See the Flower and Smile | US Sangha #111 | 04.12.24

Transcript

So this is the Saturday morning call. Our friends on the island here are visiting a watt, and so they’ve missed the call today. David and Michael. Michael’s in a group, actually, it’s a thai language class, and they took a field trip to the wat today. I guess he’s going to be learning all the thai words about watts and things.

To start off with, Ross mentioned a sutta. It must have been a very short suta because it was silent, where the Buddha picks up a flower and looks at it and is just holding it and examining it. Just being with the flower, I’m not sure whether or not he plucked the flower or not. Most likely he didn’t pluck the flower. He just held it, and it was still connected to whatever plant that it was on.

It might have, in fact, been growing out of the ground close to where he was sitting, and he was just noticing it. And then one of the monks in the vicinity smiled. And Ross has got a question about that. Ross, what actually is your question?

Ross: Well, the question is, what is it all about?

Like, is, you know, it’s somebody, I overheard somebody mention that it. That spawned the lineage of Zen Buddhism. That whole experience. Um, I’ve heard so many different theories about what it all meant.

It’s probably something very simple, but. Well, have you ever held a flower?

Yeah. Okay. Did you give a sermon about the flower? Hi. Did you smile?

Maybe. Maybe. Okay. Don’t remember. All right.

It’s probably, I was probably having a flower out to a girl or something. Pardon? I was probably giving roses out to my wife for my. Yeah, that was probably about it. Yeah.

Dhammarato: Well, one of the possible takes on that was is that the monk actually acknowledged that one of the monks had smiled. And that leaves a whole world open to all of those Buddhists who think that they’ve got to frown their way and work their way through their practice rather than smiling their way through it. Okay. And that it also has a quality of just being here. Now you’ve got a flower.

Let’s just look at it.

And so there’s really not much to this sutta. In fact, it’s sunyatai is kind of empty. And that’s worth smiling about because we think that things are full of it.

Things are stinky, things are heavy. Things are a duty to do something. And really, things are kind of empty. It’s just a flower. Probably a beautiful flower, part of paradise.

And there’s nothing much to do with it other than just smile. It’s got no really deep meaning to it. In fact, that’s the beauty of it, is that if it’s got a really deep meaning, that means that we’ve got to work. We got to get a shovel out and start digging. And maybe that’s what confused you, because you thought that there was something to it when, in fact, there was really nothing to it.

That’s what makes that sutta beautiful. Yeah. I always thought that the disciple, the disciple that smiled knew something that the other disciples didn’t know. Yeah. He knew that there was nothing to it.

Right. Got it. And maybe all of the other ones were worried about what does all of this mean? And it doesn’t mean a thing.

So yesterday, in fact, I was talking to a friend about. There’s a duality. The duality is in the hard and the soft. In the west, we use the words masculine and feminine. You have the yin yang, the animus, and the anima.

And that one of the things about the masculine and feminine point about that is that that’s a cultural adaptation. But basically, we’re talking about go in japanese language, go jew. The go is the hard way, and the jew is the soft way. Another way of talking about it is, is that one is that you’ve got to work hard. You’ve got to develop.

You’ve got to learn all the sutras. You’ve got to eat your food in a particular way. You got address in a particular way. You got to do it just right. And when you’re doing it all just right, that builds up a skill of accomplishment, all right?

And ultimately, that big ego that’s being built up will just melt away because everything is okay, because the skill is being developed now. That’s the hard way, it’s the slow way. And that, in fact, that happened to the Buddha in his lifetime, in his practice, in that six years, from the time that he left home until the time that he arrived, he was really working hard in his youth. He was a master with the bow. He would wrestle elephants to the ground.

He would be a charioteer. He was a warrior. And that, he was trained with that. And then when he went off on his wandering, he was in the hard. He actually spent a lot of time in the austerities.

You’ve seen the starving BuDDHA statues and self flagellation and all of that. And he came to almost to the point of killing himself. And then as he was struggling with that, he recognized that this is not the right path. There’s nothing to attain. And then he was saying, well, what’s wrong with the first jhna?

The first jhna is easy. It’s pleasant. We’re just sitting there with nothing to do and no place to go. And so basically what you can say is that it’s all of this hard way, and that in the west, both women and men start off in the hard. Now women have a better chance of going soft, but most of them don’t.

And so the spiritual practice is a change. When you go from the hard into the salt, when you give up, when you give up the self, when you give up the ego, and then there’s nothing much left to it. All right? And so I offer you that in the connection of this flower, one of the monks just smiled because there was nothing to it. And all the other monks were probably still struggling with trying to find out what it was all about.

For, in fact, there was nothing to it.

All right, so this leads in now to the second question, which was the Eightfold noble path. You could say then, that the Eightfold noble path is not really a path, that when we think of it as a path that’s in that hard way, that in fact, another way of looking at it and using the word way as opposed to path, then there is the word method. And this is the way or the method that we can look at that flower is to see that there’s nothing to it. All right? So you can take the hard approach of trying to figure it out and trying to get all the good out of it and worry and fart and fuss and all of that which we’ve been taught to do, or we can just simply drop that and begin to take it easy.

And this is what the Buddha realized. And that’s when he then sit under the bode tree in Bodh Gaya and figured out how the mind actually works to get us into Dukkha, starting with ignorance, building up all of our stuff, and then that influences how we see how we think. So that we wind up with the influences from the past actually defining what the present moment really is, really in the sense of what we think it is or what we perceive it is, rather than what it actually is, that, in fact, reality is actually a paradise. Reality is actually a heaven, and we keep making a hell out of it by thinking that there is something to it. We’re judgment.

