Anapanasati for Enthusiastic Beginners (Part 6) Alan 7 and Erik Z 11 3 27 21

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Speaker A: All right, Alan, we’ve got Eric with us following along as we’re continuing in our research on the book that Bhikkh Guru Dasa wrote. Are actually just jawboned about Annapan Asante while Santa Caro was translation on the fly. That shows how good Santa Caro is in Thai language to be able to translate on the fly because he spent so many years in refugee camps before he would ordained as a monk. And so he knows the Thai language really, really well. And so we can trust that. There are a few words that I would disagree with Santa Cara on, but by and large his stuff is spot on. And so one of the things that we need to point out is that even though the traditional method of teaching Anapanishanthi is normally done in an organized way, is to be practiced in a natural way. Another way of looking at it is that Praticya Sampada for instance, is normally taught in forward order, but it’s practiced more or less in reverse order. And for that reason we need to cover them both forward and backwards. And so Pianapan Sutta with the 16 states steps of Annapan Asante broken into four tetrads, or yeah, they call them tetrads, but I think that it’s actually quadrats or 4 of 4 giving 16. Now there is something very curious about that. In the sense that each of the four, four for the body, four for the feelings, four for the mind and four for the mind objects. It looks like that each one of those is a progression, a progression for the body, a progression for the feelings, a progression for mind and a progression for mind objects. And that they can be based it in the sense of for the beginner and then for the adept. So in the stuff for the body, the first things for the beginner to do is to get a hold of and start confronting, challenging, controlling, jumping on the breath so that they can maintain a long deep in breath and a long deep out breath. But step three and four is really experiencing the whole body. And that’s quite a feat. That takes some skill and then calming the body. That’s the one thing that most people can’t do. They just can’t sit down and relax their body. Don’t sit down and try to relax, wind up making themselves even more tense by thinking about things wrongly. Okay, so you can see that there’s kind of a progression. Yet also we can see the progression of step five and six working together of pity and sukha. And then later we will work with step seven and eight because what we’re actually doing there is to experience. The mind conditioner is actually where the Buddha is pointing out that our feelings condition our thought process. The feelings condition the mind, that the body actually conditions the feelings, the feelings condition the mind, the mind conditions the mind objects. Our mind objects also condition the mind. The mind conditions the feelings and the feelings condition the body. Okay, it’s all wrapped up together. You are one human being. You cannot take the part of your human being and put it into the meditation hall. There’s only the feelings leaving the mind and the body in the bed. Can’t do that. All this stuff works together in an intricate way. And this is the step where it’s making that connection, making that connection that the feelings are actually a mind conditioner. Now let’s give some sort of real world examples of how that works. You both know probably about debate societies and debating that have formal rules and that one of the formal rules of debating is no ad hominem attacks. Okay, what does that mean? That means that the debaters, intellectuals are not very mature emotionally. So that if you attack the debater, your opponent, rather than attacking his debating points, that will get him frustrated and he has to respond to the personal attacks rather than responding to the debating point. You see where that’s right there. Feelings condition the mind. Now let’s look at it a little bit deeper level. Wwe. Do you know what WWE is? World Federation of Wrestling. Right. You notice that the World Federation of Wrestling, before they have a fight, an actual bout where they’re in the ring tussling with each other, they’ll go to the microphone and trash each other. That’s very, very typical because that’s what almost all fights start with. Fights will always start with each person verbally trashing each other before it goes to blows. And while they’re trashing each other, each one of them is jacking up their feeling level based upon the language that is being used. And so the language that you hear is conditioning our feelings, getting us angry. And now the feelings are conditioning our thought to where we can’t think straight. If we could think straight, we would avoid the fight. So that’s an example right there of the mind conditioning the feelings. He trashed me, therefore I feel bad. Because I feel bad, therefore I’m going to start behaving stupidly. Isn’t that interesting? This is what the booth is pointing out at that point, that the, that the feelings condition the mind.

Speaker B: You know, there’s a couple of examples that I can think of too, you know, which is anxiety. You know, for Many people, anxiety comes as a sensation in the body of a beating heart, of a tightness, of, you know, of all kinds of physical sensations. And then the mind begins to follow the lead of the high negative feelings and fills in the gap, you know, Absolutely.

Speaker A: Here’s a physiological way of looking at that, that you could say that the chemical response to fear is adrenaline and cortisol. That stuff is pumped into the blood to get someone ready for fight and flight, which would be the answer to most dangerous situations 500,000 years ago, which is where this stuff was developed in prehistory. And it comes to us in this modern form through the DNA, except that the modern form is exactly the same as the old stuff. And we still behave the same way in the sense that this anxiety is kind of being on guard or ready for danger, that it doesn’t exist. For that reason, the adrenaline and the cortisol is building up into the blood, but we’re not jumping out of our chair and running away, nor are we balling up our fist and starting into fight. But you can see then that the mind conditioned the body because the thought of fear came up, which then turned on the spigot, literally. It’s the penal and the pituitary glands that are in the back of the head that have a direct path right down to the adrenaline gland. And the adrenaline gland is sitting right on top of, guess what, the kidneys. Why are there the adrenaline gland on the kidneys? The answer to that is the adrenaline glands are going to be making some very complicated chemicals. Adrenaline and cortisol. Guess where they get the ingredients from this? Right out of the trash heap of the body, out of the kidneys. Okay. And so a lot of that stuff is recycled over and over and over again. So the adrenaline gland then is taking stuff out of the kidneys and pumping that adrenaline right into the blood, which is right here in the midsection of the body. I mean, the kidneys are right back in the. In the back area here. So in this midsection of the body is where all of those chemicals will begin to form. And so that’s reason why the people can actually feel the sensations of this adrenaline in their blood strength. This is an important point. That’s what gives us anxiety, tightness. That is basically the body is now prepped for war and no place to go. How are we going to deal with that? I mean, if. If you’re in a dangerous situation, like your boss is about to fire you, the worst possible thing for you to do is act instinctually. Why? Because if you act instinctually, you feel like that you’re under attack, you’re about to attack your boss. That’s not a good idea to attack the boss when he’s already thinking about firing you. We don’t, but we leave all of this adrenaline in the body. And so we walk around then really uptight because we did not put these chemicals to use that the instinctual mind had created. Now, not only is that adrenaline in the blood, but that blood goes all over the body, which means we can begin to feel tensed up and ready to fight and ready for war. All over the body. Not just in the chest area, but that’s where we feel it most. But that same blood then goes into the brain. And so now that adrenaline soaked blood is also affecting the way that we think, which is a completely different kind of blood chemistry that you have. When you have oxycodone or nurturing feelings, the body chemistry changes. And it’s because of this body chemistry that the Bodhi didn’t know very much about. He only saw the actual experiential changes to it. But now we know enough about anatomy and whatnot that we can see that, yeah, the body actually works exactly the way that the Buddha experienced it working. He was spot on with that.

