What is Thinking? The Sangha UK 214

Summary

In this dhamma talk with the UK Sangha, Dhammarato challenges our conventional understanding of thinking and reality. He reveals that thinking is not just discursive thoughts, but how we spend each moment of our mind. Dhammarato emphasizes that while reality is what it is, our perceptions and concepts shape our experience of it more than objective circumstances. Through the practice of Anapanasati, he offers practical tools to cultivate awareness of our thoughts and feelings, enabling us to consciously choose our mental attitudes. Dhammarato also highlights how our language often reflects and perpetuates a victim mentality, and encourages us to start noticing this and adopt language that empowers us. By the end of this transcript, you’ll have a newfound understanding of the nature of your mind and the power you have to transform your emotional landscape.

Transcript

So welcome to the Sunday afternoon call in Thailand. There’s several of us here. David and Michael and I are on the island. Koh Phangan and others of you are all over the place, mostly. This call is for the UK, but I think some of the people are in the US right now also.

So welcome, guys. The first thing that we’re going to talk about would be what is thinking? And the easy answer to that is, however you spend a mind moment. However you spend a mind moment, that’s thinking. Now, mostly when we use the word thought and thinking, we’re talking about discursive thoughts which have to do with using language, that we’re making stuff up that could be said.

It’s got words to it, but we don’t spend all of our time in that kind of thinking. What we do instead is, for instance, if you’re looking at something with your eyes, like a jeweler is looking at a diamond and he’s investigating it, and he may have a couple of things to say to himself, but he’s spending a lot of time looking also at a baseball game. A lot of time is spent not discursive thinking. Now, there’s going to be some people in the audience that are talking to each other, so naturally they’re thinking. They’re not watching what’s going on.

An outfielder’s the batter could hit a ball into the outfield and hit one of them on the head while everybody around him is cheering and shouting for the home run. But these guys are not paying any attention to what’s going on in baseball. They’re paying more attention to what’s happening between them, what’s in their head. And so thinking, then, is actually of multiple kinds. The Buddha, in fact, talks about it in the sense of sensory input, and that there are six ways to think.

One is by looking, one is by touch, one is by taste, one is by smell, one is by sound, and one is by the mind. Now, all of these are processes. They’re a process. And that almost always when we look at something, we try to make sense out of it, which means that we try to precede it or we try to understand it, or we try to put it into a category. And the example would be, is that I can say, I see a tree.

Now, everyone, when they hear that sentence here, will have a tree that they have as a mental image. And probably the mental image that you came up with is not the tree that I’m looking at. Depends, in fact, where you live and what kind of trees you’ve seen. But here in Thailand, most of the trees are coconut palms, but we also have a couple of fan palms, which are quite rare. I’ve only seen them here on this island and also in a park in Sri Lanka.

There’s naturally photos of them. But how many of you were thinking of a fan palm when I said the word tree? Nobody. What kind of tree were you thinking about? Maybe a pine tree, maybe a deciduous tree, maybe actually what you saw was not a tree, but an art drawing of a tree, something that you’ve seen before.

All right, so what would you look at, or in fact, what would you imagine if you had never seen a tree before, or you didn’t understand the word tree because it was a foreign language to you? For instance, what imagination do you come up when I say the word gobbledygook?

Because everybody can have a different view of different version of what is meant. So what we are talking about here is that the reality is what I can see with my eyes, and that concepts are images, words, thoughts, thinking processes that the Buddha talks about comes up with some sort of conclusion that is called a saḷāyatana. Now the interesting thing about saḷāyatana is that whatever you can come up with, with, you’ve seen it before, you’ve heard it before. Very little of what you do is absolutely original. Almost all of the thoughts that you have, you’ve had them before. Almost every sentence that you’ve made up, you’ve made it up before.

Worse than that, most likely you didn’t even make it up. You heard it from somebody else, you heard it from somewhere else, and then you think that it belongs to you. This is one of the things that’s very interesting is that when people think about thinking, they think about it in the sense of my thoughts, and we often get quite attached to my thoughts, where in fact, very few of the thoughts that you have are actually original, they don’t belong to you. But that is kind of delusion that we have to think that these are my thoughts to where in fact, it’s all old stuff.

An example of that would be when I’m, let us say, writing code on the computer in order to build the website. Every statement in that code has been done before by someone else. That in fact, the guys who wrote the compiler, they borrowed their stuff from other compilers. So even the PHP language is not original, that much of it is based upon Fortran. But Fortran language, the number one basic language of the computer from 1960s was called formula translation Fortran, which meant that it was built upon mathematics in the first place.

