You Don’t Have to Fix The World | Sangha UK #210 | 04.14.24

Transcript

I have also one question. So today is Sunday afternoon in Thai time. We have David’s actually in Malaysia coming back to Koh Phangan, and Michael and I are here on this porch, and it looks like we’ve got about 14 people on the call today. And so we’ve got a couple of questions that are interrelated, and that would be western politics and western psychology. Somebody was about to speak.

Who was that was talking? You had another question.

Oh, never mind. Okay, so we’ll go ahead and start with, with what we were going for. First off, let’s talk about western psychology.

Many of you might know that I’ve spent quite a lot of my early days back in the 1970s in psychology, and that one of the things that I learned was that Sigmund Freud did a thing that developed into what’s called psychoanalysis and that he was not interested in a cure. He was interested in figuring out what was going going on. And that has remained the basis of psychotherapy till this day, even though that Freud’s reputation has gone up and down and up and down, and sometimes he’s loved and sometimes he’s hated, and that’s sometimes within the same human’s mind. And so the big point is that with his students, like Eric Byrne, who reinterpreted Freud’s id, superego and ego into parent, adult and child, it’s still an analysis, not a cure. And in fact, what Eric Byrne called his was transactional analysis, as well known now as Ta.

And that when people go to a psychoanalysis psychoanalyst, the general idea is that if you can figure out how things went wrong, you can figure out how to deal with it. That’s problematic.

That, in fact, what the Buddha’s whole teaching was all about was not trying to figure out what happened, not trying to analyze it. Then, in fact, we have certain teachings of the Buddha about, it’s called the four imponderables. And one of the imponderables is that we don’t know how things get started. Whether it was way back 13.8 billion years ago or whether it was when Jesus was nailed to the cross, of whether Mohammed split somebody’s skull. It doesn’t matter what got started or when it got started.

That’s not our business. That, in fact, when I talk about it in our childhood discussions, we talk about how things got started with the idea of you beginning to understand how things are right now, that that’s really much more important than analyzing the past is to analyze the present moment, but seems to be very helpful for westerners. When I talk about Freud and Byrne and the way that, in fact, one of the things I really did appreciate about Sigmund Freud was that he developed a system that he called developmental psychology of what happens when a child is a year old, what happens when children are two years old in general, what happens at the age of six in general, and that kind of thing. They even have certain labels for it. Oral is the first year.

Anal is the second year. That has to do with potty training. Then they go into the phallic stage when the little boys figure out that they’ve got a penis and the little girls don’t, causing penis injury and all kinds of really weird stuff that I didn’t ever figure out. And then they go into latency, all right, which is where we, let us say, regurgitate what will happen in the first five or six years over and over again until we make it into a habit. So psychoanalysis generally is of some value in helping us to understand the human mind, the way that it’s built and the way that it functions.

But the real deal, which is the teaching of the buddha called dependent origination, or piticha samupada, is the important point when he teaches us how the mind winds up in dissatisfaction, how we wind up in Duka. Why is that? Because that’s what’s most valuable. If you can see how you, not 35 years ago or a million years ago, but how 10 seconds ago you moved from being okay into being not okay. That can be helpful within that ten second range of time that.

In fact, here’s a question for you all. How long in seconds does now last? We talk about now, but when we think of now, we don’t talk about it in milliseconds or even nanoseconds or picoseconds. We talk about it in full seconds, because the human mind, as fast as it is, in reality, we’re pretty slow. We’re pretty slow that a lot of animals are much faster.

Chimpanzees are faster than humans, for sure. Cats are faster. House cats. An example of that is have you ever had a mouse or a cat that could catch a mouse in your house in the old days? That’s the reason that they had cats, so that they could catch a mouse.

You know what I’m talking about. Nobody’s raising their hands or anything. All right. You know that cats can chase. Okay, Amorett, you got that?

All right, so Amorett knows that the cat can chase the mouse. Carl, do you think that Amorett can catch a mouse?

He could set a trap. But can he actually get out on his hands and knees and grab one with his fingernails and wring its neck?

No. Humans are pretty slow compared to a lot of the animals. Animals could do a whole lot of stuff that people can’t do, and a lot of it has to do with speed. For instance, both a mongoose and a cat can handle a cobra. But humans don’t do very well with cobras unless they’ve got specific training.

But any house cat can manage a cobra.

Any house cat can manage a cobra. Why? Because they’re fast enough that cobras actually are slow. You can see when they raise up and they bring their head back and then they go like that. And humans will let that happen.

They’ll watch it happen. While the cobra strikes. You know what the cat’s going to do? He’s going to be both clawing the face off of that snake while he’s 2ft in the air.

So humans are pretty slow in that regard. Now, why am I talking about this is because we’re also pretty slow at figuring stuff out. And yet the mind is really, really fast in the sense of jumping from one thing to another to another to another. That in fact, dogs and cats and other animals tend to ponder things and look at what’s going on while the human will jump around in our thoughts over and over and over again. And that’s one of the values of psychoanalysis that in fact, Sigmund Freud called it free association.

And he would sit there and take notes while people would actually slow down enough to be able to verbalize their thought patterns. But when you are not verbalizing your thought patterns, the mind actually speeds up. It gets really fast so that we can jump from thought to thought, to thought, to thought. And one of the practices, or one of the most important qualities of anapanosati is to be able to see that and also to develop the skill of tracking. What I mean by tracking is that you wind up with one thought.

