Dhammarato
Dhammarato Dhammarato is a dhamma teacher in the lineage of Bhikkhu Buddhadasa. Now retired into the Lay life He spent many years as a monk in both Thailand and USA. He lives in Thailand on Kho Phangan and invites all dhamma friends to come hang out. He talks about the supramundane dhamma as instructed by Ajahn Pho the abbot of Wat Suan Mokkh.

The Sangha US 146 12 14 24

The Sangha US 146 12 14 24

The Sangha US 146 12 14 24

Video

Transcript

Dhammarato: And so, welcome to the Saturday morning Dhamma call. We have 11 students on today. It’s what, December 14th, middle of the month. So today I would like to make a connection for you that is actually quite valuable. And that connection concerns naturally, the Four Noble Truths. Most specifically, the connection is in. Within the Second Noble Truth. And as you all have heard, the Second Noble Truth is the actual cause of Dukkha, the actual cause of dissatisfaction. The actual cause of dissatisfaction is always something within one’s own mind. It’s never coming from the outside. So if the neighbors are bullying you, then the dissatisfaction is not the neighbors bullying you. It’s number one, you don’t like it. And number two, you’re afraid that they’ll do something that they claim they’re going to do to you. And so the Second Noble Truth is really an important point because it points to each and every one of us has our own duty, our own responsibility to the Dhamma. Nobody’s going to do it for you. No priest, no nun, no guru, no teacher, no one is going to do it for you. You have to do it yourself. And more importantly than that, you have to do it over and over and over and over again. But as you know, I pretty well harp on practice. They say I’m going to get a harp someday. Not one of those little things the angels play. I want one of those big dudes. So we’re going to talk about that today in a particular state. But there’s other. But let me harp on that point a little bit more. In the sense that if the girl leaves you, if she. And you start to say, oh, she betrayed me, then you’re missing the Second Noble Truth. Because she didn’t betray you. She just took a hike. The fact is, is that you don’t like it. And because you don’t like it, that’s the cause of your own dukkha, the cause of your own suffering. You do it yourself. Nobody else can make you feel bad. So the connection then that we want to make is between the. We’ve already made a good connection between Lopa and Moha, which is greed and ill will. That they’re almost always the same thing in the sense that if you want something, then you kind of feel inadequate or that you’re missing something and you don’t like that. So anytime that there is greed, there’s also ill will. Probably the biggest example of that currently is that Putin wants to re establish the. The territory that was lost by the Soviet Union. There’s the greed. Well, where’s the war, that’s it, that’s the greed is always ill will built right into the greed. And so when we’re pining for the girl that we’ve lost, we also will have thoughts about I’m going to get her back. We always have those, those feelings. So the greed and ill will is always a two sided coin. And if we can see that then we’re going to be able to do something about it. When you see that you want something, recognize that you also have ill will for not having it. So today’s talk I want to make a different connection and the connection to make today is the connection between the Pali word ajiva and bhaiya. Now a jiva actually has several different definitions because Pali is not a very, very sophisticated language like we have with English will. We have a dozen different words for different, different nuances. So a jiva can be translated as ignorance. It can also be translated as delusion. But in fact we could go so far as to say that there are three kinds of ignorance. One would be wise ignorance. We don’t know and we know that we don’t know and that’s the place that we want to be. Then there’s the other one, is that we don’t know and we don’t know that we don’t know. And then the third one is, is that we know. Randly, that’s delusion. We know, but we know wrongly. And that’s another definition of ajiva. Not knowing means to know wrongly. Now one of the reasons why we set it up to know wrongly is because when we know, when we don’t know and we know we don’t know, we don’t like that often. And so we’ll make something up. An example would be that the old man was sitting on the log with his nephew many thousands of years ago and the child points up to the sky and says what’s that? Uncle Jim? And Uncle Jim, he doesn’t know what the stars are about and so he makes something up and then somebody else makes something up and then somebody else makes something up and the next thing you know you’ve got a religion and it’s all made up. Why? Because people are not willing to see the way things truly are. Now this not knowing and to know that we’re not knowing, that’s a kind of doubt. And doubt has a connection. That