Change (Anicca)

A talk on anicca, which is the Buddhist word for impermanence or change. If we look closely at the world, we can see that one of the only observable truths is the truth of change and movement. Although so integral to the make up the universe, it is one of the hardest things to accept.

Transcript

So welcome to tonight's class everybody.

As we can hear we have the youth basketball league practicing in the hallway and they really want to let us know that they're here.

And you know that actually is a perfect backdrop for tonight's talk from your questions about impermanence and transitions and change.

I actually lead meditation at Andover High School too and their meditation room is right next to the gym.

And we had a few classes,

I've maybe led a five or six series there too.

And a few of their classes happened while there was basketball games happening in the gym.

So we'd be sitting here and you hear you know woo and then and like and it always reminded me of being in the monastery and we had my first monastery that I was at,

It was in Frankfurt,

Germany.

And it was on a main road called Hanauer Landstrasse.

It was this main road going into Frankfurt connecting Hanauer and Frankfurt.

And so right in front of the monastery there's this you know two or three lane street and then kind of like a median and then two or three lanes on the other side of that.

And then there was a Strausenbahn which is like their kind of,

I don't want to say like a trolley would be the word for that kind of like,

Yeah their inner city train that went around the city you know.

So it was three lane street,

Trolley,

Three lane street and then behind the monastery was the train tracks.

And our next door neighbors were the train yard.

So we had constant trains going back and forth,

You know actual big cargo trains.

And then you know Lufthansa and the Frankfurt Airport,

It's one of the most populated daily airports in the world.

So at any given time there's also you know trains over us.

And then we had a Chinese medicine center so we had about 150 people coming in and out every day at the monastery.

So you know we kind of lived like in the middle of this river of movement and noise.

And one of the things that I became pretty good at was realizing that if you just wait long enough the noise stops.

And this first became very apparent to me when I would be meditating in our Buddha Hall and a train would go by and I've told this story before many times.

And then one of our,

You know the way that we sat in our Buddha Hall there's our Buddha statues and then the monks and the nuns would sit.

And then there's an altar behind us too and then kind of the lay people,

Right,

The non-monastics,

The devotees,

Whatever you want to call them,

Practitioners.

They would come and they'd be in the back part.

And along the whole side wall was just windows,

It was big windows.

And we had a little you know a Zen garden back there with some pebbles and right behind that was the train tracks.

So we'd be sitting there meditating.

We had meditation in the morning,

Sometimes meditation in the afternoon,

Meditation in the evening.

And we'd be meditating and we'd hear a train go by,

You know,

And suddenly you're just sitting there and everything's quiet and you're shh,

You know.

And as the train would be going by,

Kind of inevitably there was this one elder Vietnamese nun who sat in her spot because the monks were on the right and the nuns were on the left.

So she was sitting like kind of near the windows.

And she was,

You know,

Maybe,

I almost want to say late 70s.

And every time the train would be going by she would get up and she would just start walking through the Bota Hall and just systematically closing all of the windows.

And I always had to kind of laugh at that because by the time that she stood up to go and close the windows the train had already passed.

And it's not like there's a train every five seconds,

There'll be,

You know,

A couple like a day.

So it was as if she was chasing a phantom of a noise that had already passed.

That she was reacting and trying to stop something but it's not happening anymore.

And it reminded me of meditation itself,

Of when you're sitting and you realize that you've been lost in thought so you try to kind of stop your thinking but what you don't realize is that the second that you've made that realization that you were lost in thought,

It means that thought is over.

So it's like you're already present again and then you start trying to stop your thinking but that thinking is already gone.

Your mind is,

You've returned already.

So now all that work,

You're just creating noise and movement,

You're getting up and you're closing all the windows,

You know,

But it's already over.

And you know,

One of the Thai Forest teachers,

Ah Chun Cha,

He had a lot of construction going on and one of his students went up to him and he said,

You know,

It's too noisy,

I can't meditate,

You know,

These sounds are bothering me.

And Ah Chun Cha looked at him and he said,

The sound's bothering you or are you bothering the sound?

And this understanding that,

You know,

Meditation,

Sure there's a reason that we come to this school,

That we sit in this room together,

That we create a safe,

A sacred,

A quiet space to practice in.

We control the conditions as much as we can but then we also have to let go and as one of the great poets,

Chinese poets,

Han Shan said,

He was living up on cold mountains,

He's a poet,

And he has a lot of beautiful poems.

