As Habits Change They Will Change Your Destiny Sangha US

Transcript

All right, so it started. And that, first off, I’m really glad to see so many people today. I have been recovering from an illness that’s called a denghu fever, and I’ve caught it several times before. And the doctors say that every time that you catch it, there are different kinds, but when you catch a new one is worse than before. And so I was in the hospital for nine days, and the doctor was a bit worried that I might lose my right leg and foot, but luckily, it’s gone down.

The swelling is not so much now, but when I sit up, it begins to swell again. So I don’t want to spend too much time sitting, but I didn’t want to make this call because I wanted to see everybody. And so I’m so happy to see you all again.

We’re not going to be back up to regular schedule of me taking calls from people on a regular basis, partly because it would require me to get up and. And walk with my walker over to this computer to take the call. And so I won’t be taking calls, let us say, except for old students, where we don’t record the call. So let’s get started with it. This morning, Jordan has asked a very typical question, and he used two words.

One was meditation, which we don’t do, and contemplation, which, as far as I’m concerned, nobody does, at least not in the past three or 400 years. And so let me define what I mean by contemplation. Contemplation is the kind of meditation that the catholic priest and monks did, which meant that they would take a topic like the compassion of Mother Mary or what is the trinity? And contemplate and dream up all kinds of stuff that, in fact, you could say that when we use the word contemplation, that’s just daydreaming. And so we don’t contemplate in that way.

We don’t daydream about things that the actual Buddha dhamma is to see reality, to see things the way that they are, so that we can make a change for the better. And, in fact, the most important point that Bikkhu Buddhadasa made is that the teachings of the Buddha is a change model. It’s not trying to figure stuff out so that, you know, it’s to see things the way that they are so that you can make a change to fix it for the better. Now, I, uh. At the very beginning, the Buddha would say that he only teaches one thing.

Everybody knows what that is, right? Alexander Hippel, what did the Buddha teach dissatisfaction and the end of dissatisfaction. Right. Okay, that’s in English. Dukkha, Dukkha Nirodha.

He taught dissatisfaction and the end of dissatisfaction. That that was all he was interested in. He wasn’t interested in spooks and fairies and sky monsters and devils and hells and heavens and all of that kind of stuff, other than to recognize that those things are merely a state of mind. And when we see what’s in the mind, we see for real what’s going on, we can come out of those dissatisfactions into a state of satisfaction. Now, many people have the idea, oh, I want to meditate because I want something.

I want to enlighten them, or I want Nirvana, or I want Jhana or I want this or that and that. Basically what you were saying when we do that is I want means that I’m dissatisfied. And if we can see that that’s what’s going on, that we’re dissatisfied because we’re wanting something, then what we can do is make a change to stop wanting, just stop wanting. And when we stop wanting wisely, we are already in a state of satisfaction because dissatisfaction is a state of warning. Wanting to either get rid of something, wanting to get something, or wanting basically to know something, which is just more dukkha.

So this, there is a cause of this dissatisfaction. And the cause for dissatisfaction is always in our own mind. Now, religions think about that it’s God’s fault that God did it, that we got to rely upon God.

Regardless of what the name is, whether it’s Rama or Krishna or Brahma or Jesus or Muhammad or Allah. It’s always something that’s out there on the outside that determines my state of mind. How many have ever heard that?

Mickey, have you heard that?

Yeah.

You were from Tulsa. You were raised on that. It is dependent upon something else, which means then that you’re left with nothing possible to do other than to suck up. This is why Christianity is so strong on humility, is because you got to humble yourself and suck up to some big thing. And that’s not at all the teachings of the Buddha. The teaching of the Buddha is to get your mind straightened out, to stop sucking up, to stop being a loser, to stop needing stuff, to stop wanting stuff, and to come to a state where you’re okay.

This is the real teaching. And so this dissatisfaction that we have, as I said, has a cause. And what is the cause? We want things, and we want things ignorantly. Now, everybody probably would understand that what they want really is happiness.

And when we say we want happiness, what that really means is that I’m not happy. That’s why I want it. And instead of wanting happiness, what we do then, instead of just being happy, we say, “oh, well, if I do this, that or the other thing, if I suck up to some religion, if I go to the car dealership and suck up to the car salesman, if I go to the dress shop and buy a dress, then I can be happy.” This is always engagement with the outside world. And that’s basically what you could say is our society, our politics, our religions, our educations, and everything else is based upon the lie that your happiness and well being comes from the outside.