connection is what we want to talk about today and that is fear. Fear always comes from the unknown. Fear almost always comes from the future. And when fear comes from the past, it comes in the form of, oh no, I screwed up, what’s going to become of me? And so it winds up being back into the past, future oriented. And one of the things that’s really important for us to recognize over and over and over again is that we don’t know what the future is going to be. We don’t know. In fact, we’re pretty good at making up the past, thinking that it’s real. We’re not very good at being in the present moment. We need to practice that because really what it is is that we’re very good at making stuff up for the future. And there’s where the fear comes in. We make that fear up. So an example would be the bully. He’s bullying you right now. But if he’s bullying you right now, you’re lucky because he hasn’t hit you yet. He’s just threatening to hit you. There’s many different ways to handle a bully. One way is to step back, to turn. You can say something like, oh, I forgot my, my gym shorts. And then you can take off. And he’s probably too lazy to chase you down. So there’s an easy way to get away from a bully. But what we do instead is we become afraid of the bully. That’s what he wants anyway. He wants you to be afraid of him because that gives him the feeling of power over you. But guess what? The world is full of bullies. And we are a victim to all the bullies that we can, that we will allow to be a bully. Cops love to be bullies. IRS agents, FBI, CIA, local police, school board administrators. There’s actually no end to the bullies. They were trained to be bullies in high school and most of us were trained also as to bully. And so that bullying always has the quality of fear built into it. Now we could say then that it. Well, it’s been said that especially in the Mahayana, they will say that what is the cause of dukkha? What is the cause of dissatisfaction? They say it’s attachment. They say that it is grasping and clinging. But it’s in the Pali Sutra where it says, oh no, it’s actually a jiva that if you want something, you can want it wisely and you can have wise wanting. For instance, you can want wisely to be friends with the bully. And so wise wanting is not a problem. Wise. I would say that in fact, wise wanting generally doesn’t have ill will built into it. But the big issue in our lives, the big issue is not knowing, and not knowing always Brings fear, even if it’s delusional, not knowing. If we have a delusion, then we’re still going to have an element of fear built into it. A really good example of that is in the various religions, and I’ll use several of them as examples. One would be Christianity. Christianity has a hell. Why do they have a hell in Christianity? Why they have a hell in Christianity? To make people afraid. When I was in high school, one of the things that we had to study was an old sermon from the 16th century. And the name of the sermon was Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. Micah, you were in Oklahoma. Did you have to study that one too? Sinners in the hands of an angry God. You know about it? Go ahead. I was just saying it sounds familiar. Sounds familiar, right? Okay. So religion wants their young people to be afraid because that’s how they think that they can control them. In other words, we can’t offer a carrot and expect them to behave themselves with the promise of something good. We have to promise the stick. And if we promise the stick, then the fear then will get them to behave. But guess what? Buddhism has the same thing. Especially ordinary Buddhism. Not the teachings of the Buddha, but ordinary Buddhism, that is a religion, has the precepts. And the precepts are like Pannatipata V ramani sukhabadam samati ami. Atinadana vairamani sukabha dham sumatam ni kamesumi chachara vairamani sukabadam sumati ami Musawada vairamani sukabadam samati ami and surat merya matramatadana vi ramani sukaba dam sumati ami. These are techniques of beating children into submission. And in fact, I would say that the pride precepts in Buddhism work a whole lot better than the promise that you’re going to go to hell that the Christians have. Now. One of the important things about this is that we control other people through making them afraid, which means then that when you’re afraid, you’re easy to control. And when you’re not afraid, you’re not so easily controlled. But normally when you’re controlled, you’re controlling. You’re controlled by your own negative thoughts. And so if we can see what we know and what we don’t know. And a clear example of what I’m talking about now is doubt. Doubt about the practice, doubt about the future, doubt about what’s going to happen next, doubt about outcomes. All kinds of things. In fact, gambling, and especially at the casino, gambling, everybody intellectually knows that the house is rigged and that you’re going to lose eventually. But people get all excited and fearful and