OK everyone, so welcome again. And we can start.
This evening's Dharma talk is going to be a continuation of
the theme that I was talking about two weeks ago.
And if you want to hear that was about the idea of developing the
perceptions of the mind, how to change our outlook, how to align
the way we see the world with the way the world actually is or
if you like with the way the Buddha taught the world is.
And two weeks ago I focused on a few kind of facts of life, which
some people think is a bit depressing, maybe talking about
old age, sickness and death kind of perennial optimistic themes
of Buddhism. And sometimes people think that
these things are kind of sad, and if you look at them in the
wrong way, they can of course appear like that.
But the reality is that if you focus on these things in the
right way, they actually give rise to a lot of positive mind
states because they guide you towards the spiritual path and
they guide you in the right direction.
But anyway, to balance things a little bit out, I'm going to
talk today more about some positive kind of perceptions,
how to develop the positive feelings within and how to see
the world in a kind of the positive light of things.
I'm going to focus in particular on the ideas of meta meta, which
is often translated as loving kindness or perhaps
friendliness, and on the other hand, on compassion.
And I may also focus on a few more things towards the end of
the talk. Yeah.
So that's going to be the the theme for today.
Is it how to develop these perceptions and these intentions
in your life to kind of to boost that happiness, part of the of,
of the spiritual practice and this idea of developing our
perceptions and our outlook is actually incredibly important on
the Buddhist path. It is important in the sense
that this is something you can do at almost any time.
Yeah. How we, the talk I gave two
weeks ago was entitled How everything Teaches you.
And the idea with how everything teaches you is the idea that
when we go about our daily activities in life and we just
observe the reality, observe the world, see how the world is.
If you know how to look at the world, how to observe it in the
right way, almost anything can teach you about existence, about
life, and about how how you know to learn more from the the life
around us so as to become more wise.
And this is just so if we know how to approach, how to look at
the world in the right way using some of the tools of Buddhism,
we can become wiser pretty much all the time.
And this is also what the perceptions I'm going to talk
about today are about. The benefit of these is that you
can do them all the time. So you can always kind of move
the mind in the right direction. So that spiritual practice is
not something that you come here on a Friday night.
Yeah, maybe you go, you go to a retreat every now and again down
at Jana Grove, maybe come to the monastery occasionally.
It's not like that. It's actually all the time, and
the only kind of spiritual practice that is really
worthwhile is the kind of practice that happens pretty
much all the time. That is, that is when real
development of the mind happens. Yes.
Every Friday at the Mallorca is Good Friday, not just today.
Yeah. This kind of the great things
about being a Buddhist. Every Friday is Good Friday.
Christianity, they have once a year, we have every Friday.
So it's kind of handy, but we want to make every minute kind
of the good minute. Yeah.
The, as I said in the, the famous suit of the bit of the
bad Ek rata suit, the one auspicious night.
The idea is to make every moment an auspicious moment.
And when you do that, then you're really making progress on
this path. And the reason why this matters
so much is because when we come into this world.
Yeah. At the very beginning of our, of
our lives, our minds are already incredibly distorted.
You know, the reality is that we come into this world, we don't
see things as they actually are. It is not as if we enter this
world as a blank slate, you know, with any, with no kind of
imprints on our mind or whatever this the idea is that we come
into this world already conditioned very, very heavily
from the past. Some people think we come into
this world with a blank slate, and then we are conditioned by
the society around us. But it's far worse than that
because the conditioning goes much, much, much deeper into the
past. And of course, this is where the
idea of Buddhist rebirth comes into the equation.
And so our conditioning is almost unfathomable there.
Yeah. It's impossible to really
understand how profound this conditioning is.
And because the conditioning is so unfathomable, because it's so
deep, because it goes back so far in time, it means that the
mind is controlled by very powerful forces.
These are the forces that force the mind to make the mind go in
a particular direction. And it's actually very hard to
turn the mind around. I like the idea of the mind or
the habits of the mind being a bit like a super tanker.
Yeah. When a super tanker is set in
motion on the ocean, these tankers are enormous, like half
a million tons. Yeah, of crude oil or iron ore.
Iron ore is kind of one of the favorite commodities of WA,
shipped out of WA onto the world's ocean.
But once that iron ore carrier gets out on the high seas and it
goes at full speed, 20 knots an hour or whatever it is, it takes
kilometres to turn it around. Yeah, many, many kilometres.
Because the momentum of that iron ore carrier is so enormous.
And our minds are like super tankers are like iron ore
carriers. Yeah, they have this enormous
momentum from the past that drives the moment forward, the
mind forward. These are the habits, these are
the regularities of the mind, things that are deeply imprinted
within us that are very hard to turn around.
And because it is so hard to turn around, because the
momentum from the past is so enormous, it means that every
time we change our perceptions, every time we guide the mind in
a new way towards something else.
Every time matters. Every time is important.
And if we can do it regularly, day in, day out, that is when
the Super tanker of the mind slowly, slowly, slowly changes
direction, moves in a different way.
And eventually the beautiful thing about the mind is that it
because it is habitual. What used to be bad habits
gradually turning around until it's 180° and then the bad
habits become good habits. And suddenly you can't avoid
doing the good things anymore because the mind now has a
different habit. And these, the problem is that
we are born with them. These are sometimes called the
distortions of the mind. Yeah, perversions of the mind.
There are wrong views about the reality, wrong perceptions about
the reality. We don't see the world as it
actually is. And there's a name, beautiful
word for this, in the suitors of the Buddha.
It's a word called vipalasa. Vipalasa means literally a
distortion. So we're born with these
distortions into the world and these distortions in the suit,
as are of three kinds. They are distortions of
perception, distortions of mind. Mind him is like thought,
thinking, distortions and distortions of view, perception,
thoughts and view. And these are like 3 different
layers, if you like, of the mind.
Perception is the most immediate thing.
Perception is how you see the world right away.
Yeah, right now when you're sitting here, you're perceiving
things, you're perceiving people, you're perceiving a talk
being given, you're perceiving the lines, you're perceiving the
room. Although these are perceptions,
this is how we make meaning out of the world, how we can make
sense of the world. But when we come into the world,
our perceptions are seriously distorted.
And I'll show you in a second how and why that is the case on
a higher level, because our perceptions are distorted.
