Good evening everyone.
Hopefully this is working properly.
So we have another graduate here with us today who's very happy to have finished the course
Or maybe he's just very happy to be done with it.
Edward, right?
It's funny, I never call my meditators by their names, so I often even forget their names.
I know them very, very well, but I don't even know their names some of the times.
Edward.
Come say hello.
Hopefully that mic works.
Hello.
Did it work?
Say again.
Hello.
Yeah, I think it worked.
So, um, you've been here for how long have you been here?
Three weeks now.
Yep.
21 days.
How is the food?
Good.
It felt like home.
It was good.
Yeah.
And the rooms were okay?
Yeah, no, everything was in order.
Everything was good.
I didn't know what to expect.
Yeah, it felt like home, so it had the comfort of being at home, but still the discipline of being at an intense meditation course, and that was excellent.
Mm-hmm.
How was the meditation?
Difficult?
What did you learn?
Wow.
Your feeling before you came here and how you feel now when you're getting ready to leave.
What's changed?
Great question.
I haven't thought about it.
I've been trying to pay attention to the moment.
So my feeling coming in here was to learn a new technique.
I've been meditating for a few years now.
And I've heard and read a lot about this technique.
So I was open to try something new.
Didn't know much what to expect.
Walking meditation was a new thing for me.
And doing that, it really showed me how it complemented having this dynamic practice to the sitting, which I found very helpful.
And in fact, I tried to sit now without walking, and I saw how much more difficult it is without the walking.
So that was nice.
It really does calm the mind and help the sitting.
There's so much to say, I don't know.
How do you feel today?
You've come out of the hardest part of the course.
How do you feel today?
Relieved that it's over.
At the same time, a part of me wants to keep going.
Okay.
And so, yeah.
But yeah, of course, relieved that it's over.
It was tough.
But as they say or as I've heard,
You purify through fire, in a sense.
You need to go through that difficulty to get through to the other side.
But do you feel peaceful today?
Yes, a lot more.
I mean, I'm sensing it now speaking on the mic.
I'm very calm.
I don't know if that comes across, but yeah, absolutely.
And the meta, yeah, the meta part was very nice, very special.
It takes time, of course, to really sort of digest what a meditation course was all about.
And it's not part of an ongoing process, right?
This isn't the beginning for you, and this certainly isn't the end.
So congratulations.
Thank you very much for everything.
You're most welcome.
Everyone says congratulations.
You're a star.
How was that?
Was the mic okay?
I got two mics set up here.
That mic isn't as sensitive as this one.
I should probably turn this mic down a little bit.
Part of a process is sort of the theme for tonight.
I often get questions about how long it's going to take to free ourselves from our bad habits.
What can we do to free ourselves?
What can we do?
Sort of an underlying assumption that it's just going to suddenly, yeah,
The mind is just suddenly going to fix itself.
The Buddha compared the path to the ocean, the great ocean.
He was approached by this
sort of the titans in Greek mythology, a demigod kind of being.
These beings who are like angels, but a little more coarse, a little more unrefined.
Some form of angel in Buddhist cosmology or heavenly being.
celestial being, but sort of associated with the earth.
And this one was one that lived in the ocean.
And I approached him and asked him, I approached him to listen to his teachings and the Buddha asked him, I asked him about the ocean.
He said, what do you think of the ocean?
I said, do you delight in it?
And he said, yes.
Yes, we are asura.
Asura is the name of this type of being.
So we delight in the ocean.
So the Buddha asked, how many great qualities does the ocean have?
He's going to set something up here.
He wants to compare his teaching to the great ocean.
So he asked, how many great qualities
cause you to delight, make you delight in the ocean.
What do you see in it?
So this is in the Anguttara Nikaya Book of Eights.
There are eight great qualities of the ocean.
And the first, the first is that the ocean doesn't, as deep as it is, it doesn't suddenly drop off.
It doesn't suddenly become deep.
It inclines
slowly so huge that so vast that this huge depth it can slant even so slightly
And even though I'm slanting just so slightly, it still reaches great depth because of how vast it is.
Not like a swimming pool.
A swimming pool has to get deep really quick because there's not enough room for it to get deep.
But not the ocean.
The ocean gets deep very slowly until it gets super deep.
And then the second quality is that the ocean is stable.
It doesn't overflow its boundaries.
So the ocean doesn't flood.
Well, it doesn't yet.
As we know, the boundaries are probably soon going to change and expand.
But well, for the longest time, the ocean has been kind of stable.
It's not like a lake or a river that floods.
The third is that the ocean doesn't keep corpses.
It doesn't keep refuse.
Because we know that now even this isn't true.
Because now there's a big island of refuse in the middle of the ocean because it's plastic.