Our judgment is going and saying, this is good and this is bad, where reality just is, and there is no good and bad. But when we get caught up in the duality of good and bad, we go around destroying parts of paradise that we don’t like. They’re bad. We’ve been told that it’s bad or we don’t like it naturally. So what then is the Eightfold noble path that the Buddha teaches?

And what is the four noble truths that is the foundation of that, as you heard me say so many times, the whole teaching of the Buddha. The Buddha said that he only taught one thing both formally, and now I only teach dukkha. Dukha Nirodha. Well, that’s another way of saying the hard, soft. What that means is that we have to come out of our hard way of doing things, of being dissatisfied and wanting to fix things and come into the soft, easy.

Everything is already okay. It’s actually an easy transition logically, but it’s not so easy because we’ve got the habits of doing it the hard way. And so the eight full noble path and the four noble truths are actually based upon this concept, is that we think there’s something to it, to where in fact, there’s really not much of anything to it. It’s easy, but we work hard. And when we come to the dhamma, most of us continue to work hard rather than remember that we can take it easy, that it’s not hard.

And so when we’re actually discovering the Dhamma, what that means is that we’re discovering all the various ways that we create dissatisfaction, all the things that we’re doing that are dissatisfying. And that when we’re practicing the Eightfold noble path, what that means is, is that we’re beginning to discover what is Dukkha and making a change to it to come out of it. So in the suit of the great 40, which is an exposition of the Eightfold noble path, that exposition is called the great 40. Now, wait a minute. Eight doesn’t divide equally into 40.

So what’s that all about? Actually, the Eightfold noble path winds up being a tenfold noble path that can be seen in four ways. Now, that two additional items that are added eventually to the Eightfold noble path is called knowledge and deliverance. And that’s basically what the real teaching of the Buddha is all about, knowledge of the eight pole noble path, knowledge of dukkha, knowledge of what we’re doing. That causes us trouble so that we can just drop it.

I think, in fact, the word deliverance is not a very good term for it, but it works only in the sense of deliver from bondage, and that deliverance is actually dropping the ball and chain, dropping the fetters, dropping our bondage, so that we are set free. Another way of thinking of it is set not just free, but set light. That is really a lot of work to carry a ball and chain around. But if you’ve been carrying a ball and chain around, when you stop carrying that ball and chain, when you’re being freed of it, life becomes really easy.

So think about the fact that the way that we have been trained in our lives is that we carry around some pretty heavy burdens. And one of the heaviest burdens that we have been taught to carry around is all the rules, our bag of rules, our bag of how things are supposed to be. Idealistic idealism, how things should be. That, in fact, that’s what destroys a paradise. Because a paradise just is as it is.

But when we start to judge that paradise, now we’ve got a burden that we’re carrying. We’ve got a fixed paradise. We’ve got an idealistic view of it. And so this is the end of it, is just to drop it all, to come out of that hard into the salt. And the way that we do that ultimately is exactly the same way that we do it in the very beginning.

And that is that we remember to look at what we’re doing and make a change. This is what the Eightfold noble path is really all about, is just take a look. That gives you the knowledge to make a change, to drop what you’re doing. Just stop. An example of this would be if you’re in an argument with somebody and you recognize that you’re not getting any benefit out of that argument, then you stop the argument.

The question is how far into the argument do you have to go? One example would be that the two guys who were arguing in the bar, they wind up wrecking the bar because they’re fighting. Another example is how do you stop an argument is when either the husband or the wife slams the door on the way out of the room yelling something like, I’ve had enough of this. Okay? But both of these are because they’ve been experiencing a great deal of dukkha.

And then they wake up to the fact that they’ve been experiencing a lot of dukkha. So the easy way to end an argument is to just to shut your face. To shut up, to not say anything. Maybe what you do instead is just nod so that the other person continued the argument and you just nod your head. You don’t say anything.

That’s the easy way out of an argument.

But it would be even better if we hadn’t gotten into the argument in the first place. So that would take even more awareness that, in fact, what we could do is we could see in our own minds that we are in a disagreeable situation and we could get out of it even as the argument is just starting.

So we need to actually train with this. Just like someone who goes to a gym does not start off as a weakling, as a newbie walking into the gym for the first time. Does he go over to the very, very heavy weights and start lifting the very heavy weights? No. Well, think of an argument is a really heavy duty thing.

What we need to do when we walk into a gym is to start working on very, very light things, like one or two kilogram dumbbells. And then we do reps over and over and over and over and over again. All right, this is then a major part of the way that we practice the Eightfold and noble path. What is that? That means that we get ourselves away from everybody.

We get ourselves into seclusion, we get away from the world, and we find a quiet place. The Buddha said, go to a tree, go to an empty hut, go to the forest, go to a pile of straw, and sit down and just look at what you’re doing. Bring mindfulness to the fore.

When we do that, we realize something. We realize that we haven’t actually become secluded at all. That world that we walked away from, we secluded ourselves from, in a way, we brought it with us mentally. And that all of that then mental world that we brought with us, that’s the job that we have to clean out. That’s the stuff that we have to drop.

And how do we do that? Is that we start watching what’s going on. We start watching what the body is doing. We start watching how we feel. We start watching what mental states and attitudes that we have.