Speaker B: You know, I took a sociology course in college. It’s funny what you remember sometimes, you know, from. There was one study that I always remembered, they talked about where they had people essentially rape, on a scale of 1 to 10, the attractiveness of another person. And they did in a state of calm. And then they had the same people walk over a rope ladder that was actually very high in the air and, you know, swaying. And, you know, it got them excited and, you know, it sort of got their adrenaline up, it got their heart beating. And then they were asked to rate the attractiveness of these other people and they rated them much higher. And so, you know, the point of that supposedly was that, you know, normally when you’re attracted to somebody, you have sort of a physical response to it. Your heart beats and you get stimulated. But if you’re in a state of stimulation, you can make mistakes. You can think you’re attracted to somebody, you know. So the point is, you know, I think it aligns here with the idea that, you know, your feelings condition your mind. The feelings in your body can trick you into thinking positively about something or thinking negatively about something, thinking that you like something or thinking that you are averse to it.

Speaker A: Precisely. So. So now the sociologists are beginning to figure out what The Buddha knew 2500 years ago. Isn’t that amazing? And they’re doing it with some research and they’re finding out that, yes, that this is true, that these things are interrelated. And so now we can look at step seven in kind of a new way in the sense of the progressions of practice. So that basically the intention now is to build up good feelings with using good thoughts. The good thoughts of gladdening the mind, the good thoughts of having wholesome thoughts as opposed to unwholesome thoughts, then will condition the feelings. So is to bring up suka and then pity.

Speaker B: So now you’re talking about number eight, right? He trains himself calming the mind conditioner.

Speaker A: Not yet, not yet, not yet. What we’re not doing is changing the thoughts that we have from unwholesome to wholesome would be the very first thing to do, not the very first thing to do in a 10 year meditation practice course. The first thing to do every point of sati the first time, the first thing you do whenever you wake up is gladden the mind with aha, glad I don’t have to think about that stuff anymore. Okay? And so we gladden the mind. And with the gladdening of the mind because of this intercommunication between the feelings and the thoughts, we begin to feel good. And as we change our attitude, we begin to feel like a winner. And that this is a much more peaceful, much more sublime feeling state than being in bad feelings. So first we’re in bad thought and bad feelings, we change the thoughts to good thoughts with bad feelings. Then we go from good thoughts with bad feelings to good thoughts with good feelings. And now what do we do? Because now we’re already working with step seven in a way of recognizing this thought feeling interrelationship. But as we go for calming more and more, now is when we move to step eight of calming the mental conditioners, which means calming the body. Now the way that that would normally be, let us say in a classical way or in the top grade level way, what this would mean would be that you would develop the good feelings and the good thoughts in first Jhna. Then you would start to put the gaps in the thoughts so that now there are very few actual discursive, talking to ourselves kind of thoughts. And we’re spending a whole lot more of the mind moments in Veda. Now we’re really paying attention to what the feelings are. Because of that the feelings get really gushy, really big. We go from what a really nice pleasant state this is into a state kind of euphoria in the second jhana. Why? Because we really are paying attention to how close we feel and we’re not running a dialogue about it. Okay, so now we’re. Because we’ve gotten to step seven, working with it in the second jhana. The third Jhna is going to then be this step eight which is going to be to calm these vital of these mental conditioners. And this is the third Jhna would be. Okay, here’s the analogies and this may help with this. The analogy for the first jhana is the batsman with his bath powder. Now this analogy works very well with my grandmother making biscuits, but it’s the same thing. She takes that flour that she’s going to make biscuits with, puts her fingertips in water and then sprinkles the dough with water because she doesn’t want a whole lot of water. She’s not just dumping a bunch of flour into great big pot of water. We don’t want that. We want just the right amount of water. So she’s just adding just a little water over and over again so that she can make dough. Well, this is exactly what the bath powder or his apprentice was doing. The bath powder maker was just putting just enough water sprinkling with his hands is to get the bath powder not being a powder anymore. But rubber is now a ball. It is cohesive. Just like a ball of dough will stick together because it’s got some water in it as opposed to flour. It’s dust. It’ll just blow all over the place. Okay, so basically what we’re talking about is that we’re adding this joy just like, like we’re sprinkling water. This is the joy that we sprinkle on our dry old mind. This dry and dust. And we’re getting it juicy. Not to the point that it’s leaking water, not yet. But to the point that it is a completely saturated with with water. So joy then completely suffuses the mind is the analogy of sprinkling the water on the dough. And we keep doing that. We keep taking a little bit of water and doing it on the dough and then sprinkling some more water. This is the joy. These are the good thoughts that we put in. The second jhana has a completely different analogy. But like the first one, it still has the analogy with water. The second John is analogy is an artesian well or a spring. Do you know what an artesian well is, Alan?

Speaker B: Yeah, I do. You mentioned this one in our last discussion.

