Matthew 1 09 23 24

Video

Transcript

Dhammarato: So, Matthew, it’s good to meet you. I’m glad to know you. You’re in Montana, is that it?

Speaker B: Yeah.

Dhammarato: Okay. And there’s not much action as far as Buddhism goes. That’s up there. But I can help you with understanding how to practice correctly that in fact, to start off with, every time that I start off, this is the first thing to do, because this is all that the Buddha teaches. Make sure that you understand that the Buddha only teaches one thing. He only teaches one thing, and that is dukkha, Dukkha naroda. He teaches to see the dukkha and to get out of its way. Just like the little sidewalk story that I just told you. You don’t step in it and you don’t deal with it. You avoid it. When you see dukkha in the mind, you change the mind. So this is where the four Noble Truths is all in is. The first Noble Truth is that dukkha exists and dukkha is actually your own dissatisfaction. Tsunamis and fires and hurricanes, acts of God arguments. None of that is dukkha. What is dukkha is you don’t like it. Okay, so dukkha is always inside the mind. And so that leads to the Second Noble Truth. And the second Noble Truth is the cause of dukkha is because we want something ignorantly or we want to get rid of something ignorantly. But greed and ill will are actually the same thing. If you want something, then you want to get rid of the absence of it. If you don’t like something, then you want to get rid of it. So it’s actually the same thing. And we almost always are ignorant about that, thinking that we can get something, we’ll feel better, get a new bicycle, get a new motorbike, get a new fountain pen, get a new laptop, and we’ll feel better. But then all the comforts and dissatisfactions comes right back in. So getting something doesn’t cure the problem. So this is the Second Noble Truth. But the third Noble Truth, which is almost never mentioned, is that you can be free from dukkha immediately and over and over and over again if you practice correctly. If you go through that step of dukkha duka naroda and see the Duke and throw it out immediately. Now you’ve got no dukkha because you just threw it out. This is available immediately. Go ahead.

Speaker B: You’re saying that throwing it out is an active. An active thing you do?

Dhammarato: Yes. Right. Noble effort to throw it out. Get rid of it, stomp it to death, put it out like it put out a fire. Okay, so let’s get into then, the method. Now, first off, the. No, the four. The Four Noble Truths is almost always misunderstood in the west because of the bad translations. The original translation, starting at about 1880 through 1920, were done by Christians, and they didn’t do a very good job of translating. And so there’s a whole lot of words that we need to work with. One is the word dukkha does not mean suffering. It means dissatisfaction. You can. The joke is, it’s like a Jehovah’s Witness. You can go knock on somebody’s door and say, oh, you read this, you won’t have suffering. And they’ll say, I don’t suffer, and slam the door in your face. Because they’re not suffering, they’re just dissatisfied. That’s why they slammed the door in your face. They were dissatisfied that you were bothering them, but they weren’t suffering. They were just dissatisfied. If we can understand that, then dukkha is much easier to deal with because suffering sounds like it’s a great big thing that’s going to take years to deal with. And in fact, dukkha is a little thing in the mind and can be dealt with right here, right now. That’s really the whole teaching, is that everything can be done right here, right now. You see the dukkha and you eliminate it. So the Fourth Noble Truth, then, is the method or the way to eliminate the dissatisfaction. They call it the Eightfold Noble Path, but it’s not a path at all. Not a path like a foot path or a bicycle path, or a path to Nirvana or a path to paradise. It’s not that kind of a path. It happens immediately. It’s much more like, how do you hammer a nail? Well, you take the nail and you hold it so that you’re not going to hit your own nail, fingernail. You’re going to hit the head of the nail with the hammer. And then you have to hold the hammer correctly and you start tapping. And then as you get good at it, you can make bigger and bigger taps, but you can just tap just a little bit and not hurt yourself. So this is the whole point that it’s a method like a carpenter uses a method to use a plane or a chisel. And when Westerners think about meditation, they think about all the furniture I’m going to have someday, rather than the actual driving of the nail or the turning of the screw. But that’s the Dhamma. It’s the. What we’re doing right now. In small place. And so this is why we call it a method, not a path. So the first item on the path, first off, let’s talk about it in the sense that there are two paths. There is the path of the ordinary person, and then there is the path of the noble. And that the better way of teaching is to teach students who are ready for the noble path and teach the noble path to them, because there’s already hundreds of millions of people that have already gotten the ordinary path. Now, the ordinary path starts with siva, goes to samadhi, and then goes to panya, Siva samatipanya. Have you ever heard those three words in a row, Silas? Samatipanya.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Dhammarato: All right. Sila samatipanya is the Eightfold noble. Actually, it’s the Eightfold path. But the Eightfold noble method is different than that. We start with ponya, we start with wisdom, Then we go through samati, the organization of mind, and the end of it is the siva. So it’s not sila samadi panya. It’s sila is panya, Sila, samati, sila. All right, so let’s talk about that. All right. Now, the first thing is, is that you’ve heard of the word sati because you’re using already the word anapana, sati. Now, sati has a quality that’s. We don’t have a really good English language word to translate. It’s been translated as mindfulness. And that’s one of the reasons why people really go off the deep end. They don’t. They don’t understand what the actual word means. The actual word samati. Excuse me, Sila sati. The actual word sati actually means to remember, to be here. Now, when we say remember, many people think of remember is like to remember the past or to remember to go someplace and do something. But actually, we’re talking about to remember to be here now, to wake up. Wakey. Wakey is probably the best definition I can give to sati, is to come up and to be here now. And then the second item on the 2nd on the April noble method is to look, wake up, and look. You probably heard, wake up and smell the coffee. Have you ever heard the term wake up and smell the coffee?

Speaker B: No, I don’t think so.

