For a layperson, how do you realize your fetters?
I'm going to take that as it sounds, as the sentence, and assume that it really is asking what it purports to be asking.
Realize your fetters in the sense of, realize what you're bound to.
How do you come to understand what is holding you?
Because that's a good question, if that's the question you're asking.
Very good question.
Lay people have many fetters.
Monks have fetters as well.
But the fetters of a lay person are more difficult to see, have their own difficulties to them.
Especially because society that you're living in tends to support them, tends to encourage them, right?
Tends to view them as being proper and responsible and beneficial even.
So how do you go about realizing what you're clinging to?
besides the obvious one, meditating, right?
Surround yourself, let's work from outwards in, surround yourself, let's see, we'll go even further, place yourself in a location that is going to allow you to practice the Buddhist teaching, that is going to allow you, let's not even use the word Buddhist teaching, no?
that is going to allow you to look at reality objectively.
This is difficult because, as I said, society, the things around us, the society in which most of us live, is brainwashing us, is what has brainwashed us into believing these things to be not fetters, to be actually supports.
So take yourself out of that if possible, as much as possible, and then surround yourself with only those people and things that are going to be conducive for objective introspection and analysis of reality, objective investigation of reality.
and then begin to undertake practices that allow you to see things objectively.
Because you see, the whole meaning of the word fetters is that they are negative, they're bad things.
So we have to ask ourselves the question, why would we engage in something that was bad for us?
We understand by the meaning of the word fetters here that we're talking about something that we actually are responsible for binding ourselves to.
We're not talking about someone else chaining us to something.
We understand in Buddhism that we are not under the control of any other being.
We willingly bind ourselves to things, become fettered by things.
And so the question is, why would we do such a thing?
Why would anyone do something that was to their detriment?
And the only answer that I think is logical is that without knowing, because they don't know that it's to their detriment.
They don't see things as they are.
So that becomes the real challenge on all levels of our practice.
finding a place and an environment and a way of life, livelihood, and doing things that allow you to see things as they are.
And I think the key there is objectivity, because our fetters are all partiality, subjectivity.
We favor certain things and we are averse to certain things, and this is what leads us to be fettered.
Once you can see things as they are, once you can become objective, and once you're able to pull yourself out of culture, society, family, religion, whatever, pull yourself out of the beliefs and the views and the customs and the brainwashing,
turning off the television and even the internet.
The rest of the internet, except for this internet.
And begin to look at reality.
Just ask yourself this very simple question, what is reality?
It's not philosophical.
What it means is, what is this that's in front of us?
What we mean by this question is not some philosophical thing about what's out there.
What's here?
What is this that we're experiencing?
And then you begin to investigate it.
And this is really what the Buddha taught.
And this is how you become to see how you're fettered.
Because the only way to see it is to pull yourself out of it.
Or to make it seem...
to put it in a position where it isn't natural.
You have to take the fetters, take yourself out of the position where it is natural to engage in the fetters, where it is comfortable to engage in the fetters, engage in those things that you cling to.
put yourself in a position where it becomes superfluous to do so, and then you'll be able to see the needlessness, the harm in clinging.