Transcript

Ah, someone’s got a very noisy microphone. Ross, I think. Yeah, that’s good. Thank you. All right, so, everybody, welcome to the Sunday afternoon tie time call.

About three of us are here on the island in Thailand, and everybody else is spread around mostly. This is a call for the UK. So it’s for late Sunday morning. And today we’re going to start with the concept of hard times. Bad times, a hard day.

Guess what days are just days. They’re not hard. What’s hard is that we don’t like something, but that’s what makes it hard. The times themselves are not hard. In fact, the Chinese would call it interesting times.

Okay, that, yeah, there’s a few wars going on, but there’s always been a few wars going on. We’ve had some. We’ve got some really crazy politicians, but we’ve always had crazy politicians. In fact, being a politician is actually. Craziness is a requirement.

Nobody in their right mind would be a politician, which makes politics kind of crazy, but not hard. Hard is your own personal attitude about things, and I welcome you to change your attitude. And in fact, that’s really what the teaching of the buddha is all about, is to change our attitude.

That when we say something is hard, what that actually means is that you feel like that you’re a victim to something. Something is hard, something is heavy, some weight that you have to carry, and I invite you to just set it down. Whatever it is, is hard. Whatever it is is heavy, especially if you don’t have it actually in your hand. In other words, whatever problem you’ve got, if it’s more than 3ft away from you, it doesn’t belong to you anyway.

So you’re often carrying burdens that don’t belong to you. In a way, being worried about politics is kind of a theft. You’re a thief. You’re taking problems that don’t belong to you, bringing them home and then feeling bad.

Partly because we want things to be different than they are. And things are not going to be different than they are because you want them to be different than they are. So we can change that immediately. Once we figure out that it doesn’t belong to me, just set it down and we might pick it up later and then we’ll think it’s hard again. Well, if you can see that it’s hard again, you can remember, oh, I set it down once, I can set it down again.

And we keep putting things down, keep setting things down over and over again, then we’re more careful when we pick them up. Again. And so that’s actually the teaching of the Buddha. Now, one question that is often raised about that is the idea of progress, making progress on the path of dhamma, and that this is very typical of the western mindset, that if we are victims, if we find things heavy, if we have burdens to carry, we want to ask, well, how long do I have to carry this burden? What kind of progress towards a goal am I making so that I can finally set this stuff down?

There is a story called Pilgrim’s progress. It comes out of the middle ages, dark ages or something like that, where pilgrims are people who are on a spiritual journey, going to a holy site. And so I ask the question, what happens to a pilgrim when he finally reaches the holy site? Is he still a pilgrim? Well, he’s been a pilgrim all of this journey.

He’s made progress. He’s gotten closer and closer and finally arrived to the holy place. Does he then change his attitude, wow, I’m in a holy place? No, the pilgrims of those times actually would only spend the time to rest at the holy place, and then they’d get up and pilgrim themselves into going to some other holy site. So the question is, why do we keep going when we have already arrived?

This is what we mean by progress. That actually much of the practice of meditation is with the idea of making progress. Oh, I can see this dukkha and I can see that dukkha. Maybe I’ll see some more duka, and when I’ve seen enough dukkha, then I can be free of it. Well, guess what?

That doesn’t happen. Another word that we could use for this would be ambition. And so we want this, we want that. We’re ambitious to go get this and go get that. And guess what?

When we get what we want, when we get the results of our ambition, guess what? The ambition doesn’t go away. The pilgrim remains a pilgrim because he’s been in the habit of being a pilgrim. So whenever the pilgrim actually arrives at the holy site, he’s still a pilgrim.

He’s not now a holy man living in a holy site, he’s still a pilgrim. So what does he do? He picks himself up and goes off on his pilgrimage to yet another holy site. Well, the site that you’re in right now is complete. It’s real, it’s got all of the ingredients that you need.

Everything that you need in life is free, and here you are and you’ve got everything. But we still have that pilgrim mentality. We’ve got to go someplace to get something. And that’s what we mean by progress. Well, guess what?

Progress is also a mental concept, but it’s also kind of an attitude. The attitude of making progress is actually the attitude of a loser, the victim. And they’re trying to come out of their victimhood by making progress. And we can change that attitude immediately from being a victim who needs to make progress into, wow, I don’t have to do any place. The place that I’m in already is holy enough.