Speaker A: Right, Right. So the artesian well is it happens mostly at springtime, and it’s almost always on the side of a hill where the water table in the hill or in the mountain because of the amount of snow that’s drank or whatever like that. And now the water table is very high, but the elevation of the land goes down so that the water table can just spring right out. I mean, it’s like gravitation. All of the water in that mountain is being pushed down to where some of these artesian wells are real gushers. In fact, the whole quality of a gusher from oil was because he already knew about them and have historically, from the time of the Buddha onward, of these artesian wells. Well, farmers like these artesian wells, easy water. And not only that, because they’re generally on the side of a hill, they’re already easy to dam up. And so now you have an artesian well that’s been dammed up, and now all that really cold water is bubbling up into the bottom of the pond, on top of the pond. It’s hot, got the sun on it. But us kids, we like to go jump into that pond and then swim down to this area where the artesian well is, because it is absolutely an experience. There is no roller coaster ride as good as an artesian well because your whole body is just turning and bubbling. I mean, it’s just all over the place. And it just gives such wonderful feelings. In fact, I would go so far as to say for most people in this artesian world, the kids who go down swimming, it completely stops the mind. The mind couldn’t possibly have a thought about what they’re doing. They’re too deep in the experience of being tumbled all over the place. Okay, just 100% experience. I remember it well. It just brings all kinds of crucial feelings back. And I haven’t been in artesian well in more than 50 years. Yeah, more than 50. So this is the way that we. That we begin to understand the second China is that it’s almost overwhelming with good feelings. It’s not just stopping the mind, but it’s rather that we spend our mind moments, one after another after another, in the experience of joy, the experience of euphoria, the experience of good feeling, leaving almost no time to reflect and to think about it. It’s just 100% experience in the second Jhana. But even while the mind is quiet, we can, over the course of the practice, move from the fruit of this, excuse me, the path of second into the fruit of the second. And the fruit of the second means that we begin to get used to having all these really big Gucci wonderful feelings. Even they too become ordinary. This is when we come in now to step eight is going into the third jhana is when let us say in the formal sense doing it in third Jhna. But we can do it in other ways and I’ll get to that. But going into the third jhana is then is the analogy is a lotus flower that’s in a fast running book or it doesn’t even have to a fast running brook. It can just be a lily pond. But the important point is that even though the lily is rooted in the soil under the water, it grows up through the water. It eventually will rise above the water, open its flower and guess what? The flowers dry. So this is the analogy that the Buddha uses is that we rise up above all of these wonderful cushions, lovely feelings that we have. And now we have calmed the mental conditioner so that now the mind can get really, really calm. It’s even more peaceful. So let’s look at the peacefulness progression. One is the peace top is no peace. Hindrances, worries, frustrations. First level going into first Jhna is going to be that we remove all the unwholesome thoughts and only allow wholesome thoughts. One wholesome thought after another after another after another. Now that we’ve got the thoughts one after another after another after another, that’s when we can sit down and really relax and enjoy our good feelings. We’re successful, we’ve got it. But then as we begin to put gaps in between the wholesome thoughts, that’s the gaps between the wholesome thoughts are now mind moments that are spent in peeling. And so we really get in touch with these feelings that regenerated in first John and they begin to grow and get big. But as they do that, the mind has become quite peaceful. In fact going from hindrances down to wholesome thoughts now to having gaps in the wholesome thoughts where we can experience the feelings. And now the level below that is that now we’re even going to calm the mental conditioners or the feelings themselves which would be then the third Jhna. Okay, so this is the progression and you can see that oh, those guys who were talking about that back in the time of the Buddha knew exactly what they were talking about. But us reading the suit nowadays it’s kind of hard to put this stuff together to understand what this is. So but when we understand that this Vedana is kind of in a progression so that once we get these pity and sukha and you can say, well, if it’s in a progression, why does piti come first? The answer to that is because pithisuka is an actual Pali word, and the Buddha would have used it in that traditional way. You wouldn’t have turned it around. But he. Because these are not in chronological order necessarily. And so we speak of pitti sukha, but we actually practice it first. The pit of the sukha will give rise to the pity. So once we have the pity and the sukha now, we don’t have to think or talk ourselves into feeling really good anymore. We can just sit there and feel good. But even that is a little bit more work than somebody who’s really relaxed. And so now we can relax even the good feelings. So the body’s relaxed, the mind is relaxed, everything is going into the state of deep relaxation. That’s what this progression is all about. Okay, so this is what we mean by steps 7 and 8 is experiencing how the feelings affect the body and how the body affects the feelings, and also how the feelings affect the mind and how the mind affects the feelings. These things are back and forth. If that’s true, then that means that the mind can in fact affect the body quite, quite quickly. To go right through those feelings, let us say that the old king is laying on his deathbed and he’s feeling poorly and he doesn’t want to get up. And one of his ministers walks into the King’s bedroom and says, king, your sons are out there fighting with each other. They’re warring over who’s going to be king after your dad. And your favorite is losing. And when the King hears that, he doesn’t like it a bit, and all of a sudden he’s got a bunch of energy and the next thing you know, he’s putting on his battle gear, going to battle. Why? Look at the mental change that he goes through. And all of a sudden he feels like he’s ready for battle. Ten seconds ago he was ready to die in bed, he felt so bad. This is. And, and we need to see that, that the human body is capable of this. Yeah. Just because you’ve gotten yourself into a bad state doesn’t mean that you pop right yourself right back out of it. We can, we can actually control these things. These, these bodily mental conditioners can affect the body through the. Them through thought. So the, all that happened was the minister came in and told him the story, and the next thing you know, the king’s all up and ready to go. And in fact, a very wise minister may have Come in and told him the story like that, just to get him out of office. Bad mood. I know him about it. Your kids are out there fighting, and they’re going to kill each other over the fact that you’re laying here in bed. But you can see that we do that all the time. The guy will be sitting there and feeling really bad and moaning and pissing, and then he’ll think, wait a minute, it’s April and I got to do my tax return. And all of a sudden he’s up and he’s writing and everything like that. Just one thought. And all of a sudden we’re all into it. So when we recognize that the. We have these conditioners and these thoughts will condition the feelings, and the feelings can condition the thoughts. That gives us a lot of power, self knowledge like that, to understand how your feelings affect your ability to think. I’ve got another story. This is one of my favorites, and that is the story of Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky. In 1972, the World Chess Championship. Everyone knew that Boris Vaski was actually, you know, top of his Russian game on chess. They’re really good at it. And they all expected him to win. He was definitely the favorite. Where Bobby Fischer was a good chess player, but he was not world class. But Bobby Fischer won that contest anyway. You know why? Because he didn’t fight fair. Jess has got a bunch of rules. And Spassky was expecting Bobby Fisher to behave the way that all the other chess players had behaved. But one of the things that Bobby Fischer would do was to get up after he had moved. He would get up out of his chair, because they can do that. But instead of leaving the stage, he would walk around and get behind Spassky and look over his shoulder. He wouldn’t touch him. But you can imagine how hard it would be for you to do your chessboard here if this guy is right here looking over your shoulder. Guess what? Same thing happened in the 2016 presidential election where Donald Trump was actually stalking Hillary Clinton on stage. They made a big point of it, of the press discombobulated her. Now she’s got two things to think about. She’s got to think about the audience and the speech that she’s trying to give. And the political points she’s got to make. Well, she’s also got to watch the vampire behind her trying to bite her neck. Okay, this is exactly what we mean by mental conditioner, that we cannot think straight. We cannot give a good debate. We cannot play chess if we are emotionally threatened.

Speaker B: So I have a little example of this. I had a job for 15 years that I was a dead end job. It was a job that I sort of had to work in order to live. And there was this sort of phenomenon that used to occur, which is that I would go to work and I would feel like my energy was so low that I could barely walk around. I felt real low in spirit, you know, I felt depressed, you know, thinking very negatively, you know, about life, the universe and everything. And then this very interesting thing would happen is that I would walk out and all of a sudden I would have this enormous burst of energy and I felt like, wow, I feel like actually maybe I can go out tonight and maybe I can see some friends, and all of a sudden I would just have energy and I wouldn’t feel so bad anymore. And, you know, it was entirely a case of my mind, my thoughts being conditioned by my feelings. And it was like an insight, you know, into the seventh, you know, training, but just being like, you know, the arising and passing, you know, of these negative mind states. And it was amazing, you know, I just felt like I could barely move, you know, at work, and then I was out the door and all of a sudden, like, completely gone, you know, loving life, happy, you know, and it was just purely based on that environment and the feeling.

Speaker A: Mm. So everyone can come up with examples of this, but we don’t think about it normally. This is very interesting that this whole point that, that we’re making today, that the Buddha thought it was important enough to actually put into an upon a sati, not just to list it, but to mention it as a skill to be developed, is to start watching how our feelings condition our mind and how our mind conditions our feelings.