One of his poems,

It kind of concludes with saying,

A rock for my pillow and clouds for my blanket,

Let the world go about its business.

And just that image of this monk just peacefully laying down on a rock with the sky above him on this kind of hillside in China,

Green everywhere,

And he said,

Let the world go about its business,

That I'm not participating.

You know,

I'm not fighting it,

I'm not even engaging with it,

Let it go about its business,

Let things happen,

I'm just here to be here,

I'm here to be simple and easy.

And sitting at Ann Arbor High School at that basketball game and what I said,

Kind of the theater of humanity,

Right?

The yay,

Aww,

And doo,

Doo,

Doo,

You know.

Sports,

Yeah,

It's a very kind of like,

It's like a spectacle,

Right?

You get everything,

Highs and lows and anger and passion and all these things,

Right?

And to just sit with that happening in the other room and to just say,

Let the world go about its business,

That is only going to bother me as much as I allow it to bother me because that's the truth.

That basketball game is true,

That there are another eight billion people on this planet besides me,

Plus,

You know,

Countless amounts of animals and insects and bacterias and whatever,

Plus things like weather,

Natural climate things,

You know,

Environmental factors,

Issues,

Physics,

Space,

Just the human body itself,

That there's so many different processes that we're involved in,

So much is overlapping on top of us at any given moment.

And if you're going to try to control all that stuff,

You're going to have a nervous breakdown,

Right?

There's too much happening,

You can't control it all.

And there's times where we need to really practice letting the world go about its business,

Letting things happen around us,

But also letting things happen through us.

And if you sit and you just watch,

You see things coming and you see things going,

These thoughts come and go,

I get a little bit sleepy,

Now I'm a little bit more awake,

Now I have a little bit of a pain in my leg,

Now I have an itch on my nose,

Now… And if you kind of just step back a little bit,

Or step forward,

However you want to call it,

Just being present with it,

But not engaging with it too much,

You'll recognize one of the three Dharma seals,

Is what the Buddha called them.

The Buddha,

Somebody asked the Buddha,

In the future,

How are we going to know which teachings are yours or not?

How are we going to know what's a real Buddha's teaching or not?

And the Buddha said,

Well,

There's three different facets,

There's three different aspects to my teaching.

And if the teaching that you hear contains these aspects,

You'll know that it's authentic.

And the three aspects of the Buddha's teachings,

The three Dharma seals,

One of them is called impermanence or change,

Or not dependability,

I don't know if there's an actual word for that,

Independently,

Not independence,

But… Because the actual Pali word for this,

It's anicca,

Is the word,

Anicca.

And in Pali,

It's like a Sanskrit type language,

If you stick an A at the beginning of a word,

It denotes the opposite of the word.

So like vidya would be wisdom,

Avidya is ignorance.

Dana is giving,

Adana would be selfishness,

Taking back.

So putting an A at the end of the word denotes its opposite.

And the Pali word for impermanence,

The word that we often call impermanence,

It's anicca.

So it's not nicca.

And one of my teachers,

Achim Brahmi,

Said,

Well,

The only time that I saw that word written down in a way that you can know what it means,

It's actually in the monk's rules,

That the Buddha also gave the monk's rules about how to behave,

How to interact and react in the society and how to be a monk.

And one of the rules,

It says that for monks,

They're beggars,

They have their bowls,

They go around house to house,

And it said you cannot become dependent on just one house to give you food every day.

You have to go and serve the community,

You have to put yourself out there,

Make contact with new people,

Allow new people to support you,

Allow people to see you as a monk and to ask,

What are you doing?

And like maybe they can hear a teacher,

You know,

At least,

You know,

Be out there,

But don't make yourself,

You cannot make yourself dependent on one person.

And the word that the Buddha used for being dependent was the word nitya.

So if we look at what the Buddha was actually saying when he said a nitya,

One of the Dharma seals in Western Buddha's,

You know,

Buddhist circles,

We translate it to change or impermanence.

But the actual approximation of the word would be not dependable,

That there is nothing that's really dependable,

That everything is in the state of change,

Everything is on this flux,

There's nothing that you can really hang your hat on.

A few days ago,

Some of you know my father actually,

He passed away a little over a year ago,

Like a year and three months or something.

I went and I sat in like his old study,

Like our computer room,

Right?

