doesn't matter so much where you are generous.
Yeah. What matters is that you do it.
But of course, the idea of renunciation, it goes even
deeper than that. Yeah, I'm not going to go all
that much deeper, but it goes deeper.
The beginning of renunciation is really just about, again, the
idea of generosity, but it goes deeper than that.
And the idea of renunciation is very closely tied in with the
idea of impermanence. Yeah, Anitsha, I talked about
this before. When you understand the
impermanence, the unreliability, the uncertainty of the world,
yeah, you take it becomes less interesting.
Yeah, because things that are uncertain, things that are
unreliable, things that we cannot count on.
Yeah. These are things that are not
really all that interesting. If you have an unreliable
friend, they don't become your friend for all that long.
Yeah, you soon you say goodbye because they're not reliable
enough in the same way. Oops.
OK. May you become well sooner and
wish you all the very best. OK, Conrad.
So the idea of impermanence is closely related to the idea of
renunciation, because when you see the problems in the world,
the uncertainty, you cannot hold onto anything.
Everything is always slipping between your fingers.
You can't really grasp onto things.
Then it becomes natural to not care about those things so much
anymore, and you start to renounce them.
And instead of holding to those things in the world that are so
unreliable and so uncertain, you start moving towards the
spiritual path instead where you actually, we can hold on to
things to some extent. We can do things that are more
you can keep for the longer term, things like kindness,
building up internal good qualities and all of these kind
of things. And so there again, the idea of
renouncing comes quite naturally here because you understand the
problems of the world, the impermanence of everything.
Yeah. You start to let it go.
And when you start to let it go, you set your sight on something
higher, something with real value, something with real
meaning. Yeah.
Something that actually takes you somewhere.
We gain something that really can sustain you for the long
run. Yeah.
And that is the spiritual path, the spiritual practice.
So let me just summarise for you very briefly what I've been
talking about talking for quite a while.
Probably talk too much. I apologise if I talk too much.
But anyway, this, this what happens.
So you start out, yeah, this path starts out, You start to
purify your perceptions. You look at the world in a more
way that aligns with the way the Buddha looked at the world.
More right view, more right perception.
And the more you purify these perceptions, the more they're
aligned with the way the Buddha taught and the Buddha saw the
world, which is seeing the world as it actually is, says the
Buddha. Yeah, we want to see reality.
Being deluded is no option. Yeah, if you're deluded, of
course you're going to suffer. Then from that, you purify your
morality. You become genuinely kind
because you understand that that is the only way to live your
life is real kindness, real compassion, even real
renunciation. And as you purify your mind in
this way, not holding onto the world, treating everyone with
kindness and fairness, then your meditation comes together.
Why? Because you feel really free and
good inside of yourself. You have renounced and you feel
good because you're living well. Your meditation starts to come
together and one day you start to experience those really
profound meditations that are earth shattering and change the
course of your life forever after.
These are the the deep states of samadhi that really make a
massive difference and you start to understand the meaning of
life itself, everything ultimately ending in awakening
itself at the very end of the path.
So this is how the development of perception works.
So if you think this is a good idea, then please, hopefully you
can make use of some of this in your life.
So that's the talk for tonight. Thank you very much.
OK everyone, so now you we give you a chance to make some
comments and ask some questions if you like Prem, Mr. Mr. Miri
Hagala over here can. We have a microphone over here
please to the just in front over here.
Thank you Ajen for the profound teaching to start the year.
Thank you. It's no secret that some deep
rooted habits get carried on from one life to the other.
Is it the perceptions that get carried over?
It, it is a mind that get carried, gets carried over,
right. And the one of the things I
didn't talk about is the kind of interplay of the different
factors of the mind. Because the mind that has, I
mean, we often divide the mind up into perceptions, thoughts
and views. This is a kind of a standard way
to divide up the mind. And there's one very interesting
suit that which talks about what is called the vipalas.
The vipalas are like the distortions of the mind or the
wrong, the kind of wrong attitude that we have to the
world. Yeah.