Dhammarato: All right, well, actually, that’s pretty good. Wake up and take a look. Or in this case, smell the coffee. Be here right now that you’re not smelling a can of coffee that hasn’t been opened and you’re not smelling a can of Coffee that’s empty and been thrown away, you’re smelling right here, right now. So wake up and look. Mostly what we’re going to do is look at the Satya Pathana. And the most important one in the beginning for the students is to wake up and look at the kind of thoughts that you’re having. The Satya Pathana then is the body, the feelings, the mind’s objects, and most importantly, the attitude. The Sama Sankapa is to look at what attitude or how the mind is leaning. Another way of talking about it is the mental state that you’re in. Are you in a mental state of desire? Are you in a mental state of being a victim, that you’ve got people in charge of you or circumstances and you feel that the circumstances run your life or your existence right now? Or are you going to have the attitude that you’re on top of things? You can handle this. Going back to the hammering of the nail, many of the kids are going to be afraid to hammer the nail because they may hit their fingernail instead. And so they don’t apply and they don’t get the work done. So the other possibility is just to go slam right ahead and then you bang your finger nail instead of the actual nail. And so those are the two extremes. You don’t get the nail driven in either case, but if you take the middle path with it, this is the whole point, is that you’ve got to look at what’s happening in the mind. You’ve got to look at your attitude, you got to look at how you feel. So let’s work with the mental part about the thoughts. Look at what you’re thinking. Are the thoughts that you’re having wholesome or unwholesome? If they’re unwholesome, then change the thoughts that you’re having. Like bugs are bad. You don’t have too many bugs in the north, but up and down in the south there’s a lot of bugs. And a lot of people don’t like bugs. But they don’t say, I don’t like bugs. What they say instead is, bugs are bad. So they’re actually lying to themselves because bugs are just real. Ask any bugs, is he bad? And he’s not going to answer you. Bugs are just bugs. But when we say bugs are bad, what we’re actually saying is, I don’t like bugs. Now another way of saying it is that there is an I or a me who does not like the bugs. And then when we start to practice correctly, we can unfocus on the bugs and say something like, bugs are just bugs, and I’m okay. Everything is all right. Everything is fine. Not a problem in the world. These are all wholesome thoughts. But I don’t like this, and I don’t like that. And some. Many times people are practicing, say, vipassana or anapanasati, sitting for long periods of time, making their body hurt. And then they have the thoughts of, I don’t like the body hurting. I don’t like the knees being going to sleep. I don’t like the pain in the knees. I don’t like the back pain. And so they’re not practicing at all. What they’re doing is what they’ve always been done, and that is having unwholesome thoughts. And so if you’re having unwholesome thoughts, we need to see those unwholesome thoughts and change them to wholesome thoughts. Now, almost always the unwholesome thoughts come because of the attitude that we have of being a victim. Like when we say, bugs are bad, that means I’m a victim to the bugs, and I don’t like bugs because what they do to me. And so we can change that from just bugs are just bugs, and I’m okay, and we start to practice. That way, everything is already okay. And with that, if you continue to have wholesome thoughts, fairly soon your attitude will start to change from I’m a victim to the bugs, to I can tolerate the bugs. I can handle the bugs. The bugs are not a problem. And when we do that, we’re beginning to change our attitude. We can also change our feelings because I don’t like bugs as a feeling. And we can change that to more neutral, I don’t care about the bugs. Or you can go so far as to start saying, oh, I like bugs. But we have a choice over the way that we feel. Most people realize that.

Speaker B: I’ve read in a. In a few. I know you say books are bad, so I asked this. I’ve read in a few. In a few Dharma books that liking and disliking are both problems.

Dhammarato: And, well, yes, here’s part of the problem with that is you’re not ready to go to the end. All right, here’s. Here’s an example of that. Mathematics. Mathematics starts with numbers. Then it starts with addition and subtraction. Then it goes into multiplication and division. And students get used to the numbers. Then they begin to learn a little bit of algebra after they’ve conquered algebra and do quadratic equations instead of. They can get into A little bit of calculus. Only after that will they go into things like number theory or maybe matrix calculus or some of the higher mathematics. So a first grader does not do the mathematics that a PhD professor in mathematics does. Is that correct? Well, then why do we take Buddhism and say, oh, well, I’m interested in the bottom line. I don’t want to learn what the beginners need to know. I want to go right to the very end. And that’s what you’ve just done. Now, the Buddha recommends it in the system like this that it’s good in the beginning, good in the middle, and good in the end. But in the beginning, if you try to do the end, you’re not in the right place, you’re not getting anything done, and you wind up being miserable because you can’t control your feelings. You don’t know how to control your feelings. We’re going to learn how to control the feelings by changing what they do. Now, here’s what we mean by that is a great big freighter, an ocean liner battleship, an aircraft carrier. None of them have brakes. They can’t stop. The best they can do is reverse their propeller. But the major thing that they’re going to have to do is learn to steer so that they’re headed right for the port. They can’t stop. They’ve got to veer away so that they don’t hit the port. Right. Okay, so this is how we’re going to work with the feelings and work with the mind. We’re not trying to stop the mind. We’re learning how to steer it. We’re not learning how to stop the feelings. We’re learning how to steer them, to take control over them. Only after you are in excellent control of your feelings can you bring them to a stop. Does that make sense?

Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah.

Dhammarato: All right. But here you’re going to read stuff that’s in a book that was written by somebody who read another book, and they’re just writing stuff down, and they don’t have a clue about what they’re talking about. They’re copying and pasting. They’re doing a rewrite. They’re editing something that they don’t even understand. That’s the problem with the suttas. It was translated by people who did not even understand what they were translating. And now all of the modern translators use the lexicons. They take a shortcut instead of actually figuring out what the language means by becoming a language scholar. Instead they will use the lexicon or the dictionary that was written by people who didn’t know what they were doing. And so now all of the modern translators that are translating nowadays are translating the same things wrongly. That very few or nobody that you know of is actually native speaker of Pali. In fact, Pali is not even one language. It’s a whole collection of languages. They’ve been able to begin to figure that out. At one time they thought that Pali was just one language, but it’s not.

Speaker B: Do you think, you think Sri Lankan Buddhists like, like Bhante Gunaratana would have a good handle on that?

Dhammarato: SPEAKING SINHALESE I actually know him. I spent time with him in the 1980s and then I spent time, a little bit of time with him in the 2000s. He’s highly respected, but I’m, I let us say that I’ll reserve my opinions of him personally, but that in Sri Lanka in general, they are very much enamored with the Vasudi Maga. Now, the Vasudi Maga was written in the 4th century AD by Buddhaghosa. And that the Basuddhimaga has some issues, it’s got some problems with it, and that even Bhikkhu Buddha Dasa was slow to come out of the Basudi Maga himself because it’s so, let us say, well loved. But the Basuddhi Maga, in fact, is where the 16 stages of insight. Have you ever heard of the 16 stages of insight?