It's about the size of Texas, apparently.
Yeah, a great island of plastic.
But the ocean, generally any refuse, a corpse, any corpses...
The idea here is corpses.
In India they would cast off their bodies into the river and carry down to the ocean.
But it would never stay in the ocean.
The ocean would toss them out.
The ocean is pure in that way.
And number four is that the ocean is one.
Even though you have all these rivers reaching the great ocean, they're no longer separate.
All water joins together in the ocean.
All water eventually goes to reach the ocean and becomes simply the great ocean.
Number five, no matter how much water flows into the ocean, there's neither a decrease nor an increase.
Even though you constantly see water pouring in and constantly water evaporating, it's stable.
Again, not trespassing its boundaries, but also not decreasing or increasing.
Number six, the ocean has but one taste, the taste of salt.
And where you go in the ocean, it doesn't taste differently.
You don't get a different taste depending on which part of the ocean, which beach you go to swim on.
Number seven, that under the ocean there are many precious substances.
There is much of
great magnificence in the ocean, the corals and the pearls and the gems, even gold, silver, rubies apparently, and all these beautiful shells and beautiful fish and so on.
And number eight, the great ocean is the abode of great beings.
We've got some names of great beings here, but they're apparently great spirits that live in the ocean.
Apparently there are even just animals in the ocean.
Some ocean animals live to be like 500 years.
Apparently lobsters don't age.
And lobsters could live for hundreds of years, except they get too big and then it's hard for them to survive.
But other fish just live on and on for 500 years in the ocean.
You think humans are long-lived compared to animals, but there are some animals that have been around in the ocean for hundreds and hundreds of years.
And then the Buddha compares this to the Dhamma.
He says, just as the great ocean slants, slopes and inclines gradually, not dropping off abruptly, so too in the Dhamma Vinaya of the Buddha, the realization of the truth occurs gradually in stages.
So it's not something that you just get all at once.
It's something that is open, Aiko.
It leads us on.
The more you learn, the more you realize there is more to learn.
The more you understand, you just get closer and closer to freedom.
And the important thing here is to realize that it's not just going to all get better all at once.
It's not going to happen overnight and it's certainly not a one-step process.
Someone tonight made me think of this because he said he'd been practicing for a few months and he still had all these problems.
Oh, don't think in terms of months.
You have to think in terms of lifetimes for some of it.
How many lifetimes have we been building up the wrong habits?
How much deeper and much more profound than we think?
So what we look at is whether we're inclining in the right direction.
Are we inclining in a wholesome direction or are we inclining in an unwholesome direction?
And just be content with that and work in a way
bring about greater and greater understanding.
Being reassured that we're, you know, it's getting deeper.
We're heading towards the bottom of the ocean, the bottom of the Dhamma.
We're getting to the bottom of it.
It's just going to take time.
And just as the ocean doesn't overflow its boundaries in the same way when the Buddha lays down precepts, the rules,
What's amazing is that people don't transgress them.
Especially a person who practices meditation will be unable to break with the moral code.
There's such a power to the realization of the Dhamma that people are
are powerfully disinclined to perform unwholesome deeds.
It goes both ways because without the practice of morality, of course, meditation can't succeed.
I've been a bit lax, but we do these online courses and I meet once a week with meditators.
So we had one meditator who just explained to me that he's involved in killing animals.
And I said, oh well, we can't continue with the course.
I mean, it's just, there's too much friction involved.
There's too much conflict.
It just won't work.
I have to be vigilant now to remember to make sure that people are keeping at least the five precepts.
But it will come to a head.
I mean, I've had meditators, I've had people
practicing meditation before, who came to realize that they couldn't continue with their livelihood and they just had to give it up.
I had one friend like this who eventually came to a head.
He had to quit with his studies.
He was studying in a lab working on rats.
He was a biologist about to finish his degree in biology, and he had to actually change his major.
He just decided he couldn't continue, and now he works for the Canadian government, I think.
In public, public something, public...
I can't remember what it was.
Something administrative, nothing to do with biology.
This is amazing that people are, through the practice,
They're willing and they're inclined to change their whole lives in regards to keeping in moral and ethical behavior.
Number three, just as the ocean doesn't associate with a corpse and thrusts it out, so too the Sangha does not associate with a person who is immoral, of bad character, impure, of suspect behavior, secretive in his actions.
So again, quite quickly we expel those who are
Theoretically, no.
Not theoretically, but in a...
In terms of the ultimate sangha, the sangha of meditators, because of course even in Buddhism there are bad apples who come and go, but
What's amazing is how good people, people who have cultivated meditation practice, want nothing to do with those who are not interested in meditation and those who are unable to see the benefit of cultivating wholesome mind states.
