MJ00 - 38 Blessings - Orientation (01 Of 39)

Orientation to a 39-episode series introducing the Theravada stairway of values and practices that lead sequentially towards enlightenment, based on the Mangala Sutta. This episode discusses introduces what is meant by spiritual knowledge and 'inner peace education' along with the background to the logic of the Mangala Sutta.

Transcript

Today I'd like to make a start on a series of talks entitled Enlightened Living.

It's based on one teaching in Buddhism given by the Buddha called the Mangalasutta and it consists of a sort of sequence of practices or teachings starting with the simple and leading to the more esoteric.

So anywhere you jump onto the staircase of virtues then it will lead you upwards.

We will gradually move through from the simple to the more challenging virtues.

But today is the orientation to the Mangalasutta so we are really talking about the principles behind spiritual knowledge.

You may be familiar with the idea that knowledge can change a person.

Generally it's what we'd expect from becoming educated is that if you are more educated through the knowledge that you get in your school or whatever then somehow you change your potential as a person to go out and seek success in life.

So we're used to this idea that knowledge can change a person.

But what we are talking about here is not just a person becoming more equipped to earn their living or a better salary.

We're talking about how they can transform their destiny to one that is brighter not just in a financial way but in terms of fulfillment on all levels.

So we're talking about spiritual knowledge.

I'm not saying that this subject is a stranger to the school curriculum although it is getting rarer.

If you can think back to your own school days you may remember something called values education or perhaps social moral spiritual and cultural development.

It's something that various countries place different amounts of emphasis upon and some countries are quite prescriptive especially if they have some sort of national religion.

Whereas in other countries like France and the United States they might back right away from the subject and delegate parents to teach what they want to their own children and the school doesn't have much of a part in that.

For the UK education policy is somewhere in the middle.

In any case they tend to change the name of the subject according to which way the political wind is blowing at the time.

Often it ends up as a part of religious education which has always been a ragbag for everything that doesn't fit in other subjects.

I've had an interest in religious education for some time and generally the curriculum is based on comparing different religions.

Sometimes they extract themes from different religions and see what's the same and what's different.

Usually more on what's the same because that treads on less toes.

But once I argued in the International Journal of Spirit Children's Spirituality that if a person doesn't have any part of that outlook which they feel they belong to then all the values just become relativism.

So everything is just like oh well it just depends on your point of view.

Unless you feel at home with some part of the values taught,

Unless you have some part of it that you can use as your own personal point of reference,

It cannot make any sense to that person.

You can study many religions but you need to have a point of reference for yourself for it to make any sense otherwise it's just like oh well that's just exotic multiculturalism.

For it to be meaningful you need to have some sense of belonging to something for it to really hit home and to make it of some use to you in your life.

So how do you get it to do that?

If you have a place where you feel you belong when learning about other or different points of view or moral philosophies or ethics you can gradually move from where you are to things that are gradually more unfamiliar to you and that's how you learn.

And with this scheme known as enlightened living it's almost like you're moving incrementally from things which are very basic which anyone can relate to,

To things which gradually move you in the direction of something more esoteric.

So spiritual knowledge does not set out to be secretive but it still would make no sense to you unless you're building upon some sort of foundation of understanding which you already have.

So in a way enlightened living continues where other sorts of studies of morality ethics and culture leave off.

The important thing is the sense of responsibility or belonging or investment to a certain extent in those values which are learned about.

So such spiritual knowledge is particularly important because whenever there are problems that occur because of people then generally it's because of people having some sort of blind spot in their sense of right and wrong.

I don't just mean like right or wrong professional practices but in terms of people cutting corners or people not doing the right thing but doing the easy thing instead.

It comes down to their sense of moral caliber or moral fiber and you could say that if a person is lacking in that department then it's because they haven't become properly educated about the importance of why it would have been better to do the right thing instead of the easy thing.

So you could blame any of these problems on their lack of ethical education.

If they're not getting it from school then where can they get it from?

These days I think schools maybe even hesitate to touch on these subjects in case the parents complain.

Especially when it comes to the vocational knowledge they get at school and how to apply that knowledge in an ethical way because any knowledge any power you have can be used for good or for harm.

Often there's not much clarity about where you would draw the line in those things.

So a lot is taught in school but not so much is said about how these can be applied to bring peace.

Worse still the higher one goes in education the narrower one's knowledge becomes and maybe the more disconnected you become from maybe the ethical implications of your specialism.

So this means that often the most terrible world events that you see on the news every night are perpetuated by people who are highly educated and usually their victims are the people who lack education.