say, oh, I want to win, I want to win, I want to win. Even though the gods are stacked against us. And so this excitement has elements of fear built into it. And if we can see this fear, we can change it. Now, one of the qualities of the word sukha that we talk about in Annapanasati, it’s in fact step six. When I say step, I should say item on the list of item number six because it’s not in chronological order. But part of sukha, the Pali definition is safety and security. So we need to develop the feelings of safety and security to develop the feeling of comfort. If we can develop the feelings of safety and security and comfort, then we can also further develop the feelings of satisfaction. And satisfaction is in fact the end of suffering, the end of dissatisfaction is satisfaction. And we can practice that, but we’re not going to be able to practice satisfaction while there is still fear. And yet, you all know we all have been trained to be afraid, to be afraid of the bullies, to be afraid of the teachers, to be afraid of not doing our homework, to be afraid of the streets. In fact, when I was a kid, I could go all over town. Now the police will bring a kid home and make a whole lot of trouble for the parents if the kid’s out wandering the streets a mile away from the house. Why? Because society nowadays is much more fearful than it was 50 years ago, 70 years ago, much more fearful. We’re going in the direction, the whole society is going in the direction of more fear, more worry, more anxiety, and that you’ve been trained that way. That’s the direction we’re going. So if you have the direction of going downhill, guess what? Over the years, you’re going to go further and further downhill into fear. It’s time that we start practicing coming out of that fear. Now, one of the things that I would say is that over the course of the time that we’ve been doing these talks, I’ve run across a number of guys who come to say, oh, poor me, she left me. This has happened to Keyshawn, it’s happened to Robert, it’s happened to Nick, it’s happened to Alexander, it’s happened to another Dick. It’s happened to many over and over and over again. We have to recognize that everything is temporary. Anita Wata SANKARA Every relationship is temporary. Where they ever got the idea of marriage in the sense of death, do US part has actually created a huge amount of dukkha in the world. Rather than having, let us say, a marriage that has a time limit on it, like, let’s have a marriage for five years. Now. One of the reasons why we want to have a marriage for longer than that is because of the kids in the old, old days. And in fact, in many countries today, like in India and in Africa, a child of the age of six is already worthwhile going to work. In Africa, many of the mines are run by kids. I was at restaurants in India and there may have been an old man on a couch and asleep in the back, but the whole restaurant, from cooking to serving food to cleaning up, was all done by kids, all at the age of 6 or 7. So 6 or 7 years old is old enough to work. Not saying that it’s a good idea, but in the old days, a marriage needed not last longer than five or six years, because at the end of five or six years, the kids take care of themselves. Nowadays we have a system set up to where all we don’t want to put the kids to work, we’ll put them to work at school. We’ve got a. In fact, it’s a workhouse, it’s a coal mine and we call it school, primary school, secondary school. And we put our kids in there and we make them work and we don’t even pay them for it. And so this has caused us to have to revamp our thinking about marriage. Oh, we can’t stay married for five or six years. We gotta now stay married for 20 years. And that, in fact, we congratulate all couples who have been married for 60, 75 years. Because that’s supposed to be a goal that we’re trying to reach. But the reality is, is that your mind wanders. Your mind is not under control. If you had full control over your mind, you would have never gotten married in the first place. All those who get married still have a wandering mind. It wanders around in 7, 11, it wanders around on the Internet, it wanders around all over the place. And oftentimes we find something. And this is the problem with marriage, is that things are temporary and yet marriage is supposed to make them permanent. Well, not permanent, but almost. So in fact, there’s a joke, and that joke is that the guy died and his wife pined for him. And then years later, she died. When she died, she went to heaven. And when she got to heaven, she saw him, her husband, and run up to him, and as she was running, he says, whoa, Whoa, whoa. Remember that in the marriage vows, it’s only death to us part. Sorry, honey, we’re finished. And she didn’t even like that. She wanted it not only death, she wanted it absolutely permanent. But nothing is permanent. Everything is temporary. And so because things are temporary, that’s a good source for fear. Yes, Nick, go right ahead.

