Lighten Your Load Max M 1 with Callum 04.17.24

Transcript

Dhammarato: So, Max, we’ve been at it for a while, but let’s start recording and you have a question, so go ahead.

Max: Sure. I think my assumption about Samata or these two things, we’re talking about Samatha-vipassana separating out but needing to be cultivated together, I think my assumption there is that same to about being able to collect enough concentration or samadhi to then apply it to reflect on anicca anatta dukkha. I think that’s when I think about these two things, that’s how I think about them. One is to have enough space to be able to, enough collectedness to then be able to direct the mind to reflect on these things.

That’s how I think about it. Is that, is that a healthy way to think about it?

Dhammarato: I would say probably we could talk about it in better terms than that. Okay, sure. What’s the suggestion?

Well, you use the word concentration and samādhi in actually the same sentence. Yeah. All right, so let’s give them definition so that we can understand.

Now, the word samādhi does not, does not translate into the word concentration. The word samādhi translates better as unification or collectiveness, bringing things together to where concentration has to do with focusing down and eliminating things.

An example of that would be concentrated milk or frozen concentrated orange juice. And yet frozen concentrated orange juice, you do not very few people drink it. I mean, it used to be advertised when I was a young man, it was advertised heavily on television. Frozen concentrated orange juice or even concentrated so much they took all the water out and then they called it tangled. But nobody eats tang by the spoonful, nor does anybody drink frozen, concentrated orange juice like it was ice cream or something.

That in fact, the frozen, concentrated orange juice, they always put water back in it. They make it whole again so that it can be drank. All right, so concentration is exactly opposite of samādhi unless we change the definition of concentration. Yeah. Now, though, there is a way of calling concentration that we can use it, but it has to have a particular definition to it.

And that particular definition has to do with repeating it over and over and over and over again. An example of that would be mom tells her daughter to do your homework and she’s doing her homework, and then she starts looking at the cell phone or she’s doing her homework and watching tv. And the mom says to concentrate. All right, if the daughter, here’s the word concentrate of do this problem in your homework, do this math problem, and then do the next one, and then do the next one and then do the next one until the list is finished. That’s concentration.

But almost all ways kids will say, oh, I’m supposed to focus, I’m supposed to shut down, I’m supposed to put things tight. Okay, so let’s use the example of an alarm clock for a moment. Let’s imagine that you found an old, maybe a cuckoo clock or an old style wind up clock that had chimes or something, maybe your grandfather clock in the attic. If we bring that clock out of the attic and take it home or take it downstairs and take the gears apart, carefully watching which each gear goes where and then clean the gears, take all the dirt out and then carefully put the clock back together again, making sure all the jewels are in the right place. Then when we wind up the clock, the clock has become somati.

Now it’s had all the dirt taken out and it’s put back together again and it’s holes and it’ll operate as a clock. Now let’s concentrate. That clock, we take it out of the attic, we put it on the bench and we take a sledgehammer to it and we’re now going to make it much smaller, okay? That’s how most people practice meditation is by beating on themselves with a hammer rather than taking everything apart and cleaning it. So while the Buddha taught samādhi, most of western meditation thinks of it as concentration, it’s actually been wrongly translated that way.

All right. But if we use the word concentration in the sense that it has to be done over and over and over and over again. Yeah. This thought moment and the next thought moment and the next thought moment, there’s no struggle because the whole point, remember, if you’ve had any anapanasati, you know that step ten, which is actually not a step, is item number ten in the list, has not to do with chronology, is to gladden the mind. So we have to gladden the mind and then it goes back to the old state and then we gladden the mind again and it goes back to the old state and we gladden it again.

And so we repeat over and over and over again to look at what the mind is doing and then gladden it. Now, in the April noble path, the Buddha talks about it in the sense of unwholesome thoughts versus wholesome thoughts that we have to change those thoughts, which would be the gladdening of the mind basically to cheer ourselves up. Okay. The samatha comes almost by itself because we keep gladdening the mind and telling you everything is okay. Because some non Samatha means that we’ve got to do something you got to note, you got to look, you got to work.

Okay? And work and samatha are exactly opposites. The right way to find the samatha is by keep telling yourself that these work thoughts are unwholesome. Just drop them. Gladden the mind to become happy in this moment, to start to feel safe and secure and comfortable and satisfied.