Speaker B: No.

Dhammarato: All right, that’s, that’s in the Mahasi method. They really love that.

Speaker B: Oh, yeah, yeah, I did hear, I did hear about that.

Dhammarato: All right, so the ordinary people, as I was mentioning before, and the noble people, the ordinary people is the first 11 steps. And the noble is when they go to step 12 of the Eightfold Noble Path and the Four Noble Truths. And so we’re going to bypass all of the first part, all of the first 11 steps of that method, going to go right to what needs to be done right from the very beginning. Rather than spending a lot of time in stuff that does not change the mind, we’re going to start working on changing the mind. We’re going to start working on the April Noble Path directly and immediately to change the mind, to change the attitude, to change the way we feel and actually change the body. Now, one thing for sure, and that is you can’t change your age, you can’t change your stature. I mean, you can put on high heels, but that’s not going to change how tall you are. It’s just going to add a fake set of heels for you. But the point is that There are things that you can change about the body. Change your postures, you can change the way that you breathe, you can change your diet, you can change what you like and you don’t like. These are the kind of things that we can change with the body. The feelings you can change from liking or from not liking to liking. But liking almost always leads to greed, what they call wanting. So you can learn to like things without wanting it.

Speaker B: Really? That’s good.

Dhammarato: Yeah. Because learn to control your feelings so that I like it very much, but I don’t want to change it. Pardon? What did you say?

Speaker B: Oh, yeah, because I’ve. I’ve always noticed, like when I have done noting, I’ll note liking and then wanting always follows. It’s like, I wish I could like things without wanting.