And the reality that the Buddha teaches is that, no, the cause of dissatisfaction is within your own mind. And so if we can properly investigate the mind, then we can figure out how to tweak it to get it back into the state where we are satisfied, to come out of the losers position, out of the victim’s position, into the satisfied position. And when we stay satisfied for a while, long enough, we actually begin to take on the attitude of being a winner, to being a champion, to being able to handle life no matter what happens. And we have the attitude, it doesn’t matter what happens in life. I can handle that.

And so with that point of view, we become fearless. Nothing is fearful for us anymore so long as we’ve got an outside world that we have to suck up to, to go buy a car or buy a dress or put money in the offering plate, or get that little girl that works at 711 in the corner. You know the one that I’m talking about? The one with the club foot and a patch over her eye. That’s an old joke from George Carlin.

So anyway, we’re always wanting things on the outside to think that if we can get what’s on the outside, we can be happy on the inside. And the reality is that, no, everything is going to either make you unhappy or happy is depending upon your own attitude. And the attitudes are built upon thoughts. And so where we begin is to, first off, to understand that if we are creating our own reality and our reality sucks, and if we make a change to that reality, then we can change our own mind, and then we can choose how we want to feel.

We are actually taught in this society that feelings are in charge, that I’m angry, I’m frustrated, as if we’ve got no control over that. Or I’m sad. And we say I’m sad because my laptop broke, or I’m sad because Aunt Susie won an argument or I’m sad because something happened on the outside world without recognizing that you’re sad because you chose to be sad and that you’re sad and chose to be Sadeena so many times, it has become an automatic habit. And so basically, this practice of the teaching of the Buddha is something that needs to be practiced over and over and over and over again to start to overcome all of the bad habits that we built up over time. But the important point is that if we practice correctly, right here, right now, for the first time, we already get the benefit of it.

That you can change right here, right now from being unhappy to being happy. There’s no time delay. You don’t have to build it up, that there are other things that we can build up. And one of the ways of talking about it would be skilled so that you can build it up so that you can be happy more often, but you can change to being happy right here, right now, and then you can do it again. You can change that right here, right now from being dissatisfied into being satisfied by recognizing that you chose to be dissatisfied.

That that’s what the second noble truth really is all about. You could say, in fact, that what the real teaching of the Buddha is, is to recognize that we are responsible for the way that we think, we feel, we behave. We are responsible for our own attitude. But we develop that attitude. We develop those behaviors and habits when we were children and too stupid to figure out that everybody around us is too stupid to be happy.

And so the whole society raises one generation after another to be stupid and to want things on the outside to where the reality is is that everything that you actually need, you don’t need those things. You want them. And sometimes you want them so badly because you’re under the delusion that you’ll be happy if you get what you want.

But you can come out of that immediately, right now and be happy. Can you do that, Mickey? Can you just put a big smile and say, yeah, I’m happy.

I can do that

Damadas, can you do that? Can you just say, yeah, right now, I’m okay, I’m happy.

This is good enough? Definitely, yes.

How about you, Alexandra? Can you just be happy right now?

Absolutely.

All right. So, Jordan, let me ask you, can you just be happy right now?

Uh, I can not be unhappy. I don’t really feel happy right now, though.

All right. Do you recognize that that’s your choice?

Yes, I do realize that’s my choice.

All right.

Choosing to be happy seems like a hard decision to commit to right now.

Well, that’s because you haven’t been doing it. An input. When it takes its first step, it’s shaky.

It falls down because it’s not used to walking, and so you’re unsure of yourself. You’ve been crawling around your whole life. It’s time to stand up.

Hey, Robert. Glad to see you. Hey, Dhammarato.

How’s it going? Good.

Great to see you. I’m so glad. I didn’t know it was going anywhere. I thought it was just sitting here being happy. That’s exactly what you’re doing.

Oh, I’m here with my friend Sarah. Say hi. Hi. Hi.

She loves the dhamma. She actually practices Buddhism, and she’s practiced for years.

Okay, well, I’m glad that you’ve joined the call, and we’ll continue on.

In fact, what I can say is that just recently, I’ve been talking about the third noble truth. Now, normally in Buddhism, the third noble truth is the one that nobody talks about.

