OK, so I think we can probably start.
So tonight's talk is going to be on the concept of freedom, the
idea of freedom, what freedom is all about, and specifically of
course about freedom in Buddhism, of course, and how
freedom in Buddhism compares to freedom.
The ideas of freedom that we normally use to in our society,
in our contemporary secular society, how we regard freedom
and how these two concepts compare with each other.
And of course, the no surprise, of course, the idea of freedom
in Buddhism, of course, is much more profound and much more
meaningful than the kind of ideas that we have in, in
ordinary society about what freedom is about.
But I think it's useful to compare these ideas to give, to
give that contrast and then get a deeper understanding of, of
what these things are perhaps. But of course the, the word
freedom or the idea of freedom is a very, it's a very kind of
positive idea, right? When people think freedom, they
think something very good or something very nice.
You know the obvious. You know, the first thing that
comes to mind when you think of freedom often is freedom from
not being in jail, right? When you are in jail, you are
definitely not free here. You are behind steel bars and
concrete and all these kind of things.
And that is kind of the opposite of freedom, right?
And of course, the reason why it's opposite of freedom is
because you are hindered. You're obstructed from doing
what you want to do in life. You can't go here.
You can't go there. And this is one of the kind of
main things throughout life that the hindrances and obstructions
in life are the things that kind of stop us from feeling free
here. Whenever there's a hindrance
somewhere, whenever there's an obstruction, that is the kind
of, you know, thing that that stops us.
We can't do what we want, right? We can't express ourselves
because of these things. So hindrance is an
obstructionist is one of those things.
And this is again, or in ordinary society, how we often
look at these things and another thing which stops our freedom
perhaps in again, an ordinary life.
And whatever is the feeling of being oppressed, right?
If you feel oppressed by whether it's by a government or by a,
you know, a, a group of people or a boss at work or, or a
family member or a bully or whatever it is that oppression
also is a lack of freedom. You can't really express
yourself because perhaps because you are psychologically, you
know, kind of confined by that oppression around you.
So this is what is so these are some of the aspects of, you
know, why this idea of freedom has such positive connotation in
our lives. There's no hindrances, there's
no oppression. And because of that, we are free
to express ourselves. We're free to follow our
desires, free to do basically to choose as we want and as we like
in life. And this is what Azam Brahm
often talks about, rather freedom of choice or the freedom
of desire here. This is like the highest sense
in which we are considered free often in contemporary society,
contemporary secular society here.
And you can see that on so many levels, right?
If you look at our society in so many ways, Is it about that?
You look at the maybe perhaps the political systems that we
have. The political systems are often
built up around this idea of freedom from desire, sorry,
freedom from oppression and being able to express ourselves.
And you know, one example of that, for example, would be
something like Marxism, right? Marxism was developed in the
19th century. And the idea there by Karl Marx
was to kind of free the workers from the oppression of society
or oppression of people who were exploiting them and these kind
of things. Again, you wanted to free
yourself from these problems that society had inflicted on
the large number of people. So even our political systems,
everything is built up around these ideas of freedom.
And capitalism is in many ways a similar kind of thing here,
capitalism, which is sort of perhaps the kind of the
background ideology behind most societies, certainly in the West
these days. It's not maybe a perfect
ideology or a perfect idea of capitalism.
Anyway, the idea there is somehow the idea of freedom,
right? You, you give out the money or
sorry, you all the, all the means of production in society
are owned by private interests. The private interests compete
with each other, right? And the idea is that you create
more wealth. The economy grows as a
consequence of these things. And when the economy grows, the
pie that we can share is larger, right?
And when the pie that we can share is larger, we can spend
more money, each one of us. When you can spend more money,
you can express yourself more in so many different ways, whether
it's through the arts or through just through your desires or
whatever it is, you can express itself in these ways.
And it's funny, I always sometimes I, you know, you read
in the newspapers about, you know, economic things and the
economy. It was, you know, sometimes
people are lamenting the economy isn't growing as fast as it used
to. Last year it was 3%.
This year is only 2%, right? And I find it so absurd.
Sometimes you read about these things in in the paper and
people are kind of discussing back and forth, how can we kind
of get the economy back on track again?
It's only growing 2%. Maybe next year only one.
And this year, last year it was three.
What are we going to do about this?
It's terrible, right? And for myself, it seems so.
I don't know, it seems so strange to think like that,
whether the economy grows by 3% or 2%, whether that is something
that really needs to be discussed up and down.
And somehow what can we do to get this back on track again?
And then we have all these institutions, the central bank,
right, tries to kind of correct the interest rate in the right
way. And then they do these things
where they kind of inject more money into the economy to get it
growing again. And everybody's discussing how
we can avoid, you know, problems and deflation.
The compare us to China. China is growing much faster.
We are growing more slowly. What's going to happen?
And I think to anybody who has a little bit of spiritual
inclination, it feels kind of a little bit, maybe not complete,
but a little bit. So what, what's the big deal?
Whether the economy is growing at 2% or 3%, right?
It's it seems sort of OK. You know, of course, you know,
probably, maybe it's better if it grows a bit faster, but at
the end of the day, doesn't really matter so much.
And of course, the answer is the reason why it matters too much
so much is because our expression, our understanding of
freedom in society has to do with our ability to choose and
to spend. That is what freedom is in our
contemporary society. It's about the ability to go out
there, to spend, spend more money than we had last year, to
choose things we haven't chosen before, to express ourselves in
ways that we haven't expressed ourselves before, whatever way
that might be. So of course, these things, they
are narrowed down when the economy isn't growing so fast.
And that is why people are in such great despair when the
economy goes down, right? Because this is freedom for us,
for large parts of the population.
