Cultivating Spiritual Pleasure, Joy, Happiness, And Peace

This is a live recording of a Dharma talk given in Brunswick Heads, NSW, Australia, on Aug 4, 2025. Along the theme of serenity, this Dharma talk mentions how spiritual pleasure can lead to joy, happiness, contentment, equanimity, and ultimately waking up.

These wholesome states of mind can also be prioritised and nourished with wise attention. In addition, with wise attention, we can also de-nourish the unwholesome and the unhelpful. These principles can be used in daily life to transform unwholesome states of mind to wholesome ones.

Transcript

So welcome to tonight's Dhamma talk.

Tonight I'd like to talk about spiritual pleasure and the cultivation of joy,

Happiness,

Contentment and peace.

So,

Um,

Based on his experience and realising the unprofitability or how unbeneficial it was to go through his six years of self-mortification,

He and waking up eventually because of practising on the middle way,

The middle path,

The Eightfold Path,

He said to be cautious of worldly pleasures.

He cautioned us to be cautious of worldly pleasures because they can lead to attachments and entanglement and keep us bound to samsara.

He did,

However,

Say to not be afraid of spiritual pleasures because spiritual pleasures,

Not only are they nourishing,

But they can lead to sublime states of mind,

Including highly refined states of concentration called jhanas.

And these can lead to awakening.

So,

Oh,

By the way,

The jhanas lead to awakening because they give clarity and power to insight.

If you remember the last talk,

I talked a lot about serenity and insight and I talked about the differences.

I mentioned that serenity or this calm,

Steady,

Tranquil state of mind that's very concentrated gives muscle to insight and insight gives direction to serenity.

Throughout the suttas,

You have this saying that goes something like this.

The proximal,

Concentration has a proximal cause,

Happiness.

Happiness has a proximal cause,

Tranquility.

Tranquility has a proximal cause,

Joy or rapture.

Rapture has a proximal cause,

Gladness.

So,

What they're saying here,

And I think I mentioned dependent arising last time,

Things arise because of other causes and conditions.

There's no singularity with all this.

There's no thing in all this.

And if we can,

If we can get,

Become familiar with what leads to what,

It's very helpful for us.

So,

What he's talking about here is that gladness can lead to joy or piety,

Piety in Pali it's called,

Or rapture,

Which in turn can lead to tranquility,

Which in turn can lead to happiness.

And happiness,

Again,

Is this quality of lighthearted sukha,

It's called sukha in Pali,

But it's just this state of mind that is uplifted,

Buoyant.

One analogy you could think about,

It's like a bit of warm,

A warm spring in a really cold lake or pond or something like that.

It's just,

It's just the right thing.

It's like a cool breeze on a really hot day or warm breeze on a really freezing cold day.

It's just this lightheartedness.

And happiness can in turn,

Or provides the causes and conditions for deep states of concentration.

But what is gladness?

In Pali,

It's called pamoja.

And in my view,

It is a form of spiritual pleasure.

So what's spiritual pleasure?

Well,

Spiritual pleasure is the type of pleasure we may experience from being on the path to awakening,

On doing good actions.

Does anybody remember what it's like?

Well,

You probably all know what it's like to be generous.

When we're generous,

Really sincerely generous,

There's a spiritual pleasure about that.

When we are kind to ourselves and others,

There's a certain sense of pleasure about that.

When we practice,

When we're mindful,

When you have a have mindfulness,

There's a really subtle pleasure about that.

And in fact,

There's the Buddha highlighted the different types of joy one can have or the pleasure one can have from releasing the hindrances.

So I mean,

This is the analogies he made,

Letting go of sensual craving or releasing obsessive sensual desire,

Which is the first hindrance.

It's like being debt free.

You know,

Like,

We sometimes get indebted to,

We become indebted to our sensual pleasure.

Sometimes they hold us,

They hold us.

The overcoming ill will,

Which is this kind of divisiveness and pushing away and aversion and literally,

Sometimes it's actually wanting someone else to experience discomfort or pain or something like that.

