The Sangha UK 254 09 29 24

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Dhammarato: And so welcome to the Sunday afternoon call. It’s getting towards the end of September now. See, it’s 29th. Wow. Really is getting close to the end of the month. And so we’ll start this call off with Amrit. Amrit, you have a question about prayer practice. Can you go ahead and repeat that question?

Speaker B: Yeah, definitely. So my question is about the recommendation you give is to do like a short bout, 5 minutes to 10 minutes of practice several times a day. And this is very different from the recommendation I got from other teachers like Goenka, who say you should at least one hour. And why I am interested in it now because I am practicing that way and I am finding it beneficial. But the thing is, recently I was listening to an interview between two health researchers, and they find that for exercise, the similar process where you are doing a small bout, one or two minutes several times a day is much better than doing it one hour a day, so on. And my main question was that because this is something pretty unique I got from you. So how did you figure it out? And if you kind of find it from your own experience, from the experience of students, or from the suttas and.

Dhammarato: Yeah, okay. Well, I’m really not sure. I don’t remember. I probably didn’t make it up. I probably got it from a Ajahn Poh, but I don’t remember him specifically talking about it in the sense of practice this often for short periods of time. But rather, what we’re intending to do is to build up the skill of remembering when we need it in the present moment. Now, when do we need to remember to be in the present moment is whenever any unwholesome thoughts come up. Ordinary thoughts. That in fact, the further you get skilled in sati, which is remembering, and the further you get skilled in ditti, which is looking at what you’re doing, the more you’re likely to see the, let us say, the unwholesome edge that is around ordinary thinking. That a lot of our thinking actually is ordinary thinking verging on or downright unwholesome. This is our standard method of thinking for several reasons. And one of them is that that’s how a little child is taught in our society. Very, very rarely do we have even an individual from occasion that’s going to have wholesome thoughts all on their own. That mostly what we find with, let us say, the more famous people throughout history was, is that they started to practice either because they found a teacher or a method or because they recognized that they were hurting so bad that they had to do something about it. Which brings my case up is that when I was a successful computer programmer and doing all kinds of stuff, living in Ann Arbor, Michigan, involved with teaching at a university, doing some side projects and having a fairly large, let us say, New age community to draw on, and I was still unhappy. And I knew it, but I also recognized that I was unhappy. And in fact those in those days I would say that I was hurting. And nothing that I could find would fulfill that need. Nothing that I could plug into that hole would be satisfactory. One of the things that I put in that hole was a Dodge Band that was. It was basically a rolling love machine. It was completely carpeted on the inside. It was good for sleeping and all kinds of activities. Had a refrigerator and a sink and all of that was put into that van. I had a BMW motorcycle at the time. Had three girlfriends at the same time. Well, basically the way to say it is I had two regulars and then a third would come in and out depending upon circumstances. But the whole point was, is that my life was kind of good. More money than I’d ever needed, more friends than I ever needed, more transportation than I ever needed. There was all kinds of things. And yet I was still not satisfied. And I knew it. And so that’s why I started hanging out at the Muktananda Ashram and eventually went to India. And when I was in India, I was searching all of the magical places and all the good gurus and all that kind of stuff. Made quite a tour around over a three year period, come back and teach university some. And it wasn’t until that I got to watch so and Moke and Aun Po that I finally figured out that I had found something that was worthwhile. So this is where we would start. Everybody in fact has their own story, but their own story is going to be similar to that. Got into the Dhamma because you were dissatisfied and you know it. Is that not true for you, David?

Speaker C: Of course, yes.