And we also watch our thoughts one after another after another. And so, sitting alone in private, we look at what’s going on internally, watching what the body and the feelings and the mind and the mind’s objects are doing. And as we’re doing that, as we practice the Eightfold and noble path this way, we actually start, let us say, discernment. Now, discernment is different than judgment. Discernment is the ability to see whether something is unsatisfactory or not, as opposed to judgments, is to find out whether things are good or bad.

But what we’re looking for is comfort, safety, security, satisfaction. And in fact, Dukkha, is dissatisfaction. So if we can find satisfaction, we’ve already performed all the teachings of the Buddha is to just come to a state of satisfaction. When you’re satisfied with the way things are internally and externally, then you’re in paradise. Doesn’t have to be gold plated, doesn’t have to be fancy, just satisfying, where everything is okay, everything is just fine.

So this is actually how we practice the eight golden noble path. And the Buddha gave us a method for doing that. So the mateful noble path is a method, and then Anapanasati is the way to practice that. Now, actually, the satipatta is the foundation of Anapanasati that we actually practice. Anapanasati for the fulfillment of the mindfulness of these four foundations of the body, the feelings, the mental states and the mental objects that we have.

And so these are the basic four primary things that we’re going to look at. We’re going to look at relaxing the body primarily. And how we do that is by beginning to watch us cells breathing, we actually begin to control the breathing, to take long, deep, easy breaths, rather than choking breaths or short breaths. There’s a lot of work, or a shallow breath, which means that we’re not getting enough oxygen and we’re not getting enough cleaning of the carbon dioxide out of the blood. But taking a long, deep, easy breath is actually part of the practice of the Eightfold and noble path.

Now, something very interesting about that. We cannot have long, deep, easy breathing unless we’re actually looking at that with the mind. The mind is controlling the breathing only because we are controlling the mind and the mind is controlling the breathing. And so it’s actually a double skill that we’re learning. We’re learning to actually start to pay attention to what we’re doing with the body.

And then with that, we also change the attitude of the mind. And we can do that also with the thoughts, by gladdening the mind, cheering the mind up, changing our attitude. Now, basically, the attitude that we’re all born with is the attitude of a victim, the attitude of we need to be taken care of. And as we grow older, we continue to need stuff. And while we’re needing, that means that we’re dissatisfied because we’re not getting our needs met and even to the point of needing love, needing affection, looking for love in all the wrong places to.

In fact, you don’t need to be loved. You don’t need love. What you need is to be satisfied. And when you’re satisfied, you don’t need to be loved. In fact, you become automatically kind of lovable, but you still don’t need it.

All right. A lot of places get this backwards because they think and say that you need then to love yourself. The love that you need to get, you can give to yourself. And the answer to that is no, you really don’t need the love. You’ve already got everything that you need.

You don’t have to love yourself. But what you can do instead is nurture yourself. We all start off as victims. We all start off in the state of wanting. We can’t use our hands, we can’t walk, we can’t feed ourselves.

And so we need to be taken care of when we’re infants and then when we become children, we are ordered around. We’re told what to do. Hold mommy’s hand, don’t walk across the street, look at where you’re going, clean up your room, do your abcs, do your homework. And so children wind up remaining victims as their being indoctrinated into the community, into the society that we live in. And so we wind up being indoctrinated and the indoctrination is being done by people who are not really qualified to raise children.

The only qualification that people need to raise children is having one. And that’s all that they need to do is just to have a kid. And the rest of it just all gets messed up. Why? Because all of the problems that the parent has, he gives those same problems to his children.

This is really, really easily seen when we understand that people who were raised in a household that has domestic violence, when they are adults, they are most likely going to be living in a house that has domestic violence. If you have an alcoholic in the house, when the child is being raised, more than likely there’s going to be alcohol in that child’s life.

So we teach our children that. Then, in fact, college professors wind up having studious children. If you have two actors that are married, their child is most likely going to become an actor. In the old days, in fact, it was required that you had to take on the profession of your elders. So now we have a whole lot more freedom in our job selection, but we don’t have a lot of, let us say, freedom about what kind of personality that we’re going to have that that’s basically set up in childhood and then, in fact, in many places and occasions that seems to be fixed.

A really clear example of that, by the way, is Christianity. They call it original sin. You’re broken, you can’t fix yourself, you need a Jesus, you need a savior, you need forgiveness, but you’re going to be breaking your rules and then forgiven again and again and again, keeping some cycle going that goes in and out of dissatisfaction. So how can we make a big change to that is by getting off into seclusion and starting to put a stop to all of those unwholesome thoughts one at a time and start changing those into gladdening the mind. This is what the real practice is now.

The practice of anapanasati really does not require someone to take a particular posture. You don’t have to go to retreats. You don’t have to sit on the floor, on a certain pillow, in a certain place in the room with an altar and pictures of a guru, candles, incense, all of that’s just part of culture. But the Buddha really didn’t have that. But he did have his students just sitting around, not trying to figure stuff out, but learning to just see a flower and smile.

That’s really all there is to.

But it’s hard for us, and we say that it’s hard. I’ve had many, many students say over and over again that it’s hard. And the reason that they say that is because they’re not recognizing that that word hard has dissatisfaction built right into it. What that means is that they don’t like that they have to keep practicing over and over again to come out of those ingrained habits that we have. We’ve been talking ourselves into being unhappy our whole lives.

Now it’s time to start talking ourselves into feeling good, to gladden the mind, to brighten the mind, to tell ourselves that everything is all right. We live in a paradise, that all we have to do is just exist, examine the reality like a flower, and just accept it as it is. There’s nothing to be done. There’s no place to go. We struggle our whole lives in this hard way of doing things, and we don’t even recognize it.