It is like overcoming that,

Is like overcoming a horrible affliction.

Overcoming sloth and torpor,

Which is this mental dullness and thickness,

And it's this kind of fogginess,

Is like being released from prison,

The joy of being released from prison.

Overcoming mental agitation and restlessness is like being released from slavery and overcoming paralyzing doubt,

Which is this chronic procrastination or self doubt and doubt in the teachings and doubt in the practice and doubt in all sorts of things.

Overcoming that,

Is like the joy or the pleasure of arriving at a destination after an arduous and dangerous journey,

Arriving safely at a destination with all your goods intact.

So there's many ways we can experience spiritual pleasure,

Just by doing virtuous deeds and being ethical.

And also,

We can experience spiritual pleasure when we begin to bring our mental energies together.

We begin to gather them and put them in one spot.

We begin to have concentration or meditative concentration,

Called Samadhi in Pali.

It's this bringing together of our mental energies,

So they're kind of uniformed and going in the same direction.

It's just a really powerful state of mind,

And it brings about certain amounts of pleasure.

So gladness,

If we can focus on gladness,

If we can attend to gladness,

It can change to something more energising,

Something more joyous,

Piety.

So joy,

Piety is joy.

And when we focus on,

When we can attend to bubbly joy,

This kind of uplifted feeling in our bodies and our minds,

It can lead to happiness,

Actually.

And when we can attend to happiness,

It can lead to a more subtle experience of contentment.

And contentment here,

I'm thinking of as a mix of happiness and equanimity.

And when we can attend to contentment,

It can lead to equanimity,

Which is this unshaken,

An unshaken state of mind that isn't pulled and pushed around by the eight worldly winds,

Praise and blame,

Loss and gain,

Pain and pleasure,

And fame and disrepute.

It's not shaken around by that.

It's also not wavered by our attraction to beings,

Or our aversion to beings.

We're kind of steady and in the middle,

If that makes sense.

So what I just described,

Actually,

Were the first four material genres.

At very refined levels of concentration,

What we have are these experiences of joy,

Rapture,

Joy and rapture,

The same thing here,

Happiness,

Contentment,

And equanimity.

So there's also analogies for how these,

These,

They're called the material genres,

So the first four genres,

How they're cultivated.

And the analogy for the first genre is like,

I think in the days of the Buddha,

They used to have,

If you want to have a bath,

You'd go to a bath house,

And someone would be there making soap from soap flakes.

So the bath attendant would make a ball of soap for you,

But he'd mix it up with these flakes of soap,

And he'd put a bit of moisture in it and mix it up,

So it's all kind of unified.

It's like that,

The first genre,

Or the experience of piety in the first genre is like this ball becoming,

Becoming unified.

The experience of the second genre,

Happiness,

Or sukha,

Is like,

And it's described like being in a,

Being in a warm lake or warm pond,

And a cool water spring comes up from beneath the pond,

And it just pervades throughout the whole upon making it cool.

The analogy for the third genre,

Where the characteristics of this are contentment,

Or this kind of mix of equanimity and happiness,

It's like having a full lotus beneath the water,

So it becomes saturated with water.

You know,

It's completely saturated,

So there's this pervasiveness and this spreading of these experiences throughout being,

It's like being saturated with it.

And then the fourth genre,

This,

With this quality of equanimity,

This material genre,

Is like a person covered with a sheet,

A luminous sheet.

So you get the sense of them being insulated from the ways of the world,

Insulated from praise and blame,

Loss and gain,

Pain and pleasure,

Fame and disrepute,

Insulated from being caught up in attraction or aversion.

They're insulated from all that,

Yet they are completely aware in the world.

They're not shut off from the world,

They're there,

And they're just peaceful and clear and bright,

Bright in the world.

So I think these analogies are wonderful,

Because if we can have these analogies,

Sometimes we can notice these experiences arising,

And we go,

Wow,

Just like it's just like being in a warm lake or,

You know,

Hot lake,

And there's a cool spring coming up from beneath for happiness,

For example.