Speaker B: I think, you know, some people, they gain insight into it, but not a lot of people think of it as something that they can really impact. You know, they think, you know, they might notice, oh, you know, when I go to visit my family at Thanksgiving, you know, I feel bad, and then when I leave, I feel better. Or they think when I go to work, I feel bad, when I leave, I feel better. But, you know, people don’t. I don’t think a lot of people think of it as something that they can practice and consciously manipulate.

Speaker A: Absolutely. And yet, if they think about it, if I talk myself into feeling bad when I go into that Thanksgiving dinner with Uncle Fred over there, the Fox News hound, and then I feel better when I can get away from it all. Okay, but because we don’t understand, we just, in fact, that could happen to half the people in that Thanksgiving meal and none of them would know that that process is going on. They’re not aware of, they’re not watching. The same thing with going to work, we feel bad coming home feel good. If we begin to watch that, we can begin to see what kind of thoughts we were having when we were going to work and what kind of thoughts we were having when we got off work have that effect upon the fact that we feel that way. If we can actually see that connection and begin to remember to start watching and seeing it, that means that when we go to work, we can have thoughts that are going to get us feel good and we don’t have to feel bad going to work and wait until end of work to feel good. We can walk into that Thanksgiving meal feeling really good and stay feeling good the whole time and walk out of it feeling any better. But most people don’t understand that connection that the Buddha is making there as a skill to be developed. Actually, there’s two skills is one is to wake up and notice that so that you can begin to control how the feelings control the mind and how the mind controls the feelings. That’s the skill to be developed. But then the other skill, skill at step number eight is to actually calm these formations, to calm these things down. That in fact almost all of the bad feelings that we ever had are based upon feelings that we generated ignorantly in the past. And we’re just going over and remembering old bad feelings. When we see that, when we see that there’s these connections now we can begin to choose how we want to feel. We can calm these bodily and mental or excuse me, Veda. Now we can calm these Veda. Now these mental conditions that in fact this particular part of Anapanasati gives kind of a new way of looking or a deep insight into Paticca Samupata in the sense of the calming of the bodily conditioners means that we can in fact start to change the San Cara itself. You can really start to change your memory systems by not remembering things, just let it go. And if you empty out your past, that means you’ve got no, no, not much of a past anymore, which is a really good thing. So this calming of the bodily condition are the mental conditioners is actually means now we’re looking at the feelings deeply associated with remembered feelings, or in fact the Sankara. That’s why the Buddha introduces this word Sankara there in the Pali that is translated into English as formations that not only are there newly forming formations, but there’s these old ones that are there already in play. And I like it that you’re checking me up. Checking this out.

Speaker B: At the back of the book, there’s a little glossary. Yeah. Sankara is just a term that I can’t. I wouldn’t be able to clearly find if I were given a test. So checking it out, and it’s got a pretty extensive definition here. I’ll read it to you, and then maybe you can clarify because this definition doesn’t. Doesn’t help a whole lot. It says conditioned thing, concoction phenomenon, formation, anything depends on other things or conditions for its existence. There are three aspects of Sankara. Concoctor, conditioner, the cause of the conditioning, concoction condition, the result of the conditioning, and the activity or process of concocting and conditioning. Okay, so it’s a lot, isn’t it?

Speaker A: Well, no, it’s actually just talking about the. Okay, here’s one thing that we can help you understand very quickly, and that is the distinction between the word cause and the word conditioning. Because we often get those things confused. In other words, if I step on your foot with a big thud and a big smile, or maybe an angry look on my face and I stomp on your foot, I am not. Then. And you get angry. I am not causing you to be angry. Rather, I’m merely conditioning you to become angry. Okay. That the causation of the anger is more deeply buried. That if you did not have anger readily unavailable, then the condition. So you can think of then that the causation would be all the circuitry and the conditioning would be the button that’s pushed. You can push a button that’s got no circuitry. The light doesn’t come on. But if you got the circuitry, then now the conditioning of flipping that switch or pushing the button and now the light will come on. So this is an important quality of understanding. The difference between something that actually causes that versus something that merely conditions it. Okay. A catalytic converter is a conditioner, not a causality. That those molecules that are hot, that are in the muffler will. Will tend to break down. But the catalytic converter will assist or condition them in order to do that. Okay. Salt will condition water, but it will not cause water. So this is something that Vika Buddha Das is pointing out there, that they. That there are. That in fact there are causal agents that do not get affected with the causality. This would be the same thing as a catalyst. In other words, the elder. You got three brothers. The elder brother can say Something to get the other two brothers, the two younger brothers, to fight without having to do much of anything. He can condition them without becoming conditioned himself. So in that case, he’s. He’s a catalyst or he’s a conditioner that is not being in self conditioned along the way. So you have causal agents and then you have the result of that causal agent. The result of it. So the result then using the word San Cara. The word San Cara can be used for all of these things. The cause, the conditioner, and then the result of that conditioning. I can’t hear you.

Speaker B: I can’t hear him either.

Speaker A: I can’t hear you, but I can hear. Airy. No, no sound. I can hear Eric, but I don’t hear you. No sound. Maybe I try calling back. Yeah, why don’t you hang up and check your microphone and call back in.

Speaker B: There it goes.

Speaker A: All right. Yeah, he’ll pop right back in. So how is Prescott?

Speaker B: Prescott is. It’s really nice. I like it. Yeah, the weather’s just right. Just right.

Speaker A: Great. And how’s your. Your dad? Is he. He’s good. You’re there, huh?

Speaker B: Yeah, well, he’s not.

Speaker A: He was in Tucson. Where was that? But he’s good. He’s good. Alan, are you.

Speaker B: Can you hear me now?

Speaker A: Yes, I can hear you now. Okay.

Speaker B: Yeah, I’m not sure what happened there.

Speaker A: There’s no camera. Voice with no camera.

Speaker B: Maybe it’s slowly sort of coming online here.

Speaker A: So your question. Go ahead and ask your question.

Speaker B: So the Sankara is a process done.

Speaker A: Can be thought of as a process, right? The word, it depends upon the way that the word is used. And you have to understand that when we use the word Sankara as an English language word with English language syntax, we fix. Failed to understand that actually the word Sankara is a root word that has many different possible endings. So that it can be a word, it can be a verb, it can be an adjective, it can be a noun.

Speaker B: And so it involves some type of cause. So some type of what? Simulation at the sense doors.

Speaker A: Some sort of cause, some sort of conditioning. And the results then are kind of stored, but not very well.

Speaker B: So like your feelings of craving or aversion in response to that cause that we experience.

Speaker A: Well, let us say it this way. Remembered craving.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Okay. Remembered craving would be a San Cara. And that Sankara, a remembered craving will now condition this present moment so that you will be in craving again.

Speaker B: So it’s like an ingrained behavior in a way. And so. So for instance, if you, you know, if you were being. As you were being raised, somebody teased you a lot and said, you know, you’re a big dummy. You’re a big dummy. And so you develop a lot of very negative feelings associated with that. And then someone else, you know, out in the world says, oh, you big dummy. And then you have an automatic response. It could be very, very negative. Even if the person maybe didn’t intend it to be.