We can take the easy way out. In fact, our society is dead set against us taking the easy way out. We’ve got a whole lot of negative words in the language, like lazy, goof off, do nothing. All of these words in our society are designed to make you work. And why do you want to work?

So that someone else, like the employer, can make a profit, because he’s got to work, too. And everybody in the society is unhappy because they are in the state of needing to work. Got to do it the hard way.

And the easy way is what the Buddha taught. Aha, I see you. So when the mind wanders away, when the mind is in a state of desire, doubt, restlessness, wanting something, we can see that the mind is actually just doing what it was trained to do, to be uncomfortable, to be in a state of need, to be in that hard place, and we can say, aha, I see that. And by saying, aha, I see you, mara. What that actually means is that now I’m going to go out of that hard method into the salt.

I’m just going to take it easy. Nothing to it. Everything is all right. The world goes on. You’ve also heard words like, if you don’t work, you don’t eat.

And yet I can show you millions and millions and millions of examples of people who don’t work and they eat. So working and eating are not necessarily related. Another point would be, is that some people who have no food, they work really, really hard, and they still have no food. So working and getting food is not actually as related as people think that, in fact, most people have a salary such that they only spend a very small amount of their money on food. So that whole cliche of, you don’t work, you don’t eat has us trapped.

It’s a lie. It’s not true. And it’s one of many of the lies that we’ve been told. And what the actual practice of Annapanasati does is it frees us from the lies that we’ve been told, because we can see the way things really are. And the way things really are is it’s already okay.

Everything’s already just fine. Not a problem, not a worry in the world. If we can start to get in seclusion. And here’s a really important reason to get into seclusion, is because we’re practicing something that goes against the grain of our society. It really goes against the grain.

We’re not supposed to be satisfied and happy and content. Even people who go to meditation retreats, they call it boot camp. It’s hard because of the fact that the volunteers and the people who run the retreat, they haven’t figured out that a retreat should be really easy.

Just come to the retreat, just hang out, do nothing, enjoy your doing nothing.

So this is all there really is to the Eightfold noble path, is to remember to look at what we’re doing and make a change over and over and over and over again, to take a look at what you’re doing and make a change.

Look at what you’re doing and make a change. In this regard, one of the jokes is that the entire teaching of the Buddha is on the back of a shampoo bottle. You know, the shampoo bottles that they sell at 711 and the grocery stores, they all have the one phrase on the back of, of the bottle. Rinse and repeat. And that’s really all we have to do is just keep cleaning the mind and then do it again.

Repeat, complete, change the mind. Repeat over and over again. Yes. Anna, you got your hand up.

I went to Tibet house last week and it was enormous amounts of very difficult visualizations. So why it’s made so difficult, why this triggers, we’re in the habit of making it difficult, but it’s so. It’s so difficult. It’s not just difficult. It’s enormously difficult to imagine all these flowers and diamonds and people and on top.

So what is it? How it’s connected to the teaching? Well, actually, thinking of a deity is much more pleasant than thinking of a gorilla about to tack or a devil. So in fact, what we can do is just think of nice things. But basically what we’re really intending to do.

And many of those practices, in fact, the ones that you’re talking about sound very tibetan.

And when people think about a diamond. Yeah. When they’re thinking about a diamond maybe they want a diamond rather than recognizing they’re already a diamond.

And so it’s hard because we’re in the habit of making it hard. So what we can do is recognize in this moment, oh, I’m making it hard. I don’t have to do that. I can make it easy. Again, it’s your choice.

It doesn’t have to be hard. You’re just calling it hard. And most of the reason why it’s hard is because you want something. Like you want that diamond instead of just recognizing you’re already a diamond.

That’s all there really is to it. We make it hard because we’ve been taught to make it hard where in fact, it’s easy. But we have to practice making things easy.

And when we make things easy, then easy things are easy. In fact, for most people, even easy things are hard. Ross, you got your hand up? Yeah. The question I had.

Sorry, I’ve got my video on. The question I had was you talked about gladdening the mind.

When does that happen? Like when you remember to gladden the mind. And how do you gladden the mind? Well, I’m glad I saw that. Well, I don’t have to do anything right now.

Well, I can just take a breath and relax.

Is it a subtle feeling or is it like a. You know, are you a euphoric feeling? Well, it’s. It doesn’t have to be any particular kind of feeling. But right now, in fact, you’re confused and you want to get it right.

So you already have the mental attitude that you’re the victim and that you got to get it right. And I invite you to say, oh, you’re not the victim, you don’t have to get it right, you don’t have to understand it. You can just relax. That’s in fact a major aspect of the teaching that so many of the westerners miss. They think that they’ve got to understand it.

They think that they have to get it right and they don’t understand it and so they’re not getting it right and so they’re disappointed. They’re dissatisfied instead of just practicing being satisfied. You don’t have to get it right. The knowledge that we’re looking for is the knowledge of look at what I’m thinking that gives me dissatisfaction so that I can drop that. We don’t have to have knowledge of diamonds or deities or you don’t have to have the poly language, you don’t have to write a book, you don’t have to teach meditation, you don’t have to have a million dollars, you don’t have to be do any of that.

But that’s what we’ve been taught in our society. You got to figure it out. No, you don’t. You can be happy without figuring it out just by remembering it all. I don’t have to figure it out.

I don’t have to figure it out.