How did you wind up with that thought? Well, there was a thought before that. Do you know what that thought was and what proceeded it that way? That, in fact, I would suggest that you start watching so that you can backtrack at least three thoughts back. And if you’re getting good at it, you can.

You can go back four or five or six thoughts.

So begin to watch the thoughts, because most people, they can’t track one thought. By the time that they’ve got one thought, they’ve got another, and they don’t even know how they got there. And so psychoanalysis was kind of based upon how the mind moves around and what kind of dialogues and transactions are happening within the mind. This is where Eric Byrne really was delightfully able to say things by putting it in the frame of that. We have dialogues with ourselves, and these dialogues are normally between the parent and the child.

Now, we can actually use neurology to understand this in the sense that the human brain is broken into three major categories. One is called the reptilian brain, and it’s got some things in it, especially the amygdala. It also has the hippocampus, it has the cerebellum, it has the brain stem, and it’s got a couple of partners called the pituitary and the penal glands. And that this part of the brain, this primitive part of the brain, actually is the part that controls our actual feelings. Most specifically, the amygdala is in charge of both fear and anger, where there is also called a mid cortex or a Templar lobe, is also referred to as the mammalian brain, where his language is stored.

And that Eric Byrne then would associate that with the parent ego state. And the Buddha would call this sila bhatta paramasa. And what we’re referring to is all of the things that we talk to ourselves about. And so the things that we say. A lot of people think that our thinking is only discursive in the sense that it’s only language.

But, in fact, we think in many different ways. We think, in fact, with each of the senses. For instance, we can hum a tune but not remember the words. So that would be auditory, but it would not be a discursive thought. A discursive thought is actually language kind of thoughts.

And then we have visualizations, and it seems like that the visualizations are the ones that are fastest, that we can flash an image in the mind. And. And that’s what then creates a feeling that the amygdala grabs a hold of that image and. And converts it into appealing. All right, so if you just listen, for instance, to a news broadcaster who says that all things are really bad in Gaza, what will happen is, is that you will imagine something, you will create an image of what you think is bad in Gaza, and then you will feel that image, not what the commentator said.

In other words, we create our reality. So the commentator can say all of these statistics and they can talk about all the stuff. Like, for instance, the Israelis are going to flood the tunnels in Gaza. When I say that, don’t you imagine a tunnel? Didn’t you see a tunnel in your mind?

Anybody here that when I said about talked about a tunnel, you didn’t see one in your mind? Everybody does. You see that image in your mind? Do you recognize that you’re actually creating the image? Some of you also saw not just the tunnel itself, but flooding, because I mentioned flooding.

And guess what? It took you much less time to see the image of a tunnel being flooded than it took me to say the words. In Gaza, the Israelis are flooding tunnels. And those images are really, really fast. And when we feel, we feel with those images as well as the didactic, and so we take language in and we also repeat it to ourselves, that in fact, all of the language that we use has to do with rules, laws, commandments, sharia laws, precepts.

What mommy told you not to do, what the kids on the playground told you you could get away with all of this kind of stuff. We restore it as verbal information and then we repeat it to ourselves. And as we do that, we create images. And as we also do that, we also feed information into the penal and the pituitary gland that are directly connected through the lymph system, right down to the adrenaline gland that secretes two fluids. One of them is adrenaline and the other one is cortisol.

Now the interesting thing is that why is the adrenaline gland on top of the kidneys in the lower back to where the penal and the pituitary glands are right up here? The answer is that the penal and the pituitary glands are actually part of the reptilian brain system that we have. But in order to manufacture adrenaline, we need the chemicals. And that’s why the kidneys in the liver are there next to the adrenaline gland. So the adrenaline gland can get the old poisons out and reconstitute and make some more adrenaline to pump into the blood system.

And that blood then first gets into our system right here in the chest area, before it’s pumped into the heart, there’s a huge reservoir of blood right in the midsection of the body. It’s in a lot of capillaries and a lot of veins and. Excuse me. Yeah, this part of the vein system, because the arteries don’t start until after it goes through the heart. But in any case, what I’m getting at is that when we see something, or actually we hear something and then we create a picture of it and we see it and then we have a feeling about it that actually is starting in the amygdala and is transmitted down to the kidneys, down to the adrenaline gland which pumps all of this stuff up.

And, Ross, where. When you feel tension and anxiety, where do you feel it? Do you feel it in your big toe? Do you feel it in your left ear? No.

Where do you feel it? Um, yeah, just. Just sort of, like, around the. The abdomen area. Yes, precisely.

In the stomach. The abdomen, the chest area, where all of that blood is. It has all of that adrenaline in it. And so whenever you feel uptight, anxious, whenever you feel agitated in a panic mode, then, in fact, that panic mode or that agitation is because the whole body has so much adrenaline in it that is almost like an energy drink that we have already in the blood. And so many times I’ve asked students if you.

They will mention, oh, while I was sitting in Annapanasati, I began to recognize that I had anxiety. I had tension. So I start asking them questions, where is that anxiety in the body?

Where does it belong? Or where do you feel it? And most people, in fact, are not aware of their anxiety consciously. What they’re aware of it is subconsciously. And so they become agitated and upset at a feeling level without understanding either this process that they go through or that they had certain thoughts, memories, visions.

They heard something on the news that created this blood flow that is full of energy in the form of adrenaline.