Now, by the way, these four words, safe, secure, comfortable, and satisfied, are part of the lexicon for the word sukha. And, you know, the sukha is in the Anapanasati sutta. To develop it as a skill. Thus, one trains oneself while breathing in long and breathing out long. One trains the mind into sukkha, which means that we find fear in the mind.

We take the fear out so that we become not necessarily fearless, but rather feeling safe and secure. Also, a lot of the meditation practices in the west have to do with people sitting for a long time, and they become uncomfortable. But the whole point about Annapanasati is to bring the mind, to bring the body into a state of comfort so it can relax. But when people from the west are sitting for long periods of time, their body gets more tense, not more relaxed. Yeah.

I appreciate that emphasis in your teaching that I’ve heard many times, and I. Do you mind if I jump in for a moment? Go right ahead. Yep. Yeah.

I’ve been. The sense of the unification coming together, collectedness.

I think I was thinking of it in terms of the return, return, return. And then the mind quietens, and then something emerges. This is my experience. It quietly depends upon what you turn to, the say, what the focus of the practice being. So it might be the breath or say in metapractice.

It might be intentionally cultivating meta in a particular way. No, but. No. The intention of satya patana, the satya pathana, does not have metta. The four foundations of mindfulness is the body.

Kaya nupasana, vedanapasana, the feelings, sita nupasana, the states of mind that we’re in, the attitudes that we have. And then the dhamma nupasana includes the thoughts, and metta is not in the satipatthana. I understand that. However, in terms of glad, brightening the mind, bringing the mind up would be a correct way of practicing meta. That.

In fact, a chandamavitu in particular, talks about metta in the sense that you’ve got to brighten and gladden your own mind. And yet almost always, universally throughout, especially in the vipassana, they teach meta in the sense of, may all beings be happy. Yeah. Okay. Guess what?

May all beings be happy is delusional. You can’t make all beings be happy. In fact, the beings that you’re trying to make happy are nothing but a concept of the mind. You don’t even know all beings. The all beings is in a bigger universe.

That’s only a concept in your own mind, that, in fact, the only beings that you have around is you when you’re in seclusion. And instead of saying, may I be happy, the answer to that is, let’s actually gladden it. That’s what. So may be happy, or may all beings be happy is what a loser says because they’ve already planted their feet, and I’m not happy, and I want to be. And so that’s a delusion, and it’s also full of greed.

There’s your second noble truth right there. So, most of the practice of metta is, in fact, creating dukkha, not eliminating it. Only when metta is done correctly is, in the sense of gladdening the mind. Wow, this feels good. Well, I feel safe.

I feel secure. I feel comfortable. I feel satisfied, because satisfaction is the key ingredient for the sukha, and sukkah is exactly opposite of dukkha. So sukkah is the place that the Buddha is talking about when he says, dukkha Nirodha is to come to a state of satisfaction. Everything’s okay.

Everything is fine. Not a worry in the world. Is that right, Colin? Not a worry in the world. Everything is already okay.

Yeah. Damra, I was going to ask if you could talk about how that ties in with the three trainings in the noble Eightfold path. Because you say that it’s wisdom first, then concentration, and then sila. And how. Sila samādhipania.

Is that what you’re talking about? Yeah. Okay. And how the no. Eight fold.

Pathetic. All right, let us start off, then, with that. Part of the point is that there are two noble. Excuse me. Two eight fold paths.

There is the Eightfold path that everybody starts on. This is the Eightfold path that’s taught all over the place, especially in western Buddhism. And then there is the Eightfold and noble path, which is where we start teaching. According to the advice that I’ve gotten from both Vika Buttadasa and a chan po, we do not teach the ordinary path that starts with selah samādhi kanya, all right? Sila means behavior.

Now, there’s a value in watching your behavior, and so you get your behavior perfect or good enough, and then you do the samādhi practice, which means getting the mind settled. You can add the word samatha there, and then you come to right view. Okay, so I’m quoting now. Sutra number 24, purification of selah, purification of the mind, and then purification of view. All right.

That purification of view will then start you on the Eightfold noble path. That actually starts with panya. It starts. And the way that you would say that would be samādhi Sila, that Selah is the outcome of having a noble mind that’s unified. And so this is actually the way that Buddha teaches.