I’ve already got everything that I need and that is just to remember that I can relax, to remember to look at this confusion that you’ve got and see you weren’t looking at the confusion you had, you were just expressing the confusion. So this is a really good example of that is just start to see that you’ve got a question and I don’t have to have any questions. I could just relax instead.

Thank you. That’s what makes this practice so marvelous on one side when we get it and so hard to do on the other. And why is it hard to do? Is because we’re not looking at the fact that we’re confused and dissatisfied. And if we can see that we’re confused and dissatisfied, we can say, hot dog, I see that.

So begin to examine your mental states. Begin to examine when you knit your brow, when you’re confused and say, oh, I can see that confusion and I don’t need that. I don’t need information to stop being confused. I can just stop being confused.

Anna, I notice that you still got your knit and your brow knitted. All you have to do is just relax. You don’t need to figure it out. You can just say, oh, everything is okay. Everything is fine already.

No need to figure it out. Everything is already okay.

Not a worry in the world. And this is what needs to be practiced over and over again, is to take a look at what we’re doing, take a look at how we’re knitting our brow. Take a look at the questions, the confusions, all of this stuff that’s inside. And recognize it. It’s okay.

I’m all right. Not a problem. And practicing this over and over and over again, coming out of the hard, back into the salt. So the hard is I’ve got to figure it out. The hard is, I’m in doubt.

The hard is I’m being dissatisfied because I don’t understand. And then the soft is, I don’t have to understand. I can just relax. I don’t have to perform.

So, Amir, do you have any questions?

No questions. No questions. Yeah, just relax. That’s all there is to it. Ross, where are you?

I’m back. You’re back? Okay. You got that? This is.

It’s such a subtle little point. And I would like for the two of you, Rossen and Anna, to be able to get this point is that we don’t have to figure it out. There’s really no answers to it. That’ll be satisfying. You’ll hear every different possible answer, and you’ll still remain confused because the habit is being confused and confused.

Pardon? Why are they doing it? You were trained to do that. It is so much work to remember all these visuals. Mm hmm.

So put a stop to it. My question is only why they doing it? I’m not able to. Okay. Because those monks that are doing this think that they can do something.

They’re still in the hard mode, and so they visualize this. They remember that they practice every little rule correctly, thinking that if they get everything right, they’ll be happy. And eventually they have to give up that belief. This is exactly what happened to the Buddha, that he was starving himself, he was flagellating himself. He was living on, you know, not a bed of nails, but a bed with one nail.

He was the very best there was at torturing himself.

The very best. He went absolutely to the end of it. No one could torture himself as well as the Buddha. Just like he tortured himself with the hygnas. He had to get the mind straightened in a certain way rather than just relaxing into it.

This is why that first Jhana is so valuable. This is what the Buddha really teaches in third, in Sutta number 36, where he says, why? Why was I so against this first Janna that the pleasure that I get from the first Jannah has nothing to do with sensual desire and sensual pleasures. It’s just the pleasure of doing nothing.

And yet every young monk who was raised, they are raised by monks who are still working hard.

It takes, you know, there are millions and millions and millions of monks in various different traditions all over the world. Not just Buddhism, but Christianity and everything. There’s millions of them. And look how hard they try. Look how hard they work trying to become enlightened.

I was going to say, like, in that tibetan tradition, like, one of the things they have to do is like a hundred thousand frustrations to the Buddha. So, you know, that surely must give them something like at the end of doing all that, doesn’t it? Well, isn’t there any better when they stop counting and start enjoying, hmm?

That you’re doing 100,000 prostrations. You go to the bank and prostrate to the bank. You go to the problem, and prostrate to the problem. You go to the government. Prostrate to the government.

We’re doing all of these bowings and scrapings. Oh, I need that. Because why is the prostration, it’s something a victim does.

Oh, please don’t hurt me. Oh, please give me something. Yes, go ahead. Amen.

I was just at a retreat. And to answer, maybe one answer to why there are so many difficult concentration exercises, could be that many of these tend to break the mind or like, get so tired that you give up and then there’s a lot of joy after that. So as an example, as an example, one of the teachers read this sutta that was an hour long, and it was so, so, so boring that my mind actually broke. And then it was just great to point that what there is sometimes you gotta go through that route, I guess, right? That’s actually the story, is you gotta go through the tough part all the way to the end.

There is a door at the end of the journey.

And that if you take the journey and do all the work and do what you’re told to do or do everything that’s in the book, eventually you’ll get the door and then you can open it. Guess what? The door has been right here all along. That’s what the buddha actually figured out was he didn’t have to be the best at everything.

He didn’t have to finish the job. Okay. And you mentioned something about this. And so let’s, let’s look at it this way. Let’s see that you’ve got a project that requires you to verify, let us say 1000 records and you got to go through whatever process.

Maybe you look them up on the Internet and you look at Google and see what Google has to say. And then you look at this other search algorithm and you keep looking and looking and looking and you get one and then you go to the second one and then you look and you search and you gather the data and then you go to the third one, right? And eventually you get tired and you’ve only gotten ten of them done today, but you quit. And then the point that I’m making is that you feel good when you quit, whether you’re finished with your list or not. It’s the quitting that I’m talking about.

Stop doing the work because there’s never an end to the work. Just quit working.

Now you can continue to do the list, but let’s enjoy it now. Let’s stop having a pressure. Oh, I’ve got to get ten of them done a day? No, you can get one or two done today. And if it’s easy enough, you might wind up getting 15 of them done today because it’s easy because you like doing it.