Dhammarato: This is almost too obvious. How about you, Captain? Yes, Duka brought me here. So we all start with the Dhamma in the same way. How about you, Carl? Why did you get into the Dhamma? Same, same, same thing. Everybody has the same story. We got everything that we want, everything that we need, and we’re still not satisfied. Why is that? The answer is clearly that we’re actually in the habit of being dissatisfied. We developed that habit when we were a child. No child is born and the first minute after he takes his first breath does he say, I’m glad I’m out of there. Nobody know. All of us got, most of us in fact were picked up by the doctor by the heels and slammed on the butt with a forehand. Well, for me, I let out a yell and I didn’t stop yelling for about 35 years. And I think that that’s what happens with all of us, that we’re a born dissatisfied. And if you’ll check with your mom, she didn’t like the event much either. And so life starts with a lot of pain, a lot of struggle, a lot of dissatisfaction and it never really gets much better than that. I remember, in fact several of the birthdays that I had. I was extremely dissatisfied with my fourth birthday. Howdy Doody was on television all the time. Let’s see, what was that? That was 1950, I think. So my mom gave me a Howdy Doody doll for my fourth birthday and I hated her for that. A dollar? Yeah. Never mind that it was a puppet that you could put as your hand up his butt and move his mouth. But it was still a doll. Didn’t like it got. For my fifth birthday, I got a bicycle. It was a long ranger bicycle. It had a scabbard for a gun. It was black colored, all of that kind of stuff. You’d think that a five year old in those days would really like a bike like that. But I wasn’t. In fact, within a year I got a real bicycle. So this is the whole point that we live our lives being dissatisfied. We’ve trained to be dissatisfied. Now, Amory, you were talking about people who are trained, in fact now as an adult by, let us say meditation teachers who were trained into a system of sitting for an hour. How many of you have ever sat for an hour, maybe one hour after another, maybe done retreats? Everybody here done an hour. Okay. How much of that time were you satisfied? Or did you want some results? Waiting for the bell to ring, noting this and noting that. And so what? And all this, whatever the practice is, sitting for an hour is unsatisfying. But there is a promise. And that is that if you could sit for thousands of hours, maybe 10,000, maybe 50,000 or in some cases 100,000 hours, if you sit there long enough, then the common machine is going to come waltzing into that meditation hall, spray some shakti pot on you and then you’ll be satisfied. Is that how it’s supposed to go? I’ve heard people say I’ve been meditating for 50 years, you can’t tell me anything about it. And he’s been practicing 50 years and gotten nothing out of it. That’s the problem is these long sitting meditations put us in a deeper state of dissatisfaction. The knees hurt, the back hurts. Everybody who’s done those kind of meditations know that that’s what we’re doing. Everybody, eventually, before the bell rings, were waiting for the bell to ring. About the only real value that I got out of it was being able to guess when the bell would finally ring. Now it’s time. And then ding. And the bell would ring. Hot dog. At least I’ve got that hour pegged down. I know what an hour is, but I was waiting for that bell to ring so that I could name it. So, Amrit, there are so many teachers who say about an hour. Why do you think that they chose an hour? Is it because it’s kind of convenient? It’s something on the clock. We can schedule it like a class at school. You know, there’s at schools, they have 8 o’clock classes, and then 10 minutes before the bell or before the class changing, you got five or 10 minutes, depending upon the size of the school. Some of the big universities had to go to 15 minutes so that the students get all the way across campus for the next class to start on the hour. So these systems are just actually part of our culture. I have been at several meditation centers, both in Burma and in Thailand. And one of the things that I found quite commonly was a great big grandfather clock, an Asian version with Asian carvings on it. How many of you have ever seen such a clock in a meditation center? They’ve got them in Burma. They’ve got one at the Maha what Mahat in Bangkok in the Vipassana section. And it goes tick, tick, tick. When it gets quiet, you can hear that clock even to see in the other room. And then you’re waiting for that chime to ring, waiting for the bell to ring. So when the hour comes up, it goes big, great big tick. And then it starts to chime. And everybody’s so happy because this hour is finished. And what have we got looked forward to is another hour just like this one. So this. There’s problems with that issue. About an hour. Here’s something that’s very, very, very interesting about that, and that is in the time of the Buddha, they didn’t have any clocks. How do you think they measured time, especially time for sitting meditation? How do you think that they would meas that you would think mosquitoes would have anything to do with it? Yeah, okay. Both Cat and David have been at Watts long enough so you can answer this question. On special Buddha days, especially once a year, there is a traditional gift that lay people come and give the monks. There’s three of these things. What is the typical thing that everybody gives a monk on special Buddha days?

Speaker C: Flowers.

Dhammarato: Pardon?

Speaker C: Flowers.

Dhammarato: Flowers.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Dhammarato: Wow, you missed that one. No, specifically, it is a lotus. And specifically, it’s not an open lotus. It’s a lotus bud. That’s one of them. Okay, what’s the other two? Really? Don’t know. I can’t remember. What are you going to do at night to see? Oh, fair enough. A few candles. Yeah.

Speaker C: Okay.