The eight pole noble path is that we start with not Selah. That that’s what the monks teach the children. That’s the ordinary way. Okay, that’s. That’s for, let us say, the beginners.

And that we need that in our society. And we need to have those seal of rules and the precepts, because otherwise, we’ve got no society at all. We’ve got just a collection of barbarians. And so we teach the children and we teach them through punishment. You break the rules in this house and you’re going to get a spanking.

Are you going to get yelled at? Are you going to miss out on your dessert or something like that? We punish the children. And that instead of that, we could, in fact, teach them wisdom, that you’re better off if you practice it by wisdom. In other words, I’ll get into it in just a moment.

So we start with Silas samādhipania for ordinary people. But the way that I teach is according to a chan po and Bhikkhu Buttadasa, is to make this distinction so that the students recognize that I don’t teach it that way. We teach it from the position that you’ve got to see what you’re doing. You got to take a look. You got to remember to look at what you’re doing and then make a change.

This is the three steps of the Eightfold noble path. This is, in fact, the ponya part of taking a look at what you’re doing. To remember, to take a look at what you’re doing, to recall, to reflect, to see, to do it over and over and over and over and over again. This is what Sati is all about, is to come into the present moment and look at what you’re doing and then make a change to it. So this is right dickey, right, noble.

Okay, so it’s sama area, panya, arditi sama area, sati and sama area. Viria. We have to make a change over and over and over again. We have to see what we’re doing and make a change to it. When we do that, the way that we’re making a change is when anapana satisuta talks about gladdening the mind, brightening the mind, begin to change your attitude over and over and over again.

And when you begin to change your attitude over and over again, this is what’s adding the fourth item on the Eightfold noble path. And that fourth item is called sama Sanghapa. Now, Sama Sanghapa also has a twin brother called Shraddha or sada. And Sarah does not translate to faith. It translates better to confidence that I know that I can do this, I know that I can practice over and over again and clean my mind out.

And then in sutta number 48, the buddha makes the point that no matter how hindered the mind, no matter how much unwholesome stuff or what obstructions there are, the student knows. He knows that he can clean that stuff out and come to reality, to come back to the way things actually are. Now, this is called the first knowledge, and that first knowledge is noble. That first knowledge is supra mundane or locata. It’s above the world.

It’s super mundane. It is noble, and it is not held by your masses of people. It’s not held by ordinary people. Ordinary people are still stuck at Siva samādhipanya, and here we are transferring into pNA samādhi sila. Okay, this is, in fact, what really unifies and organizes the mind is when we have that confidence to come out of our hindrances by being able to see them, no matter how much you obstructed the mind gets.

I can see that, and I can come right out of it. All right? And so with that SAMa Sangha, that’s where the right unification of mind comes in. The samādhi mind is a mind that is whole, a mind that is, let us say, confident to keep making the changes into the wholesome over and over and over again. And as the mind is made whole that way, like the clock that I was giving the example of, okay, that is clean now, we’ve cleaned our clock, we’ve taken all the junk out of it, and anytime a speck of dust comes into that clock, we catch it, and we keep it, the mind clean.

We keep the clockwork functioning correctly. Okay? So when the mind is a samādhi mind, that means that we’re free from hindrances, which another way of saying it, you don’t want anything, you’re okay the way you are. You’re safe, secure, comfortable, and satisfied. Over and over again.

And by the way, I’ll add something that I should have said before. And that is that the son of ten kappa has that quality of confidence. Which means that now the mind is successful. So we’ve added from safe, secure, comfortable and satisfied. And now into being successful.

When the mind is successful, that means we know that we can clean it out every time. Doesn’t matter how much. So this is what then begins to bring the mind to that organized place. Is because we’ve got that confidence that we are successful. We’re the winners here.

We could do it. We’re no longer victims. We were born as victims and raised as victims. And we all have a victim’s mentality in the sense of we want help, we want a guru, we want a doctor, we want a teacher. But when you have that samādhi mind, that means that you already have that winner’s attitude.

I can do this myself. I’m the boss here. I’m the boss of my feelings. I can feel the way that I want to feel. But the world doesn’t tell me how to feel.

I can feel the way I want to feel. I can choose how I want to feel. I’ve got a choice about it. And when you have a choice about how you feel, how would you feel, Max? How would you feel right now if you could change the way you feel?

