Good. OK, everyone, so nice to be here
again to see you all. And because we just had a
retreat, I thought I would talk a little bit about meditation
practice, perhaps a bit about right view and these kind of
things. It is interesting.
We were just chanting the meta suit, Karaniya meta suit, the
Buddha's words on loving kindness.
And before that we chanted the homage to the Triple Gem.
Yeah, it'd be so and all of that.
And what is interesting about these things is that they really
are about right view. It would be so.
Formula is how the Buddha recommends we recall the Buddha
himself. Yeah.
And then you have the Dhamma afterwards, how the Buddha
recommends we should recall the Dhamma and then the Sangha
afterwards. And all of these things are
really about right view. They are about how to think
about these things in such a way that our mind inclines in the
right direction. And you may be surprised to hear
that when I say that the Karenia metasuta is also about right
view, maybe that sounds strange. Maybe you think that is more
about sealer or morality or development of the mind.
And of course it is all of those things.
But to be able to do that, to be able to incline your mind in
such a way, you really need to have a kind of the right values.
You know, you need to have the right intentions, the right
preferences and, and when you have the right values and tend
to give you the right priorities.
And when you have the right priorities, you develop the
right things in life. And the more powerful you make
that right view, the more clear and the more purposefully
directed are your is your mind going to be?
And so right view supports the whole development of the mind,
Yeah. And moving it in the right
direction towards meta or whatever.
So it is amazing how important right view is on the Buddhist
path. So what I and so it's quite nice
little tune, isn't it a mobile phone Ding Ding, Ding, Ding.
See the positive and things I have to so right view.
Yeah. And one of the things I wanted
to mention briefly, something I have talked about a little bit
before, but it's actually it's very fascinating and that was
something that happened at Bodiniana during the rains
retreat this year as it's quite last year rather and it's quite
interesting. It's quite a fairly recent
thing. Yeah.
And usually during the rains retreat, Adambram will give one
talk a week and then I will often give a, some kind of suit.
I think that's kind of become a famous for my, you know, for
suta speciality. And I, I love the sutas of the
Buddha. They're really powerful and
beautiful. And it gives you a very good
overview of the Dhamma. One of the difference between
the Buddha and if you like individual teachers in the world
is that the Buddha had seemed to have this very broad scope.
His job was to lay down the Dhamma in a complete sense,
whereas individual teachers tend to have their kind of take their
feel how they succeeded in the Dhamma and these things.
So the suitors are much more and and for me, I always find it
very useful. And one of the reasons I found
it useful is because of the way Ajam Brahm told the Dhamma I was
just sit back, relax, go into the Janas and just have a good
time. And not everyone can do that.
Yeah, you need some broader idea of what is going on, otherwise
you can't get access to those deep meditations.
So I find it extraordinarily useful to read the suitors and
to base myself on what I would call the gold standard, what is
Buddhist practice. And this sort of came up during
the Reigns retreat last year. And because I was doing the
suitors readings. And then, of course, there's
always questions. And you're very welcome to ask
some questions at the end of this as well.
And one of the question was precisely about this.
Yeah. About.
Oh, Ajam Brahm. He says, you know, just, you
know, just sit down in your meditation.
Don't do anything and just wait. Yeah.
And be very patient about things.
Don't have any expectations, that's for sure.
And as you do that, all the things in meditation just
happened to you. All you have to do is sit back
and relax. Yeah.
And just things happen. He doesn't teach quite like that
anymore, but sometimes he knows that people need a little bit
more support. So now he teaches a bit of body
sweeping very often and relaxing the body and these kind of
things. But the basic idea is just to
sit back and relax. And if you are sit long enough
and you are patient, then all of these amazing things will happen
to you. And then, of course, he's the
master of talking about these amazing things.
You have the bliss states, the peace, the power of the mind,
all of these things. This, this alternative reality.
Yeah. Not, not the opposite of fake
news. The real news.
This is the And so and so it sounds really, really great.
And then, of course, this person, they asked me, you know,
but when I do this, it, it doesn't matter.
It doesn't happen. Yeah.
So why is that so? And this is like the almost like
the $1,000,000 question, yeah, If we can understand why that is
the case, why it is that when you sit back and you just relax,
why your mind doesn't just go into these states which you
otherwise would think. If we can answer, answer that
question, then we will have a clarity about the path who
understand what is going on and everything will kind of open up
in front of us and we'll be heading in the right direction
there. So it's a very interesting
question. Why isn't that One person sits
down and relaxes, everything happens, another one does it, it
doesn't happen. Yeah, if we can get into the
mind of Ajambaram, yeah and do it his way, then we are kind of
probably we're going to be in business as well here.
So But the first thing here, before we really get into that
question, is to really understand what Ajambaram means
by relaxing. Yeah.
By sitting back, by allowing things to be, allowing things to
happen. Because even that is actually
quite hard to get right. Yeah.
I don't know if you've noticed, but when you sit back and you
kind of try to relax, a lot of the time is, yeah, Relax, yeah.
Let go. Yeah.
A lot of things to be. Yeah.
And we're not. And it doesn't really work that
way. That's not what Adam Brown means
by letting go or by relaxing. Yeah.
And to get into the right the mood, if you like the right mode
of relaxation, it's important to let go of exactly those kind of
things. Yeah, whereby you're trying to
encourage yourself or you're trying to say what you're
supposed to do. So a very simple way of doing
that is that you imagine yourself.
Yeah. Like for example, you come, this
is, this is a simile and all, no simile is perfect, of course.
But imagine yourself coming back from work.
Yeah, you're kind of tired. You've been working hard all
day. And when you are tired like
that, often you just want to sit down.
I don't want to do anything more because your mind is just needs
to relax a little bit. So then what happens if you sit
down in a nice chair, like a nice armchair or whatever, and
then you relax because you are tired.
What do you do at that point? The answer is you don't do it
very much at all, Right. That's kind of the point.
You don't think in a certain way.
You don't tell yourself, yeah, relax, relax.
You don't do any of that. Yeah.
You just sit down in the armchair and you chill.
That's what you do. You don't do anything.
You don't have to say, you know, say anything to yourself.
And that is kind of the idea of meditation.
The only difference is that you're not coming back from
work. You're not really that
exhausted. But we're always a little bit
exhausted because life is just exhausting in general.
Even when you wake up in the morning, sometimes you're
exhausted because if you had a dream that kind of dragged your
mind around or whatever else. But the idea is then just to
kind of almost get into that mood where you are just
relaxing, you're just sitting back doing nothing.
Like you sit down in an armchair after work.
And that gives us an idea what you're supposed to do.
And you may think that's crazy because if I do that, my mind is
just all over the place. Yeah, that's kind of the idea.
Allow your mind to be all over the place because if that is
where your mind wants to be, your mind should be allowed to
do that. If you try to control it, then
it is going often to make matters worse.
So this is like the beginning. Yeah, But it's not enough.
And the reason it's not enough is precisely because if you do
that, you find that, yes, your mind settles down a little bit.
Yeah. After running around for a
while, it becomes more peaceful. And you can feel that even when
you do, you know, come back home after work.
In this way, you can feel the mind settling down a little bit,
regaining a bit of energy and all of that.
Yeah. And things are kind of going
better, but it's often it doesn't really get any oomph.
It doesn't go anywhere. Yeah.
Your mind gets distracted. You think about this, You think
about that. You try to sort out all the
solutions and all your problems in life because that's what
happens. If you get a bit of energy in
your mind, you think, yeah, now I've got the power to resolve
everything. And of course, that destroys the
meditation. It destroys the peace.
