Good evening, everyone.
Welcome to our live broadcast, an evening Dhamma talk.
Tonight we're looking at training in Gautam Nikaya, starting at Book of Threes, Sutta 81 and onward.
So another list of three.
This is the list of three things that we have to do.
Three tasks to be accomplished.
.
Three things by a samana, a shaman, a reckless.
That's what we all are.
We are wizards, like shamans who have left the world to seek out higher things.
The things that we accomplish in meditation, most people would think of as
Wizardry, if they knew what we were capable of.
I'm not talking about magical powers, although there are incredible magical powers that come from meditation.
But the simple ability to bear with things that most people aren't able to bear with.
These are not simple things that we do.
These are not easy things.
These are not mundane things.
A powerful spiritual achievement through the practice.
The ability to let go.
The ability to tame the mind.
To discard all the garbage in the mind and have a pure and clear mind.
It's a very profound thing.
So we are all samana.
We are all shamans here.
What are the three things that a shaman, a samana, should accomplish?
Well, in Buddhism, all that magical stuff, all the things that we normally associate with a shaman in modern times, or even in ancient times, most of it's not important in Buddhism.
Buddhism sticks to the core.
separates the wheat from the chaff.
So much is just chaff.
You might think it looks good, and you might think it's useful.
But when you investigate, you find that actually there's not much to it, not much benefit to be had from it.
And the end doesn't give you anything special.
So what are the three things that we have to accomplish?
, three things that must be done by a shaman.
It's quite simple.
Many of you must know what these are.
.
means taking upon yourself, right?
Yes, to take upon.
Taking upon yourself the practice of higher sila, higher morality, higher ethical behavior.
Number two, adhichita sikha samadhana.
Taking upon yourself the training in higher mind, higher mind state.
Concentration is usually translated as, explained as.
And number three, adipanya-sikha-samadhanam, the training, taking upon yourself the training in higher wisdom.
Morality, concentration, and wisdom is how it's usually described.
So how do we understand these things?
Well, it's important to be able to distinguish between morality, concentration, and wisdom, and higher morality, higher concentration, and higher wisdom.
Because it's of two kinds.
There's ordinary morality, and then there's higher morality.
Ordinary ethics.
Ordinary ethics is keeping rules.
We all love rules, no?
Some of us do.
Rules are easy to keep.
You think it's hard to keep rules?
Relatively easy.
Monks can keep lots of rules.
Lay people keep rules.
Some people think because they keep rules, that means they're practicing Buddhism.
They're practicing mundane Buddhism, sure.
But it's actually not enough, unfortunately, to just keep rules.
Rules are like fence posts.
You can't keep the cows in.
You need a fence for that.
You need something real.
Fence posts are useful.
They keep the fence from falling down.
Rules are useful.
They keep your practice from falling down.
But you need the fence nonetheless.
And that's Adi Sila.
Adi Sila is not just keeping rules.
Adi Sila is cultivating a mind that is free from the inclination to break rules, to do anything immoral.
It's guarding the mind, bringing your mind back.
In meditation, the simplest way to understand morality or ethics is not letting your mind wander, not stopping it, but the act of bringing your mind back when you realize you've been thinking to remind yourself, thinking, thinking.
The simple reminder, the initiative,
to say to yourself, ah, I've been unmindful, and to bring yourself back, to cultivate a habit of focusing the mind.
Because these lead one to the other.
What truly leads to higher mind states, focused mind states, clear mind states, is this act of guarding your mind, catching your mind, bringing your mind back to focus on the present moment, focus on reality.
When you're caught up in the conceptualization of an experience,
Suppose you have a thought and it gets you lost in a world of the past or the future or imagination.
To come back down to reality and to remind yourself, hey, that's a thought.
That's images in my mind.
It's just seeing.
Or if someone's yelling at you and you start to plan how you're going to get back to them, then you remind yourself that that's just sound.
And suddenly you're back in reality.
That act of bringing yourself back, that's the purest, simplest way of understanding ethics.
Not letting your mind wander.
Not freeing your mind to let it follow after its inclinations and habits.
But instead training the mind to see the facet of the experience that is real.
The kernel of truth that is in every experience.
what's really happening, to not get lost in what's not really happening.
Adhichitta Sikha.
Again, two kinds.
An ordinary citta, ordinary concentration.
An ordinary focusing of mind states.
This is how we normally think of concentration as, where you fix your mind in some way, or where your mind is just
shielded from the world somehow, shielded from unpleasantness.
Your mind is fixed and focused on one thing in one way.
And that can't help you either.