How would you feel? I’d definitely be. There’ll be a lot of more spaciousness within me. That’s for sure, than there is now. Okay.

You’d feel spacious. Isn’t that another word for empty? Could be, yeah. All right. Okay.

So we’re going in the right direction. Okay. So once we have that samādhi mind. That’s based upon confidence. That’s based upon the over and over practice of taking unwholesome thoughts out and putting wholesome thoughts in.

Which is another way of saying gladdening the mind. And gladdening the mind. And keep gladdening the mind. Until the mind is glad. It’s no longer a victim.

It’s no longer sad. It’s no longer needing anything. You’ve already got everything you need.

Once you’ve got everything you need, then you don’t want anything. Because you’ve got it all. So here’s where Sila now comes into play. In the noble regard is that if you don’t want anything, you’re unlikely to kill somebody to get it. If you don’t want anything, you’re very unlikely to go steal it.

If you don’t want anything, then it’s unlikely that you’re going to lie to somebody about it. Okay? This is the way that the Buddha introduced in the first place. He introduced it in a noble way, and within 200 years later, it became a set of rules for ordinary people. The buddhist teaching is actually noble, and it should be taught from noble, and yet people are practicing it from ordinary.

This is why Selah starts. Now. Here’s an important point, and that is that when you’re sitting alone, when you’re in seclusion, no matter what posture you’re in, if you’re having happy thoughts, then isn’t your Coela perfect right then and there, you’re not thinking about harming anybody, and you’re certainly got no hands on anybody’s throat. Your seal is perfect right then and there. So another point about the Coela is that most people think about Selah over a long period of time.

Oh, he’s been a good boy for five years now. Okay. Rather than what is your mind state right now? Yeah. Yes, is perfect right now, because you don’t want anything right now.

This is why we talk about the whole teaching of the Buddha is dukha, dukkha Nirodha. Come out of your dukkha into Dukkha Nirodha, or into a state of sukkha right now. You don’t have to practice it hopingly someday that you’ll be enlightened, because you’re enlightened right now when you’re free from Dukkha. So this is what we’re practicing. We’re not practicing to become enlightened.

We’re practicing being enlightened.

Now that I’ve introduced that word, we got to define it, don’t we?

Because I used the word and you guys defined it yourselves in whatever way that you thought that it actually has. But let’s define it according to the way that it is. Now. The first thing that we can do is we can look at where that word came from. It came from basically a conflict between the catholic church and the Protestants, and then it became a conflict between all religions versus science, and then it became a french revolution.

That’s when the word really became popular, is when it says all the common people have to get rid of all the nobles. And so the word enlightenment has been going up and down. But let’s go back to the point about science versus religion, which means reality versus crap. So the word enlightenment actually has the word light built into it. That’s the operative word.

Now, we can see light in the sense of not dark, light like daylight. Shine a light on it. This has the quality of knowledge to being able to see what’s going on. This is what we’re practicing when we’re practicing. The Eightfold noble path is right.

Noble view. Viewing. Most people hear the word view. This is a bad translation, actually. And they think of having a viewpoint or a worldview or a way of looking at the world, and that’s what you would call right and ordinary right and wrong view.

But the Buddha talks about actual noble dity as looking. It’s a verb, not a noun. Looking, investigating, examining. Right. Now, every time you remember, you do a new investigation.

Most people think that it actually means looking, making the determination, coming to a conclusion. And now we know that most views have a conclusion to them. And the Buddha did not have a built in conclusion. He had instead to keep looking. Look again, look again, look again.

This is what it means to be enlightened, is to keep looking without coming to a conclusion. You don’t ever close the book on the. On the issue that closing that book makes you dark again. Coming to a conclusion is not light, it’s dark. Or another way of saying it is.

There’s a big difference between an investigation and investigating. Investigating is what Sherlock Holmes does, where a good detective is actually investigating. But what is an investigation? It’s a whole pile of paper in a folder sitting in some office in the police department. That’s an investigation, a closed case.

Or maybe it’s still open, but it’s closed in the sense that the file cabinet is closed and it’s in the dark.

It’s not actually open and being investigated.