So even the first compiler language still has that equation sign that equals sign on most of the statements.

So, in fact, the word function that we use quite often in PHP language, the original functions were mathematical functions, mathematical formulas that we could use to plug stuff in in order to, say, calculate the geometric path of one of the planets.

And so what I’m getting at here is that we can come out of our belief that everything that we think is mine, because it’s not everything that you think is generally borrowed from someplace else. The students will oftentimes talk about Dhamarato’s version of the dhamma. Well, Dhamarato doesn’t have a version of the dhamma. Damarato borrowed his version of the dhamma from someone else. We can put somebody else’s label on it, maybe Bikkhu Budhadassa, or maybe his teacher, or maybe his teacher before him, maybe all the way back to the Buddha, and even the Buddha.

Most of what the Buddha taught, he got from someplace else. Almost all of it he got from someplace else. All of these Pali words that we use, they were all original words, like the word nirvana, for instance. We have trouble with understanding what the word nirvana means, but the original intention was, it was an ordinary word. It’s what you do with food after you take it out of the oven or take it off of the fire.

You don’t eat it when it is boiling hot. You let it cool off a bit.

When animals are domesticated, for instance, some dogs are violent and vicious and will bite anything. But Lucky here, she’s pretty well cool. She only barks at postman and delivery people, but she’s really cool. In fact, the thing that I find so amusing is that we’ve got a new puppy in the house, only been here for a couple of days. And before, many years ago, any puppy that came anywhere close to Lucky, she was going to be really hot about it.

And now I can throw Lucky food, and this puppy will go and take the food right out from under, Lucky’s nose, and she’s cool. This is what we mean by domesticated animals. When an animal is domesticated, that means that they’re cool. They don’t act wild. So anytime that you’re acting cool like this, that’s the state kind of nirvana.

Nothing special about it. And so this is what we’re talking about with the word thinking is number one. It is a process that has generally to do with looking at something, taking some input, processing it, trying to figure out what it is. Based upon stuff that we came from our past, old data to come up with an understanding of what it is that we see, think, touch, taste, smell, etcetera.

Like, for instance, a wine taster. He draws upon a tremendous amount of knowledge that he’s had with snipping wines over and over and over again, so that when he is sniffing wine, he doesn’t spend a whole lot of time sniffing. He spends a whole lot of time thinking and classifying and trying to put this new wine into some old system that he’s already got built up.

So you can think about it almost like this. Imagine there’s difference between a movie that’s being made where you’ve got the camera, you’ve got actors, you’ve got light settings, microphones, directors, and all of that kind of stuff. And then you have the movie that’s shown on the screen. And between those two times is what they call the cutting room, where most of the film winds up on the floor. And they put stuff together.

Okay? We do that kind of stuff inside of our own mind. So the reality is coming in like the guys who were making the movie. And then we process what we’ve seen, and then we come up with a story.

That whole process can be called thinking. And that thoughts that we have then is what impacts us, not reality. Reality, in fact, doesn’t impact us. What impacts us is our own concepts, our own viewpoints, our own ways of looking at stuff is what impacts us. I’ve said this many times.

Imagine that, you see, you have three guys standing on a street corner, and they, let’s say that this person walking down the street is dressed as a nun. I normally use an SS officer, but this time we’ll use a nun. And one of them really likes it because he’s in seminary. And so he goes and prays and says, “oh, sister, I’m really happy to see you.” Another one comes up and slugs her because he was slapped and his hand was hit by a ruler because he was in Catholic school. And the third guy is laughing because he knows this is not a nun at all. This is a Halloween costume.

So the reality is not a reality at all. It’s mostly what we live in is our perceptions of reality. And we call that reality.

It’s not real at all. Now, if we know that we’re making stuff up, if we know that we’re living in a concept, then that’s much better off. Because if we know that we’re living in a concept, we have a chance or a choice of changing people, they live in a conceptualized world. They don’t even know that they don’t live in the real world. They think that their concepts and their thoughts and all of that stuff that they made up is actually what is real.

A really good example of that is, in politics, many people will listen to some politician say something and then believe it without checking four or five or six or 20 different sources. And so they’ll just take in that information that may be a lie that they’re told, and then they’ll believe that lie staunchly. That’s especially true if it fits into what we have known from childhood. But the fact is that much of what we got in childhood when we were really little, our childhood memories impact us much more strongly than the current ones do. In other words, when you see mommy lie to people, if you see her lying to you, then you get the feeling and live with the point that it’s okay because mommy lies, it’s okay that I lie, too.