And so the question really would be, what were you thinking that caused you to feel anxious and anxiety? The next question that we would ask would be, is this anxiety brand new, or is this just an old habit? Because we go through this same cycle over and over and over again. We take in information, we heard the news, we create visualizations, we have a story about it. Then that story gets stored into the amygdala, which then creates this message to the pituitary glands.

That gets the adrenaline system ready for fight or flight, and they’re readying it is the freeze. And so these are all neurological things that happen within the body, and yet very few people are aware of this system, and they’re not even aware of the anxiety that they’ve created. So this is where Annapanasati comes in is because we’re actually not just interested in this cycle and how things happen. We’re interested in looking at when do I see it and how can I change it? We’re not interested in being able to change our childhood.

You can’t change the past. But what we can do is begin to interrupt the cycles that we have created from the past. So, Thomas, you got your hand up?

Yeah. I’m wondering if this is directly the same with opening and closing of the heart and how that works.

How what works? Opening and closing of the heart. Kind of. Yes. All right.

The opening and closing of the heart is a metaphor, possibly a christian metaphor, that a better way of talking about it is to open the mind. Except the question would be, well, where is the heart? Is the heart actually in the chest? Is, because that’s where a lot of people thought. In fact, this is called the horror, because that’s where the sensations actually are discovered.

But the actual reality is that it was the mind that created that anxiety. And so a better way of talking about it would be to open the mind, not open the heart. And what do we mean by opening the mind? Means to be able to see what the mind is doing, the opening process. That, in fact, the joke would be that my mind is so open that everything fell out.

Cat’s calling. He should have called us, not me.

Is that you, Cat, that just joined us? Yeah, it is. I can see your eyeglasses now. All right, so back to what we were talking about, this neurology, this science that I’m talking about. Almost everything that I’ve said in the past ten or 15 minutes.

The Buddha didn’t know any of that stuff, because it’s really not important to talk about it in this regard. But what is important is for you to recognize the sequence of events that you go through to get into bad feelings. And his method of talking about that is called or entire samuppada, and that it has a lot to do with the sequence of events. From the time that you take in the input, you hear it until you wind up in the feelings of liking and not liking or the fear or whatever like that. And the actual process that’s happening inside the brain is not so important that we know the actual items.

I mean, the Buddha didn’t have a knife. He didn’t cut his brain open to see what was in there. We’ve done that in recent times. But knowing all of that is of no value. Just like Freud, he knew about the superego and the id, and Byrne knew exactly what was going on between the parent ego state.

And we also, the neurology knows exactly what part of the mind that that stuff is happening in. It’s either happening in the back, which is where all the feelings are, which is what we call the child, and also the verbal dialogue and all of that stuff that happens, which is in the mid brain, the cork, the temporal lobes, or the mammalian brain. The Buddha didn’t need any of that because he was much more concerned with how do we wind up in bad feelings? And the reality is, is that there is a part of the reptilian brain, the ancient brain called the cerebellum, that has a whole lot to do with this, because this is where memories are stored. And this is what the Buddha talks about in the sense of Sanghara.

All the stuff that we’ve got stored is then used in the processing for us to figure out how we’re going to feel. Is this pleasant? Is it unpleasant? Is this a good thing or a bad thing? Is this dangerous?

Or is it benign? All of that kind of stuff depends upon how information is processed, not the actual data that comes in, that you’ve seen many, many examples of how something happens. And two people who observed that event have completely opposite reactions to it. Why is that possible if the brain works the same way? The answer is to that is that because they’ve got different stored memory systems?

So two guys see someone walking down the street, let us say, in a Gestapo uniform, an SS officer’s uniform, and one guy starts to howl with laughter, another one salutes and a third one runs away. Why? Cause the guy who howls with laughter, he just sees that costume is something, let us say a Halloween costume, and he thinks it’s hilarious. The guy who salutes thinks that it’s real and. And he is all for it.

And the guy who runs away thinks that the SS officer is chasing him. Now, with all of that, why would we think then that what you hear, for instance, Ross on the news, why can’t you control how you feel about it? The answer is that you can’t only because of the fact that you let your past interfere with what’s going on, rather than just seeing what’s going on. And one example would be when you’re sitting, let us say that you’ve got your cell phone and you see them talking about, or you hear them talking about flooding the tunnels in Gaza, what do you do? You actually go to Gaza to feel bad.

You don’t remember that you’re in reality just holding a cell phone.

If you could keep track of the reality of the moment, that you’re just holding a cell phone, then why should you feel bad? Why should you feel terrified?

But say, for example, I won’t go into the news this morning, but it was something that made me feel sad because it happened to somebody. It did not make you feel sad. You chose to feel sad and you did so ignorantly. And here you are blaming what you heard has made you feel sad. Did anybody else catch up on catch that point, you didn’t.

It didn’t make you feel sad, because if it did have that quality, it would make everybody who heard it feel sad. And I bet that there was quite a number of people, maybe in the millions or even billions, when they heard that broadcast and say, yay, my team won.

It was how you perceived it that made you feel bad. It was your own perception. You made that stuff up, and that’s what you reacted to. You felt sad because you made it up. So I didn’t catch that last point.

But are you saying, dalmarato, that is not reality? No, the reality is you’re sitting in your chair watching a cell phone. That’s the reality.