That too is not really the way to enlightenment.
There are people in other religions who fix and focus their minds on things and don't ever reach enlightenment.
How many lifetimes did Bodhisattva practice focusing his mind, calming his mind, and never became enlightened?
Until he was finally ready and he realized
by watching, by looking at reality instead, and seeing cause and effect.
To see cause and effect, you have to focus on what's real.
You have to focus on things that change.
You have to focus on the kernel of truth, this kernel of experience that is real.
Because that's where cause and effect lives.
It's the only way you can truly see
Good causes good and bad causes bad.
Clinging causes suffering.
Ignorance causes clinging.
Or you can give up ignorance because you can see this clearly and no longer cling.
So this comes in meditation when you watch reality.
It's not as comfortable, of course.
But there's a focus to it.
There's a clarity to it, to being able to move from one object to the other, stay with each object as it changes, as the object changes to keep the mind the same.
This is what we're training ourselves for, to slowly be able to experience everything with the same clarity of mind, to slowly be able to see everything as it is, rather than judging it, reacting to it.
We slowly give up our reactions, our judgments, our attachments, our aversions.
That's adhikita.
Adhipanya, that then leads to panya.
This clarity of mind where you see things as they are.
You see things clearly, what allows you to give rise to wisdom.
Again, there are two kinds of wisdom.
So ordinary wisdom is where
You listen to a talk like this, and you learn something.
So you learn what are the three trainings, or you learn what are the two levels of the three trainings.
You can have ordinary training, or you can have higher training.
But we often think that that's enough, that kind of wisdom is enough.
And so our teaching has to include a reminder that true wisdom doesn't come from listening.
It doesn't come from thinking.
It doesn't come from intellectual thought or rationalization or logic or whatever.
True wisdom comes from seeing things as they are.
As you watch things arising and ceasing, this is where you see cause and effect.
More importantly, you see the nature of things.
That everything that arises ceases.
It's really the most important thing.
It sounds silly.
It sounds overly simplistic.
But when you finally get that truth, not intellectually, but only because you've seen it again and again,
and you finally realize that the truth of reality is nothing more than everything arises and ceases everything that arises ceases because that allows you to let go of it there's no clinging to something that arises and ceases there's only clinging to things that you think are stable that you're perceiving correctly as being consistent predictable stable and secure
and thereby satisfying and controllable.
But if things arise and cease moment after moment incessantly, they can't be satisfying, they can't be predictable, they can't be controllable.
They come and go on their own.
We see so much more as the problem.
Panya really is a limiting of what we see in things.
Normally when we see something, we judge it immediately, right?
We see so much in things.
Too much.
And so we react to them.
This is good, this is bad, this is me, this is mine.
This is right, this is wrong.
We fail to see that simple reality.
None of those things.
It's just arising and ceasing.
But when that's all you see about things, then you let go.
Or when you let go, that's what you'll see about things.
You start to see that all of this is wrong, all this judging and clinging and reacting, so much suffering.
And you'll see it again and again and again until you finally have enough.
And your mind will start to let go, loosen up, free itself from the clinging and suffering.
There's some more suttas about these things, but I don't think they're that important.
There's one about the donkey.
If you're interested, I'd recommend reading the donkey one, but it's not really important as a meditation.
The field is an interesting one.
Interesting similes.
A farmer, a farmer who is planting
Planting a seed needs to do three things.
First, they have to plow and arrow the field.
Then they have to sow their seeds at the proper time.
And then they have to irrigate and drain the field.
So what does a monk have to do?
What does a meditator have to do?
Well, they have to do the same.
But what does it mean to plow the field?
Well, that's morality, I think.
Because you can't focus the mind unless you're ethical first.
And ultimately, this means practicing, means walking and sitting.
And then you sow your seeds by being mindful during the time when you're walking and sitting, guarding your mind.
And then the irrigation is the wisdom.
Anyway, most important to remember, there's only these three trainings.
Regard the mind and then focus the mind on reality and start to see things just as they are.
Don't think too much about things.
Don't see too much in them.
See things clearly and fully as they are.
See the kernel of truth.
See the samadhi pannaya.
This is the higher training of the Buddha.
Quite simple and quite powerful.
So that's the Dhamma for tonight.
Let's go to questions.
Robin, I don't think, is here unless she snuck in.
She said she had something with her daughter.
OK, questions.
Would you expand on the meaning of delusion?
Delusion, moha.
Moha, it means to be confused in a sense, muddled.
Deluded is a really good, delusion is a good translation.
But moha, it's like a cloud.
It's a word that means to be muddled, confused.