Not if you have a spiritual inclination, perhaps, but
certainly if you live in ordinary society.
So it may seem funny, it may seem strange when you sit and
you're a little Hut as a monk in the forest, you know, and you
think about this, it seems really weird.
But actually it is a serious matter if you buy into the
ordinary understanding of what freedom is all about.
So this is, this is one thing our society is built for this,
right? It's built around this idea of
freedom, and because it is built around that, it means that we
tend to pursue those things. And one way of course, that we
pursue those things is by making money, right?
We go out into the world, we want to make money.
And of course, the more money we can make, the more we can spend,
the more we can express ourselves, the more we can
choose, the more we can fulfill everything we want in life.
Money is one of the key means of enabling that freedom of choice
that is so hallowed in our society.
Society. So we go out and we try to make
money, right? And what happens when you try to
make money? What happens is that often you
butt up against other people because other people are also
trying to make money here. And sometimes you compete for
the same contract, you compete for the same job, which is well
paying. We start competing with each
other and sometimes the competition is unfair, right?
The person who was clueless, who didn't really know what they
were doing, they got the job. Whereas, you know, I, of course,
I'm doing, I'm practice, I'm doing the right thing.
So, and I didn't get this job and I should have had it.
They didn't. And when we have competition,
when we have this fight over limited resources, because it's
always going to be limited resources, limited money to go
around, a limited economy, when we fight over this, when we
compete over this, there's going to be friction, right?
There's going to be anger, there's going to be irritation.
Sometimes there's going to be violence because violence is
rooted in anger and the problems that come from these kind of
things. And this is one of those basic
teachings, actually very important teaching of the Buddha
is this, that when you have at a search for choice, the search
for enjoying yourself in the world, search for expressing
yourself, for making choices, for accumulating things,
whatever it is, one of the consequences of that is always
violence. It's always anger, it is always
conflict, it is always problems. You can't have this craving,
this desire, this search for, you know, expressing ourselves
in whatever way. You can't have that without
violence. Violence goes hand in hand with
that. So craving, desire always must
go hand in hand with violence. And that is one of the terrible
things about it, right? Straight away you can see that
this ideal that we have, this ideal of freedom of choice,
freedom of expressing ourselves. Even if we do that in a way
where we don't hurt others directly, of course, that's the
only right way of doing it. Even if we don't do that, still
it must lead to violence. Still, it must lead to problems.
So this is the first problem that with this idea that we have
of freedom of expression, the first problem is that it is
intertwined, interconnected. It cannot be separated from the
problems of anger and violence in society.
Very interesting. I think a very powerful insight
of the Buddha is explained in many places in the discourses.
And of course it gets worse because if you really, if you
really want to pursue freedom of choice and the freedom for
ourselves to what to do. One of the things that people
always want is power. We want to have power because
power is one of the things that enables us to express ourselves.
Once you have power, you can kind of, you have the ability
and you have the ability to basically use that power in such
a way that you gain advantage. That's what power is about,
right? In subtle ways.
You may not do it deliberately to hurt others, but it tends to
go that way here. Power is very dangerous.
Power corrupts, right? This ancient, not ancient
perhaps, but this well known kind of psychological effect of
power. Power corrupts, and because it
corrupts, we use that power for our own advantage.
There is a problem again, the problem again, it leads to
conflict. It leads to my desires, my
cravings over somebody else's. That is what power is all about.
And again, it leads to conflict, and it's natural.
As long as there is craving, as long as there is a desire to
express ourselves, the search for power is just behind it,
because power is what enables us to take that to its highest
possible level here. So again, this is the the first
point. Violence and craving are two
sides of the same coin. But it's much worse than this.
That is only the kind of the beginning.
Why? Why this kind of freedom doesn't
really work. I'll just bring you back to the
beginning. I'm talking about freedom here,
the idea of freedom of choice, right, freedom of expression,
etcetera. But this gets much worse than
that. And to give you some idea of
what I where, how bad it can get, I want to do a little
thought experiment with you here.
And this is the experiment of think we now live in a society
where there is a fair amount of freedom, right?
We can choose a lot more in terms of indulgences, in terms
of material well-being, in terms of expressing ourselves in
various ways, much, much more today than we could say 100
years ago, even 50 years ago, let alone 2 or 300 years ago,
right? We have kind of expanded our
horizons. We have much more freedom.
There's less interference in our lives than there was in the old
days when kings and governments might kind of be much more
oppressive and all these kind of things.
So we have, we're kind of moving in that direction, which
probably is a good thing, right, That that is a good thing to
have kind of freedom. But my thought experiment is if
we take, if we move this further, if we take this to the
extreme, where does it lead? So and where it leads if we take
it to the extreme. So today we have, we are much
more able to satisfy our desires than we were before, much more
quickly right than we were before.
So the extreme of this, if we keep on moving in this
direction, this is just a thought experiment, it's not
reality. If we take it to the extreme,
all our desires at the extreme could be fulfilled, might be
fulfilled instantaneously, right?
That is kind of directions you're moving into everything
you want straight away. It is satisfied, right?
This is taking this whole idea where we're moving to, to an
extreme. Now, what do you think about
that? Is that, would that be a nice
thing if as soon as you had, as soon as you had a craving, OK,
I'd like to eat this straight away.
You were satisfied, right? As soon as you had some kind of
idea, I'm going to, I'm going to make a beautiful piece of art
and have this idea on your head and what you're going to paint
straight away. There it is.
It's done. You have this, you know this
person that you're very interested in this relationship
you'd like to get into straight away.
There they are. They are your boyfriend or
girlfriend, right? Or whatever you desire in life,
whatever you want straight away, the desire is fulfilled.
That is kind of the optimising what we're doing already.
