Happiness Is The Path | Ven Canda

In this Dhamma Talk Ven Canda talks about how happiness is the path. As we progress on the noble eightfold path we will naturally walk in the direction of increasing happiness. This kind of happiness is not depended on the outside world. Spiritual happiness is caused by qualities like kindness, compassion, giving, stillness, and contentment and so on, which we can practice with our thoughts, speech, and bodily actions. This happiness of the mind should be pursued and cultivated said the Buddha.

Transcript

Very good.

Time goes quickly.

So today I wanted to talk about happiness,

Which is perhaps not that often discussed in Buddhism.

Obviously we think about happiness as the end goal of practice.

The Buddha says the happiness of Nibbāna is the highest happiness.

But there are many happinesses leading up to that too,

And I think it's a common conception,

Perhaps not for most practitioners,

But maybe more so in the West or perhaps coming from traditions such as Vipassana,

That we also have to suffer quite a lot on the path and that that suffering is somehow part of the purification,

And somehow that the more we suffer the more we're eradicating our defilements and moving towards enlightenment.

And of course there may be some truth in that,

In the sense that we will meet things within our minds that are difficult,

Things that we don't really want to see and that we haven't been particularly honest about before,

And sometimes that can be difficult.

But in the Buddha's teachings,

And in one particular teaching that I like very much,

He talks about the path as a refinement of wholesome happiness,

And how the practice,

Starting with suffering,

Because suffering is often the catalyst that causes us to search for a way out,

How that suffering can then lead to confidence,

And from confidence a whole sequence begins which begins from joy.

And this is a really beautiful teaching because he's saying that it's a very natural process.

As soon as we have some suffering in life we tend to look for a way out,

And when we develop confidence that there can be that way out,

As we're hearing the teachings of the Buddha,

This gives rise to a lot of joy,

A sense of relief in my case,

When I heard the teachings for the first time.

Even before there'd been very much benefit,

It was just simply hearing that suffering has its causes,

Therefore those causes can be removed,

And there's a way to happiness,

There's a natural path to happiness.

So happiness isn't just something that we're either fortunate enough to have or not,

Happiness is something that we can cultivate and train in,

Train toward.

As well as that,

I wanted to talk about it because I think seeing the teachings in that context shows that happiness is the kind of direction we should be inclining in.

So if your practice is leading to increasing peace then you know you're on the right path.

There were quite a few suttas like this in the Buddhist teachings.

One was of his aunt,

Mahapajapati Gautami,

Who was a non,

The first non in the Buddha's day,

And she came to him and said,

Please can you give me the teachings in brief?

She didn't have very long,

She wanted to go to the forest and meditate,

And he said,

Whatever leads to peace is basically the path.

Whatever leads to peace and a few other things like disenchantment,

Disengagement,

A kind of drawing away,

Drawing inward and drawing toward more solitude,

That is the path.

And if you're going in that direction you know that this must be the Dhamma.

So the Dhamma has that taste of peace,

And this is a different kind of happiness than the course happinesses that we're used to in the world.

So I wanted this to be an encouragement to develop the right kind of happiness,

The wholesome happiness,

And to explain a bit how that can happen in the process of meditation,

But also to have a little bit of a look at the definitions that are common.

There's one in the Oxford English Dictionary which says that happiness is a state of feeling or showing pleasure or contentment.

So that's talking about a state,

And it's quite limited in a way.

I like that it uses the word contentment because contentment for me is something much deeper than pleasure.

Pleasure seems to be a very transitory thing that is perhaps quite based on sensations like physical feelings or the sense stimulation,

Whereas contentment to me seems to transcend that,

And perhaps there's a possibility to be content even with feelings that aren't very pleasurable or very happy.

And then the other one which came from a approach called positive psychology is similar to that,

But they try to tie it up with your life situation.

So they say that happiness is a state which is characterized by contentment and general satisfaction with your current situation.

So they've tried to go a little bit deeper with this,

But I actually feel it falls flatter for me because if we have to be content with our current situation and that was happiness,

Then it's not going to last long because our current situation is current only maybe for a day or two.