Let me sit down and enjoy it. This is the concept that most people miss. They think that the Buddha’s path is a path of progress and that it’s a path of attainment. Many people want things, and they see that Buddhism has these words, these labels, and they’ll say, hot dog, I want that too. Words like nirvana, words like enlightenment, words like, oh, arahant, soda, panic, meditation, then I’ll have a big whip to do experience.

And so this is the idea of con, of progress. Carl, you had a question.

I just wanted to add on. For me, it ties up into not being okay with existence of simplicity. And we’re not essentially like, it’s put like this. We’re looking for problems to solve constantly. So we create a problem and then we try to solve it.

That’s progress. When in essence, we’re trying to create a meaning. We’re trying to create meaning out of words we perceive in our heads, and then we try to explain them to ourselves. So even with like, nirvana, all these words, we’re trying to see what it is. Or what is this?

What is this is. Maybe there’s more to life. We’re just not okay with this fact that everything is easy. It’s simple, it’s just that uneasiness with same boredom. We say we were not okay being bored.

We’re not okay. We’re just sitting. So that’s what it kinda enticed for me. All right, well, boredom itself is actually wanting something to be different than it is. We’re not, we don’t like what is right now, we will call it hard times.

We’re bored with it. All right. However, if we recognize that the human mind is actually quite a piece of machinery, but unfortunately, instead of being a machine to enjoy reality, our cultures have turned this into a problem solving machine. The human mind is a machine to solve problems. Well, the funny thing is about that is that when we don’t have any problems to solve, that’s a real problem.

For a problem solving machine, it’s got no problems to solve. So what do we do. We invent new problems to solve because we can’t stand not having any problems.

And so that’s exactly why buddhism is difficult to understand, because the reality is that you don’t have any problems and you’re really not a problem solving machine, that we can just enjoy reality, just enjoy life without having to solve any problems. There are no problems, in fact, other than the ones that we manufacture or have been given or we steal from someone. Last week, somebody asked me the question about thinking and thought, and where does thought come from? And the answer to that is there’s very few original thoughts. Almost none.

Almost every thought that you think now, you’ve thought it before. And before that you heard somebody else telling you about them thinking about it. And so thoughts are actually just repeated the same thing over and over and over again, often in the realm of trying to solve a problem. In fact, there’s no problems.

So if we can change our attitude about the problems, then there are no problems. Also, the idea of making progress is that that’s a victim’s attitude, making progress towards solving problems. Well, guess what? When you get a problem solved, that just means that you’ve got to go find another problem to solve because you’re in the mode of problem solving. We might think that that’s progress, but it’s really just getting stuck.

The same thing over and over and over again. You probably heard about being lost in the woods, and people are lost in the woods, and they’re walking, and they keep walking and they keep walking, thinking that they’re making progress. And as they keep walking, they eventually recognize a rock that they just saw a few hours ago and recognizing that they’re going around and round and around in a circle and not making really any progress at all. And so this is really how people live their lives. They keep journeying, they keep going, thinking that they’re making progress, and they wind up back in the same place that they were.

Okay, so some real change needs to be made, and the real change that needs to be made is to change our attitude about things. Yes. Ross, you got your hand up? Yeah. Thanks.

Tomorrow. So this whole concept when you’re, you know, when you’re at school or, you know, just generally in life where people say, you got to find your purpose in life, that say, are you saying that’s really just a, you know, that’s your. That’s really taking you down the wrong path because there is, there is no purpose, right? There is no meaning to life. There is no purpose to life that, in fact, what we believe gives meaning to life is some sort of authority figure.

And the bigger the authority, the higher up in the sky this authority is, then the more we believe in meaning, that life has got to mean something. There’s got to be goal. There is no progressing towards a big goal. Pardon? But if there is no purpose, what are we.

What are we meant to do? There is actually a lot of purpose in life. And what is the purpose of life? Well, ask whoever’s got the purpose. People make up purposes.

They make up meanings of life, or they borrow it from somebody who gave them the idea that there’s a meaning in life. And everybody’s winds up being confused because of the various purposes and the various meanings of life. The reality is, is that if you want life to mean something, then make something up. That’s what you’ve been doing anyway. You just make stuff up.

Carl, you got your hand up again. Yeah. The purpose is a funny one. As soon as you say, what is the purpose? And then you answer that there is no purpose, you can see that another question arrives in your mind.

Okay, so if there’s no purpose, then what? And then, yeah, you’re still creating a problem for yourself by having this.

You need to snap out of the sequence. You need to look beyond the sequence of these thoughts, and then you can see the purpose of all of it. That’s the. That’s like a paradox. I don’t know how to precisely pinpoint it, but you can see the questions.