That's taking it to the extreme, right?
This is just to get some feeling for whether we're heading in the
right direction or not. That's why I'm saying these
things. But what is that like?
If everything straight away is satisfied, what would it feel
like? And I say what it would feel
like, it would feel terrible. It sounds like some kind of
ideal perhaps, but I think it's absolute an absolute nightmare
if everything is straight away satisfied.
And the reason for that is because for the vast majority of
people, the whole purpose of life is that striving is that
craving is that doing which moves you towards those goals in
life, right? This is what it's about.
We identify with that doing. We are that doing.
We identify with the craving itself.
We are the craving. Take away that distance between
you and where you want to be and narrow it down to nothing so
that you have everything straight away.
Then your sense of identity, of who you are or the very purpose
of life is kind of removed and taken away, and you would get
depressed, right? You would feel terrible.
The purpose of life is no longer there.
There's nowhere to go. There's nothing to do because
everything is satisfied straight away.
Buddha himself says that we sometimes we take craving to the
be a self, right? We identify.
We're craving so much that this is actually who you see yourself
to be. And the same thing with the
doing. Doing and craving are very
closely related to each other. We identify with the doing.
We are the doer. We are the person who goes out
into the world and does stuff, right?
So many people identify with the doer.
I've seen so many people. And that's often why you can't
meditate, because as soon as you sit still, you, you kind of
start to disappear, right? This is one of the problems.
We're identifying too much with the doing so it is really, it is
a nightmare. It is I think for the majority
of people it would be absolutely terrible to get to the point
where everything is satisfied straight away.
And yet that is in a way what we're striving for.
That in a way is where our society is pointing to.
That is what we're always trying to do.
Satisfaction more quickly, satisfaction more complete, more
money, larger economy, right. Everything more instantaneous.
That is, in a sense, we can never, probably never actually
get there, but at least we're heading in that direction.
We're heading towards a nightmare rather than real sense
of freedom, right? Whoa, this is kind of weird.
I'm glad we have Buddhism. If we didn't have Buddhism, it
would be terrible to see that because you actually realize
that this is not working out. But it's even worse than that
because I think what you what happens when that craving and
that doing is taken away and suddenly everything
instantaneously is satisfied? You realize suddenly that you
feel very incomplete. You feel that there's something
lacking in your life, right? And this is the, this is the
problem is that we as long as we crave, as long as we are moving
towards something that we feel, we give our satisfaction.
We never, never really have time, or at least not as much
time to feel that something is lacking inside of us.
But once everything is satisfied straight away, that sense that
there is something missing, something not there becomes
very, very powerful. This is what life is, is about,
right? We're trying to always satisfy
ourselves, find the sense of completion, find the sense of
fulfillment by following the craving.
And then one day we take away the gap between the result of
that craving and where we want to go, where we want to go and
where we are. We take that away and we realize
that that getting those external objects 100% satisfied straight
away does not fill that gap, that hole, that emptiness inside
of us which is always there. It cannot fill up that
emptiness, right. And suddenly your feeling of
emptiness, your feeling of lack of meaning becomes incredibly
strong and incredibly profound. And you understand that you're
never going to be able to find completion, find satisfaction by
searching for it externally. There's no way that becomes so
obvious when everything is satisfied straight away here.
And this is one of the actually, this is a great insight, right?
Because that makes you start to turn around and you start to see
that actually to feel fulfilled, to feel complete, to feel a
sense of satisfaction, I'm going to have to do something else.
It's not going to happen through external things.
It will only happen if I develop myself internally.
And this is one of, I think one of the great distinctions here
between the freedom of the ordinary world and the freedom
in Buddhism. And this is the distinction.
And freedom in the ordinary world is always about external
things, but being able to get those external things as soon as
possible and as completely as possible, whatever it is,
whether it's a relationships or jobs or artistic expression or
just sensual enjoyment in general.
And then the Buddhist way is actually seeing the emptiness of
that, the whole of this, of that, how you can actually never
get there, and then starting to look for those things in a
different area inside instead. So Buddhism is about seeking for
that freedom inside rather than seeking for the freedom outside.
And that I think, is the main distinction between the two.
But before I, I talk a little bit more perhaps about the
Buddhist idea, I want to talk about another aspect of this as
well. And that is the aspect that if
we are always searching for things, we are, we want to use
our choice to express our will. One of the interesting things to
contemplate is, well, OK, so we want to have freedom of will,
right? Freedom of choice, but how free
is that choice in the first place?
Do we really have free choice or do we have a freedom of will?
How free are these things? And if you start to contemplate
this, and I think this is one of those nice things to contemplate
if you are into meditation practice and you're into
spiritual growth, is to look at yourself.
Whenever you choose something, whenever you decide something in
life, where does that decision come from?
Does it come from you? Is it a free choice?
Or is it a choice that is heavily conditioned by all sorts
of things? And if you look at that, you
will discover very quickly that any choice you make, any use of
the will that you make in this life is so conditioned, right?
It is so heavily influenced by all these other things.
What you choose to have for breakfast in the morning or to
eat at any time is conditioned by the past, by what you thought
was nice in the past. Sometimes you're not even,
you're not even interested in in new stuff because you don't know
what it is. So you just kind of pass it by,
right? This is what I've been learned
to eat, perhaps since you were a child of eating this, right.
And whenever I go back to Norway to visit my family, I get on to
the Norwegian food, right? Even though I haven't eaten
Norwegian food for 20 years, I'm absolutely sure that this
Norwegian food is going to be delicious, right?
Nice things like pickled herring.
You know you like pickled herring.
This is the kind of stuff that I get into when I go back to
Norway. Pickled, pickled herring sounds
very nasty for other people, but to me it sounds really delicious
and nice. So And this is it, right?
