Pleasure Wherever It May Be Found The Sangha US 113

Transcript

All right, well, welcome to the Saturday morning call. It’s Friday evening in the US, and today we’re going to talk about making stuff up and that the, there are a number of videos on the details of petite samupada, which is dependent origination. And this is the Buddha’s teaching on how we make up stuff through taking in sensory input and then processing it, called perception, and coming up with an idea, a concept, a thought, or whatever. And then that idea, concept, or thought that we come up with is what impacts us and brings on feelings. And so it’s really good for students when they’re practicing anapanasati is to recognize that almost everything that is in their world, in their universe, is stuff that they’re making up. We make it all up based upon the raw data of sensory input. Now, the thing that’s really interesting is that the sensory input is almost always, in fact, it always is sensory input that we’re getting right now. So when people are, say, reminiscing or living in the past, that means that you’re not taking in much of any kind of sensory input that a gorilla could sneak up and right in front of them and they wouldn’t know it because they’re thinking, and thinking, and thinking based upon reminiscing. So in that case, the perception is taking almost no sensory input and doing everything from stored memory.

And we normally refer to the stored memory as the Sankara in the poly language. So as we make stuff up, one of the things that we don’t realize is that much of the time that we’re making stuff up, we’re not even aware that we’re making it up. Just thoughts, just thinking and not recognizing that those thoughts that we have, we’re making that stuff up based mostly on the past, which means then that much of the thoughts that we have are repetitive and they’re not generally original. That the thoughts that we have are thoughts that we had ten years ago and 15 years ago. The thoughts that we have now may have a little bit of new century information, but the style of thinking is the same. The kind of stuff that we make up is the same thing over and over and over again.

Now, the point that we can look at, based upon what Ivan was talking about, is that we have a choice about what we’re going to be making up, and we eventually will have a choice of not making stuff up. And when we cannot make stuff up, then we can just live in reality the way things really are. But the beginning of the practice is to start noticing the kind of things that we’re making up and then beginning to improve them, making some change to it. Now, one of the things that the Buddha said that is quite remarkable in this regard, he said to Ananda at one time, he was talking about mental states and jnanas and all of that kind of stuff. And the Buddha said that I find pleasure wherever it may be found.

That’s a really powerful statement, to find pleasure wherever it may be found. So you can make stuff up, and if you are wise about the way things are made up, you can make stuff up that is pleasurable and enjoyable, and then you can take great pleasure in seeing reality as it is without making stuff up. So this making stuff up, actually is what we call exception in the pali. It has the term nama rupa. And what that means is that we’re taking something that’s real, a rupa, something that can be seen, touched, taste, felt, heard, etcetera, and then putting a name on it or putting some sort of story around it.

And that we have been trained in our society to make up stories about the way things ought to be. The way things should be.

We also, from infancy, make stuff up based upon our desires, what we want. And now that wanting that an infant has is generally based upon sensory input, in the sense that a baby will cry when it hears a loud noise, a baby will cry when it’s hungry, a baby will cry when there is pain. Let us say the baby falls off the couch. There is generally sensory input. And we start in the sense of liking and not liking.

And that one of the things that an infant learns is that they like getting what they want. If they’re hungry, getting fed, they like that. And we get into that habit. And when we don’t get what we want, we don’t like it. And this is what happens most of the time.

So we actually train the mind to be dissatisfied. This is really what Dukkha is all about, is that we train ourselves into being dissatisfied. So now it’s time to start training ourselves into being satisfied, to start looking for and finding pleasure wherever it may be found. Now, an example that we can use is there is a court trial in New York where they’re prosecuting Donald Trump. And that in that trial, it looks like that he is not finding any pleasure anywhere, that he is finding everything and finding it dissatisfying.

He doesn’t like anything about this trial, but you could go into that trial sitting in the back of the courtroom and find great pleasure in what you’re doing. In fact, this is what the newsroom people are doing, they want to go, they like it. And this, their attitude based upon their past. And you have a choice, Ivan. Your choice is that you can find pleasure wherever it may be found.