Speaker A: The same thing could happen in another way. And that is that for some silly reason, the guy who was called a dummy 10 years after he gets out of high school is looking through his high school book and runs across the. The. The photo of the guy who called him dummy and just how he’s going to feel when he remembers that. There it is again. He didn’t even have to be called a dummy. He could just recall or see the photo of the guy who called him a dummy. And now all of that stuff comes flooding back in. So this is how the thing that was the noun Sankara, as an old memory, now becomes the conditioner or becomes the verb. It Sankara’s the present moment.

Speaker B: You can actually change sometimes. I’ve heard the analogy of seeds. You know, that these things are like seeds within you.

Speaker A: Mm.

Speaker B: And if you water certain seeds, they. They grow. So, you know, if you have these negative seeds that have been planted and you. And when they arrive, you go into them, you know, you’re watering them. But if you. Let’s say when you have these reactions, if you view them with wisdom and equanimity, then eventually that those negative seeds will cease to arise, whereas they might have.

Speaker A: Yes, we can actually unlearn bad habits. I have a really clear example of this that happened to me when I was just about ready to graduate from high school and was trying to get into the university music school as a Bachelor of Arts in music as opposed to education. None of the musicians wanted to get a degree. Bachelor of Science in music education because everybody hated the education school almost bad as they hated the business school. So the real arts and the real scientists, you know, we were ganging up kind of on the softer arts. But the point is that the head professor of the music school would not give me a free ride because it required four semesters of piano, two full years of piano lessons, unless the student already had proficiency in piano. And so I look on the list of things that they will allow to play. Got the three of them out that I could. Studied up on them and fail that examination because the teacher that I had was just a regular high school Music teacher. So knowing what was going on and also being familiar with it, I happened to know up in Rockingham, North Carolina, at the university up there was a newly graduating PhD in musicology as a pianist. And he was. And so I got in touch with him and basically what he had me to do was to unlearn the wrong fingering that I was using in one of the pieces of music that I was playing it and sloughing through it. And what he had me to do was to slow it down almost to the point of only one note a second, and then with that, to start changing the rhythm so that I had to play it in 20 or 30 different ways, all of which were different than the way that I had learned it wrong. But in the process of doing that, I learned to control my fingers a whole lot better. That was possibly the best set of lessons. It took about six weeks for me to go through that, but I had to really learn fingering, the kinds of fingering that I should have learned the first year of piano lessons. But that was a very, very clear sign of having to unlearn a bad habit. Well, if you think that bad fingering on a piece of music is a bad habit that takes so long to unlearn, think about unwholesome thoughts as a bad habit. And we have to unlearn those bad, unwholesome thoughts by starting to have wholesome thoughts. And if we can’t learn to do that, then we’re not going to get a whole lot out of our practice of meditation. So we have to actually understand there’s a. In Sutta number 18 in the Majumenikaya is the honey ball, where the Buddha is talking about habits when he talks about it, that mental proliferations, and we’re using the word here, proliferations, like things are prolific. So these mental proliferations, these Sankara’s that run over and over and over again, change the way we think. So the honey ball is actually an exposition of this step number seven and eight of Anapanosati, how we condition the mind, how we have these Sankaras that happen over and over again. So think of the Sankara Zen is not one thought, but rather that they proliferate and that those proliferations grind in. Like, imagine that you had some sort of very, very dirty old large wash tub, maybe blackened with soot or whatever like that, and you take one little piece of steel wool that you can put in your hand and you just scrub back and forth over and over and over and over and over and over and over. Again, just doing that one motion and pretty soon that stuff, the dirt, will lift off and be removed from that one place where we’re scrubbing. Right? This is exactly the way that we should be practicing an upon a Sati with the breath is to start scrubbing down this Sankara over and over and over and over and over again. We remove those unhappy oats, unwholesome thoughts with happy thoughts of this is okay, everything’s fine, no worries, no troubles. Just scrape and scrape and scrape and scrape until you get right down to the bare metal. Okay, so this is the point that we’re making here about that these mental preparations not only have built up over time with the dirt, but now we can have new mental proliferations of this scrubbing down that we’re talking about is constantly replacing unwholesome thoughts with wholesome thoughts over and over and over again. And by doing so we are actually then conditioning the feelings. This is why joy naturally arises is when you’re having good thoughts. Joy does not naturally arise when you’re having unwholesome thoughts is because of this connection that is pointed out here in step seven. So with step eight, we’re going to go back and do the same thing over again. And that is that we laid these Sankaras down as habits over and over and over and over again, layer after layer. Now we’re going to go scrub that layer one layer at a time, back off again with wholesome thoughts.

Speaker B: So is it kind of like wholesome San Cara in a way?

Speaker A: Yes, absolutely. Sankara is not known as wholesome or unwholesome is merely known as the build up, the company, the compounding, the collection of whatever it is. That’s what Sankara is. It’s the proliferation of thoughts, proliferation of feelings. The children because of, because of the child’s ignorance and greed and the ill will. Kids have bad feelings all by themselves. They don’t have to be busted or talked into it by adults. But unfortunately, if the child has no mindful or bodhisattvas or whatever in their life, then there’s not going to be any adults who try to help that child to rewire their circuitry to come out of your vata unwholesome thoughts when you’re a kid and come into wholesome thoughts because of that. In fact, most kids when they’re raised, they’re raised not only building up their own sandcarrie with unwholesome thoughts, they’re getting a whole load of it from the adults around them too. And so now we have Double layers or triple layers of this Sankara. Everything keeps piling on like that. And it’s almost always unwholesome thoughts. But that doesn’t mean that they have to be unwholesome, that you can cheer a child up, you can get them to laugh and sing and be joyful. And the more of that that they do as a child, the easier it will be for them to do it when they’re an adult.

Speaker B: You know.

Speaker A: So if you’ve kind of wasted your childhood in bad feelings, now is the time to regain your childhood and of joy.

Speaker B: It reminds me a little bit of in psychoanalysis, what they call the super ego.

Speaker A: The superego is in fact the Sankara. That’s it. All of those mental proliferations and that Eric Byrne talks about the superego that Freud came up with and uses the term parent ego state. And that gives us 100% clue into what’s going on. That it’s the parent ego state is all of those Sankaras that we learned from adults when we were kids, all the rules, all the right supposed to’s, all you gotta do it this ways. You were taught to stand in line, how to open a door, how to sit in your. At your desk, how to do your ABCs. All of that stuff is stored in these mental proliferations or these Sankaras of the mind. But the ones that are the most ferocious is the fact that not all of the things that are stored as memories or as San Caras are thoughts or concepts. We store memories of feelings and we feel the way that we have gotten into the habit of feeling. But we can change those habits through practice. Just like I changed the fingering of that piece of music. By the way, I eventually did get out of those piano classes. In fact, I eventually had a really good relationship with that professional professor who failed me the first time. Yeah, so. So the, the best revenge is living well. But in this case, back to the whole point about the. That these mental proliferations change the mind, they pollute the mind, they poison the mind. Or if we turn it around, we can begin to purify the mind by remembering to remove that stuff. Every time that it comes up, we throw it out, we bring back into the wholesome. And so this is the way that we would look at it from that perspective of step seven and eight is actually a fairly advanced practice. But we’re already practicing. Just by taking that first breath, waking up and changing how we feel by talking to ourselves into feeling good, we’re actually, without even understanding that we’re Doing it. We’re actually already practicing step seven and eight. And the very first breath we take, we already start to doing that. But as we grow in, in our wisdom and ability to see things, we can really see that stuff happening.