We are so conditioned and we are so completely conditioned by the
external environment. What do we do in life?
What do we study? I remember when I was 18 or 19,
I had to decide what I was going to study at university.
I didn't know what I wanted to do.
And maybe maybe it was kind of in the cards.
I was going to become a monk anyway.
So what's the point, You know, choosing a particular education
if you're going to become a monk?
It just kind of seems all perhaps not so important.
But the reason I chose to study, when I chose to study was
because my father said, oh, I went to this university.
This is a good university, why don't you go there?
I said, OK, whatever, I'll go there, right?
I mean, you can't get more condition than that, right?
This is kind of absolute conditioning here and and so it
is. So it goes on and on.
Our religion, our life, where we live, our house, what we
everything almost we do. Your mental life, your thinking,
right? Where does your thinking come
from? Start to analyze your thinking
and you will start to see that too.
It's just so heavily conditioned as well from all kinds of things
in the past. And one of the interesting
things that condition us, which I find very fascinating here is
that we're not just conditioned by things in this life, but we
are conditioned by things in the past lives as well, right?
Many of the things you may not understand.
It was like for me, for example, why did I become a, become a
Buddhist? Why did I become a Buddhist
monk? And I have, I can't really
explain that from the present life.
I remember when I was in my early 20s, I wanted to go to
Asia when I had a chance to go as an exchange student to Asia.
But why did I want to go to Asia?
I didn't have any Asian friends, right?
I wasn't really interested in Buddhism at the time.
And of course, as soon as I went to Asia, I went to Japan.
Actually at that time, this was in the mid 1980s, I went to
Japan and straight away I went to all the Buddhist temples,
right? And I thought, wow, this is
really cool. And then I got my first kind of
book about Buddhism and I read that right.
And again, found that interesting, fascinating.
And when I got back from that holiday overseas, one of my best
friends, he said, well, here is a book you should read.
And it was a book about meditation practice, right?
It was called The Calm Technique.
That was the name of the book. And it was about breath
meditation, basically the same thing Ajam Ram teaches in the
present, right here and right now.
So again, and I started doing that and I had some nice
results. And it's gradually, gradually
you move in that direction. Eventually you become a monk.
Where does it come from? I can't explain where it comes
from. I think it's very obvious that I
must have been a Buddhist in the past life.
Otherwise I cannot explain what is going on in my life at all.
There's no explanation. It's just completely weird.
And the same thing goes for I think many of the other monks in
the monastery as well. And this is is both interesting,
but also it is a bit concerning. Why is it that sometimes I get
angry about stupid things in life, right?
Sometimes the same kind of thing makes me angry or upset every
time. Why is that certain desires keep
arising all the time? Why is it that certain delusion,
certain stupid thoughts keep popping into my mind?
Where does all this stuff come from?
And a lot of that stuff comes from the habits that we have
carried with us for innumerable lifetimes into the past, right?
Going back, back, back, back. And I understood that really for
the first time when I spoke to somebody who claimed to have a
memory of a, of a past life and it seemed like a very powerful
memory. And he said that that's exactly
what happened to him. He saw how his personality had
carried on from the past and that scared him.
It scared him incredibly powerfully because it felt
trapped, right? I'm trapped by my personality.
I'm trapped by these habits that I created.
I can't even see that I created these habits in the past life.
I'm trapped by these things. And when I see that and I walk
on my walking path in the monastery and I feel that
something arises in me, some kind of stupid thought which I
wish I didn't have. But you can't wish these
thoughts away, right? It just happened.
Even whether you want to or not, sometimes you probably,
actually, I probably want to have them.
That's the scary thing. So the thoughts are there, they
arise, and they come from some kind of unfathomable past, some
program that you created many lifetimes ago.
And now, like a robot, you keep on repeating the same patterns
again and again. And it gives me the sense of
urgency I've got to get out of this.
I don't want to be a robot being programmed from some past life,
right? And it gives me the sense of
aversion towards these thoughts. And I just want to get out of
this. I don't want to think like this
anymore. I want to turn around and move
in a different direction. And this to me is a powerful
impulse in my practice to remind me that I don't have control
over these things. This is stuff that comes from
the past, which is now controlling me.
I'm not in charge. These things are in charge.
I don't want to stand for that. I don't want to have anything to
do with that. I want to release myself from
these problems. So this is how you can use ideas
of past lives, right? Of being trapped in the past to
urge you on, to say I must find a solution to this.
There must be another way of looking at this.
This person I'm upset with, okay, what are their good
qualities? They have so many good
qualities. Why am I upset with this person?
I'm silly. Forget about it.
And you change your focus and you're able to overcome those
problems as a consequence of using that kind of reflection.
Very powerful. At the same time, you realize
the limit in choice. Choice is incredibly limited
because you are basically programmed to a very large
extent by the past, right? OK, so we talk about freedom of
choice. Now, if you are programmed from
the past, how, you know, kind of the whole idea of freedom of
choice start to become quite meaningless, right?
If you're just this robot wandering around doesn't feel
like it, but perhaps you are, then how, how important is that
freedom of choice? But you can take it even
further. And because I, you know, when
you understand the we'll just wait for the we're not going to
wait for the whole call. So please just great, OK, It's
always, it's a very hard to always turn off all the mobile
phones. So we have a so that's that's
OK. This is life.
So So what happens if you look at the Buddhist teachings about
how what we are as human beings, what would I say?
It says that when you look inside of yourself, you don't
find any self, you don't find a core, you don't find the essence
inside of yourself, who you actually are.