So it encompasses a lot of different things like confusion, anything that's based simply on delusion, right?
a misunderstanding of the world, a misapprehension of things, grasping things wrongly.
So any kind of arrogance, anything to do with self, with ego, is all delusion.
Arrogance, conceit, but also confusion and worry.
These are all delusion.
But these are pure delusion states.
The other thing you have to understand about delusion is that it's also present in greed and anger, because greed and anger are based on delusion as well.
They're based on a misapprehension of reality.
So that's what delusion means.
Delusion is really the root.
It's the opposite of wisdom.
The opposite of seeing things clearly as they are.
But the pure delusion states are those that are free from greed or anger.
Those moments when you're arrogant or conceited or worried or even distracted or confused.
Doubt.
Doubt is a big delusion.
Because a person who sees clearly has no doubt.
Will I ever do a TED talk?
I was on my way to do a TED talk.
I was a semifinalist to do a TEDx talk.
TED talk, TED talk, you have to be famous for that.
But this TEDx talk, and I backed out because it didn't feel right.
It was not really about meditation, and I just thought, here I was reading something I had written, and it just felt kind of wrong.
I like this better, teaching meditators.
Sam Harris, a good source for learning meditation.
Yeah, I don't know about that.
I wouldn't learn meditation personally from him, but that's just me.
Again, it's sort of outside of my realm.
I don't like talking about other teachers, other groups, other peoples.
Are lucid dreams more wholesome than non-lucid dreams?
seems to me that you can manage to be mindful if you know that you're dreaming.
Potentially, I would say there's probably certain qualities missing to your lucidity.
Just because you know something doesn't mean you can be mindful of it.
Because the word mindful is misleading.
It really shouldn't be translated as mindful.
But when we talk about sati, and in terms of the satipatthana, we're talking about something very specific, where you're able to remind yourself, this is this, this is that.
Seeing is just seeing.
I'm not sure if that's possible during lucid dreaming.
I mean, it's not possible most of the time when we're awake, right?
But no, but during dreaming,
There's potentially something missing, because you don't really have control over the mind in the same way.
Not exactly control, but sort of the ability to remind yourself.
I don't know.
I mean, it's all very speculative.
I would stick to worrying about meditating when you're awake.
And said, an enlightened person doesn't dream.
So you can go by that.
An arahant doesn't dream.
Of course, the Buddha had dreams, but those are, I think, special dreams.
Or the Bodhisatta?
Is it the Buddha or the Bodhisatta?
I can't remember.
Maybe the Buddha didn't have dreams.
Is there a way to change the email address that is linked to our account?
I think there's supposed to be.
I'm not sure if there is yet, but you might want to look at the issues on GitHub and go and submit an issue if there isn't one.
cockroaches and insects.
When I'm awake, when I flick off the light and try to sleep, I can feel them crawling all over me.
Yeah, I know how that is.
I remember waking up in Thailand once, and there was a cockroach on my lips, and I just went .
They're very hardy, those things.
You don't have to worry about hurting them.
Makes sleeping difficult.
Well, get a net.
The best way is to get one of those mosquito nets, I would say.
Sleep in a mosquito tent.
Otherwise, just live with it.
Good reason to sleep off the floor, I suppose.
There's nothing wrong with sleeping off the floor.
If you sleep on a bed, just make sure it's a, you know, if you get one of those wooden beds, it's just wood, you know, and then just a thin mat on top of that.
It's not really about the height of it.
It's more about the softness and the luxury of it.
But there is something to sleeping on the floor that just makes you feel kind of humble, I suppose, or simple.
I'm considering becoming a monk.
Advice.
Should I further my education?
Would you suggest before continuing on to going to Sri Lanka?
No, if you want to ordain as a monk, become a monk.
But you've got to be ready.
You've got to really want.
If you say, I'm considering becoming a monk, I'd say forget about it.
If that's how you phrase it, forget about it.
You're not like jumping off your seat, champing at the bit to become a monk.
Your chances of surviving as a monk in modern times, very slim.
You got to want it.
And you got to be sure that it's for you.
I was sure.
I don't mean to brag, but it's not really bragging because you see there's this class of monks who ordain and they're just sure that's what they want.
It doesn't mean they're good monks, but it means they can stay monks.
And then you see this other class who are kind of like, well, you know, maybe.
And then they become a monk and they don't last.
They just, they don't have it.
It's not, becoming a monk is not like a decision you make.
It's something you have to, it has to be a part of you.
It's a very special thing.
Becoming a Buddhist monk is not something to look lightly upon.
If you don't, if you're not 100% ready, don't do it.