Dhammarato: All right. And what is the third one? I’ve already given a great big hint about that flashlight. Give it that hint again. What about the mosquitoes? Oh, yeah, yeah. The coils and incense and all that sort of stuff. Ah, the incense sticks. They call them joss sticks. Right. So now that you know that, can you remember? Have you ever received from people candles, incense, and a lotus? Buddy, don’t remember the lotus, but the other two. Yeah, yeah. All right, so now here’s the question. An incense stick. What’s the purpose of an incense stick? Get rid of those mosquitoes. Yes. Here’s that. Point is that it smells good. No, because the joss stick can smell good without lighting it. The point is that you set it on fire and then the smoke. Is that right, David? The smoke keeps the mosquitoes away. So how long does a joss stick last? An hour? Yeah, about an hour. No, they do not last an hour. You check that out? I think the last an hour, I think. Well, how long do they last for you? About 20 minutes, if you’re lucky, they last about 20 minutes. Now, how many of you have set up all night with the monks on the night before the Patty mock event? Have you done that? Oh, yeah. Okay. That’s the time to put those mosquito coils out. I mean, the joss sticks. 20 minutes. And so at the end of the time when the joss sticks go out, if you’re sitting alone, distant from other people, then the mosquitoes will come in the night. In fact, they’re kind of waiting, sitting in the trees, waiting for those joss sticks to end so that they can come and say hello to you. All right, so what I’m getting at here is that the monks, even in the time of the Buddha, did not sit for an hour. This only came. That whole concept didn’t come until, let us say, recent times when grandfather clocks finally made their way into Asia. They didn’t sit that long, 20 minutes at the max, because that’s the life of an incense stick. Those little candles that they give, they don’t last so long either. You can turn one of those candles on and it’s going to go out. In fact, the whole point about you, you’ve seen especially the the Mahayana. I’ve seen candles that as big as a barrel. Why do they have candles so large, tall, tall candles is because they will last and last and last and last. But the little candles that they give the monks, they don’t last for very long. About the same amount of time, about 10 to 20 minutes. So this is the time that is measured for normal practice for the monks in Thailand, not an hour. The next point would be is that in modern science they’ve come to understand through actual testing that the normal child in school does not have an attention span that lasts for the whole class. Attention spans will last at best about 20 minutes for a kid. But I knew about this in high school because I had one teacher that intentionally told us that she puts things in three groups and when we come in there for her hour class, she’s going to do three different things to break up that time. Because she knows that the students cannot have an attention span unless it’s something special. If it’s very, very interesting, then the kids can pay attention to it. But this is also why on television they would have a 20 minute, excuse me, a 30 minute program that’s got commercials at the front and the back of it. And so back in the 1950s, all the television programs were short. And you look at the YouTube broadcast, most of them are going to be maybe 10, 15 minutes or so like that. There’s a few of them that are very long, but when they’re very long, people don’t stay to watch them. Also, in the old days, movies were shorter. And so getting to this point that the attention span of a human is not an hour 10 to 20 minutes. And after that the mind gets kind of fuzzy, not on subject and stuff like this. And so you could say that if someone is actually training and has been practicing correctly for a long period of time, then extending that period of time would be valuable in order to help the increase of their attention span. But teaching brand new students, people who are not well practiced, they’re going to be wasting most of that hour. When you do it for an hour or 50 minutes, having a break between. So what we’re talking about, Amrit, is something that’s quite natural. It’s natural in two Ways it’s natural because of the attention span and because of joss sticks and because of candles and because of the old system from the Buddhist time, practicing for short periods of time is the right way to go. But it’s also quite natural that we’ve got a great big clock here. So now we’re going to start meditating according to this clock, and we’re going to wait until it chimes. So that’s the way that these things have gotten set up, especially in Burma. And these things were set up by old, old monks who were practicing for a long, many number of years who developed the time span. And they didn’t started teaching young students, new students, and with that, they were giving them the, let us say, the sitchum that had been developed over a long period of time. So if you’re new to the Dhamma, let us say under 20 years, then you need to practice for shorter periods of time because you’re going to get more value out of it and practicing more often. Now, remember when we started this call, I pointed out that the whole point about developing the skill of sati, to remember and to develop the skill of Ditti, to look and see what’s going on and also develop the skill, which actually is the best skill that we need to develop, is the ability to take right effort, that when you have right effort fully developed, it actually changes its name from right effort into right energy. You can hop right to it because it’s easy to change the mind once you’ve developed that skill. So in that regard, how long you sit after you’re well skilled is not so important. The important thing is, Ken, whenever you need to remember to look at what you’re doing, you can remember to look at what you’re doing. Now, one of the ways that I would talk about it would be that the beginners that are in the Mahasi or the Goenka or the insight meditation, where they’re sitting for an hour, in fact, Gonka would say, I’ve heard him say that if you sit for an hour, you will be able to get rid of your anger slowly. If you practice two hours a day, you’ll be able to get rid of it within a year or so. And if you practice three hours a day, it’ll only take you a few months to get rid of your anger. So this is a kind of a goal that they set. Now, here’s an answer to that, is that if you can remember to not let your mind wander into anger, or if you can remember to look to see that if you’re in anger and come right back out of it, isn’t that something that you can do right now? You don’t have to sit for three hours hoping for the bell to ring, and then you don’t have any anger anymore. And so this issue of sitting for shorter periods of time was bika Buddha, dasa and a champo. I don’t remember them talking about it, that, oh, you should do it six times a day for 10 minutes. He didn’t ever say that to me, that I made up. I gotta tell you, that was mine. But I used a lot of evidence. I use the way that the monks actually said and practiced as a guide for that. Now, the next point is that if you are practicing just one time a day, maybe for an hour, then that means that 23 hours a day, you’re not practicing at all. And there’s those hindrances. And so if you’re an adult, you’ve been practicing in hindrances for all of your life, and now you’re practicing one hour a day, that’s mostly hindrance. And then you got 23 hours a day, that solid hindrance again. How much progress are you going to make that way? Not much. And yet that’s the way that people practice in the West. So how can we develop our skill? It’s because when we’re actually practicing, we practice as long as we can do it. And so that’s why I would say 10 minutes. Because 10 minutes, it takes some people about five minutes just to be able to settle down and start saying everything is okay, everything is all right. And then they practice for