Okay? So if we understand light this way, that it’s investigating and looking and looking and looking and looking and looking. Now, we have a particular kind of enlightenment going on. It has to do with investigating and looking. This is what science was all about, was to look at what’s going on rather than taking somebody else’s conclusions about what was going on.

So Galileo looked at the science, looked at the. The planets, and he could see what was going on. And the church didn’t like it at all, because they had already come to a conclusion. They were in the dark.

And Galileo was using his eyes. He was looking. That’s the light. Now, let’s talk about a second definition of the word enlightenment. And that is not heavy.

Lighten up. Which means that if you have the knowledge, then you can see the defilements and throw them out. This is what Reich Noble effort is all about, is to see the dukkha, to see the unwholesome thought and throw it out. Lighten up. See what you’re doing and stop.

See what you’re doing and stop doing it and do something more wholesome. So this means that you can lighten up. You can stop being heavy. You drop the burden. And what is the burden?

It’s what you’ve been clinging to and holding on. So imagine that somebody’s got a. Let us say he’s wearing a shirt, and he’s walking down the beach, and he finds a seashell that he likes. So he picks it up and puts it in his pocket, and then he picks up another shell, and he likes that one, too. And pretty soon, he’s got so many shells that won’t fit in his shirt, he takes his shirt off.

Now he’s baking in the sun, and he’s putting more and more and more shells in that shirt. And now he’s got a great big burden on his back, like Atlas, carrying the burdens of the world, picking up one shell at a time. If he’s wise, he’ll start looking at each shell as he picks it up, comparing it with the shells that he’s got, and not pick up so many. Only a few shells will do. A pocket full of shells is good enough, but a whole shirt bag full of shells is a burden.

So we need to be very selective about the kinds of things that we think is important and carry around. The more stuff you recognize is not important, you can set it down.

So this is real deliverance. This is what the second kind of enlightenment means. It means to lighten up, to lighten your load. See what load you’re carrying and stop carrying it, which is back to the Eightfold noble path. All, again, is look at what you’re doing and stop.

Don’t carry that stuff around. Make a change.

By the way, the name of the sutta that I’m quoting is Sutta number 117, and the name of it is the great 40. Well, eight doesn’t divide into 40, but ten does. So basically, what we’re saying is the eight full noble path, when it’s fulfilled, actually has ten steps. So after we go through the investigation and the changing and the confidence and the unification of mind and the purification of one’s behavior and speech and livelihood, then the step nine is going to be knowledgeable to see what you’re doing. And number ten then is to stop, to set it down.

No more clinging.

That’s the buddhist path. It’s not an eight full noble path. It’s actually a ten step noble path, which adds the knowledge and deliverance put the ball and chain down. You don’t have to carry it. That’s why they call it fetters.

Asava Khalesa. This is stuff that we’re carrying around, and we’re carrying it around ignorantly. But when you see what you’re carrying around, you can put it down.

But it takes practice over and over and over again to keep looking. Examine every shell that comes by. Every shell that you find is not worth picking up and keeping. Every rule that your parents told you is not worth keeping. You should examine that and throw them out so that you become light.

Lighten your load.

See what you’re doing and put it down. That’s all the teaching is. That’s where the Duke of Nirodha comes from, is because we can set that stuff down.

Yeah. Sometimes it’s hard to see the seeing part, the seeing it. That’s why we have to keep looking and keep looking and not come to a conclusion. Oh, it’s okay that I carry this. It’s only 150 pounds.

I can handle that.

Yeah. It’s a whole second body. Mm hmm. No, it’s the first one.

And you’d be surprised at how people cling to and carry around their first body. Okay, look here. Here’s some industries. We have an entire set of industries. Yeah.

How about the makeup industry? The face painting industry? How about the fashion industry? How about the shoe industry and the Gucci bag industry? How about the weightlifting industry in the gyms?

Yeah, how about the gym and the workouts and the running? And all of that is because I am the body. And so people are carrying that body around. This is who I am. And yet, as Jesus said, you can’t change your stature.

One width. You can change the pair of shoes that you’re wearing, but your stature is the same. You can’t change your age. You can lie about it, but you can’t change it. The old man can’t become young again, and the young man cannot become old so that he’s above the drinking age.

So, in reality, we can’t control the body, but we think we can. We’re lying to ourselves. Instead of allowing the body to just be the body, we carry it around trying to fix it. Yeah. Yeah, I know that.