You’re not supposed to get the results so quickly. You’re supposed to wait for years, meditate your heart out, spend 50,000, 100,000 hours sitting on the floor, squatting and contemplating and meditating and all of that. And then somehow, something is going to happen. Like the kamma machine out of the sky is going to come down and do some ooby doobie Gobby Gobby and shake some water on you, and then you’re going to feel good. And the fact is, is that 100,000 hours or so, the meditator has been wasting his time because he could have been happy every time he remembered to be happy.

And so that, in fact, you mentioned the word mindfulness. That’s what the word mindfulness is, badly translated from the pali word sati. And the word sati means to remember that right now you have a choice to remember to wake up and to be here now to be in reality, as opposed to being in some dream state, creating our realities, daydreaming, wanting things we don’t have, thinking about the past, thinking about the future, and being generally dissatisfied. And when we have Sati, that means that we can wake up right here, right now, and see that we’re doing that kind of stuff and make a change to it so that you can be happy right now, you can be satisfied right now. And that, um, this is the third noble truth is that it’s available to you right here, right now, and it’s available to you the next right now, and then it’s available to you for the next right now.

That in fact, that’s all we have as a right now.

How many of you really have a future?

Is not your future just a daydream?

How about a past?

Anybody here got a past? When we’re thinking about the past, is that not also just a daydream? T

hat really all we really have is right here, right now. And you wake up and see what reality is, the reality on the outside and reality on the inside.

And when you have a choice about the reality on the inside, then you would naturally choose to be satisfied.

Does anybody here choose consciously, willingly to be disappointed and dis-satisfied?

No. If we’re awake, if we’re able to see what’s going on right now, the choice that we would make would be to be safe and secure and comfortable and satisfied right here, right now. So this leads us then to the fourth noble truth. Now, this point about Dukkha Duka Nirodha, or dissatisfaction versus satisfaction, that’s the basic teaching. But the Buddha unpacks that into four noble truths.

The first one is that dissatisfaction exists. You made it up. It’s not that life itself is unsatisfactory because there’s no one here who would say, “yeah, you’re right, life itself is unsatisfying. Let’s just kill ourselves right now.”

Nobody’s willing to do that. Everybody wants to live. Everybody has a life force. But that life force also can be called the self preservation instinct. And that self preservation instinct, or life force, when handled ignorantly, creates dissatisfaction. But when you handle that life force correctly, wisely, mindfully, we can actually guide it and change it so that we have a life that’s not just worth living, but it is marvelous.

So there is a method to do that. That’s the fourth noble truth. There is a method. And that method they call the Eightfold path. Some people call it the Eightfold noble path.

And I’d like to at least take a moment to recognize that in Buddhism there’s actually two eight fold paths, one for ordinary people and then one for the nobles, and hopefully making change out of the Eightfold ordinary path that people normally practice, which means you’ve got to get your act together, you got to get your morality together, and you can’t get anywhere without having your morality together. That’s the ordinary path. Christianity has that, too. That you got to get your morality together so that you could suck up to some God or something, and then you’ll be happy because he’ll let you be happy. That’s the ordinary path.

The noble path is through wisdom to recognize that you’ve got a choice about your state of mind right here, right now. And when you have the right sort of mind that is noble, or you don’t want anything, that you’re satisfied the way things are, then in that state, you’re very unlikely to go around hurting people. You’re very unlikely to kill for what you want because you don’t want anything. You’re very likely to steal what you want because you don’t want anything. And so, in that regard, morality is the outcome on the noble path, not the beginning.

It’s not a means to an end. It’s the result of having a mind that is noble. And so this is the Eightfold noble path that actually starts then, with the wisdom to remember to look at what you’re doing. Right. Noble view means to look at yourself, to look at your mind, to look at the mind in its relationship to the outside world reality, and to really look at the fact that most of the time, you don’t live in reality.

You live in a made up dream world that you were taught.

So we basically then start with three items. One is piti, to look to see what’s going on. And in order to do that, we have to remember to look to see what kind of thoughts that we’re having. And once we can see those thoughts, see what we’re doing, then we can make a change for the better.

So if you have anxiety, a lot of people will come and say, “oh, I’ve been meditating, and I find this anxiety.” And my answer to that would be, is that anxiety new or old? And everybody will say, “oh, it’s old. I just haven’t been paying attention to it. It’s been driving my life that we get up and go to work with anxiety.”

We go out to eat with anxiety. We go to the movies with anxiety. The anxiety drives us. But when I’m sitting, just doing nothing, sitting in what you would call meditation, then the anxiety is there. And now we recognize we can’t do anything about it with the skill levels that we have.