And we haven't touched it,

So it's still kind of all of his stuff and his books and I kind of like went through some of the draws and just looked at the stuff and I thought he was probably the last one to touch this stuff,

You know,

And just really,

And I felt his energy still around me.

And I said,

Yeah,

Like he's gone but this one room is still containing,

I still feel him in this room because he set it up with his energy,

You know.

And as soon as,

You know,

We give away those books or clean out the stuff or move or whatever,

Like kind of his last little,

You know,

Vestige of like his life energy that you can feel will be gone,

Right?

Then it's kind of dispersed and that's it for him,

Right?

His footprint in that way is gone,

In the physical way.

And just kind of sitting there in that room and looking through all this stuff and looking at these pictures of him and I mean when you lose a parent it's just insane.

Anyone that's close to you anyway when you lose them,

It's so shocking and so reality breaking,

I don't know how else to say it,

This person who's been there since the day I was born who for me is just like an inherent part of existence and life in this earth,

My mom and my dad,

Right?

These people that are,

They are synonymous with the trees and the sun and the moon,

They're just things that have always been there for me.

And when one of them leaves it's like wow,

You know,

It's really the greatest teaching I'm probably going to get until I die and then hopefully I'll be able to kind of understand that process.

But to lose somebody that's so close to you,

It makes this so real that yeah,

There is nothing to depend on.

That even he will go,

Even my mom will go,

Even this will go.

This too shall pass.

Whatever the situation is,

That will pass,

That will end.

Each person,

They will go.

You will go.

All of our belongings will again,

They'll be scattered,

They'll go to somebody else.

All of the information that we have will be lost.

All of our experiences will be gone.

That there's just this process of things coming together and then separating again and again and again.

And that's truth.

That would almost be the definition of truth,

Right?

Is change.

Impermanence.

Not dependability.

Flux.

Flux is.

And we live our lives as if that wasn't true.

We don't live our lives with gratitude for every moment.

We don't recognize how precious each moment,

Each day,

Each interaction with everyone is.

How every time you see somebody you love,

It might be the last time you see them.

I read a post on Facebook and it said,

The last time that you and your friends played outside together,

You didn't know that it was the last time that you and your friends were going to play outside together.

And it's this really kind of,

Wow,

It's heavy,

Powerful,

Right?

Yeah,

True.

Do we really live our lives keeping ourselves sane?

This is the definition of sanity,

Is remembering.

Remembering what this place is.

That this is a temporary reality.

And treating it that way and also,

My God,

Look around,

Look at all these,

Just look at the people in this room.

Every one of you in this room is going to lose everybody in your life and then each one of you is going to die too.

Do we really remember that each time we meet a new person?

Do we look at them and say,

Wow,

This person will never exist on this earth again.

This combination of experiences is so precious and unique.

And this person has stories that will never again be told or heard.

This person has a certain brand of wisdom that nobody else has ever had because you have your unique set of experiences.

Do we look at everybody and say this person is going to experience the most heart wrenching loss imaginable and this person is also going to die.

If you walked into a hospital and you went to the terminally ill ward of the hospital,

You would have like a reverence for every single person that you saw there.

You would really look at everyone and say,

You would hold them in a certain space and you would just be honored to see them and to say hi.

But look around,

We are all in that same boat.

We are all terminally ill.

Every baby in that hospital that's getting born is terminally ill too.

And if we could remember that,

And it's scary and it's sad and it's painful and it's heavy,

But it's like the only truth that there is about this place is that things come and things go.

And if we could get to that place where we accept that truth,

We would be able to make peace with it.

And like a lot of people who actually get a terminally ill diagnosis,

They say,

You know,

I've lived the last year of my life with the highest quality that I've ever lived my life because I knew how precious it was,

Because I knew that I was going to die.

That a lot of people that have cancer and have different things,

They say,

You know,

And you see often these two different boats,

Right?

There's one that they fall into more of like a negative depressed kind of victim feeling.

And then there's some that really take more of like the proactive,

Like grateful and gracious.

And that they really use that realization to propel them forwards into making the most of this.

And when we keep all that in mind,

All of our smaller daily problems and our situations are not that big a deal anymore,

Really.

Kind of like in relation to impermanence,

To not dependable,

That there's nothing,

That there's no one that even this life,

It's not dependable.

What really matters?

What is there that can really make you feel stressed?

One Buddhist teacher I went to for my birthday,

Actually,

When I first got to the monastery,

He was this Tibetan teacher,

This old Tibetan man.