Like, that’s why I said 150 pounds. That’s why I tricked you. Sorry. Yeah. Yeah, I know that.

As I’ve gotten older, for sure, I’ve become more aware of that, and there’s more of an attachment to it. And sometimes I’ll see myself in the mirror and be like, oh, no, I don’t want that. And have an aversion, even to myself, and it’s kind of scary. I prefer not to have that. Okay, well, then when you look in the mirror and laugh because you’re looking at a clown, I feel like that.

Yeah. Yeah. When you say clown, what a joke. Tell me. Red ball nose and all red hair out to here, shoes that four people could walk on.

Yeah. Just recognize that you’re a clown. Enjoy the show. You can’t change it. You’re already okay.

Yeah. You’re already what you need to be. Yeah. So when you have those thoughts, I want it to be fixed. You can make.

You’re all right. Okay. You’re already all right.

Yeah. But even just hearing that, it feels better. Yeah. No place to go and nothing to do. Okay, so you said that you’re going to be going to a retreat.

That’s right, yeah. All right. What I’m telling you today in this talk is exactly opposite of almost everything that you’ll hear from the people who are doing the retreat.

Even Goenka would say, you gotta work. No, the practice that I’ve done with these people is a lot about coming, returning to the body as the first set of practices and softening and relaxing. Yeah, it might be different, but. Yeah. I’m not sure.

I don’t have enough perspective to be able to say, but I feel that there is some crossover that will be helpful for me. Yeah.

I have another question for you, if I may. So I have this belief that I want to kind of test, and it’s that if I just do the first practice of anaparasari being following the breath, that then the mind, we said Samadhi. So kind of coming together, and then those other states will naturally arise. The other steps of the path will naturally arise, like the something will take over in the system. Is this just like a false view that I have?

Well, there’s a couple of things that we can talk about. The first one is that you said following the breath. Yeah. All right. When people hear that westerners especially love high numbers, you want to follow the breath.

In fact, what the Buddha said instead, he didn’t talk about following the breath in Anapana sati sutra, he talked about noticing a long breath, long in breath and long out breath. All right. Which is actually following or chasing breath actually has the quality of not controlling it, just letting it be, following it around as if it were the boss. But the Buddha thought, you’ve got to actually control the breath. Interesting.

And in order to control the breath. You have to control the mind. That, in fact, just watching the breath, the way that most of them are saying is easy for you to just, the mind is going to wander away. It’s got no game, it’s got no dog in the fight. But if you’re actually there controlling the breath and making sure that this is a long, easy, relaxing breath, then the mind can stay focused on the breathing much easier because it’s got a job to do.

Yeah, Damarato, I think I go with that and then I go eventually. There needs to be some letting go of controlling the breath to be able to experience impermanence. Well, you’re going to do that already anyway. You don’t have the mind to be able to watch every breath anyhow. You’re going to forget the breath anyway, and it’s going to go, you’re going to let go of it.

Yeah. What we need to do is practice not letting go of it.

So to stay focused on it and keep going so that you can continue to have long, slow, easy breath. But most people, nobody can do that. In fact, when they start practice. Yeah, the mind will wander away. Gotcha.

Nevermind, start again. As Gonka says, when the mind wanders away, never mind, start again, come back. This is the repetition over and over again. This is how we would concentrate. Now, most people would want to concentrate in the sense of, oh, I can’t let the mind wander away from the breath.

Oh, I supposed to do it this way. And they wind up giving themselves new duke. Like a bit of flagellation. Yeah, a bit of flagellation there. Yeah, yeah.

Because the mind will wander away from breath. Can you bring it back happily? Yeah, yeah. I call it remindfulness. That’s how I try to think of it, like, oh, I’m remindful again.

Here we go. That’s okay. Good job. Well done. Yeah, yeah.

Okay. The other thing in my mind there, Dhammarato, is if I then become attached to only having a long breath. Is that an issue that my practice only works if I have a long breath that I can focus on? Actually, we can talk about it like this, that I’ve had students who come in and say, oh, I get so tired. Oh, yeah, I get tired when I’m doing the long breath.