But the reality is that you do have the skills, if you’ll practice them, to come out of that anxiety by taking a deep breath and recognizing that, “oh, I can have thoughts that don’t create anxiety, that I can have thoughts instead of right now. Everything is safe. There’s no alligators in the room. There is no mod squad. There is no SWAT team. There are no cops knocking on the door. There’s nothing here right now. Why do I have anxiety?” The answer to that is, is because we are in the habit of it. So we can begin to change those habits and tell ourselves instead, “everything is okay.Everything is fine.”

We can start having some noble, happy thoughts. And so this is the real key then, if we could say it this way, is to start looking at what you’re thinking and make a big change to it and start having the kinds of thoughts that are worthwhile, that are wholesome.

Everything’s all right. Everything’s okay. No hurry, no worry, no problems. Everything is going to take care of itself. Just one more breath. Just one more.

That’s all we need to do.

And so these are the three points of the eight vulnerable path that’s so important. This is how we start, is we remember to take a look at what we’re doing and then make a change to it. If we do that over and over and over and over again, we begin to change our attitude. That attitude, by the way, in the pali, is called sama Sanghapa. It also has the word shraddha or sadha, which means confidence.

Do you have the confidence that you could take this next breath happily no matter what happens? Well, the way to handle that is by getting away from everything, getting away from the alligators and the snakes, getting away from the cops, getting away from society, coming back to a place in seclusion where it’s very easy to recognize that you are saved, to see that you’re safe, to recognize that you’re safe, to recognize that you’re okay. Right now, this is how we practice over and over and over again. And when we begin to get the confidence that I can handle seclusion, then we begin to say, “okay, I can handle seclusion. Let me go handle a little bit of the world.” “Let me go handle some of those people who are not happy. Let me bring my happiness to them. Give them a great big smile, maybe give them a great big hug and be happy.”

This is what we have to practice over and over and over and over again because we’ve already built up the practice, built up the habit of being like everybody else. In fact, that’s what girls in high school want. They want to be able to fit in. I don’t know why, but they want to fit in with the crowd. Seems to me that the moms and dads could teach those girls, you don’t want to fit in. What you want to be is happy. If you’re happy, you don’t have to fit in.

You don’t have to be like everybody else. And in fact, the reality is, is that all of those people, everybody else they want what you’ve got. What is that? Happiness, a smile, contentment, satisfaction. And so this is what we practice over and over and over again.

And when we do that, we begin to change our attitude.

So let’s finish there and ask. Does anybody have any questions? Now, Jordan, do you have a question?

I just want to make sure I understand. Sort of like the strategy, or like the plan you have for getting rid of. By the way, it’s not my plan. I don’t have a plan. What I’m doing is I’m teaching what the Buddha taught.

This is his plan. Okay, well, the Buddha’s plan that he taught was to, like, he wants to get rid of satisfaction. So you’re supposed to be mindful or remember to be mindful of what’s going on. And if you see dissatisfaction, then you change something so that you’re not as dissatisfied. Right?

Make a change to the thoughts that you have. So you said you’re supposed to remember to pay attention and then like, what are you actually looking for? Well, you’re looking for the kind of thought that you have. Is this thought wholesome or is it not wholesome? An example of that?

Is this, is this thought of the past? Or is this thought of the moment, present moment? Or is this thought of the future? If it’s the thought of the future, then we can just say the future is not yet to be that. The future that I’m thinking about actually is a form of daydreaming, wanting something.

And so we can say, aha, I caught you, mister future. Aha. I see that you’ve invaded the mind and given me something to want. Let me come back to the present moment and recognize that right now everything is just fine.

One little thing to say about it is that this, what I’m about to say, is a sequence of events that makes things look like they’re very hard. And that is that our thought give rise to our feelings, our thoughts and our feelings give rise to our speech, our speech gives rise to our actions, repeated actions, over and over again bring on habits, and habits then determine our destiny. And so when people say, oh, well, I can’t change my destiny because it’s already built up over all of these habits, all of these actions. And the reality is that, no, we do it one thought at a time. If we can change this thought and then change again this thought, and then change again this thought and begin to control the way that we feel so that we can feel safe and secure and comfortable and begin to feel satisfied, then that will begin to change our speech.