So listening to you right now is not reality. Well, yes, it is reality in the sense of here I am talking, and there you are sitting and listening. But what you invent with what I’m saying is your own reality. Ah, got it.

There’s. Some of the people will like what I have to say. Others will. Hmm, that’s really interesting. And somebody else will say, that’s spot on.

The guy, by the way, who says that’s spot on has probably heard this before, and it agrees with what he already believes.

In other words, he’s already got a spot to be on. And other people, they don’t have a spot, so they’re confused about what I’m saying. And other people have a spot someplace else, maybe a psychologist or someone, and they at their spot, and I’m not on their spot, and so they don’t like it. Navid, go ahead. I see your hand is up.

Yes, I was. Sorry. I don’t know if I was next in line, but I was wondering how.

How do you remember that? I mean, what you just said there was so true, and I realized that. But you have to keep reminding yourself of that because you always look at whatever you’re looking at as if it was actual reality until you remind yourself that you’re not. Mm hmm, exactly. Is that what you do constantly, or did you use to do that?

We’ll use that word for a moment to remind ourselves. Have you ever heard of the buddhist word mindfulness? What do you think it means? Other than to remind ourselves, which is exactly how we use the word sati, in the sense of to remember or to remind ourselves that we’re in reality. To keep reminding yourself that everything is really okay in spite of the fact that you’re having thoughts of misery.

Right? Right. Okay. When Ross hears the news, he feels miserable when he can, in fact, remind himself that he’s sitting on his butt in his living room and he’s having a ball, but instead he chooses to feel sad. Why does reminder?

It’s almost like a mantra. You have to use it as a man. It’s not a mantra because almost everyone who does a mantra does it mindlessly. Okay, I get it. I get.

Yes, you’re right. It’s very easy to turn it mindless. Right. It’s not a mantra that we grind in. That becomes a habit.

We have to actually start to come out of our habits to remember, to not do our habits.

But does that remembrance become a habit eventually? Pardon? Does that remembrance become a habit eventually, actually, or is it a constant word? But the way that I talk about it is, is that it’s a skill that in fact all skills are habits. But most of the habits we have are unfortunate.

They’re lemony snicket’s habits. Yeah, everything happens, unfortunately. But if you start to develop of the skills that you need, one of the most important skills that you need, in fact, is to remember to look. Another really important skill to learn is how to look. And what are we howing to look?

How do we, how to look is to look for the discrimination of is this worth having a thought about or is it not? Is this a wholesome thought or is it not a wholesome thought? So those are the two twin skills that we need is to remember to look at what we’re thinking about and then to actually judge what we’re thinking about in a very positive way in the sense of that’s not worth thinking about. And now the third skill that comes in, which is the one that western meditation really misses of often, is the skill of doing something new about it, to make a change, to take the right noble effort to change that unwholesome thought into a wholesome thought. Ross, when you see that they’re flooding Gaza on your cell phone, you could have the positive glad as well.

I’m glad they’re not flooding my toilet.

Well, I’m glad that I’m not six inches deep in water because you’re not in reality underwater. But what about the feeling of feeling sorry for the people that are subjugated to that? Well, they’re already feeling sorry enough for themselves. They don’t need your help to feel more sorry. Okay.

Yeah. Mm hmm. Feeling sorry for someone just makes you feel sorry because you’re not going to do a damn thing about it. You’re not going to go take your bucket and take the water out of that tunnel. You’re just going to sit on your couch and feel sorry for yourself.

Yep. Spot on. And I use that example, but I don’t, because I don’t even know what you were feeling sorry for yourself about. Well, it’s just, you know, look, there’s just, you know, the news doesn’t stop, right? Every day there’s something.

Yeah, it doesn’t stop, does it? No. Okay, so we can, uh, this. Let’s wait and introduce that topic next. Deidre, you still got your hand up.

Oh, you’re such a patient lady. Thank you so much for waiting.

Yeah, I’m really a little bit curious about.

I think it’s really important to know your own mind. You see, everybody process information differently because we have this whole archive in which we run through, and then we get the reaction to something. We have an uncatalogged library. It’s in a great big pile. That’s it.

Very few people actually categorize and do a Dewey decimal system on their entire memory system. Very few people do that. Almost all of us just pick up something out of our junk pile and let that affect us. So whatever the biggest thing is, is most likely what we’re going to pick up to do our mental processing with. So is it important to know the archive, the pile of rubble where we’re running through?

Oh, it’s very, very good and useful for us to start piling new, good, wholesome stuff on top of that pile so that when you reach into that pile, you reach in and you grab something useful, rather than the oldest, biggest, grimiest things that are there. Like the thought, I can change this. I can change my. I can change this. Ross, you can change the way you feel about the news.

You can see Donald Trump, for instance, as the best comedian on stage right now. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, he is very, very much like George Garland, because half the things that George Garland says is not right. It’s not correct, but it’s funny.

Would see George, I would see Donald Trump that way, too, that what he says is not correct, but it’s funny.

Yeah. And then the other thing is, like, what I wanted to ask is being in real, watching, observing reality is actually makes me think of that. You have to be out of your mind to watch reality. Well, wait a minute. Let’s go into that.

Is the news real? Is the news reality? Have you not heard the expression, if it bleeds, it leads? Yeah, I know that one. All right.

Well, what that means is, is that they, the newscasters and the big publishers, they optimize their news for how much they can make off of that. An example of that would be Fox News has the business model that the more lies they tell, the more money they make.