Maybe you get on a roll and it lasts for a few years,

But the situation has changed all the time.

So if we're depending on things like our job or our salary,

Apparently salary is only a determinant of happiness up to about £50,

000,

And after that it doesn't really make much difference.

Any extra money over and above that makes no difference to happiness.

This has been researched in psychology,

So I find that quite fascinating.

The whole pursuit of money is rather meaningless because once you have your basic needs met,

And perhaps you can go on a nice holiday once a year or twice a year,

Or quite a lot for £50,

000,

You can do quite a lot,

Then there's not a lot more you can get out of it.

Money is very limited.

In terms of jobs,

I think there's a difference between a job that you do just for the sake of having to work and something which is more like an occupation,

Which is perhaps something you feel your talents are suited to,

Or you feel a particular ethical resonance with.

There's some very beautiful professions.

In the car,

Kirsty was telling me about her work with people with learning disabilities,

Particularly autism,

And I could sense that you got a lot of satisfaction from that work,

And my mother also did something very similar in her work,

And it was satisfying until the bureaucracy hit him.

But then at a deeper level than that,

There's also something which is known more as a calling in life.

I think for me this has been the greatest determinant of happiness,

Because until I found my path,

I had experienced a lot of happiness in life.

I'd also experienced depression,

And in my teens I really struggled with that and found a way through it by having some cognitive therapy and learning to just perceive things a bit differently,

Basically change my negative thought patterns into something a lot more positive,

Because you realise that you can use your mind in ways that bring you happiness or lead to further suffering.

So that was very effective,

And I came out of it pretty quickly,

But I still had this wish to find something deeper.

So I left England when I was about 18 actually,

But the big one was leaving at 19 and going to India of all places,

Just to terrify my mother.

And I didn't know what to expect in a continent like India at all.

But it was really eye-opening,

And one of the first things I saw there was that although people had very little at the material level,

There seemed to be a sense of being connected to something greater than themselves,

Maybe through their religious beliefs or perhaps through just living in a massive sea of humanity like that and seeing life and death just taking place on the streets there every day in front of you.

Death wasn't hidden.

I mean there are actually places you can go,

Like Varanasi in India,

Where death is happening right there and the bodies are coming down to the river Ganges to be burned.

And you see the bodies being carried through the streets on palquins,

And it's just an everyday event for people.

Of course there are a lot of holy men,

Holy women,

And there is this sense of a spiritual search,

A different dimension of life.

Even the concept that you could be a lay person or you could be a recluse or an aesthetic is very present in India.

So for me it felt very clear from the beginning of my path that this was an option,

And that this was a way of life I could actually follow should I ever get the chance to do so.

But in India I also had my hedonistic pleasures.

I travelled a lot,

I went to the full moon parties in the Himalayas.

You wouldn't know where you were until the morning and you'd wake up and you'd be faced with these huge white-capped mountains and amazing decorations that people have put in the rhododendron bushes and all these wonderful people that you were with from all over the world.

It was really quite exciting,

Especially at that age.

And then of course just the pleasure of being in a different culture,

Learning yoga for example,

Becoming healthier,

All of these things.

And so I experienced a lot and yet there was still this sense that that's not quite deep enough for me,

There's something I'm still missing here.

And it's interesting in psychology they call this,

I don't know if I can say the word,

Eudaimonic happiness,

So you have the hedonic one,

Which is basically pleasure,

An experience of pleasure which is higher than the proportion of pain that you feel.

So when that tips then it's no more really pleasurable.

So your experience is mainly one of effective happiness.

And this can include satisfaction in one's job or life or relationship.

But the eudaimonic one conceptualises happiness as the result of a pursuit and attainment of meaning in life and a path or a purpose.

And I think this goes hand in hand with the idea of service.

And for me very early on in my path after discovering meditation I also started to give service in the meditation retreats and that deepened the happiness and sense of purpose considerably because I felt like I was connected to contributing to something more meaningful than my own life,

Something that could help others and something which was universal.

And this was something really emphasised in that particular approach which I'll always value to today,

That the Dhamma is universal,

It has results.

So if we put these causes in place it gives the results.