It also begins to change our actions. That if you’re satisfied 99% of all the actions that you used to do, you don’t need to do them anymore because you’re satisfied with the way things are. And if you can change your actions, you can change your habits. And the habits then as they change, will change your destiny.

You’ve heard statements like, he who lives by the sword dies by the sword. Well, you can understand then that you’ve got a young japanese buck. He’s been training on the sword. He’s 20 years old, and he can slice bamboo trees and people in half with one slice. But if he carries that sword around slicing people in half into his forties and fifties and sixties, there’s going to be a young buck of 20 who’s going to come and slice him in half sometime.

He’s going to have to put down that sword or somebody’s going to use it on him. This is basically what we’re talking about. Can you put down your sword? Can you remember to keep putting down your sword? Can you remember that you don’t have to defend yourself?

But doing nothing at all is the best defense. They say an offense is the best defense, but the real best defense is to not see any offense. No offense. No defense. Nothing to do.

Everything is already okay. And we have to practice that over and over and over again because we’ve gotten into such a habit of carrying that sword around trying to defend ourselves when there’s really nothing to defend.

Alexander, do you have a question? I see you just sitting there coupling with a big smile on your face.

No, I’m just having a good time listening.

Basil. You’re kind of new. I haven’t really spent much time with you. Do you understand what we’re saying? Do you have any questions?

No, I don’t. I understand most of everything you’re saying.

I’m glad to see that you’re doing well. Ah, thank you. Actually very good discussion with Mikey the other day. Yes. From here up, everything is okay.

Down on the right leg is beginning to swell and itch.

So Jordan, do you have any more questions?

Yes. So you’re saying you control your, like, whether you feel happy or not, right? Is that, that you’re controlling how you interpret what’s going on? Yes, you’re already controlling. You’re already controlling, but mostly it’s ignorant, controlling.

So you’re controlling the interpretation of what’s going on, which makes you feel a certain emotion. Right? Right. We make stuff up. Okay.

Okay. When I say you make stuff up. There’s actually a technical word for that. It’s called perception. We don’t perceive reality.

We perceive what we make up. And that’s what leads us to our feelings. If you stop perceiving and just see things the way that they are, there’s not much to feel. No fear, no worries. Everything is okay.

So go ahead, Jordan. Oh, yeah, yeah. Sorry. I was charging my phone and it lags when I do that, but I don’t really have. I’ll think a bit more.

I know I have questions. I just can’t think of them right now. But what you’ve said so far has made sense to me, and I think I need to think it over a little bit. Well, I would prefer that you don’t do that.

I would prefer instead that you actually practice it. You can think it over and mull it over for years and get nowhere. You can understand it completely, you think, but until you practice it and do it, then you’re not going to get any benefit out of it. So this is what I would recommend instead, is start to practice. Okay, so I’ll start to practice.

And if I have any questions, then I’ll ask. All right, Ivan, you got your hand up? Yes. Damralto. The question is, we don’t really perceive reality as it is.

Usually it’s clouded by our thinking and our emotions. So how can we really see reality by just practice? By looking and looking and looking and looking some more. Looking on the inside, looking on the outside. This is what I would recommend then, is to get yourself into a room.

The Buddha says, go to the forest, go to a foot of tree, go to an empty hut, go to the pile of straw and sit down and start looking at what the mind is doing. So everyone can find a room, everybody can find a porch to sit on. Everybody can find a place where they’re alone, not distracted by the outside world. And we can now begin to recognize that we brought that world with us.

And we can stop doing that and start looking at what’s actually real. And when I say looking, I’m not talking about the eyes, looking out at the bushes and the trees and the cats and all of that. I’m talking about looking at the kind of thoughts that we have. And if we have thoughts about the past, thoughts about the future, thoughts about wanting stuff, thoughts about doubt and trying to figure it out and mulling it over. These are called hindrances.

This is why I would recommend, Jordan. You don’t try to figure it out, trying to figure it out. Trying to understand what’s going on actually will prevent you from feeling good.

What we actually need to do instead is to say, everything’s okay, everything is fine. I can handle this. We come back to the present moment, and in this present moment, everything is all right.

So, Ivan, this is what we would do. Now. The next point is that while you are looking and changing what you’re doing, that means that you’re beginning to change your perception. And what we want to do then is to change the perception. This, we’re operating full time, making stuff up into just being aware, being conscious of being alive, being conscious of the body, being conscious of the feelings, being conscious of our attitude, being conscious of our thoughts.