Yeah, but I’m referring to is, like, we had about, like, let’s say, the archive of your mind, like, the whole bundle. You can also say, if you’re not reaching into the bundle, like, say, your mind, you stay out of your mind. Stay out of it, and then observe reality. All right, now that leads us back into petite sampata. At the point that we can refer to as the choices that we have is either take data in and not process it so much, and just take more data in and not process it so much, and then take more data in and not process so much.

Just take the data in and put it on the pile. Or maybe just take the data in and throw it out.

That’s one. The second one, which is what everybody does, is they take things in indiscriminately and throw it on the pile indiscriminately. They’re not really careful about what they’re. They’re taking in. This is what we would call ignorance.

They’re not choosy. And we were, when we were kids, we were especially not choosy. We just took in whatever crap that was fed to us, and we just accepted it.

Alexander, you got your hand up. This has been a lively crowd. I’m really liking this. Go ahead, Alexander. Yeah.

I’d just like to relate on one of my experience based on the conditioning of what we receive from outside. So a couple of days ago, my mom called me late, telling me that my grandmother might not stay among us for long. And so after this call, I started to feel sad, you know, like the idea that my grandmother will pass away soon. And suddenly I started to feel sad and even crying. And I caught my mind, like, why am I feeling this?

You’re still here. You know, like, I don’t need to project myself at the moment where she will be dead yet. And you’re feeling. Yeah, exactly. And I just caught my mind and why?

And so I just chilled, and I was like, okay, never mind. You know? Yeah. This is how the conditioning on one reality, which was the call of my mother, influenced my state. And I started to feel the sadness based on just, like, a conditioning from previous event.

Okay, well, let’s talk about it like this. Remember that we had talked about the parent and the child talked about how things should be versus how we want things or how we feel about things. Okay, so this leaves you with two points. One, would be when you hear about someone getting sick and is about to die, that will trigger a deep embedded DNA thing called an instinct. The instinct is a self preservation instinct.

Right. And so when somebody gets close to death, we don’t like it because we don’t like death. Why? Because we do not want the death to be visited on Granny. Because that same death is going to come visit me.

All right? But there’s a second thing that’s going on with that, and that is then in our culture, people are not supposed to die. Everybody does die, but we’re not supposed to die. So something is wrong. Your grandma’s not supposed to die.

That’s why she’s in the hospital is because she’s not supposed to die. If you pay enough money to the doctors and you pray enough in that spittoon, you will in fact, save her life for a little while. But it’s going to happen again, and you’ll have to pay the doctors again and you’ll have to pray into the spittoon again. I’m not sure if it’s a splatoon. What is Catholics call that?

Never mind. It’s something you got to go pray and pay to keep somebody alive, when in fact, the reality is, is that they’re dying.

Can you accept that your granny is dying? Can you accept it happily? Now, here’s a question for you in that regard. That your mom also has this twin combination of that she doesn’t want to die and she feels that instinctual part, and she also has the mental part about she’s not supposed to die and that your mom feels responsible because she’s got that rule, granny’s not supposed to die. I’ve got to do something to keep Granny alive.

So with that, that’ll give you some information for how do you handle your mother? Do you want her to have to take care of you sobbing, too? Are you going to support her with a smile? That’s your choice. Yeah.

Yeah. That’s actually how I project myself as I’m going to handle myself because my mom’s going to need me and she doesn’t need me to be the child, you know? Yeah, she does not need you to be the child. You let her be the child. Let her be sad and let her get over it.

While you’re talking about it, in the other sense of, well, it was her time to go, she’ll rest in peace. She’ll be okay. You don’t worry about it. Do some positive things for your mom rather than giving her your misery.

But you’ve got a choice about that. You have? Yeah. That’s the thing that happens. When I.

When I caught my mind, I mean, when I caught myself getting sad, I’m like, why should I be sad right now? Everything is fine. So I just. Which the buddha would say, aha, I see you sadness. Aha, I see that.

I get sad because she’s not supposed to die. I see, aha, I get sad because I’m afraid to die, too.

And so these twin combinations of she’s not supposed to die, and I’m afraid to die. Oh, in fact, when you get sad about the news, isn’t it because, Ross, somebody died? Or did you get really sad because some stock broker lost a million dollars on the stock market there? It’s normal. It’s normally because someone has died.

Somebody died, correct. Right. That’s the whole point, is somebody died, and they’re not supposed to die. Those murdering Arabs, they should not kill those Egyptians, and those Egyptians should not kill the Jews, and the Jews should not kill, you know, and the Germans should not kill. And all this kind of stuff are rules that you made up in your mind, and it’s not real.

The fact is that Germans do kill, Jews do kill, muslims do kill, Arabs do kill, children get killed. You can’t do anything about that except manage how you feel about it. You can’t change reality with your rules, and you can’t change reality with your fear, but you can change your own reality when you recognize that I’m being afraid, or you can recognize I’m applying a rule that doesn’t work. This is, again, is where you can remind yourself to come back to reality. Reality is that shit happens.

Yeah. And then you don’t have to get over it because you not got in it that you had to get over it. You can stop before you get into it. You don’t have to get over it. You can happily go right through it.

You don’t have to get over it if you don’t get in it. So this is where reminding yourself really comes in, is to remind yourself before you get into it, instead of reminding yourself when you’re half stuck into it. This is when Sati really, really works, is when you can see things in advance. This, by the way, is what we call wisdom. Wisdom is being able to see what’s happening in advance rather than what happened in the past.