The way we think about the world, the mind that we develop
from those basic perceptions. You have the thinking mind that
is also distorted because the thoughts are built up out of the
perceptions and then the thinking mind then makes creates
the views that we have. We view the world in a certain
way here. We have ideas about what is good
and bad. We have ideas about religions,
political parties, football teams, whatever it might be that
we have views about. You know, these are the views
that we build out of our thinking mind, whether Buddhism
is good or bad, whether we should be an atheist, whether we
should meditate or not, all of these kind of things.
And then the views, in turn, inform our perceptions.
Yeah. Because the way we look at the
world, the way we see the world, that becomes like the guidance
for our perceptions. So we have views about things,
and you see the world through the lens of those views.
And now you can start to see how trapped you are.
Right? You're not only trapped because
these things are very deeply ingrained from the deep, deep
past, but you're also trapped because it's like a circular
thing. Yeah, your perceptions inform
your thoughts, your thoughts inform your views, your views
inform your perceptions, and round and round it goes.
And it's very hard to see an escape from that cycle of how
the mind works. So if everything is distorted,
there's this reinforcement happening and it's hard to
break. And the way to break it is to
gradually recondition the mind, recondition that super tank so
it can move in a different direction and.
One of the most. Simple, most obvious ways of
doing that is to challenge our perceptions, to develop new
perceptions, to start to see the world in a new way here.
So what are those bad perceptions?
And what, how does the Buddha summarise these things?
And they can be spoken of in many different ways, but there's
four kind of main categories that the Buddha talks about.
Yeah. The first thing is that we tend
to see things as far more permanent, far more reliable
than they actually are. Yeah.
You know what it's like you see some kind of news on TV, or you
see someone die or you see someone get sick and you're
shocked. Yeah.
Wow, the world is going bad. This person died.
Oh, that's terrible. And of course, the reason why
you think it's terrible is because you don't haven't really
taken on board the idea of impermanence and unreliability
in the world. Yeah, things are really deeply
impermanent, and it's hard to take that on board.
And we have this feeling, this root distortion of the mind.
We see things as far more reliable and permanent than they
actually are. We see things as more happy than
they really are. We.
We chase after things that don't really provide much happiness,
not really understanding where happiness is to be found.
We have an illusion about things being happy when actually they
provide much suffering. Instead, we have an idea of
there being a self. You have an idea of yourself
existing in a certain way. This is the delusion of the
sense of self. I exist in a certain way, when
in fact you don't exist in the way that you think you do.
And the fourth one is the idea of beauty in the world.
We see beauty when in fact there isn't really anything beautiful
at all and we don't really appreciate those things that are
truly beautiful there. What are the things that are
truly beautiful? Well, this is one of the things,
the topics of today's talk, the idea of meta, the idea of loving
kindness and friendliness. The Buddha says when you develop
that fully, you are called subbang adimuti, Subbang
adimuta. Adimuta means focusing on what I
focus on subba. Subba means the beautiful.
That is what is beautiful. In Buddhism, when you have a
fully developed mind or heart of loving kindness, that is a truly
beautiful state of mind. The normal things in the world
that we think think of as beautiful, actually, they're
often very problematic. They change very fast.
They're not far less satisfactory than we think.
And the happiness that we get from them is often very shallow,
not very deep at all. So it's truly problematic.
Yeah. So these are the distortions.
This is the problem we are faced with.
It's a very serious problem, very deep problem.
And because it is so deep, we need to challenge it and we need
to develop the perception of the mind, to take the mind in
different direction. And one of these perceptions is
perceptions related to meta, to loving kindness, to
friendliness, to kindness towards all beings, including
ourselves. So how can we develop meta?
And one of the first things I think to answer before we talk
about that is to ask where does meta come from?
Yeah. What is the cause of meta?
What is the driving force behind it?
And once we can start to understand some of the driving
forces behind meta, we can start to understand the conditionality
behind this. Then we can start to understand
what it is that we have to do. Now, if you know the noble
effort path, the noble effort path starts with right view.
Yeah, there's a number one of the noble effort path.
The second factor, noble effort path often called right
intention or right purpose. Right aim is where we are
heading here as and Brown calls it right motivation, which is I
think OK, but I prefer right purpose for this term and the
right sama sanka. The second factor of the noble
hateful path is precisely about meta and Karuna.
Yeah, loving kindness and compassion, the intention of
these things. So the intention of these things
relies on perceiving these things.
Where does it come from? It comes from right view.
Right view leads to right intention.
If this is what right intention is about, Right view is a thing
that actually gives rise to meta, gives rise to compassion,
also gives rise to renunciation. If you have right view, you want
to renounce. I may come back to renunciation
later on. These are the three things I
want to talk about tonight. So what How does Right View
support the idea of meta? Well, remember the idea of right
view, a large part of this is the idea that the, you know, the
danger in the world of living in an immoral way, the danger in
the world of having a mind which is angry, which is negative,
which makes your head in the wrong direction.
Yeah, this is one of the big problems according to Right
View. When you have that kind of mind,
when you have the wrong kind of intentions, you will tend to do
bad things and you will reap the bad consequences.
And because, as I mentioned, many of these things like ill
will and anger, because they're often very deep seated, because
they come from the deep past, they are difficult to challenge.
And unless we challenge them, unless we do something with
these things in this. Life chances are we would bring
them with us into the next life and then into the next one and
carry on like that. And given the wrong
circumstances, given the wrong influence on the people around
us, who knows where you might get reborn in your next life.
And given all of these things that ill will, that anger, those
unwholesome roots, those unwholesome tendencies in the
mind will then maybe flourish. They will come out again and
become large, out of control, and they will become terrible,
have terrible consequences for you because of that.
So what we then need to do, we need to understand the sense of
kind of urgency with these things.
Yeah. We know that these things are
dangerous. We know that the leader's
astray. It is obvious that they do so in
this life, even more so perhaps in the future.
So now is the chance to do something, and that is the idea
of right view. These are dangerous things.
We need to deal with them. Unless we deal with them, we're
going to have to face the consequences in the future.
That is what gives you the motivation to deal with this,
right? Another motivation is, of
course, that if you have a heart of kindness and matter and
friendliness towards your fellow human beings, you feel good
about yourself. Yeah, it is a beautiful feeling
to feel a sense of kindness towards others.
You know it when you feel that. You feel kind of a warm heart
and you feel all of these positive feelings and it's
wonderful. Whereas ill will and anger makes
you feel isolated. It means you feel separated from
others, ruins your relationships.