And some of us can’t even tell the difference between a lie and the truth anymore, because we live mostly in a set of lies, and we think that they’re true. This is where anapanasati, or the teaching of the Buddha, really comes into play, in the sense of beginning to learn to see that we don’t live in reality. We live in a conceptual, made up world.

Now, I’ll give you an example of that. There is a whole lot of meditation places that teach a kind of meditation called metta. And often this metta is taught with the phrase of, “may all beings be happy”, “May all beings be peaceful”, “may all beings be enlightened”. How many of you have heard this kind of, uh, stuff before?

Right? Most of us have heard that, right? Guess what? When they say, may all beings for you and for every other student, and hears that that’s not real, that’s your concept. You cannot see in reality all beings.

Every time that you think about all beings, you’re making that stuff up. What do you do? You see a city street? How about a pack of worms? What is it?

They all beings.

What the reality is is that you make it up. And the world that you live in is the world that you can see, touch, taste, smell, feel that which is around you. I would say offhand that everybody’s world is less than 50 meters in diameter. Often the world that you live in is inside the room that you’re in. And everything that you think about on the outside of that room is a concept.

It’s not real. And so when I say I went to Chicago. Everybody has a different concept of Chicago. Those that have lived there in one section of Chicago, they think about the section of Chicago they lived in. Other people, when I mentioned Chicago, they’ll think about a map of Illinois.

Other people, when they think about the Chicago, they’ll think about the Chicago bulls.

So when I say the word Chicago, it’s up to you to put it into your framework or your imagination or your conceptualized understanding that, in fact, how many Chicago’s actually are there?

Since Chicago was constantly changing, I would say that there’s quite a lot of Chicago’s. The Chicago that I remember when I was a child, the Chicago that I remember when I was in the Sears Tower, the Chicago that I remember when I was at Wat Namaram. So when I think about Chicago, what do I think about? Gun violence.

So when we begin to understand that everything is conceptualized and that when we conceive things, we often do not conceive of the same thing that the people who we are talking to. I remember one time when I was a teenager that my dad and I were having an argument, and my mother was becoming quite frustrated, not because we were having an argument, but because we agreed and yet we were fighting about it because we couldn’t. The other person wasn’t seeing the same thing that we were seeing, but my mom could see that we were talking about the same thing, but we couldn’t see that we were talking about the same thing. And maybe we weren’t. Maybe my mom made that up. She thought that we were thinking about the same thing. But dad and I, we knew that we were talking about something else.

All right, so this is the way that we begin to understand that we can actually start to spend more time in practice by actually looking at the kind of discursive thoughts that we have and also begin to look at how we spend our mind moments.

Not only that, but if we look at it and see what we’re doing with our time, with our mind moments, only then do we have a chance of changing it. But this is what we normally mean by subconscious, that when we are subconscious, what that means is, is that we are having thoughts, conscious thoughts, but we’re not aware of those thoughts as thoughts. We’re just thinking those thoughts. And so what the practice of the equal, noble path is, is to start waking up to and looking at a thought. Not being in the thought, but looking at the thought kind of from the outside and kind of with discrimination.

All right? So when we see the thought or the concept or whatever. We’re making it up. Do you know that you’re making it up?

Do you know what quality of thought it is? An example of that. The Buddha puts them in two different references. One is a wholesome thought, and another one is unwholesome. Now, reality is just reality.

But when we make up stuff, we often make up stuff that’s different than actual reality.

We make stuff up, and we don’t even know that we’re making stuff up. And not only that, but the stuff that we’re making up. We’re using old garbage to make it up. So it’s probably not new. You’re just making up something that’s been made up before.

And so practicing means that we begin to look at it from the perspective of, is this a wholesome thought? How do I feel? What kind of breathing do I have? In fact, the satipatthana, the four foundations of mindfulness, is the reference that we will use in order to, let us say, classify our thoughts.

That one of the kinds of thoughts that we have, that very rarely do we understand it as a thought, would be a sensation. Now, one kind of sensation that I’ll mention will be referenced by anxiety. Now, normally, anxiety is a concept, but it does have a sensation of tightness, normally in the chest, maybe in the stomach, maybe up here. But it has to do with the fact that the body has been changing. The blood chemistry has changed because of the kind of thoughts that we’re having.

So we can talk ourselves into being tense and uptight. And we call that anxious, even a panic attack. And we don’t even know that it’s actually just a sensation in the body that we don’t like. We’re ignorant of that. And so we’re going to start paying attention then to what the body is doing, to pay attention to the kind of feelings that we have.

If we can pay attention and see the kind of feelings that we have, only then can we do something about it.