Speaker B: And the, and for the eighth training, the book does offer what he calls a wisdom method here for calming the mind conditioner. And he, he suggests what he calls contemplating the asada, an element attractive quality, and adenva, an element unhealthy consequences. So this sounds like a way of using wisdom to sort of try to understand feelings. And so asada is an element’s charm that deliciously tempts the heart. Attractiveness, satisfaction, loveliness, infatuating quality. And adanava excites and disturbs its unsound, noxious quality that drives away tranquility. So that sounds like another way of trying to get rid of unwholesome feelings.

Speaker A: Yes, exactly. That’s very, very interesting that this is in there like that. We have to change the language that, that they’re using. It may in fact have been that when Santa Caro was doing that translation that he was not familiar with some of the suttas that Viku Buddha Dasa was referencing in his own mind. That happened. You know, your translator is just not quite up to the level of the guy who’s actually giving the talk. All right, so let’s, let’s look at that in the reference of a sutta that the Buddha actually not one sutta. It’s all over the place in the sense of a new way of looking at the characteristics. And that is this the word that we could use that Bhikkhu Bodhi chose to translate it into was gratification that we like things that we like things that are unwholesome for us, and we do not see the danger in it. This is exactly what you’re referring referencing is that we take gratification with we can’t see the danger. And because we can’t see the danger, we can’t see the escape. The simple one is analogy is the fat man who loves donuts. Let’s say that we’ve got a real Homer Simpson on our hands. Love them donuts. And Homer then goes to the doctor, and the doctor does this, that, and the other test and comes to the conclusion that Homer is going to die, he’s going to kill himself if he doesn’t go on a diet. And then he and the doctor start discussing this donut addiction. And Homer walks out of the doctor’s office with the firm conviction that these donuts are dangerous. Once he sees the donuts are dangerous, now he can plot his escape from them. How can he find an escape? Don’t have any doughnuts in the house. Don’t walk into the room at work where the boss is serving donuts. We got to avoid those things because they’re dangerous. Okay? This is exactly what happens with children, is that your child cannot see the danger. We can only see the gratification. An example of that is the young teenage boy who gets infatuated with girls. He sees all the gratification there is. Gratifying here, gratifying there. Look up that skirt. Look at this. Look at that. Isn’t this marvelous? Isn’t it wonderful? But he has no clue about how dangerous doing that kind of stuff is. He may, in fact, get slugged. That girl may walk up to him and bust his nose for what he’s doing. He thinks it is not dangerous, but in fact it is. So we have to see that danger. That things look gratifying in the beginning, but they wind up being dangerous. This is that also, that mental proliferation is because things are dangerous. Is. Is this what you’re referring to there? Yeah.

Speaker B: So I’m imagining, you know, that what, you know, you’re meditating, you’re practicing, and then within you arise maybe feelings, I don’t know, a trip feeling that you want to do something else. I’m guessing, you know, you know, whether it’s, oh, you know, wouldn’t it be nice if I just, you know, ate something right now? Or wouldn’t it be nice to just sit down and watch tv, watch a nice show or, you know, go out, do this or do that. And these are the things that we think we like, the things that we think are pleasurable.

Speaker A: The things that I have right now is Grandpa was sitting in front of the TV enjoying Fox News, not recognizing how dangerous it is.

Speaker B: You know, I think I’ve remarked, you know, before, is that this is. This is the one that really, I think, is the one that can shake people to their boots. You know, because I think on a certain level, people understand that if you’re having a lot of feelings of aversion and negativity and dislike, that maybe, you know, those feelings aren’t, you know, aren’t always ones that you want to go into. Aren’t ones that you want to always entertain, you know, Absolutely. It isn’t always the case. Some people get all twisted up into thinking that their negativity is their power or, you know, that, you know, being.

Speaker A: Angry, their power, anger, Is like that anger gives us the feeling of power. Anger is the victim’s revenge. In other words, we come from position of weakness. We come from the position of fear. And so we. With the adrenaline and all of that fight and flight stuff that comes up. Anger is actually a delicious response to being threatened. In other words, a good offense is the best defense, right? That is the normal thinking that seeing the gratification in the anger, it makes us feel powerful. We get the idea that with all this anger, I feel powerful. Maybe I can get them to do what I want to do. My power is great. I feel it. It’s all over my body. No, it’s not power. It’s adrenaline. But yes, we do have these delicious feelings, or let us say delicious liking of very negative feelings. An example of that is nobody likes to feel really sad, legitimate. You don’t want your own dog or your mother to die. But we can get a great deal of pleasure out of vicariously feeling sad. For instance, listening to sad music or watching the sad TV show, right? And we see the gratification in that, but we don’t see the danger in mucking around in those artificial bad feelings.

Speaker B: And with the attractive feelings, you know, that. That’s the one that’s a little bit harder, I think, for some people because they think, well, these are what make life meaningful, you know, and that. And then people.

Speaker A: And isn’t that ridiculous? Because why bother to put any meaning in it? That’s a lot of work. Meaning. That’s a lot of work to put meaning into life.

Speaker B: And so people, you know, they get addicted to the things that they like. And then the things that they like can become fetters, you know, I mean, we all know the people who are, you know, familiar. There are two playing video games for 16 hours a day or gambling or eating or, you know, whatever it is. You know, what. What we find pleasurable can turn. Can become destructive very easily.