If the results aren't coming you're not practicing.

So Dhamma is always something beautiful and something that leads towards peace,

It leads towards wellbeing and it leads towards the wholesome states increasing.

I mean of course in life there can still be ups and downs but I think when you have this happiness that comes from within you have a greater resource to meet those vicissitudes of life without getting completely thrown away to one side or the other.

You don't get elated when things go especially well because you know it's going to change and you don't get completely crushed and deflated when things go wrong because it's all framed in a bigger context.

And for me the first context that really changed my life was hearing the Buddha talk about reality in terms of the Four Noble Truths.

I don't know how many of you are familiar with that but these are the truths which are based around suffering,

But that obviously carries with it the opposite dimension of happiness.

So the Buddha said that the first noble truth is the truth,

That there is suffering.

And he said that suffering is not to be avoided or not to be run away from but is to be understood.

And for me this was already wonderful because I had suffered in my life,

Not for reasons that I necessarily understood myself.

I just knew that if my mind wasn't happy nothing outside could compensate for that.

And here the Buddha was saying suffering is a part of the path and if you can understand it,

It leads to freedom.

So it wasn't pointless suffering.

It was actually suffering that led to freedom,

Suffering that led to happiness.

Ajahn Chah who is my teacher's teacher says there are two kinds of suffering.

One is the suffering that leads to more suffering and the other one is the suffering that leads to the end of suffering.

So I felt like I struck lucky here.

So that's the first noble truth.

And then the second one is that there's a cause and that cause is wanting.

In a nutshell the cause is wanting or craving.

So anything that takes you out of the present moment into wanting to be somewhere else or wanting to be someone else than you are or to be with a different feeling than the one you have right now,

A different mental state than the one you have right now.

I've got a bit of burning in my tummy from the journey and also from my medicines that I'm taking at the moment.

But if I don't want that then I make a big deal of it and it becomes like the predominant experience that I'm having right now.

But actually I'd forgotten all about it until I just mentioned the word suffering because I'm focused on something different.

I'm focused on giving and I'm focused on the Dhamma and what Dhamma means and trying to share that with you.

And just the beauty of the fact that we're gathered here to practice Dhamma together and to discuss this.

It's really quite amazing.

It's quite wonderful.

So there's a cause for suffering.

So of course as soon as there's a cause you know there can be a way to eradicate that cause.

And the eradication of the cause is the opposite of the wanting.

So it is the contentment,

It's the letting go,

It's the giving,

The giving away.

So the whole thrust of this practice is away from self-oriented interest and into interest of others,

Interest of orienting to ourselves to the happiness of others and to wanting to be of service to others.

So the whole practice starts with compassion.

So the Buddha said that all beings desire happiness and recoil from pain.

And because of that,

You know,

Morality,

Ethics make sense.

We don't want to cause harm to ourselves or others.

And the two are inextricably linked.

If I'm causing harm to someone else it's usually because I'm struggling inside myself.

And when I cause harm to somebody else,

Even if I didn't realise I was struggling,

I certainly will be after that.

I'll have a court case or some kind of retribution.

Someone punches me on the nose or whatever or just,

You know,

I lose the trust of friends if I've been gossiping or backbiting.

You know,

There's many,

Many downsides to not living an ethical life.

And yet ethics is more than that.

Ethics is also the positive side,

Right?

So not only do we not kill but we develop compassion to all living beings.

That's the opposite and that's the active side of the virtue.

And so instead of stealing we actually learn generosity.

What do I really need?

Do I really need all the stuff I've got stuffed in my cupboards at home or could I actually give some of them away?

Or even just starting to be less kind of covetous and looking at other people and what they've got and learning to simplify.

Learning to simplify is the opposite of trying to acquire.

And so this is very freeing.

All of this is a movement towards freeing and unburdening ourselves.

And so the opposite of harsh speech or false speech is gentle speech and truthful speech.

Speech that brings harmony.

Speech that divides,

Sorry,

Reunites the divided.

So it brings about harmony.

And another one is rather than gossiping we speak words that are worth recording.

We speak words that bring uplift and bring meaning and bring inspiration to people.