If you can see the questions and kind of see the cycle. Exactly right. That that’s the whole point. That when we say, well, what comes next is because we’re still looking for some meaning. We’re still looking for some purpose.

We’re not willing to recognize that there really is no place to go because where you are is already okay. If it’s not okay, then all we need to do is to change our attitude about it from it’s not okay to it is okay, because the reality is, is that it’s okay that we’ve been taught that it’s not okay. We’ve been taught that we gotta work, that, in fact, we’ve been abused. When we were kids, we were put to school. We were put to work.

We did what we were told to do. And then the rich people tell the poor people what to do. This is where the idea of purpose comes from. The purpose is to do what you’re told to do.

Deidre, go ahead.

Yeah, so, interesting. I think it’s really, when you say there is no purpose, there’s this whole festa opening up. Like, there’s such freedom because you can choose your own meaning or purpose you want and then choose wisely. Like, my purpose is to enjoy life, or my purpose is to connect with others or whatever. You can choose your own.

But that’s also, like, it’s so much freedom that I think that’s sometimes hard to grasp. Like, oh, wow. Everything I’ve been indoctrinated to. Like, I should do this or be ambitious or have goals or have meaning or whatever. To let go of that.

That feels a little bit shaky.

It’s both thrilling, exciting, and also terrifying to recognize that you don’t have those boundaries, that, in fact, the pilgrim is bound by his pilgrimage. The one who is making progress is bound by his progress. The one who has a meaning in life is bound by that meaning. The people who are problem solvers are bound by their problems. You want some reference points?

I mean, I do. At least you want some steady reference points, like, this is what life is or something, you know, it’s the same as I was reading in Sutta 22. Like, you have a self. You have a not self, self, not self. That.

To look at that like from this is everything is concept. So, you know, it’s a little bit hard to grasp, but I like it. Right? For many, many, many centuries, we have been taught that we are not okay. The church is given the idea of original sin.

You were already broken before you were born. You were broken. And your purpose somehow is to one of two things. One is to fix yourself, which then they tell you is impossible. Or the second one is to figure out how to get forgiven for being broken while you still remain broken.

That it’s okay that you’re broken. Well, guess what? Broken again is a victim’s attitude. That you’re not broken at all. You’ve just been convinced that you’re broken and need to get fixed.

You’ve been convinced that something is wrong with you, and you need to make progress to come out of it. The reality is that you’re already okay, and you don’t need to do anything to make any progress or to solve any problems. You’re already okay. But that mentality, that attitude, that victimhood, has been so in ground, in so ingrained that we have been repeating that as an attitude over and over and over again, moment by moment, minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day, that we’ve actually practiced being a victim, let us say, 100 million times in the past ten years. So what that means then, is that we have to begin to practice being okay, we have to practice being okay by recognizing those not okay thoughts that we’ve been practicing already and make a change to them.

Like the thought of, I’m sick, and then say, aha, I see that I can be sick, but I’m still okay. I’m already. All right, Thomas, go ahead. Oh, sorry.

Yeah. So that just brought me to what I think happened just before I got on this call was that I had an expectation of wanting practice to be easy, practice to feel good. And that kind of created another layer of unwholesomeness on top of that. So I wasn’t feeling okay. I wasn’t feeling good because I wanted to practice to be like it was before.

And then what just happened, somehow it just kind of dropped and, yeah, it just all fell apart. And now I’m feeling really good. All right, Deidre, go ahead.

Yeah. Because before you said about, like, you’re already okay, but still before that, we had about ambition. So I was thinking it still also can be okay to do, like, a goal setting. I mean, that’s, there’s nothing wrong in it. But I think what you mean to say is that it’s not, like, not from victimhood kind of goal setting.

I’m sick. I want to get better. I have no job. I want a job. I have no money.

I want money. But it’s more like a goal setting can also be fun. Can it? Right. It depends upon your attitude.

Yes, that’s what I mean. It certainly does. It always depends upon your attitude. And we have developed the attitude of being a victim to the circumstances. And so we blame the circumstances rather than recognize that it’s not the circumstances.

It’s our opinion. It’s our view. Ross, go ahead.

The topic of being sex, I always find that an interesting one because I always feel like, isn’t thought trying to make sense of how you’re feeling at that moment in time? So if you’ve, like, say, for example, if you catch the flu, right? You’re sick, so your body feels run down, you don’t, you know, if you’ve lost energy and then thought is now translating that experience and saying, you’re sick or I’m sick. So isn’t that, isn’t that reasonable for that to occur? Actually, what you were saying was, is trying to make sense out of things.