Speaker B: I was saying it’s a relief that it’s not permanent. At least that’s what I’m saying now.

Dhammarato: Pardon, Maybe you can’t hear me, but.

Speaker B: I’m saying it’s a relief that it isn’t permanent.

Dhammarato: Actually. That’s correct. That’s correct. What a relief it is that nothing is permanent. That in fact, here’s a question for you. That if things were permanent, you’d be stuck in the first grade. Robert, good to see you.

Speaker C: Good to see you, too. I’ve got another good joke for you. So why would anyone sign up for something that 50% of the time ends in divorce and the other 50% ends in death?

Dhammarato: Well, why should you buy a car? 50% of the cars get wrecked and the other one, 50% of them wear out.

Speaker C: Exactly. That’s all.

Dhammarato: So this is the whole point about I, me or mine. If you attach to something as I, me or mine, by attaching to it as I, me or mine, you’re going to cause fear because you can’t control it. An example of that is if you register yourself as a Democrat, then anytime the Democrats lose, you feel bad, you feel fearful. Oh, no. Donald Trump, what is he going to do? Well, you don’t know what Donald Trump is going to do. In fact, Donald Trump doesn’t know what he’s going to do. Nobody knows what Donald Trump is going to do. So why be worried about what Donald Trump is going to do? We can disassociate ourselves from politics because the only reason that you would in fact associate yourself with politics is it’s going to bring fear, it’s going to bring worry, it’s going to bring anxiety. If you don’t associate with politics, you’ve got no worries on that behalf. So this is the problem with the third. No, excuse me. The second noble truth is that people really don’t make the connection. When they hear loba moha dosha, they hear greed, ill will and ignorance. They don’t make the connection of how powerful this third, this second noble truth is in the sense of this is it, folks start paying attention. Start paying attention because that second noble truth is going to grab you. It’s sneaking up your leg, right now is persistent. And we have to learn to practice in a persistent way so that we can persistently see our fear. And by seeing it, we can make a change to it. If you can’t see that, almost all of your motivation is based upon fear. If you can’t see it, then you can’t make changes to it. And if you can change it, you might in fact not change your behavior, but you can change the way you feel from being fearful. Oh, I’ve got to into joy. Oh, I’m going to do it this way. This is the better avenue. That in fact fear is deeply buried in our DNA. Fear is deeply buried in our DNA and it shows most obviously in the form of the self preservation instinct. In fact, you could say that fear is the language of our instincts. We have hurting instinct because of fear, we have territorial instinct because of fear. And mostly we have the self preservation instinct, which is we become afraid of things that are dangerous to us. Now that instinctual system is really, really old. It’s been passed down from father to son, from mother to daughter, etc. For many, many, many centuries. And yet the reality is, is that in our culture there is very little real danger. There’s very little real danger to where in the old, old days we had bears and lions and the tribe next door and all kinds of things that were really dangerous. But in our society there’s nothing really much dangerous. And so my question then would be, why is there still so much fear? In fact, there’s more fear now than there’s ever been. People are now terrified and there’s nothing to be terrified about. Yes, Ivan, go ahead.

Speaker B: No, it’s also funny because I was thinking about people often getting into fights with people on the Internet. And then like, there’s actually less danger now. But for some reason people just get into those arguments when it’s never needed in the first place.

Dhammarato: Yeah, you’re right about the Internet. About 90% of the Internet traffic is people afraid. Trying to make you afraid too. But in a way we justify our feelings by getting other people to feel the same way we feel. So when someone is angry, he wants everybody around to be angry. Another example of that is when you have guys who were drinking in a bar or someone new comes in the bar, everybody in the bar wants him to drink too. Why? Because if he doesn’t drink and he’s in a bar, maybe he’s trying to teach us a lesson that we shouldn’t be drinking in a bar. Right. And so we don’t like it when somebody Comes in a bar and doesn’t drink. We want him to be like us. The same thing, by the way, is true about turbans. We don’t wear turbans. Those guys who wear turbans must be dangerous. They’re bad people, right? They’re not like us and we don’t know who they are, so they must be dangerous. So in fact, our culture has trained the children to be afraid. And now we’ve got the Internet. But there’s no end to the things that you can do to become afraid. Almost all of the news is to make you afraid. You probably heard the story of journalism is that it bleeds, it leads. We want blood and gore on the first page. We don’t want happy stories. We don’t want a first front page newspaper where it says, oh, I can’t think of anything happy. Oh yes, young Mr. Smith went to seminary, or boy, girl and boy A got married, or maybe Ms. Y had triplets. That’s not front page news.

Speaker B: I heard an R. John’s Law said, like the talk was about the disaster, natural disaster happening in certain part of country. And let’s say the newspaper never talk about 300 people sitting in a meditation retreat peacefully and not out interfering with the world. Like they don’t talk about stuff like that. I think it’s.