You are not this one solid monolithic thing which is always
is there. What you are, what you are right
here and right now. You are the sum of causes and
conditions from the past, right? This is what you are, all this
cause and conditions coming together and making you who you
are right here, right now. Now, what that means, if that is
all you are, this cause and conditions from the past, it
means that also your choices. Your choices is part of you,
right? Your will is part of you now
because everything what you are is a function of cause and
conditions in the past. It means that you will also must
be, according to Buddhism, a function of cause and conditions
in the past. And there is nothing but these
cause and conditions. There isn't anything else.
There is no independent entity standing outside of those things
and saying aha, I'm watching all this cause and conditions.
Those things watching are also just part of the this web of
causes and conditions. So what that means, Of course,
if the choice, the willpower, if that can be fully explained in
terms of cause and conditions, and there's nothing apart from
that, it must mean that from a Buddhist point of view, there is
no freedom of the will, right? Because it is all explained by
these other factors. There's nothing apart from these
factors. There's nothing standing outside
of that that has a perspective. You're fully trapped and fully
immersed in this cause and conditions.
There cannot be any free will there.
That's how it seems to me anyway.
Some people disagree with that. They say that, you know,
Buddhism requires a certain freedom of will, but I, I
personally cannot see that. And and anyway, even if even if
there were, you know, a degree of freedom of the will, what I
said before that we are very heavily influenced by causing
conditions is true regardless. But I take it a step further to
say that the cannot it is a it is kind of follows from all the
teachings of Buddhism that they cannot actually be in the end
and the free will. So again, if there is no free
will, what does that mean to this Western idea or this modern
idea that we should go out and choose things in the world?
We should be the agent of our own happiness.
We should go out and express ourselves, right?
What are we expressing? We are just expressing all this
cause and conditions from the past that it pushes us in a
certain direction. That's all we are expressing
here. The reason why this idea of
freedom of choice or freedom of the will, this idea that we're
going to express ourselves, the reason why it is so important in
the world is because we have a sense of self and the feeling is
that we are expressing ourselves.
That is why it is so important, right?
Once you take away this idea of a self there, the whole thing
kind of collapses. You're not expressing yourself
anymore. What you are expressing is
conditions and causes from the past.
That is not as exciting, right? OK, So what it means then to
have freedom of choice is that you just allow these cause and
conditions to flow naturally. That's all it means.
But there's nobody there actually expressing themselves.
That is what it means. So again, it undermines Buddhist
ideas, undermine this whole, you know, this whole thing that we
have built up our civilization on this whole idea of freedom of
choice, of expressing ourselves. It is undermined by teaching
such as non self. So what does that mean?
Sometimes I, I think this is very fascinating and I and I
think, you know, what are the consequences of that?
And sometimes, you know, when I, when I say these kind of things,
other monks or other people say these kind of things, people
say, OK, that means I can just go back to bed and just lie down
and just chill because there's no sense, there's no free will,
right? There's nothing to be done.
So we can just have a good time and not worry about it, because
things just happen according to Causeway and Effect.
That is not what it means at all.
And that is a complete misunderstanding what lack of
freedom of the will means. Because what they are talking
about is fatalism, that the whole world is kind of fated to
go in a certain way and regardless of what you do, it
will still go in the same way. But that's not the point.
The point is rather that the will has an effect.
If you do things in the world, there are consequences.
So you have to do things, you have to get out there, and the
better you practice in accordance with the Buddhist
teachings or any teaching or whatever, the faster, the more
progress you're going to make on the path, right?
So these things have an effect. So you should certainly do your
very best to practice in the right way and do the right thing
here. This is the first thing.
It's important to understand that it doesn't mean that you
can just kind of say, OK, nothing matters anymore.
That is a wrong understanding of the lack of free will here,
because the will has an effect basically here.
But the other thing which I think is just as important is
that for all of us, even though, you know, even though this is
very theoretical, right, very philosophical, there is no free
will. It's really just the construct
of the mind. And that is perhaps one reason I
don't really like to talk about it so much because it's just a
figment of the imagination in in a, in a large sense, it's it's
philosophy without real content. The reality is that it feels
like we have free choice, right? When you do something, it feels
like you are choosing free freely.
That is the reality. And that in a sense is what is
important. And so you, what you do, instead
of saying I just don't do anything you say, I will
exercise that feeling inside of me, your freedom of choice and
freedom of the will to do what is good in the world, right to
do what is right. And I will also understand that
because I am so conditioned, because I'm so influenced by all
these external factors, I will ensure that I put in as many
cause and conditions as I possibly can.
I will put those in place to increase the speed of my
practice, right? My practice, my movement on the
spiritual path depends on these cause and conditions.
How can I put things in place in such a way that it increases my,
my, the speed by which I progress on this path?
That is the right way of thinking, right?
And then when you think like that, then you can start to
become creative about how to improve your own spiritual
practice. And This is why this is one of
my favourite sayings in the suitors in the Discourse of the
Buddha. Well, the Buddha says, you know
very famously that no, the spiritual life, spiritual
friendship is not half the spiritual life.
Spiritual friendship is everything in the spiritual
life. And now you can understand why,
right? Because spiritual friendship is
the other causes. This is the cause and condition
which allows the spiritual path to come into practice.
The Buddha started all this. The Buddha is a supreme
spiritual friend. Other people who practice the
path are also spiritual friends. And we kind of move each other
forward. And the more we hang out with
the right people, the more we are conditioned in the right
way, the faster this path will go.
So this is one way. If you understand how little
personal choice you have, then the more powerful becomes this
idea. I need to be in the right
environment. I need to do the right things.
I need to make sure I'm influenced by all the right
conditions, reading the word of the Buddha, understanding what
this is about so I can enhance my practice.
Never avoid an opportunity, never miss an opportunity to do
good, right? This is so powerful.