Isn’t that reasonable? The answer to that is that’s back to the problem solving. All right? That’s back to trying to understand an example, by the way, of that is that when I’m giving instructions for people on how to practice anapanisati. They keep asking questions and over and over again, one question after another, after another, after another, because they’re trying to understand how to practice.

Well, guess what? They don’t need to understand all of that stuff. That’s still just a confused mind. They’re still in the victim’s attitude of, I need to know more. I need to figure it out, because I still don’t feel good about it.

So this is what we mean by we have to practice changing that attitude, to practice changing the state of mind that we’re in to gladden the mind (see [[Brighten Or Gladden The Mind - Replace Unwholesome Thoughts With Wholesome Thoughts - Dhammarato]]) . An example of that would be, oh, I don’t have to know all of that stuff. I don’t have to read every buddhist literature. I don’t have to figure it all out. I can just relax, okay?

I don’t have to be afraid of that great big dictionary of Buddhism. I can lay down beside it and take a nap. I don’t have to figure it out.

You see, the figuring it out is the. Is the method of the victim. Oh, I’ll be okay when I figure it all out. Guess what? When you do figure it out, you’ll find something else to figure out.

And there’s no end to the desire to figure things out. What we have to do is to change that desire to figure things out and let how things are be okay. This is a radical idea. It’s radically different than the way that we have been raised. And so the way that I would say it is that we have been spending our whole lives talking ourselves into feeling bad, giving ourselves duties, giving ourselves problems to solve, giving ourselves the desire for knowledge, the desire to gain, the desire to get better.

And, in fact, we can live our lives just happily doing what we’re going to do already, being the winner. And, in fact, the best thing to do is nothing at all. Just sit down and relax. There’s nothing left to do. You don’t have to figure it out.

You spend all of this time talking yourself into what you need. And, in fact, all this time, you didn’t need anything. So now it’s time to start talking to yourself in a way that you’re already okay. There’s no progress to be made because there’s no problem to solve. There’s nothing to figure out.

It’s just merely changing your attitude from I’m broken to I’m okay.

Thomas, you got your hand up? Yeah. So, really interesting stuff. And it kind of. It jars against everything I’ve, you know, considered before is necessary.

In terms of personal development jars in a good way. But, but still, it’s different. What is the role then of motivation? Because it does take effort, right? You talk about right effort and changing your attitude in the moment.

What is the role of motivation in ensuring that you’ll make that effort? And does that coincide with what the Buddha says about, like, skillful desire? Well, skillful means wise wanting. Okay? This is what we’re coming to is unwise.

Wanting means that you need it, you got to have it. And that, I would point this to you as an example, is that you can start or learn to want things that are easily available to you and stop wanting things that are far away. In other words, whatever you want, if it’s in within 3ft or easy walking distance, then that’s okay. You can have the wisdom to only want things that you can easily get and stop wanting things that are hard to get.

So that’s the way of looking at it, is to take the easy way out. Only desire easy things that are easy to get. Like the next breath. If you want to take the next breath, go ahead. The air is there.

If you want to smile, that’s easy to do. Just smile.

But if you want to know all about Buddhism, you’re going to be suffering for a long time that even when you actually figure out the real thing about the Buddha, unless you apply it, you’re going to stay in that desire to want more and more and more that you start reading. Then you read more, and then you start wanting to read the Pali, and you learn the PaLi language, and you read more, and then you want to translate the Pali. And now you’re a translator, you’re a scholar, and you’re still miserable the way that you were all along. That, in fact, becoming a buddhist scholar is a curse because they’re not practicing. If they would practice correctly, they wouldn’t write books. ^3edc97

Books are for people who are trying to figure stuff out. And we don’t need to figure anything out. We can just relax. We can let those books just lay there.

There’s no progress to be made.

So if you are a pilgrim, get yourself into the holy state immediately, and then stop being a pilgrim and just enjoy the holy life. Here you are, you’re whole. Everything around you is okay. You’ve got enough. I like the word enough, that the word enough actually fits in very well with the middle path, the Eightfold, the middle path of the Buddha.

That in his first sermon, as he begins to talk about the four noble truths, he introduces it by talking about the middle path. And that middle path solves all of our problems in the sense of where dukkha comes when we’re at some extreme or another, but when we recognize that we’ve got enough, that this is it, you’re already in the sweet spot. Things are good enough just the way that they are. Ivan, you got your hand up?