Now, we’re not talking about making plans. We’re talking about something that’s about to happen. Like, I’m about to feel bad when I see Donald Trump or I’m about to. To feel bad when I see them flooding the tunnels, or I’m about to feel bad when I hear that granny, or I think about granny croaking or knowing the reaction that I tend to feel when I watch the news, am I just better off just not even switching it on? Pardon?

I said, knowing. Knowing the reaction I feel when I watch the news. Most, on most occasions, am I better off just not watching the news? Just switch the thing off? Well, okay.

Have you ever heard me talk about seclusion?

Sort of, yeah, sure. So why don’t you start seclusion then, from those things that you know are going to upset you? Because it’s not them things that are upsetting you, it’s you upset yourself. When you’re in the vicinity of that stuff, you choose to feel bad, and you also have a choice to not be around it so that you trigger yourself into feeling bad. And then later, when you’ve gotten to the point in that seclusion, that even if you think about the Jews killing the Gaza children, you can still feel, well, that’s just happening.

I can’t do anything about it. I can feel okay. Later when you do that enough and you get that established, when you get that good wholesome habit going now you can look at the Israelis killing the little kids and you’re okay. You can watch the news without it affecting you. And in fact, it’s a good test for you that if you watch the news and it does affect you, you can say, hot dog.

I’m putting that down. I don’t have to listen to that. I can scroll through this. You don’t have to sit there and read and read it and. And see the videos and hear the dirty words and feel bad.

You can say, I’m finished. Yeah, and go. Go away. You could go back into seclusion at any time. All right, so we can do that with anything in the news.

We can do that with anything in politics. We can do that in every case. We can even do it when we’re in an argument with someone. Are you wise enough to not get into an argument? Or are you wise enough to see that you’re in an argument?

Or are you just going to argue on and on the way that we do mindlessly so, Michael. No, wait a minute. Ivan, you got your hand up. Yes. I was just thinking about how Buddha often, at least in the dharma, are teaching.

I heard a lot about this feeding, right? Like we feed ourselves, whether it’s through food or just media consumption. I guess that would be the terminology for the modern age. And I’m just curious. I feel like the Buddha will have said the same thing in terms of what we see and what we read.

And I’m voicing this out because sometimes I think people argue mahogany. Well, it’s not good to be ignorant. But then I was just thinking about what you said about the mammalian brand. How the brand has not really evolved over the years is that there’s a tendency to want to hear bad news is because it makes sense back in the days, because bad news means information. Information means we can do something about it.

And it always ties back to a sense of safety in the case that. But for this situation in modern age, it’s kind of stupid and ignorant because you are listening to news that you could do nothing about. And I just think. I was just thinking about skillful consumption. Just something the Buddha talks a lot about, how we feed ourselves.

Okay, you’re giving me too much, and it’s hard to hear. You’re a little bit muffled. Michael, can you give me a short version of what he just said?

If I could, I could maybe just comment on it for you. Dhammarato. The news that’s worthwhile paying attention to is what’s new right now. What’s happening right now in your vicinity. In your vicinity part not on the news broadcast, because that’s been filtered by people who have an agenda.

Use your own mind.

And we also have. I saw a hand up from Thomas, and I think there might have been one more. I’m not sure Thomas’s hand is up, so go ahead, Thomas. Yeah, thanks. Thanks for sharing.

It’s. Yeah, I. What I’m taking from it, or at least if I were to relay what we’ve discussed today to someone else who doesn’t know the Dharma so well, I think the one thing that they would pick up on, they’d say, yeah, but you have a. Like, for example, in Russia’s example, he should feel sad because that’s the only way in which you can, you know, make the world a better. A better place.

If you don’t care about what happens, you know, somewhere or other, then. Then you’re not. Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. What world are you trying to make better? No, no, I’m.

I. What world? No, answer the question. What world are you trying to make better?

Let me define it so that you get an idea. Okay? There’s three kinds of worlds. One world is the planet Earth. I contend that the planet Earth would be better off without humans.

The humans are quite a skin rash on the planet earth. So if we all died, the planet Earth, that world would be better off. She don’t need 7 billion ants crawling all over her.

So the second kind of world is the world out there, the general world that you have as a concept. We’re talking about Turkey and Iran and Australia and China and all of them places on the globe. And all of those people is merely a mental concept in your mind. And then the third kind is your world. The world that you can sense, the world that you can see, touch, taste, smell that comes into it.

And your world is probably less than 50 meters in diameter. Okay, so which world are you talking about making the world better? You talk about making the planet Earth better, then fine, let’s just kill all the humans. That’s not going to happen. I don’t even want it to happen.

In fact, the planet Earth can do pretty well with humans. She won’t just have another tsunami or something when she gets pissed off. All right, so we can eliminate that one. The second world that you’re trying to make better, I think, though, is the conceptualized world in your mind. Because you do not know the world.

You couldn’t possibly know the world. It’s far too big for your little brain. This, in fact, is far too big for all of us combined. We all couldn’t take a quarter of it and know everything. This, I mean, one point, Deidre, your assignment is to know everything that happens in the congo.

Ross, your job is to have is to know everything that happens in Atlanta.

Right. Can’t do it. It’s too big. And not only that, but we reduce it to a concept. So when you’re talking about making the world better, you’re talking about making a concept in your mind better, not the actual real world.