So I started meditating about 50 years ago,

And in those days,

You know,

I aspired to creating,

You know,

Cultivating the jhanas,

Because there was,

In the suttas,

The Buddha talks about kind of three ways,

And I think I mentioned this last time I was giving a talk here.

There's three pathways or three vehicles,

Basically,

For awakening.

One vehicle is serenity first,

So your mind gets really clear,

Then insight.

Another vehicle is insight only,

Like practicing the Four Establishments of Mindfulness,

So we're really clear from the beginning,

And that's said to be the faster way.

And then there's this way of serenity and insight co-joined,

Which is like what I'm inviting you to practice with the Four,

With the 16 Steps of Mindfulness of Breathing.

There's a going backwards and forwards between serenity and insight.

So,

You know,

When I was very young,

I ended up in Thailand,

And I was practicing,

And I had the memory of,

You know,

Serenity first and insight,

Which is the way the Buddha woke up.

He practiced these jhanas,

And then he used the power of those jhanas to look into phenomena.

And it was all,

It was really difficult.

I noticed that all I noticed really was my hindrances.

And after a couple of years,

I just sort of gave up with that path.

And I decided,

I'll practice the way of insight.

And that was really helpful.

I mean,

Practice the Four Establishments of Mindfulness,

Really,

Really helpful.

So I just practiced that,

And it had fruit,

And it was really,

Really practical,

And it helped me work with my issues.

Then one day,

About 25 years ago,

Or maybe 20 years ago,

I was on a self-retreat.

And the way I'd stay awake at night was,

It was in the forest up at the Forest Retreat Centre,

That's now no longer existent up in near Bodhi Farm.

I used to have a candle.

I was just there by myself,

And I had a candle,

And I had the suttas,

Had the suttas there.

And I just used to read the suttas.

And one day,

I came across this amazing sutta.

And it was called Kaya Gata Sati Sutta.

In other words,

Mindfulness immersed in the body sutta.

And it's Majjhima Nakaya 119.

And in it,

I noticed that in the ways of being mindful of the body,

They described being aware of the first material jhanas,

The first four jhanas.

And I thought,

Wow,

The way I learnt the jhanas is from this kind of golden,

The golden standard text of meditation,

Which is,

It's called the Visuddhimagga in Pali.

It's also called the Path of Purification.

It was a book that was edited about nine centuries after the Buddha's presence in India.

So it became the gold standard.

And the way they talked about the jhanas here was so,

So refined,

And so almost out of body experiences,

No connections with the body at all.

So here I am reading this,

And they're saying this is one way to be mindful of your body.

And in fact,

The way they described it,

I thought,

Oh,

Gee,

I've had those experiences.

So what I'm thinking here,

At this point in time,

Was that when I was young,

I used to think,

It's just impossible for me to attain those jhanas.

It's so out there,

So refined,

I won't even try to practice.

But here I see that it's actually described in a different way.

It's described in a way that is actually accessible for everyone.

So I kind of practiced that a little bit.

And then I eventually got to read a book called Right Concentration by Lee Brasington.

And then I ended up practicing with him.

I called him up,

Contacted him,

And he helped me on,

Well,

He mentored me on a number of self-retreats that I realized I needed to have longer time with these self-retreats.

And in this book,

He talked about these eight jhanas,

Like there's eight jhanas,

There's four material jhanas and four immaterial jhanas.

And he talked about them as being like swimming pools.

And I'll just quote what he said here.

One may skim the surface of the water,

Wade in,

Swim on the surface,

Or dive in deep.

However one enters,

To whatever depth,

The pools of water are still the same pools.

The eight jhanas remain the same,

Even though the depth of the experience differs depending upon how one engages with them.

So what this meant to me was that even though there was these eight jhanas described in the Vasudhi Marga,

It became apparent to me that some beings can attain those jhanas,

But it's quite rare.

And,

But it doesn't mean that we can,

Doesn't mean we can have similar experiences at a lower level.

And Lee was criticised,

Lee Brasington has been criticised by scholastics as,

You know,

Teaching like jhanalite,

Like not real jhanas.