If we can see what we’re thinking, we can see then the relationship between our thinking and our feeling and our body. That if the body is sick, we’ll have unpleasant sensations that we talk about, as in a sense of feelings. And then we’ll have thoughts that are associated with that. So this satipattana means that we’re.

It’s like a pizza. And that we’re drawing it into four quarters so that we can investigate this part of the pizza and that part of the pizza and this part of the pizza. Or another way of looking at it is that a pizza has dough. It has crust. It has cheese. It has jalapenos, and it may have anchovies.

So every pizza, or there’s other kind of pizzas that have ham and pineapple. All right. But there’s various things on the pizza. So imagine that you’re you. The makeup that you have is actually four different parts.

The part is the body and the feelings and your mental states, the mental attitudes that we have and the thoughts that we have. So the thinking that we do is actually influenced quite a lot by the attitude that we have. For instance, if you have the attitude of being a loser, if we have the attitude of being a victim, if we have an attitude that things are tough and hard to do, then we’ll say when something new happens. Oh, no. Now this has happened.

That’s the victim’s position. Another way of looking at it is when something new happens, that’s a new opportunity. And I can change my mental state from being that of a victim to the circumstances into- “I can be the champion.” “I can handle this.”

Yesterday, in fact, we talked about the Buddha mentioned that to find pleasure wherever it may be found. David, did you find the reference? Did you look for it?

Sorry. No, I’ve been busy traveling. Sorry. I didn’t hear that.

Yeah, right. Okay. How about you? Says, well, I just took your word for it. Yeah, I took your word for it.

Yeah. You took a word for it. Yep. Or how about I don’t care, but notice that you took the victim’s position. Oh, I’ve been so busy on poor me.

I didn’t mean it in a negative way, but I heard it. I saw it. My reality was, did anybody else see the reality that I saw? Yeah, dtree did. Uh huh.

Thomas did. How about you, Michael? Maybe you didn’t see it until I mentioned it, and then as soon as I mentioned it, then you saw it.

All right. So David is up to you to see it before we do, to become conscious of our attitude about things.

This is what the real practice is, is to decide how you’re going to feel before you display that feeling to other people. Now, the easy way to do that is by going off on your own in seclusion, in private. And then we can investigate that feeling that we have, and we can make a change to it and play with it slowly. But if we’re in an audience with other people, we’ll go ahead and feel without investigating it. We’ll go ahead and feel the way that we do.

And then we express ourselves based upon the mental attitude and the feeling that we have, rather than investigating it. So this is why we want to get into seclusion, is so we can take the time to figure out how we want to feel in this moment, moment by moment by moment.

And if we can gain the skill of figuring out how we want to feel moment by moment by moment. Now, some people will use the phrase “all the time,” and I caution you to not use the phrase “all the time,” because if you use the phrase “all the time,” that’s like making a rule that you should investigate all the time. And there’s no possible way that you can do that right from the beginning that it’s going to be a skill that you develop.

And so let us say that most people there may be conscious of their feelings, their conscious to it, as opposed to subconscious, about one out of 100, or maybe one out of every 200 thoughts and feelings that they have, they’re conscious of those. And then when we begin to practice, we’ll get it down to maybe one out of 100.

Then we’ll go by continuing to practice to get it down to one out of 50. And so we’re four times as likely to get the reality of actually how we feel because we’re practicing now, we’re four times better, but we still only get one out of 50. We continue to practice and then we’ll get down to maybe one out of 25. And then sometimes we’ll practice and get one out of ten for a while. And then we’ll go back to one out of 200 for a while.

Cause nothing is constant. Everything is changing that our moods, our attitudes, etcetera, like that. But we can take any moment at any time to check out how we feel. What is our attitude so that we can begin to change our attitude from the attitude of being a victim into the attitude of being a winner. We have been trained from childhood to be a victim.

We were a victim to mommy when we were born. She nourished us, she cuddled us. We were victim to her when we were two years old. In the potty training and the terrible twos. We were a victim when we were three years old.

We were a victim when we were six years old. We were a victim when we were teenagers. And then when we graduate from college, we graduate from college as a victim and we go around living our whole lives as victims and we don’t even know it. It’s subconscious. It’s the attitude that we have, the state of mind that we’re in.

But as we practice anapanasati, we will begin to change that attitude from being a victim into being a winner, to stop being a whiny little brat and start being on top of your game.

So, Deidre, you got your hand up. I’ll take you first.

You’re muted. Yeah, yeah, but Roche was first. Well, never mind. Yeah, you. So, interesting.

Deidre: You gave me the assignment of watching when I say sorry, when we say sorry, like. Like, that’s a victim’s word, isn’t it? Yeah. Yeah, I found that out, too. And every time I could catch myself saying, why am I saying sorry?