Dhammarato: Well, you can, by seeing that you want it and say, I, I like it, but I don’t want it. You have to keep repeating that to yourself because you’re in quite a habit of liking and then wanting and then needing it and then having to have it, which is part of the Paticca Samapada path. But if you know in detail that first off you made those feelings that you have, you made them up. It wasn’t. Didn’t come from reality. But we’ll talk about Potica Samuel Pota at a later time. Right now we’re going to work with the point that we can begin to change our thoughts, because that’s the easiest thing that in fact, you’ve heard of the concept the monkey mind. All right, well, what does that mean? That means that the monkey mind is just jumping all over the place. Let’s learn to settle that monkey mind down by having it in a corral, say of only wholesome thoughts. And when the monkey mind jumps out of the corral, we can see that it’s done, that it’s jumped into the unwholesome. Let’s bring it back into the wholesome. And then fairly soon we begin to change the attitude and from, wow, this is hard work to keep bringing that monkey mind back into the wholesome, into the thought of, hey, I can do that. Anytime that that monkey mind jumps out of that corral, I can bring him back in. You see, that’s the attitude. That’s the state of mind that we’re in. But, but we use the objects of the mind to help bring and control and settle down the state of mind. And then the state of mind that we’re in will actually help us to control the way that we feel. That in fact the Feelings almost always are subject to what we’re thinking and how our, what our attitude is. And if you’ve got the attitude of a winner and your thoughts are wholesome, then you’re going to feel pretty good. And you don’t want anything, you just feel good. And so this is actually the practice of Anapanasati. If you read the whole book or he rolled thing, you’ll come to the point that is actually mentioned in sequence several times, the part about gladdening the mind. This is normally referred to as step 10. But these are not steps, not in the sense of you have to take step one and then step two and then step three. These are more like items on a list, but the list is not in any particular order other than the order of one by one as they occur. And so once you see what kind of state of mind you’re in, once you can see the kind of thoughts that you have, you can actually then take the right noble effort to gladden the mind, to brighten the mind, to change the attitude, to change your thoughts. And this is a change model. The Buddha’s model is a change model. Bhikkha Buddhadasa talks about it like that, that you either have your old actions, your old habits, your old ways of doing things, and you can sit and meditate for 3, 4, 5, 10 hours a day and still do the same things the way that you’ve always done, or you can spend some time changing. And so that that issue about the dukkha, when you see that dog pile in front of you, that’s dukkha, that’s mental dukkha, that’s satyapatthana dukkha at whatever level, change it, get out of its way. Here’s another metaphor, and that is imagine that you’re standing in a road and then you see that a big truck, a semi or a lorry or some freight carrying truck, maybe a big panel truck that’s loaded down and it’s barreling down the highway. It even honks his horn saying, here I come. Choiceless awareness is going to see that truck coming, stand there in the road and let the truck run right over it. Joyceless awareness in fact, they would have been better off if they hadn’t seen the truck coming. If they saw the truck coming. Now they have duka while the truck is coming, and then they have real duka when the truck hits them. That’s two kinds of trouble. Then there’s the Mahasi method. You’re standing in the road, here comes that truck barreling down on you. And what does they do? They play Popeye. They’re going to stand in the road and they’re going to say, I’m going to stop that truck. And then they get run over. Two kinds of dukkha. One is I’m going to stop. That is delusional. And number two is they get run over anyway. There’s a third option. What is that third option? Get off the road, get out of the way. Don’t you think that that’s a better one? Rather than getting hit by a truck while you’re not watching, get hit by a truck knowing that it’s coming, or try to stop the truck or just to get out of this way. So this is the reason why Western meditation systems generally don’t get anything is because they’re either letting the truck hit them or they’re trying to stop the truck. And the right action is to get out of the way. This is what we mean by gladdening the mind. This is what we mean by changing the thoughts that we have from unwholesome thoughts to wholesome thoughts. And we do that over and over and over again. Another word that’s badly translated is the word samati, which is translated as concentration. And all the Westerners hear that word concentration. They think that they’ve got to get it really tight, they’ve got to look, they’ve got to get some object and ignore everything else. But what the word samati actually means is gathering together, becoming unified, getting the mind together rather than at war with itself. Having one thought and then another thought, and then a monkey mind goes here and a monkey mind goes there and is jumping all over the place. Let’s get the mind organized and fit for work. And so that organization and that fitness for work then is actually the gladdening of the mind, making it bright, making it shiny. Now, there’s other ways to talk about it, and we’ll talk about this later, but often we have rights, rules, rituals, supposed to’s ought to do it this way. We have standards, etc. Like this. And then we judge ourselves according to these standards. Well, there’s your duality right there. We have the standard, and then I judge myself according to that standard. And the example is I ought to go on a diet, I want to go on a diet. And then I open the refrigerator door, I want that. The hell with the diet. You hear all of that duality in there? Okay, so the point then is that when we can have the mind unified, we don’t want anything. We don’t want to be on a diet. We don’t want the refrigerator. We’re already okay. Everything is already fine. Everything is okay. And so this is where how we practice is. We get the mind into a state that it’s all right, that it’s okay, nothing to do, no place to go. The spring comes and the grass grows all by itself. I don’t even have to cut the grass. I’m okay. And so this is the way that we practice over and over again. Now, sitting for three hours or even sitting for an hour, almost no one has that sort of, let us say, attention span, that it’s better to practice short times often that for you, I would recommend that you practice 10 minutes at a time every hour, maybe five minutes for 12 hours a day, five minutes an hour. So you practice a little while and then you go live your life and then you come back and practice again. Over and over and over again. You come and brighten the mind, glad in the mind getting it into a good state and then go do something. And then within an hour you come back and you gladden the mind, you brighten the mind. You throw all the unwholesome thoughts out over and over again. We do this and pretty soon you begin to fill in the gaps so that you can brighten the mind. Just because you remember to brighten the mind. So one of the values of watching the breath is that we’re going to change the breath. This is a change model. There are many people that you mentioned, Gunaratana, I have heard him say, just watch the breath. You don’t have to change it, just watch it. The answer to that is that’s not possible. If you don’t have a monkey in the fight, if you don’t have a dog in the fight, if you don’t have anything going for it, just watching it and you’ll forget to watch it, something else will happen, the monkey mind will come in and you’ll stop watching it. But if you’re actually using your mind, controlling the mind to control the breath so that you’re taking long deep in breath and long deep out breath. Then every time you do a long deep in breath, that’s sati. You remember to take a long deep breath. Every time you breathe out, you remember to take out a long deep breath. And so you’re building that sati as a skill to remember to be here now, to remember to breathe in long, to remember to breathe out long. To remember to gladden the mind, to remember to have wholesome thoughts, to remember that you’re okay to remember that you feel good. There is a satipatthana, and you can do all of that in one breath. And so anapanasati, as you read in the sutta, it says we do the anapanosati for the fulfillment of the four foundations of mindfulness. And the whole sutta is geared around the four foundations. You have the body part, you have the feeling part. And as you begin to practice over and over again, you will develop what we call suka. Have you ever heard of that Pali word suka? Yeah, it’s step seven in the Anapanasati Sutra, if you want to call it by steps. It’s an item on the list. Suka is exactly opposite to the word dukkha. Sukha is exactly opposite to the word dukkha. It’s that way in the Pali. It’s that way in the Thai. In Thai, they say suk and duke. And I’ve also heard that in the Gujarati language, I have a student who, his parents are Gujarati from India, and they Suki and suki right there in their language. And they’re opposites in. In Gujarati, they’re opposite in Thai, and they’re opposite in Pali, which means that when you’re in a state of suki in suka, you’re not in a state of dukkha. Isn’t that amazing? And there sukha is right there in the Anapanasati. Sukha. So let’s define sukha for a moment. It has these following qualities. You feel safe, you feel secure, you feel comfortable. And as that goes on, you begin to feel satisfied. It might be better for you just to listen rather than writing stuff down, because we’re recording this. You can go back through the recording and do the writing later. But right now I’d rather you focus on listening rather than repeating it and typing it out. Okay? All right, so just listen. Suka has the quality of being safe, feeling secure. Those are feelings. The feeling of safe, secure and comfortable brings on the feeling of satisfaction so that we begin to feel satisfied. Well, there’s that state of satisfaction is exactly opposite to the state of dukkha, being dissatisfied. So if you can walk around in the state of sukha all the time, you’ve got the eight full noble path working for you. You’ve got anapanasati working for you. You’ve got it going. You’re a winner here. You’re satisfied. We don’t need enlightenment. You need satisfaction. Think about it like this. If somebody was enlightened, but they were still dissatisfied with the way the government and the wars and all of that, how is that then, in comparison to someone who is satisfied? They’re satisfied now, they’re satisfied a minute ago. They’re satisfied the next moment into next week, and they’re satisfied. And they don’t care about enlightenment. They don’t care about the wars, they don’t care about Putin, they don’t care about politics. They’re just completely satisfied with the way things are right now. Which would you rather have? Enlightenment that has still got Duka in it, or to be satisfied and forget all about the word enlightenment?

Speaker B: Would the satisfied person in that situation still make the choices to improve things? Could it?

Dhammarato: If you’re satisfied with the way they are, why would you want to improve.

Speaker B: Things if other people are not? So, let’s say, can you be fine, sort of like the Buddha? The Buddha was fine with. The Buddha was fine with everything, but still made the choice to teach people so that those people could be more satisfied.

Dhammarato: Well, that’s the whole point is, is that he only taught people who were willing to listen. You don’t want to go fix the government, because nobody in the government is going to listen to the Dharma. You only teach those who want. And you wanted to talk to me, so I’m talking to you. But I’m not talking to you because I’m a teacher and I’m supposed to. And you’re broken. I’m talking to you because I enjoy doing it. I’m having fun here. I’m satisfied whether you get the Dhamma or not. There’s a slight difference there. You think that the Buddha was teaching because he was dissatisfied with their ignorance? No, he was already okay, but he enjoyed teaching.

Speaker B: That sounds good.

Dhammarato: All right. That’s the way to look at it is another way that I would state it is turn all of your work into play. Because work means you’re doing something that has got a purpose and intention, and you have some sort of pressure, a deadline. You need to get it done. And you’re in the state of duka while you’re doing it. In fact, that’s what most employment is. Most employment is people working at a job that they don’t like. And they’ve done that for so long in school, in college, in university, all throughout their career, they’ve been doing work that they didn’t like to do. And then there are those who do like what they’re doing, and then there’s no pressure. So what we can do then is to come out of the bad habit of not liking what we’re doing and getting the mind fixed into a state of liking, get the mind into a state of satisfaction. Bring all of the fear and anxiety and everything to rest so that you’re in a state of satisfaction. Now we can take that satisfaction back to something to do. And we’re enjoying it. While we’re doing it, we’re enjoying while we fail, we enjoying. While we’re fixing what we failed at, we’re enjoying getting her done. This is the way of doing it. And when you get dissatisfied with the work that you’re doing, instead of continuing trying to get it right so that you’ll be satisfied, the right thing to do is to leave that work, come back over here to the practice of anapanasati, get ourselves back into a state of liking, and then go back to the work. Because now it’s no longer work. When your play becomes work, stop working, stop the play. Because it’s not play, it’s work.