And there's a large,

There's quite a bit of disagreement in about how the jhanas are understood and to what depth you need to go for them to be called a jhana and so on.

And in my experience,

I thought,

Well,

You know,

The scholastics,

The scholars and the,

You know,

Meditation practitioners can say what they want.

What I know is from my own experience,

Even if I practice these,

These practices at a very low level,

At a lower level,

That's sub jhana,

They're still bringing me some joy,

Happiness,

Peace and contentment.

So I continue to practice these ways.

And I found that,

In fact,

I could use them clinically with all sorts of people,

All sorts of presentations.

And there's,

It's like,

If we can,

If we can find joy somewhere,

If we can find some spiritual pleasure,

This is what Lee teaches actually.

Lee teaches for us to concentrate our mind and find some pleasure in your body,

Attend to it,

And then it goes through these processes of transforming to joy,

Happiness,

Contentment and peace.

So I,

I've been using these,

These principles in clinical practice,

Actually.

And what I noticed,

While I did some training with Lee,

With Rick Hansen,

Who's a neuropsychologist and clinician and meditation teacher,

Great guy.

And he teaches this principle called HEAL.

And HEAL stands for having a positive experience,

Enriching it,

Absorbing into it,

And then linking it to something.

Linking it,

HEAL,

The linking stands for linking it to an experience that may be opposite to the positive experience you've had,

If that makes sense.

I'll just clarify what I do here,

And what my patients do and what we,

How this arises.

So it's like with the serenity approach,

We attend to something positive or neutral,

And in that attending,

We strengthen that pathway.

And what we do is we,

We attend to one pathway,

Like the pathway of the wholesome,

And we don't feed into the unwholesome.

You may,

Did I mention that story of the two wolves last week,

A week back?

Did I mention that?

There's a story of two wolves,

And there was a,

There was a story of a,

A young warrior in American Indian,

A young American Indian warrior,

And he was talking to his grandmother,

And he said to his grandmother,

How come,

Grandmother,

You are so wise and compassionate and such a good person?

And the grandmother responded to him by saying,

It's like I have two wolves.

One wolf is really mean and nasty and horrible and aggressive,

And the other wolf is kind and generous and peaceful and really nice to be around.

I don't feed the wise,

The,

I don't feed the bad wolf,

And I feed the wise wolf.

Basically,

It's as simple as that.

So what we have,

If we can choose to attend to something wholesome,

Then wholesomeness grows.

And in doing that,

We don't feed into the unwholesome,

Like,

Say,

If we're worrying or something like that,

We just don't feed into that.

And in that,

That,

What we attend to then becomes our reality,

If that makes sense.

So this is an explanation of HEAL.

So that we have,

We first of all notice something wholesome,

Or we attend to something wholesome,

And we enrich it,

We enrich it with our attention,

Or we can enrich it with words or imagination or whatever,

Then we absorb into it.

Absorbing into it means you kind of marinate it,

You let it pervade you,

You sink into it.

And then,

Actually,

That's all I invite people to do a lot of the time,

Because the linking can happen naturally.

It's like this wholesome state of mind,

The state of happiness,

Joy,

Peace,

And so on,

Can become our default mode of being.

And then when anything unwholesome arises,

Like a memory of a horrible experience in the past,

It just kind of comes up into our psyche and dissolves away.

And the analogy that I like to use with this,

And this comes from the suttas,

It's like when you have a glass of water,

And you put a tablespoon of salt into it,

It makes the water undrinkable.

Is that correct?

Yeah.

If,

However,

You put that same tablespoon of salt into a pristine lake,

It's irrelevant,

Just dissolves away.

And the water is still beautiful to drink.

And it's like this.

If we can allow these wholesome states to grow,

Then they're like this beautiful,

Pristine lake.

Then when the shitty stuff comes up,

When the unwholesome memories come up,

When the beliefs that we get caught up in come up,

They just come up,

And they just fade away.

They're nothing.

So thank you very much for your attention.

And may we all experience the peace and freedom of Nibbāna.