And those distortions are found at all of those levels or the
level of perception. Perception is like our immediate
sense of something, right? Perception, like our immediate,
how we make sense of the world straight away.
They're also found at the level of thought.
Yeah. Our thoughts are distorted, and
from those thoughts and perceptions we build up often
our views. So these things are all related
to sort of views, thoughts and perceptions, and they're all
distorted in a certain way. So we bring with us into this
life a whole bunch of distorted ideas, distorted, distorted
views of what things are actually like.
And so for that reason, the reshaping of our views, the
reshaping our perceptions and thoughts is such an important
thing because we come with all this baggage from the past.
Yeah, all of this messed, messed upness from the past and that is
what needs to be sorted out. Enable us to kind of get the
noble Apple path to start, because the noble Apple path
starts with the right view, and that's kind of where everything
comes together here. So I'm not clear if my question
was answered. And I'm not sure my I have no
idea whether it was answered. Yeah, habits.
I mean, it's no secret that like yourself, I mean one number of
times you have told us that you may have been a monkey in our
previous lives in some other margins as well.
How does that happen? How, what what gets?
Is it the karma or? Well, it's the same thing.
I mean, karma is one thing, habit is something slightly
different. It's not exactly the same
because karma is the the ethical aspect of your actions, right?
It's your intention. So, and, but habit is just what
you are doing again and again because you're used to it, it
doesn't necessarily have any ethical significance.
So there's 2 slightly different things.
So why am IA monk? Is it because of Kama, because
of habit? I don't know.
I, I think probably habit, right?
I just became a monk because I was a monk before.
So I just now I'm a monk again. There I, there's this nice, I
gave a talk about this many years ago, why I'm a Buddhist
monk. And there's a little booklet
about that now as well, which is available, available on the
Internet actually. And many people really like that
big booklet. So check it out.
I don't remember Mali. Why?
I'm a Buddhist monk, and you can see it, find it out in there.
But, you know, the main story that I tell in that book is
that, you know, when I came to Buddhism, initially I thought
that was because I'm really smart.
I'm a Buddhist. Yeah.
Because I'm really. I understand.
Yeah. I Chuck away all the nonsense in
the world. I kind of get to the choral
things because I'm really wise and smart person there.
But of course you quickly understand that this has to do
with ego. Yeah, once you kind of get into
that kind of way of thinking, it's not a good idea, you know,
that there's an ego plays it's role there.
So then I start to think, well, if I'm not very all that smart
necessarily, I could put aside the whole idea of smartness
because it may turn out to be completely irrelevant anyway,
whether you're smart or not so smart.
What's that got to do with it? Where does it come from?
Yeah. And that's when I started to
look into some of the things that I experienced in my as a
younger person. Yeah, in my younger years.
And I had some strange experiences, you know, just very
simple things, really like the idea of wanting to, when I was
12 years old, I wanted to live in a Hut in the forest by myself
and these kind of things, which I thought this is kind of weird,
But there were more than just that.
And that's where eventually it dawned on me that.
Well, maybe I you know, the reason I couldn't really explain
why I was a Buddhist monk. Yeah, I grew up in Norway.
There's just ice and snow. There's no Buddhist.
There's there's nothing going. On which we might remotely
reminds you of Buddhism. In Norway, we had no Buddhist
friends. My family certainly wasn't
Buddhist. They were a bunch of atheists
that didn't care about any religion at all.
And so then I, I, after a while, it came to me that probably the
reason is why it happened to me. I probably was a Buddhist monk
in the past. Yeah.
I'm doing this out of habit. And that's a scary moment, yeah.
Because you think that you're doing things because you're
wise. You think you're doing things
because it is right. But when you think, realise
you're doing it out of habit, it becomes kind of scary because
then you wonder, is it really right at all?
Maybe I'm just a dumb dumb who's just following my ancient habits
without really investigating properly.
It's the right answer. Then the moment you understand
that you're doing anything out of habit, including becoming a
Buddhist monk perhaps, well, then you start to think, OK, I'd
better investigate these teachings if they make sense or
not. I'd better investigate them very
carefully. I can't take anything for
granted, right? And that is where you start to
look at the Buddhist teachings. You read them really carefully,
you start to compare them with your own experience, and you
start to ask, do they really make sense?