Speaker B: Quick question about that. So Ajahn Mahabhu was talking about how the work of training the mind is not fun. It’s very difficult.

Dhammarato: That’s the first part of his book. That’s the struggle. Okay, so there’s always part of the book of what the struggle was. You no doubt have heard also that the Buddha, he practiced all of those jhanas and was dissatisfied with them. He practiced all of those austerities, and he became dissatisfied with those too, because they were about to kill him. And he came back to the actual practice of that. What we’re talking about is the first jhna that has that sukha quality to it, so that we’re in a state of liking. So Mahabhar is talking about it in the sense of why he was failing at it. He was working too hard, he was doing it wrong. But he eventually gave up on that and stopped working and started enjoying his life. So we’re going for the. For the noble right from the very beginning. We’re going to bypass the ordinary, the working hard to get something. We’re going to stop doing that and start practicing getting the mind into a really good state. That’s noble. Ordinary people work really hard trying to get something. And you begin now to enjoy. Aha, I caught you. Aha, I see you. That’s a phrase of the Buddha. When that unwholesome thought comes in the mind, instead of, oh, this is a lot of work to do, we say, aha, I see you. You can congratulate yourself for seeing what you’re doing, including stop calling it wrong, stop Calling it hard, start having some fun with it. And when you see the mind wandering away, you can say, aha, I call you wandering away. Let’s come back and let’s gladden the mind and brighten the mind and be in a good state again. So that’s the noble path. The noble path is to change those unwholesome thoughts to wholesome thoughts. To change those feelings of hard into the feelings of this is easy. To change the attitude from this is hard into the attitude this is easy. And every one of us has to go through that change process. Because you have been trained from childhood that everything is hard. You need help. And basically all you really need is someone to put point out to you, you’re working too hard, you’re making it tough on yourself. An example would be bugs are bad. Well, that’s working too hard. How about bugs are okay and I’m okay and now we got no problem. I don’t like bugs. It’s a lot of work. Got no problem with bugs. That’s easy. So take the easy way out, brighten the mind, gladden the mind, come out of all of the hard work, have an easy happy life. This is the practice getting your mind into a state of sukha.

Speaker B: The main, one of the main hindrances for me with that is just sleepiness. So a lot of the time, this.

Dhammarato: Is why the long deep breaths will be valuable, is to take a deep breath when you’re getting sleepy and probably you’re tired. You get sleepy because you’ve been sitting too long, working too hard and getting tired.

Speaker B: Yeah, that’s true. It always happens after 10 minutes. The first 10 are good as you say.

Dhammarato: Yeah. So let’s have good 10 minutes and then finish. Get yourself into a really good state. This sitting for an hour is very, very modern by the way. It came with clocks. Guess what? The Buddha didn’t have a clock.

Speaker B: So when he talked about peacefully abiding in the first Jhana, was that something that happened in 10 minutes?

Dhammarato: Certainly.

Speaker B: Really?

Dhammarato: Yeah, Immediately you can just abide in the first John and just say everything is okay. Ah, relax, go into first John immediately. So stay. The trick is to stay. The trick is to stay. You have to apply the mind and then sustain it to keep it going for 10 minutes. Getting into first Jhna is easy. Getting right back out of it is just as easy because the mind goes into an unwholesome state again. You have to apply the mind to the wholesome and then keep applying the mind to the wholesome until it begins to stick, sustain it, keep it going. Those unwholesome thoughts will come in. I see you. Aha. I see you and out you go. But if the first jhna is there and you’re having all, everything is okay. And then that monkey mind comes up and says, yeah, but what about you got to go to town this afternoon? And then you say, yeah, we got to go to town, your Ghana is gone. But if that person thought, yeah, we got to go to town this afternoon, you can say, oh, never mind about that, I’m having too much fun right now. You have to learn to sustain it. You’re thinking about, it’s hard to get into it in 10 minutes. Oh no, the trick is sustain it for 10 minutes.

Speaker B: Yeah, that’s a good point because the first two breaths feel to me like, the first two breaths usually feel like the best one. So there’s about the sustaining though. So I feel like there’s a couple things I’ve. When you talked about saying, oh, I’m not going to worry about that right now. One thing that feels really good is when I put just a little bit of, just a little bit of attention on the breath and most of it goes to a distraction, comes up, I just say leave it. Is that. And it feels. So I just say leave it and the mind lets go. Is that method in line with what you’re saying?

Dhammarato: Actually if it’s in line with changing, keep, keep that in mind. Remember sati. Change, change. Throw those unwholesome thoughts out and put wholesome thoughts in. You could go so far as to say that any thought that you do have could be improved. And if you have a super duper wildy zoo up the nose kind of best kind of feeling and thought that you’ve ever had before for you can even improve that by congratulating yourself for having it. So just keep coming back to the wholesome over and over and over again. Wow. Everything is okay. Everything is fine.

Speaker B: Okay, so it doesn’t need to be, it doesn’t need to be that kind of glued to the breath. You can move around enough to improve the thoughts and improve the mind.

Dhammarato: Absolutely, absolutely. Then in fact, for too much focus. Okay, here’s a really, really good example. You’re sitting there focusing on your breath and a ninja comes up and strangles you or slits your throat. What good then is your breathing? Wouldn’t it be better that you had some awareness of what was going on around you while you were taking a deep breath? So that when the ninja is actually coming into the Room, you know, he’s there, though.

Speaker B: It depends on who you talk to.

Dhammarato: Well, I’m talking about what the Buddha said. I’m talking about what Aun Po said. I’m talking about what really is there. Getting tightly focused and too focused down is not the right correct practice.