And then there’s the world that you can actually do something about. And that is to throw out all your concepts about the world and look at the world you live in. The reality is that your world is pretty small. It’s a small world, after all. Then.

In fact, the funny part about it is, no matter where you go, there you are. That’s your world.

Wherever you go, there you are.

So cats world is a wad in Udan Tani. That’s what his world is. His world is not the Congo. His world is not Atlanta. And he’s having a difficult enough time dealing with the world that he’s in.

Because really, the whole point is, is that the real world that we’re talking about is between the ears this is what we really need to learn is our thought patterns that you, if you want to make the world better, then change your thought from an unwholesome thought to a happy thought, and then act with empathy in your direct environment. You do not have to empathize with any of those klutzes out there. You can act in joy and happiness for yourself. They want you. In other words, your empathy is probably just joining their pity party.

You will treat them better if you treat them with joy.

You do not have to empathize with them. In fact, the story is that here you are on board a big fishing boat that’s in heavy seas, and this guy that you want to empathize with just fell over the side. He wasn’t hanging on. He didn’t have sea legs. He wasn’t able to manage himself.

And so off the overboard he went. You know what I’m talking about? Metaphorically, because you know what it’s like to go overboard. You’ve been overboard yourself about times. Okay, so now that your friend and buddy and companion is overboard, if you’re going to empathize with him, that means you’ve got to jump in, too.

A much better thing for you to do is to throw him a lifeline and then drag him back onto your boat. What is the lifeline that you’re going to throw him? Your joy, your happiness? He did not have to go overboard, and you can pull him back on board. But if you empathize with him, that means that you’re just jumping into the sink with him.

That’s what we normally mean by compassion. Compassion means join their pity party. Oh, mom is crying over Granny’s casket. Let me go nurture her and say, oh, she was a good woman and all of that kind of stuff. You can nurture her well, and you can help her to have a smile.

You can tell. You can tell her to remember that Granny took good care of you. And Granny doesn’t want to see you crying over her casket. That’s the kind of thing that you can help her with. But what is most likely going to happen is the kids going to go up on with mom to the casket and he’s going to bawl, too.

Oh, poor me, my granny’s dead. And I’m going to hold my grand, my mom’s hand while she says, oh, poor me, my mom’s dead. That’s what empathy is. We don’t need it. What we need is a way of pulling people out of their misery.

And that’s your job, to spread joy to spread the dhamma. And in this case, to spread the reality that everything’s okay. Yeah, Granny croaked. But you’re going to be all right. Granny’s better off now that she’s croaked.

You want her to sit and lay in the hospital and call and charge, you know, run a great big bill up while she’s feeling bad? No, she’s better off dead now. She doesn’t even have to breathe. You’ve got to still breathe. You’re the one who is suffering.

Granny’s okay. She’s dead. She’s resting in peace. How come you are falling to pieces?

So we don’t need. We don’t need to empathize. What we need to do is to change the situation from an unwholesome state into a wholesome state. That one of the people that I’ve got, she’s a really good friend. You know her.

She’s Anna. She’s been talking with me for a long time. She’s a psychotherapist. In fact, she’s a PhD psychoanalyst in New York City. Right.

And my advice to her is don’t try to fix any of these people. They didn’t come for you to change. They came to you for comfort. So what I give the psychologists the job to do, and this is back to what Amrit was talking about. And that is the job to do, is to make people feel good when they come to you.

Don’t try to fix them. Don’t try to make them better. Make them feel good right here, right now. Because this is your world. Your world is not five minutes ago.

Your world is not ten minutes from now. Your world is right now. And it’s small. I would say probably about 50 meters in diameter. For some people, that’s a pretty big world.

All right, so yesterday I talked a lot about hard versus salt. That we have a society that wants to do everything really hard, do it the hard way. Build up those skills so that we can manage things very well. And the question is that when do you get enough of working hard and then say, I’ve done enough and just quit? And that’s what I’m inviting you to do now.

Ross, stop trying to fix the world. You can’t do it. Not even if you were a news commentator, you would still be told what to commentate.

So why don’t you sit on your couch and commentate? Commentate reality for yourself.

Hey, I’m not over there. I’m not being killed. Things are okay. People are dying every day, how. How bad are you going to feel?

But when everybody dies, remember that you’ve got a choice. You do not have to have that old rule. People should not die because that rule is getting broken left, right and center. You don’t have to feel bad because that rule is broken. In fact, the best thing for you to do is to throw that rule out.

And, in fact, this is what the Buddha recommends. Throw the rules out. Throw them out because all they do is just make you feel bad.

Yep. So throw the rules out. Stop having rules about how things are supposed to be. Stop trying to fix the world. Because the world really, in reality, that world out there is not broken.

The reality is, is that we all live in a paradise. All seven or 8 billion of us live in a paradise. It’s just seven or 8 billion people don’t know that. They’re trying to fix it because they’re confused. They’re stupid.

They don’t realize that everything is okay. But you can figure that out.

I see you smiling, dietary. I think that you can figure out that the world is.

It’s all right. It doesn’t need your help. It doesn’t need to be fixed. The problem is, the 7 billion people are out there trying to fix it.

I remember it’s a song that came from my childhood. I haven’t heard this song since then, but basically it has this. That a committee. A horse. Wait a minute.