Yes. I just have a quick question. Is it true? I heard that the Buddha himself actually disliked the idea of his teaching being written down in books? Something like, he thinks that works on paper are very limited, as in, he prefer talking, like maybe dharma talk, to spread the knowledge rather than through words on paper.

I’m not sure. I’m just asking. Okay, you’ve got some background noise in your muffled. Michael, you’ve got a clear mic. Can you repeat what he said?

Ivan was asking if it’s true that the Buddha preferred not for his teachings to be written down and that when written down, it can sort of obscure the dhamma as opposed to having dhamma talks, for example.

Actually, I wouldn’t say that that would be true. And the reason for that is because we’ve done enough literature search to know that certain works, like the Sutta napata and the Udana, were written in the Buddha’s lifetime, that there are some things that are worth writing down.

However, the problem with written literature on its own is that you can’t ask questions and that book cannot point out to you your desires, that it takes someone who is kind of skilled because they’ve worked through their own mind. Once you learn your own mind, the human mind, you recognize they’re all the same. Everybody’s got a mind. All the minds work the same, and they all can have a tweak here and there with the attitude. But a book is not going to give you that, but writing stuff down.

In fact, in the time of the Buddha, the way that they did it was because writing was difficult. We didn’t make easy copies. They didn’t have xerox machines back then, didn’t have computers. But what they did do was that they would chant certain suttas. They would chant it over and over again, and the new students would come in and listen to the chants and then learn the chants and get things in order.

And after they learned the chant, then it was explained to them so that they could understand it correctly, that, in fact, chanting something and getting it over and over and over again is actually quite valuable, but only if eventually, or as you’re learning the chance, you also understand what they mean. And so when lay people listen to the monks chant. The monks are getting a great deal of value out of it because they know what the chant means. But the laypeople will hear that same chant over and over again, and they still don’t have a clue about what it means.

And so the same thing is true with a book. You can read the book over and over and over again, but you’re going to keep missing the same points over and over again. Your blind spots are going to be there until somebody can point those out to you. And so, Ivan, you’re kind of half right, but it’s not because of the problem with the book itself. The problem is the way that it’s being read.

Deidre, you got your hand up.

Yeah. I’m referring a little bit for what we talked about earlier, like, you’re saying, like, the. About the right practice. And I wanted just to make, like, a remark that was really stunning for me. A few.

Couple of sangha talks before where you said, oh, it was one on one. It was the first time I heard in all my meditation practice and in all my going to retreats or whatever, is that you be aware of what attitude you have and what thoughts you have, but then not letting the thoughts go, but giving them a counter thought, like the opposite thought. Like, I don’t. I don’t feel well, so I’ll be okay. Yeah.

Remark. Okay. What? What? Just look what is happening?

What am I thinking? I’m thinking, oh, what a shitty day, or whatever, and then you can take a counter thought and say, it’s going to be a perfect day, or it is a perfect day. Yeah, it’s already. Okay. Exactly.

All right. This actually comes out of several different suttas. One sutta is number 117, which is the Buddha’s really, really clear explanation of the Eightfold noble path. And it is completely different than almost all of the other explanations of the Eightfold noble path, because most of the time, the path that is taught is taught by ordinary people in an ordinary way. So I will introduce now to you the concept that there are actually two paths of the Buddha, the beginner’s path, the ordinary path, and then that graduates into the second one, the noble path.

So the way that, in fact, we do that in our culture, in a way that when children are raised, we give them rules. So in buddhist culture, they give the children precepts. Okay? Now, precepts are not the same as rules. It’s not the same as a commandment, it’s not a law, but rather is precept in the sense of begin to understand what it is, okay?

Harming other people.

We can understand that in two ways. The very ordinary way is that the kamma machine is going to come get you if you hurt people. But the more noble way of looking at it, the middle way or the intermediate way would be, oh, if I harm those people, they’ll take revenge upon me and try to harm me back. If I insult somebody, they’ll insult you back. That’s just the way human nature is.

And then the high level, the really noble position would be, I’m not going to insult anybody because I don’t. I don’t have any desire to insult anybody. That when you don’t want anything, when the mind is noble, then you. You don’t take it out on other people because there’s nothing to take out. You’re.

The mind is already clean, the mind is already pure. You don’t want anything. Okay, so how do we come to that state is that they start by teaching the children the precepts. And once we have that Selah, then we can take on gathering the mind together so that we can have the mind together, so that we can see clearly. And when we see clearly, then our view changes.