So we need more. But that is like the beginning.
Yeah. Just learning to relax in the
right way with the right attitude gives you an
inclination towards that. But we need more and this is
where it gets really interesting.
So we then that this during the rains retreat, then we started
to discuss, you know, why is it that Ajam Brahm kind of why it
works for him? But why, you know, you only go
so far and it doesn't go any deeper, whoever that is.
And I suggested to them that the reason why it works is because
Ajam Brahm's mind is inclining towards peace.
And because the mind is already inclining towards peace, it is
directed towards that. It means that when you close
your eyes, yeah and you just allow the mind to go, the mind
actually inclines to peace. It goes towards peace like a a
very good dog. Yeah, it goes in the right
direction. It know where it is to hang out
there. The mind is like a bit like a
well trained dog if it is kind of has all the right qualities
in there. And of course people looked at
me and they thought, yeah, OK, maybe.
And then as often they decided, yeah, OK.
And actually I told them what you should do is of course ask
Azam Brahm. Yeah, they have interviews with
Azam Brahm every week. But people are a bit afraid of
asking Azam Brahms that I'm a kind of a proxy.
Yeah, They ask me instead to ask Adam Bram.
He's not dangerous. Yeah.
What are you kind of. And.
And it's, it's funny how that works.
Yeah. And, and I can understand why
because. But I've been sitting next to
Adam Bram for so long. I'm not, I don't have that fear.
But I can understand why people are a bit sort of, you know, a
little bit concerned or whatever the right word is.
So they they went. They asked Adam Brahm, and they
asked him the same question. They said, yeah, this Brahmali,
he said this. We're not sure about that.
Yeah. We want the real, the real
answer. And so they went to Adam Brahm.
They said, well, and then they thought about it.
Yeah. Because sometimes it's strange
for Adam Brahm. I think these things are so
automatic. Yeah, that he needed to think
about what he actually does. Yeah.
Because the process for him is just so ingrained.
And he knows what he's doing so well.
It's not hard. And he said, well, what I do, he
said actually after thinking about it is I incline the mind
to renunciation here. And that inclination to
renunciation means that the mind is always moving towards
renunciation. It means that stage by stage it
goes deeper and deeper and deeper.
And at every stage the mind keeps on inclining towards
renunciation until everything in the world, the world starts to
disappear. The joy comes, the stillness
comes, the samadhi, the janas, everything comes out of that.
So that is how it works. Yeah, that is kind of the trick.
This is the the answer to the $1,000,000 question, really.
You have to kind of incline your mind in the right way.
And that inclination in large part is an inclination towards
renouncing, giving things up. And as you do that, these things
happen all by themselves. So then how do we do this?
Yeah. This may not seem obvious.
Sometimes people don't like the word renunciation because they,
it's just too challenging. What do you mean renunciation?
I want to keep hold on to my things.
I didn't come to Buddhism to renounce.
I came to have a better life. Yeah.
I don't want to renounce things. I want my relationships to be
better, my work to be better, my, you know, everything to be
better. That's why I'm here, not because
I want to renounce stuff. I'm, I'm just saying in general,
I'm not saying this is how you think, but this is how many
people think. So one of the important tricks
of for making meditation work and for how to get this
renunciation happening in the right way is to turn things
upside down and to actually make everything you do in life to be
a support for your meditation practice.
So instead of prioritizing your life, your ordinary thing is in
the world, and making meditational support for the
ordinary things. Yeah, that's what many people
do, meditational support for all of these other things.
And what happens when you do that is you think about those
ordinary things because they are more important.
Meditation is only secondary. It is that to support the other
things. Lo and behold, what happens, you
sit down, you close your eyes and you think about those other
things. Why?
Because your mind is interested in them.
They are the most important. It's very simple, right?
The mind goes to those things that the things that are
important in the world. And if you take the ordinary
things in life to be the most important and that is where your
mind goes. So if you find yourself
distracted by things, that is why this is how it's going.
So we need to turn things a bit upside down.
We need to ask how can we prioritise the spiritual path
and make the world secondary? Make the world the things, the
family life, work life, hobby, whatever it is that you we,
however we live our lives, that should be secondary here.
Yeah. That should be the support for
the spiritual path. And then the spiritual path is
the number one priority. Then when you come to your
meditation, you're not going to think about the worldly things
because they're secondary. Now you're doing what matters.
Now you're doing what is meaningful.
So that is what it kind of comes down to.
Yeah. Turning things upside down and
then making the spiritual life the most important.
And I'm sure we can see how this works.
Yeah. And why that will work it and
this will work sometimes. Sometimes it will not work.
Sometimes you will think about things because your mind is too
is too obsessed by whatever is going on.
And that's OK. Don't expect perfection in these
things, but move in the right way here.
So how can we do this in a practical terms?
And one of the ways of doing this that I like to do is to do
sometimes a bit of depth contemplation here.
Yeah. One of the remarkable things
about death is that death has many of the same qualities as
meditation practice. Many of the same things happened
in the dying process as happened in meditation.
Yeah, it doesn't mean you're going to die when you meditate,
but it just, it just means that your mind is inclining in a
similar kind of way. Because when you are dying,
yeah, when you are leaving this world, you are faced with the
fact that you have to give up. Yeah.
It's staring you in the face. It's becoming bleeding obvious.
As I say, you have no, there's absolutely no choice.
You have to give up. And that is why getting yourself
into a little bit of that mind state of what it's going to be
like when you die. Yeah, will help you to give up
in the here and now. And meditation also is, as I
just said, it's about renouncing, it's about giving
up. So the two are very closely
related to each other. And that is why people sometimes
have success in meditation on their deathbed.
That is why the deathbed is often said to be the time when
you can make a breakthrough to real insights and things.
They are precisely for this reason, because you are face to
face with the fact of having to give up.
So sometimes just take yourself through that process of dying
and remembering. I don't know when I'm going to
die anyway, so now is the time to be ready.
If I'm not ready now, I probably will never be ready.
Now is the only opportunity here.
So sometimes take yourself through that process and see
what it feels like. OK.
What other things I have to give up.
I have to give up all my material possessions.
It's very obvious. Yeah.
But that, too can sometimes be difficult for people.
We have some things that are very valuable to us, dear to us.
Yeah. But everything has to go.
Yeah. Your home has to go.
Homes often places we are most attached to, perhaps, you know,
a place where we kind of feel safe and where we have our
things and where we hang out and and all of that.
And so this is obviously area of attachment for many people.
But everything in your life, everything that you own in this
world has to go. Your home, your car, your
clothes, whatever it is that you have, whatever it is that you
enjoy here. So see how what that feels like
to give up that, give up your attachment to those things.
Get a sense of perspective and distance to those things.
Clothes have to go. But even much more powerful than
your worldly possessions is all the relationships that we have
with people in this life. Yeah, people is often a very,
very important source of, you know, of happiness and joy in
this world, but also a source of great attachment.
Yeah. It's very difficult to lose
people that are close to us. People die, and it's very hard
off in there. So feel what it feels like to
give up the people in your life. Yeah.
From now on, I'm going to fare on into my own future without
the people around me here. And that will show you a lot
about your spiritual maturity here.
If you're able to give up the people in your life not attached
to them and just carry on on your own, let go of all of that.
It shows that you have detached quite a lot and you have a quite
an independent mindset with the ability to move forward.