about five minutes. And then we get up and take that skill with us into the next rest of the hour. One of the things that you could say is that if somebody’s practicing very well for every hour for 10 or five or 10 minutes and getting some value out of it, their productivity will be higher than if they’re practice that they’re not practicing at all. And working for two hours in a straight row because the mind gets dull. We need that change up. We need to take a break. And the best break that we can take from unwholesome thoughts is anapanasati. To take a break from our own wholesome thoughts and bring in wholesome thoughts one after another after another for about five minutes. Get yourself into a really good state. And if you can do that five or ten times a day now you’re gaining a skill rather than having an hour of hindrance followed by 23 hours. Of solid hindrance. Now we’re going to be practicing so that we’re developing some skill at coming out of our hindrances. Now, as we develop that, we begin to put fill in the gaps so that whenever those unwholesome thoughts come, like for instance, I’m sitting here and I’m all blissed out and everything is hunky dory, and then I go back to work and I’m working on my computer program and the boss comes down the hall. Can I remember right then and there, hey, I can put myself right back into good state before he gets here. Or how about doing some coding and your code doesn’t work. In fact, you crash your whole system. Can you remember that it was a system that crashed and not you? Are you going to crash when the system crashes? You just brought it down with your bad code. But this code is bad. You’re not bad. Can you remain happy even if that happens? How about if you’re a carpenter and you make a wrong turn, you’ve got that chisel and you chisel a little too much, Are you going to feel bad because that’s the normal way that we do it? Oh, I would ruin this piece of wood. Or are you going to go get that sliver of stuff and some glue and put it back in? Can you get your own mental glue and your own mental happy slivers and put them back in place and get your mind back together again? This is the real practice. The practice of doing it for 10 minutes is simply because we don’t have the skill to remember to do it anyway. We’ve got to develop that skill because the normal state of mind is going from one unwholesome thought to another unwholesome thought to another unwholesome thought, including the unwholesome thought of, oh, well, this thought’s a wholesome thought. That’s an unwholesome thought. Let’s look at it and investigate it and say, hey, can I do something better than this? Now we’re getting more wholesome. And you’d be surprised at how many unwholesome thoughts we consider wholesome thoughts. One of my favorites would be that thing that they call meta meditation practice where people sit there and say, may all beings be happy. I can’t think of another unwholesome thoughts that is as bad as that because it’s a direct lie. You can’t make all people happy. You can’t do it. So you’re, you’re already in a basis of lies. Why don’t we say instead, can I make myself happy right now? The answer to that is darn tootin, I can. I can do this right here, right now. That’s the practice is to remember to bring yourself out of whatever state that you’re in when you get into that state, or better still, to remember when you see it coming, can you see it coming and stop it. So the first thing then that we can look at in that regard is we got to learn to apply the mind to the wholesome. And as we continue to practice applying the mind to the wholesome for 10 minutes or five minutes every hour or two hours, in fact, I would say that probably the ideal practice for somebody to build up to would be five minutes every hour. And then you’ll have maybe three or four minutes every half hour and practicing like that to start putting little times in intentionally so that you begin to practice often. This is an important quality of practicing correctly often. If you practice only occasionally, often, then you’re not going to get the results. That’s the question then that’s the real issue, Amrit, that you’re asking if you can sit there and practice fully, practice for an hour, congratulations. If you can do it fully for an hour, that means that you can probably do it a hundred times throughout the day because you remember to. That’s the way to practice. So I wouldn’t say, oh, we’ve got to practice for an hour simply because somebody has a clock. Buddha didn’t have a clock, but they did have joss sticks. And so a shorter period of time would be the way to practice. So we want to practice often, we want to remember often. And pretty soon you get to the point of every time that you have your mind go into an unwholesome state, can you see that? And pull it right back out. Now, the time that you’re most likely to go into an unwholesome state is when someone who was already in unwholesome mind state, an ordinary person in an ordinary mind state, talking about ordinary things, talking about income tax, talking about the police, talking about anything at all, and his thoughts are unwholesome. And guess what? You’re more than likely going to buy right into it. It jump right back into the unwholesome because you were trained in the unwholesome and now somebody’s there with you with the unwholesome. So it’s better, Anna, to be around people who have trained themselves into being in a wholesome state so that they’ll remind you to be in a wholesome state. Rather than being around people who are in unwholesome state, reminding you to be in an unwholesome state, that in fact how long you practice is irrelevant. The question is, are you practicing correctly while you’re intentionally practicing? And then every time you remember to practice, you can come back. You don’t even have to put the keyboard down. You can take a deep breath and says, wow, I’m glad I found that error. Haven’t fixed it yet, don’t know how to fix it yet, but at least I found it. This is the way that we want to have our minds, is that we’re happy to see things that need to be worked on. And yet most of us are trained to get downright miserable when we find a new bug, a new era, a new problem, a new bad thought, a new unwholesome thought. Whatever it is, we’ll just get downright hard on ourselves. This is why the Buddha talks about Siva Bhatta Paramasa is to come out of the rules that define standards and define what is good and what is bad. Let us not keep the knowledge of what is good and what is bad, because we’re going to have to eat it. The best thing to do is to stop having rules about how things should be and look at everything that does happen as a happy new surprise. Can you train yourself over and over again that everything is brand new, everything is a happy new little surprise? If you can practice that way over and over and over and over again, then your life becomes a joy. But if you’re looking at dukkha and seeing I get the dukkha and I’ve got to understand dukkha, and I’ve got to go deep into the dukkha to be able to do it. Cut it out by the roots. That’s not a very enjoyable practice at all. Oh, I’ve got to sit for an hour and go deep into meditation. Basically, what deep meditation is is just getting drowsy. That’s really all it is, is just getting drowsy and perhaps downright unhappy, almost going to sleep. And we call that deep meditation. You can tell those deep meditations then. In fact, the guys who are really expert at telling those deep meditations are the Zen mast carry those Zen sticks around. Jamie, who does the Zen master hit with his Zen stick? I think the fellow who’s falling asleep. Right, right. Who’s deep in meditation, deep in his dream states. That’s the guy who gets hit. How about the guy who win the. The Zen master comes by or gets close he sits up straight. Is he the one who’s going to get hit? No, because he just sent his in master signal that, hey, I’m alert. I can see this. I know what’s going on. Welcome back, cat. All right, thank you, Amrit. Does that answer your question?

