Is it good to give up?
I'm 19, out of college.
I can't find a job.
What should I do?
I think a lot of people are stressed out by unemployment and frustrated by such daily lives.
What can people do to at least keep their minds straight and focused and centered on living
On what?
On living?
Living, yeah.
This person seems to have more or less given up.
Should we ever give up?
What secrets are there?
What practices are there that can get us back in a mode of at least continuing to attempt
to live a normal life.
Well, if I can give a first little bit of answer here is that, and I want you to understand carefully and don't take in what I say until you've heard it all.
There's something I told a
It's kind of tongue in cheek, so be very careful with it and let me explain it afterwards and then I'll give you probably a better answer.
The tongue in cheek part is that the first thing to do is to give up.
This woman from Spain came to practice with me and she said she wanted to die.
She wanted to kill herself.
She was meditating, she said she wanted to kill herself.
I said, good, good, kill yourself and then keep meditating.
And I was laughing.
I was very clear with her that this was what I was saying.
Because as I say, this is why you have to be careful with these things.
But with her, it was really good.
And she recovered a lot.
She had some of her own problems.
So the point of it is that even with meditation, many, many, many, many times during meditation you have to give up.
Stop meditating.
Stop striving.
And then start again.
And then keep going.
Throw away all of what you are doing.
Throw away all of what you are hoping for, what you are needing, what you are wanting.
Throw away your life and start again.
Because from a point of view of why this occurs in practice and why it's important in practice is because practice doesn't exist.
There is no meditation.
You're not doing meditation.
You're not
You're not taking on a practice.
And the problem comes is that you do take on practices.
You think it's a trick that you can say, pain, pain, pain, and all your pain is going to go away.
And you get more and more frustrated when it doesn't work.
You have this practice that doesn't work.
People, you know, this person who said earlier, breath meditation helps me balance.
That could be true, but it could also be true that it's just a trick that you're using.
It could be true that you're just covering it all up with this trick that you have to get to a state of calm and peace.
In which case it's not going to work and eventually you're just going to get so frustrated that you're just going to want to give up.
And that is what you should do.
You should give up.
Stop.
Stop meditating.
Stop caring.
Stop wanting.
Stop striving.
Give up everything.
And then start again.
Start again without all of that baggage.
This is the point.
Not start again, but do it without all that baggage.
So you say you want to give up.
I think it can be extrapolated into your life.
Give up.
all of your life and start again without all that baggage, without all your expectations, without all your needs.
Start again as a person living on the street and put your life back together in a way that is free from all the baggage.
Now that's just the first little bit of answer because
the next part is well suppose you don't have hope suppose all you can expect from from you know it's not that you have expectations is that you have no hope that you are out of out of work out of money in debt and so on you're in a state where that is there's
pitiable that we get into sometimes and some people get into some people don't get into and really interesting to read what people have to say about this is people who are not in it have a very hard time being sympathetic or even believing people who are in these states and yet it can be so devastating and horrible to have to be in such a state
depends on the person.
But what is the answer?
Well, the Buddhist answer, whether it comforts you or whether it helps you, is to
accept and learn from it.
Let me take an example that's very close to us here.
Larry, for example.
Larry had to go through several years of great stress and turmoil.
But none of it was, as I understand, involving being destitute.
You must have caused money problems.
I think you mentioned that.
Not to the point of, or let's use, maybe if it's not using Larry, but someone like this who is in this sort of a state and has such horrible, even though they have money, even though they have a home and family and people who care for them, have to go through horrible states of physical and even mental suffering.
So, here's a person, you could say it could even be a person who has a job, or even a person who, suppose they have an inheritance, so they're rich, and so they don't really even have to work.
A person who was born with a silver spoon in their mouth, suppose this sort of person.
But, they get sick and they have to go through this horrible suffering.
Well, are you really in a worse position than that person?
You have to ask yourself.
It's a good question.
Because no, in many cases you're not.
You might go hungry for a day, even two days.
I've gone hungry.
I had a point where I had no money.