Please remember, this does not mean that you become a callous,
hard hearted evil character. Yeah, just because you act like
this. In fact, it means the exact
opposite very often, because attachments are really vested
interest. If you are attached to
something, you are really concerned about yourself and not
about the other person. Yeah.
So it actually does a negative thing.
Yeah. And so I don't think that this
makes you a bad character. In fact, it does the exact
opposite. Usually you're better able to
look after the needs of others if you are not attached in this
way. So, yeah.
So let go of that. Let go of the all the things you
own in the world, then you let go of the people in in your
world. And then you let go over a large
part of your identity. Yeah.
Who we are, Who are we? Well, we what the things we are
are so closely related to our position in this life.
Yeah, whether we are a parent or a child, whether you are the
female or male, whether you are educated or uneducated, whether
you are from this country or that country, Yeah, whether you
are one race or another race, whether you are poor or wealthy,
all of these things gives us a sense of identity.
It makes us who we are. But once you are dying, once you
are giving up everything that connects us to this world, all
of that identity largely vanishes as well.
Yeah, some of that identity may go with us, but a lot of it has
to go because it is tied down to this world.
And there's something very freeing about letting go of your
identity. Your identity is something that
narrows us down, makes us into these individuals who are
separated from the rest of the world.
But when you get rid of your identity, you let go of that.
It's almost like you, you become more.
You become more equal in a sense.
Yeah, we become more the same. And that is, you know, a
wonderful thing when that happens, you take away the
barriers and taking that where those barriers means that also
your mind expands. And that expansion of the mind
is similar to what we do when we practice meta and those kind of
things. Yeah, you're allowing kind of
the barriers to fall away here. There's an interesting thing, I
don't know if I if this is really all that relevant, but I,
I remember in, you know, you have a Finnish monkey.
Yeah. Mudita.
He's from Finland. And one, one of the things that
Finland is famous for is the saunas.
You know, this is sauna is actually a Finnish word.
It's the kind of sauna you all know.
It's a really hot room. Yeah.
And in Finland, the hot land, anywhere else, they're super
duper hot. And and so the and, and this and
one thing they say about the saunas, one of the things they
do because in the sauna you're basically naked.
Yeah. So it says it makes everyone
equal. Yeah.
And that is kind of the one of the nice things when you're
naked. Then there's many of the
barriers and the status symbols you have are taken away.
So you go into the sauna with your boss.
Yeah. And certainly you are the same.
Yeah. Which is which is quite nice,
right. And then you are kind of on the
same level and you can have a different kind of conversation.
We can relate to each other in a different way here.
That is a very worldly way of taking down barriers.
But it's kind of, it's kind of nice.
Yeah. This is the kind of the
Scandinavian, the Nordic way of taking down barriers.
So there you are. But the Buddhist way is just a
little bit deeper. So, yeah, so take on barriers
and get rid of these things that we identify with.
Identification is always problematic.
Yeah, I'm a Buddhist monk or whatever.
It's problematic because it narrows you down.
It separates you from others. That is always a problem.
And then your body has to go. Yeah.
And this is also very powerful because the body is also a large
part of identity, something we are attached to in a large to
great degree. So just letting go of the body
here. And what comes out of that, of
course, is that what is left after you do all of that is
really just the mind, the mind itself and nothing else.
And that is exactly the sort of thing we're trying to reach in
meditation. Yeah.
Getting go of the body, letting go of the senses, that's another
thing you can do in your death contemplation.
The sense is gradually going. Yeah.
Letting go all of that and going into the mental world instead.
So by going through a kind of simple depth contemplation in
that way, actually you're coming very close to what we are trying
to do in ordinary meditation practice when we watch the
breath. So giving yourself a little bit
of a boost in letting go of things.
Yeah. And this is kind of what this is
about. And that helps you to have a
similar outlook to what Ajam Brahm has in his meditation.
This is what we mean by renunciation.
And you start to understand when you do this that it is actually
extremely pleasant. Yeah, it is very nice to let go
of things. You realise that the vast
majority of things that we hold onto this world actually are a
pain. They are oppressive, they are
problematic. And the more you let go of, the
more you let go of your sense of self, the ego, if you like, the
more you let go of the things that you think you think you own
in the world, but you don't actually own them.
Yeah, because they get kind of taken away from you before you
know it. This delusion of ownership is
one of the great illusions in the on the Buddhist path.
The more you let go of these things, the better you feel.
This is a strange thing. It's a strange thing how we try.
We try to amass things, yeah, grasp onto things, thinking this
will make us happy. But it's actually when they give
those things up, that's when you become happy.
We've got it completely the wrong way around.
It's weird, isn't it? There's that beautiful saying
that you probably heard before, where the saying that what the
noble people in the world take to be, or rather what the
ordinary people in the world take to be happiness, the noble
ones say is suffering. Yeah, yeah.
And what the ordinary people think are suffering, the noble
ones say is happiness. So we get things almost 100% the
wrong way around. So letting go, that is where
that happiness arises because you are freeing the mind,
liberating things instead of narrowing things down and making
them very kind of contracted. So death contemplation is one
way of doing this. And that leads to this feeling
of letting go. You know of of of renunciation,
if you like. It's quite simple when you when
you think about it, but there is more to it.
The other ways of learning to let go.
And one of the great opportunities now.
And of course, what happens is that even though we have that
great opportunity now, people tend to forget it so fast.
But right now, we still have this COVID-19 running around the
world. Yeah.
And people think COVID-19 is so much suffering.
I don't know. Do you think it's suffering or
do you think it's OK or is it neutral or is it good, bad, who
knows? Or what do you reckon?
OK, you don't have to answer. Yeah, it's a rhetorical
question. So this is the thing.
A lot of people think this is bad, but that really depends on
how you deal with it, how you think about it.
In the monasteries, we think COVID-19 is great.
Yeah. Everything became very quiet for
a while in a monastery in Perth. Nobody.
People stopped coming to the monastery, just kind of dropped
the food off. And they dropped off more food
than usual. That's what's kind of the
amazing thing here. And then they dropped it off and
drove home, like driving for one hour or an hour and a half,
shopping, doing all of that, coming to the monastery, staying
there for 2 minutes. Adam Brown gives you a quick
blessing. We know we're at a big distance.
And then you you drive off again and it's kind of amazing.
One of the things that you find is actually how kind sometimes
people become in these difficult times.
Yeah. That was one of the beautiful
things. We could certainly see that in
the monastery. People became more generous,
more kind, more willing to help out.
It was. It was marvellous to see that.
But for us, it was great. Yeah.
And everyone says, oh, the monastery hasn't been this good
for for years. For a long time it's been, it's
been so quiet and so peaceful. But actually it is that's,
that's not really fair to put it that way either, because the
reality is it's often a very nice interaction between the
laypeople and the monastics. So it's just a matter of
perception. But it was very, it was
unusually peaceful. That is still true, though.
So what is it? Is it good or bad?
Well, it depends on how you use it, how we deal with these
things. And of course, one of the really
important points about COVID-19 is that these things are to be
expected. Yeah.
I mean, we, we know that all the world, World Health authorities
of the World Health Organization, all of these, they
said we can expect a pandemic to come every so many years.
Every few decades there will be a pandemic.
And you look at human history, there's always been pandemics
around. So the fault is ours.
We're not expecting it. Yeah.
When it comes, we say, oh, yeah, pandemic.
Yeah. What are you on?
This is not a pandemic. What do you.