Speaker B: Yeah, definitely it does. Thank you very much.

Dhammarato: All right, so David asked about euthanasia. I didn’t like it when he mentioned that I’m about to euphonize him myself right now. Actually, one way of looking at it is that there is no other way to die. If you’ve gotten poisoned and you’re laying there sick, I mean, one thing that they, that the doctors are not very good at, if you’ve been poisoned, then you’re sick with it and there’s. If they can catch it quickly, they can pump your stomach, but that’s only a couple of three hours. If you’ve been poisoned for a day, the likelihood of you being able to survive that poison is very, very low. So the question is, how long are you going to hang on? When does it take? Where breathing gets too much work and by your own choice, because that next breath is just too much effort, you just don’t take it. How about if you’re on the cross? Jesus wasn’t the only one that was crucified. Anybody who crossed the Romans, they got crucified, right? And so there you are, think about it. There you are hanging up on the cross. Maybe they didn’t have any nails and they roped you by the arms, maybe they put it through the wrist. It doesn’t matter how they hung you up. The point is, is that you get tired of standing, being nailed to the cross. And when, when your body goes drip like this, it gets really hard to breathe. How long are you going to keep breathing when it gets really hard to breathe? This is why they want to stand up straight, take the weight off of their arms, put it on their back. And so the, what are the Romans do? They break the legs so that you hang by the arms stretching the chest, making it hard to breathe. So now let’s say, what about the little old lady that’s laying in bed? She’s. It’s 2:00 in the morning, she’s been sick for a while and then she just simply stops breathing. That’s what defines what death is, is when people stop breathing as if she stops breathing. That’s because that was just the way that the body decided to go out at that particular time is just stop breathing. Life has been too much already. So this is one of the reasons why it would be good for you to practice on upon a sati now wouldn’t it? So that you can remember when it gets really hard to breathe, you’re going to be able to take that next breath. Just one more breath. Just one more. Can you do it? Can you take another breath? It’s going to get hard to breathe. You’ve been poisoned. You’re hanging from across, perhaps underwater. If you let go of that breath, then there’s nothing but salt water to breathe. That’s not going to be very refreshing as a good breath of air. So that’s the whole point is about the breathing. So now they have people, they have several ways. One is they can give them some kind of poison. They euthanize dogs. Here’s the thing that’s very interesting about putting dogs, they call it putting them to sleep. What does that do? It puts them to sleep and relaxes their lungs to the point that they can’t breathe anymore. The same thing is with morphine. When people are in the hospital and having trouble getting close to death, the doctors decide they’re going to give the person morphine because the morphine then relaxes the muscles, makes it difficult to breathe. And people are going to die from the morphine, but really they’re dying because their muscles are so relaxed that they’re not breathing. Also, they’ve got now little pods that you can go into to where the air that’s inside that pod is nitrogen and all the oxygen been taken out. And so people will die in there. Now, here’s the point that I’m making. The very important point that I’m making is that it depends upon circumstances. And you always quite often have a choice about the circumstances. You quite often have choice about your circumstances. Not 100%, but more than likely you have choice about your circumstances. The next point is that in the circumstances that you’re in, people do have a choice about whether they’re going to let go and stop breathing. One story that I have, in fact, this story has happened quite often, and that is on Sunday the whole family comes to visit Grandma in the hospital and they pray for her and everything is going to get better. And they’ll say, oh, Granny, you’re going to get fined, and all of that kind of stuff. And she sees that as the last reunion. And on Monday she’s dead. And all the family didn’t bother to say goodbye to her because they were encouraging her that she was going to live and survive until the next time that the family Came to visit, but she was finished. Interesting. Like that, that as soon as the family reunion is over, another one is birthdays. Two very, very famous dudes. They hated each other. Both of them signed a direct Declaration of Independence. One of them was Thomas Jefferson. And I don’t remember who the other one is. I think it was Adams. The funny thing it was is that they both died on the same day. 50 years exactly on the day of the signing, 50 years after the signing of the anniversary in 1824. They both lasted that long. And then they both said it’s quits. And in fact, I think one of them asked about the other one on his deathbed. I’m letting go is, where’s the other guy? And the fact is that he just died within an hour or so of that time. So if you recognize this and see this and see how often it happens, recognize you do have a big part of the choice about whether you’re going to give up the ghost. Actually give up the breath. That’s what a spirit is. By the way. The word spirit and spiritual actually has to do with. With breathing. In fact, one of the words that they use is expire, which is breathing out. Nobody dies on an in breath. They all die on an out breath. They let it all out, they let it go and then they don’t take another in breath. That’s the way. So, David, do you think that you’ve got any choice about whether you’re going to die or not?

Speaker C: Yeah. So you’re saying like, we have a choice if we want to take our last breath.

Dhammarato: Yes.

Speaker C: But then I’ve heard you at other times say, like, we have like a really strong instinct to take a breath. Like if you were to hold someone’s throat.

Dhammarato: Right. That’s what’s keeping you alive now. But the circumstances are such that your instinct take that breath can be hampered by reality. Okay, so here’s an example of that. Is suppose somebody is sitting on your chest, maybe pneumonia, sitting on your chest today, tomorrow, the next day, and it gets harder and harder to breathe. Are you going to take that next breath or not? It’s your choice. We all come eventually to the poise that I’m not going to take the next breath. It’s just too much work.

Speaker C: Interesting. I’ve never experienced that.