Now, in that regard, we can also recognize that there are consequences sometimes, that if we do some things that gain us pleasure, we might wind up developing a bad habit. An example of that is an older brother takes food off of his younger sister’s plate, and he likes doing that, but he gets punished for it if he gets caught and his sister doesn’t like that. And that kind of destroys their relationship. And so when they’re adults, their relationship is tense and he doesn’t even know why because he was looking for pleasure wherever it may be found, causing havoc and causing consequences. So this is where wisdom comes into play, is that we can find wise ways of gaining pleasure and finding pleasure, and we can find also unwise ways of finding pleasure.

And then we can go back to the original point, is that we’re not finding pleasure at all. We’re finding discomfort and we’re finding other things. And so we’re looking for pleasure. And often when we’re out looking for pleasure, that’s where we’re causing problems to other people. If we are wise about gaining our pleasure, then we’re not harming ourselves or others.

For instance, the boy that took food off of his sister’s plate, he wanted that food and thought that he would be better off without it. Maybe if he wanted more food, he could ask for more food. She might, in fact, be happy to share her food with him and then they would have some pleasure. So it takes wisdom, and this is an important point, but we can say that the main point is to go find pleasure wherever it may be found. And then the second point would be, and do that wisely.

So I will give an example. By the way, we were talking about this just yesterday with Michael and I, and I haven’t talked about it in a long time. There is a book that Eric Byrne wrote that was published and it became a bestseller. And he had also written another book and there was contributing editors to this. The name of that book, by the way, was, “I’m okay, you’re okay”, where he talks about life scripts, but the second book that he wrote, the publishers didn’t want to publish it.

And the reason for that was, is because all the games that people play, according to Eric Byrne, are psychological games that wind up with a negative outcome. The negative games that he would talk about would be, oh, there’s quite a long number. It’s a thin book, but there’s a number of games that people play. Perhaps you’ve played some of these games before. One of them is let’s pull a fast one on Joey.

Let’s just play it prank. Another one would be, let’s you and him fight, which means I don’t like Mixter X and I want you to not like him, too. But in fact, in the, um, uh, the paddy mock, in the rules of the monks, this one is one of the stars in the sense that, um, it’s well known that monks don’t criticize other monks to a third party, that if you’ve got a beef with a particular monk, go and talk to him about it. But don’t talk about him behind your back unless you’re plotting to, let us say, help him rather than put him in a disadvantage. So there are many different games.

Lush, drunken, proud. A lot of the games that are in this book, and the publisher didn’t want to publish them, published the book because there were no good games in there. And so Eric Byrne invented a game to put at the end of the book, and he named the game, which was the only positive game in the book, and he named it the busman’s holiday. Now, Michael knows the answer to this. Let’s see if others do.

Andrew, do you know what a busman does on his holiday? The bus driver, when he’s retired, what does he do?

He stops driving buses. He has a break from driving buses.

Right. In fact, he sits on the bus and rides the bus with the idea that when he was driving the bus on that bus route, he had to pay attention, he had to work, he had to watch what the road was doing and that he saw a lot of people when they would get on the bus, but he never had a chance to get a relationship with them.

So now that he’s on his holiday, he can actually interact with the old ladies that ride the bus on a regular basis. They’ve known each other for years, but they just haven’t talked because. Because he had a job to do. There is another, a good game that you could call. Well, what does a railroad engineer do after he retires? Or a better state way of asking is, what does he do in his basement? What does he have in his basement?

Train set, maybe? Yes, exactly. He’s got a train set in his basement. And so these are good games in the sense that we can recollect, remember all of the good times if we choose, or we can recollect and remember all of the bad stuff that happens now. If we do this mindlessly, if we just left the mind wondering, it may be wandering through some good stuff, but it’ll find bad stuff to think about. So we have to remember wisely. We have to recollect wisely so that we can remember things that are, let us say, pleasurable. Just like the buddha says that he can find pleasure wherever it may be found. So we can reminisce about the past. But most of the time when people reminisce about the past, they feel bad. They either think about a truck or a motorcycle that they had way long ago, and now they want that truck again. Oh, I was better off with that truck. I liked that truck for me. Now I don’t have that truck.