So it's ironic that we each spend tens of thousands of hours learning in school and having the potential to learn really useful things but the things we get instead are things that only add to the problems of the world.

So some of the terminology which I'll talk about today since there are some terms that might be unfamiliar to you.

Firstly something known as inner peace education.

Secondly the path of progress,

Blessings,

The Mangala Sutta,

Enlightened living and last but not least the manual of peace.

So I think I better define these because otherwise you will probably think hey didn't he just mention that with a different word.

So inner peace education or IPE for short in the context of Buddhism is values education and it's intended to help students to know themselves better and to guide their own life towards fulfillment.

The term path of progress is a sort of campaign that was used in Thailand to integrate IPE into the school curriculum.

The word blessing is a direct translation of the word Mangala which doesn't mean to mangle things up it means it comes from the Pali scriptural language and it means a blessing.

Some people think a blessing must be an object or an action but as we look more closely at the Mangala Sutta we find that it can be anything that is the cause of prosperity or progress or happiness in life.

The blessings are supposed to bring about abundance,

Wisdom,

Virtues and progress not just in the present time but in your future as well.

The unique thing about this sort of approach to ethics is that unlike a sort of blame culture where the bad things happen and you just look for someone to blame it on this is completely the other way around in that if something comes into being then it predicts that the future is going to be brighter.

So by bringing these things into being it's like you are putting down a deposit on a brighter future.

This is the sort of logic of these blessings.

The Mangala Sutta is the source of the Buddhist scriptures where the knowledge of the blessings is contained.

If you look in the Theravada scriptures so Sri Lankan,

Thai or Burmese traditions of Buddhism then you can find it in the Kutipada or the Suttanipata but it's also found in a Tibetan scriptures called the Kangyur.

The format was in terms of 38 things which the Buddha referred to as blessings and he divided them up into 10 groupings which are almost like steps on a staircase.

Details of how to practice these 38 are enlarged or expanded or interpreted in different ways by different teachers in different traditions.

Enlightened Living is the name given to this lecture series and it's almost like a lifestyle informed by knowledge of the 38 blessings.

Sometimes they are called the blessings of life and the manual of peace is an English language textbook detailing how to practice those 38 blessings.

So I'm going to talk a little bit more about Inner Peace Education which is education and spiritual knowledge for peace.

It starts by imparting awareness to a person about the consequences of their own actions because every action whether good or bad has an impact not just on the person who does it but also on the people around them.

So if you are spiritually educated as So if you are spiritually educated as a person then you cannot at the same time be an irresponsible person.

It's not just about theoretical knowledge about actions.

The outcome of the learning would be that you would become a more responsible person as a result of that education.

So it advocates certain actions by a student and the education would be concerned with how different actions bring about different levels of peacefulness.

It's different to the approach of some religions where you'd expect to sign up to a package of maybe unchosen obligations.

Here Inner Peace Education is about giving people a way to work out for themselves the peacefulness or unpeacefulness of the consequences of different actions that they might choose.

So it's about giving people a way of reasoning rather than a set of prescriptions.

It's not a sort of dogma and this is why it's rather more difficult to make it into an educational system than simply saying ah memorize this and this you can do and that you can't.

It relies on lived experience more than belief or faith and it allows a person to determine their own approach to their spiritual knowledge in a way that can provide a firm foundation of peace for any other sort of knowledge that they might learn in terms of vocational knowledge.

Each person has a hand in their own education so you could say it's self-education and it's also applied.

It doesn't necessarily have to take place in the classroom.

It can be taught as part of life.

However in order to really get to grips with this sort of education it requires continuity,

Perseverance and quite a lot of goodwill.

Often these sort of qualities are eroded away in more materially focused education.

Often with a curriculum that is already full and they want to stuff it with yet more content and all the sort of stem subjects displace everything else.

This is what's happening in the world over especially in western societies and it's why even subjects like religious education are disappearing.

Meanwhile inner peace education has tried to help bridge the divisions that tend to come as a result of race or nationality or religious differences because they explore shared values.

Although it can originates from buddhist-led values which you can see from the pictures here in Thailand,

The things it talks about are basically human qualities.

The people who learn about it will tend to reason through their decisions instead of being temperamental and they tend to have more of a sense of responsibility coming out of their education towards themselves,

Towards their nearest and dearest and towards the economy,

Society and the environment.

So they have a clear understanding of themselves and a clear understanding of purpose in life.