Why? Why is this? Because, actually, I’m not sorry. I just made a mistake or whatever. It’s not nothing to feel sorry about.

And you did something you didn’t like, and now you call it a mistake, and now you feel sorry. You did all of that subconsciously. Yeah. And now I’m really training myself to change that before I say sorry. No, don’t say sorry.

And then I correct myself. No, I’m not sorry. It’s just like this, and this. And this is the circumstances or whatever. And that’s also really makes it.

That makes an immediate change in attitude also, like, the victim attitude goes out of it, because now it’s really like, I don’t have to feel sorry for anything. I’m just human, and I’m just learning, and this is what I do.

Dhammarato: All right, well, you could even change that attitude into a “Hot dog! I saw that! Yeah, I caught it!”

Deidre: And now something else interesting is happening because of that training that. There was a moment I woke up, and then I really feel a little bit, like, not well in my body. Some body sensations were not well, and then I could really catch myself, like, blaming others. You didn’t do that right. And you didn’t keep your word, and this is not good.

And then I was really. Oh, hold on. Wait a minute. I’m not feeling well, and now I’m blaming others. So this is really what a blaming mind looks like.

This is how the blaming is the victim. We want somebody else to be responsible because we don’t like something.

Yeah. Yeah. And that’s.

That’s really. So we’re actually. I’m trying to train myself more and more, like, to catch myself, to really observe what is happening. Where am I? What’s my attitude?

What’s my attitude in this? That’s really helpful. So I just wanted to share that with you guys.

Dhammarato: Yes. In fact, thank you very much, Deidre.

I will make this point. Is each one of you have the opportunity, now that she’s mentioned it, to pick out the kind of words that you use commonly that define your attitude. Okay, I’ve got a list of them. The word “hard.” When you have, when you use the word “hard,” that’s something that a victim will say.

How about the word “try?” Because “try” has the quality of being a failure. The old joke is, is that the wife says to her husband, there’s a new coffee, I’m I’m trying. And he says, your coffee is always trying.

Now he’s changed the definition of the word try. But she actually, when she says, this is a new coffee, I’m trying. She’s not sure she could have says, hey, this is new coffee, enjoy.

But she thinks that it’s going to be a failure. And he just proved it by saying, your coffee is always trying in the sense that his, he, for him, the coffee and he is a failure. All right, so begin to look at the kind of language that you use that indicate your state of mind.

Hard. Try, long, tough.

All of these words that have a painful experience so that you can begin to see that you manufacture the reality. And then you choose the vocabulary based upon the habits of the vocabulary that you use. Because the attitudes that you have are also ingrained. They’re part of the habit system. So Diedre is actually making great benefit from this because she’s beginning to look at just one word that she uses and begins to change her whole attitude about life.

But you have to watch, you have to observe, you have to actually wake up out of your subconscious into being fully awake, into being fully conscious to see the language that we use.

All right, so, Ross, you got your hand up?

Ross: Yeah, yeah, sorry. Um, now that was great. Um, I’m going to pick on Dave, David there, because, uh, that was quite interesting, that little conversation you had with him. So when, when you asked, David, have you found the quote? And obviously he went into that little story of, you know, whatever he said, and, you know, we assumed he’s going into that victim mentality.

If he had turned around to you and said, “oh, and in fact, I don’t want to have, I don’t want to look at the quote. Look for the quote. So that’s it.” Is that still a victim mentality or no?

Dhammarato: Well, let us say that there are various degrees of it, and that’s certainly not as much of a victim’s mentality is. No, I’ve been busy and I haven’t had time.

ROss: Yeah. Because the reason I ask is that often at work, managers or colleagues will try and push things onto you. And most, you know, most of the time, if it’s your manager.

You sort of say, yes, you’ll do it, but then do it out of being a victim because you’ve got so many other things to do.

Dhammarato: Well, it depends, again, on your attitude. Here’s an example of that. The boss says, here, do this. And I said, yeah, I’ve been wanting to do that. Thank you. That’s a really good opportunity. I’ll see you later. He walks off and I put it in the drawer.

Right? Okay. Yeah. So the point is, is can you have a cheerful attitude? Can you find pleasure in every moment?

David, if I ask you the question, have you done that research on that quote to find out what sutu it came from? What would you say if you had the winters winter’s attitude right then?

David: No, I haven’t. I’ll take your word for it.

Dhammarato: Okay, that’s one. How about, can you make even more of a winner’s attitude?