No one likes to be around angry people.
It's just really unpleasant. And so this is the destructive
force in the world. And when you start to see this,
you understand this, just understand the urgency of doing
something with it, then the motivation is in place for
dealing with these incredibly unwholesome qualities.
So what do we need to do to develop Meta in reality?
And it's actually very simple. The development of meta
development of kindness and friendliness towards other
people and not only people but towards all beings really is
really about seeing the good side in other beings.
Seeing the positive in the people around you, seeing the
good qualities that are there. And if you start looking for the
good qualities in the world, in the people around you, there's
heaps of good qualities. Yeah, one of the, one of the
great things of being a big Buddhist monk, of course, is
that you, when you even when you travel around the world, and I
travel way too much these days, but when you travel around the
world, wherever you go, you meet so many wonderful people there.
And that is because when you are in Buddhist circles, there are
good people and people flock to this Buddhist centres and they
come there, they want to do the right thing, they want to live
well there. These are people with good
hearts. Yeah.
And they are everywhere in the world, wherever you travel
there. And when you open your eyes just
to try to see the reality of the world, it is often far better
than you think it is. You read the news and you think
the world is a terrible place. But then when you meet the
reality and you start to look at what actually is happening, the
world isn't so bad at all. And this is one of the things I
love about coming here to Damaloca Centre here.
When you come here, you meet good people, right?
Is there anyone here who is badder?
I told you no one is bad. I like this quote.
My favorite question on Friday night.
Is there anyone here who is not good?
No one ever raises their hand. It always works every single
time. That's good.
I'm glad we have the self-confidence to think of
yourself as a good person. Some people have a low self
esteem. Please don't have to.
Please, please kind of praise yourself for the good things
that you do. Yeah.
Don't have low self esteem because the fact that you are
here means that you're already worthy of having good self
esteem because you know you're doing the right thing.
Yeah. So this is great.
What is it about people here that makes them, makes them
beautiful? What is it about people here
that they are worthy of respect? Well, it is not because they are
perfect. It is not because they always do
the right thing. Yeah.
But the fact that they are inclining in that way, the fact
that their intention is to be good, the fact that they want to
be kind. Yeah.
Everyone who comes here wants to be kind.
Otherwise, what are you doing here?
Yeah, it's kind of obvious. Who wants to be peaceful, sit
down, meditate, unless you also want to be a good person.
And everyone here has that intention.
And anyone who has that intention, anyone who has that
wish, anyone who is leaning in that direction is worthy of
respect, worthy of praise, worthy of loving kindness, of
friendliness, and all of these things.
You're all worthy of that. And look at the people around
you and you will see other people also worthy of that.
And this is how you develop matter.
Look at the good qualities that are there.
Look at the little things that people do.
Yeah, around you. The way they speak with
kindness, sometimes the way they do beautiful things.
There's a lot of beautiful things happening in a place like
this. At the very least, people's
intentions are very powerful and beautiful there.
This is how meta arises. I try to do the same thing in
the monastery. Maybe my fellow monks don't
won't believe that, but it's true.
I try to look at my feather monks and see the good qualities
and actually it's quite easy to see in my feather monks because
they are really, really good people.
You don't become a monk unless you have some very powerful
forces for one thing to do the good thing in the world.
And I think I've mentioned this here before, one of my favourite
quotes from the suitors. I got many favorite quotes.
This is one of them. You know, one of about 10,000
favorite quotes. So, you know, but the suitors
are full of these kind of things.
And this is the quote where the three kind of these are the
three kind of examples of good monks in the suitors and the
Rudda Kimbella and the Nandiya and the Buddha comes to them
because the Buddha likes to see the good monks.
Yeah, the the ones who are practising for to become
Arahans, the ones whose meditation is going really,
really well. And then he asked them, He says,
are you, are you living in harmony?
Yeah. And then they say, yes, we are
living in harmony here. How do you live in harmony here?
And then he answered, this is Venable and the Ruddai, the
great monk. And he answers, the way we live
in harmony is like this. When I look at my 2 feather
monks, Kimball and Andia, I think how fortunate I am, how
very fortunate I am to have companions like this in the
spiritual life. Such a beautiful sentiment,
right? This is what loving kindness is
about. Loving kindness is the idea that
you really rejoice in having people like this around you.
People who want to do the right thing, people who are leaning in
the right direction, people with good hearts, people who want to
do something in this world that is positive both for themselves
and for others. Because this always goes
together. How fortunate we are, how very
fortunate we are to have companions like this in the
spiritual. Life.
When you start to feel like that, look like that, at the
people around you here at the Buddha Society, at the
monastery, at the Buddhist around the world, at anyone
around the world who is kind, kindness is found in everywhere,
regardless of religion or background or nationality or
gender or handicaps or whatever it might be here, it's found
everywhere, then you are truly developing loving kindness.
And this is how he talks about this.
And then he says when we live together, we blend like milk and
water. Milk and water blends perfectly.
Yeah. There's no separation as there
is with water and oil. When it's separate, milk and
water blends perfectly. And then he says that, well, if
these other venerables want to do something, yeah, I will
change my mind and do what they want to do.
Yeah, the idea of just giving up when selfish desires and go
where what someone else wants to do, it doesn't matter so much.
Yeah, whether we get our will or not.
What matters is the harmony. That we produce in a place in
the Buddhist aside, in a monastery, wherever it is.
So this is some of the ideas of loving kindness.
Yeah. Seeing the good in other people,
understanding how incredibly fortunate you are to be part of
a Buddhist society. It is not a given that there
should be a Buddhist society here in Perth.
Perth is a small city on the edge of the world, right?
We are far away from everything else.
It's nothing is further away than Perth.
Yeah. And if you look around the
world, they look at the big cities of the world, New York,
Tokyo, London, Paris. Yeah, Berlin, whatever it is,
Rio de Janeiro. Yeah, Toronto, the large, really
large Sydney, even on the East Coast, the large cities of the
world there, there's nowhere that has anything quite like
this Buddhist society here. Sometimes we don't know how
fortunate we are here. This is a very powerful place,
small, little Perth. We have this beautiful spiritual
community together here. That's extraordinary here, with
a leader like Ajambram who kind of brings up the level of
spirituality to an entirely new level.
Yeah. Wow, how fortunate I am to have
people like this in my life. And when you start to see that,
you start to develop that loving kindness.