Dhammarato: Well, I can tell that much. Let me tell you this. Let’s do it this way. If you do experience such a thing, send me an email from beyond. But that’s the whole point, is that many people have gone through that Houdini was the most famous in recent times that says that I’m coming back. If I can come back, I am coming back. And they have a seance that they did for years in Las Vegas to where every musician that was of any note would come and they’d all have a seance. And Houdini never came back. And he was intentionally saying, I’m coming back if I can. All right? So people, they don’t come back. Now, here’s an interesting point about that. Let us say that there was an old hamburger in the refrigerator. It got old, it got moldy, it got crusty, it was hard, and it stinks. And you throw that into the garbage pail, and tomorrow you’re going to go to that same garbage pail and pick that old, moldy, stinking hamburger out of that garbage pail and eat it. Not a chance. Well, the same thing. I mean, if your body is not worth keeping up when you’re old and sick and frail and you stop breathing, the body’s going to start rot. Who’s going to come back with that? Who’s going to come back with that? Nobody’s going to come back to an old stinking body. Once we give up the body, it’s gone. We’re not coming back. But now the important thing is that right now you have a choice. You’ve got several choices that we’ll talk about. One of the choices that you have is can you look forward to your last breath because it’s going to happen, or are you going to be in the mental state of I’m dreading it, I don’t want to go to the last breath, I want to live, I’m afraid to die, I might become a ghost, I might go to hell, I might become an animal, I might go to bad, the wrong heaven. All of that kind of mentality happens to people and they are afraid to die, which goes right along with their instinct of self preservation. I know people who stay miserable most of their life because they’re afraid to die, which basically means they become afraid of any and everything that comes along. But if you’re willing to die when the right time comes, I’m ready to go. And if you have that attitude, then you basically become fearless because you’re not afraid of anything, you’re not afraid to die, you’re not afraid of anything. And so when the time comes, let go happily.

Speaker C: Yeah. Although I think the vast majority of people are afraid to die, when they’re on their deathbed, they’re in fear, so.

Dhammarato: They cannot let go they cannot let go, and they cannot let go, and they cannot let go. And then guess what they do? They let go. They let go of that next breath. They expire, they breathe out, and they don’t breathe back in. And then pretty soon things start to rot. So this is the whole point, is that euthanasia is now people who already know that their body is going downhill, they already know that they’re sick, and they’re actually now ready to die. Even when the body is not quite ready, it’s got a few breaths left in it. That’s what euthanasia is. Euthanasia is when people know it’s time to go. Mentally, they’re ready for it, but the body’s still got yet a few breaths left in it. And now the law comes in and says, hot dog. Now we can do some interference with this person’s life. You’re not supposed to commit suicide. You’re not supposed to die like that. It’s supposed to be natural. So they say. But euthanasia, actually, I think that they started it in Switzerland. There’s a Swiss company that has a little capsule or a little box, and the people climb into that box and they still are breathing, but the air that they’re breathing has got no oxygen in it. And so they pass out and then they die. It’s actually the easy way to go drowning in saltwater, not so easy because it really, really burns the lungs. So they say, dying on the cross, not so easy. But breathing nitrogen or going to sleep and dying in one sleep, that’s the easy way out. Well, guess what? I don’t want the easy way out. I want to be there for it. I want to watch what happens. So here’s an example then, that you can start to play with. And that is, in a way, every time you go to sleep, that’s a little death. Most people die in their sleep and they don’t wake up. So the question would be for you, when you’re going to sleep, do you know that you’re going to sleep? Can you watch yourself going to sleep? That’s the way to train. If you can watch yourself going to sleep, then you’ll be all trained and ready to go. When it’s time to die, you can actually watch it happen. The cowboys that I remember in all the cowboy movies, they’d say, I want to die with my boots on. What does that mean? That means that when you’re in bed and you’re sick, that you take your boots off, you go to sleep and you die. But A real cowboy. He. He dies with his boots on so he can watch what’s happening. So that’s the issue about Euphanasia. Euphanasia is, is that. That’s how almost everyone goes out, is they decide that this is going to be the last breath. Let us say that you fell from a really, really high place onto really hard concrete. And the whole body, everybody, every bone in your head, every bone in your body is crushed. Your brains are just falling out all over the road, blood everywhere. Is that the time to stop breathing? Because you can’t. Since the body’s in pretty bad shape, it can’t take another breath. So this is the time to let it go. I remember this happening, in fact, was, let us say, tooling around on a bicycle in Thailand on the way to Watson Mo, and saw this motorcycle pass by. And he had a rider on the back. And right up the road we saw that guy stop and then take off again. And when he took off, the guy on the motor that was sitting on the back of the motorbike fell backwards. And by the time we got there, there was a big pull of blood on the back of his skull. But he was not dead yet. He was dying. He had one minute or so, but at least he could still blink his eyes. And he said goodbye by blinking his eyes. I watched that happen. That had a big impact upon me. And I said that, right, Tim, I’m going to go out like that, I’m going to know it. Practice skull. In fact, it was really a funny kind of thing because you could tell that half of his skull had been crushed right up into the part of the skull that when he was laying back, the last, the last part of his head had disappeared. It wasn’t. He wasn’t sitting there with the back of his head, he was sitting there at about ear level because all of his skull had been crushed right in a lot of blood. You could see the, the, the brains leaking out, but he was still alive. He was blinking. So you have that kind of choice. Would you rather die in your sleep or be awake and be there for it? Choice is yours. I mean, how can, how can it possibly be that all of a sudden you wake up dead, except you didn’t wake up. You’re dead and you didn’t even know it happened because you weren’t awake. So let’s practice being awake, if for no other reason to practice than to practice for that last moment to make sure that you’re awake at that most important moment of your whole life. Your Last moment. Buddhism is really big on that, by the way. I forgot where it was. It’s in Samsung. But your last mind moment is the most important moment. The most important thought that you’ll ever have is the last thought that you’ll ever have. Why is that? Because in fact, in a way, all the thoughts that you have had up until that time were doing nothing but preparing you for that last thought. So practice well. Get ready for it so that you can have a great big whiz bang. Last thought, Your choice. Mikey, what kind of thought are you going to have? What kind of last thought are you going to have?