So this is the way that we can begin to understand that we, too, can find pleasure wherever it may be found, if we remember to look for pleasure, rather than remember according to our habits, because our habits are going to take us into unwholesome memories, unwholesome states, our worries, our frustrations, our guilt trips, the things that we’ve done that were wrong, and we will remember those without any possibility of it being corrected. So one of the things that we could do then is if we do remember something that happened that we didn’t like, we can remember a different way in the sense of, wow. Well, I bet nobody remembers that but me.

And I’m the only one who remembers that situation. Everybody else has forgotten about it. That I was very egocentric in that point in time, I did something wrong, but now nobody remembers it. Let me forget about it, too. So in that regard, again, wherever it may be found, let’s look for pleasure.

Even when a negative thought comes up, we can have a pleasurable thought about it then. In fact, we talk about this quite often. The Buddha had this statement that when he sees Myra, when he sees a negative thought, when he sees something unwholesome, he says, “aha, I see you, Mara.” So he actually takes pleasure even in seeing unwholesome thoughts.

But our habits would be that when we see an unwholesome thought, oh, poor me, I shouldn’t have unwholesome thoughts. All the cosmos, all the comma, machine, all the Lord is going to be unhappy because I had an unwholesome thought. And it’s, in fact, you’re the God here. You’re your own kamma machine. And you’ve got a choice about the way that you feel.

If you can remember that, you’ve got a choice.

So whenever you recollect and remember. You can remember the very best of things. And if you remember something that is unwholesome, then you can make a change to that. Aha, I see that I have an old memory, and nobody else has that memory. Nobody else is thinking about it. Wow. It doesn’t, it’s not important anymore. I’m glad that I can just forget about it. And we keep working in this way. Okay, so let’s talk about now activities.

Let’s say that the busman isn’t retired yet, and so he’s got his bus route. The question is, can he grumble about the problems with the bus? Can he grumble about the traffic? Can he grumble about the people who were on the bus? One of them smells bad and the other one’s ugly.

Or he can ride the bus and be the bus driver and enjoy his job.

He can say, aha, that guy is so ugly. Aha, that old man is so stinky and he can just enjoy it. Somebody cut me off in traffic. Aha, they do that all the time. He must be angry. I’m not angry.

So we can begin to find pleasure wherever it may be found. But we have to train to do that because we’re already well trained to find unhappy, unpleasurable things wherever we go.

So start to watch the way that we look at things. Remember, we’ve got choices here. We can choose the way that we perceive things.

Ivan, do you have a comment so far?

Ivan: Yes, I was just thinking about how when. No, I was just thinking about how usually in my work, because I do creative stuff and design related things, and sometimes when I see problems, instead of seeing as probably I can laugh about it, I can see, oh, I can improve it here, I can improve it there. And I don’t have to see this as a burden. I can have fun with the problem. I don’t know.

It’s just something I thought of.

Dhammarato: Well, one of the things that we do with much of our activity is we do it at what they call absentmindedly. We do it subconsciously. We’re not paying attention to what we’re doing. And because of that, we screw up. And the reason for it is partially, is because we don’t like what we’re doing.

Most people don’t like the job that they have. Why is that? It’s because we’ve got to have a job. At least I can hate it.

Yeah. Yeah. People, I mean, very, very few people in the world actually like the job that they have. Now. Many, many self help books will say well, why don’t you go find a job that you like?