And that is where the faith and confidence really becomes
powerful because you start to feel these are real things.
They're not just a habit I follow.
Actually, there's something very profound and beautiful going on
here. So this is kind of how we should
think, right? So at the moment you see a habit
in yourself. I'm habitually getting upset.
Everyone gets upset every now and again.
I'm habitually get that. And you think that is
frightening If I I'm habitually getting upset because if this is
an inheritance from my past life, it means I have this now.
Unless I get rid of it, I will carry that inheritance with me
also into the future. Yeah.
Very scary. I may not be Buddhist in the
future. Maybe you get born in Norway
next time. Prem.
Yeah, among all the, among all the snow and ice and whatever.
Yeah. And, and you, you, you may not,
maybe you would you, you'd be surprised.
You will enjoy the snow and ice once you get born into it.
You may now you may think it's a horror, but actually once you're
born into these things, you actually enjoy it.
Yeah. Because you get condition in a
different way. That is the danger habit is
very, very scary here. And This is why when you get
this feeling of how scary habit is, because you bring it with
you into the future, the idea of rebirth becomes very scary.
Yeah. You have no idea what's going to
happen next. You bring these things with you
into the future and the whole thing starts to look really
trouble, really troubling. Yeah.
And you gain energy to get out of this mess that we are in
there. So contemplating habits is very,
very useful. Thank you, Adrian.
I have some more questions, but I'll ask them another time.
Oh, Anton Bramley, thanks for the really wonderful talk.
You know, I have two related questions.
The first one is, you know, on as you Bramley, you know, do you
notice not the last few years now, maybe 4 + 2 the last six
years now. OK, there is some problem, you
know, in people's thinking, you know, the perception, you know,
people are less happy. I see like jittery impatience in
people, you know, you know, and you know, the negative also,
like in certain traits you deal with, dishonesty comes out too,
you know. So I take this to be from the
the mind, from the all people, OK, negative.
They have the negative imports from them.
They pollute, you know, you know, and also from the press
too. They pollute people's minds and
people become like that, you know?
Do you notice not I don't think it's racism from from, from my
point of view. It's just like that, you know,
people's thinking. Yeah, I, you know, that not, not
sorry, not put this by as happy as possible.
It's outside, you know, Yeah, I, I, I think it's true.
I think that how the leaders in the world, how they behave
effects everyone. Yeah.
And things tend to trickle down from the top.
And that is why it is so useful to have, you know, the worldly
leaders, they often get corrupted because the world is
corrupting and. When the world is corrupting,
leaders will get corrupt, not because the leaders are bad,
just because that's the nature of the world.
And so that is why it is so important to have alternative
leaders, you know, leaders of religion or leaders of
philosophy or leaders of spiritual paths.
As we have in Buddhism, we have something alternative and we
Buddhism also gets corrupted, right?
This is also the dangerous thing.
This is why you look around the Buddhist world.
You will find corruption in the Buddhist world as well, because
it is just a human condition. We get corrupted as human
beings. And so if what you are observing
in the world, maybe that's true, I don't know.
I can't really tell.
But maybe that is true that people are getting, you know,
more impatient or more bad or whatever.
But remember, that is just nature.
Nothing has gone wrong. Yeah, This is the nature of the
world. And whenever we see the world
and how impermanent and reliable it is and how and all these kind
of things, it is not because something has gone wrong and we
should write it and we should fix the world.
That is always the wrong way of thinking about it.
The right way of thinking about it is this is the nature of the
world, OK. The spiritual path becomes more
important. That is the right way of
thinking. Yeah, sorry.
The second part, you know, you know, you gave a talk few weeks
ago on the UN, you know, and how to, to, to introduce Buddhist,
you know, principles, maybe, you know, not to correct this, you
know, this mess you are in now, you know, maybe like how if you
can introduce some Buddhist principle, you know, like loving
kindness, all these, you know, the best place to introduce
Buddhist principles in your heart, that's the best place.
Yeah. Yeah.