So Sila is the first one. Now I’m talking out of sutta number 24. I’ll get back to Sutta number 117 in a moment. But in Sutta number 24, it talks about the way to start is by getting the sila together. Now, the reality is that if you’re sitting quietly, just sitting, your seat is already perfect, because right then and there, you’re not harming anybody, you’re not telling any lies.

You’re just sitting there, your seat is okay. So as the mind develops, it develops into a quiet state. And then when the quiet state happens, imagine that it’s something like this, a camera. And you’ve seen this a lot on the Internets and whatnot. That when somebody is holding a camera, it’s shaky.

But if you take a camera and put it on a tripod, then it gets a much better image. Well, the mind is like that. When your mind settles down, then you can see better. And when you see better, then you begin to understand, okay? And so having from the sila to the quiet will then give you the view.

And the noble view is to investigate, to look, to keep watching. And this is where then we come back to Sutra number 117. That in fact, the noble path requires wisdom to begin with. And so we’re ordinary people until we begin to see clearly. And when we can see clearly, we keep looking, we keep investigating, we keep recognizing that things are always in a flux.

If you look at something and study it and come to a conclusion, guess what? The evidence is going to keep changing and your conclusion is going to remain the same. So at one time you were right and you hold the same viewpoint and the same attitude. You’re going to be wrong soon enough because reality has changed on you. But if we stay with reality, we’re always up to date, but we have to keep looking at things over and over again to stay up to date.

And so we have to remember to keep looking. We can’t live in our concepts, and yet most people develop their concepts. They develop their worldviews when they were children, when they were too stupid, too ignorant. Children are pretty dumb people and they stay dumb for the rest of their lives because they keep stuck in the same views and opinions that they formed when they were children. But if we can continue to investigate, can we have the stability to look?

And when we look, we can see clearly. And when we see clearly, then we can see these things in our minds that are harmful, that they’re unwholesome, that they are in fact hindering us from being in that really great state. This is why they’re called hindrances. That in fact, one of the hindrances, I think you’ve heard is called to doubt. What is that?

That’s the thirst for knowledge, wanting to know something. And you’ll find people in practicing meditation, they want to know all about it. They really want to know and more and more and more and more. And while they’re wanting more and studying more, they’re not happy. They haven’t gotten enough yet.

So the question is, when are you going to get enough? Well, all we really need to know is to take a look at what we’re thinking and make a change to it. Make a change. Any thought that you have can be changed. Any thought that you have can actually be improved.

Now, if you find yourself having a really, really super duper, 100% excellent thought that cannot be improved upon, at least you then can recognize that that’s the case. And then you can congratulate yourself for having such a super duper wonderful thought. So even then it can be improved. So always recognize that whatever thought that you have can be fixed, it can be better. And so you can begin to congratulate yourself.

You begin to look at, ah, I see that. Begin to see what thoughts that you have. This is the real practice. Now, you probably heard about noting. The problem with noting is that you note, dukkha, you see the dukkha, you note more dukkha, you see this dukkha, this unsatisfactory ness is connected to that.

That one. And now you have a whole group of unsatisfactory things that you’ve noted. You begin to get buried under all of that dissatisfaction. Some of them even claim that it’s a dark night of the soul. In fact, there’s no dark nights and there’s no souls.

But you feel like that you’ve seen so much crap that you’re being buried under it. Well, that’s because that practice is missing something. Every thought that we have, every note that we take will put an additional feature to it. And that’s called change. Right?

Noble effort to make the change. Any thought that you have can be improved. Every unwholesome thought can be turned into a wholesome thought. For instance, the thought, I’m sick. Can be changed into the thought of, wow, I ain’t dead yet.

Wow, I’m okay. I can survive this. I’ll get better. Well, I can handle this. Well, I can take the day off.

I can lay here in bed and just be sick. Oh, I’m so sick. Oh, I love it.

So this is the way that we can change our attitude. Don’t be a victim of your circumstances, even the circumstance of being sick. You can change that by changing your attitude about it. We can, in fact, change our attitude. We can change, in fact, in the suttas is talked about in the sense of a state of mind.

You can change your state of mind. You can gladden your state of mind. You can improve it. You don’t have to be victim of your own thoughts then. In fact, that’s the only thing that you could be victim of, is your own thoughts.

And so we can come out of that victimhood.

Thomas, you got your hand up? Yeah. Just. Just wondering, do you then get to a point, or can you get to a point where you stop having the thoughts altogether? Is that.