What do you expect? Yeah, That's life.
Life is full of pandemics. And if it isn't a pandemic, it's
something else. COVID-19 is a metaphor for all
the things that go wrong in the world.
And there are a lot of things that always potentially could go
wrong in the world. I remember just not long ago, we
had the Cold War. Yeah.
I'm old enough to remember the Cold War and.
And that was a very difficult time for people.
Yeah. There's the feeling of mutual
annihilation being possible because of the atomic weapons.
One person presses the wrong button at the wrong time.
Yeah. Imagine having Donald Trump in
office during the Cold War. That would have been scared.
Much more scary. No, I shouldn't.
I don't really mean to be political.
I just. But so, yeah, so there's always
these problems in the world. And right now there's also lots
of problems in the world. But it's always been like this
to some extent. There's always been problems
around, always things going wrong and, and, and going funny.
And so COVID-19 is just a reminder of that, reminder of
the problems in the world. The world is never stable.
The world is always out of control.
The world is always doing what you don't expect it to be doing
here. Yeah.
And sometimes it goes better. Sometimes it go worse.
But we have no idea where it's heading next.
And when you have no idea, it's scary because we want stability
in our lives. If World War 3 is just around
the corner, that's not a very nice thought.
Yeah. If climate change is going to
lead to massive problems in the world, it is not a nice thought.
What exactly is going to happen? We don't know.
It's just impossible to know. But that uncertainty itself is a
cause for concern because it's unpleasant to live without
uncertainty, never knowing what's going to happen.
So this is the great opportunity.
Very often what happens is that you come out of a problem like
COVID-19, and you say, oh, yeah, now life is going to go back to
normal. There is no normal.
Yeah, forget about normal. It doesn't exist.
Things are always changing, moving around, normality,
There's no such thing. It's the same reason why we
can't compare each other to each other.
We cannot say I'm like this, you like that.
Because there is no normal inside each one of us.
It's always changing, always moving around.
And when you get that, that there is no normal, things are
always so uncertain. You become more wary of the
world, and this is beautiful way of distancing yourself from.
This is a beautiful way of renouncing a little bit.
Yeah. Of understanding the problem,
understanding if you want to find a real solution in life,
that solution is not found in the external world of the five
senses because that's what really what it is.
Because that world is inherently, inherently right,
deeply flawed all the way to the core.
There's nothing there you can hold onto.
It's like a carpet. You're walking on a loose carpet
and someone is always trying to pull the carpet from under your
feet. You can never stand anywhere.
Standing is here a metaphor for grasping, clinging and
attachment, and nothing you can attach to.
As soon as you try to stand, as soon as you try to get a
foothold, someone will come and pull the carpet out.
And that someone is nature itself, and nature is just
nature. There's nothing.
You can't control it. You can't change it.
So this is the problem and it leads to a change in values.
And I'll tell you another story, which I, I really enjoyed when I
read it many years ago for the first time.
And I was really, kind of, it really was one of the things
that had a kind of powerful influence on me in my life
because I thought, wow, this shows you a different way of
thinking about the world. And I probably told this story
before and I'm going to tell it again because that's, that's
what life is about, telling stories again and again and
again. That's what we do as monastic.
I've learned this from Ajam Brahm.
But he is A and and this is very important.
Yeah. And the Buddha does the same
thing because stories are often so many levels to them and it
takes a while before they really sink in properly here.
And so this was a story from back in Norway.
Norway was is where I was born. And now I'm also Australian
citizen. So I don't really know what I'm
now. I'm probably just confused, but
you know, so, but anyway, so this was back in Norway during
the Second World War. And after the Second World War,
there was this fellow who wrote a book about the war.
And this book was called The Human Being, Happiness, Human
Beings and Happiness or something like that.
And one of the things they talked about was the paradox of
happiness, how happiness sometimes emerges in situations
where you might not expect it, you know.
And he told the story of how during the Second World War,
which was Norway was not very badly affected by it.
Yeah. I mean, yes, it we were invaded.
Norway was invaded by the Germans, but it wasn't any kind
of destruction, wholesale destruction of society as you
had in some of the other European countries.
Fairly small scale everything. Yeah.
Even though we were affected by the usual things, you know, the
Norwegian Jews sent to the concentration camps and that
kind of stuff. That happened in Norway as well
there. But Norway had a very small
Jewish population, so it wasn't so, so big in Norway here.
But So what happened during the Second World War?
Yeah. It was a time of great
difficulty for people. Many people had family members
who were interned in concentration camps or were
killed or were many would leave home and they would kind of
retract to the Norwegian Forest to kind of be a resistance
force. Yeah, from from afar.
And there was a lot of problems, you know, so there was some
destruction. It was very hard to get ordinary
requisites for life. Food was being rationed during
the Second World War because imports became very difficult.
Yeah, because of the war going on in Norway.
It's a very cold countries. It's very hard to grow all that
much food. And of course, all other
requisites for life, also difficult to combat.
It was a very hard and difficult period for people in general.
People suffered a lot in the superficial way.
And then this fellow who wrote this book, he said that what was
so strange was that despite all that suffering on the surface,
under the surface, people were very often more happy than they
had been during peacetime, just before the war, just before it
was the 1930s or whatever. Yeah.
And he compared people's life before the war and then during
the war, and he said people were often much more happier.
And the question then was, why was that the case?
How could when all the external things, all the world was kind
of collapsing around you still, you felt more happy.
Maybe you felt guilty about being happy.
I'm happy. Gee, that's really bad.
Yeah. And that's kind of how the human
mind sometimes works. We feel guilty about being
happy, which is really crazy. Yeah.
Which is OK. I'm happy.
And why is that? And they should investigate it
instead of feeling guilty about it.
It's OK to be happy regardless. Really.
If you go to a funeral and you're happy, it's OK.
You can be happy at the funeral service.
Yeah. And sometimes that happens,
especially if Jean Bram leaves a funeral.
He will tell a joke. Everyone burst out laughing at
the funeral. I've.
I've seen this happening in a few times, and it's kind of
nice. It kind of breaks some of that
sombre atmosphere. And it, it points things in a
different direction. But even during war, you can't
be happy. And he said the reason he
thought why people were happy is because their values changed.
Suddenly there was a common enemy.
Yeah, the Nazis. And then everyone kind of banded
together, and everyone sort of felt a sense of comradeship, a
sense of common purpose of helping each other or caring for
each other. Yeah, I don't know.
They probably didn't care for the Nazi.
There still wasn't an enemy, obviously, but still there was
some something that brought people together and they dealt
with each other with a sense of care that we don't normally do
in ordinary life. Because in ordinary life we're
too busy with the worldly things to really care for each other
properly, to look after each other.
Yeah. Because in ordinary life, while
everything is going well, there's no, you know, we can be
can afford to be less, less kind to each other.
So this was this amazing thing. Yeah.
That happened during the Second World War.
It actually brought people together.
They became kinder. And what it really did, when you
think about it, what it did was it brought out spiritual
qualities. When the world is no longer
reliable, when the five senses aren't reliable, when the things
that you normally depend on can no longer be depended on, you
have to go to a different kind of resource.
And those are the spiritual resources.
And you go inside and you ask, how can I live well?
Instead? That was the lesson for this
man. During the Second World War,
people became more spiritual. They became kind in a different
way. And this is exactly how we
should deal with the COVID situation.
This is how we should deal with climate change.
This is how we should deal with wars and political instability
or whatever it is in the world. That is funny.