A camel is a horse that was designed by a committee. You get a committee and they’re going to paint the house, and everybody puts in their own color. And so they paint very many houses. But every house that this committee paints, it always winds out being gray. Why is it gray?

Is because everybody puts in their color. And when you put enough colors in, all you’re going to get out of it is gray.

So are you going to be on a committee and helping things get even more gray?

Are you going to stop with that and just enjoy your life? Make your life bright, joyful. It’s your choice.

You don’t have to paint the news. You can leave it as it is. In fact, the best thing to do with the news is to put it down, to set it down. You don’t need that. Just live your life happily.

Go ahead. D. Three? Yeah. Now there’s this line I heard from a mindfulness teacher some time ago, and it reminds me of this situation.

It says, you always experience yourself as the center of the universe. You always expect. You see yourself as the center of the world. You look from off the center, and this gives you a clue of who’s creating it. Yeah.

Who’s creating your universe. Mm hmm. You’ve got a choice about what you’re creating and the best choice you can make is stop creating. Give it a rest already. Stop working so hard creating a universe that doesn’t need your tinkering.

You’re already okay, guys. You’re already okay.

You’re already enlightened. You don’t have to go fight for anything anymore. You just sit down and relax. Ross, you don’t have to fix the news.

You don’t have to fix anything. You’re already okay. Can you remember that? I will. Can you remind yourself, like Novid was saying, remind yourself that it’s not your business to fix what you think is broken.

Because in reality it’s not broken. You’ve just got a rule that’s saying it should be this way and when back reality is like this. There it is. Yeah.

Guys, this has been such a great conversation. Thank you so much. Does anybody have any last comments? Carl, you’ve been quite quiet. What do you have to say about this?

Which Carl? The one with Karl with the k. Okay, well, Carl would see you go first. Right. No, I just.

Really interesting discussion. I was thinking about the, didn’t you mention that mendicants, when they, when are they supposed to walk away from circumstances, they’re actually supposed to walk away before the circumstances happen. Right. But didn’t just like warfare floodings. Yeah.

Then if this happens, stay away from it. Right. Right. So I. Okay, when you remember the warfare would be is if two guys are standing on the street corner arguing.

Right. That’s the warfare. Stay out of it. Unless it’s telling a joke. My favorite joke about that, by the way, is you have a christian and an atheist standing on the street corner arguing.

And the atheist says there ain’t no hell. And the Christian says the hell there ain’t. And the buddhist just walks by in passing and just happens to mention hell. You’re both in it right now.

All right. So even in that, if there is warfare, don’t go there. If there is famine, don’t go there. Don’t ask hungry people for food. If there is pestilence, don’t go there.

Stay away from it. That’s the wisdom. Because if you walk into the place where there’s a lot of pestilence, you’re more than likely going to get a pest or two, which means that if you’re a nurse, don’t work on a COVID ward because you’re likely going to get COVID.

That’s the wisdom, is to stay away from dangers. Don’t go there. But the important word way to think of it is don’t go close to the. To the dangers you’re manufacturing between your ears. Don’t go there.

Stay away from the unwholesome thoughts. Don’t worry. Be happy.

So, Carl with a k, you got something to say?

Nothing much. As far as moving and trying to save the world. It all boils down to like this one quote. I once heard that saints move in silence. And what that means is that the real people who are doing any change, they’re usually quiet, they’re usually joyful.

Small actions through throughout the day, like giving you that extra biscuit at the grocery store. Or like small actions that bring joy into the world. It’s not done on a grandiose scale as we have to solve a big issue. As you said, we would just kill all humans off if we try to solve a big issue with a bigger issue. Yeah.

And if you don’t have a biscuit, give them a smile.

So, Alexander, how are you over there?

I’m good. How’s your granny? Well, she’s well. I mean the one between your ears, because that’s the only granny you’ve got right now. Yeah, no, I’m okay.

Yeah. All right, cat, how about you? You’ve lost some weight. You’re getting downright thin in those ropes.

So giving me a little bit more insight into the situation I talked to you earlier about. Yes, thank you for that.

Amrit, did we answer your question about psychology? Oh, yeah, definitely. You answered very well. So. But my final understanding is psychologists are going too far in the passed maybe several years back.

But Buddha is going maybe like 10 seconds back and analyzing about 10 seconds. We need to go. Thank you very much for this. All right, David. How about you, David?

In Malaysia? Everything is all good here, and I got no problems. Not really concerned about the rolled out beyond my 50 m² in front of me. So everything’s good.

All right. We got a couple of Thomases. Thomas without the, um. Yeah, really, really enjoyed it. And I think what stuck with me most was my question at the end around empathy.

And, you know, replacing empathy with joy. I think that’s really. Yeah, really, really practical and powerful. So I’d never seen it in that way. I always thought I had to be a good person.

I have to feel empathetic. But I think there’s another way. So, yeah, thanks for clarifying that.

How about Thomas with the. You?

Yeah, I really, really enjoyed it. A lot of stuff that I might normally not see or look for, so. And also make me really, really glad. Yeah. Feeling really good right now.

Well, thank you all. Anybody got any last words?

Everybody’s good. Okay.

Thank you. I really appreciate you guys coming. So we’ll see you later. See you, Lamato. Thank you, Dhammarato.

Thank you. Thank you all. Bonjour. Bonjour. Thank you.

Bonsoir. We’ll see you. Okay, bye.

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