This is what loving kindness, It's what meta really is about.
There's a beautiful similarly in the Suitors where the Buddha
explains the idea of meta, of friendliness, kindness, love if
you like, and he says that it is like a mug, a monk or maybe a
nun. A rag robe wearing monk.
Yeah, we don't have any rag robe wearing monks here, but is it?
We have a few at the monastery. That's not, No, that's not,
that's not very nice robe. But we all have a few patches on
our robes, but not quite rag robs yet.
And it is beautiful to have a rag robe, actually, because it's
really worthless piece of cloth. Yeah.
I had a rag robe when I was a really young monkey.
It was just completely rags. There was nothing left of the
original robe. And I was wandering through the
airports of the world in these rags, and people were looking at
me. They were kind of, oh, what's
going on here? That was really cool.
I really enjoyed that. That was one of the highlights
of my young monastic life, wandering around like this.
And so the Buddha says there was a rag Rob wearing Monk.
Yeah. Or none, Like he says monk, but
none's probably maybe 2. And when a rag Rob wearing monk
is wandering around, he's always looking for rags.
Yeah. Because if you have a rag robe,
it means it's always falling apart.
It means that things are wearing out.
You need rags on top of the old rags.
Whatever sort of kind of, you know, becomes very thick after a
while. He's always looking out for rags
as you walk along the road and you see a rag on the roadside.
And So what does the rag rope wearing monk do?
Well, what he does, he takes this rag and he spreads it out.
He stands on one side with his left foot and he spreads it out
with the right foot. And so he gets an overview of
that rag. He sees the whole width of that
rag. And then when?
He sees the whole scope of the rag.
He sees part of it is rotten, part of it is dirty.
It will not do even for a rag, not even do, not even for his
rag, Rob. But the other part is nice, so
it tears it in half. He tears off the section that is
useless. He chucks it out in the
spittoon. There's no spittoon here in the
monastery. We have nice spittoons to Chuck
bad rags into, but there's no spittoon here, so we'll have to
just Chuck it on the, I don't know, on, on the sorcery thing.
Yeah, there you are. OK, rag, bad rag is now there.
And then he takes the good part of the rag, the intact section
of the rag. He folds it up.
Yeah, and takes it with him so that he has the rag to be able
to use in the future, takes it into his pocket to carries it
with him. And then the Buddha says it's
exactly the same thing with people.
You put people, you kind of spread them out in your mind's
eye. Here, spreading, spreading out
the person means seeing all their qualities, all from the
good ones all the way to the bad ones.
The bad qualities are over here, the good qualities are here.
You tear it off in the middle here.
You scrunch out those bad qualities.
Maybe you write them down on toilet paper, whack them into
the toilet, flush the toilet and out they go.
Then you take. The good qualities are left, you
fold them up nicely here, you take them within, put them in
your robe, carry them with you into the future.
This is what you keep in your mind.
In other words, the point is we focus on the good qualities.
We store the good qualities of other people in our mind and we
bring that with us into the future.
We Chuck out the rubbish. The rubbish is the bad qualities
of other people. We don't focus on that because
why? Because it is useless.
It doesn't help us in our spiritual practice.
This is the way we deal with that.
If you have people that you find sometimes a little bit
difficult, and I'm sure that there are people even here in
the Buddhist society who irritate you sometimes.
Yeah. Just like is anyone in this
world who is not a little bit irritating.
Here we are all a. Little bit irritating, right?
This is the problem. Every one of us is a bit
irritating, not because we really are irritated, but
because people perceive us that way.
It's just the way the world works.
But when you see the big picture, you can allow that
irritation to be because the big picture is beautiful.
The intention where that person is travelling, that is beautiful
and that is what we see and we crunch up the rest with.
Check it out. Why?
Because it's rubbish. Now sometimes people say, well
isn't that just denial of reality?
Surely people have good qualities.
If you just focus on the good ones and you deny the bad ones,
isn't that just, Aren't we supposed to see reality as it
actually is? Isn't that the purpose of the
Buddhist teachings? Yes it is.
But remember, there is no reality when it comes to people.
One person will relate to another person in one way.
Another person would relate to exactly the same person a
different way. One person's friend is another
person's enemy. There isn't really a neutral
objective person that we can say this is how this person is.
And because there isn't any objective person, there's a
wrong question to ask. What is this person like?
The right question is to ask, rather, is how do we focus on
that person so as to develop and optimise our own?
Spiritual qualities. That is the right question to
ask because the reality there is, there is no reality for how
a person is, there is only how to focus on that person.
So that is the right answer, and that is why we do this kind of
practice. Then you are on the right track.
Yeah. Then you're heading in the right
direction here. Now there's a nice story.
I I think I told this story here before.
I'm sure I told this story here before, but I, I can't remember
when it was last. Maybe it was 2 weeks ago.
No, I don't think so. But this is a nice story from
the Viner Pittaca. The Viner Pittaca is the kind of
the book of the rules and regulations for the monastics.
It's an era that lay people know very little about.
How many people have I read the Vineya Pittaca?
0 persons. Yeah, except for my my 2 fellow
monks here, perhaps. But very few people read it.
So that's there are stories in there that no one has ever
heard. Yeah.
Because they are kind of deep into the kind of backwaters of
the Buddhist Canon. So one of the stories in there
is this beautiful story of this rag robe monk.
We're talking about rag robe monks, right, Right.
Right now. So one of the places that the
rag robe monks would get their rags, sometimes the rags were
not available on the roadside. Or if you go to the, you know,
the, the shops or whatever, sometimes we have to go to the
channel ground. The channel ground is where the
corpses get put out and like kind of the first of all, you
put them there and later on you might burn them.
That's the charnel ground. It's a really kind of scary
place. Yeah.
Lots of ghosts. Don't go there if you don't like
ghosts. No, that's why you should go
there if it. If you don't like ghosts or if
you like ghosts, go to the charming ground.
Yeah, ghosts are cool. So check out the ghosts in the
charming ground. If you see.
A ghost, one of the best thing that ever happened to you
because it opens your eyes to a new reality.
So please welcome the ghosts in your life.
And so this monkey goes to the charm ground because the corpses
get thrown there. And when the corpses get thrown
on the charm ground, they are usually wrapped in cloth, right?
But because it's a corpse, they don't really need that cloth
anymore. So we can take the cloth from
that corpse, or so you would think.
