The Two Daggers Of Life

I want to talk about.

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A parable.

It's called the Parable of the Two Daggers.

It's from the Buddhist tradition.

I think it's just such a spot on teaching.

A way of looking at our life and looking at what happens to us and how we suffer psychologically.

So the first dagger.

Is representing life happening to us.

So unfortunate things.

So we may get criticized.

Our car may get scratched.

We get ill,

We lose a loved one.

Have a headache,

Whatever.

It may be something as simple as getting caught in lots of red lights.

Things we don't like,

Things we don't want.

Okay.

We can't do anything about a lot of those.

They just happen.

Life just happens.

It doesn't stop happening,

Does it?

Until it does.

And yeah,

Hopefully be a why for all of us.

But there you go.

What happens there is.

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An unfortunate event has happened.

We can't do much about the unfortunate event.

It happened.

We have a headache.

We got criticised.

What we can do is we can.

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Call that the pain of life.

The first dog is the pain of life.

What happens is we move from.

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The actuality of life,

What's actually happening,

Which we're calling an unfortunate event.

And what we do,

We move to the second dagger,

Which is the mind's interpretation.

It's the story.

Around.

The first dagger.

Things like,

Why me?

How long is this going to last?

This is the third time in a month I've had a headache.

Now,

That doesn't mean to say we don't go to the doctors and get it seen to.

That's a natural part of a healthy,

Intelligent,

Compassionate response.

It just,

Yeah,

I'll go to the doctors.

I got it checked out.

I'm not really talking about that because that will arise quite naturally.

But also fear can get in the way.

But I don't want to go into that too much right now.

But that second dagger is,

In Buddhism,

We call it papancha,

All that unnecessary catastrophizing around the first one.

Might be blaming others.

Let's just look at criticism.

So we get criticised.

The boss criticises you or the neighbour criticises you.

What do we do?

We either want to blame them.

How we feel and we may need to say something or do something but off we go blaming them who do they think they are blah blah blah blah blah blah or maybe they're right maybe you know they've got a point maybe I am useless or a bad person or yeah yeah and off we go we take it personally that's the problem where if we present,

Just staying with that first dagger,

As a criticism.

If we're present,

We know how to respond.

It might be with.

.

.

Oh,

Well,

I disagree with that.

I think,

What about X,

Y,

Z and how we respond depends on the situation and depends on us.

But it's not taken so personally.

It needs a response.

The response might be initially to walk away,

To get that space.

Okay But a really useful thing to do is to notice when you're using the second dagger.

Illness is another good one.

Oh my goodness.

What's going to happen?

This is.

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And off we go into the future,

See.

We get drunk on future.

Catastrophizing.

So we have something,

We have a headache or we have a.

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Some ailment.

But the mind interprets it.

That's what mind does.

It labels it and off we go.

The bar I've talked about previously,

The thought bar.

Intoxicating ourselves with the future What's your gonna be like?

How bad you gonna get?

Instead of just going to the doctor's.

And it might be bad news.

Well,

That's where the practice is.

Practice before we get the big bad news.

And we will all be more capable of being present and practicing and being more at peace with whatever comes along.

So notice during the day just how we go into these.

Spins and see what needs to happen.

Let's take the criticism again.

What does action need to happen?

Well,

There's a criticism and there's a feeling of hurt.

Maybe anger covering up the hurt.

What do we need to do?

We need to feel that hurt.

But when we blame other people,

Or even blame ourselves,

It stops us feeling the hurt.

The hurt needs to be just felt,

Cleanly,

Without the story.

It's the stories that doze in,

Guys.

That's what it is.

It's the stories.

It's the.

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The Mind's Interpretation of what's going on.

So we just take our attention to that feeling of hurt.

And just.

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Feel it.

Just.

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What's it feel like?

Feels tearful,

Nervous Vulnerable Just feel it for a few minutes.

And that's what it wants,

That's what it needs.

It's calling out for us to do that.

That's all we need to do And then we'll be in a.

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In a position we have more clarity about how to respond to the criticism.

We're not clouded by all the emotion,

Blaming emotion.

So I hope that's.

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I hope that's helped.

I hope that's given us some idea of what to look for in daily life.

Look for it.

Look for the papancha.

It's a great word.

You can really sort of spit it out.

Papancha.

You won't forget that.

And notice the catastrophizing.

The getting drunk on future or past?

See we get intoxicated with our spins.

They're all personal dramas.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.