Dhammarato: That doesn’t sell. People want to see Gore, they want to see misery, they want to see suffering, because that’s their style. But if you, if you start to practice correctly more and more and more, then you don’t want to see Gore, you don’t want to see Putin, you want to avoid all of those negative things and have a happy life. So this is one of the things that I would recommend is don’t spend so much time on the Internet, especially all of the gore and all of the worry and all of the misery. There’s a whole lot better stuff. In fact, what you can do instead is watch documentaries about the graining of Africa or the Green Wall in China. This is something that’s useful to watch. Watch something that’s wholesome. Watch something that’s valuable to you, that keeps you from being so afraid because the media wants you to be afraid. That’s how they make their money. If you’re afraid, you’ll come back and read the second article and then the third article. And every one of them is designed to keep you more and more afraid. But guess what? We don’t need the Internet in order to be afraid. We’ve already got the habit. We’re feeding the habit from the Internet. But basically the real point is that we get it from being trained as afraid is also part of our DNA, that in fact, what you could say is that practicing correctly the teachings of the Buddha is exactly the same thing as taking over and controlling your instincts. Now, Christianity and other places, they place high regard on instincts, intuition and other things like that. But in the teachings of the Buddha, the right way of looking at it is oh no, we’re going to use wisdom, we’re going to use a higher mind to control all of those instincts so that we’re not going to instinctively be afraid. This is why it takes so much time and dedication and right noble effort is because you’ve got all of culture and all of your DNA going in a certain direction and we’re going to turn that around so that you can be joyful and happy when you want to be. That’s the teaching of the Buddha is that we’ve got to practice, practice, practice coming out of our fear. But in fact, you could go so far as to say that greed doesn’t. A lot of people talk about it as greed in the sense of wise grace greed and the ignorant greed is causing the problem. Another way of looking at it is that fear caused the greed in the first place. If you weren’t afraid, you would not want anything. Because almost all the stuff that we want is from is for protection against something bad that’ll happen. And so let’s work with this wisely so that we don’t have to go around doing stuff out of fear. We could just do what we like to do and begin to enjoy life. Life is fun when you’re not afraid. And so this is a real teaching of the Buddha, though it’s missing this quality that fear is the foundation of of all dukkha. Fear is the foundation of all dukkha. If you’re not afraid, then guess what? You’re probably closer to satisfaction than when you’re afraid. And we go from one fear to another fear to another fear, over and over and over again, one fearful thought after another after another. So when you hear the girlfriends left you, instead of saying, wow, what a relief it is, I hope she has fun. Instead we have thoughts of oh poor me, oh, she let me, she betrayed me. And we need to change those thoughts from she betrayed me into oh, what a relief it is. I got along without her before I met her, I can get along without her now. And that goes double for women. You don’t need a man then. In fact, women are taught that they need a man because as a woman, they’re not strong enough to take care of themselves. And so they need a man to take care of them so that they’ll be safe. And guess what? The biggest danger in life is that one man that you got in order to keep you safe. So all of disappointment, all of negative stuff, all of dukkha is the source of it is fear. Let’s look at it like this. With fear, you have anxiety. With fear, you have anger. With fear, you have disappointment. With fear, you have a sense of loss. With fear, you have grief, lamentation, despair. All because of a feeling of losing something and being afraid that you can’t do without it. All right, now let’s look at the other side. When you have no fear, what are the possible feelings that you can have? A feeling of satisfaction, a feeling of joy, a feeling of contentment, a feeling of relief. Now, which do you prefer to have? What kind of feelings do you want? Mikey? Yeah. Joyful, happy, relieving, calming, soothing feelings. Yes, that’s the way to go. But we’re not going to have those feelings while we have sometimes literally. Did we lose our Internet?

Speaker B: Oh, yeah. You were cutting out the last 32nd armado.

Dhammarato: Oh, I bet I know what happened. The cat came through. Oh, he’s back home now. Okay, so this is the way that we have to look at it is, is that we need to look at the fear. If you can see the fear, you have a choice. If you can’t see it, then you have a habit. Anybody has a choice when they can see fear. Ivan, can you see your fear?

Speaker B: Yes. I also want to say it’s very interesting because years ago, before I met the Dharma, when I see the fear, instead of feeling good about it, I see you, I start to feel sorry for myself. And I think the change I’m witnessing here more and more is when I see the fear, instead of feeling like a victim, I was like, oh, I see you. And I can feel good about it. So, yeah.

Dhammarato: Yes, that’s, that’s the case is that when we cannot see the fear, we’re ignorant of the fear as well as with that ignorance, we’re going to even keep the fear going or make it stronger. But when we can see the fear, we know that it’s there. That means that now we’re no longer ignorant to the fear, that we could see what’s going on. And now we have a choice to make. A choice to come out of the fear, a choice to be happy. And that’s the choice that we have to make over and over and over again. Remember that We’ve got to practice over and over and over again because you’ve got got all of this stuff going directly against you. Not just you, but everybody’s got this burden of the society teaches you to be afraid and you’ve got a natural tendency to be afraid called the instincts, especially the self preservation instincts. So our basis is fear and all of our training is in fear. We go to school because we’re afraid to not go to school. If we had a choice, we wouldn’t go to school. Oh, somebody’s changed something. Let me see if I can change it back. Somebody’s.