So there's all these ways we can use our speech in order to bring about happiness in the world.

And another thing that I read on a teabag actually just the other day when I was talking about something that wasn't particularly making me happy.

My current housemate said to me,

Oh there's this thing on the teabag.

It says speak to yourself in ways that bring happiness.

And I thought,

Oh,

Oh yeah,

That's really wise actually because I'm speaking now in a way that's not really bringing me happiness.

And how many times do we not only do that with others but we speak to ourselves in ways that are really quite cruel.

You know,

Oh for goodness sake you always do that.

You shouldn't have done that.

Don't you know by now?

You know,

There's this kind of horrible inner tyrannical voice that goes round and round our heads telling us we should be different or better or we should have known better.

Often that's conditioned.

I mean it is conditioned actually from the society,

From our parents,

From our culture.

But once we start to recognize this and we see what we're doing,

You know,

And whether this is leading to happiness or not,

We can start to walk the path.

We can start to use our mind in a way that moves away from that suffering out of compassion for ourselves and compassion for others and moves towards looking at the world,

Perceiving the world,

Thinking about the world in ways that leads to happiness.

Yeah?

So this is the start of the training.

But anyway,

There's not a lot of time to go through the entire path.

But I wanted to talk a little bit about,

Yeah,

So I've talked about the cause of suffering and the way out of suffering,

Which is the giving,

The letting go,

Yeah,

The being generous,

Living a life of virtue,

Etc.

,

Etc.

And of course that leads into meditation eventually,

Which we've all just had a little taste of.

And then the last one is the path,

Right?

So we'll get into that a bit more in a minute.

But first of all,

I just wanted to mention about the Buddha's own description of happiness and what happiness is,

Because we've had the Western definition,

Which is I think a little bit limited.

And we also talked about it being hedonic,

So in search of pleasure.

So do we think that the Buddha searched for pleasure or not?

What do you think?

No?

Okay,

So you sort of half right and half wrong,

Because in the beginning,

Before the Buddha was enlightened,

He actually thought that he had shun all pleasure,

And he leaned towards a life of austerity.

But when he realized the dumb man,

Realized the truth of suffering and the end of suffering,

He found that that is one of the extremes.

You know,

Self-torture,

Tiring one's body,

Tiring oneself out is actually the wrong way,

Because it doesn't lead to happiness,

It doesn't lead to freedom.

But equally the wrong way,

He said,

Was the pursuit of sense pleasure.

Okay,

So he said that sense pleasure is actually,

The words he used were quite confronting in a way.

He said that sensual pleasure is low,

Is vulgar,

Is inferior,

Is he even called it filthy pleasure,

Which is quite interesting,

Because it's not so much a value judgment as a description of that pleasure in relation,

Compared to the higher pleasures of the mind.

So when you experience something much purer than the pleasures of the senses appear just dirty and ordinary,

Very worldly.

It's not really looking down on it,

But it's trying to tell you there's something more.

Right?

So he didn't encourage us to follow those sense pleasures.

And he said that they're not to be pursued.

Right?

So he's not saying that we can't experience sense pleasure,

Because that's obviously a part of life.

And sometimes it's important to eat,

Like for example,

A good meal,

Which I had today,

I had a delicious meal.

And it helps digestion,

You know.

Or you want to go to see a movie with a friend.

It's perfectly okay,

You're not monks and nuns.

You know,

I don't go and do that,

But that's the choice.

You know,

I could if I wanted to,

But I choose not to,

Because I prefer to sit quietly and meditate or maybe watch a dumber talk instead.

So it's not that he's judging this,

But he is saying that it's not leading to enlightenment.

In that way,

It's not beneficial.

So the Buddha's concerned with our benefit.

He's concerned with compassion.

He's teaching out of compassion.

So he's pointing us in a direction that leads to deeper happiness.

So the sense pleasures are the one of the ways that he defined happiness,

And they're the kind which are not to be pursued.

But there was another kind of happiness that the Buddha talked about,

And this is in the Majjhima Nikaya.

It's 139 for anyone who reads the suttas.