Yeah. When we talk about the five
sentences, this is what we mean. It is that world outside of us
in a very large scale, also in the small scale family life, our
individual experience, but also the large scale, how the large
world impacts on us in this way. That is how we deal with it.
We understand how problematic it is.
We turn in a different direction and we move towards the
spiritual life instead. What is that spiritual life?
It is whatever develops your mind.
It is the ability to be kind, the ability to be caring, the
ability to be compassionate, the ability to be peaceful, the
ability to withdraw inside and experience deep meditation.
Yeah, that withdrawal inside is precisely a giving up of that
external world, and it's going into your real home, as Ajanshah
famously said. Yeah, a place where you can be
safe from the external problems. So that is the right attitude
towards all of this. And what matters now that we
have, you know, we have we kind of maybe on the tail end of
COVID. Well, hopefully eventually we
come to the tail end. It seems to be going dragging on
and on and on. But when we're coming to the
tail end of COVID, it's important that we don't forget.
Yeah, that we're kind of back to business as usual and back to
the same old things. That is tends to be the human
fault or flaw in how we forget every time things go badly.
And then we, you know, someone dies.
And after a few years, we've forgotten about that.
And we live ordinary again as if no one is ever going to die.
We have a war. And then after the Second World
War, of course, in Europe, Europe was really devastated by
the Second World War. Something like 80 million people
died during the Second World War, a lot of those in Europe.
And. But then, you know, people say
never again. We don't want to do this again.
This is so much, so much suffering.
Yeah, it's really, really bad. And then you create the European
Union to kind of part of that is to stop the World War, stop
future wars. Yeah.
There's been so many wars in Europe.
It's a small place with lots of different languages, lots of
different cultures, all kind of on top of each other.
It's a recipe for war, right? It's my culture is better than
yours. And you, you speak the wrong
language. I'm better than you are.
OK, But let's fight it out. And then kind of that's what
happens. This is the human kind of human
create madness. And so they create the European
Union. And then, you know, very clear,
we don't want this to happen again.
And then of course you, you forget time goes by and all
those lessons that were there, the people who were part of the
Second World War, they have died.
Next generation is kind of getting older and it kind of
drifts into a distance memory and you forget the horrors of
war if you get how bad it actually is.
And then you move towards greater antagonism again.
And I think this is what we are seeing.
Yeah, right now, people forgetting these things.
So one of the most important jobs that we can do as Buddhists
is not to forget. You have to remember the
reality. This is what we mean by right
view. Right view is to remember the
reality of things, to remember the instability of the world,
how out of control it is, how we cannot really have things the
way we want them. They're always going to go
counter to what we really desire.
And as we remember that, we remember that all the COVID
nineteens of life and there's just one COVID-19 after the
other. Yeah.
And if you remember that, then you will not, you won't go
wrong, and you will be kind of heading in the right direction.
And that is what we need to do now.
And this is how you come to this idea of renouncing the world a
little bit stage by stage, understanding its limitations.
And as you do that, your mind becomes more.
More peaceful in meditation. Why?
Because all of those things that you cling to, all of those
things that you hold on to the world, you cling a little bit
less, you hold on a little bit less.
It allows your mind to withdraw inside a little bit more.
There's an inverse relationship. Yeah.
Inverse relationship. I used to be engineers, I mean,
to kind of this kind of terminology, inverse
relationship between you're holding on to the world and your
ability to meditate. And this is then how it
gradually comes about. Yeah, gradually letting go of
letting go of these things. And so that is our our job.
And this is what we have to have to do.
And this is how you gradually do that.
But how do we remember? This is one of the things that
I've always been kind of one of those very important questions,
How can we remember? If the whole world cannot
remember? How can we remember?
How can we be different from the whole world?
I know that there is that all famous saying.
It is saying that for those people who don't learn from
history, they are bound to repeat it.
Yeah. You know that saying.
It's kind of well known saying in the world, and it's invented
by some philosopher or something or some decades ago.
And it's a nice, actually quite a nice saying.
If you don't, if you don't learn your history, you're bound to
repeat it. The idea is precisely that we
kind of go back into the world, do the same mistakes again and
again and again. And there is something to that.
I think if we do learn a bit about history, we will help us a
little bit. But what I have also noticed is
that we tend not to learn from history.
Yeah. You read the history books and
then you cannot really imagine what it is like.
Yeah. You may read about war.
You may read about the terrible times in the Middle Ages,
perhaps when you had the witch hunts and the Inquisition in
Europe and all that kind of stuff.
And you read about it, but it doesn't really sink home.
Yeah. It's as if we can't really feel
it properly. So even when you do learn about
this, maybe we should teach history in a new way.
I wonder why they were teaching history in the wrong way.
We should have more immersion. Yeah.
You can You get into there. You are part of the movie.
You kind of maybe you don't get killed.
That's taking taking the the virtual reality too far when you
actually die. That we could be
counterproductive, but we need to make it more real.
Yeah, you know what they say? They're saying that the first
casualty of war is the truth. Yeah.
Because as soon as you have a war, you start showing the war.
You never show what actually is happening.
If you show all the mothers who are grieving over the children,
the children who become orphans because they lost their parents,
the wife and the husband who lose their partner, if you show
all the horror, all the grief, all the terrible sadness of war,
you won't get your population behind you.
The population are going to support the population is going
to say don't go to war. It's crazy.
So we never show the truth. Instead you show, yeah, we got
this really nice, you know, super duper computer system that
guides the missiles right into the right place.
And all we do is kind of it blow up the kind of the the
opposition's ammunition. That's all we do.
And people generally are OK don't worry too much about it.
Yeah. So the first casualty of war is
the truth. But what we shouldn't do, if we
really don't want to have war in the future, we should show what
actually it is like, how much suffering it creates.
And this, I think, will be a far more powerful history lesson.
So in schools we should be, we probably should teach maybe
history in a more in a slightly more realistic way here.
Maybe they do that now. Maybe it's a long time since I
was a school child, so I'm not really sure how that works.
But this is how you gives you an idea of how we can remember as
Buddhists. Yeah.
What we have to do is we have to renew that memory of the world
being problematic, being unreliable, being uncertain,
always changing, not being something you can hold onto.
And the way to do that is always to come back to this.
Buddhist teachings always remind out that I'm really happy.
One of the reasons I like to give talks is because it's also
a chance for me to remember the teachings.
Yeah. When I teach, you may think that
I'm teaching you, but no, I'm actually teaching myself.
Yeah, I'm, I'm really happy that you are here because if you
weren't here, I probably wouldn't be giving a talk to
myself. So it's actually helpful to have
a few people here. Yeah.
So thank you for coming. But it is actually, it is true,
though. It is actually a a way for the
teacher. Often the teacher is the one who
learns the most because I have to actually think about this.
It's more powerful for me. In a sense.
You are like the passive recipients, but when you have to
teach to become more actively involved for obvious reasons.
So make sure you come back to these teachings.
Make sure you ask questions about them.
Make sure you take the opportunity to be the teacher.
Yeah, if you have the chance. Being a teacher is a great
thing. It's one of the best things you
can do is to actually teach others because that really makes
you think about these things in a new way.
So if the president asks you, OK, would you like to teach?
Yeah. Or, or if he himself want to
teach, please take the opportunity.
Don't be shy. Don't think you can do it.
And if only one or two people show, show up, you know, to the
teaching, that happens. Sometimes only one person comes.