The world outside is so difficult and complicated.
Yeah. You know, Right.
Yeah. Put them in your own heart.
That is the really the only place that you can put Buddhist
principles. Yeah.
That's what I recommend, yeah. Thank you.
OK, Eddie. All right.
Yeah, All right. Anyone else?
Yeah, please. Thank you, John Ramadi for the
talk. You mentioned that perception
and feeling are very closely knit.
So my question is about feeling being positive, neutral or
negative. So is so when let's say
sometimes perception can be changed by somebody saying
something to you and you can just see the reverse side of it.
So it could be a +1 and then someone says something and your
mind can jump to the negative. So is Buddhism all about keeping
it neutral or always trying to see the positive it?
Depends on the circumstance, right?
And in terms of when we move around the world in daily life,
then the very often keeping it neutral is the right thing
because we tend to move between being attracted to things and
being repelled by things. You see something nice and you
get attracted to it, you want it.
You get say something you don't like and you get repelled by it.
And ordinary life is often good. It's called sense restraint.
This is kind of evenness of the mind and ordinary life.
But in terms of spiritual qualities, it's important to
develop positive qualities. Yeah.
Joy, meta, compassion, all of these things are positive
feelings, and they are very, very important.
In fact, they are so important that the whole path of
meditation starts out with this positive feelings.
The Buddha has the six anusatis. Yeah, the six recollections that
we're doing. And this is really also what I'm
getting at with these perceptions.
These perceptions are really just another way of thinking
about these recollections that the Buddha's talking about.
Yeah. Recollecting the good things in
our life, building up those perceptions.
And as we build all of these things up, it also becomes
easier to remember the positive things because we're developing
the perceptions in the right way.
So it is a little bit time and place dependent, but certainly
the positive perceptions and feelings are very, very
significant for meditation to work.
Yeah. So when you're fully
enlightened, then does everything still have that joy
as well as the community? Both mingle together.
I don't think you even as fully enlightened, you're not always
joyful. You know, you can, you can often
be your economist. Probably, yeah.
And so often you probably have a very balanced mind.
But the joy can arise incredibly easily.
You know, you can kind of anytime, if you turn your mind
towards it, you will feel joyful because you have that access.
You don't have any deformers or problems.
So. Yeah.
So yes, please fire away. Hi.
Besides Buddhist texts or Buddhist teachings, what are the
knowledge or answers shall I be seeking?
You should be seeking the truth. Yeah.
I mean, one of, to me, one of the really beautiful things
about the Buddhism, and this is kind of where it really is
exceptional. It is a what I call a
naturalistic teaching. In other words, it is, it is
about, it's a description of the world rather than a description
of a faith, if you know what I mean.
Yeah. The Buddha says the world is not
what you think it is. The world is actually slightly
different. This is what the world is like.
This is the real description of the world.
And a very important part of that is this idea of non self.
Yeah, actually we think there's a self that's a delusion.
So the Buddha gives us a description of the world.
It's it's a naturalistic religion in the sense that it
reflects reality here. So if as long as we're seeking
truth, we're on the Buddhist path.
That's why I'm saying seek the truth.
But that was maybe not your question here.
Can I find the truth only through Buddhism or the?
Truth can be found anywhere where there's truth, yeah.
Science, hopefully, is truthful. That's kind of the purpose of
science is to find truth about the world, right?
Any kind of. So whenever there's truth,
there's truth. And this truth should align with
each other. If they don't align with each
other, there is a problem. We have to sort it out.
Thank you. You're welcome.
Yeah. Very good.
OK. Ben in the front table asked the
question. Bill, Bill and Ben, that's
that's right. So nice alliteration.
Hello. I'm going to ask about a secret
that you mentioned in the middle there.
You're talking about you remember?
I can't remember what did I. I was talking about Thor.
I think about you believe in him more than some creation and
stuff. OK, there was a secret involved.