It's in the Theravada Pali texts.

And he said that you should know how to define happiness,

And knowing that,

Pursue the pleasure within oneself.

And so this related to different kind of pleasure that is the pleasure born of meditation.

And he was particularly talking in this case about the higher states of samadhi.

So I'm not sure what people's experience here is with meditation,

But samadhi in brief is a state of deep peace,

Inner peace,

That's co-joined with a lot of happiness,

But very tranquil happiness.

And it's when the mind and the object are completely unified.

So the mind is completely stilled.

So in the way that we were just focusing on the breath,

It was gently.

It wasn't like with harsh force.

But when this becomes deeper and the breath starts to open up and you start to feel happiness with the breath,

The mind just starts to get pulled into that object and the two things start to become almost one and the same.

And then a lot of joy can arise from that because you put down such a lot.

You've put down all the complexity of the thinking mind,

The different sensations,

The diversity of sensations in the body,

And the mind has just become very kind of content and settled with one very simple object.

And from there the mind starts to build up energy and bliss.

So as the mindfulness increases,

The happiness increases.

With the happiness comes the energy,

With the energy you get more happiness.

So it's kind of like a snowball effect once you get into this.

There's a lot of happiness and it's a happiness born of stillness and contentment rather than sense pleasures.

So the Buddha said of these kind of happinesses that they're very different because they lead you in a different direction.

So it's not that the middle path has two extremes and that we're supposed to go somewhere in between those two extremes,

Not really hate stuff but not really like stuff too much either,

But just kind of a very passive kind of bland existence.

That's not what the Buddha's talking about.

He's actually talking about the two extremes are those within the sense world.

The middle path is going away from the sense world in a completely different direction.

So it's actually going away from those two extremes into a different inward basically,

A different direction,

So within ourselves.

And he said that those pleasures are to be pursued,

Are to be cultivated and are not to be feared.

And he had words for these.

So he said that the states of samadhi,

Which are otherwise known as jhanas,

Are pleasures which are born of seclusion,

Born of renunciation.

And again renunciation is probably not a very popular word but it means putting down stuff that you don't need.

So you renounce the suffering,

The things that cause you suffering.

Like here tonight you renounced going home,

Maybe the family is a nice family but still you wanted a break from the family tonight or you've obviously left work so you're not working late at night or anything like that.

You've even put dinner down,

Which is most admirable because I don't eat dinner so I don't have to put it down.

So this is what renunciation means but obviously it can go deeper than that and you can start to renounce even the body and just go even deeper into the mind and then renounce even the coarser feelings of pleasure for something stiller.

So renunciation is also a spectrum.

So the pleasures of renunciation of seclusion,

The pleasure of peace,

Upasamasukha,

Which is a beautiful word.

So this is a different kind of happiness than the types discussed in modern psychology.

It's a peace.

It doesn't even relate to satisfaction with your job or anything like that.

You've put it all aside and you're just going inward.

And then the last one he said is that these are the happinesses of enlightenment,

Which is quite surprising because of course most of us who know anything about Buddhism will know that samadhi states are not actually states of enlightenment yet,

But because they're so powerful and so free from a sense of self and free from so many burdens of the body and the coarser states of mind,

All thinking has gone,

Usually the hearing has gone,

The senses are really starting to quieten down.

So he compared that to the bliss of enlightenment because the pleasure is so strong and it's so,

So different from anything you can get in the world.

So I don't want to kind of freak you all out by thinking,

Oh,

That's way too far down the line for me.

So what I did want to do was quickly go through some of the steps in the beginning because this is a gradual path and there's a training to lead up to this.

And it starts,

As we said before,

With the virtue,

Right?

And even at the level of virtue,

The Buddha said there's a lot of happiness to be had there and he encouraged us to reflect on our good deeds.

He called it Chaga Anusakti.

It means bringing up your own goodness,

Your own virtue.

And there are different ways you can do this.

You can just sit down and remember some of the things you've done today that you felt brought happiness to yourself or to other people or maybe something that happened to you that caused gratitude to arise or something you did for someone else and they felt very moved by that.

Bring it up in your mind just to remind yourself how that feels.