The really ambitious aspect of IPE is that even the people who teach it need to have some sort of first-hand experience in understanding themselves in order to be able to teach it to others.

So they need to be able to exemplify it.

This is quite a big ask for teachers who are on board with it.

Nevertheless in Thailand which is where those pictures are from,

There have been about 20 million children or adults who have passed through this system.

It's known as the path of progress and it's been taking place in Thailand for about 40 years now.

It's based on these 38 blessings and is taught on different levels right the way from kindergarten up through colleges even to police colleges and military colleges.

They can all choose to participate.

In part participants are motivated by a chance to receive national and international recognition.

So where can we learn about these sort of things?

I've been involved with a book which brings together all these 38 blessings with an extended explanation in English and they are based on 80 that is eight zero hours of teaching by our vice abbot in Thailand where they were known as Mungkhonjeevit.

They were taught in about the 1970s mostly to students.

The nice thing about his teaching was that it gave a lot of examples many derived from the scriptures.

So the Buddhist scriptures are just like a huge bookcase of books.

If you've ever seen the scriptures they're not just a book they're a whole bookcase of the books.

The problem with the size of the scriptures is that you don't know where to start.

But if you've got a sort of structure like these 38 blessings which you know are in order of difficulty and you've got examples to go with each of these then you can start simple and you've got all the examples laid out for you which makes the scriptures much more accessible and helps the reader get to the point about practice in a way that can be related to real life.

Second thing which I used when I was compiling these books was the shorter version which is used by the school children which is much more abbreviated.

It doesn't have any examples but it's much more structured.

From the combination of these sources I started to teach in western countries.

But it turned out that there are a few ideas which it is quite hard for westerners to get their heads around.

There's a challenge to understand Thai reasoning on certain sorts of ethics.

Some things which Thai people might understand in just a sentence of explanation might take much more explanation to make sense at all to a westerner.

Some of the problematic subjects for westerners including things like respect and gratitude and things like not drinking alcohol which most westerners found unnecessarily strict or at least austere.

So this sort of subject needed a lot of extra explanation.

It's not that you can just take a Thai ethics book or a set of lectures and translate them to a different language.

You have to basically reinterpret and re-explain the whole thing for it to make any sense at all in a new culture.

A culture where people don't have that foundation of basic knowledge.

A lot of the Thai explanations are quite rhetorical such as oh well everyone knows this and you should do it too which is not that convincing for a westerner.

And often they rely quite a lot on a line of reasoning that goes if you do this then you will go to heaven which is fair enough but again it doesn't work very well in a western context.

So I had to reverse engineer a lot of the explanations and what I've done in many places is to talk instead about the flip side of what happens when a certain virtue is neglected in any particular society and the damage that comes because of that.

So it's like re-explaining the whole thing although the conclusion may be the same but how you reach the conclusion might be very different in a western context.

Also I had to go back and look at quite a lot of the scriptural references because one thing our organization often gets accused of is making it up as we go along without any scriptural references.

So to avoid criticism that we have deviated from the traditional teachings what I've tried to do is to show that actually all the things discussed are in the scriptures already it's just that they might not be particularly well known because a lot of western buddhist teachers tend to focus on rather different aspects of the scriptures maybe not such practical ones.

Also I've replaced some of the illustrative examples with western ones where possible and where the moral of the story is clearer.

So copies of these books should be available in your meditation center libraries or your favorite booksellers if you're interested in a companion textbook.

If you miss out on any particular episode of the 38 blessings then you can go and read up on it from those books for yourself.

In recent years it's been admitted from the Vaisabhad Venerable Dattachivoh,

The monk who originally taught the 38 blessings in Thai,

That where people don't get these 38 blessings they need to backtrack and first master a set of teachings called the five forms of universal goodness namely cleanliness,

Orderliness,

Politeness,

Punctuality,

And meditating.

If you don't understand the 38 blessings then you should backtrack yourself and make sure that you are clean and orderly and on time and polite and meditate otherwise the rest won't make sense to you.

So it's like there's a foundation course of things to train yourselves in before you even get to these 38 blessings.

Only if you have the five forms of universal goodness as your habits will the 38 blessings make sense.

So in Thailand how has this inner peace education been helpful?

It has helped schools quite a lot to inspire their students to obtain an ethical perspective on their vocational studies.

I'll give a couple of examples briefly.

There's an example of an elementary school,

So a primary school if you're in the UK,

Where students adapted the 38 blessings to other aspects of their curriculum.