Summary of this Dhamma Talk

In this Dhamma talk, Dhammarato explores the Second Noble Truth, focusing on the cause of dissatisfaction (Dukkha) and its roots in fear, greed (Lobha), ill will (Dosa), and ignorance (Ajiva). He emphasizes that dissatisfaction arises from within the mind, not external circumstances, and explains how Ajiva (ignorance or delusion) leads to fear and suffering, while Bhavana (cultivation or development) through mindfulness and wisdom can lead to satisfaction and joy. Dhammarato illustrates these concepts with examples, such as how fear of the future or clinging to impermanence (e.g., in relationships) creates dissatisfaction. He also critiques societal conditioning and media for perpetuating fear, urging listeners to recognize and overcome fear through mindful practice. By understanding the difference between Ajiva and Bhavana, and by cultivating safety, security, and wisdom, we can move from dissatisfaction to lasting joy.

Outline of this Dhamma Talk

1. Introduction and Setting the Context (0:05 - 1:00)

  • Dhammarato introduces the topic: the Second Noble Truth and the connection between Ajiva and Bhavana.

2. The Second Noble Truth: Cause of Dissatisfaction (1:00 - 3:00)

  • Dissatisfaction (Dukkha) arises from within the mind, not from external events.
  • Example: If neighbors bully you, the dissatisfaction comes from your reaction (fear, dislike), not the bullying itself.

3. Ajiva (Ignorance/Delusion) (5:00 - 7:00)

  • Ajiva can be translated as ignorance or delusion.
  • Three types of ignorance:
    1. Wise ignorance: Knowing you don’t know.
    2. Ignorance: Not knowing and not realizing it.
    3. Delusion: Knowing wrongly.
  • Example: Ancient people creating myths about stars because they didn’t know what stars were.

4. Bhavana (Cultivation/Development) (5:30 - 7:00)

  • Bhavana refers to the cultivation of positive mental states through mindfulness and meditation.
  • Dhammarato contrasts Ajiva (ignorance) with Bhavana (cultivation), emphasizing that overcoming ignorance through mindful practice leads to wisdom and satisfaction.

5. Fear as a Root Cause of Dissatisfaction (7:00 - 11:00)

  • Fear arises from the unknown, often related to the future.
  • Example: A bully threatens you, but the fear comes from the anticipation of being hit, not the actual threat.

6. Society and Fear (11:00 - 15:00)

  • Society trains us to be afraid (e.g., fear of bullies, fear of authority figures like police, IRS, etc.).
  • Modern society is more fearful than in the past, despite fewer real dangers.

7. Practical Applications (35:00 - 42:00)

  • Recognize fear and see it clearly.
  • Practice mindfulness to develop safety, security, and satisfaction.
  • Example: When you see fear, acknowledge it and choose to move toward joy and contentment instead.

8. Conclusion and Final Thoughts (42:00 - End)

  • Fear is deeply ingrained in our DNA and society, but we can choose to overcome it.
  • Practice mindfulness and wisdom to control instincts and move toward joy and happiness.

Definitions: Ajiva and Bhavana

  • Ajiva (Ignorance/Delusion):

    • Not knowing or knowing wrongly.
    • Leads to fear, dissatisfaction, and suffering.
    • Example: Creating myths to explain the unknown (e.g., stars).
  • Bhavana (Cultivation/Development):

    • The mindful cultivation of positive mental states.
    • Leads to wisdom, satisfaction, and joy.
    • Example: Practicing mindfulness to overcome fear and ignorance.

Practical Applications

  1. Recognize Ignorance (Ajiva):
    • Acknowledge when you don’t know something and avoid making up explanations.
    • Example: Instead of creating stories about why someone acted a certain way, accept that you may not know their true motivations.
  2. Cultivate Wisdom (Bhavana):
    • Practice mindfulness and meditation to develop positive mental states.
    • Example: Use mindfulness to stay present and reduce anxiety about the future.
  3. Confront Fear:
    • Identify fears, especially those related to the unknown or future.
    • Example: If you’re afraid of losing your job, practice mindfulness to stay present and reduce anxiety.
  4. Develop Safety and Security:
    • Cultivate feelings of safety and security through mindfulness practices.
    • Example: Practice deep breathing or meditation to create a sense of calm and safety in the present moment.

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