How about, it doesn’t matter. I’m okay without it. I don’t need that. Yeah, I don’t care about it. I don’t care about it.

So this is what we begin to understand about our thoughts, is that we’re often, we’re not watching what we’re thinking. This is the topic of this conversation, is what is a thought and what thoughts are we having. Because if we can see the thoughts that we have, we have a choice about how we’re going to maintain that thought, how we’re going to respond to somebody. We have an opportunity to change everything. And the most important point here is to change your attitude, to recognize what attitude that you have based upon the language that you’re using, and start to change the words that you’re using so that you can have a better attitude.

Like another one you could say is, “yeah, I forgot, I’ll do it when I feel like it.” Or “it’s an interesting point.” The other one that you can say is “Dhamarato. You remember almost all of the quotes and what sutras that they come from. And I was curious, do you know about where that one was coming from?”

So you could have turned it right back around on me, and you could have done that with double winner’s attitude. Not putting me down, but just saying, I thought that you knew, and so I just took your word for it.

But in fact, upon reflection, I’m pretty sure that that quote does come from Sutta number 139. I challenge anybody to go find that quote. The quote, actually, the Buddha says that he can find pleasure wherever it may be found, but it’s not so much of a quote from the Buddha. That’s important. The question is, can you use that statement for your own benefit?

Can you find pleasure wherever it may be found in the circumstances of the moment that you’re in?

Can you find pleasure wherever it can be found? Well, if you’re subconscious, more than likely, not more than likely, you’re going to be feeling the same old way you’ve always been feeling under the similar circumstances. But if you’re awake, if you’ve got that sati, if you can remember to look at how you feel, if you can remember to look at the kind of thoughts that you have, if you can remember to look at the kind of attitude that you have, if you can look at the body to see, is the body safe, secure, comfortable, satisfied? By doing that waking up process, you’ve got a choice. You have a choice about the way you feel.

You have a choice about your comfort level. You have a choice about everything, if you remember to look at what’s going on. And so this is one of the things that I would recommend, like Deidre is talking about, is to start looking at the language that you use, start monitoring the language that you use, start looking at the words that have feelings associated with them, like pain, hurt, sorrow, a hard, long, tough, sorry.

All of those kind of words indicate the kind of attitude that you have of being a victim. Or how about the other kind of words and phrases that you can use is,

yeah, we’ve got that. I can do that. Hot dog. I like that. We can do this. That’s not hard. It’s easy. Nothing to it. nothing to do. We’ve got a handle on that.

All of these kind of words [and phrases] are winner’s words [and phrases].

Can you start intentionally using that kind of language? Because if you intentionally use that kind of language, the Buddha calls that brightening the mind or gladdening the mind. And it actually has the quality of changing your attitude and changing the way you feel.

And I’m saying this in the sense of not just the words that you use in public when you’re around other people, but also when you’re alone in seclusion, you begin to look at the kind of thoughts that you have then, in fact, figuring stuff out. How are you going to handle that? Yeah, I can handle it this way or that way. Instead of thinking of all that code is so hard. Oh, I’ll have to struggle with it.

We can say, yeah, I know how to do that.

So this is the kind of thinking that we have. This is that discursive thought that has a great deal of, let us say, influence on our attitudes and how we feel and we can change. You do not have to be a victim of your circumstances any longer. You’ve been a victim long enough. Now it’s time to take control over your life.

Start taking control over your language. Start taking control over the thoughts you have. Start taking control over the way you feel. Start taking control over your attitude. Start taking control over your breath and how you breathe.

Start taking control of the way that you look at the world. What world are you looking at anyway? What kind of concepts are you creating when you create a world?

Oh, somebody’s put us together.

Who’s experimenting with her computer. Can you put it back the way that it was?

Oh, sorry, folks. I was just experimenting. I thought today I’m doing it only for myself. You don’t have to be sorry. You could just put it back.

Can you put it back? Yeah. All right. It did, huh? All right.

On. Is it good? It’s still the way that it was.

So, Ross, you had a question a moment ago and now you’ve got your microphone off and the hand is not raised. Oh, look, it was. It was more. It was more about, you know, you talked about going into seclusion to see your thoughts. Look, it’s.

Ross: It’s. It was just. It was more of a joke, really. What happens if your thoughts horrify you? There are times when I’ve.

There are times when I’ve, you know, sat in seclusion and I’ve watched my thoughts and I’ve gone, where the hell has that thought come from? It is so bad, I’ll be shamed even to think about it.