But when we’ve got to do it, we make it hard. So how can we get people to understand that they can move from the hard approach to the easy way? It’s a change of attitude. The attitude of I’m a victim to it and I got to work hard at it versus the attitude of I’m a champion.

My dad had a phrase, there was one of the many things that I learned from him that I didn’t even appreciate. He was a blue collar worker. He really, really worked hard. But he had a saying and he says, work. I’m not afraid of work.

I can lay down beside it and take a nap.

So think about it like that. Can you actually just stop working and start living your life joyfully? And all of those tibetan monks are working really hard and you don’t in fact have to work hard. It’s matter of an attitude.

Here’s a story for you. You have seen the tibetan monks in one of their ceremonies that will take and break a river open with the ice on the, on the top and put their robes in the ice cold water and then sit on the shore and put their clothes on wet. Have you seen that ceremony? Okay, well guess what? It’s an attitude.

And if they have the attitude that I can do this, then sitting there with that wet, cold clothing on, they can actually generate the heat that it takes to dry the clothing to the point of having its steam. You can see the steam rising off of the wet clothing because they have the attitude. Now, imagine that you in the attitude that you have right now are with those monks. You take off your robe, you put it in the cold water, you put it on your own. How do you feel?

You feel like this is too much, right? You feel like this is hard work, but you live your lives like that. It’s the same attitude that you take to that. And there are some monks who can walk, walk over to that and say, yeah, I’ve done this before. I could do it again.

I’ll tell you a personal story. This happened back in the 1970s. It had a dodge van all decked out. It was a love room. It was.

It had mushroom windows cut into. It had a little refrigerator. It was really decked out, and I needed a valve job on it. And so here it is in Michigan in February, and I’ve got the tools. They’ll stick to your hands.

You’ll freeze. And while I was making that, in fact, it was when I was putting the head back on, I’d gotten the head off and taken it to the. To the mechanics, where they reground the head. And while I was putting it back on, I said, I’ve got to get out of here. This is too cold for me.

And so I left. And I made a lot of trouble in leaving. I actually harmed people. One woman actually sold her house needlessly so that she could follow me to California. And it was all because I didn’t like the cold.

All right? So when I decided that I was going to live in northern North Carolina, they’ve got snow and all of that, too. And so I made my mind up. I am going to manage this cold. I can handle it.

And I’ve got photos of me sanding in sandals with no socks on, a regular Theravada robe that’s used in the heat of India. Standing in with a photograph in Rhode island, where you can see the snow in the background. I also remember one evening in particular after I had given a talk. I was standing out with the students who were on their way to the cars. They were all bundled up, very, very cold.

Here I am standing on the cement walk barefoot with the clothes that I was wearing inside, and they were shivering. I remember specifically, it was nine degrees fahrenheit. It was cold. But I was so happy. I was so pleased that I could stand there and not be cold.

It was a mental attitude. I had decided that I was not going to be bothered by the cold, and I didn’t become a victim to it.

So this is all a matter of attitude. It’s not a matter of training, because those, you could have a tibetan monk up in the hermodels who hated the cold, and he would be shivering and freezing to death while that cold, wet robe was on him, and the other monks have a change of attitude. I can handle this.

And so that’s basically the hard versus the soft is. The hard is when people think that they’re a victim to it, that they can’t handle it, that it’s hard work. And when we change our attitude, that’s all that really needs to be changed. And we can go, let us say, on a journey of a thousand miles, and many people will go the pool thousand miles before they can feel satisfied. I’ve finally done it.

Now I can rest me before the journey starts. I can rest. I don’t even have to take the journey. I feel good already. Maybe I can take a half a mile journey, maybe ten steps, and now I’m ready to quit.

When do you find your satisfaction inside that you’re already good enough? And all of those people who were working so hard, all of those people who were doing those Tonkas and doing those mandalas and doing those cold settings that the Tibetans do are, in fact, all of this point that I’m making started with Kathleen, who is in a watt in Udan Thani. It’s actually the wat that Ajahn Munich was in, a very famous monk, and he really worked hard and hard. Most of his biography is about how hard he worked, and then he quit, and now it’s full of Germans. You got a german achon and german monks and all of that.

And Catholic was saying, they’re working so hard. Look how hard they’re working. They have to eat their food really, really quickly to where the Buddha says, no, take it very easy.

Okay. So the monks in Thailand, some of them german monks, they’re working really, really hard to get the dhamma. I worked really hard, too. I was really good at working hard until I figured it out. I don’t have to work so hard.

I don’t have to work hard at all. It’s a mental attitude change.

So, ana, change your attitude, recognizing that you’re already a wonderful human being. You’re already marvelous. You’re okay. You’re a wonderful human being already. You said you worked very hard to change your attitude, and then you realized it.

So before you changed it, you worked very hard, right? Until you change your attitude. And once you change your attitude, everything becomes really easy.

But while we’re working really, really hard, we also develop a lot of skills, and those skills become very valuable and very useful once we make that transition. Like the Buddha, he was really, really, really highly skilled when he made that transition, and so he remained highly skilled. But there are monks, in fact, who make that transition easily, and they wind up being a goofball. They don’t teach. They just hang around.

They’re having a marvelous life, but they don’t become great gurus. They don’t become well known. But, man, do they have a wonderful life.

So which do you want? Do you want to be a very famous, hardworking guru, or do you want to just take it easy?