Well, it's not a secret. It's just that the way that we,
it's interesting, the way that we think about kind of gods and
this kind of thing to me is really backward, you know, the
way we think about in the, especially in the kind of
Western world. I, I'm not so clear about how I
think these things I thought cut differently in many places in
Asia, at least traditionally. But in terms of Christianity,
there was a very fascinating book that I read long time ago,
kind of by a lady called Karen Armstrong.
She's this professor of the history of religion or whatever,
and she wrote a book called The History of God.
That's kind of really fast. The What do you mean the history
of God, right? Surely God is just God, right?
No, God is not God. God has evolved.
God started off as this kind of small, kind of small time king
almost in the Middle East, and he evolved stage by stage into
this universal kind of spirit that is really far removed.
In the early days, he was close to his people, the Israelis,
very close to them. Yeah.
They kind of hung out together. He prayed to him and he kind of
bestowed benevolence on his people.
And then he became more and more removed until he got kind of the
modern Christian God who is so removed you have kind of no idea
what what this God actually is. So it is kind of completely does
never interferes in human things or anything like that.
And it's kind of the history of God.
And so I started to ask myself which of this kind of God is
more aligned with Buddhist ideas.
And I realised that, you know, the, the Christian God is or the
not the Christian, but the creator God, The creator God
that is said to be permanent and always there or outside time and
space or however you want to define this creator God actually
makes no sense because it is something you can never
experience. You can never experience that
sort of thing, right? If you ask someone who believes
and they create that kind of, you can say, oh, I have
experienced God. Like what exactly was your
experience? And I will tell you something
that does not add up to those qualities of creating God,
because actually you cannot experience something that is
permanent and everlasting. Such an experience doesn't
exist. All our experience are limited
in time. They only last for so long.
Even the most profound somatic experience only lasts for so
long. And so the whole idea of a
creator God has to be man made. There's no other way around it.
And so then I realised that actually these are ordinary
gods. Yeah.
They're old Yahweh of the Old Testament.
Yeah. Odin and Thor, the Greek gods,
the Roman gods, the Hindu gods, all of these ordinary gods, they
are far more realistic because they're much more like us.
They die. They have desires, they have
husband and wives yeah, they have they war with each other
sometimes, depending on which kind of level of God you are.
They, you know, they, they, they are something we can experience,
something that we can relate to, much more realistic.
And so I think that although the history kind of religion says,
if you ask, you know, how we have become much more in the old
days, we used to think about this kind of really primitive
gods. Yeah, we kind of then we evolve
and we become more sophisticated.
And now we believe in this world spirit, the real creator God.
Yes, we have become really sophisticated and evolved.
I would say no, we haven't evolved at all.
We've gone backwards. Yeah, we are less realistic than
we used to be. The all the our way.
That was the real evolution. That's when we were on the top
of the game. Now we have lost the plot
completely here. That's why I say ordinary Thor,
much more interesting and realistic than this kind of some
of this permanent gods. Anyway, that's my kind of thank
you. You're very welcome.
I apologise for anyone who finds this offensive.
I, I just, this is the way I, I just think about things.
So yeah. Please, you were talking about
clarifying perception and how to clarify perception.
And I would ask, why is it so easy to go back into those
habitual patterns instead of moving towards that clarity,
even though that clarity feels fantastic and great and amazing
and you want to move towards it? And how do you actually do the
practices to move through the resistances?
And are there any like milestones or things that you're
just being like, OK, cool. I'm starting to be more mindful
and notice that I'm getting back into that path.
Yeah, that's basically what it is.
OK, cool. I'm getting more mindful.
That's kind of that's part, very large part of it.
But yeah, I'll, I'll go a little bit.
I'll say a bit more because that's a bit too short.
But yes, that's exactly. You have discovered what is kind
of the very difficult part of the path.
Yeah. That our habits are very strong.
Yeah. And because our habits are so
strong, it's very easy to fall back into those habits again.
Yeah. And even though deep down you
would like to move on, the habits are more powerful than
your will. The will is a very weak thing.
Yeah, the will is never going to win out.
The habits are always going to win out.
So you have to be sneaky. You have to sneak up on your
habits, right? So and being sneaky basically
means reconditioning your mind. And you have to think about
these ideas again and again and again.