Speaker B: So when you say the Buddha never taught, never taught Metta, what if. What if? Metta is a kind of thought that helps make the mind more wholesome or glad.

Dhammarato: Well, now you’re labeling a wholesome thought as metta. That’s all you’re doing. But when you have those kind of meta meditations like may all beings be happy, may all beings be free from suffering. You’ve heard that kind of stuff before before, haven’t you? Yeah.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Dhammarato: Okay, well, it’s a lie. You can’t make all beings be happy. You can’t do that. The question is, can you make yourself happy? And if. And if you’re happy enough, then leave those people alone. If one of them wants to be happy and he comes to you and asks you, you can smile at him. At least you can make him happy just by being happy yourself. But this stuff about may all beings be happy is an absolute lie. It’s a farce. It’s wishful thinking. It’s wanting something you cannot have. The Buddha did not practice Metta, and if he did, he was an absolute failure at it. Because all of the time since the time of the Buddha, we have never had a point in time where all the people who were alive were happy all at the same time. Didn’t happen.

Speaker B: Okay? I feel that way a lot of the time when I’ve practiced it, that sort of stress, like, yeah, I don’t know how this could happen. I don’t know how I could do this. I must be doing this wrong. And you’re the first person I’ve heard who’s ever sort of made me feel not crazy about that.

Dhammarato: You can’t. You can’t do it. So what you can do is to get your own mind together. Now, let me define something for you. May all beings be happy has a problem. Just that. Let’s take all beings in the sense of the world. Okay? So now I’ll give you three different definitions of the world. One is the definition the planet Earth. Planet Earth has a skin rash. It’s called humanity. The planet Earth would probably be a whole lot better off, more natural if there were no humans on this planet. But the planet Earth is good enough. Even with all these people, all of these humans digging, burning, slashing, polluting all of that kind of stuff. And the planet Earth is kind of getting along all right. So the second definition of the world is basically human society, including all of the humans in it. Those that are polluting, those that are starting fires, those that are digging in the ground with great big shovels, all of those people, they’re doing all of that stuff because of their desire. They want something or they’re. They want to get rid of something. They want better batteries, they want to get rid of pollution that they’ve already caused and all of that kind of stuff. And so though the. The world then is the world of human society that is always wanting something, you can’t fix that no one has ever been able to fix it. It just is. And it’s all part of greed and ill will and ignorance. In fact, you could say that human society is a form of dukkha, with all the attendant causes of dukkha. Now let me give you a third definition of the world. The third definition of the world is what you can see, touch, taste, smell, hear your five senses, and what you can bring in of those five senses, augmented or not with technology. Those five senses is actually your world. So when you’re saying may all beings be happy, are you talking about on the planet Earth, are you talking about human society, or are you talking about the real world, which is the world that you are in, that you experience? And right now, in my world, I’ve got two cats and you, and that’s all that I’ve got in my entire world. The cats are already okay. So think of it like that. May all beings be happy. We immediately go into concepts. We’re talking about all the people that we’ve never met and never seen. Why don’t you work with all the beings that are in your world, and you’re the center of it. Here you are. Can you make yourself happy? If you can make yourself happy enough, you’re making all the beings in the world happy right then and there. Easy. Not such a big job after all. But you have to keep practicing over and over and over and over again to make yourself okay, to recognize that your environment is a paradise and you fit right in. So much for meta. Go ahead.

Speaker B: So I guess I’d like to ask kind of what I was getting at before when it comes to hearing about different practice methods. For example, I’ll hear about things, you know, certain practice methods from you and from other people.

Dhammarato: Not for me. This is the teaching of the Buddha. I don’t have to have my own method I teach what the Buddha taught I. I teach according to what Pika Buddha Dasa could see. And so I come from a lineage that goes all the way back to the Buddha. And so all of these other methods are in fact going to be diversions. Here’s one point, and that is that in a very, very, let us say, intense situation that happened in Bangkok in the 1930s, the Bhikkha Buddha Dasa made the statement that the Buddha only taught one practice. You use the word meditation. I’ll use that just to make clear of what we’re talking about. But when we use the word meditation, we’re not being clear at all. We’re being very wishy washy. But the Buddha only taught one meditation. The meditation he taught was anapanasati, all of its characteristics, including the four foundations of mindfulness. And I haven’t talked about all of it yet, but we’re getting started in the four foundations of mindfulness that lead then to the sambojana. But we’re doing this by practicing the Eightfold Noble Method. And the Buddha only had one practice. And when Bika Buddha Dasa made that statement, he got a lot of crap from a whole lot of monks. And so there was a literature search that was done by the university and the big Polish school of the time where, I mean, we’re talking about the monks have a huge Pali school. It takes nine years to go through that. And so there was an awful lot of Pali scholars in Thai language that were looking through the suttas, looking at the Pali, looking at the Thai translations, and they came to the consensus that that’s correct, the Buddha only taught one. Now, in the Basudi Maga, they start off by talking about those 40 meditations. 10 for the channel ground, 4 for the meta, 4 for the jhanas, 4 for this, 5 for that, and they wind up having 40. But that was something that was put together a thousand years after the time of the Buddha. There is actually only one practice, and that is anapanasati, done with the Eightfold Noble Path. I use the word path, let’s say method.

Speaker B: So it’s other parts of the Satipatthana sutta, like for example, the corpse contemplations.

Dhammarato: And he stopped doing that, right? He stopped it. That, that was something that he did very, very early. And he found out that it would, it was depressing people. He wanted them to get to the point that everything is temporary. But monk started committing suicide, and so he stopped with the charnel ground meditation. She didn’t teach that anymore, okay? Okay, that was a failed experiment. You don’t even have a charnel ground to go meditate in. Gonka had an old video VCR of an autopsy. And I’m not against people looking at an autopsy to get to the understanding that the body is temporary. It’s got this bean and that bag and that pea and that corn chuck and all of that kind of stuff that’s in the body. But that’s all there is to it. It’s not mine. And so he did not get keep with the charnal ground meditations at all. That was one of the points that was brought up. What about the Parana ground? What about the meadow? What about the jhanas? And that’s stuff that was put aside so that we would practice anapanasati, which by the way, the whole sutta is designed around putting someone in first jhana with the sukkah.

Speaker B: Because that’s all you need.