Ah, that’s the wrong question. Okay. That’s a goal in it. The better thing to ask at this point is, is that, can I do it again?

Can I do it right now? If I can do it right now, I can do it again later. In fact, doing it right now is a skill that I’m developing, and I’ll do it. Really, I’ll be fine later. I don’t have to want to come to a state to where I don’t have any more unwholesome thoughts.

Because, hot dog, I can handle this unwholesome thought.

I always understood the practice to be that you become the observer of thoughts, not the creator of thoughts at some point. I understand. Those idiots never make any progress. They don’t. They become meditation teachers instead.

Okay. They observe the thoughts and then observe more unwholesome thoughts. And then observe more unwholesome thoughts. How about let’s observe an unwholesome thought and then change it so that now we’re observing a wholesome thought. And can we observe another wholesome thought?

And when an unwholesome thought comes in. Hot dog. I caught that one too. Let’s make a change. The Buddha, in fact, had a little phrase that he used that it was early in his time when he was at Bodh Gaia.

And that little phrase is, aha, I see you, Mara. Aha, I see that unwholesome thought. In other words, we can gladden the mind immediately.

And wanting to be gladdened completely is just another unwholesome thought. Because you’re not. You’re not. Okay, right now, all of these unwholesome thoughts. Oh, will I ever get rid of them?

Instead of, aha, I see that unwholesome thought, too. I could get rid of that one too. I can become a winner. I am a winner right now. I can’t handle that unwholesome thought.

There’s no progress to be made. An instant change is necessary.

Wanting to make progress is actually just another unwholesome thought.

Carl, go ahead. I think it ties back to the even. Even sickness. And wanting to stop talks. Like, if you’re sick and you concentrate on the sensation and you just keep your attention, that one sensation of, like, oh, my belly hurts.

Then you become that whole thing. You become the whole life in the essence of my belly hurts. But if you allow the sensation to keep passing and you can see that it’s moving, your belly hurts. Then you’re thinking about something. Then you’re looking at something.

You can see that you’re not even sick. You’re just creating some kind of reality. Your body’s feeling one way and you’re creating reality. So in a way, when you say you want to stop the thoughts, you’re becoming stagnant. You want to create a stagnant reality.

When in reality, if you’re stagnant, you’re dead, right? If everything was stagnant, we would just be dead. That’s the only way to stop the thoughts. And same way with sickness and sensations. That’s the only way to stop sickness, is to be stagnant.

Which means you’re dead. Exactly. What you’re actually referring to, then, is that we have been talking ourselves into feeling bad all of this time. We’ve gotten into the habit of talking ourselves into feeling bad. Now it’s time to change that, to start talking ourselves into feeling good.

I’m okay. I got this wired. I’m all right.

Somebody’s joined us. Baloney. Alberto? Yeah? Can you.

Yeah, sorry. Yes, you can. You called? When? We’re just about to finish this one.

We’ve been on for an hour. Yes. Check your world clock. Yes. Yes.

And, mister, for an hour. We join next weekend. All right, so this is basically the way that we practice. Now. It’s okay for people to go into a retreat, go into a meditation hall, to sit down in the hall with all of the other people sitting cross legged, squatting on the floor with an idol or an old monk or something up on the altar, along with candles and incense and that kind of stuff.

You can think of that as meditation, but then recognize that we’re not practicing meditation. We’re practicing changing the mind. And you can do that at any point in time, wherever you are. You can gladden the mind, whatever you’re doing. But I do recommend that you spend a few minutes, intentionally, for the next five minutes or so, and do this several times a day.

Intentionally start watching the mind and making improvements, making changes, start going. Getting into the habit of doing this. This is not something that you do occasionally. This is something you want to start doing. A lot of that.

In fact, when it becomes consistent enough, we can, in fact, put a label on it. This is what the word sotapan actually means. The one who is in the stream means the one who is looking at every raindrop that comes into his mind, every little bit of water that passes through. He’s in it. He can see it.

He watches it. He’s eager to see what’s going on in the mind.

I invite you all to become eager to watch what’s happening in your mind, to become joyful, to recognize that any. Any problem that you have can be changed right then and there.

That if you’re sick, lay down and enjoy being sick. If your butt hurts, stand up and walk around or lay down and let it rest.

Most of us will actually sit until our butt hurts, and then we’ll sit another couple hours because we’re busy. We got to get the work done. Won’t take the break. Allow yourself to break. Allow yourself to quit.