So this isn't egotistical.

This is actually just training the mind to look in a different direction for its happiness.

Because so much of the time we don't notice absences,

Right?

We think,

Oh,

Well,

I didn't do anything bad,

But so what?

I mean,

Why would I?

But the fact that you didn't react to that mean comment that somebody said to you at work is actually a big thing.

You've saved yourself and other people a lot of suffering.

And in that moment of nonreaction,

There was a certain stopping.

There was a certain wisdom there that caused peace.

You knew this is the right track.

I'm on the right track here.

I'm not adding to the problem.

So there's all these things we can do.

And I just wanted to read out a few words about one of the reflections you can do with the sealer or one of the results perhaps of living a life of ethics.

So this is from the Madhyamini Kaya 129,

Another one of the texts.

And it says,

I'm going to change man for woman because after all,

There's not enough women around on the Buddhist scene,

Although there are always a lot of meditators who are female,

Not represented as leaders.

So here it says,

When a wise woman is on her chair or on her bed or resting on the ground,

Then the good actions that she did in the past,

Her bodily,

Verbal and mental actions cover her,

Overspread her and envelop her.

Just as the shadow of a great mountain peak in the evening covers,

Overspreads and envelops the earth,

So too when a wise woman is on her chair or on her bed or resting on the ground,

Then the good actions that she did in the past,

Her bodily,

Verbal and mental conduct cover her,

Overspread her and envelop her.

Then she thinks,

I've not done what is bad,

I've not done what is cruel,

I've not done what is wrong,

I've done what is good,

I've done what is wholesome and I've made myself a shelter from anguish.

Isn't that nice?

Isn't that so nice,

You know,

That we're being encouraged to reflect in that way?

And the Buddha called that the bliss of blamelessness.

And then in this sequence that I wanted to go through,

And I'm probably going to run through this,

In this sequence it's part of a natural process that gets the happiness flowing,

Right?

So the Buddha says that for one who is virtuous,

You do not need to make the wish or exert the volition,

May I be free from remorse,

Because it's natural if you have a virtuous life that you won't have remorse,

You won't,

You know,

Basically non-remorse will be just there for you,

Right?

And again,

There's a bliss to that.

It's not just a lack of remorse,

It's actually a happiness that you can look at,

Reflect on and bring up in your mind,

Yeah?

At the moment I'm doing a lot of service because I'm trying to establish a monastery and I was sent over here by my teacher on quite a difficult mission because I didn't have a trust in place when we started.

Also I can't handle money,

Okay,

So this is like just putting another little factor into the mix.

I can't handle money and I can't cook as a Theravada nun.

So I had to basically figure out how to survive on the ground without any permanent base and gather some trustees around me,

Start doing some teaching and basically present this idea and try to encourage people to be involved and keep them inspired with the vision of where it's leading and why we need such things and what the practice is all about.

So this is quite a lot of work and it was definitely a challenge but sometimes happiness isn't only about an easy life,

Sometimes it can be very difficult and cause a lot of tiredness and struggle but because of the sense of meaning that's imbued there,

It still nourishes the mind and the heart and so I can still bring up quite a lot of joy from what I'm doing and especially when people come and stay and they say that they get benefit from coming or that it means a lot to them that this is happening.

It really gives me a lot of happiness because it's not easy for people to find things to be happy about in the world these days.

Most of the news is not about places of refuge and safety and practice and harmony,

It's not.

It's about Donald Trump and Brexit and all the rest and what on earth is going to happen to the economy and what's happening to the climate.

And I mean obviously these are real issues and we need to be strong enough to know how to deal with that but by always immersing ourselves in the bad news we're just draining ourselves of energy and we're not resourcing our minds.

So you know these are ways to resource ourselves and to actually bring some resilience and perhaps some clarity as well from where we can act if need be.

So it's not about being completely passive and ignorant of what's happening and trying to avoid it but it is about trying to resource and nourish our minds so that from a place of wellbeing we know how to respond wisely rather than with reaction,

Reactivity.