Dhammarato: That’s all you need. If you’re satisfied, then that’s the end of dukkha. When you’ve got sukha, you’re at the end of the dukkha. Can you maintain that?

Speaker B: Now slicing through to that ignorance that causes, that causes it to keep coming up, though that’s sort of when I hear say this is why you see.

Dhammarato: It when it comes up and say, aha, I see that. And then sustain your first Jhna. And okay, aha, I see that. I see that ignorance. I see. In fact, the ignorance always comes up into some form of desire. I want this or I hate that.

Speaker B: And by doing that repeatedly, the ignorance will stay there.

Dhammarato: It will stay there. You will. In fact, that’s if you know about the 10 fetters. Ignorance is the final fetter you’re going to have. Ignorance. One of the things that I see in Western mindset is that they want to know and they want to know. And they read this book and read that book and they read another book and they keep reading books, they keep searching for knowledge. And you’re not ever going to know everything. The question is, can you know enough? And when you see that ignorance coming up in the form of I want to know. See it coming up in the form of questions, you can say, never mind, I’m okay, I’m already all right. I don’t have to know the end of all of everything. Ignorance will remain. You will remain about as ignorant as you always were. But now you don’t care anymore. So let me give you this one example, okay? The dean at the great big university, one of the big fancy ones the dean or the president had a ball and all of the professors, all the department heads were there at this party. Now the question is, would be, would there be one of those professors at that party who knew everything that all the other professors at that party know? Or is that person who thinks that they know all the information that all the other professors know, is he not in delusion by thinking that he knows everything that they know?

Speaker B: So that’s, that’s a different kind of ignorance than what I’ve been taught is. I’ve been taught ignorance in the sense of what the Buddha said is the first link, independent origination.

Dhammarato: Well, let me tell you about that then. The ignorance that is in the first link of dependent origination is the fact that we have been accumulating stuff ignorantly. That the foundation of all of our past, all of our memories, all of our pile, all of our library, is that we accumulated all that information ignorantly. Children learn all of those rules ignorantly. Most of the stuff that the parent tells the child, if the child was really wise and not ignorant, he’d just brush it off. Oh, dad’s full of crap. But oh no, we remember it, we pick it up because the child is ignorant and we stay that kind of ignorant. So, yeah, the ignorance then would be to figure out what’s good enough and what’s not good enough. And thirst for knowledge is what you’ll find in Western Buddhism. They want to read, they want to know, they want to figure it out, they want to translate, they want to write a book, they want to become famous, they want to be the one who knows it all. And all they really need is to know enough to be happy.

Speaker B: And is that, is knowing enough to be happy? Just repeating that process, is that sufficient to prevent rebirth, to end birth in this life?

Dhammarato: But you just been preventing rebirth over and over and over again. Don’t work about, don’t fret about or think about something that is way off into the future or buried deeply, deeply in the past. Forget about it. Be happy right now. And in fact, spending time on what happened 20,000 years ago or what’s going to happen a century from now is ridiculous. And it prevents you from being in the here now. I think in fact, reincarnation was a Hindu thing. It came from the Brahmins. It started up at about 800 B.C. when the, when the Brahmins were, let us say, in the decline of owning all the land in India, when people were challenging them. And their answer to that was, we were born Brahman. We are the priest we are born Brahman because we were good in the past. You are not Brahman because you were not good in the past. There comes the. That was the birth of rebirth, that was the birth of reincarnation, about 800 BC. By the time of the Buddha, it was full blown into knowledge. Now you have all these Hindus and you have all of these Buddhists that believe in that kind of stuff to where in fact, it’s actually a side trip, it’s actually a diversion. It keeps them from actually being on the correct path of being right here, right now.

Speaker B: So why now?

Dhammarato: It’s also, it’s also a point. Go ahead, go ahead.

Speaker B: I’m just curious why. I’d love to not believe in it, but why did he teach about it in so many of the suttas?

Dhammarato: They don’t. The Buddha says, in fact, if you’ll read sutra number 20 when he’s talking about it, he says, therefore all monks do not be reborn. Rebirth is in fact what you do every time you have an unwholesome thought. Let me give you this one, okay, bugs are bad. Then we can come to a little bit of wisdom to say, I don’t like bugs. That’s why I say they’re bad. And then they come to the point of I see that I don’t like bugs. And that’s when we begin to see that rebirth, the rebirth of the eye. And so selfishness is a much better way of looking at it, that when you’re selfish, you just be reborn as an eye. And when you’re not selfish, when you’re altruistic, when you’re okay, then there is no self there. So the Buddha was really into the rebirth is taking on a self. Now the whole point about Anatta is that it was badly translated as no self. A much better translation would have been no soul, no permanent soul. But the Christians who translated that, they couldn’t tolerate that, so they didn’t translate it correctly as no soul. They translated as no self. But the reality is that the belief in a soul is that it’s everlasting, long existing and permanent. But the Buddha teaches that everything is temporary, consciousness is temporary. So if you can see everything as temporary, then you don’t have any issue with rebirth and reincarnation. Because reincarnation talks about a permanent soul, a permanent self, and you’re not permanent at all. So if you think that you’re going to be reborn 200 years from now, then it’s not going to be you, this reborn, it’s going to be somebody Else who’s going to think of him as himself. And he doesn’t have a clue about you. And so stop thinking about what happens way off into the future, because it doesn’t belong to you. What belongs to you is right here, right now.

Speaker B: That is how I used to think when I started on the path. And it was much better. But after hearing Ajahn Tenesuro, for example, is has talked a lot about the path being separate from the goal and.

Dhammarato: How he is talking to ordinary people at an ordinary level. That in fact Shela is taught because people are too ignorant to see the wisdom of behaving oneself. And so we give these precepts to children, to ordinary people, because they’re too stupid to see what dukkha and Dukkha Naroda really is. And so we give them rules, but eventually we have to throw out the rules. And so the whole point of the rules is you do good, you’ll get good results. You do bad, you’ll get bad results. Is that not what reincarnation is based on? Basically, is. One more point. Do good and you’ll get good results. Do bad and you’ll get bad results. No matter what, even if you die, you’ll still have to have the bad results coming. That’s the teaching of the Brahmins. That is not the teaching of the Buddha. So let me ask you a question for you to ponder. What’s the difference then between rebirth and reincarnation? Because in rebirth there is no self, there is no soul to be reborn. Only in reincarnation, only in the Hindu teaching is there a soul to be reborn. In the teaching of the Buddha, the rebirth, there’s no self, no soul to be reborn that way.