You think, OK, well, still, let's have a conversation about
these things. So come back to these teachings,
engage with them, reflect on them, try to understand what is
going on. Yeah.
And as you do that, gradually, gradually, your mind turns
around, looks at things in a new way, and then your meditation
becomes more profound. The world is receding slowly.
It's not a shock therapy. It's not like you're going cold
Turkey. Yeah, this is real.
The real cold Turkey is when you give up all the sensual
happinesses of the world, you don't go cold Turkey, You
gradually move away from it. That is the way, right way to do
it. If you go cold Turkey, you won't
be able to deal with it, and then it's not going to work out.
So just so slowly, what feels comfortable, make sure it is an
enjoyable path. And letting go of the world
actually is very enjoyable. It is very peaceful.
It gives rise to all of these beautiful qualities.
And then you are doing it in the right way.
It's so important that the spiritual path should be
enjoyable. Yeah, there's enough problems in
life already. I don't know if you, if you
haven't got enough problems and let me know afterwards and I'll,
I'll tell them whatever. So there is enough problems and
the spiritual path should be something that enhances our
quality of our life, not that detracts from it.
And it's funny, it's taken me a long time, even as a monk to
really see that clearly. Yeah.
And not to kind of make this, this teaching something
oppressive. So when we give up, when we
renounce, we should see the beauty of renunciation.
We should see how it is healthy, how it leads to more stability
of mind, how it leads us on the spiritual path, how it makes us
better human beings, more caring, more kind, not more
callous and hard hearted, but more gentle and more useful for
ourselves and for society around us.
Then you're heading in the right direction.
So this is what Ajam Brahm does, and this is what we have to do
to have the same kind of success in our meditation as Ajam Brahm
has. When Ajam Brahm sits back and
just relaxes, he lets go of the world because he knows very,
very deeply that the world is problematic.
So we should try to approximate that.
And then when you do that, when you have that right view, this
is a very important part to right view.
When you have that part to right view, then you too.
When you lean back, when you relax, when you enjoy yourself,
your mind will. OK, good dog.
Yeah. Would go to the right place and
hang out in a place where it is letting go rather than clinging
on there. And then stage by stage, each
one of us can follow that same path, the path of the Buddha,
the path of meditators like Ajambrahm, and the part of all
the great people in the world who have deep meditation and who
really enjoy the spiritual practice.
OK, that's the talk for today. So there you are here.
So that is just that's it. And if you have any questions or
comments or whatever, this is the time to ask you.
Yeah. And discuss.
You are allowed to disagree with me, but please do so in a kind
way so you don't scare me because I might.
So, OK, anyone would like to start?
We've got, we've got 2 online questions.
So if you want to come from the from the, we have someone over
here who would like to. Yeah, just behind you.
Yeah. Thank you.
I'm just wondering, you mentioned kind of flipping our
perception of spirituality on its head, like using our life to
support our spirituality. What are what are some of the
ways that we can do that a bit more specifically, I suppose.
So like for instance, our workplace, how can we use our
workplace to support our spirituality or our
relationships? How do we use our relationships
with our spouses to support our spirituality?
Yeah, sure. Great.
Yeah. Thank you.
That's a very important question, So thanks for that.
And I yeah, I talk about this sometime.
That's why I didn't go into detail now, but just briefly
remember that the most important support for meditation practice
and the spiritual life is basically how we treat other
people, You know, how we live in society.
So whether we deal with whether we are kind or whether we, you
know, we don't, that is really what matters.
I would, I would say I very often said that the spiritual
life can really be reduced down to kindness because if you are
kind in a very profound and deep sense, then meditation and all
of the other things tend to come together from that.
And that gives you the answer to your question.
So, you know, in your workplace, ask yourself how we can think
about that work situation a different way.
And we always have customers. Yeah, we have Co workers, we
have company owners even. Yeah, we have whoever is has
some kind of interest in that company.
When you do your work, when you do it well, when you do it in
the right way, with care, the kindness, all of these things,
all of these people are supported through your work.
Yeah. So yes, you get your salary from
that work and of course you have to, but you can add the
spiritual component on top of that and making sure you do
things in the right way here. So some of the one of the
problems is that very often we tend to focus too much on the
results. Yeah, we want to get the, you
know, the company has a certain bottom line, you have to meet a
certain budget or whatever it is.
And all this kind of. I think it's really, it puts too
much pressure on people sometimes or, you know, you are
looking at your more personal thing.
You want a promotion, maybe you want a pay rise or whatever.
And we focus on the results in life.
But every time you focus on the results, you tend to forget the
means. Yeah.
The result becomes the important thing and the means are
subsidiary to the result. Yeah.
And this is always very scary because the moment the means are
subsidiary to the results, the results become the most
important. That is where the morality often
comes to a stop, Yeah, where you start to forget about kindness
because the result is what matters.
So we really, we should turn things the other way down
around. The result is irrelevant.
Yeah. What matters is the process, how
we get where we want to go. Dude is a process imbued with
kindness, is a process imbued with a sense of compassion, with
understanding the suffering of other people.
We're all in this mess together. Yeah.
Everyone has more suffering in their life than they want to.
And once you get that, then you make the process in your life
what matters, not the results. And the company may not be so.
I don't know if the company's going to be happy with you, but
So what? Yeah, it's it's kind of, it's
irrelevant. The big picture here is so
important that if the company is not 100% happy with you, it
doesn't actually matter. But chances are the company will
be happy with you because chances are if you do things
with kindness, you're creating a good sense feeling in the
company. Yeah.
You're kind of bringing people together.
We're working as a team rather than working as competitors
within the same company, which is terrible.
Yeah. It creates a bad atmosphere.
We're working as a team. We're pulling in the same
direction everyone. And very often you find that
when that is happening, the bottom line of the company
actually is better here. Why?
Because you're working with joy, then you have more energy.
You have everything come becomes better here.
There's less backbiting, there's less problems in the workplace
and all of that and then everything kind of goes well.
So I, in my experience, I, I have found that very often it is
the the nice people who do the best in corporate life.
Not always. Sometimes the, you know, you
hear about the kind of the, the psychopaths or whatever who do,
who do well. And maybe there is some truth to
that. But I think that in the end,
nice people often win out. And if you don't win out, it
doesn't matter because you win out in a different, much more
profound way. You win out in the spiritual
way. That is the way that really
matters at the end of the day here.
So that is the work life and your family life is the same.
Yeah. How do you treat your, I don't
know if you have a wife or whatever you have or children
maybe or whatever, or your parents.
Yeah. Or whatever it is.
How do we treat them in a way that is fits with the spiritual
practice? How do I treat them with
kindness and compassion? How do I make sure my temper
doesn't kind of get out of control when my kids do
something bad? Yeah.
This is very difficult to be a parent sometimes.
I you love your kids and still sometimes it's just hard to to
stop yourself getting angry and upset with them.
But you make that a real priority because you understand
the importance of that. You make that a priority with
your partner in life, with your parents.
Yeah. And this is one of the things I
tried to do as a monastic my, you know, looking after my
parents in the right way. And it's tremendously powerful.
There might, might be really turned my parents around when I
first became a monk, they said, OK, well, we've lost our son.
Yeah. We.
Our upbringing failed. Yeah.
Everything has gone completely wrong.
That's how they because they didn't know anything about
Buddhism. They thought it was some kind of
cult or something. I was brainwashed.