And for a few days I really was destitute and, what's the word I'm looking for, malnourished.
Yes, that's the word.
It's just a few days.
I've never been horribly, horribly destitute.
I mean, I am now, but because of my work and my position and my ability to set myself in the right place, there are people who support me and people who always give me food, so I'm not in that.
But I have been, and I know what it tastes like.
I don't know the full meal of being destitute, but
I know how it feels, the first onset of it anyway, because it's never lasted very long.
But the worst it can do is kill you.
The worst it can do is make you starve to death or freeze to death or so on.
And that sort of thing happens to people who are not destitute.
It can happen to anyone at any time.
So that's the truth of life.
You might be a very rich person who has to suffer, a person who gets cancer and dies, even a horrible death.
Far worse than the death of someone, not far worse, but theoretically worse than someone who dies healthy but malnourished or I guess it would be from some sickness or so on, on the street.
So, you take it like that and you see that, well, it's something that can be dealt with.
It's not unlike many other conditions of human existence, and all of which are very, very, very much the reason
or a very, very, very important reason for the Buddha teaching what he taught and for the practice, a very important reason for taking up the practice of what the Buddha taught.
Because these states may become reality for us at any time, we
or any number of states, probably will come to us.
States of loss, states of inability to obtain the things that we want and so on, could come to us at any time and do come to us and cause great suffering.
You know, people who are really well off, but then they fall in love and it's unrequited, you know, end up killing themselves just for that.
And experience horrible suffering.
they can experience thousands of times worse suffering than a person who's living in poverty, who has come to accept and be comfortable with it, or not comfortable, but be at peace with it.
A person who is rich, but has some silly infatuation that is unrequited, or loses their job, or is embarrassed, or so on and so on and so on.
The reasons why we suffer have very little to do, have much less anyway to do with our external situation than they do with our internal reactions to the situation.
I should write that down.
It's so vain.
I've got to remember these things, because then I can make it, I can write it to people and so on.
So you're really not in a bad way externally.
You're in more of a bad way, it sounds like, internally.
Go for it, Larry.
If I might interject something.
I know at the age of 18 or 19, less than 20 years old, I understand that
You can become perplexed.
You become overwrought with situations.
You may feel that there's a dire need to take another direction and being unable to do so.
But at my age, looking back those many decades ago, at age 18 or 19, you're in your, as they say, your prime of life.
Life is just beginning for you.
In my estimation, it's not a time to lay down the gauntlet.
It's not a time to quit.
It's not a time to feel defeated.
Because you're not defeated.
You're just on the very cutting edge of starting a life.
So my advice, if you could call it advice, or my outlook on that is don't give up.
Stand there and fight for it.
and um i think you know i think that things will turn around if you persevere that things will get better i mean it's it's just inevitable that it will um i think i've always heard i think coaches used to say it's always easier to give up than it is to keep fighting so you know you've got to keep
Yes, 19 is certainly that.
I was thinking, I had this kind of irrational desire to write a chronicle of my teenage years.
It's just so horrible looking back and I thought, wow, that would be wonderful to just put it out there and how embarrassing to have to show it, but
What a, if only we could all do that and put it all out there and really see what life is really like.
I don't know.
I only lived until I was 20.
You say you died, you stopped growing at 36.
Well, I stopped growing at 20.
20 was when I found Buddhism and I haven't grown since.
My life ended at 20.
I didn't live after 20.
I'm not alive anymore.
That's not exactly true.
But Noah, the person who I was, is gone.
I'm now just like a pen, as one monk told me, one monk said it.
I'm a tool, I'm something that is used or that is, you know, that's not entirely true, I practice for myself and cultivate, but my life is much, much more, not entirely, but much more as a, you know, like a part of this tradition that I'm in, to spread and to help and to, and so on.
So, point being,
The only experiences I have are up until 19 years old, 20 years old.
And 19 was a horrible time for other reasons.
And what I really wanted to write down was all my romantic involvement.
Because it's so funny if you... It's just ridiculous.