Speaker B: A fabrication process is how I think, right?

Dhammarato: They fabricate it. But your next life is not going to be fabricated 300 years from now. You’re fabricating it right now. It’s a fabrication that you’re fabricating right now. When you’re thinking about it, stop thinking about rebirth and stop thinking about reincarnation and just be here now. Whether it actually exists or not, nobody knows. It’s a fabrication. It’s a concept designed to char is designed to control other people’s behavior, children.

Speaker B: Yeah. So that’s one reason why lay life has been more easy for me to practice in and be peaceful in the present moment. Because at monasteries there were a lot of. A lot.

Dhammarato: What monastery you go to? Yeah, there’s an awful lot of really stupid, stupid people who teach stupid, stupid things in the watch. But there’s an awful lot of watch. They’re pretty wise. And it’s possible for someone to be wise to really understand, but they still teach stupid people stupid things. You don’t know whether Achahn Tenesuro is teaching out of wisdom to stupid people, teaching them stupid things, or whether he’s stupid too. You don’t know that. But that’s been the tradition all along. Is very wise. Old monks will teach stupid people stupid things so that they will stay out of doing stupid things.

Speaker B: Okay, so for when you. When you talk about the importance of ordaining, if the essence of the practice is using anapanasati, the whole. The whole thing to be happy and content and right effort in the present moment, there seem to be a lot of people who really do that and really get that, who are not even. Not even Buddhist. Are they doing something different?

Dhammarato: Not all the time. It’s possible. But then they don’t do it all the time. They’ll get frustrated and uptight. And they don’t have the technique of remembering that they can come out of that uptight just right now.

Speaker B: So is the benefit of ordaining help with remembering to do it consistently?

Dhammarato: When you’re around noble. When you’re around the noble people who remember to be here now, they will help you to remember to be here now. And when you’re around a lot of ignorant people who are all over the place, then they’ll help you to be all over the place too. This is what a noble sangha is all about. This is why the Buddha started this. The Bhikkhu Sangha 2500 years ago was to let people have an environment where they could be nurtured.

Speaker B: So you’ve taught quite a lot of lay people. I’ve seen some videos before.

Dhammarato: A few months too.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, of course. Do you think that we. Do you think that we have a chance if we don’t fully.

Dhammarato: Right now you have a chance. Right now you have a chance. It doesn’t matter what kind of clothes you’re wearing or where you are. The better part of it is that you’ve got a better chance if you’re not around other people. Because if you’re around other people, the likelihood is that those people are unwholesome. So go into seclusion, get your mind together, get into that state of unification of mind, get that joy, get your mojo.

Speaker B: And you can breathe however you need.

Dhammarato: In order to do that, if it’s consciously. This is why there is a short breath and there is a long breath, but both of Them are consciously intentional, not just haphazard, not thinking about it.

Speaker B: So sometimes when I have tried, when I have done the, you know, breathing to gladden the mind to feel good, sort of that whole. That whole thing like, how do I feel good breathing right now? Sometimes the best way to do that has been to let go for a little bit. Let the breathing happen and just, you know, and then I’ll adjust it when I need to, but to let go.

Dhammarato: Let me interrupt you here, Matthew. You’ve been asking an awful lot of questions. You’ve been asking a lot of questions. Let’s go back to the point that you don’t need to have the answers to all of those questions in order to practice correctly. You don’t need to know all of that. What you need to know is take the unwholesome thoughts out of your mind right now and then. In fact, you probably know enough to know that one of the hindrances is doubtless. And the manifestation of the hindrance of doubt is questions. And while you’re asking questions, you’re not being satisfied. You think that answers to the questions are going to make you satisfied? Oh, no. You got to practice satisfaction to be satisfied not getting answers to questions.

Speaker B: Well, thank you very much. I hope. I hope you have a good.

Dhammarato: I’ll be okay. Don’t worry about me. You go practice correctly. You go Practice solidly for 10 minutes. Get yourself into a really good state. Then spend the rest of the hour maintaining that and then come back another 10 minutes and practice, practice, practice. Begin to see what wholesome and unwholesome thoughts are. Begin to investigate what is dukkha. Gain the skill of being able to recognize it immediately so that you can throw it out. That’s the way to practice. Good luck to you.

Speaker B: Thank you.

Dhammarato: We’ll see you soon. Call in about a week.

Speaker B: All right.

Summary of this Dhamma Talk

Dhammarato explains that the Buddha only taught one thing - seeing dukkha (dissatisfaction) and getting out of its way. He emphasizes practicing in short sessions of 5-10 minutes, focusing on changing unwholesome thoughts to wholesome ones and developing sukha (satisfaction) rather than striving for enlightenment. The talk challenges common meditation practices and emphasizes immediate availability of relief from suffering through proper practice rather than extended sitting or complex techniques.

Outline of this Dhamma Talk

The Buddha Only Teaches One Thing

• Dukkha and getting out of its way
• First Noble Truth: Dukkha exists (dissatisfaction in the mind)
• Second Noble Truth: Cause is wanting something ignorantly
• Third Noble Truth: Freedom from dukkha is immediately available
• Fourth Noble Truth: The method to eliminate dissatisfaction

The Noble Path vs Ordinary Path

• Noble path starts with panya (wisdom), then samati, then sila
• Ordinary path starts with sila, then samati, then panya
• Focus on noble path from the beginning

Correct Practice

• Practice in short sessions (5-10 minutes every hour)
• Change unwholesome thoughts to wholesome thoughts
• Gladden and brighten the mind
• Use long deep breaths consciously
• First jhana is immediately available but must be sustained

Satisfaction vs Enlightenment

• Sukha (satisfaction) is opposite of dukkha
• Being satisfied is more important than enlightenment
• Work on being satisfied in the present moment
• Turn work into play

Common Misconceptions

• Metta meditation’s limitations
• Issues with focus on rebirth/reincarnation
• Problems with extended sitting sessions
• Importance of changing thoughts vs just observing

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