These, by the way, those are the four foundations of mindfulness. Being conscious of the body, not mulling it over, not thinking about it, not all. I need to go to the doctor. We’re actually experiencing the body as we’re breathing in and breathing out to experience our feelings. This is how I feel right now.

As we breathe in, as we breathe out. This is my mental attitude right now, as I’m breathing in, breathing out, and these are my thoughts. And we can begin to control the thoughts, and to control the thoughts, we can control the breath. Controlling the thoughts and controlling the breath will begin to slowly change our attitude. And as we’re changing our attitude, we can actually change the way that we feel.

For instance, I mentioned about anxiety. We can see that anxiety and say, right now, there’s nothing to be anxious about right now. Whatever it was that I was thinking that wronged, that anxiety is not happening right now. Isn’t that marvelous? I can feel good right here, right now.

So thinking about feeling good is really the matter of giving yourself the right directions, beginning to control the mind with, everything is okay right now. It’s not having the kind of thoughts, oh, if I tell myself everything is okay, then maybe someday things will be okay. That’s more like contemplation. So let’s not contemplate, let’s not try to figure it out. Let’s just start saying right now, everything is okay, and keep practicing everything is all right.

Everything is fine. No place to go. Everything is all right. We keep doing that over and over again, and we will begin to change the way we feel. We begin to change our attitude, and we keep doing that.

And pretty soon, that attitude flowers into a champion where everything is just fine. Not a worry in the world. Doesn’t matter whether Donald Trump or Putin or Vladimir Zlenski or Biden, doesn’t matter who those guys are. And what they do, I’ll be okay. I will survive no matter what happens in politics.

But, you know, here’s something very interesting about that. The media, they like viewers. They want people to watch. And because of that, they want to keep things exciting. And they, the point is, is that if Donald Trump is elected next terminal, things are going to be really exciting for four years.

If Biden wins, they’re going to be exciting for a little while, and then things will get really boring. People will stop watching the news. And now CNN and Fox and MSNBC not making so much money anymore because nobody cares anymore. So this is the way that I would recommend is stop looking at politics, stop caring about politics, because you’re going to be okay. No matter what happens in politics, if you have the attitude that you’re going to be okay.

And so instead of worrying about what happens in the world, all we need to do is to just be, I’m all right, I’m okay. Doesn’t matter what they do. They love excitement. They make money off of excitement. And we gain great pleasure off of just being peaceful.

So let’s stop thinking about the past and the future, and pretty soon, we stop thinking about right now and just start to experience right now with no place to go and nothing to do and everything is just fine.

So you still got your hand up, Ivan? Oh, yeah, I just want to clarify, would it be fair to say as long as you are thinking, then you are not, in reality, the thinking minds? While you’re thinking, you’re making stuff up? So let’s stop perceiving and start looking consciously. You know, there are six sense organs.

The sense organs are touch, taste, smell, hearing, seeing with the eyes. And then the 6th one is on the inside, which means that we can experience what’s happening on the inside. You can experience the body, you can experience the feelings, you can experience your attitude, and you can experience the thoughts and you can control those things. And one of the ways of controlling things is to stop thinking so much and just start looking. Just be here now.

Not talking to ourselves about here now. Just be here now. That takes some skill, because mostly the mind is just chatter, chatter, chatter, chatter. Perception. Making stuff up, believing stuff, thinking about the past, thinking about the future.

And so it’s a shift of perception. And the way that we start to shift that perception is by starting to shift our internal dialogue away from the past and future into just experiencing what’s happening right now. And guess what? The reality is, is that not much is happening. Things begin to get really peaceful, actually, going in the direction of being empty.

There’s nothing really going on. Just sitting here doing nothing. The body breathes by itself.

Now, that would be a real skill to be developed. And so the way that we develop that skill is by beginning to change the thoughts that we have. Having wholesome thoughts, more wholesome thoughts and more wholesome thoughts. And more wholesome thoughts. And then we begin to put some gaps in those wholesome thoughts, and in the gap is where we find reality.

So, Michael, do you have a question?

Go ahead. I didn’t know if you’re talking to me or the other Michael. Yeah, no, no questions. But, yeah, the other Michael’s at work. All right.

How about you, Robert? Good to see you again, friend.

Oh, it’s great to see you, too, Domarato. Let’s see. I don’t have too many questions right now. Just enjoying. Sarah, do you have any questions?

No. Want to try? No? Okay. Everything’s okay.