Take the easy way out. Take the easy way out early, don’t have to go the thousand miles and develop all of those skills and then take it easy then. In fact, almost everyone who does the first thousand miles finds another thousand miles and another after that, and they are still in that state of I haven’t gotten it done yet. I’m not satisfied. The job that needed to be done has not been done yet.

And the reality is, is that we can develop the attitude that what needed to be done has already been done.

This is the Eightfold noble path, is to come to the state. Everything is okay already. We have to practice that over and over and over again until it sinks in at a deep level. I’m okay. I’m already okay.

So, Paul, what do you think?

How about you, Ross?

Um, yeah, I. You know, it’s the attitude, eh, it’s. Everything’s okay. It’s good enough.

Just keep going back to that. How about you, Nova? Do you understand this is all we have? I do. I do.

Yes. I was going to ask you. So, when you say relax and investigate, the investigate part is what is like to pay attention to your thoughts, is this thought worth having or not? That’s the question to ask. Can I do better than this is when does it get to the.

We have is thoughts about things are broken and need to be fixed, and you can change that thought into everything’s okay.

So that’s. When do you investigate the mood? I’m sorry? When do you investigate the moods? Whenever you’ve got a mood.

Sometimes you’re not even aware that you. I mean, does it start with the thought we have to practice is to wake up, to become aware, to remember, to look, to remember, to investigate. This was actually the reason why meditation got started was to get away from it all, sit down and start looking at what you’re doing. But the reality is that you don’t have to get away from it all. You don’t have to sit down.

You don’t have to be in any particular posture. What you really need to do is to remember to look at what you’re doing and make a change.

Remember that you’re in the heart. Remember to look to see, though I’m making it hard, when in fact it’s easy. And change your attitude. That’s the right noble effort. The right noble effort is to change the attitude from this is hard into this is easy from, oh, this is a lot of work into, oh, I can handle that.

Nothing to it.

Beautiful nobin. It’s an easy thing to do. Can you recognize when your attitude is, is that it’s hard, and change that attitude into, oh, I can handle that, oh, there’s nothing to do. There’s no place to go. I can just sit here and just enjoy.

You have been trained to make it hard.

Your parents have been angry at you. Your parents fussed at you. They made it hard for you. So you remembered that things are hard. They proved to you how hard they are.

Look how hard your dad worked. Everybody around you works too hard. They don’t enjoy their lives. And so every child is trained into that hard method.

Men, women, children, everybody. The rich, in fact, the really, really rich are really stuck with it.

No rich man takes it easy. They will take the sensual way out. They’re looking for pleasure. The priest, they work really hard at being a priest. The preachers look at, I’ve seen these christian preachers and they’re just dancing all over the stage with rage, yelling and screaming about the Christianity.

I don’t know of anybody who’s taking it easy to take relaxed because it’s an attitude. And the attitude was, we were trained to make things hard. We were trained to be a victim. But we were born victims. If there is an original sin, is that babies are born not fully clad in the robe of a judge or a professor that were given diapers.

Because we’re victims.

We’re born that way. We’re born as a victim. And then everything that you’ve ever learned from anybody who remained victims stays a victim. And so you were trained excellently to remain a victim. And for the victim, everything is hard.

So remember, this is the real practice of the eight bull. Noble path is to remember you’re not a victim. To remember this is not hard. You’re saying it’s hard because you don’t like it and you want it to be better and you don’t know how to make it better. And all you have to do is just stop wanting to make it better.

It’s already okay.

This is what we mean by being able to see the dukkha. The problem is our ignorance. We’re stupid. We don’t recognize how easy life could be. We’re still working hard.

Can you make these? You can’t. If you remember, you can do it once, you can do it a second time, remember a second time, remember a third time, remember again and again and again. And pretty soon you start to develop the habit of everything’s easy, everything’s okay, not a problem, not a worry. In the world, we have to train for that because we’ve been trained to have a hard life.

We’ve been trained to be top.

We’ve been trained that the world is a wicked place.

So now we retrain ourselves to another world’s a playground, it’s a toy.

You become the master of your destiny only when you just simply change your attitude. Instead of being a victim to your destiny, you become its boss.

And we have to practice this over and over and over again. It’s not a piece of information, it’s not intellectual. It has to go over and over and over, grinding it in.

Even grinding sounds like a hard word.

But layer after layer after layer after layer of joy, we begin to become light, easy.

It needs to be practiced.

Delmardo, can I ask you a question? Absolutely, yeah. Not over in the world. I just love these things you’re answering. I’ve been waiting for these, for these answers.

But in the time of the Buddha, what was. I mean, all these Indians or Hindus, I don’t know what you would call them at that time. I mean, they were just meditating, doing these difficult things. And that’s where. So he went very far into it and he saw that there was nothing into, there was nothing to it.

You had to, you only use it to investigate your thoughts and your mood. And you don’t go much further than that. Is that what it is? Well, everyone in the time of the Buddha, including all the students who came to him, they all had that attitude of it’s hard work. The Buddha was trained in that, that it was hard work.

And it is a major, major change in lifestyle is to recognize that all you need to change is your attitude from being a victim into being a winner. But if you’re in that hard method, there’s no end to the kind of journeys that you can invent for yourself. Climbing mountains. Climbing mountains while crawling, sleeping on a bed of nails, hanging yourself from the furniture, hanging yourself from a tree on a fishhook under your rib.

Austerities. There are endless numbers of austerities that people try sitting for long periods of time. Why? Because of two things. One is that they want something.