I was beyond any kind of no way of retracting me from that, that
dodgy cult. But over time, as you live well,
as you treat your parents in the right way, don't try to convert
them. That's the last thing you should
do. They come around and towards the
end, my father passed away now a couple of years ago, but towards
the end of his life, yeah, My father was a person who would
say to me, let's sit down and meditate.
Let's sit down and have a short, Dumber talk.
Yeah. And then he would, he was kind
of this. So he would bring the whole
family together. Yeah.
My brother and my sister, all the kind of in laws and we all
sit and sit them all down. And then we we would do Dharma
discussions and have a Dharma talk and meditate together.
It was amazing. Yeah.
It was such a turn around. And this is what I think
kindness does, not to everyone, but to a lot of people.
It brings them around and it kind of creates that sense of
harmony and a very positive feeling as a consequence.
So everything you do in a life, imbue it with those qualities.
Those are the spiritual qualities.
Imbue it everything with kindness, with care, with
compassion. And then you're practising
bringing the spiritual life into the daily life.
It enhances both the daily life. It also enhances your spiritual
path. Everything benefits from that.
Then I think you are on the right track.
Yeah. So you have a few online
questions? Yeah, please, is question one
from Sarah Dear Ajan. My 44 year old brother tried to
kill himself and has asked me not to tell mom and to lie to
her until he's ready to tell her she would like to know.
So there's a couple of Yeah, there's a question.
We try to find it. Yeah, yeah.
She would like to know how to resolve this clash between right
action of respecting his brother and the wrong speech of
misleading mum. And he's all key and getting
professional help already. Thank you.
OK, So, yeah, I, you know, remember that it's important to
remember that right speech and right action is very relative.
It depends on your motivation, why you're doing things.
So in a situation like this, the first thing I would say is that
try to avoid lying if you can. I try to say, oh, Mum, I don't
want to talk about this now. Come back to me, you know, later
on. It's just too difficult or
something. Say something.
We don't outright lie. But you also don't have to say
it. Asking for compassion or say
whatever it is that you do. Yeah.
To kind of avoid lying. But if you do have to lie in
that kind of situation, it is not a very bad liar.
Yeah, because you're coming from compassion.
You're trying to, I mean, obviously your brother Sarah, I
don't know if you're hearing me right now online, maybe you are
obviously in a very distraught and difficult position.
It's very hard to talk about these kind of things.
It's very personal. And so I think in this case,
it's very, it's very important that your brother be allowed to
come out and talk about this when he is ready.
If you force these things, often they can be even more traumatic
and they can lead to even more difficulties.
So we have to remember that these precepts are not set in
concrete. They're not absolute standards.
It depends enormously what our motivation and intention is when
we do these things. If your motivation is anger or
I'll will or greed or something like that, of course it is bad.
But if your motivation is compassion, is kindness, it's a
bigger picture of understanding things, then it is not
necessarily bad. In certain situations, it might
even be good if you're coming from compassion.
So don't worry if you have to be a little bit evasive with the
truth in this case, then you know that's OK.
But even then, try if you can. Instead of lying, try, if you
can just to kind of, you know, navigate it a little bit without
saying what your brother is doing here or has done.
Thank you, Arjan. The second question is from
Norma from Fort Lauderdale, US question, how can you control
this your speech even when you understand right speech, but if
you have tendency with so much energy almost spectrum autistic,
how can you control your response?
Yeah. Thank you.
How can you control the response?
One of the ways of controlling it is to speak less.
Yeah, this is one of the things that I have found very useful in
my my own life. So, and this is what the Buddha
says. It was interesting.
I was just reading recently, I was looking at the idea of right
speech because we were doing a workshop in in Perth on the
noble at full path and one of those great suit, as the Buddha
says, well, if you speak a lot, 4 bad things happen.
Why what? You lie.
You speak devices speech, you speak harsh speech and you speak
idle chatter. Yeah, you speak a lot.
These things just come out. Yeah.
Because that's what a lot of speech does.
It reflects our mind, and because our minds aren't
entirely pure, bad. If things come out so speaking a
little, speaking, not speaking much is actually a great way of
reducing bad speech. So this may be the first one.
Speak less. Don't necessarily respond.
Yeah, learn to just kind of people talk just, you know, nod
and smile and say, oh, yeah, sure, whatever, you know, I'll
talk to you later or whatever. I don't know why, you know,
something like that is a little bit evasive without being rude,
you know. And so this is how you, this is
one way of dealing with speaking less.
Another very important thing, and this is exactly what we've
been talking about now, is the idea of right view.
Keeping that right view at the back of your mind at all times,
remembering how important these things actually are.
Every time you make a mistake in your speech or your actions or
even in your thoughts, you're taking a step backwards on the
path. Can you afford to take a step
backwards? The answer is no.
Yeah. This is what life is about.
It's about moving forward on the path.
Every time you make a mistake, you're letting yourself down and
you're not going forward anymore.
And so being very clear about that and having that as a very
kind of strong thing at the back of your mind at all times.
Yeah. Remembering the importance of
these things. This is about your meaning of
your entire life. That is what the spiritual path
is about. And when you get the
significance of these things, the important of these things,
by listening to the Dhamma again and again, by reflecting what is
going on, establishing that kind of right view, then when you
come in a situation where you, you, you feel the compunction, I
must talk. It can be very compelling, very
strong force that you have to speak.
Actually one day you don't speak at that particular point.
Yeah. Instead, you you remain quiet or
you say something or you lead the conversation in a different
direction or whatever it is that you do, but you don't actually
react because you know, you know what is going on there.
So that is that is an important part of this.
Another one is to remember that very often when the people talk
to you and they say something that you don't like or something
that you want to react to, one of the thing important things to
remember that is not personal. Yeah, when people say something
to you, it feels personal, but actually it is not personal.
Why is that? Because the other person, they
are acting, speaking out of their own conditioning.
It's relevant whether you are there or some other person like
you was there. They would be saying the same
thing because they're conditioning.
As such, they have to speak at that time.
It's about them, not about you. And one is you take that
personalness out of the equation, it's much easier not
to respond. The reason why we respond, the
reason why we get angry, the reason why we cannot stop us
from saying something in this particular case is precisely
because we take it personally here.
Don't take it personally. The issue is largely gone.
So remember, it's never personal.
Nothing in life is ever personal here.
Everything is just conditioning it.
People say things because of their own inner demons, their
own inner, their own past, their own inner programming.
Their own inner robot is coming out.
And that inner robot is often misprogrammed and it misfires
and it says stupid things. But why get angry with a robot?
Why respond to a robot? If a robot comes up to you and
says you are bad, I you do bad things, you probably would
laugh. Yeah, you wouldn't.
You certainly wouldn't react to what the robot is saying.
People are like that. People are robots.
People are on programs. They don't know what they're
doing. Doing.
Yeah. There's no need to respond to a
robot. So just yeah.
So this is a very useful way that comes from the whole
Buddhist idea of non self. Yeah.
That we are conditioned, we are just the way we are.
Comes from the past, this life, maybe previous lives or whatever
it is Anyway that's think about that.
Reflect on those things. You may think that you may, you
may, I don't know if you'd like what I've said or find it
useful, but think about it. And some of these techniques are
actually extraordinarily useful and very powerful to help you
overcome these issues of morality and things.
OK, We've got two more questions.
Yeah. OK.
What about people who are here? Anyone want to ask anything?
Because I want to give people here a chance because you're
online. Hello again.
Good to see you again. Yeah.
How do I fit in my daily life as a layperson?