Ringu Tolku was his name,

Ringu Tolku.

And he said,

You know,

People feeling insecure is kind of like water being afraid of getting wet.

He said people feeling insecure,

People being afraid when they don't have security,

People searching for security.

He said it's as silly as water being afraid of getting wet because water is wetness.

And he said people are change.

We are process.

That there is nothing to hold on to.

There's conditions that we can kind of keep going.

It's like if you build a fire,

You know to keep feeding it wood,

To keep it going,

Same thing.

I have to keep putting food in my mouth,

Keep breathing.

There's things I can do to keep this process going for as long as I can.

Getting it is helpful and as useful as I can.

But then there's also that reality that there's nature,

That things will change.

This too shall pass.

And that can be said if you want to get even deep into the quantum level.

I mean things are passing,

You know,

Things are almost passing before they even arrive when you get into quantum theory and stuff,

Right?

It happens so fast.

And then when you kind of zoom out and you get to the planetary level,

It's like well,

Our sun actually reached its half-life in 2001.

Our sun is now on its way out.

When the sun is gone,

That's it for the whole solar system.

That all of this,

There's a big bang.

And then in Buddhism,

Actually the Buddha talked about this interestingly enough,

He said there's a big bang and then a big collapse.

And then another big bang and another big collapse.

So in Buddhist cosmology,

There's not like a beginning or an end.

It's just this constant process of the universe expanding and then contracting and expanding and contracting.

So 2,

500 years ago,

The Buddha talked about this as what's up.

And also this question about past lives and things like this and same kind of understanding.

So at the time of the Buddha,

There was two main schools of thought.

There was the Brahmanism or Brahmanistic way of thinking and there was Jainism.

So the Brahmins,

They believe that there is something called like the Atman,

Right?

There's like this big over soul.

That there's this infinite soul that we kind of come from and we return to.

That we always were and we always will be,

Right?

The sense of infinity.

Permanence,

Nietzsche,

Yeah,

Soul.

And then the other school at the time of the Buddha was the Jains,

Jainism.

And they said,

When you die,

There's nothing.

It's like destruction,

Right?

Annihilation.

So you had one school of thought that said,

There's this thing that lasts forever.

And then there's other school of thought that said,

There's nothing.

So that there's like black and white,

Everything and nothing.

And the Buddha came in the middle of that and he said,

You're both wrong.

Then the philosophical debaters of the time said,

So you're saying that there is something.

The Buddha said no.

And they're like,

So you're saying there's nothing.

And the Buddha said,

No.

And I said,

Oh,

So you're saying that there is both something and nothing?

And he said,

No.

And I go,

OK,

So you're saying that there's neither something nor nothing?

And he said,

No.

And they're like,

Well,

Then you don't even have a theory,

Buddha,

You're stupid,

Get out of here.

How can you say that?

How can you say no to everything?

Do you even have a view?

And the Buddha said,

Of course.

And they said,

Well,

What is it then?

And the Buddha said,

There's a process going on.

That there is a process that this consciousness,

That this mind.

Like,

I've used this example before,

But it's like if you look at a flower,

Right?

It's the seed plus water plus earth plus time plus space.

And then this flower grows.

It's a process.

It's made up of a bunch of different things.

That flower,

You could call it a flower.

That's the label we use,

The designation for it.

But if you really look deeply at a flower,

It's just all these conditions that came together.

And then eventually those conditions fade,

And that thing moves on.

It becomes,

Again,

The earth,

And the sky,

And water,

And it goes back into the cycle.

And the Buddha said that what this is,

What we're experiencing,

Is that there's a cycle that's going.

And there's not this you that you can hold on to that transcends that cycle.

But there's not nothing.

I could slap somebody in the face and say,

Look,

There's something there,

Right?

It's like,

We're here.

It's like what a Zen master would do.

He'd slap you and say,

Is that something or nothing,

Right?

So there's definitely something,

But what is that something?

It's just a process,

That there's this movement,

That things come together.

And the way that we talk about consciousness,

Also in Buddhism,

There's a whole technical kind of way of talking about this.

There's a text called the Abhidharma,

Which is like an accompaniment.

There's the Buddhist rules.

There's all of the Buddha's teachings.

And there's this thing called the Abhidharma,

Which is almost like the molecular teaching of the mind and how the mind works,

That there are these moments of mind that arise and pass away,

That a moment of mind arises,

And that moment of mind then has attention,

And feeling,

And contact as qualities within it.