All right. How about you, Basil? Do you have any questions? Nope. Everything is okay.

I’m completely satisfied in the moment.

All right. Hello? Hello.

Um, Domrada, were you asking me earlier, Michael? I was. Sorry. I’m at work right now, so I was slow to respond. All right, no problem.

Do you now have a slow response? I do. I didn’t have a question. I just wanted to pick up one thing you said and bring it back. Cause I feel like you say it often and it can go past people, and I think it’s really important.

But you said, when you go into seclusion, one of the first things you realize is you brought the world with you. And I just wanted to kind of point out how significant of an observation that is, because one of the aspects of right view is realizing that all views are constructed, and that’s what makes it liberating, because, yeah, you realize that you’re making and you’re concocting the world yourself, and therefore the mind sort of relinquishes ownership of it because you realize how fabricated it is. So, yeah, I mean, you said that, and I just didn’t want that to go past everyone, just in case. Right. We could say, in fact, that concocting is an old style word, and making it up, that’s a kind of a later thing.

But if you’re a Gen Z, the right way to say it is you made that shit up.

You make it up. That’s what we mean by perception, is that we don’t see reality as it is. We make that shit up, and that’s our reality, is the stuff we made up. And so we recognize when we go into seclusion, that all that we brought with us is the stuff that we’ve been making up. And so we continue to make it up.

And all we have to do is to start, first off, making up some much better stuff. And as we get into the habit of doing that, we can begin to not make stuff up so much and just let it be the way it is. Caleb, you got your hand up? Oh, it’s still up. Okay.

I had a question about the gladdening the mind and how it relates to greed, ill will and delusion. If you experience those yourself, does your gladdening the mind change in any aspect in order to counteract that specifically? Certainly. Greed means you want something. Greed means, oh, I need to move my leg.

Well, just move your leg. Greed would be, oh, I need a million dollars. No, you don’t. You’ve already got everything you need. And so you can begin to counteract those thoughts of I need this and I want that.

And especially true for westerners. Oh, if I only understood Damarato, if I only stood Annapanasati, then I could practice.

And that’s why students never go anywhere. It’s because they want to know first.

Like in practice, it’s kind of like a bicycle trip. Interesting. You think you’re going someplace, but the reality is you don’t know where you’re going. But if you don’t get on that bicycle, if you sit and plan and map and look and figure it out and go on the Internet, you’ll get nowhere. You got to actually get on that bicycle and start pedaling, and then you don’t know where you’re going to wind up.

In fact, there’s an old Nasrudine joke, Mullah Nassrudin, just a book of an islamic joke book that I ran across when I was in India. And in one of the stories, Mullah Nasruddin, at 12:00 every day, got up out of his office chair and went over to the mosque day after day after day. And right across the square was the police station. And the cop saw him do this day after day after day. And he went up to the moon and says, where are you going?

Mulan asked her, Dean. And the muller says, I don’t know. And he pissed off that cop. That cop got really angry. You know where you’re going?

No, I don’t know where I’m going. And he got so angry at Mullah Nasuddin, he grabbed him by the arm and pulled him in the police station. And Nasruddin said, see, I told you I didn’t know where I was going.

So don’t try to get someplace. Just be here now, taking a step, one step at a time is all it takes. Right here, right now. Make a change. Right here, right now.

Let’s have a wholesome thought.

So does anybody else have any question? Caleb, you still got your hand up. Go ahead.

I don’t know how to turn that down. My bad. There you go.

The brother. I have a quick one. I was thinking that wholesale is away. To bring the mind back to its natural state. Would it be fair to say the mind in its natural state is wholesome?

Yes, the mind is naturally wholesome and normally unwholesome. Okay, naturally it would be wholesome. But in our society, the normality is that it’s not.

Yes, in the society it’s natural to go around defenseless because there’s no danger. But it’s normal in society that we carry our swords, our weapons, our guns, our attitudes, because we see it as dangerous. But when we recognize that we create all of our dangers, in fact, all of our dangers are just thoughts.

It very rarely in the present moments are things dangerous. Very infrequently are things really dangerous. 99.99% of the time, things are not dangerous. And yet look at how many times we think about dangers.

So let’s stop thinking about dangers and start thinking about everything’s okay, everything is fine. No worries, no place to go, nothing to do, and we’re just all right.

Anybody else got any questions?