They work together by having assemblies on themes from the 38 blessings and often the students were so motivated by the things they learned about the 38 blessings that they broke out into little groups to evaluate themselves and see how they could improve themselves on each of the 38 blessings.

So these initiatives came from the students themselves.

Even the little kids were interested but they couldn't manage the assemblies so they did it with the help of their homeroom teacher.

Some of the kids learning about the 38 blessings were quite good academically and there was even a boy called Prajna who won a medal in one of those mathematics olympiads.

He won an international medal but he said that what was more important to him was knowing how to apply what he had learned in an ethical way so that organizers thought it was a good sign that they were on the right track,

That kids weren't just interested in academic knowledge to the expense of all other things,

They were also generally interested in the ethical side to their knowledge.

In a secondary school it was the same sort of thing but it was the teachers who got quite interested.

Because they had to know what they were talking about first before they could teach it to their kids,

Especially secondary school kids,

And a lot of them got big benefits out of this as well.

A really dramatic story was one of those secondary school kids who got himself in trouble,

A guy called Visarut Gomgaew and he was at school in Nakhon Pathom.

When he was young he was brought up by his mother and he had a good relationship with her.

His mother always told him to be a good person but at a certain point in his secondary education he started getting trouble and he had a falling out with his teacher and he dropped out of secondary school.

Instead of going home and helping his mother he started to go out every night and eventually he was introduced to drugs.

I don't know what sort of drugs it was in pill form he said but he got addicted to these and he ended up selling them in order to support his own habit at which point he got caught by the police.

He was remanded in juvenile detention but his mother bailed him out.

At the time he asked his mother why did you do this for me and his mother had tears in her eyes and she didn't say too much but what she did say was whatever you do I have to forgive you,

I have to help you,

I am not going to give up on you.

That conversation made him realize not just how he was ruining his own life but he was ruining his mother's life as well.

So part of the conditions for his probation was that he had to go back to school but even though he went back to school he still had these two voices in his head the whole time.

One of them is saying you should do the right thing,

The other one's saying that you shouldn't miss the opportunity to be selling drugs to your friends.

So it was like two voices in his head.

He's on the point of relapsing and then his teacher came along with a book on 38 blessings asking him do you want to join in with this quiz contest for the 38 blessings.

So reluctantly he started revising for the competition and he realized that the book wasn't merely academic knowledge but it was actually speaking straight to the better voice inside himself.

He found himself fascinated by this to the point that it pulled him back from the edge of relapse and he started to see his mother's devotion to him in a different light.

He started to be more confident in the good things he did at school and he started to be accepted back into the community of fellow students without that suspicion anymore to the point that he started to be able to inspire fellow students to learn about this sort of knowledge.

So he said that was really the turning point in his own recovery to allow him to go back to leading a successful and a normal life again just by having that knowledge.

So that was a dramatic example of how knowledge can change a person's life.

So without going into too much detail I would just say that it was a few years ago when some of these teachings received more interest in English probably going back to about 2005 or so.

They also organized a world peace ethics contest in English.

You will see some of the trophies won by local people with expert knowledge of the 38 blessings around your local meditation center.

Sadly after 2005 the powers that be moved on to other books like the Warm-Hearted Family because they thought that once they'd done one book they could start having a different book every year.

Nonetheless the world peace ethics contest continues to enjoy popularity with students who speak English in places like Sri Lanka,

Bangladesh,

Nepal and Mongolia.

So that has been a final example of the good things that has come out of having some of these 38 blessings materials available in English.

So to continue with our orientation to enlightened living the 38 blessings is derived from a set of trainings in everyday life which people can master alongside their meditation in a way that will help their meditation to become more successful.

The 38 blessings cover every aspect of life so having looked at inner peace education where these 38 blessings have been incorporated into a school curriculum for values education and taught alongside other more academic subjects in a way it's hoped that the young people will grow up with a sense of integrity and valuing ethics and having at the very least an interest in ethics.

Most of my introduction to IPE was based on experiences from Thailand but what I'd like to continue with now are some of the principles behind these 38 blessings and why they are worthy of our attention even outside Thailand in the western world.

So really we're talking about something known as spiritual knowledge and to play the devil's advocate at least for a few minutes I would like to say that it probably will be much more convenient just to trust the judgment of the majority of educational ministries around the world who are pretty sure that academic or material knowledge alone is plenty for students to learn about and certainly sufficient for them to be able to make their way in the world successfully.

There are many experts who think that students and pupils would be better spending their time focusing on vocational subjects because vocational knowledge will bring them a higher salary and if they have a higher salary then they will surely be guaranteed to have happiness in life and in the happy eventuality that a full stomach and a place to sleep turns out to be enough to keep a human happy then we won't need to waste our time learning about any sort of spiritual knowledge whatsoever.