That means that they actually are attached to it. That’s why they’re getting tired. Remember that the long breath is to be relaxed and people get attached to it. And then it’s a work. They’re supposed to do it rather than happily coming back when they’ve forgotten about it.

Attaching to the breath may in fact be a good thing. Yeah, but it depends upon how we attach to it. What would you say in western Buddhism? In western Buddhism, they tend to think that all attachment is bad. Yeah.

All right, well, what about attaching to this present moment? Keep coming back to right here, right now.

In that regard, there are good things to attach to. How about attaching to a smile?

Attachment to what we’re doing, developing the skill. Is developing the skill the same thing as attachment? Well, it depends upon how you use the word. But I’ve actually heard mahayana people say that the cause of suffering, the second noble truth, is because people attach. That’s absolutely wrong.

What causes the suffering is ignorantly being greedy. Ignorance is the cause. Stupidity is a better word. Denial.

Yeah, that’s a more helpful one for me, for sure. Yeah. Interesting.

I want to keep going. I do have responsibilities I need to tend to this evening. All right. Well, this has been a happy talk. Yeah.

Are you gladdened up, Callum? Yeah, I can see all that stuff experientially, all the three trainings in that order, because I found every time I would try and focus on morality first. I can never keep my moral trip together, really. But, yeah, it does seem like a natural outcome of a collected mind. And for me, the certain flavor that it manifests is Carl Jung had a quote of ending your inner civil war.

And that kind of feels to me what a collected mind feels like. Right, okay. Carl Jung was actually a freudian student. He was a student to Freud. He knew Freud personally and he visited him.

What is that? In fact, I wouldn’t call it a civil war. There’s nothing civil about it. But there is a war between the id and the superego. What is that?

It’s the war between what we want and what is supposed to be. And the war stops when we live in reality. What’s real? That would be reality. That would be the adult and the parent and the child are always at odds with each other in the sense of this is how it’s supposed to be versus this is how I want it to be.

This is why people feel bad when they go look in the mirror is because you’re judging it. It’s supposed to be this way and then we feel bad because it’s not the way that we want it to be. Yeah, right. And that inner war sort of correlates to. For me, I see it as there’s a lot of the rights, rules and rituals tied into it.

Like there’ll be some dislike with the way I am or the way I’m acting. And then the parent will come in and say, this is how you need to be. This is the rules you need to follow. You know, society expects us to be like this. And then the kids like, no, but I want anarchy.

And there’s this between rules that are trying to be imposed, right? Yeah, in a way. What we can say then is that the seal of the beginning, the way that we teach our children that Sela, as a set of rules, has to be thrown out. We have to disassemble, discombobulate all of this, built our destiny, built how we’re supposed to be.

So the sila that there are taught to children winds up being the enemy. Sila Bhatapiramasa is the pali word, which means attachments to rights, rules and rituals.

Let’s look at it like this as the last example when you’re building a building, let’s say in Thailand, most of the buildings are built out of concrete. All big buildings are built using cement and structural steel that they put inside. But in order for the concrete to be poured, it’s poured into a form, right? Sort of like scaffolding or a form that you don’t order cement from a cement truck and have it poured out on the ground with no form. And yet that’s how we normally give our children.

Seala is poured without a form, and then, in fact, the coel itself is the form and whatever form it takes. But wisdom is saying, oh, we’re going to put up wooden forms and we’re going to put the forms up so that when we pour the concrete and when it’s set, now the concrete has the correct structure. This is kind of wisdom then. But the whole point is we don’t leave the scaffolding up. We take it down.

The Coela has to come down in order for this building to be in its full glory. So this is the way that sila is done. But in fact, the concrete winds up having the form that the original forms specified. But we don’t need the forms anymore. You don’t need the Coela anymore once you’ve got the mind unified.

And so the rules become irrelevant. In fact, they need to be disassembled.

And yet most people can’t tell the difference between the concrete and the scaffolding. The forums.

Well, thank you very much. It’s been enjoyable to meet you both, and thanks for just spontaneous call. Here we go. Dharma teaching. Thank you.

All right, well, Max, when are you going to call again? I’ll call back next week after the retreat. All right, I’ll look forward to seeing you on a Thursday. Or Friday, but probably Thursday. Okay?

Yeah. All right, guys. You guys have a good weekend too. We’ll see you. See ya, Namu Budhai.

Bye.

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