Well, if you're not 100% ready,
Chances are if you do do it, you won't last.
That's all.
Doesn't mean don't do it.
You can go for it.
But your chances of lasting are slim.
is the donkey one.
Yeah, well, you got to read it for yourself.
I didn't want to bother my meditators with too much.
The donkey is more about monks.
You know, there are monks who pretend to be monks.
There are donkeys who pretend to be horses.
So suppose there was a donkey following after the horses saying, I'm a horse, I'm a horse.
But his body doesn't look like a horse.
His brain doesn't sound like a horse.
And his hoofs don't look like, his footprints don't look like horses.
And the same goes with a monk, a bhikkhu.
A bhikkhu doesn't have sila-samadhi-panya.
They're just a donkey following after horses.
Because sila is your physical appearance.
Samadhi is your sound, your voice.
I mean, it's just an analogy.
And wisdom is your footprint.
Are you happy?
That's a funny question, really, because I don't exist.
Happiness is something that arises and ceases.
But I don't answer questions about myself.
Sorry.
We have rules as well.
Someone can't be happy.
You know, you can't be a happy person in general.
You're asking me, at that moment, was I happy?
That's something I suppose I could answer.
In this moment, am I happy?
But moments arise and cease happiness.
You know, honestly, the only true happiness, and that's really valuable, is nibbana.
So you could only really say of a happy person, someone who had attained Nibbana.
Either they're in Nibbana, where there's the cessation of suffering, or else they've attained it and they're there for enlightenment, or an arahant or a Buddha.
Happy we are among the unhappy, the Buddha said.
It's an arahant.
Yeah, the Bodhisattva had dreams.
Thanks, Sankar.
That's all the questions for tonight.
25 people on our site.
We're getting up there.
42 viewers on YouTube, that's average.
It's great to have people watching.
I was just looking at an article about virtual reality conferencing.
They're getting there.
They're getting where you can actually get in a room with each other and wave your arms, I think.
I don't think I broadcasted this, but when I was in Thailand, I should have taken a picture.
My uncle owns a partner in one of the bigger film companies in Asia.
Well, in Thailand anyway, not Asia maybe.
But they're big.
They do a lot of Hollywood films that happen in Asia.
And they got virtual reality.
And they're working on this idea of virtual reality as the future.
So I got to try it out.
And I was meditating up on a cliff face.
It's really neat.
Because I was thinking, you know, couldn't you do some kind of meditation teaching where you go up on the cliff?
And there's the monk.
I am.
But there's the teacher sitting on the cliff face.
And they start to teach you meditation.
I mean, for a beginner meditator, I think how attractive that would be.
If you've ever used virtual reality, and it was my first virtual reality experience, it really is kind of immersive.
It was funny because the air conditioning was on in the room, and it felt like there was a breeze blowing.
But you know, it'd be interesting if we could have, oh, I don't know.
This is good enough.
Let's not get too complicated.
It's kind of weird with that.
You got this big thing on your head.
But it was nice sitting up on a cliff.
I got to sit up on this cliff and close my eyes and meditate, I guess.
Anyway, this is good enough.
We're all here supporting each other in our meditation.
The funny thing is, you know, when you meditate, you're all alone anyway.
You don't meditate actually with others.
And you shouldn't.
Meditation should be very much about you.
I got one more question popped up.
I'll answer one more, and then we're done.
During meditation, is there a problem when the pace of noting is inconsistent?
Mostly too fast, but sometimes very slow.
If it appears too fast, it's something you should note.
Knowing, knowing, or feeling.
Knowing may be better.
Because it shouldn't appear too fast.
It shouldn't appear too slow.
It shouldn't seem fast and it shouldn't seem slow.
If it does, I'm going to note that and you should bring it back to something that doesn't feel like anything at all.
It doesn't give you that feeling that you're going fast or you're going slow.
It's not a magic trick where you can just note faster and you get there quicker.
He said, I think he was talking, I think it was, I was translating for him, I think, and he's talking about us Westerners.
He said, you know, I know you Westerners, or maybe it was just modern, he was saying in modern society, but I think he was talking to Westerners.
He said, modern society, you think that
You know you have to work hard and you have to work quickly and you have to get things done quickly and you'll get a great reward from that.
So meditation is not like that.
Meditation has to be slow.
You practice slowly and you get a reward.
But it doesn't mean really slow.
It just means you have to, you can't speed it up.
You have to be patient.
You have to go at the speed of it.
an ordinary speed.
All right, call it a night there.
Thanks, everyone for tuning in.
See you tomorrow.