One last point, then, and that is that I would like to everyone to congratulate Mickey. He has been doing so much. He’s held down the fork, but we couldn’t have done it without him. He’s been sending messages and taking care of things. And I very, very much appreciate him.

And I’d like to give a great big warm thank you.

Thank you, Ivan Alexander. All of our regulars coming around and continuing to participate in Sangha. This is what Sangha is all about. So thank you, Sangha as well, for just keeping things going. And by that, I mean keeping on doing nothing, just chilling.

So, yes, yes. Another thing that Mike Mick has been doing is helping with the website, the Open Sangha foundation. And I would highly recommend that you start in your own mindset, moving out of Skype onto the website. That we have friends, we have group, we have posts. Anything that you can do on Skype now we can do on the website.

So I would highly recommend that you log in, start taking advantage of what we have the better part of it is that on Skype, once somebody puts something there, it just scrolls off into Netherland and it’ll take you forever to go find what you were looking for. But on the website, things are pretty well cataloged. And so if you remember that you read a post, you could go look through the post and you can find it again. We have suta pages, we have text pages, we have PDF files, we have blogger post. Everything like that is available on the website.

But the important thing there is this website is designed for you to make friends, to message one another, to email each other, to get off on a video call, to do things like that.

No, I don’t mean discord. No, I mean opensongafoundation.org. our website, opensongafoundation.org. please join. And if you join, two things that I ask.

One would be to put your name. Don’t put some sock puppet. It’s a sock puppet. So for the administrators who were trying to get the website going and are experimenting with various users, but you can put your real name. The second, which is even more important, is put a photo.

Let us see what you look like.

Another one is that there is a field called tell us about your practice. I would highly recommend that you start using that as a journal place so that you can start putting notes about I did this and I did that. I set this long, I felt this good, that kind of thing, and begin to use that. You can also any sutures that you find that you like, put them in our sutas. If you have something to say, write a post about it because the posts then are easily available.

If you post something on the Skype or the discord, it just scrolls off into higher and higher because they’re not cataloging things very well.

But the website is designed to keep things all cataloged so that people can find things.

So I highly recommend that. In fact, the idea is that if we keep tweaking and keep advertising that this open Sangha foundation website will be the go to buddhist website.

An example of that. There are several places that have, let us say, a list of facilities. Well, we’ve been gathering their data from all over the place. And so we’ve got more than 6000 facilities. We’ve got a huge map where all about 4500 of these places are on the map.

And so you can use our map to find places. You can search by city, you can search by name, you can search by lineage, you can search by tradition. All kinds of ways of searching to find people and to find watts and centers and places to hang out. And so if people start using this website, it will become the go to place. For instance, Buddinet.

We already have as many places as Buddha net, but with Buddha net, it’s not organized very well. Go sit is another website that, in fact, we got about 2000 of our places off of go set. They were like, um, let us say, generous enough to give us a CSV file, which we’ve actually uploaded. And so now we’ve made it very easy to search many different ways of searching. If you’re looking for a teacher, we’ve got a list of online teachers.

If you’re looking for just teachers in general to see who’s out there, we’ve got a page for that. If you want to see who’s been on the website recently, we’ve got a recent page to show who’s been logged in.

We’ve got groups, we’ve got event page. If you have an event coming up, you can post that. I don’t know of anything that we can’t do. And if you can think of something, we’ll put that in there, too.

So I welcome you all to start spending more and more time looking for friends, finding things, and then, in fact, thank some of our friends, like Damodas and Scott and others who have taken up the slack while I’ve been ill. And I would continue to encourage you to do that, to make friends with each other, for old students, to make friends with the new students, to help them in their practice. Old students make friends with old students so that you could bust each other’s nuts.

Go find some plans. This is, in fact, why we call it the saga, the Sangha Open Sangha foundation. The sangha means noble friends. That if the Buddha had just merely taught the dhamma and had not started the bhikkhu sangha, Buddhism would not have lasted. It’s because of the community.

It’s because of the sangha. This is what we’re wanting to promote in the west, is a real saga of Buddhist like minded people who can find friends, find teachers, find students, find places to hang out, find places to move in, find places to live, find robes to wear, find nothing at all. That’s where you’ll find it.

So does anybody have any final questions about today’s talk?

All right, well, thank you all. I very much appreciate it. I’m like Jack Nicholson in the shining. I’m back.

Thank you so much. Thank you for the talk. Appreciate it. Thank you. Damarato.

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