Yeah. So this monk, he goes to charm
ground. There's a fresh corpse, maybe a
little bit too fresh, right? It has to be careful, not too
fresh. So he goes to the corpse and it
starts unravelling the cloth because it's kind of wrapped in
cloth. And as he unravels the cloth
from this corpse, the corpse opens his mouth and says, don't
take my cloth. And the monk goes, what?
Wang said. Shut up.
You're dead. Yeah.
You have no say in this. I'm going to take your cloth
whether you like it or not. You have no say.
Dead corpses don't have any property rights.
Yeah. So you are out.
And so this monkey continues kind of pulling off the cloth
until he's got everything, the poor corpse now completely
naked. Yeah.
And he starts walking off. And when he starts walking off,
the corpse gets up. This is the original zombie
movie. Yeah.
From 2500 years ago. This is where all the zombie
movies originate from. This story in the Vinabitica,
The Buddhists had it first. Everything is first in Buddhism.
Yeah. Why?
Because we have one of the all the scriptures in the world.
The corpse gets up, the zombie gets up and follows are falling
off this monk as the monk turns around and looks around.
And this is a zombie. I don't mean you're venerable.
It sees a. It sees a zombie.
And then he starts to run. He is frightened for his life as
he runs with his cloth zombie coming behind.
You can start to see how this is working, Right?
And he gets to his cootie. The cootie is hot in the forest.
He runs in, slams the door, and he kind of wipes the sweat from
his forehead, Right. And the zombie comes, and then
it falls down just outside of his cootie.
Yeah. Exhausted from following this
monk all along. Yeah.
And then the kind of the monk finally happy.
And then the Buddha, you know, then the story kind of gets out.
Yes, the story gets out. OK.
There's, there's this kind of monk who kind of was followed by
a zombie. There's, there's no word for
zombie in the party language. But, you know, you have, you get
the idea. There's a word for corpse.
And so the Buddha lays down the rule.
Yeah. But when you when you take the
cloth from the corpse, you should wait till the corpse is
cold. If the corpse is still warm,
there might be still a consciousness attached to it.
It might get up and it might follow you behind.
Yeah. So don't take cloth from a
corpse that is still warm. This is one of the rules for
monastics. This is why we have so many
rules right now. You know why we have such
enormous number of rules? Because this is one of the rules
that we have to follow. Don't take love from a corpse.
That is too, too. And lots of rules like that that
are pretty kind of obscure and amazing here.
Have you ever heard that rule before?
Yeah, It's a pretty good rule, right?
It's good, good advice. If you're a layperson and you
ever happen to be in the vicinity of a corpse, you know
what you should not be doing. Yeah.
So you have meta also for corpses.
That's what I really wanted to say.
Perhaps I'm not sure what I wanted to say, but that's kind
of what I compassion and meta also for the corpses.
So this is the idea of meta in practice.
Yeah, the practice. Seeing the good qualities in
other people, seeing what is there, and then having a sense
of warmth and friendliness and kindness to them as a
consequence. This is how you develop this.
This is how you make meta meditation possible because you
are already seeing the good in people around you.
Then you can wish them well. Then you can say may all beings
be happy and well. But unless you have developed
these perceptions beforehand, perceptions that go against your
deep conditioning from the past, probably you will not succeed
with your metal meditation. You have to get the stages
right, overcoming the ill will, overcoming the problems.
Then it is possible that that these things may actually work
out. So that is the first one.
The second one I wanted to talk about is the idea of compassion.
Compassion is also one of the fundamental kind of building
blocks of Buddhist morality. Yeah, Buddhist morality comes
from the idea of meta, and compassion builds up from that.
And then the right speed, the right action, the right
thoughts, all of that comes really from these fundamental
building blocks. So what about compassion?
What is that based on? I was saying before that meta is
based on right view because this is Sama Sang Kappa coming from
Sama. Didi the right view?
So what is the, what is the foundation for compassion?
And compassion is built on also on the idea of the right view,
of course, that of suffering in the world.
Yeah, but there is problems in the world.
There is suffering. I said before that one of the
distortions of the mind is that we tend to see happiness where
in fact there is suffering. Yeah.
So this is a very important part of that distortion.
You want to rectify that view as you start to become better at
understanding the suffering of human beings.
It's very often it's quite common for people to think that
our suffering is somehow unique. Yeah, I suffer.
And you feel very sorry for yourself.
But actually our suffering is very much the same around the
world. Everyone suffers, everyone is
pretty much in the same boat. And when you start to see that
in the world, that is one of the basis for compassion to arise,
obviously. But there is another aspect to
this idea of right view that gives rise to compassion.
And you may be surprised by this aspect.
That is the aspect of non self, the aspect that there is no
inherent aspect to a human being.
Because if there is no inherent aspect or an inherent essence to
a human being, what there is then is just conditions.
Yeah, what we are, what we are is the sum total of all the
conditions that work on us in past lives, also in the present
life, also right now. That is who we are.
We're nothing really, apart from all this conditioning that has
worked on us for a very, very long time.
So these two things give rise to compassion.
The first one, understanding the suffering in the world, that
gives rise to compassion. When you see the disasters in
the world, you see the wars, you see the people getting killed,
you see the natural disasters, you see the traffic accidents,
you see the fires, right, Bush fires right here in WA and you
feel for those people there. And compassion means that you
want to do something about it. Yeah, compassion is a driver to
action there. You want to act to help those
people there. So it's not just about fellow
feeling, fellow feeling or feeling feeling their pain,
that's more like empathy, but it's also the desire to help,
the desire to create a better world, that is really what
compassion is about. So when you see all of these
things in the world you actually want, you realise that health is
important because we are not really responsible for this
suffering. It comes to us unbidden.
We get sick, natural disasters, whatever, but we can take this
one stage further. And this is where it starts to
get very interesting. Yeah.
Because one of the some of the people that often difficult to
far have compassion for. It is relatively easy to have
compassion for all the victims in the world, right?
The people who are the victims of war, the victims of violence,
the victims and all of these kind of things.
But is it possible to also have compassion for the perpetrators
of all the crimes in the world? And of course the answer is yes.