Speaker A: Makes a point of that. That, in fact, it’s. That when we see something, let us say instantaneously when we see something that we like, that’s a kind of gratification. In other words, I like it. It feels good. But then the ignorance will be compounded in there for an instant. New Sankara is that I like it, therefore I want it. It must be good, therefore I want to have it. The example of that is the young man sees a pretty girl across the room, Purdy. Not because of what she’s doing or makeup she’s wearing or anything like that, but Purdy is because he likes it purdy is because he likes it, but he doesn’t understand that. He thinks it’s the girl herself that is beautiful, rather than understanding that no, the girl is just a girl. It’s he who likes it. A really easy way of looking at that is that a little child, an old, old, old man, or even another girl of her age does not look at that girl the way that the boy does and likes her. He’s doing that. And that’s an important quality for us to understand is that when we like something now, because we like it and we get a good feeling out of it now we want to perpetuate that feeling of gratification. Therefore, the boy can’t just see the girl across the room and say, that’s nice. Now he’s got to go over there. He’s got to get more and more and more. I like what I’ve got so far. I want more, I want more, I want more. I want, I want, I want, I want. Not just that I like it, but in fact there is a story and Robert told me this story. I think it’s hilarious. It’s a story about a samito before he was an ajahn, when he was still less than 10 years a monk and a Chan Cha, that in fact Tomato was like Achon Cha’s very first western student. And so you can see that this way back in the old days when I chant, only has one western student achieved Tomato at that time. And so they go to a kitten ceremony where all of the young Thai girls are going to be dressed to the nines. Just like once a year the church will have where all the women get all dolled up and dressed to their to the nines, they say, accepted at the content ceremony. There’s something else going on and that is that this is matchmaker time in Thailand. This is where all the grandmothers take all the young birdied up girls to the what? Because this is when the boys that are going to disrobe will disrobe and they’re out husband hunting. So this is the situation, right? Achon Cha turns to Achon Semedo and says, what do you think? Achah must have been able to see what Achahn Tomato was doing with his eyes. And so Achahn Cha said to Sumedo, what do you think? Samado coming back with one of the best dharma words I’ve heard. This is brilliant what Samado came up with. He says, I like it, but I don’t want it. Now that is wisdom. At the point of Contact. Yes, you do like that girl. And I have actually come to understand that the girls do work very hard to be beautiful, to be attractive, and we can’t ignore that. We’ve got to give them credit that they’re working really hard to be beautiful. And I appreciate that they work very hard to be beautiful. But that doesn’t mean I want one of them. I don’t want her. Why? Because I can see the danger under that makeup. There’s a real human there I’m going to have to deal with. I’m falling in love with, with a paint job, and there’s something real under there that I’m going to have to deal with. And that might be kind of dangerous. I’m going to have to check that out before I go off warning that girl.

Speaker B: You know, it’s interesting. You know, one of the things that has struck me, you know, about the Dhamma, you know, is the recognition that you have thoughts that arise based on Sankara, based on conditions and habit patterns and your upbringing. When a condition arises, you have a reaction to it, but you don’t have to go into it. You don’t have to necessarily, you know, because you find something pleasurable, you don’t have to pursue it, or you find something aversive, you don’t have to run away from it.

Speaker A: This is why Shati is so important, is because we got to wake up and take that and look at that stuff to investigate. It is wholesome, or is this dangerous, or is this just merely pleasurable?

Speaker B: And I think that being very nuanced and careful and thoughtful and trying to see the actual thoughts and feelings that arise and to be aware of them is important, because I think that there are a lot of people in our culture who want to say that they don’t want to recognize, you know, negative thoughts, you know, or they don’t, you know, like, oh, you shouldn’t be thinking that, or, you know, I don’t know. It’s like they want to pretend that all of your thoughts should just be wholesome all the time. But I think what the Dhamma is teaching is that if you actually look at your thoughts and your feelings, that you’re going to see that there’s all kinds of stuff coming up, and you really can’t control that it comes up, but you can control how you react to it.

Speaker A: Eventually, you can control it, because if you don’t react to it over and over and over and over again, it begins to lose its power.

Speaker B: Right? And that too. So I’ll give A little example, you’re in a relationship with committed, monogamous relationship, and you’re walking along and you’re seeing lots of people pass you and your partner says to you, do you find any of these people attractive? And you know that if you say yes, you’re going to hurt their feelings because they think that you should not.

Speaker A: That sounds like a setup, doesn’t it? It sounds like a setup. Bad feelings follow. Exactly.

Speaker B: And so you know, the correct answer would be yes, I’m seeing all kinds of people and I’m feeling attracted to some and I’m feeling adverse to others. But that’s not what’s important. What’s important is how you are, you know, how you are either going or not going into those feelings.

Speaker A: Exactly. So. Exactly. This is what the practice is really all about, is to, is to wake up and investigate, to figure out what is wholesome and what is dangerous. This is in fact the first noble truth. This is the whole show Duka, Duke and Aroda. This is it. I mean, this is all there is to the teaching of the Buddha. This one thing that you just mentioned, and you put it in the situation of you walking down the street with your significant other and she sets you up.

Speaker B: But eventually, eventually you’re also saying that if you practice, you practice, you’re sanding it down, sanding it down. That eventually you may actually change your habit patterns and your reaction to where maybe you’re not, you’re not having those old patterns rise up.

Speaker A: Exactly. So that in fact, what we can do is we can train the mind to have one wholesome thought after another after another after another, one wholesome thought after another after another. With in the beginning, some unwholesome thoughts spread in. But as we get good at it, we begin to eliminate all the unwholesome thoughts and just stay with the wholesome intentionally. So that the thing that’s kind of amusing to me is that the wholesome, like the truth is very small and the unwholesome, like a lie, is vast. If I ask you how old you are, you can only give me one right answer according to the year. But if you lie to me, there’s no end to it. I haven’t been born yet. I’m going to be born in 10 years. I’m minus 10. How’s that for you? It’s an answer, but it’s a total lie. I’m 300 years old. I’m 900 years old. There’s no end to the lies that we could tell. There’s also no end to the kinds of unwholesome thoughts that we can have. For instance, if you’re thinking about your grandmother and you want to do something nice for her, then we kind of work really hard to try to figure out what was she really like. But if we are angry at her and we want to hurt her, there’s no end to the things that we can do to hurt her. I mean, the two. Just look at the tool shed. We got hammers, saws raised. There’s no end of the damage that we can do. But. And so this is one of the. The points about always having only wholesome thoughts means that we’re throwing out a whole whole bunch of junk. About 90% of all the stuff that we have is unwholesome. And that probably is. That’s probably a. How to say it, an opportunist or a optimistic. That’s the word I’m looking for. That’s probably just optimistic. And so the wholesome is actually quite small, which means now that we can kind of rehearse it, we can get into a state of hope, some thoughts, and just keep returning, repeating those over and over again. This is how I teach. I only have just a few wholesome things to say. Everything’s going to be all right. No worry, nothing to do, everything is good. I mean, how far do I keep going around in that tight little circle, you know, so stay in that tight little circle of wholesome thoughts and not loud, unwholesome thoughts. I mean, because there’s no end to how many unwholesome thoughts that we could have. So knowing that the number of wholesome thoughts that we can have are small, that means that we can be very careful to stay out of the kinds of thoughts that we know are not wholesome. For instance, thoughts of the past, thoughts of the future, thoughts of someplace else that in fact, the Buddha called himself the tathagatha. The word tathagatha is translated as thusness or Tata’s thusness, or this ness. And we can begin to use that word this then, in the sense that if we begin every sentence with the word this, it’s got a much better chance of being wholesome than if we use the word that. Why? Because this is here, this is now, that is there, that is then. And so this present moment, this feeling, this thought, this thought is wholesome over and over again, this present moment. But if you think about this present moment actually like the truth, or like wholesome thoughts, this present moment actually is not very big. I mean, I know that there’s the big now of one mind moment or one thought, or one moment after another after another after another. But compared to the vastness of the past or the expansiveness of the future, right now is actually quite small. Which means that we should be able to find fairly easy to be here now, to find wholesome things in the present moment. Now there’s also the kind of thing that we can look at in the sense of facts or the truth, that we often confuse facts with the truth. Facts always have to do with something that’s happening only in this present moment. But truth, especially noble truth, is true all the time. The four Noble Truths are noble because they’re true all the time. They were true in the time of the Buddha. They’ll be true next week, and they’ll be true right now as we’re speaking always Dukkha, Dukkha naroda is there. It’s a noble truth. Which means that if we’re thinking about noble truths of the Dhamma, we’re thinking whole some thoughts, especially if we’re applying the Dharma to this present moment. Ah, this is suffering. Ah, this is the cause of suffering. Or ah, this is really nice right now. No suffering. Ah, this is the method. This is the method of getting out of suffering. Right view, right sati, right effort, right attitude. And so we keep going over this Dhamma over and over again because it’s very wholesome, it’s very healthy, gets us in a good state of mind. So these proliferations of unwholesomeness are all over the place. How many bad feelings and bad thoughts have you had your whole life? Zillions of them. And so now we’re going to start honing things in, corralling this, putting it into a smaller package. Getting into the reality of the situation means that we stop proliferating, we stop keep manufacturing and sticking things together that in fact Sankara can be thought of as nothing but just sticking stuff to together. Just like a chemist, they when we talk about in England, the chemists there, the old time of pharmacists, they actually compounded medicine. They took a little of this and a tincture of that and they put it into a mortar and pistol and they’d compound it and mash it all together. Okay? This is basically what our past is. It’s just a whole bunch of mashed together stuff. So if we can come out of that and come into wholesome thought, then it’s a whole lot easier. No worries. So this is the way. Go ahead.