And as you think about these ideas again and again, your mind
starts, you start to think in a different way.
The way I like to talk about, I'll talk about this, this is
kind of the way I have traditionally talked about this,
is that you can imagine yourself as a super tanker.
You know, the Super tankers, there's enormous ships, yeah, on
the ocean, they have like half a million tonnes of oil or
whatever. And they sometimes they go quite
fast and maybe do, you know, 20 knots or something.
Yeah. So 30 kilometres an hour and a
half a million tonnes of ship goes at 20 or 30 kilometres an
hour on the ocean. It takes a long time to turn
around, right? The kilometres and kilometres,
the momentum is so large. We are like super tankers.
The momentum from the past is enormous.
We're heading in a certain direction.
It takes a long, long, long time for us to turn around.
So just like the Super tanker kind of turns around 1° by 1°,
one degree 1°, slowly coming around in the same way you
recondition your mind, it's steadily 1° at the time until
and this is kind of the miracle until one day you have turned
around 180° and heading in the opposite direction from what you
were before. So you just have to be
persistent. You have to allow this beautiful
Buddhist brainwashing. Yeah, yeah.
Brainwashing, right? Brainwashing is you have to
allow because we get brainwashed anyway.
That's kind of the issue, right? So you have to just get the
right kind of brainwashing. So get the right kind of
brainwashing. And then eventually you will be
heading in a different direction, like keep on
investigating these teachings build up, right view, try to
your very best to understand what what is this Buddha talking
about? Yeah, maybe he's onto something.
Yeah. And then as you gain faith in
this teaching, something starts to happen inside of you.
And after a while, you don't really want to be unkind
anymore. You feel kind of aversion to non
kindness because, you know, it's just dangerous and bad.
And you turn away from that. Yeah.
And you. And it becomes very, very
beautiful after a while there. So don't give up.
That's the most important thing. Yeah.
All right.
Shall we take some questions from overseas?
Bill here. Good idea.
What was that there? Sounds like a good idea.
Good idea. OK, good.
So before before midnight strikes or whatever.
So, so so the first question is from Sydney.
Dear Alzan, I was just wondering how Buddhism views the truth and
reality behind war and in what way the Buddha teaches us to
show peace. OK, so the truth and reality
behind war. Well, this is basically a
consequence of human definements, right?
So when there are human definements like anger and
greed, war and delusion, war arises from those things.
And one of the, I think, very important causes of war, which I
find really kind of problematic, and one of the things that we
can do a lot better with as Buddhist is the sense of
identity that often goes into wars.
Yeah, people are proud of the nation.
You see people like, you know, the, like the war in Ukraine,
for example. Yeah, the Russians have a very
proud of the country, proud of the culture, and they want to
kind of, you know, have a Russian empire or whatever.
And I think there's a lot of this idea, the self view and the
self identity as a Russian is a very important 'cause behind
that war. And I think many, many wars in
history are this feeling that we are important, we are the best,
our culture matters so much is more.
And therefore we have the right to invade others and what what
what have you. This is terrible.
This is really, really bad idea. So what we'd need to do is
reduce our sense of identity. Yeah.
Understand that we are not better than other people.
We're just slightly different, slightly different culture.
So what essentially we're all the same.
No one is really any better. If anyone is better, it is the
noble people in the world. Yeah.
The areas, the ones who have really practised this path all
the way to the end. And so taking away some of this
conceit, some of this identity. Yeah.
I I find identity and I find nationalism really kind of
disturbing when I see nationalism around the world
because it all it means, it means that our country is is
better. It comes from insecurity, I
think very often. And it's a very ugly thing.
Yeah. And so Buddhism can bring in
some of this non identity business.
And I think that the world could do a lot, do quite a bit with
that, and that would already bring more peace.
But in the end, you know, we can do what we want as Buddhists,
but we are only a tiny minority on this planet.
And because we are only a tiny minority, we never really,
there's, there's no such thing as permanent peace.
There's no such thing as a final point where there would be no
conflict anymore. In the end, there's another
thing that we have to do that is practice the spiritual path in
your own life. And that is where you find real
peace inside of yourself. And that is the final refuge
from the problems of war in the world.