Like in terms of Dharma Cela and Bhavana like, and also the five
precept, does it count as a cela or like that's to be minimum
like 8 or 10 presets 227, 311 for the nuns.
That's I reckon that's the minimum.
Yeah. But no I5 precepts is great.
Please keep the five precepts. I would not necessarily
recommend keeping the 8 precepts as a layperson because life is
so busy and if you don't eat in the afternoon, it may just make
life really hard. Yeah.
And so don't keep the five. That's good enough.
And, you know, enjoying the sensual things of the world is
not very bad according to the Buddha.
It's not going to drag you down a lot.
So a bit of enjoyment of essential things in the world is
almost a requirement to have an enjoyable life.
Otherwise life might end up being too miserable, and then,
you know, you are. That's not the idea either.
But more important in terms of virtue is the idea of kindness.
Yeah. The five precepts are not really
in themselves about kindness. They're more about avoiding
doing bad things. But on top of avoiding doing bad
things, do good things. Yeah, That is really, I think,
the most important thing to do in life.
So always have that at the back of your mind.
How can I be more kind? How can I treat people in a
better way? How can I understand people
better? Yeah, and a lot of that has to
do with right view. Again, understanding people in
the right way, because when you understand them in the right
way, actually kindness comes almost automatically here.
Yeah. If you remember the suffering of
people in the world, remember how out of control they are, how
non self they are, how they are like little robots going walking
around. Yeah.
You start to have a sense of yeah, OK, I should, I should be
kinder to people. That is really the kind of the
holy, the Holy Grail almost of Buddhist practice.
Yeah. That that ability to turn around
and be more kind when it comes to Bhavana, in terms of
meditation practice, use that largely to support your kindness
in life. Yeah.
So that you are more chilled, you're more relaxed.
When you meet people, you don't react so quickly.
Yeah. In their presence, very easy to
be reactive. Sometimes you're not so reactive
anymore. And so use it mostly for that.
And occasionally you may even have really beautiful
meditations, even in ordinary life.
Yeah, don't expect that. Yeah.
This is one of the things we're talking about.
Don't expect it. Use it only to relax and to
enjoy. And then occasionally you have
something really beautiful happening here.
And as you do all of this, all of these things coming together,
then when you eventually you go on a retreat somewhere, yeah,
whatever that might be, you find that you have changed.
You're more mindful, you're more ability to watch the breath or
whatever because you have done the right thing in ordinary
life. And I just want to say the
meditation tips that you gave like this morning because I felt
like it's personally like cater for me.
Like there's all the questions that I have and like you
answered all my questions. Thank you so much.
Marvelous. Wow, that's really nice to hear.
So yeah, thank you for that. OK, anyone else?
OK, let's go online online again.
OK, Arjun, the third question from Huey, Tokyo, Japan.
My friends were frustrated with me when I started renouncing
entertainment. I couldn't be with them in the
end. Was it possible for me to be
around them? Now I only have a few friends.
You don't need that many friends, right?
I Let's face it, few friends is better to have few good friends
than to have many scallywags as your friends.
And I, this is a question I've come across quite a lot.
Yeah. People come.
Oh, yeah. You know, I don't really want to
be sociable anymore. And all the people I used to be
sociable will. They just talk about things that
I'm not interested in talking about.
And sometimes they drag me down because they talk about worldly
things that are completely, utterly irrelevant and just
depressing and, and lead your mind astray.
So, you know, don't. I would say don't worry too much
about having, you know, losing a few friends.
I don't think it's a big deal. Make sure, though, that you have
enough friends to make life enjoyable.
Don't make life miserable because that is the last thing
you want to do. But letting go with your
friends, it is often not a bad idea.
One of the things that Buddha talks about is the importance of
Kaliana mita. Yeah.
Good friendship or spiritual friendship, and also the
importance of giving up the Papa Mita, the evil friends.
I'm not saying that your friends are evil, but they may not be as
wholesome as you might want them to be, and they might feel them
to be distracting or whatever. So remember that because the
Kaliana Mita are the people who influence, who support us to
move us forward on the spiritual path, whereas the other ones are
the ones who hold us back. So this becomes very, very
important. So there isn't any absolute
answer to this. I cannot really say.
It depends on the circumstances. Make sure you find a balance in
your life. Don't take things too far or go
too quickly, because if you do, you will suffer again, Find that
balance. But there's nothing wrong with
being antisocial. Yeah, antisocial is great if
you, if you define antisocial ability in the right way, you
know, I don't mean antisocial as in being a juvenile delinquent
or anything like that. I'm what I mean is not being
interested in the in the social life.
It's perfectly fine as a, as a Buddhist, perfect as a serious
Buddhist to be like that. There's nothing wrong with that.
In fact, I would say that a lot of people who I know who are the
best meditators are precisely antisocial in that way that they
don't really enjoy social interactions very much unless it
is really purposeful. So, yeah, so I would say don't
worry about it, but be careful that you don't make your life
miserable or negative or anything like that.
Try to find a balance in these things, and then you'll be on
the right track. Yeah.
And eventually you will give up every last friend and you will
be a hermit. Yeah.
In a cutey somewhere in a nice monastery, wearing a nice brown
robe with a shaved head somewhere.
Maybe, maybe, maybe something like that.
Who knows. Who knows what the future
brings. Anyway, good luck.
And the last question are done from Jack Isbister.
In daily life the mind swings between the inner and the outer.
How do you stay connected to the inner as one participates in the
outer? It seems to be challenging as
one moves deeper into self discovery.
Thank you. So the inner in daily life is
really mindfulness. Yeah, that's kind of the inner
in daily life because mindfulness gives you like a
cushion between you and the world outside.
It's like you have almost like the sense of like a little bit
of a distance at all times. You never completely immersed in
the world. You have a sense of perspective
and a sense of ability to navigate in the world outside.
That's what mindfulness is. It gives you, it empowers you,
and you feel empowered. When you have mindfulness, it's
almost as if you feel in charge of your mind.
You can decide whether you want to look this way or look that
way. Yeah, you can avoid the
definements from arising because of that mindfulness.
And it feels like you are centred and that is really the
inner life in the ordinary world, that centredness.
And then you have to imbue that mindfulness with right view.
I've been talking a lot about right view now, and that right
view allows you to look at the world in a beneficial way.
You don't allow people to upset you because you look at them in
the right way. I've just been talking about
this before. You don't allow yourself to be
too attracted to all the shiny things in the world.
Yeah. Why?
Because you know their disadvantage.
You know the downside, You keep your precepts and all of that.
So mindfulness allows you that kind of restraint.
Yeah. Where you hold back from those
worldly things that are going to be detrimental to you.
So that is how you navigate that inner life in the ordinary
world. And then you do as the previous
person suggested, you can also cut down on your social
engagements a little bit. Yeah, you kind of navigate, you
can kind of adjust your life a little bit to make it more
suitable for the spiritual practice and the spiritual path.
And then you. Yeah.
So that's what I would say in that particular case.
No more questions. OK, good.
Yeah, I don't believe that. No more question.
But anyway, there's always more questions to it.
OK everyone, very nice to see you all again and thank you for
having me here at the BSV. And maybe if life remains, as
one of our fellow monastics used to say, if life remains, then
maybe we'll see you again sometime in the future here in
Perth, on the Internet or wherever.
So let's just finish off by paying respect to the Buddha.
Damasanga. Is it just the Arahang?
Is that what we'll do? Yes, we'll do that.
We'll do just to finish off. Please do browser for last.