No, it was more of an observation of thoughts. There are times when you have really good thoughts and wise thoughts and you feel chuffed that you’ve had a good thought or a very wise thought. But on the other side of it, you also have very. You know. You know, there are times when I’ve sat in seclusion and they’ve been quite depraved and And the visual imagery has been pretty. Pretty intense. You know, it’s not something I’d want to repeat on a. On a public call but, you know, it’s just. Yeah.

I mean, thoughts just seem to be very random and they can be good and they can be bad. You know, it was just more of an observation.

Dhammarato: All right. As we practice, we don’t have so much monkey mind that in fact, by practicing having wholesome thoughts, by practicing over and over again, we begin to get the mind steady. Now, one of the things that I mentioned just before was about that you can take control over your body.

One of the ways that you could do that is by start looking at what you’re doing with your body. Start looking at what you do with your hands. One of the examples would be is that if you scratch, know you’re scratching, if you put your hand to the face, whatever you’re doing, I’m not saying whether it’s good or bad. The question is whether you know what you’re doing or not. Another one would be, what about your eyes?

Do you know when your eyes are diverting? When you’re looking off like that and thinking? A lot of people will have their eyes just go off someplace when they’re thinking. They don’t even know that they’re doing that. But if you start watching where your eyes are pointed, then you have a choice about where you’re going to point your eyes.

For example, most of the people are looking at the screen, but sometimes when people start to talk, their eyes will go off someplace else. It’s almost like they’re looking for something to say instead of keeping the mind and the eyes focused. So that’s a major part of the issue about the body. All parts of you, your body, your feelings, your mental states and the mental objects start paying attention to it. And it’s best to do that in seclusion.

We’re not necessarily talking about a formal meditation, but if you do practice formal meditation, this is how to practice formal meditation is look at what you’re doing. Recognize that most of your thoughts are stuff that you’re making up. And if that’s the case, you’ve got a choice about what you’re going to be making up. Why don’t you make up some wholesome thoughts rather than unwholesome thoughts? Look at the kind of language that you’re using.

Are you using hard language or soft language? Are you looking for right now? Are you looking way off into the future? Are you looking for, sorry, apologies, I’ve screwed up. Are you looking for Oh, it’s no important, not in, it doesn’t matter.

This is the way that we want to start looking at how we deal with our own mind, because then we have a choice. And generally, I will ask the question often to students. If you could feel right now, if you could feel the way you wanted to feel, how would you feel right now?

Peaceful. Calm, joyful, sad, angry? Your choice. If you know, if you don’t know what you’re doing, if you’re, let us say, doing whatever you’re doing absent mindedly, or another word for absent minded would be subconscious.

Start being conscious. Start looking at knowing, investigating your thought system. Start knowing, looking, investigating your attitude. If you could see what attitude you have, you’ve got a choice about it. So I’ll ask that kind of question.

If you could have the attitude that you wanted to have right now, what kind of attitude would you want to have? Like, I’ve had enough of this Dhammarato, that attitude. How about, I’ve heard all of this before, it’s good enough. How about, wow, this. I’m going to put together all of these kind of ways that you can look at the kind of attitude that you have and this based upon, or it will be very helpful if you look at the kind of language that you’re using to describe how you feel without even knowing it.

So now we’re going to bring all of that stuff into conscious awareness over and over and over and over again. And pretty soon you begin to realize that you do have a choice about how you feel, that you’re angry and you’re pissed offness is only an old habit. How many people would actually choose right now if they had a choice about how they feel? How many of you would choose pissed off, angry, frustrated, anybody?

If you could choose the way that you wanted to feel, how would you feel in this sense? How about pleasantly? Surprised? How about enthusiastic? How about delightful?

I would choose that one.

I feel delightful with the dhamma.

By the way, the name Dhammarato, that’s what it actually means. “He’s delighted with the dhamma.”

So I invite you all to start feeling delighted. Enthusiastic.

How about confident? If you could feel the way you wanted to feel, would you feel confident? Would you have the attitude of being confident?

These are the ways that you have choices. Once you can take a look and see how you feel, see how you attitude that you have, look at the body. This is what the Anapanasati practice is all about. This is one of the reasons why we avoid the word meditation, because almost always meditation means something else- cogitation, contemplation, noting, that kind of stuff.

And the problem with noting is that they don’t have a choice. They just keep noting what is there without having a choice. Here we’re offering choice as the operative. If you can see what you’re doing. You’ve got a choice.

Take the choice. Intentionally change your attitude.

Begin to even see the distinction between, let us say, enthusiastic as opposed to delighted.

Enthusiastic is what the winner of, let us say, 100 meters dash and the racer is within inches of the finish line. They’re enthusiastic, but when they cross the finish line, they change that enthusiasm to delight.