And it says, even though he is seated in the midst of the Sangha, yet he is far from the Sangha and the Sangha is far from him.
How unsullied the mind and the world of the meditator is from the defiled minds or the ordinary minds of those who are inclined towards sensual gratification and
indulgence in immoral activities.
Number four, just as when the great rivers reach the ocean, they give up their former names and it all becomes the ocean, so too everyone who comes to the Dhamma.
What's amazing is that they all just become Buddhists.
As we were talking about before, the idea that we give up a lot of who we are, not consciously, but just naturally.
We give up status and
identity, personality, and we just become people, kind, compassionate, natural, peaceful people.
We lose all the demarcations of groups and
all the barriers of culture and race and class and so on, gender, it all just disappears.
And number five, even though, just as when the, just as the ocean doesn't increase or decrease, even though, no matter how much rain falls into it or is evaporated out of it,
even when many people attain the truth, um, just means that many, many people attain it and it never, it never becomes, uh, full.
We can always, always receive more meditators, receive more.
There can never be too many basically.
I mean it's the, the,
Statement is that nibbana doesn't increase which is actually interesting in the sense.
It's not like heaven or something Whereas heaven gets quite full when when a Buddha comes to being The Angels all remark at how full heaven is becoming because all the Buddhists go up to heaven And so they they comment they come in the comment on this to the Buddha But nibbana doesn't isn't like that Nibbana doesn't get more full
So I guess what you could say about this is how special the teaching is or the goal is, the goal of the Buddha's teaching is, and that it's infinite.
There's no change.
It is beyond samsara, is really the point.
Number six, just as the ocean has but one taste, so too the Dhamma of the Buddha has only one taste.
While the ocean is salty, that's the taste of the ocean.
The Dhamma is freedom.
It has the taste of freedom, the taste of liberation.
So that's what meditation, that's what Buddhism should feel like.
How should it taste to you?
What is the flavor of the Dhamma?
The flavor of the Dhamma should be liberation.
If you feel more trapped and more caught up, then you're not practicing the Dhamma.
But if you feel more free and more released from your traps and your bonds, your bondage,
more free from judgment, impartiality and identification and ego.
That's the taste of the Dhamma.
Number seven, just as the great ocean contains many precious substances, lots of precious, beautiful, magnificent things,
So too the Dhamma of the Buddha contains great things.
It contains the four foundations of mindfulness, the four great efforts, the four bases for power, the five faculties, the five powers, the seven factors of enlightenment and the noble eightfold path.
A lot of jewels there.
A lot of precious and magnificent things to be found in the Dhamma.
And number eight, just as the great ocean is an abode of great beings, whales and sharks and wondrous ancient creatures,
Apparently there are beings that live in the ocean that are 500 yojana, which is 500 leagues, which is about 8,000 miles.
I don't know.
I don't know what's going on here, but very, very far too big to actually exist in the ocean as we understand it today.
Maybe Sanka can shed some light on this.
Because a yojana is 16 kilometers.
500 times 16 is 8,000 kilometers long.
I don't think such beings could fit in the ocean as we understand it.
Nonetheless, great beings do exist in the Dhamma.
They're not that big physically, but they're great and profound mentally.
So in the Dhamma we have the stream-enterer, the Sotapanna, the person who has freed themselves from wrong view of self and attachment to rites and rituals or doubt about the practice.
We have the Sakadagami who is weakened, has very little greed or anger, such that they'll only ever be reborn one more time.
And the Anagami who's freed themselves from all sensual desire and all aversion.
And we have the arahant who has freed themselves from all delusion.
All these great and profound beings.
Yeah, maybe they're celestial.
That would make sense.
Then they could somehow be an extra-dimensional sense of being so big.
So those are the eight astounding qualities of the Dhamma.
The Dhamma is something great and profound.
It's like, think of the great ocean.
It's a useful simile because it allows the mind to grasp just how great this teaching is, how profound it is.
Because when you compare the ocean to the Dhamma, the ocean is actually quite insignificant.
But we often...
minimalize or trivialize the Dhamma.
And so by thinking about the great ocean and just how profound and deep, vast and complex the ocean is, the Dhamma is vast, profound, deep.
So there you go, there's our Dhamma for tonight.
Today I have two monitors going.
I've got this little monitor here that's allowing me to...
I can check questions here on the other monitor.
So hopefully the recording went well.
I think it's got the whole screen in it now.
How does impermanent affect a yogi mother in relation to her children?
Does she become unattached to them?
The question is from a real life situation.
Yes, absolutely.
I had this happen to one of my meditators.
It was great.
This meditator, she came, or this woman, she came to me, a Thai woman, and her 30-year-old son was, I mean, it's a,
It's probably not exactly what you're asking, but it's still a good example.