And this is where it gets very interesting because now you can
expand the compassion out, not just to those people who are
obviously deserve compassion, but you can expand it out to
humanity as a whole. Not just humanity, in fact, all
beings as a whole. Because when you understand the
idea of non self, when you understand that we are just the
product of all the condition, it has worked on us into the
unfathomable past, Once you understand that, you understand
that we are actually the victims of that conditioning.
So if someone is conditioned in a bad way, whatever bad way that
might be in previous lives as well, they may be even the
perpetrators of crimes in this life.
But because there is no self, there is no inherent essence
that can withstand the conditioning from outside.
They have been formed into what they are by external, external
conditioning, and they don't really have the ability to
withstand that. They can't.
They can't withstand it precisely because there is
nothing inherent that can withstand the forces of the
world around us. And when you start to look at
people in this way, when you start to see that people,
everyone in this world is a product of the conditioning
here, is a function of the conditioning here.
You start to see that we are trapped in our personalities.
We are trapped in our habits. We are trapped by the way we
have been formed over all this time, over all this infallible
past, going back as far as we can possibly think.
Yeah, once you look at ourselves in that way, that you are
trapped in your personality, trapped in your character
traits, then you can have compassion for almost anyone.
And one of the things that I sometimes like to do when I see
people wherever they are, and sometimes you see people maybe
doing bad things, doing silly things.
When I see that, I sometimes visualise this person as inside
a bubble. They are inside a bubble and
they cannot penetrate. They cannot get out of that
bubble. That bubble, to me signifies the
conditioning. It signifies the habits, it
signifies the bad trait. It signifies the personality,
all the aspects of the personality.
They cannot break out of the personality, right?
Have you ever tried to be someone you are not?
Have you tried to be not yourself?
I'm going to break out of my personality, be someone else.
You can't do that, right? You are given these traits that
have been formed of a long period of time.
That is what you have to deal with.
These are the cards that you've been dealt in this life and you
can't really do anything else. You're trapped in that bubble.
So when I see a person doing stupid things, trapped in that
bubble of personality and conditioning here, I have
compassion for them because I know at that moment they are
incapable of doing anything else than the silly thing they're
doing here. And there's something very
beautiful that happens when you think like that.
It changes your entire outlook on the world.
Instead of blaming others for their vadnais, instead of
getting angry for the bad things in the world, you start to
extend the compassion to everyone.
Instead of limiting it to certain people who are the
victims, you also include the perpetrators or even the
greatest crimes in humanity because you understand the
limits of what we can do as individuals.
And I know many people think this is crazy way of thinking
about the world, but actually it follows naturally from the
Buddhist idea of a non self. The reason why people think it
is a crazy way of thinking about the world is because they feel I
have agency. They feel I am responsible,
right? Everyone of you here would
probably feel that to some extent.
Yeah, I am responsible for my own life.
And because it feels as if we are responsible for things, it
is very hard to see how conditioned we actually are.
But the Buddha says you cannot choose your choices.
Your choices are given to you by the conditioning from the past.
It's one of the most famous words of the Buddha, found in
the Anata Lakana Suta. The Anata Laka means the.
The Lakana is like the Aspects or the OR.
The aspects of non self yeah, very, very famous suit.
There is no choice about your choices.
Your choices are pre programmed for you.
Even though it feels like you have that agency that you can
choose differently. Actually, you're already bound.
This is the entire idea of the non self teaching of Buddhism.
It actually goes beyond that. That is a very important part of
it. That is why we get it wrong.
That is why we don't understand the world in the right way here.
So expand your heart to include everyone.
Don't exclude anyone in the whole world.
Everyone is trapped in the conditioning.
Yeah, one day you will be in the shoes of that perpetrator.
You too may do those things that the perpetrator does today here.
You may read about some terrible crime in the newspapers and you
may think that is terrible. If I should do that, no way I'm
ever going to do that. I am better than that.
But that is because you have the wrong view of a self.
If you understood the idea of non self, you would understand
that you are fully capable of doing that crime given the right
circumstances. That is what is so scary.
That is a problem of conditioning in this world.
So have compassion for that person, because when you have
compassion for that person, you also have compassion for
yourself because you too may one day be doing similar kind of
things. There's a beautiful similarly,
again by the Buddha to talk about compassion.
And the Buddha says. This is like seeing someone
travelling on a desert Rd. travelling through the
wilderness. And this person travelling
through the wilderness, they are sick, they are ill, they have a
grave sickness. In other words, they are kind of
move going towards their death. But as they are going through
this wilderness, there is no doctor, there is no food, there
is no medicine, there is no village nearby where you can go
to rest and maybe be looked after.
There is no nurse. There is nothing to look after
this person. And if you're from afar, you
look at this person, you see them walking on this road, what
do you feel? You feel sympathy, you feel
compassion, you feel concerned. You feel may this person find a
doctor, a nurse, some food, some medicine, a village where they
can be looked after her. Why?
Because unless they find that support, they will meet with
disaster, they will die because they are basically heading for
that when the illness is so bad and.
The Buddha says it is exactly the same thing if you see a bad
person in this world, and by a bad person it says someone who
has bad conduct by body, bad conduct by speech and bad
conduct by mind. In other words, all the aspects
of that person are bad. When you see a person like that,
they are like a sick person. Why are they like a sick person?
Well, because in exactly the same way as that sick person is
walking towards their own death and demise, in the same way that
person with all that bad conduct is walking towards their own
enormous suffering in the future.
Because bad people generally have to reap the bad
consequences of their actions. So once you start to see people
who are bad not as terrible people who willingly do bad
things because they have agency. No, instead they are conditioned
to do what they are doing. They very often they have no
choice. They are like a sick person.
They are walking in darkness. They are deluded.
They have no idea what's going on.
They don't even understand that they're doing bad things.
Most bad people think they're doing good things.
They think they're doing things to create happiness in the world
and for themselves, when in fact they're doing the exact
opposite. Is almost tragic in a sense,
when you think about it that way.
Delusion is so powerful, leading us astray, leading us on the
wrong track. Yeah, the bad people in the
world are sick people. They don't know what they're
doing. Yeah, once you start to see
people in that way, you can have compassion.
I guarantee you, for everyone in the world, all you have to do
change your perception, see things in accordance with the
perception of compassion and kindness.
And when you do that, then the meta and the compassion will
start to arise as a consequence. So this is how you change your
outlook. This is how you change your
perception. As you change your perception in
this way, you look at people with new eyes.
You think about the world in a new way.
You start to think with more care.