And number two is that they don’t recognize that they don’t need it. Those are the causes of all dukkhka is desire. Wanting to get rid of stuff and wanting to get stuff and the ignorance that we don’t need it.

So every religion is absolutely full of people like that. Every hospital is full of people like that. Every school is full of people like that. Every church is full of people like that. Every government is full of people like that.

But the guys who are just sitting in the woods, hanging out and doing much or nothing, they’re not well known. Nobody cares. They’re not working hard. Our society promotes people working really hard.

Meditation teachers become famous because they’re working really hard.

One example of one, in fact, there’s several teachers. And look how many emails they send. I get one or two emails every day from some of these guys. They’re working. They got a whole staff working for them.

Oh, do this retreat. Oh, do this exercise. Oh, read this article. Oh, do this. Oh, do that.

So all the people caught up in western meditation and western Buddhism, they’re all just working too hard. When are we going to recognize that life is easy? All you have to do is breathe.

Why is this lesson so hard to learn?

That’s, by the way, a pun.

It’s really very easy to learn it. Once you learned it, you see how easy it is to learn. But we got to practice it because we’re really well skilled in making everything hard. So we have to practice making things easy.

Where’s Ross? Did he go? No. Here he is over in the corner. I’m here.

I’m here now. I was just, I was just laughing when he said, life is easy. All you got to do is just breathe. It’s brilliant. That’s it.

That’s it. All the best things in life are free. That all the hard stuff, the reason that it’s hard is expensive.

Even will is free once you change your attitude. But that attitude change is expensive. Gotta work at it. Gotta practice over and over again. The hard part.

The hard part for me. Well, no, sorry. Let me. Let me rephrase that.

Okay. I find. I find work. The test for me, because, you know, people, the majority of the people I’m surrounded with don’t have that attitude. So it’s trying to, trying to keep this attitude of, you know, everything is good enough, you know, amongst an environment where, you know, it’s very, it’s very cutthroat and everybody’s trying to be better than everyone else and climb the corporate ladder.

So that’s the challenge. And nobody’s enjoying their job, nobody’s having a happy life. And after they cut a few throats, they’ll continue to cut throats, they’ll continue to harm other people, step on other people, trying to make it to some magical top. And if they do make it to the top, you know what happens? Somebody’s going to slit their throat.

So why get into that pile? The easy way out is just to quit.

Not that easy. Hmm. It’s not that easy. Yes, it is. Every time you do it, it’s easy.

But you think already that it’s hard because you’ve got to keep practicing it over and over again rather than thinking, yeah, but I can practice it over and over again. That’s the easy part. It’s easy to keep doing it over and over again. But I can’t quit my job. Well, I didn’t say to quit the job.

I said quit throats. Okay, I can do that. Stop competing with the people you work for and just be the friendly guy who’s got his throat cut. Just go in to have, I mean, just dance your blood all over the room.

Try that on Monday. Yeah. Just be joyful.

Just enjoy your job.

Here’s the point. The point is, is that if someone in a group, working under a boss, if he gets fired, if the boss fires somebody, who is he going to fire?

He’s going to fire the guy he doesn’t like and he’ll claim that the guy that he doesn’t like who got fired is not productive. So you can go and be the best friend of the boss. It doesn’t matter if you ever do any work at all, just be the best friend the boss has. He’s not going to fire you. You’re the best thing he’s got going at that place.

Let everybody else work hard. You just make yourself friendly to everybody. Everybody there just loves you because at least they can compare themselves. Well, I get, I get more than that happy guy done.

But the happy guy, he doesn’t ever get fired.

He’s needed. He’s probably the most valuable person there. Keeps everybody else from going absolutely nuts, killing each other.

So this would be my recommendation to everybody who’s got a job is to change your attitude about the job. The attitude changes from I’ve got to work, I’ve got to complain, I’ve got to get my way, I’ve got to cut other people’s throats, I’ve got to get stuff done into. All your job is at wherever place that you work. Your only job is to cheer people up. That’s your only job.

And that’s easy enough to do when you’re cheered up yourself. So the real job that you have to do is go cheer yourself up. Quit working so hard and just enjoy your life. Anna, all you have to do is cheer up your clients. You don’t have to fix them.

Stop working to try to get them to change. You don’t have to change them. Just be happy. They’ll be glad to come back to you week after week after week simply because they get a big belly laugh while they’re there with you. Don’t try to fix them.

Don’t try to make them fix themselves. Just be happy with them.

That’s what the world needs. It needs some happy people. It doesn’t need more workers.

This stage we already achieved. Pardon? We already there, but we need to move somewhere else. Where? We don’t know.

I’m not sure I understood what she was saying.

I said this stage we already achieved. We can cheer up and we can be happy, but some reason we need to move somewhere else and we don’t know where. Well, it doesn’t matter, does it? You’re going to be okay whether they move or not.

Domidoss. Do you have any final remarks?

Just thank you so much. Say what I just said. Thank you so much. All right, Ross, do you have any final remarks? No, thank you.

It was. It was a great, great to be on the call and I had a lot of fun listening to your talk. Okay, Navid, how about you? You have any final remarks? It’s been a pleasure.

It’s been an absolute pleasure. Hope to be around you and even talk to you one on one. Hopefully you can call. Thank you. Amen.

How about you have any final remarks? I’m good. Thank you. Paul, how about you? You got any final remarks?

I think he’s boring. Happiness is really boring, folks.

We’ll see you guys next time. Thank you so much.

Thank you. Go do nothing for a while. Enjoy doing nothing.