And that’s getting it all wrong because you’re going to take your dislike and your dissatisfaction and your, and your negative thoughts and unwholesome thoughts. You’re going to take those to whatever job you go to. So the way that we handle this is that we want, first off, to get into seclusion and getting our happy thoughts in order to bring ourselves back to enjoyment. Once we do that, then we can go and look at that job. But most people think, I want to quit this job without even thinking about the job itself. They’re only looking at their own dissatisfaction and blaming the job for their being dissatisfied with it. But if we can gain our joy, gain our wisdom, then we can go and look at that job in a realistic way and recognize, maybe this job hurts people. Maybe this job is in a business that is shady, it’s a shyster business. That, for instance, working for GM may not be a satisfying job because of all the things that GM has done over the years. For instance, destroying the trolley car industry in many, many cities, especially la, they are doing that now, that the way that they made cars for many, many years, they made them intentionally obsolete, that they would fall apart just so that people would have to buy a new car often.

That’s why the japanese cars made such an inroad in the United States, is because they were more reliable. Because General Motors made cars that were unreliable intentionally. And so if you were on the product line and you recognize that that’s how they were doing it, maybe you would be better off going and getting another job. But you don’t know that, because originally your dislike of GM was based upon your feelings. But once you get your feelings straightened out, now with wisdom, you can decide whether that company is worthwhile working for.

And so finding a company that has, let us say, useful, valuable, and wholesome products would be a much better company to work for. But it’s also possible that you can find a way to live happily without having to work.

It’s not necessary to work, but we have been told in our society that you got to work, got to work to eat. Andrew, have you ever heard that you got to work to eat?

Andrew: Yeah, I certainly have.

So are you employed now?

Andrew: Yeah, I am.

Yeah. Okay. How much of your income do you spend on food?

Small portion of it.

Only a small portion?

Yeah.

Okay. So if you got to work to eat, then maybe we don’t have to work so much because all we have to do is eat. the problem is that we are unhappy and dissatisfied with our work and our job. And so we wind up buying a lot of stuff to make us feel good, when in fact we could if we felt good, we probably would be very well off without buying a lot of stuff. I mean, people say, oh, I’ll feel really good if we can buy a house.

That’s the american dream, to become a homeowner. That’s actually a pretty stupid thing to do. Why don’t you just go camp out in the woods, have a tent, $300 $400, and live for weeks and weeks. But no, we’ve got these standards, we’ve got these “supposed tos” in our society, and that when we get the salary, we wind up spending it on things that wind up not making us happy. Why?

Because the unhappiness is ingrained, it’s deeply, let’s say, attached. And this is why we have to keep practicing over and over again, to keep detaching ourselves from our unhappiness. And when we bring our joy, when we find pleasure in what we’re doing, one of the things that’s a great benefit is we wind up not spending so much money, we’re just satisfied with, you know, a ten-year old laptop. I don’t have to have a new one, this one’s good enough.

And so if we live our lives that way, then that work to eat business winds up. Maybe we don’t have to work all the time, maybe we can work part time. And so if someone has, let us say, ignorantly and unwholesomely, racked up a whole lot of debt, then wisely the thing to do is to stop buying stuff and pay off that debt.

The Buddha actually talks about being in debt in the sense that when you pay a debt off, that’s freedom. And when you owe money, then in fact people work at their jobs so that they can pay their debts. Well, if you didn’t have any debts in the first place, then that’s one of the good reasons for not having to work so hard and so we can gain pleasure then by being debt free.

Think about that. To become debt free, to not owe anybody any money at all means that they’re not going to come to you to get their money. And better off than even that is you don’t have to think about it. You can find pleasurable things to think about. So if you want to have then the pleasure, wherever it may be found, have the joy and the pleasure of paying off the debts so that we can become debt free, living simply simple clothing, simple food.

In fact, we call it requisites. In the suttas, there are four requisites, and the requisites are talking about just enough food, just enough clothing, just enough housing, and just enough medical supplies so that we can remain healthy. And yet, most of the medicines that are paid for, bought and paid for, prescriptions and otherwise, are because people don’t find pleasure in a head cold, and so they want to get rid of it. They don’t like a head cold. In fact, you can find pleasure in blowing your nose.

You can find pleasure in removing the phlegm from your sinuses. You can find pleasure wherever it may be found.