And as you think with more care, your view is gradually changing
as well. You view people in a new way.
The whole world becomes a more beautiful and bright place, a
more hopeful place. Why?
Because you understand that there are actually solutions and
the first and foremost place to find that solution is in your
own life. And this is how gradually it
comes out. You're building yourself up.
And as you build yourself up in this way and you start
practising accordingly, one day you will sit here on the Good
Friday at the Mallorca Centre. Yeah, every Friday again is a
Good Friday. Whenever you come here is a Good
Friday, You will sit here and you will start to feel these
emotions in your own life building up within you.
Compassion meta more and more and more, and you start to
understand what the Buddha means when he starts to talk about
developing meta and compassion in your meditation.
Eventually this will go all the way to attain a very profound
state of samadhi based on these beautiful qualities.
These are the foundation of the spiritual path.
This is how you build them up gradually and eventually
reaching the very high stages of the path itself.
I was going to talk about renunciation where I thought I
was going to talk about that, but that will have to be another
time because time is already up. That's the talk for this
evening, yeah. OK.
So very good everyone. So are there any questions or
comments about today's talk? Please.
My on, yes, sorry, just just question I suppose about
perception thought and view that for myself, I my clinical
psychologist and so I talk a lot about people with their
thoughts, impact on their thoughts.
So I suppose I view thoughts coming first to impact on the
perception. Yeah, and a perception and view,
very similar. Perception and view.
Yeah. Perception.
OK, so perception are much more immediate.
Yeah. Perception is what you see
straight away. You look at someone, you see
friend. Yeah.
Or you see maybe not friend or depending on who the person is.
It's kind of an immediate thing. Yeah.
View is more a considered thing. Yeah.
So it's like, OK, how do you, you know, how do you, what is
your religion or what is your view about religions?
Or is it more a considered kind of thing, a view?
It's more like a broader outlook.
Perception is more immediate. The thought is somewhere in
between, but you're right, you can't really start to work on
this circle anywhere. You can start to work.
Perception is one place, but you can also the thinking.
Of course, you can also change. In fact, thinking and perception
are very closely linked to each other because by changing your
thinking, you're changing your perceptions.
Yeah, these things are all kind of go together in a sense.
So you think and you and then you kind of by looking at this
person in a new way, by reminding yourself that they
have these good qualities, then your perception changes.
Yeah. So thought would normally be
very much part of that process. Absolutely.
Yeah, yeah. OK.
Thank you. Yeah, OK.
That's yeah. Everyone OK.
OK, good. So.
OK, well you still have a nice shaved head.
That's that's great. Yeah.
So he had his head shaved recently in for to raise funds
for the one of the monasteries in Perth.
That's really nice. Isn't it so?
So still has shaved heads. Obviously enjoyed that, which is
great. OK so a few questions from
outside of the Buddhist society we have from Tom in the Czech
Republic. Dear Adam, I had a fever last
night and my mind went totally crazy.
I had a lot of weird thoughts in my head and I couldn't stop
them. This experience made me realise
how our mind is out of our control.
This realisation however felt quite scary.
How to accept this in a positive way here?
So the the the way to accept this is like.
This is, you know, one of those things about when the Buddha
talks about our misunderstanding of reality.
Well, this is a very big part of it.
This is the idea that everything is impermanent.
Everything is always subject to change.
And we don't really understand how impermanent things are.
Things change so fast. Yeah, this is kind of the
problem. And often the conditions that
build up under the surface and then they reach a certain kind
of momentum, all these conditions together, suddenly
things start to fall apart and you wonder what's happening,
what's going on. Yeah.
Things are just, it's like climate change, all the causes
kind of coming together. And one day it may turn out to
be really bad. Yeah.
We don't know exactly how bad, but it looks like it's not going
to be all that good. Or in the political scene,
suddenly you see turmoil. You see the invasion of Ukraine.
No one had really predicted that.
It's just the forces building up.
The same thing with the mind. There's all these things
building up under the surface. Yeah.
And then when it all comes together, then it starts to kind
of crash and it goes funny and you start to feel crazy as a
consequence. So the answer is to understand
the danger, to understand how impermanent actually is, how,
and then use that as a force to drive you forward on the
spiritual path. Because when you understand the
danger, when you have that right view, that is when the
motivation arises for practising in the right way, for getting
that. Oomph in your practice.
Yeah, so this is the right way of doing it.
But of course, the good point about that understanding the
conditioning of the mind is that it can also be reconditioned.
If it is a fully conditioned phenomenon, which the Buddha
says it is, it means that reconditioning is possible.
That is exactly what we do in Buddhism.
This is what this talk tonight was all about, the
reconditioning of the mind looking at the world in a way
that aligns with the way the world actually is.
So just hang in there, do the right thing and you will be OK
here. OK, so we have a question from
Pierre Pierre, Angela Dear Aja, how to best deal with the root
cause of anxious thoughts which lead to unfavourable bodily
reactions? So how to deal with anxious
thoughts? Well, again, the thing here is
that the mind is conditioned. Yeah, because the mind is
conditioned, it can condition yourself out of those anxious
thoughts. Anxious thoughts are not
permanent. And I, I, you know, there's all
kind of therapy that is used these as cognitive.
What is it called? All kinds of cognitive therapy
that is used that's basically reconditioning the thinking
mind. And Buddhism also is a kind of
cognitive therapy. And so you learn to look at
things in a new way. Now, one of the things about
anxiety, anxiety is very much like fear.
Fear and anxiety are two sides of the same coin.
It is seeing the danger in the future.
Yeah. Anxiety is always about the
future, seeing the problems in the future.
So you try to learn that the future, this is just a habit
that you have, you know, the anxiety coming from the past.
By changing that habit, by learning to see the positive
outcomes instead of the negative outcomes, you can learn to let
go of that anxiety here. And one of the beautiful nice
things about being on the spiritual practice is that
generally speaking, your future is going to be a bright one.
Yeah, that's the whole point of the spiritual practice.
We are practising this to create a better future, brighter
future. So if you're already living
well, doing the right thing, your future is basically going
to be bright positive. So you already have, you're
already creating the foundation there for less anxiety because
you, you know, and after a while you start to know these things
that you're heading towards something positive.
This is one of the great benefits of meta we talked about
before and Karuna, the compassion and the loving
kindness is that if you have these in a very deep and
profound way, fear is completely gone.