Speaker D: This is so nice.

Dhammarato: Oh, wow. It’s over now. Goodbye, cruel world. David, what would be your last thought? If you could choose what kind of thought you were going to have? The very last one, what kind of thought would you have?

Speaker C: It would definitely be hot diggity dog.

Dhammarato: Hot diggity dog. Okay, well, you got to practice that thought. You gotta practice. You gotta be ready for it so when it happens, you’ll be sure you got the right thought. Amrit, what kind of thought are you gonna have? Your last thought.

Speaker B: My last thought would be, here I come. The heavens.

Dhammarato: Well, you don’t know if there’s a heaven that you’re coming to. All you know is that you’re going coming I’m not sure about. Maybe that would be the thought you’d have. Is there a heaven I’m going to now? Your mind is full of confusion. How about, I’m in heaven right now. This is good enough.

Speaker E: But then why would you want to leave?

Dhammarato: Well, that’s the whole point, is at that last moment you don’t have any choice about whether you’re going to leave or not. It’s too much work to take that next breath and maybe you can break. I take a few more breaths, but eventually you’re going to come to that point is that this breath is too much. Can’t do it. What kind of thought are you going to have upon that recognition that you can’t take another breath? This is it, Anna. What kind of thought are you going to have? What’s going to be your last thought? I can relax. Wow, what a relax. What a relief it is. Yeah. Now I can finally relax. Dad, what kind of mouth are you going to have? What’s your last thought? How about you, Carl? What’s your last thought?

Speaker F: I don’t see that much difference from sleep, so it’s the same thoughts I have before sleep. Oh, this is so good.

Dhammarato: This is. How about you, Lawrence? What’s going to be your last breath if you’ve got.

Speaker E: I’m not sure, but I’ll just pick one. I’ll just say, into your hands I commit my spirit.

Dhammarato: Well, you don’t know if there’s hands and you don’t know if there’s a spirit.

Speaker E: You don’t know that it’s symbolic. It’s. It’s a symbolic type of thing. But I had some good experience. I. I think life can be painful, but I, when I was younger, I went fishing and canoeing and sometimes I enjoy life. But you can’t always guarantee that.

Dhammarato: Actually we could say that it’s better to have a happy thought. I like Anna’s thought of, wow, what a relief it is just letting it go.

Speaker E: Could be somebody who dies on Mount Everest, Mike. They first they think it’s cold and then they think it’s hot. I think I read that people are freeze to death all of a sudden they feel hot and they take their clothes off or something.

Dhammarato: Right when you’re, when you’re freezing to death again. That’s the issue of this next breath is just too much work. The air cold is freezing on the inside of your lungs. You don’t have it, you’re freezing.

Speaker E: And so I was inspired by death awareness meditation at one time, which I think I got from like a Buddhist book. But I decided it was morbid, so I changed it to be. I observed the end of all phenomenon, because even death is a phenomenon. A skeleton or a dead corpse is a phenomenon. It’s transient, temporary. If I think of death, I think of a corpse and it seems morbid, but the corpse is also transient.

Dhammarato: Well, it’s not a corpse on that last breath. That last breath is not a corpse. It’s one becoming a corpse. But it’s not. So that thought that you’re having of this is it, that that would be good enough kind of thought. But this is it, this is real, this is happening.

Speaker E: I think it could be something like, whoops, I took the wrong turn. Or your last thought might be like, oh no, there’s a car coming. You just don’t know.

Dhammarato: Your choice. You have a choice about what your last breath is going to be.

Speaker E: You don’t have it. You may not have a choice of when it’s going to be.

Dhammarato: Actually this is what we’re saying is that you do have choice over when it’s going to be. It may be not over years, it may be over just a day, or it may be over a few hours, or it may be Over a few minutes or even a few seconds. Like the guy who fell off the back of that motorbike. He only had a few seconds left and he knew it. And if your mind is well trained, enjoy. Then you can have a joyful thought. And if your mind is not well trained, you’re going to have an ordinary thought like, oh, they got the wrong corpse.

Speaker E: What about some people who, they, they, they apparently have no pulse and then they come back to life.

Dhammarato: Well, what is back to life means they start breathing.

Speaker E: I think there’s been people who stopped, had no pulse when they were dead, clinically dead, but then they somehow came back.

Dhammarato: We’re not talking about clinical. We’re talking about your last breath. So you stopped breathing for a while, maybe on the football field, and then you start breathing again. You weren’t dead, you started breathing again. We’re talking about the last one, Carl.