And yet, we don’t find pleasure in a head cold. We find unhappiness.

And so we go spend a lot of money on the medicines that we really didn’t need.

There was an episode of Beverly Hillbillies way back when, and grandma found a magic formula for a head cold, and the banker wanted to make money off of it. And she had all kinds of really strange stuff in her potion, really funny stuff, like shoe polish and that kind of thing, and that she called it a miracle cure. And everybody in the family called it a miracle cure. And she said that if you take this medicine for your head cold every day, within two weeks, you’ll be finished with the head cold. Well, the answer is, if you take nothing at all, within two weeks, the head cold will go away.

So her medicines didn’t do anything at all, but she enjoyed making it. So, wherever your pleasure may be found, you don’t have to go spend a lot of money to have a lot of medicines. You can just play around with a little bit of medicine, see what effect it has on your body. In fact, one of the great pleasures in life is investigation. It’s fun to see what medicines do for you.

How many of you have had a prescription drug before? In fact, how many of you have prescriptions right now?

So, Domidos has got a prescription right now. How about you, Ivan? You had prescription drugs before? Sometimes three or four at a time. Um, you know, when I was sick, many months ago.

Well, as people get older, they more prone to be sick. And then they go to the doctor, and the doctor is going to sell them all kinds of stuff. And the reason for it is, is that over time, the kind of thoughts that we have of negative habits and unwholesome thoughts begin to pile up. Things pile up in the body. One of the things that piles up in the body is cortisol, that adrenaline and cortisol are made by the adrenaline gland, and cortisol builds up to where adrenaline breaks down very easily.

And so one of the products that make people old is having a lot of cortisol in their body, which means the more time that a person feels angry and upset, the more cortisol they’re going to have in their system. And so old people wind up being really miserable. You’ve even, they’ve had movies about grumpy old men. People get grumpy when they’re older. They become dissatisfied when they’re older.

They become more afraid when they’re older. This is one of the reasons why the churches, what’s left of them, have old people in them, that the old people are the ones that are most likely to be dissatisfied, angry and upset. And this is why the voter block with the Republican Party is the way that it is, is, in fact, the republican party spreads misery. They want people to be unhappy, they want people to be uptight, upset, hating people, hating immigrants, hating the government, whatever it is your thing, go hate it. The more you hate something, the more likely you’re going to vote republican, the more likely you’re going to have medications, the more likely you are going to be sick and older and tired.

Why? Because we spend so much of our time being in a state of not liking. So training ourselves to become happy and wholesome actually has a great benefit medically so that we don’t need much medication. And when we do take medication, what do we do? We investigate, what does this medication actually do?

How do I feel when I take this pill? And so we begin to experiment with them and find out, is the pill actually doing me any good or did I just buy it because the doctor said so, and he said so just to get me out of his office after he charges a high fee.** ** So if we can change our mental habits, we can begin to seek pleasure wherever it may be found and do it in a wise and wholesome way.

If we can do that all the time, then that would be what we would be calling enlightenment, is that we’re dedicated to the dhamma. We’re dedicated to being in a wholesome state. We’re dedicated and spend much of our time being happy, and we spend very little time being sad and dissatisfied. But we have to practice doing that because our whole lives we’ve been spending our lives the way that we were trained, and we were trained by miserable people. Aunts, uncles, policemen, teachers, older siblings, mom, dad, grandpa.

They were all miserable people. And they taught every little child how to be miserable. Just to fit in with our society.

And they want each other to help each other. In other words, grandpa wants you to go get a job so you don’t have to live off of his poor pension anymore, that kind of thing. And so he wants you to be miserable so that he can put you to work, to go do what you’re told to do. But people who are happy, they generally don’t do much of anything because they can find pleasure in the simple things. The best things in life are free. So I’ve heard. Like the air, the smile, all of that kind of stuff is free. And yet when we feel bad, things get expensive. Why? Because we’re wanting to find pleasure.