I better not say that but well I'm going to say it because I'm conditioned but in my family my parents do watch a lot of news and you know get very upset with things that are happening and I do try to say you know I'm not sure that it's so healthy just to keep reading about it you know because of course whatever you put in your mind is going to keep coming back at you even when you turn the TV off or put the newspaper down you have that residue there you know.

It creates a sense that the world is a difficult and unfair place,

An unjust place that you don't really want to live in right.

So we have to create our own mini world as well because the reality for us now is that we're not in that context we're in a room of people who are trying to be good people who want to learn about kindness and how to you know act in kind ways and bring happiness to the world and happiness to ourselves and take responsibility.

You know this is a big one with practice right we're learning to take responsibility for our own actions and thoughts so this is also happening that's just as true as the other.

So it's good to reflect on that and just you know the goodness of our intention that we bring to the practice yeah and then alongside the sealer comes a great confidence in the path yeah a confidence that something can be done there is a path to practice and as I was saying before this confidence can lead to joy arising so by the time we sit down to meditate you know we have the base of sealer we have the base of confidence we've heard the teachings we've got some kind of faith in those and joy should be there for us you know there are various ways we can use to help establish that joy but it's not supposed to be just plain old suffering from the minute you sit down to meditate you know you can sit down and you can start to reflect in a wise way yeah you can bring up images of the Buddha or people who are kind or bring up things you've done that you feel grateful for things that have happened which were wonderful things that you've done which were wonderful and get the joy flowing yeah and another way to get that joy flowing in the meditation is the practice of loving kindness metta yeah this is what we chanted at the beginning yeah this is what should be done by one who is skilled in goodness and then it has all these beautiful qualities that enable you to open the heart and practice metta and bring love to all beings yeah so it's quite a high practice and people think that's just a beginner's thing but it's it's actually a very deep thing you know to purify the mind so much that we can have this loving kindness even to people who hurt us or even people we don't agree with and have very different views from us yeah so the loving kindness is a beautiful reflection and it can bring a lot of uplift to the heart so then from the joy which is already starting to refine this you know very wholesome pleasure it can turn into rapture what is called rapture in the practice the parley for that is pithi and this arises when there's becomes a strong interest in our meditation object so for example we're working with the breath and the breath starts to feel very soft very smooth maybe quite pleasant yeah you can either get into just one breath or you might get into the rhythm of the breath and just the mind starts to settle on that and get some kind of energy coming up and because your mind's not kind of diverted to lots and lots of different things the mindfulness starts to build and because of that the energy arises right so the buddha likens mindfulness building to kind of plugging up a leaky bucket so when the bucket has leaks the mindfulness goes out and the energy kind of drains but if you can plug it up by staying on the one thing then it just starts to build and all that lovely energy starts to kind of fill up this bucket yeah so you keep that on the breath and my teacher Ajahn Brahm says that this is the kind of pivot point in meditation because you start to enjoy the practice and because you're enjoying it you don't need to make a volition like may I stay with the breath no matter what you know I'm going to stay with it I'm not letting it go this doesn't have to be done at all you want to stay with it because it's simple and it's easy and it's natural if you're still struggling to get onto the breath it's probably because you're not ready yet yeah so that's why I mean it's a very short session but in the meditation I just tried to get you to start with the body sensations and then if your mind's ready for the breath let it come if it's not just let it go because it doesn't help to try and grab something yeah it's like a little birdie that comes along it's like a very delicate shy bird and if you grab it really tightly you just kill the bird but if you hold it really loosely it flies off and it's gone right so you have to learn this way to hold it in a very tender and gentle way just enough kind of focus just enough softness and it's it's really a very subtle thing yeah also you need different amounts of this sort of holding at different times sometimes the mind's just naturally happy with the breath other times it's a little bit more agitated and it needs just a bit more encouragement but the whole point of this sequence that's happening in this particular sutta this particular teaching is that it is happening naturally it's not through an act of will one thing leads to the next right each thing conditions the next so the joy conditions the bliss and then from there you start to calm the mind so from the the piti that arises in the mind once the mind's had its fill of that and the body's had its fill of that the whole thing starts to settle down and you experience something much more tranquil