Yeehaw.

So you have a choice. Does anybody have any questions about this? Amrit, how do you feel right now?

I feel delighted. You feel delighted? All right. How about you, Thomas?

I’m feeling calm and good. Very pleasant. All right, how about you, d three? How do you feel? What’s your attitude?

Happy. Happy. Okay, Alex, how about you? How do you feel right now?

You feel muted.

Can you unmute your microphone?

His microphone is still muted.

It’s got a red line to the mic. Oh, well, you want to keep it that way. That’s all right. Michael, how do you feel? Splendid.

Happy to be here. Did I haven’t thought of that word. Yeah, I like that one. Splendid is how you feel when you remove a splinter.

Exactly. David, how do you feel right now? I feel offended, you know, like Damarato was picking on me, you know? Just kidding. I feel great.

It wasn’t you that I was picking on. It was the attitude that you had at that moment. It’s the attitude, not you. David, you’re one of my best friends. That’s why I can pick on your attitude.

Go for it. Yeah. Thank you, Ivan. How do you feel right now?

Uh, this is good enough. Good enough. All right. How about you, Ross?

Yeah, I feel pretty chill. Children, relax. Pretty chill. Relax, chill.

All right. How about you, Mike? You just joined us. How do you feel?

Very uncomfortable. Pardon? Feels very, very uncomfortable. You feel uncomfortable, huh? Very uncomfortable. But if you’d have called an hour ago, you’d feel great.

Probably.

But you got a choice. You can change it right now.

Well, I feel like when I embrace the fact that I feel uncomfortable, I stopped feeling uncomfortable. But I missed your lecture, so I don’t really know the trick you were describing. Sorry about that.

Well, that’s all right. That you came late. It’s okay with me.

So, Alex, you got your mic on now. How you feel? I feel good enough tomorrow to. Okay. Thank you very much for the meeting.

So, Karl with a k, how do you feel?

I’m just chilling. Chill. That’s good. Carl with a c, how you doing? How you feel?

All good. All good. I still feel sorry for Dave, though.

You said what? I still feel sorry for David.

You feel sorry for David. Looks like he’s got a smile to me. I don’t feel sorry for him.

Yeah. No, but really, I would rather be delighted than enthusiastic, because I have a tendency to get very enthusiastic about things, and there is always that kind of sukkah. Right. But then often I feel dukkha afterwards, the enthusiasm. So I think enthusiastic can be a dangerous kind of sukkah.

All right, well, when dukkha. When you start making that change, notice that you’re making that change, then you have a choice about, are you going to go through that change or not?

Hmm. Yeah, I guess so. Yeah, you do. But it. But it’s easy to get carried away and, you know, carried away by the enthusiasm, and then you.

You. You don’t pay attention to that shift. Well, this is what we practice for, is to start looking at that stuff so that you can see it. The bigger it is, the easier it is to see. But for some reason, for beginners, they’re in such a habit of feeling bad that they think that that’s normal.

Well, it actually is normal, but it’s not natural.

It’s normal for them. And so when you are enthusiastic and eager for something, and then that falls apart and it falls back down into the dissatisfaction. That’s a normal state that you’re in. You’re familiar with it, and that’s why it becomes subconscious. So the question is, can you see that you’ve made the change between being enthusiastic, excited, versus that change that you’ve made to go back into the ordinary?

All right, let’s see who’s. Pardon? Good. Well, no, exactly. Great.

Well, great meeting. And all is good here. Yes. We got one guy left. Vitale.

Hey. I am great. I am great. I am pleasantly surprised. Let’s see.

It was an amazing, very rich, content wise meeting, so thank you very much Dhammarato. It’s this decomposition of thoughts into mental attitude background and the small bubbling thoughts which overlay in this background. It’s a very useful and impactful idea, I think. Right.

But it’s not to be practiced occasionally. It’s to be practiced every time that you can remember to do it. And so one of the skills that we want to develop is to remember often, because if you can remember often, that means that you have a choice often about the way you feel. If you don’t remember very often, then you’re going to be feeling like you normally do instead of feeling like you’re on top of the world.

Well, guys, thank you very much. This has been a really great talk. I really appreciate it. And wow, what a crowd we’ve got today. Four, 6810, 1214 people on the call.

That’s a record or tied with the record. So thank you all very much. We hope to see you again. In the meantime, don’t worry, be happy. Go find pleasure wherever it may be found, even in your failures.

Because your failures is just your bad attitude. And you know what you can do with that. Aha. I see you.

All right. Thank you all.

Bye bye. Thank you, everybody. Bye bye.

Thank you. Bye.

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