And the more expensive it is, the more pleasure we think may be found there, where in fact, that kind of pleasure is fleeting. And not only that, but if you get something expensive, that means it’s valuable. So you’ve got to take care of it, which means more work.

And when you put more work into it, then it becomes valuable and you don’t like losing it. You want to take care of it and then you lose it. And then you feel even worse. If you want something, you feel bad because you don’t have it. If you get it, you have a momentary pleasure, but now that you’ve got it, you got to take care of it.

Taking care of it is not pleasurable. And after you’ve taken care of it for a long time, then you lose it. And now you feel bad. So let’s break that cycle and say, aha, I see that I like that car, or I like that house, but I don’t want it, I don’t need it, I don’t have to have it. I’m already.

Okay. There is already pleasure that can be found in what we already have.

Michael, do you have any comments?

No, no comments. Really? I’m free. You’re free? Free of debt.

Excellent. Andrew, do you have any comments?

No, not really. But I can see a lot of truth in what you say for sure. I can definitely say from personal experience that the more I’m happy I am, the less I need. Definitely, definitely. I don’t need to buy too much when I’m happy in myself.

Yeah, right. And if you don’t have to buy too much, then you can pay off your debts and be happy that you’re debt free every time you make a payment. Wow. I’m getting there.

Well, I’ve just got a student debt to pay off, but I’ve got the money to do that. So I’ll just do it.

Yes, exactly. So, damadas, do you have any questions or any statements to make?

Not really, but just thank you. And that was, it was nice being here and nice seeing everybody.

Ivan. Yes. Take pleasure wherever it may be found. Yes, I see it all. Does that answer your question?

Originally, yes. More so than I thought. That is really that simple? Yes.

David, do you have any final comments?

Your mic is muted. David, can you hear me? Yes. Yeah. Take joy and pleasure wherever you are.

I find pleasure and fun in doing visas. I enjoy going to the immigration office and seem like everyone there is, like, stressed, frustrated, but I feel like, just fine, like, nothing wrong. It’s fun. Mm hmm. Traveling.

The travelers at airports, they’re frustrated, they’re unhappy, they’re not finding pleasure at the airport. And yet airports are big. There’s all kinds of things to see. They’re very interesting.

If you take a look, if you investigate, visa offices are that way, too. Everybody who’s into visa office is unhappy because they’re afraid. They’re afraid that things won’t go right with the visa. And in fact, almost every time it does go, okay.

People hate visas and passports primarily because of the fear that they have that something will go wrong. And yet almost never anything goes wrong.

So find the pleasure in the fact that, wow, we can get that visa.

Well, I can sit in the immigration office and do what needs to be done, including waiting. Wow. When I’m waiting at Tavis office, there’s no place to go and nothing to do. I can just chill. But very few people think about that.

What they do instead is ruminate. Oh, why does it take so long? They’re always having negative thoughts, and they don’t even know it because they’re not paying attention to the kind of thoughts that they have. And so they are habit bound in bad thinking, bad thoughts, unwholesome thoughts. But David has mastered that and can allow himself to go to the visa office and remember that he’s got a choice.

He can find pleasure at that visa office.

So wherever you go, whatever you have to do, whatever you choose to do, remember that you can find pleasure there. If you look for it. If you remember to look for pleasure, you will find it. And as the Buddha says, he will find pleasure wherever it may be found.

Even if somebody’s criticizing you, you can find pleasure in that.

Do you know what Suta reference that is? Where the Buddha says, what is the sutra reference for that Buddha saying, I will find pleasure wherever it will be found? I think I might be wrong on this, but I think it’s in Sutta number 139.

That’s a very interesting sutta. It also talks about how to teach the dhamma.

But you can google it. You can google something like the Buddha says he can find pleasure wherever it can be found in. See if it comes up with a reference.

I find great pleasure with Google.

All right, does anybody have any final comments? Everybody’s find pleasure. Excellent. All right, well, let’s finish this talk. Thank you very much, guys.

Thank you. Dalad, go find some pleasure. Guys, stop worrying. Don’t worry, be happy.

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