OK question #2 Dear Rajan, I was wondering what are your views
about advanced artificial intelligence such as ChatGPT?
Yeah, I don't know. It's probably just another turn
of Dukka. Dukka comes in various forms,
and Kajak TPT is 1 version of Dukka.
People think that it might destroy the world.
Maybe it will destroy the world. I I'm not so concerned about if
the world gets destroyed. Yeah, to me, that's not such a
big deal. I don't know why people are so
concerned about that. Because we reap the results of
our Comer. If you live well, if you do the
right thing, you're going to have a good future regardless of
what Chachi Petitis does or says.
Yeah, it's kind of irrelevant. So the end of the world is that
good or bad? The beginning of the world is
much worse than the end of the world.
Have you ever considered that before?
Yeah, If people say it's not the end of the world, you should say
no, no, no, it's not the beginning of the world.
Isn't that kind of, that's kind of that's the Buddhist way of
saying it. Yeah.
If it's not, it's not the beginning of the world.
It means it's OK. Yeah.
If it's the beginning of the world, wow, it's bad.
Yeah. So that's kind of the Buddhist
attitude to these things. So ChatGPT, it's just, you know,
it's like everything in our world.
It is our world is uncertain, it is unreliable.
So the right attitude to have to artificial intelligence is that
it is more uncertainty, more unreliability, more no idea
where this is heading and no idea what's going to happen.
Some people say artificial tales might destroy the human race.
Yeah, OK. I have no idea whether that's
true or not. Who knows?
But the point, that is not the point.
The point is uncertainty. The point is this is another
reason to practice the spiritual life precisely because of the
unreliability. That is what is important with
these things. Last question from London.
Hello London de Rajan, Even if you know deep down people are
suffering, if you get irritated by the facade, how do you stop
having ill will towards them? Even have meta towards them?
If you get irritated by the facade, remember that facades
are really just a sign of suffering, right?
So when you see that facade, know that actually, yes, it may
be irritating, it may be whatever, but actually really it
is just suffering that you're seeing.
You're staring into suffering when you're staring into a
facade that is kind of, you know, people put on some kind of
me, some kind of pretense or whatever it might be.
And I wish we were all more honest about our lives, that we
didn't pretend so much. Because when we are honest about
our own problems, our own difficulties, our own
shortcomings, it makes it also more acceptable for other people
to have suffering in the life, make them more acceptable for
them, too, to have shortcomings. If we pretend that our life is
great and wonderful, then we're kind of forcing other people to
also live according to the same pretence.
And everyone is pretending. Yeah, but it's beautiful when
some people are honest. Yeah.
Beautiful when people say it as it is because it allows all of
us to. Yes, we are part of the same
human race. We have the same problems, the
same issues in our life. So when you see that facade have
compassion, there's something going on there which is not very
nice, not very beautiful. Someone is really having
probably deeper problems down just behind that facade.
You know, sometimes we get it so wrong in the world.
You know, we worship all the wrong kind of people.
We have too much respect for movie stars and all these kind
of people. And movie stars often are these
people with glossy surfaces and with endless amount of suffering
behind the surface. Yeah, endless amount of
depression and problems and all of these kind of things.
These things arrive in those kind of circles.
Why? Because they live superficial
lives. And if you live a superficial
life, eventually it leads to suffering.
Yeah. There's nothing interesting in a
movie star. It's like yucky, basically.
Yeah. It's terrible stuff.
Who wants to have anything to do with that part of the world?
It's madness to kind of have some sort of respect for these
sort of people. There's nothing there.
There's no profundity. There's no real understanding.
Yeah. And so this is we're trying to
do the opposite. And the honesty with others and
with ourselves, I think it's a very beautiful thing and very
helpful to heal the world and heal ourself as a consequence.
Anyway, wonderful to see you all again there.
Very nice to be here at the Maluca Centre and I wish you all
a very nice night. A very nice week ahead and we'll
see you again soon. Let's have a pay respected
Buddha Damasanga before we finish off.