and the Buddha says this is like somebody who's been searching in a desert for water or for shade and they come across a big tree and they're able to sit under that tree in the shade and just just relax and cool down so the tranquility is the stage where the mind and the body is so still and so quiet that you can just easily sit for long periods of time without trying to do so you know because we're not in any sort of competition with anyone else or with ourself here like I can sit on the chair longer than you can sit I can sit on the floor forget the chair you know or like oh I used to be in a monastery actually where someone was sitting for 12 hours every night non-stop okay and it became a bit of an ego thing you know like I can sit for the whole 12 hours I don't need to go to the toilet it's like well okay but but also she did confide at one point that she felt pressure to keep that up because she was starting to get a reputation for that you know and people were coming to see her like where's the nun that sits for 12 hours and there's just you're just basically going the same way as of the world right you've gone from spiritual values and you know you've taken worldly values and just described them to spiritual values so it's kind of a spiritualized materialism in a way so we're not trying to get anything or be anyone other than you know right where we are right who we are so this tranquility is very peaceful and very lovely and you know you don't feel the need to move your mind doesn't feel the need to move and from the tranquility this leads into even deeper happiness which is called sukkah and this is the precondition for the deep samadhi right so the deep states of stillness so this so this just again shows that samadhi or stillness is not achieved by an act of will its condition proximate condition is happiness so it's only the happy mind that can go into the deep states of samadhi yeah and at this stage of happiness with the sukkah that comes from the mind it can be really quite overwhelming because you may not have experienced anything like this before and it's a classic experience for many people that go to these sorts of stages in meditation that they'll either experience fear or excitement because it's something that's happening because you're letting go and in a way you're starting to disappear like the sense of self is starting to disappear and the process is really starting to take off on its own without you being involved and at this point if you do interfere with the process and go oh i better just shift my attention a bit you know or hey what's going on here something happening then the whole thing starts to unravel and the happiness starts to subside so it's really something that happens when you stand out of the way but by standing out of the way it can be scary because you're going to places that you're not familiar with right and so this fear can start to come up like i don't know what's going to happen next the other thing that can happen if you're more like me probably is a little bit of excitement so this is when you start to kind of again get out of the present moment and start to lurch into the future like what's going to happen next you know and you've kind of lost that contentment that centeredness in the present moment so it's yeah the fears like you sort of recede and retract and the excitement's like you lurch forward so these are very very subtle things that the mind is habituated to do and these stages are quite interesting because they reveal those tendencies right which are conditioned very deeply and yeah one more thing i think is worth mentioning at this point is that another experience that can happen to a lot of people probably mostly westerners is guilt can come up at this point because we're not accustomed to happiness right and we almost feel like we don't deserve it so that's one of the reasons i wanted to talk about it tonight because the buddha's saying that you do deserve it right and that this is a natural part of the practice so it's not helpful for us to suffer along with everyone else you know sometimes we feel that if other people are suffering we don't have the right to be happy but how is our suffering going to contribute to the overall happiness in the world it's not you know i mean it's quite natural of course to feel guilt or to feel that you don't deserve things and this is something you know you can work with but it's also helpful i think to understand that this is kind of not nothing to do with you at this point and that the guilt that comes up is it's an old habit it's conditioned but it is an obstacle and it doesn't really belong in buddhism i don't think there's any concept of guilt in the whole buddha's teachings he does talk about remorse you know when you do things that you later regret or feel that you shouldn't have done but there's no point beating yourself up about that and in fact it just belongs the problem the best thing to do is say okay i did this it had that outcome maybe i'll try not to do that again it's like just learn from the mistakes and move on because you know staying with the old problems with the old mistakes is just going to drain your energy and make you feel quite undermined and disempowered right so guilt doesn't really have a place in the buddha's teachings so then what happens i'm aware of the time but we will have time for q and a then what happens after the uh the happiness is that we get into the deeper states of stillness and so this is when the mind becomes unified with itself

Reviews

Lovely open tone and camber to this. The teacher makes the talk accessions non technical minimal jargon, whilst being educational. A true sense of infectious humility was felt.
Thank you so much