Speaker B: One of the things that doesn’t get talked about very much. And I think I kind of understand why, but is the idea of renunciation. And it would seem to me that if you are practicing the Dhamma and you are progressing and you are being aware of your rising of craving and your being aware, you know, aware of the arising of aversion, and you are seeking to, you know, not go into them as frequently and to be equanimous towards them and to. And to, you know, not just dive into every impulse, that part of the side effect of that would be that your behavior would start to change and maybe, you know, you don’t need to go out to the club every night to be. To be, quote, unquote happy or that you don’t need to, you know, I don’t know, buy XYZ to be happy or you don’t need to do this or do that, that you’re going to see some of that habit pattern, compulsive behavior begin to reduce.

Speaker A: Mm, exactly.

Speaker B: But you don’t hear, you don’t hear that part of it, you know, because I think, I think that look at.

Speaker A: Nunciation in two different ways. Normally the renunciation has to do with organized formal religions. We can think of it as taking a vow and that normally this kind of renunciation is done out of the super ego in the sense that it’s a rule that it. That somebody says it would be good for you if you would do this, or it would be dangerous if you don’t do it, therefore you should, you know, or in the sense of renouncing, if you do that, it’s going to be bad for you. You should not do it. All right, this is the normal way of renunciation and this is also wholesome. But it is ordinary right view and it is tinged with attachment. It ripens in attachments in the sense that now you become attached to this thing because you should do it. There’s another kind of renunciation that’s more noble and that renunciation is much more aligned with the word escape. And that escape comes from the fact that we can see the danger in it. So we set up boundaries not because we renounce them, because we have heard and we think that they’re bad, that we set up these barriers or renunciations and boundaries because we know that that stuff is dangerous and is to be avoided.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And yet most of the renunciation that you have in the world is done from, let’s just say, the wisdom of someone else. Someone else, the Bible or the priest or whatever says you ought to stop Doing that. And so we stopped doing it out of following orders or doing what we were told to do. We really don’t want to renounce it, but we kind of think that we ought to. Yeah, all right. That’s completely different than the renunciation. I don’t want anything to do with that. Get out of here. I don’t want that. And that’s the real renunciation is when we can renounce things because we can see the danger. We can see the dukkha in it, because we can see that dukkha. Now we renounce it, but we renounce it at a completely different level. Even before we were announcing it as a vow and an intellectual level, and then having a hard time not engaging with it because we liked it anyway. And we were just avoiding it because we were told to avoid it.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: As opposed to avoiding it because we can see that that stuff is downright dangerous. So going back to the man of the fat man, it’s unlikely for Homer to actually hear what the doctor said. If he doesn’t hear it correctly, then it’ll be an ought to or a should. He should not eat donuts, but that’s not going to stop his craving for donuts. But when he sees that these donuts are dangerous now, not only does he renounce it intellectually, but he knows deep inside that these are dangerous and he actually now has no desire for them. He has a desire now to avoid them. This is real renunciation.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: So this is why the Buddha will sometimes refer to his renunciation is ordinary right view. Because renunciation is an order, or it’s a way that you should do it, or it’s a rule in some rule book or something like that. An example of it precisely is the word celibacy. Celibacy is the renunciation because you should do it. It’s. It’s a good idea the priests do it, etc. Like that. But a better word of renunciation would be freedom. Hey, I don’t want to mess with that stuff. That’s a lot of work. You don’t know how difficult and how much trouble and how much bad feelings it is to get those panties off. But when we don’t see that, then all we see is the delight. I want it, I want it, I want it. And then the word celibacy comes up. We say, wait a minute, wait a minute. And so celibacy is very dangerous. Freedom, not so dangerous, depends upon what kind of renunciation you’re doing there. If you can see the danger in it, then it’s easy. If you could do it because you think that you should or that you’re going to get some future benefit out of it, then that’s an ordinary kind of right view. Funny thing about that renunciation stuff. So, Alan, this is getting old. We’ve been doing this for about an hour and 40 minutes. Continue this on I’ve got other callers calling. Eric, I really enjoy your beautiful smile.

Speaker B: Thank you. It’s so nice to talk to you both.

Speaker A: This has been really wonderful. This has been really great. Alan, do you have any questions about this as we leave?

Speaker B: Hmm. I can’t think of anything off the top of my head. You’ve been very gracious in talking through a lot of my questions already, and so I think I’m okay.

Speaker A: I like this. You really test me. You’re asking really interesting questions.

Speaker B: Well, it’s pretty exciting because next time we get to start with the ninth training and the sita.

Speaker A: All right, we can do that.

Speaker B: So we’ll have some great, great stuff to talk through next time as well. And I appreciate it.

Speaker A: Once again, I really like this stuff, guys. This is so much, much fun. Dharma is such good stuff. All right, well, we’ll see you. Be well, Alan. Enjoy the moment.

Summary of this Dhamma Talk

Outline of this Dhamma Talk

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