So he was 30 years old.
He was quite old.
But he was being terrible to her, and he had taken up Hinduism, but he had gotten involved with his guru, and he had gotten very egotistical about it and wasn't very nice to his mother.
So she was having real trouble with him.
And she said, Can you help my son?
Can you do something to help with this?
And I said, Sure, I'll help.
You come and meditate.
And she was kind of unimpressed by that answer.
But eventually she did come and meditate and she finished a meditation course with me.
And once she finished, I asked her, you know, how's her son doing?
And she said, oh, I don't know.
Let him go his own way.
And she had totally changed from being worried and attached to him to being totally free and liberated from that.
So, yeah, certainly a mother would become, now the question I suppose is, what would they do in regards to a young child?
I mean, just because you're unattached doesn't mean you don't care for or do positive things for others.
Actually, the opposite is the case, is that you care and wish well for others even more than before.
much more inclined to be supportive.
So I doubt there would be much problem for one practicing the Dhamma, but they wouldn't be at all inclined to.
So another case is I had a meditator who became pregnant.
She came to do a course with me, finished a meditation course, and then went back to meet her husband.
And they slept together.
And when she came back, she was pregnant.
She came back to do a second course with me, finished the second course and went home.
Her husband actually left her.
He found another wife.
She was forced now, as a quite accomplished meditator, to take care of this young girl.
Wow, the trouble that it was for her, and the challenge that it was for her, but how well equipped she was to deal with it.
but it's even more of a challenge for her because she's not at all inclined to be a mother.
She was inclined to be a meditator, but nonetheless she took care of the child and is probably a better mother than most.
I met her child later on when she was about five years old.
Crazy kid.
I've heard of the technique of trying to be mindful of the last moment before falling asleep and the first moment after waking up.
This is something a non-intensive meditator should try to do.
Yeah, for sure.
Try to be as mindful as you can before you fall asleep.
I mean, it's just a challenge.
It's not like you get a prize when you do, but it's a sign that thinking in that way will keep you mindful.
It will keep you from falling into a mindless state before you fall asleep.
And you'll find that your sleep is actually improved because of it.
If you're mindful, up into the moment before you sleep.
It's a good idea to do walking meditation right after waking up.
Yeah, absolutely.
It depends.
If you're really tired, walking just might make you fall over.
It might be too much.
Sometimes sitting for a bit allows you to wake up.
You have to decide.
Sometimes sitting meditation is better, right, when you wake up, depending on how you feel.
But again, if you're sleeping well, when you wake up, you should be refreshed.
To reflect the nine virtues of the Buddha is to consider them in the terms given of the given explanations.
It is difficult to memorize, so can buddhanussati be done with a guide or does it require memory?
I don't teach too much about buddhanussati.
I'm not really going to give details about that.
It's something that you should know about and you should be inclined towards, but you shouldn't put too much thought into it.
It's good to memorize that.
But if you can't, you can just say, That's really enough.
For meditation purposes, you don't need to memorize much.
And that's all the questions.
Are there any local questions here?
Is it possible to have a mind of upeka when one sees a being who suffers?
Are arahants always moved to help when they see beings who suffer, given that they are in a position to help?
They're not really moved to help in that sense.
And often they don't help.
But they're inclined to...
go with the flow for the most part, in the sense that if it's the right moment for them to help, they will act appropriately.
I mean, I would think most people would look at an arahant and think of them as quite passive and uninterested, generally uninvolved.
Unless it's requested of them, they would generally not get involved with other people's problems.
Because they're free.
I mean, they don't have any desire for it.
They have a desire to help others or a desire to change the world.
but they'll never be mean or nasty and cruel.
And if approached to help, they will generally, I mean, it's generally more if they're approached and asked to help or if there's some expectation that they have on them to help.
Can stream entry be attained through sila alone?
It depends what you mean by sila.
I mean, sila means normal.
So it can be attained by the proper
And by normal here it means what is one's ordinary way.
So if one is by nature, means by sila, mindful.
If by nature they are mindful, meaning they have as a sila being mindful.
That's not normally how we use the word in Buddhism, but it's what the word actually means.
What is your normal behavior?
So if your normal behavior is good and mindful, yes, that's enough to become a sodapanna.
But not just from keeping precepts.
Precepts are one way of understanding the word sila.
That's not enough.
If you're always guarding the senses, well, that's enough.
That's being mindful.
If you're watching the mind as things arise to keep from liking and disliking and learning to see things objectively, well, that's enough.
That will lead to enlightenment, to arahant.
Okay, I guess that's all for tonight.
Thank you all for coming out.
Wish you all a good night.