Convinced?

Not really.

Well even if we were to overlook the many threats to society in various forms created by money and the unethical application of the knowledge that our poor children learn in schools it's quite hard to escape the conclusion that conventional education has let us down in certain important respects and probably the reason that you're still listening is because you're not entirely convinced by materialist arguments.

There's an increasing number of people who recognize that inside every person there is something deeper which is not just about earning a living it's searching for answers to the deeper questions in life.

Some might call them the eternal questions a quest for purpose and meaning from life and the world around us.

If supporting yourself financially were all there was to life then how come so many lottery winners have lives that end in misery or tragedy?

You can look up all the examples on the internet if you're interested.

Winning the lottery doesn't ensure happiness in life so it's an inconvenient truth but wealth can only ensure physical comfort and money cannot buy the means to nourish and nurture our mind.

Even if you have a degree in philosophy then it can't protect you against that annoying feeling of existential angst in the mind.

In the ideal world our system of education would provide us with the answers we need for the deeper questions inside us and maybe that's what that inner peace education project in Thailand was trying to achieve.

But generally speaking secular education doesn't seem to fill this vacuum which people have in their lives and maybe even if we were to try it would fail because part of that quest is our motivation to look for ourselves to thirst for our own education and to acquire that knowledge for ourselves.

We're forced to look to spiritual knowledge to get that sort of transformative power to upgrade our own sense of meaning for the future of our own lives.

It's possible that educators are afraid to delve deeper into spiritual knowledge because they suspect it will open the door to lots of gullible or uncritical belief systems that are superstitious nonsense.

When such a variety of things can affect our spiritual progress it might be people,

It might be objects,

It might be attitudes or situations or experiences.

Who's to be the judge of which are the reliable ones and which are not?

Because for most phenomena of a spiritual nature their worth or their uselessness is just a matter of opinion.

How can you get beyond hearsay or opinions and be sure that the spiritual knowledge that you've chosen will have an universally uplifting effect on people's lives?

The dilemma is comparable to maybe a more contemporary phenomenon of branding and I don't mean branding cattle.

I mean trademarks and that sort of thing where brands are constantly vying to become universally acceptable as status symbols.

So to give an example if you've got a Mercedes or you've got Adidas sneakers or trainers as they call them in the UK here then they are very sought after brands or at least they used to be.

In Asia if your family can save up to splash out on their first bends then they feel that they have somehow arrived in polite society.

It's true these days that desirability may have shifted slightly.

I think the top 10 these days includes Ferrari and Apple more because surprise surprise brands going in out of fashion.

So we shouldn't be surprised by this because even heroes go in and out of fashion these days as you've seen from the tearing down of statues in various public places recently.

Incredible as it may seem people want to spend their hard-earned money on things that they can associate themselves with because they think it improves their own worth to be seen wearing or using those brands.

This only makes sense if that brand or whatever has some sort of enduring or unchanging perception of quality about it.

Imagine people who get themselves tattooed with a particular design have to think pretty carefully about why they want to get it tattooed on them because presumably they think it's going to make their life better somehow because once you've got it then you're stuck with it right?

So in that person's mind they are thinking through what shall I get as my tattoo that is going to make me happier afterwards and not to be ridiculed by my friends or earn me a guest appearance on Tattoo We Do.

Even in the present day people still think pretty hard about these sorts of issues presumably quite carefully but in the old days they might have framed the question more as how can I overcome anything that's going to cause me bad luck in life.

If we take a long view though we find that from age to age it's pretty hard to find anything whether it's brand or heroes or tattoos that don't go out of fashion.

In times gone by the ancients realized the changeability in the things that they valued and they would call them not brands but they would call them blessings.

They would be things that they like to have or to associate themselves with as a way of highlighting their own worth or somehow attracting progress into their lives.

These sort of things in the slide anyway are probably what we would recognize more as what we'd understand by a blessing you know lucky horseshoes or 40 clovers.

In these days we might regard these things with a pinch of salt but in olden times the role of such charms was much more significant.

Nowadays of course we are much more sophisticated.

Systems of spiritual knowledge since ancient times would have been attempts to model the values of the world in a way that's more substantial than those lucky charms and to try to get deeper to what might be unchangingly lucky or a blessing in a person's life.

Things that are reliable and things that don't differ from one person to the next.