And then it passes away as the next moment arises that's informed by that first moment.

So it's like karmically arisen.

If there's a moment of anger,

Then the next moment will be anger,

Because it's conditioned by that.

So it's kind of like,

Almost like dominoes,

Right?

One thing hitting the next thing,

Hitting the next thing.

And we experience that as one continuation,

As if you're watching a movie in a movie theater,

And there's a lot of frames going really fast,

Which seems like one thing.

But there's actually these mind moments,

That every moment,

There's actually a new consciousness arising,

Happening really fast.

Some of the real meditation masters,

They say that they can actually experience this,

The mind arising,

Passing away,

Arising,

Passing away,

Arising,

Passing away,

Seeing how each mind moment is just conditioned by the one before it,

Watching the actual arising and ceasing of consciousness.

So in Buddhism,

When they talk about past lives,

It's not like they don't say it's like my eternal everlasting soul that goes back and forth.

They're saying that,

Yeah,

I can follow this process back,

That you can follow that process back.

And I myself,

If I say honestly,

I have had past life experiences while I was in the monastery,

That some things came up very powerfully.

And it was like,

OK,

I've experienced little snippets of past lives.

And there is something,

Right?

Yeah,

There is this thing that somehow this life is still connected to that's not here.

But according to the way that the Buddha talked about it,

It's more that there are just these moments arising and passing away.

And you can follow that kind of karmic wake,

The conditions back.

And that's a whole teaching that I've found to be somewhat helpful and somewhat not helpful.

I think that things that we can experience directly,

Things that we're going to experience directly,

Good things to talk about.

When we start getting into things like that,

That you can only experience if you're an incredibly accomplished meditator,

It runs the risk of becoming like a religion,

Becoming like a blind faith.

That you have a bunch of people walking around saying,

Here's the truth.

The truth is that there is no self and that there's just this.

It's like,

Well,

How do you know that?

Well,

Because the Buddha said,

Yeah,

But then how is it different than this guy saying,

Well,

The Bible said?

You can't just take what somebody else said and say this is the truth.

So when the Buddha spoke about not dependability or things moving and changing,

That there's nothing there to hold onto,

That's something that's right before our eyes in every second.

And the other two,

I said there's three Dharma seals.

The other two,

One of them it's called anatta,

Which is non-self,

Which is again what I was saying with the flower,

That that thing called the flower,

It's made up of all these different parts.

So everything is made up of many different parts.

Existence is dependent.

I am here dependent on other conditions.

I'm here because I had parents,

Because there's an earth,

Because there's air and food.

I'm in this room also because you guys are here.

If you didn't sign up,

There'd be no class,

Right?

So this class only exists because of us individually are here.

So it's all kind of that same thing.

Is this,

Does this class exist or not?

Or is it just a bunch of individual people that create this class?

It's both.

That everything is made up of other things.

So there's interdependence,

Is the word Thich Nhat Hanh used,

Interbeing,

That everything is in a state of interbeing.

And that includes our emotions.

If a tiger walked into this room,

We would all feel anxiety,

Because now there's a new condition that arose a new emotion.

There's a lot of things going on in our lives.

There's a lot of stress,

A lot happening.

All of our feelings are happening interbeing,

Dependent on the situations.

Plus our belief system about those situations,

Plus our habits.

Does anyone here know somebody that just gets angry all the time,

That their habitual way of reacting is just to feel angry?

Yeah,

I see people like that in the car.

Sometimes you're driving and people just get angry.

And there's not a real reason.

You could just tell that,

Oh,

That person has a habit of just responding with anger.

So our habits are part of our experience,

Too,

How we're just used to respond,

What our belief system is,

How much we've reflected on things.

So this things being made up of other things,

Interbeing,

That's the second one.

Then the third one he talked about,

It's dukkha,

Which is suffering,

Or could also be called unsatisfactoriness or pain,

Or talked about kind of just the fact that,

Listen,

If everything is changing all the time,

If everything is made up of other things,

If everything is actually so ephemeral,

Living as a human being in this place,

Pain is going to be necessary.

You're going to feel pain.

Even if it's just like pain in my leg because I'm getting old and I have back pain,

That pain is necessary.

Pain is part of living here,

That there is painfulness.