Allow yourself to take your life easy. Stop having goals. Oh, I’ve got to get 10,000 things done in ten days. That’s a thousand things a day. Oh, no.

The only thousand things I need to do today is take one breath at a time. Maybe there’ll be a thousand of them by the time I all breathed up. But other than that, we don’t need to have goals. Take it easy. Slow down.

The analogy that I used today with the student was when you’re out digging a ditch with the boss looking on, you see, then the boss gets in his car and drives away. Are you going to keep digging the ditch? Are you going to sit down under the tree?

Well, guess what? Why don’t you send your boss on an errand?

The boss, in your own head. Send him off someplace so that you can sit down and rest.

That’s the way to look at it, is, in fact, the boss that we have. Is that superego? It’s all the rights, rules, rituals that the Buddha talks about. We become obsessed with how things are supposed to be, and then we’re in conflict with that because the way we want it. So we’re in conflict with how things are supposed to be, what the boss says and how we want it to be.

And the reality is always missed. So what we need to do is to come out of this conflict between how things are supposed to be and how we want it to be, and come to be restful in how things actually are. Things are good enough as they are.

Go ahead, Deidre.

Just a little remark I wanted to make. I sometimes talk to my own mind and say mind. Thank you very much. You’re very helpful. You’re very skillful.

But it’s enough for now. You don’t have to worry. Use more of enough that you’ve got enough. We come from a position. Security.

That’s what the victim’s position is, is that it’s not yet enough. I don’t have enough knowledge. I don’t have enough products. I don’t have enough money. I don’t have enough love.

I’m looking for love in all the wrong places and recognize you’ve already got enough. Enough already. If you want a good mantra, use the mantra enough already in Thai is Polao. I’ve got enough polow. Enough already that this is enough.

It’s good enough. You’ve got all you need. If you start living your life like that, it can become a joy. Everything you’ve got is you’ve got enough already.

So does anybody have any last remarks? Wow, what a good crowd. Two, four, 6810, 1213. Now, that’s enough.

And so let’s end this talk now. I’ve had enough of it already.

Does anybody have any last remarks?

All right, you guys have had enough too. Great. Enough of this.

Enough already. Thank you, Dhammarato. Thank you everyone.

Youtube Video

AI Summary From Claude AI

Prompt: #ai/prompts Please summarize this transcript from Dhammarato. Please give me the key points and also direct quotes to illustrate each of those key points. At the end give me any insight that you may have on this talk from your own experience as an AI and what you’ve been trained on that could apply.

Key points from Dhammarato’s talk:

1. Hard times and bad days are just concepts - it’s our attitude towards circumstances that makes them seem hard. “Guess what days are just days. They’re not hard. What’s hard is that we don’t like something, but that’s what makes it hard. The times themselves are not hard.” ^3027b8

2. The idea of making progress on the spiritual path often comes from a victim mentality, always feeling like there are problems to solve. But we can change that attitude. “Another word that we could use for this would be ambition. And so we want this, we want that. We’re ambitious to go get this and go get that. And guess what? When we get what we want, when we get the results of our ambition, guess what? The ambition doesn’t go away.”

3. There is no inherent purpose or meaning to life other than what we make up. Searching for meaning often leads to suffering. “The reality is, is that if you want life to mean something, then make something up. That’s what you’ve been doing anyway. You just make stuff up.”

4. The solution is to change our attitude in each moment, to “gladden the mind.” We can do this by countering negative thoughts with positive ones. “Every thought that we have, every note that we take will put an additional feature to it. And that’s called change. Right? Noble effort to make the change. Any thought that you have can be improved. Every unwholesome thought can be turned into a wholesome thought.”

5. Stop striving for goals and just accept things as they are. True freedom comes from being content with the present moment. “Take it easy. Slow down. The analogy that I used today with the student was when you’re out digging a ditch with the boss looking on, you see, then the boss gets in his car and drives away. Are you going to keep digging the ditch? Are you going to sit down under the tree?”

My insight as an AI: Dhammarato’s teaching aligns with principles I’ve been trained on regarding cognitive reframing, acceptance, and mindfulness. By changing our internal narratives and relationship to our thoughts and circumstances, we can radically alter our experience of life. His emphasis on contentment and non-striving is a powerful antidote to the restless ambition and discontentment that characterizes much of the human condition. Ultimately, his message seems to be that liberation is available in any moment simply by shifting our perspective. This resonates with what I understand about the transformative potential of the mind.