This is so fundamental to the Buddhist path, and yet we waste
so many opportunities to do what is good.
There's opportunities at all times, right?
To do good things, to say something nice, to do something
good. But then we feel a bit upset.
And because we feel upset, we miss the opportunity here.
But please don't do that. This is so basic, so
fundamental. Every time you do something
good, every time you do something nice, you're lifting
yourself up and you are making meditation possible.
If your meditation wasn't very good this evening, it is because
at least in part because you haven't taken every, every,
every opportunity in life to do what is good, to do what is
right, and to avoid doing bad things.
So please, this is the power of goodness.
This is the most important aspect of the whole spiritual
path, is to practice kindness, goodness, and to avoid the bad
things in life. And everything we do in life
should be turned into a path of kindness and avoiding the bad.
This is how we should think, right?
This is so important. And then we move forward, we
condition ourselves in the right way, we put all those calls and
conditions into place and things start to happen.
So this is how you should think when there is no if there is no
free will, which to me seems the right way of looking at the
world. So now I have given you a number
of things. Why I don't think that our
modern secular idea of freedom is all that useful at all,
right? First of all, it leads to
conflict. We go out into the world, we
want to enjoy the things that other people enjoy.
Conflict is inevitable, right? This is the first thing.
The second thing, if you take this kind of society to its
logical conclusion, it leads to despair rather than happiness.
Whenever. Everything is instantaneously
satisfied. You feel despair, you feel
emptiness. There's no purpose to life
anymore. Everything is pointless.
That is the second reason. And lastly, if there isn't any
free will anyway, then what's this big deal about going around
and kind of expressing yourself and, and having all this free
will? The whole thing sort of
collapses. It is, it is somehow kind of
built upon the idea that there is a self.
That is what it's built upon. Take that idea away and the
whole thing starts to unravel here.
So what then about the Buddhist idea?
If the our modern idea? I'm not saying that the modern
idea is all stupid. It isn't.
Of course. There's a lot to be said for
freedom from oppression. There's a lot to be said for
being able to express oneself and, you know, talk and write
open and all these kind of things.
I'm just saying it has very clear limitations.
That's all that. So what about the Buddhist idea
then? And the Buddhist idea is the
exact opposite, right? It is as I was saying before,
that we understand that if you want true fulfillment, you need
to practice the spiritual path. And as you practice the
spiritual path, as you build up the happiness insider, as you
reduce the suffering insider, you build up the loving kindness
for people around you, for the whole world, the compassion and
the peace. And one day you feel complete.
One day you feel full. You feel you don't need anything
anymore. Why?
Because happiness is yours, right here, right now.
There's nothing more to search for.
If there's nothing more to search for, craving comes to an
end. You can't crave for anything
anymore because there's nothing more to crave.
You are complete as you are. You are fulfilled as a human
being. In fact, you understand, and
this is kind of the point here, you understand that craving is
actually the enemy because craving takes you away from the
state of completeness, right? You sit there, you feel
complete, and then suddenly you think, oh, you know, I would.
You start craving for something and then you think, no, I'm
actually moving away from my sense of completion and craving
is the enemy. Before craving was your friend,
craving was a thing that made you choose this way or that way.
And now you come from the other side.
You realise that the very thing that made choice possible, the
very thing that made this freedom of expression, freedom
of choosing possible, this craving, that very thing is
actually the problem. So when we talk about freedom in
the ordinary world, the freedom of choice, it is a very, very
shallow freedom. It's like being in prison,
right? You are in prison.
Imagine one of those old prisons.
You are kind of, you know, fettered to the wall, right?
With manacles around your, your hands and kind of fetters around
your legs, right. And then the prison warden comes
and says, well, you know, you can choose whether you're you're
kind of fetters, whether they are steel or aluminum.
And then you say, yeah, give me aluminum.
Hooray, that is what what kind of the choice in the world is
about, right? You are already shackled.
You're already in prison, and you're allowed to choose kind of
the color of the concrete in your cell.
Do you would you like green or would you like blue color in
your cell? Oh, yeah, Hooray, I can choose
my color. No, you are in prison, for
goodness sake. That is the real problem, right?
Not the color of your cell. And this is kind of the
misunderstanding that's going on here.
And This is why the Buddhist idea of freedom is so beautiful
and it is so high and it is so beyond all this kind of stuff
that we talk about in The World in Ordinary, that our whole
society is built around this idea of freedom of choice.
And from a Buddhist point of view, it's complete delusion.
It is just about choosing the colour in your cell and not
really getting out of your cell at all there.
So you practice the path. And as you practice this path,
you feel a sense of completion inside.
Craving becomes impossible. Craving is no longer
interesting. Craving is your enemy.
And eventually, as you go to the end of the path, you eliminate
that craving completely. And that is why the end of
craving is the highest happiness on the Buddhist path.
And there's a nice little story, there's a nice little story in
the suit as I like this little story.
It's the, there's a monk at the time of the Buddha.
It's called Badiya. And Badiya, he was actually one
of the, he was in the, he was a relation of the Buddhas.
He was from the Saki and the Sakin family was the Buddha's
family. And Badiya, he was the son of
one of the kings, right? So he was very wealthy and he
had everything in life. Then he became a monk and he
meditated. And then one day after many
years, he was sitting in the forest and a tree cross legged,
right, with closed eyes and he was just sitting there and he
was just saying Aho sukang, Aho sukang.
Oh, what happiness, Oh, what happiness, right?
They were sitting there saying that.
Imagine coming to Budding on a monastery and you see a monk
sitting on a tree saying, oh, what place or what place?
That would be interesting, wouldn't it?
And so, and then of course, just as he was saying that, you know,
these monks, other monks were walking past and they were
looking at him wondering what's going on with this monk.