But so... Well, no.
I mean, no, really, my... Anyway, whatever.
What do you call those escapades?
I mean, it's all I had.
I never had a more serious relationship.
So for me, that was what love was.
When I was 19, I went through a ridiculous experience or several ridiculous experiences that just made me say, you know, I've told this before, I think I was in love with a woman and then suddenly I was in love with her best friend, or kind of.
Mark Casanova.
It was absurd.
It made me realize this isn't certainly something that you could call love.
in the sense that I understood it even then.
This is a fire.
This is my mind going crazy and, you know, seeking out sensual pleasure.
That's really all it was.
And it just... It was your hormones kicking in.
Yeah.
So it's disgust.
It's disgusting.
And so...
The only point I had with that was that it was a horrible time.
And all the years leading up to 19 were a horrible time.
20 was actually, even before I got into Buddhism, when I dropped out of university, that's what did it for me.
You know, suddenly life began.
I didn't know what I was going to do.
And even when I went to Thailand for the first time, what did I do?
I sat around watching the Godfather movies in Thailand, in Bangkok.
That's what I did in Bangkok.
I didn't know what I was doing.
I didn't know why I was there.
I didn't know what I was looking for.
Bought a couple of Zen books, because that's what I was looking for.
Tried to meditate.
Failed miserably.
But it changed.
It was different at that point.
So certainly I agree that in your specific situation, it's a horrible coming out of puberty, isn't it?
And that whole experience up until you're
I don't know, I guess 17, 18, but for me it was all the way to 20 when I dropped out of university and started my life.
Well, talking about writing your life stories, of course, at my age, either fortunately or unfortunately, whichever the case may be, I was born at a time, of course I was in a rural area, a farming area,
I was like seven or eight years old before we had electricity.
So, I mean, I definitely remember doing my homework in the evenings at the kitchen table with a kerosene lamp on the table.
We had an old battery radio, and the batteries stayed down all the time.
We
order about once a year.
We'd have enough money to order new batteries from Sears and Roebuck for the radio.
And we had a wooden cook stove that we cooked our meals on.
We had a heating stove in the living room that we burned wood.
So that's the life that I came up with, an outhouse.
wash pan.
I mean, that was life.
That was a rule of life.
And I don't want to give those memories up, because I think it helps put me in a perspective as to where I am now.
Like I said, I was about, I think, close to eight years old before we got electricity.
And of course, we didn't have an icebox.
I mean, I can remember putting milk
in the water bucket and letting it down in the well to keep it cool in the water because we didn't have an icebox.
We had a number 10 wash tub that we kept in the basement and the Iceman came once a week.
We'd get a big chunk of ice sometimes and put that in the washtub and cover it over with quilts.
We'd go in there and chip off a piece of that ice.
That was the only ice that we had.
I mean, that was life for me for the first time.
eight years of my life.
And so I wouldn't take anything for that, but things got better, I guess.
But I look around my grandson today and all the gadgets that kids have in today's society, even myself, the gadgets that I have as well,
And I think we've come such a long ways to a black and white 12-inch TV that only got one channel.
And you watched what was on, or you didn't watch.
Yeah, one thing someone said is it's very much what you're accustomed to that determines your suffering.
So people who are accustomed to a certain state will be hard hit by a change in the states that they're most accustomed to.
I mean, it's funny because even I had to... Our house had...
had an indoor outhouse and an in-house we had no no indoor plumbing we had a wood stove we had a cook stove all that not so long ago um i don't know where that's i just thought it was interesting that i kind of can relate but um yeah
Certainly.
I mean, don't give up.
Give up, but give up your expectations and start again.
Start fresh.
Always start fresh.
That's very Zen.
They always say beginner mind.
So always start over.
And that's good.
That's true, not just for Zen.
That's a really good thing to say.
Meditation should be about a beginner's mind.
Life should be a beginner's mind.
Don't continue life.
Start fresh.
Start a new life.
Every moment.
That's very cliche, but I think it's true.
Anyway, there's