And that's part of what it means to live here,

To be in this world,

Is that there is going to be pain in some way.

And again,

The same thing is that from first glance,

That seems like something that feels really heavy and scary and difficult and depressing.

But if you can really acknowledge that and accept that,

I knew when we had meetings in our monastery,

We had meetings of the monks and nuns,

And things started getting kind of stressful.

It's weird,

Right?

Bunch of monks and nuns,

And it's all stressful.

And we're having meetings every day,

And people are starting to get upset and all this.

And I started to feel almost like a heaviness in my belly before meetings.

I didn't want to go.

It's almost that feeling if you have to go to a family function or something,

And you're like,

Oh,

And you don't necessarily want to go,

Or something like that.

And I kind of said to myself,

Well,

Why not just accept that this is going to be a little bit unpleasant?

Don't fight it.

Just say,

Yeah,

This is going to be painful.

And then I went in the meeting.

I just kind of sat there,

And people were like,

There's arguing,

And people.

And I just said,

Yeah,

It's OK.

It's not that bad.

It was only bad because I wanted it to be different.

And there's more teachings,

Of course,

Because then the Buddha went on to say,

The whole point of these teachings is that because they're suffering,

There's a way out of suffering,

That there is a path of practice that can lead us out of this.

And that's what we're doing,

And that's even what we notice.

I meditate,

And I feel a little bit better.

I can't necessarily put my finger on it.

I feel a little more spacious,

A little more relaxed,

A little more collected,

A little more peaceful.

So yeah,

OK,

There's something to this.

Whatever this is,

This seems to give me a positive,

Pleasurable,

Happy feeling,

And seems to disperse some of my pain,

My suffering.

And that's almost what the Buddha taught entirely.

Everything he taught is just wrapped up into those three things.

And those three things are really beautiful because they're all to be experienced.

They're all things that are right in front of us.

They are onward leading towards freedom,

Is how the Buddha talked about it.

Because what this ultimately does is if you can really examine how everything is just shifting,

There's nothing dependable,

Everything's made up of other things and breaking up,

So there's nothing to really control.

It's this whole wave of tapestry of interconnections moving.

And then there's grief and pain and loss and all these things.

What it arises is a kind of dispassion.

And that dispassion leads to you turning inwards.

A lot of people,

They come to meditation because they're desperate,

Because their lives are so painful,

Everything's falling apart,

That they need help.

They're desperate,

And they need it.

So it's like out of this kind of ultimate pain of the world and this dispassion that they're going to find their answers outside of themselves somewhere.

They turn in.

They let the world go about its business.

Yeah,

It's that eventually you get to that point where you lay it down.

And it's not depressing.

It's peaceful.

When you can lay things down,

It's such a relief.

You don't need to control it anymore.

You're not upset by things.

You don't have disappointments because you don't have expectations.

Everything is just OK.

And we need to take that responsibility to really look at our mind and see how am I causing my own suffering?

In which ways am I misapprehending the reality?

In which ways do I want this world to be something it's not?

Yeah,

If you ever feel suffering,

If you ever feel stress,

You know that in that moment you are at war with the reality because any time you want something from this place that you're not getting,

That's the recipe for suffering.

That's it right there,

That suffering.

Expecting from this world that which it cannot give you.

And so this path of letting go,

Of opening up,

It's so free.

When I was on longer term retreat,

I became so happy,

So peaceful,

So simple.

Just sitting,

Meditating.

I would just sit on this wooden porch in Australia in the sun and just smile.

And sit there for three hours just in bliss.

And I would stand up and I'd walk and get my food.

It didn't matter how good the food was or what was there.

And I would eat.

And it was just one meal.

And I would eat.

And I had some left.

I'd feed it to the kangaroos that were kind of hopping around.

And I would sit back.

And everything was OK.

I wasn't trying to get anywhere.

I wasn't pushing myself.

I wasn't fighting anything in this world.

I was just there.

I was totally present and at peace with the moment.

And my mind was just residing in this beautiful,

Blissed out state.

And I think there's also a misunderstanding that that's like a selfish state or something.

That there's children in Africa starving.

How can you sit there smiling?

And I would say,

Well,

Look.

As I was sitting there smiling,

Everyone I saw,

I would smile at them.

I would help people.

If there was any insects in my room,

I would save them.

I wouldn't squash them.

I would try to take care of the animals that were like hanging out around my hut.

That when you're happy,

You're naturally a happy person.