He's saying, you know, what place or place?
So they go off to the Buddha and say to the Buddha, you know, we
we saw this monk, but yeah, he's sitting in the forest saying,
oh, what place or what place? We are absolutely sure that what
he is doing, he's sitting there and he's thinking back to the
time when he was a Prince in the palace and he was thinking about
all the pleasures of palace life.
Oh, what bliss. Oh, what bliss.
And now I have to endure this monastic life sitting under a
tree. Right.
Oh, how sad compared to the, compared to kind of royalty and,
and king kingship and all these kind of things.
So the Buddha says, and of course the Buddha understand
there's something more to this. The Buddha says, OK, bring
Venable Badiya to me. So he asked brings when the
Badiya comes and he asks, Venabanya says, oh, Badiya, why
are you sitting in the forest saying oh, what place?
Oh, what place? And then Badiya answers.
Oh, I'm sitting there because I used to think back at all the
troubles of being a king, right? All the troubles of that life of
being a Prince, all the things you have to look after, all the
things you have to sort out, all those worldly things.
And now I'm free from all that, right?
No choices, nothing to do. I'm freed from craving.
Free. I've attained the highest bliss,
the highest freedom in the world.
And of course, that is the freedom of arahanship.
And that is why I'm saying aho sukang.
Aho sukang. Oh, what bliss.
And that is the real bliss in
Buddhism, when you have the freedom from craving rather than
the freedom of craving. Yeah.
OK. Thank you.
OK. So any, any, any questions, any
comments anybody here before we take, is there anything from
overseas or there is OK, is anybody here want to ask
anything before we go from take over here?
OK, Yeah. Thank you very much.
Thank you for your talk and for the wonderful meditation.
And I just happened to be wearing freedom on my clothing
tonight. But I feel that I really believe
in my Buddha nature and that I have the freedom to respond or
to react when I have anger or someone upsets me.
I mean, I still get upset, but it's like I'm not going to react
and bring that up, you know, have a an unpleasant experience.
What I find helps me through my Buddhist practice is I actually
chant. I will chant.
I bring in loving kindness into that situation so that next time
it happens, it doesn't. I'm not reacting.
I'm not. It's actually very different.
Yeah, it's, it's quite miraculous what chanting will
do, the power of chanting. And that helps me every day I
chant and that helps me enormously.
Yeah, with my life. So I feel I have the freedom.
I have the freedom to do. That great, great.
No, that's in a sense that's what what I meant is, is
basically that we use the freedom that we have, right?
And that freedom, from my point of view, just that the freedom
that we feel we have in the, in the deeper sense of the Dumber.
My only point was that to me, it looks like an illusion, but the
point is that it feels like we have a freedom and we use that
freedom to the best of our ability to do exactly what you
were saying. And this is, you know, this idea
of chanting is it's great. You know, we, we use basically
whatever, whatever skillful means work, we use those to kind
of to, you know, and that is of course, 1, you know, one of the
great ways of overcoming unwholesome states or whatever.
Certainly. And that's what I recommend when
people do chanting, do it for a purpose, do it for a reason.
Don't just do it for some kind because you are used to do it or
you've been taught to do it or whatever.
Give it some real meaning. When you do chanting, make give
it a sense of pace, loving kindness, all the things you're
saying, yeah. Thank you.
Yeah. Could all this accumulated
condition in which you mentioned, yes, which could also
be called the karma? Yeah.
Could that be called the self of that person?
It's, it's it. First of all, we say it could be
called karma, but it's not just karma.
Karma is only one type of cause and conditions.
There are all other kinds of cause and conditions as well,
right? So karma is one thing.
And karma is basically about the kind of the ethical actions we
did in the past. They have consequences for our
feelings now. But then there are all other
kinds of other kinds of cause and conditions as well.
Can that be called the self? Well, the, the whole point here
is that the idea of a self, remember the Buddha here is
talking to a society in which they believe in a permanent core
to the human being. This is the brahmanical society
in, in the days. And it's very similar to
Christianity in in that sense and Islam and all the theistic
religions very similar to that. So the Buddha is kind of
speaking to that society. And So what he's saying is that
this permanence that people believe in, that there is
something permanent there, whatever that is, that is the
problem, and that is what there is not, and that is what is
meant. So we have to define yourself
very clearly, first of all. And once you have defined in
that way, then there cannot be a self in that sense, according to
the Buddha. If you say that of course there,
there is a kind of a self in a sense that there is a, you know,
I am separate from you or you're separate from me, right?
We are different. We are kind of different streams
of consciousness with different comic background.
We don't really mingle with each other in that sense.
In that sense there is separation.
So there is a sense of individuality that is true
individuality. There is, but you can't really
say that it is a self in the Buddhist, Buddhist sense, the
utter. Thank you.
Just a question in terms of what you were talking about about no
satisfaction from the craving, you know, from reaching the
craving. And I couldn't help but think
that there seems to be a lot of people that strive to be rich
and wealthy and then get there and then miserable.
Yeah, yeah. And there seems to be a lot of a
lot of that, yeah. And the other thing is, is that
a lot of them turn to volunteering and helping others,
and then they feel more satisfied, which is what you
were talking. About right.
Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah, indeed.
I find it very fascinating that some of the greatest
philanthropists in the world are people who are extremely
wealthy, people like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, two of the
most wealthy people in the world today.
And they are carrying other people with them, right.
And what they do they. They have kind of seen the limit
of wealth. Obviously you can't get much
more wealthy than that. And then they turn their whole
life into giving. It's not a it's not a wonderful
example. And it.
And it kind of it also, I think that there must be some very
powerful condition in their life to actually want to give.
And I think that probably comes from a past life.