Speaker F: Yeah, I think all this talking about death is also. We’re talking about just breath and we’re talking about moments, but there’s a lot of, like, connection with death. Body, where does it go? There’s a whole story connected instead of just focusing on the moment itself. Isn’t it like when we, when we even talk about euthanasia, there’s a. There’s a whole process. Oh, the body was sick or the body was tired. There’s a whole story entitled. But that’s just not it. That’s just, just another moment. But we, we keep tying it to something more. We keep wanting it to be something more than just another moment.

Dhammarato: Right. This is what I’m coming to now. You made an extremely important point there. You’re still in the state of wanting. And that’s not a good way to lose everything, is by wanting something when you’re losing it all. Why not be able to be happy when you’re losing it all the way that Anna said, wow, what a relief, dropping this burden. Can you come to the state of being satisfied that this is it?

Speaker C: Do you think it’s possible to be in such horrendous suffering that that sort of wholesome thought is not possible?

Dhammarato: Right. For an ordinary, untrained mind. Hello, folks. Train your mind. This is what this is all about, is getting your mind trained and ready so that you can handle anything. If you can handle your own death and get to the position that you know that you can handle your own death when it happens, then that means that you can handle life. There was a state, you’re in a state of wanting when you’re dying and being dead. That Means that you probably spent your whole life in state of wanting, not satisfied. So let’s go ahead and finish this call now. Does anybody have any last words? That’s a joke.

Speaker E: There was a story about a woman. There’s a story about a woman and her life was very difficult and couldn’t deal with it anymore. So she sat down in a bed with her young daughter and she turned the gas on, and they were gonna. She was gonna kill herself and her daughter. And then some religious music came on the radio, and she suddenly realized, oh, I made a mistake. So I thought that was kind of interesting. And then she became religious after that.

Dhammarato: So she didn’t die. She turned the gat on. Okay. But she was in a state of being dissatisfied. She was so dissatisfied that she was willing to kill herself because her life was so dissatisfying. Yeah, but you understand what I’m talking about, Lars, is that we’re talking about getting your mind into a state of being satisfied.

Speaker E: And then there was another case. This girl told her boyfriend to commit suicide, and they did. And then. So then she ended up getting in trouble for that, I think.

Dhammarato: Yeah. Well, you’re talking about ordinary people with ordinary events. Let’s start talking about noble. Let’s start talking about someone who has trained their mind so that you’re ready to go. Only then can you be really ready to stay. When you’re ready to give. When you’re really ready to give it all up. That means that in that state, you can give it up. You can become noble in this life. This is why we practice. We practice getting the mind into a really good state over and over and over again. We practice getting the mind in a really good state. So when the. When things happen. I mean, people feel like that they’re ready to die. When they get a letter in the mail from the irs, when the bell collector is knocking on the door, when their automobile goes kaput, when they see the repair bill, they’re ready to die. Why? Because they’re suffering that much. We’re talking about a completely different situation. When you’re so happy, so satisfied, it doesn’t matter what comes in the mail or doesn’t matter what happens to the car. Doesn’t matter what happens. If you’re ready to die, then not only in. Are you really ready to live. When the worst possible thing that could ever possibly happen to you. The very, very worst thing that could ever possibly happen to you is. Okay, it’s okay. I can handle that too. Then you can have a really happy life. Because nothing can touch you. So, Mikey, are you still alive? All right, let’s take this thing home.

Speaker D: Okay. If you’re watching this on YouTube, go ahead and hit the subscribe button. Give this video a like and feel free to leave a comment as well. If you check the YouTube description, there are links to TheOpenSanga Foundation.org as well as our Skype groups and our discord group. And you can also schedule a call with Domarado there from the YouTube description. So, yeah, all sorts of nice little goodies there. And yeah, Domorado has been putting. He’s been playing with the website quite a bit lately and it’s looking really nice and yeah, it’s just very cool to see how far along it’s come. So yeah, go check all that stuff out. Thank you.

Dhammarato: Yeah. All right, well, we’ll see you guys next time. Give me your final words. You’re departing. Dearly departed. It.

Summary of this Dhamma Talk

Dhammarato discusses the advantages of shorter, frequent meditation practice over traditional long sessions. He explains how the historical Buddhist practice was naturally shorter, matching human attention spans. The talk then evolves into a deep discussion about death, choice, and the importance of maintaining wholesome states of mind, particularly at life’s end. Dhammarato emphasizes the value of being present and aware, especially during our final moments, and how daily practice prepares us for this ultimate transition.

Outline of this Dhamma Talk

Short Practice Sessions vs Long Meditation

• Practice 5-10 minutes several times daily rather than one long session
• Natural attention span is 10-20 minutes, not an hour
• In Buddha’s time, practice length was measured by incense sticks (~20 mins)
• Hour-long sessions came later with introduction of clocks to Asia
• Short frequent practice builds skill of remembering (sati) when needed

The Purpose of Practice

• Develop skill to recognize and shift from unwholesome to wholesome states
• One hour practice followed by 23 hours of hindrance isn’t effective
• Goal is to remember throughout the day, not just during formal practice
• Practice often to develop the skill of coming out of hindrances

Discussion on Death and Last Breaths

• Everyone eventually chooses not to take their next breath
• Death comes when breathing becomes too much effort
• Choice about final moments varies with circumstances
• Importance of being present and aware for death
• Training to watch yourself fall asleep as practice for death
• Last thought is the most important thought you’ll ever have
• Value of maintaining wholesome states even in difficult circumstances

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