And you do good things.

If you want to help the world,

Gary Schneider,

If you guys remember him,

He was way back like Jack Kerouac and Gary Schneider,

These kind of beat poets.

Gary Schneider,

He became like an environmentalist.

And I actually heard Jack Kornfield tell this story.

He said that they were interviewing Gary Schneider.

And he's in Northern California working to protect the forests and all this.

And they're like,

What can we do?

What can we do for the world?

And he said,

Don't feel guilty.

He said,

You help the world because you love the world.

Fall in love with nature.

That's how you can help it.

And kind of this understanding that,

And this is kind of the steps of the path,

Is that we practice.

We start to free our minds.

We start to put everything down.

We start to become more peaceful and happier.

And then we start to kind of shine that light around us.

And that helps and supports other people,

Too.

And that's kind of what there is to it.

I was actually talking to Shaina earlier.

And I was trying to explain the spiritual path.

Because those of us that are on a spiritual path,

There's something like the spiritual yo-yo effect,

Where you feel like you're making progress.

And you kind of revert to old ways.

And you feel like you're making progress and revert.

And it keeps kind of going back and forth.

And I've,

Over the years,

Had the feeling it's more like you have a bunch of weights tied to you.

And so you cut off a weight.

And you're in the middle of the ocean or something.

So then you start to rise up in the water.

And you go,

Oh,

Wow,

I'm making progress.

But then you only rise up so far.

And then you kind of stop.

Because then you need to cut off another weight.

And then you could rise up a little bit more.

And that this feeling of going forwards or going backwards,

You're always going forwards.

Any time you've learned something,

You've gone forwards.

And just because you're back in an old habit or you're suffering or pain,

That doesn't mean that's not part of our path.

It doesn't mean that that's not what we're supposed to go through.

So we need to look at it as that it's about just like releasing things.

Like the more that we can release,

The more that we can meet with an open heart,

The more we can be honest,

That we can be honest how we feel,

Honest how we speak,

Honest in our actions,

The more that we can start to let things go and be present to realize what causes me happiness,

What causes me pain.

That starts to propel us down this path.

We start to get lighter and lighter and lighter.

And then we'll look down and we'll see other people below us with weights on them.

And we'll be able to swim down and say,

Hey,

You can cut these things off.

Hey,

I had a weight just like that.

Here,

Let me show you.

I know this one very well.

That's the self-doubt weight.

Or that's the guilt weight.

Or that's the worthlessness weight.

And that's kind of how we help each other.

And that's what this path does.

And that's what it's about.

So I would invite you for tonight's class,

For tonight's sitting,

Walking,

Sitting meditations,

To really work on being present,

On being a little bit freer of letting go of any expectations about even what this class is going to be or feel like for you.

But also catching yourself if your mind is running off into past or future,

Trying to control something or get something or figure something out or plan or worry or be angry or is anxious.

So just kind of call yourself out in a loving way.

But call yourself out and just say,

Let it go.

I don't know.

I'm not going to figure it out right now.

Maybe my suffering's not coming from the situation.

Maybe my suffering's coming because I'm trying to control the situation.

Maybe my suffering's coming because I'm not trusting.

Maybe the real problem here isn't the world that's bothering me.

Maybe it's that I'm bothering the world.

Maybe I need to let go.

And yeah,

I just want to give that to you all tonight and see how that integrates into your minds during the next 45 minutes or so.

So we can get into our meditation positions,

Whatever feels comfortable.

Reviews

Truth is change. Our suffering is due to our war with reality. We’re all terminally ill and we need to remember that the only truth is that everything comes and goes. Once we accept this then we can find peace and make the most of our lives while we are granted time to be here. Letting go is so freeing and once we have achieved total honesty in our presence and our ability to let go of control then we then can lend a hand to others on the path. Thank you, Seth for helping us to remember to hold a sweet reverence for this life! 🙏🏼

Simply give this talk a listen & you’ll know why it’s deserving of 5 stars!

Loved this talk on change and chasing ghosts, thank you!

A nice Dhamma talk. I found the last 5 minutes especially helpful. 🙏🏼

Wow! Kind wisdom to help us on our path. Thank you.

Excellent teaching. There is a depth of wisdom about Buddhism taught in a way that one can learn to experience directly and make part of one's life.

I loved this. This teaching was light and yet impacting. Thank you for helping me remove that weight. 😉🙏🏻