That's why they got wealthy in the 1st place.
And then they continue giving in this life, right?
You see the thing rolling on like that.
So yes. And I think I think that is a
very, that's a very important point.
And I think that many people also find that if you indulge a
lot in sensual pleasures and you have like a really big full of
sensual pleasures, maybe a very big hire afterwards, after it
kind of when you've got everything in a sense, you feel
kind of empty here. You feel almost depressed,
right? If this is what life is about, I
have now achieved the pinnacle. There's nothing really there,
right? And you feel a sense of empty.
And this is kind of AI think a known psychological phenomenon,
the sense of emptiness or depression that you can have
after, you know, sensual pleasures in that sense.
So yes, thank you for that. Thank you for the comment.
OK, thank you. So we have a few, few questions
from overseas. Oh, I can, I can just read this.
Good. But this is from, oh, can you?
No, that's too easy here. This is from Bomber in the USA.
Can you comment on craving in regard to the Buddhist teaching
and the Buddhist path? How should we approach this
desire in our lay life? How should you how should you
approach desires in your lay love and what basically what
you're the most important thing right in on the Buddhist
teachings is to do good is to live a good life is to be
ethical, to be virtuous, to be moral.
That is what really matters. So what you should do in your
ordinary life is you should not allow craving nor anger nor
delusion to stand in the way of doing what is good and doing
what is right. This is the most important
thing. And so don't worry too much
about the craving. You can't really control the
craving. If you try to control it,
usually you just you make a mess out of it.
So but instead just watch it and be aware of it and be aware of
the danger and then sidestep it and then practice what is good
and what is right instead. And by doing that, what happens
by if you really get into doing what is good in the world,
really get into changing the way you think, right?
Having less anger, trying to understand people instead.
People don't usually want to be bad.
They're just deluded. They're just silly.
Well, when I get angry, I think I'm stupid, right?
And probably same thing with everybody else.
So because of that, you, you change your attitude, you look
at the world in a new way, you look at people in a different
way, you become more kind. And as you do that, your own
personal sense of satisfaction internally will increase and
that will cause craving to decline.
That is where the decline of craving really comes from.
That's the most important decline of craving because you
can't, you cannot really hold craving in check that much.
OK, so I hope that makes sense. I'm going to, yeah.
So second one is from Marcus in Germany.
If there is no freedom of choice, why is there right
effort in the noble at full path?
Isn't it the requirement for changing habits and awakening
here? The reason there is right effort
is because when you practice right effort, you're doing the
right thing here. So there's still right effort,
right? But the question is that why are
you doing that effort? You're not necessarily doing
that effort because you are choosing it as such, or you are
choosing it in a certain way, but not because that choice is
entirely free. You're choosing it because you
read the Buddha's teachings and the Buddha said this is what you
must do, and then you have confidence in those teachings.
And because you have confidence and they say what you do, you
choose that right? That is how it happens.
So this idea that there is the freedom doesn't really come into
the picture here. What comes into the picture is
that you condition yourself in a certain way through the Buddhist
teachings, through otherwise people, through whatever it is.
And in that way the right effort comes into effect, right.
So don't, don't think, as I said before, that it means you can
just sit back and chill. That is not how it works.
OK, last question, is it from Singapore, Victoria?
In Singapore, how can we choose to be kind and choose to be with
good people if all is conditioned?
Do we have the free will to do so?
You don't need the free will to do so.
Don't worry about the free will, right?
Just know you know that is right to choose that.
So you choose that. Because of that, the Buddha says
it's good to be kind. The Buddha says it should do the
right thing. So then feel it feels to you
like you have free will. Use that feeling that you have
inside of you that there is free will to choose the right thing.
That is what you should do, right?
This is the problem with talking about things too
philosophically. It's something that's very hard
to relate to. I'm not sure if I can relate
100% myself to the idea that there is no free will.
It's very difficult to really grasp, right?
So I, I, I talked about that more just to counter the idea
that freedom of choice in our society is something very awe
inspiring and wonderful. That's really why I talked about
that. But in our ordinary life, in our
life as Buddhists, you use the feeling of having freedom.
You use the feeling that you can choose.
That's what you use. And then you make sure that you
put all the calls and conditions into place to support you on
that path. And when you put all the calls
and conditions into place to support you, it will happen
faster because you understand that a large part of it is about
causes and conditions. OK, anything else?
Everybody happy AD here. OK, Eddie Short, short one.
Eddie Short. OK.
Thanks for the wonderful talk. Yeah, it's very interesting.
Yeah, I also see the Buddhist freedom from another angle.
I quit it with the piece of Nirvana.
Remember the Buddha was saying Nirvana is the freedom from the
cycle of rebirth in the 31 pence of existence.
Yeah, yeah and sorry. And the Nirvana is the
extinguishing of the negative thoughts and emotions, greed,
hatred, delusion and the accompanying things like anger.
No, you will hate you will jealousy.
We think, I mean think, bet on, on people, you know,
selfishness, all these things, elimination, you know,
extinguishing of this fire. Yeah.
And then become peaceful. Yeah, that's peace.
Yeah, that's all. That's all good.
And I think actually the most important freedom in Buddhism,
which I shouldn't should have mentioned, which I didn't
mention in the talk, is the freedom from suffering, right?
That's what really it is about at the end of the day, freedom
from suffering here and in in ordinary society, we think that
freedom from suffering comes through freedom of freedom of
choice. If we have freedom of choice, we
won't suffer so much. But actually the Buddha says,
no, it doesn't work like that. It is freedom from craving.
That is what gives rise to freedom from suffering.
Yeah, Yeah. OK.
Thank you. Thank you, Eddie.
So let's pay respect to Buddha Dama Sangha.