Yeah. You cannot, you cannot have fear
and compassion and meta at the same time.
These are anti fear qualities. The more you have of these
qualities, you don't fear death, you don't fear anything anymore
after a while. Why?
Because there's like an intuition inside that you are
your future is a bright 1. Whatever happens, good things
are going to happen to you now. So keep on on the spiritual
path, gradually seeing. That your future is bright and
you will be hopefully be able to let go of those things.
And it can also be useful to go to see a psychologist, perhaps
to give you some other ideas what you might be able to do
now. Then we have a question from
Squamar 2. Squamar 2.
That's an interesting name, Squamar 2.
All right, so hello, Squamar 2 from Germany.
I had some pretty peaceful and relieving experiences in
meditation. How to let go of the expectation
of it feeling so good again, which is stopping exactly that
so. What you have to do is to
remember that No2 meditation experiences are exactly the
same, so if you are expecting it, we are expecting something
that will never happen anyway because it cannot happen in that
way. So you're expecting a mirage
respecting an impossibility in the 1st place.
So because of that, just be open to any experience because the
next experience very likely will be different.
From the one you had anyway. So expectation is completely
irrational in this case. So enjoy whatever you have.
Yeah, don't expect that thing which never will happen anyway.
And enjoy whatever outcome comes from your meditation.
There will always be some positive outcome in your
meditation. Little bit of happiness, little
bit of something, little bit of peace.
And occasionally you might have something deeper which is really
beautiful and really worthwhile there.
There we are. OK, good.
OK, Mr. Poke Pirate. I don't.
That's doesn't sound like your real name.
But anyway, I'll answer it anyway.
How should we view having expectations on others?
Is it always a bad thing? Yeah.
For example with a partner or children.
So should you have expectations of others?
I think what you should do is that you should.
If you have children, you should obviously help them to have some
good values in life, right? You should.
Guide them in the right direction.
And you should do that out of loving kindness, out of
compassion for the child, because you know that if you
want to have a good life, if the child wants to have a good life,
they have to have good values. You cannot have a good life
without good values. So you want to kind of instill
some good values in that child. Then you are doing what is good
for that child. But you shouldn't really have
expectations what you should do. You should just do the right
thing because you know it is the right thing.
And then that child will kind of, you know, follow or not
follow according to its abilities.
Yeah. And if it doesn't follow, then
will you try to think how can I help more?
But don't have expectations. The more expectations you have,
the more suffering you will have with those with your family
members because no one will ever live up to those expectations,
whatever they are. Just live with love and
kindness. Do the right thing because it's
right without having too many expectations.
I I know it is impossible to be a parent and not have any
expectations. It doesn't work that way.
But try to lower them a little bit because then you will create
more happiness for everyone. Then we have a question from
Gayatri Ganeshan. My question is, are we born with
a pure mind and a condition negatively by the world?
I see that kindness in my child and it makes me wonder.
Not really. That depends on the kind of
conditioning you. You, you get, Yeah.
Who are your parents? What country are you born into?
Who are your teachers? What religion do you subscribe
to? Where do you go to get your
spiritual teachings, all of these kind of things?
Who do you hang out with? You know, if you're born into a
mafia family, sure, then you might have a problem.
But you might be born into a very nice Buddhist family, Yeah.
Or whatever. So it really depends.
On the circumstances. Generally speaking, we tend to
be born into families that are roughly had some congruence with
how we are. You know, it's not kind of
completely random where we get reborn.
So usually if you are a fairly pure person, you will sometimes
usually get reborn in a fairly good family here.
So that's you. That tends to be some kind of a
congruence there between the two.
But sometimes not. Sometimes we can have a very
pure child maybe get reborn into a family which is not so pure.
Yeah, these things can also happen there.
So the reality is that these things, there isn't really
anything given there. The most important thing through
our life is that we seek those people, those places that can
condition us in such a way that we can become more purer.
And that is our responsibility to ensure that we do that.
Because you understand the importance of conditioning, the
importance of kalyanamita, and the importance of a pure mind to
have a good life. Then last question for today
from Wolf Wolfram Gaby from Germany.
It is difficult to embrace your depression with meta.
When you are depressed, how do you do that?
Same for peace and stillness. How do you get how to get it
when fear and depression are strong?
Yes, it is hard because depression is often the opposite
of meta. But very often, depression comes
from not accepting things as they are.
Yeah, depression comes because maybe you are too hard on
yourself. Don't accept yourself for who
you are. Maybe you don't accept the
world. For what it is like.
So learning to think of yourself as good enough as you are
because you are good enough. Yeah, you're already doing the
right thing, living in the right way.
You're already worthy of respect because you are obviously living
in a good way. So leave those things aside
whereby you put yourself down or you put the world down or
whatever. Leave those things aside because
you are obviously focusing on the wrong things in the world.
There are a lot of things that you can focus on in your life
and the world that are positive, and then that depression will
lift. It's very easy to get depressed,
for example, if you have two high expectations of yourself.
You think that you should be perfect in one way or another,
but you know you are good enough as you are.
If you can be a kind person in this world, you're already far
better than the vast majority of people.
That's all that really matters. Often we measure ourselves by
the wrong yardsticks. We measure ourselves by how
successful we are at school, what kind of grades we get, what
kind of exams we go through, what kind of degrees we have,
how we do in the corporate world, whether we are successful
or not. But these things are irrelevant
if you are a completely ordinary person with a beautiful heart.
That is what is important in life.
That is what really will get you somewhere in the future.
These are the things that really matter, not all that superficial
stuff that we often focus on. Yeah, you can be a completely
ordinary person. You can go through life at this
person. No one ever sees, no one ever
pays, pays any notice to at all. Great.
No one looks at you Wonderful. Yeah.
You can be left in peace. You can do your own thing.
You can meditate, be quiet. No one ever looks at you.
Actually, I can be a blessing in disguise.
Too many people these days, all they want to do is be seen by
the world. They want to be on Instagram and
kind of pretend that they're far better than actually they are.
That life is miserable. But looks on Instagram that the
life is really wonderful. What kind of thing is that?
This crazy stuff. Appreciate the little things in
your life and I can guarantee you that you will become a more
happy person. That's probably maybe what you
have to do. Everyone gets depressed now and
again, but this is often the way out of it.
So best of luck. OK everyone, that is all for
tonight. Let's just pay homage to the
Buddha Dama Sanga.