There's a Buddhist story I'd like to tell today of how this teaching came into being these 38 blessings or portents of a person's life going in a better direction.

They're interesting because they originated about 2500 years ago in India where there was a group of people asking these sorts of questions and they were wondering whether there was anything enduring behind the fashions.

Were there blessings that transcended fashion that could allow a person to live a life without obstacles?

Suppose you want to have wealth or honor or praise or happiness.

How would you ensure that you attracted these qualities into your life?

In the ensuing debate everyone had a different point of view but to generalize there were three groups of debaters and the first group thought that the thing to make one's life a blessing was to see something that was a pleasing.

So if you got a glimpse of that thing then it's going to turn your life around into something better.

The second group believed it was hearing something maybe a particular sacred word or on the breeze or a particular piece of music.

If you heard it and it was pleasing then that was the thing to turn your life around for the better.

There was a third group that looked a little bit deeper and they thought it wasn't the external perceptions that mattered it was the effect it had on your mind.

So it could be something you saw it could be something you heard but if it had a pleasing effect on your mind then that was the thing that made it a blessing.

So they had a long discussion and they couldn't come to a conclusion until eventually the whole problem was referred to the Buddha.

So this is a picture of them referring the question to the Buddha because obviously one person's pleasing music at a late night party might not be considered a blessing by the neighbors.

The answer the Buddha gave for what is enduring in the sort of thing that will predict or attract fortune and blessing into a person's life was something known as the Mangala Sutta,

The discourse on blessings and he talked about not one or two things but in fact a total of 38 which is divided into 10 levels.

We need to explain how knowledge or more precisely the habits inspired by that knowledge can change a person's life for the better because we are not into superstitions or magical thinking here.

We can compare the way things might work in a person's life to change or transform what they are or what they experience to be rather like a working computer which has both software and hardware.

The hardware of a computer is the wiring and the circuitry while the software is the code that you install on the computer.

Although the hardware is generally neutral what makes the difference between a beneficial or a harmful computer would be the sort of software installed on it.

If you install productivity software then the computer can be used for something useful.

If we install violent games or viruses or malware on the computer then it becomes a threat to anything that's connected to.

So the worth of the computer depends more on the software than on the hardware.

Even if you look at that drinking glass it's also neutral.

What makes a difference between a beneficial cup of something and something that is scary is the sort of drink that you put in it.

So if you pour nourishing milk or something in the glass then it will be welcomed by everybody.

However if it's poison in the glass then immediately it's eyed with suspicion.

So the worth of even a drinking glass depends on the content not on the hardware.

In the same way our human body has two important parts to it.

The part we can see,

The physical part,

The body,

And the other part which we can't see which we are working with when we are trying to meditate which is known as the mind or you might think of it as the awareness or the attention.

Everything else whether it's the blood,

The bones,

The muscles,

Even our brain is part of the physical aspect of ourselves.

Meanwhile the mind means the knowledge and the attitudes that constitute our awareness and it's almost like the ghost in the machine.

So although the physical part of ourselves may look different from person to person but really the physical component is neutral.

The real difference between people especially when it comes to predicting how their life is going to go concerns the software which means what's in the mind especially the sort of habits generated by what is in their mind.

So unfortunately the software of human beings doesn't come factory pre-installed.

Well we come into this world without a great deal of software and how we get that knowledge or the content of our mind well that's what we spend our early years doing.

We need to learn as much as we can to fill our gaps in our knowledge.

So we can navigate life successfully and our subsequent pathway through life depends on the sort of knowledge that we pick up.

It's not just the more the better it depends on the sort of knowledge as well.

Sometimes we might fill ourselves up with a lot of positive outlook on life which generally will predict a better future for ourselves.

However if we fill ourselves up with a lot of negativity especially the sort of things that you would categorize as a lies to yourself or lies to your soul then that negativity might end up being harmful not only to yourself but to others around you as well.

So there are values in the knowledge not just any knowledge will do.

So we learn from the things around us but we learn especially from the people around us and the sort of knowledge that is exemplified by those people who are close to us.

The sort of knowledge which is described as positive which would predict a good future for us are contained in the 38 blessings I'm trying to describe.

There are 10 levels to the 38 blessings but the first set of blessings concerns the acquisition of what's known as discretion which means the ability to tell the difference between something beneficial and something harmful because even if someone is knowledgeable but if their discretion is faulty then they are likely to get themselves in some sort of trouble.

If they get in there with the wrong sort of people then that will be the sort of habits and knowledge that will brush off on them.

So in this first group at the bottom of the screen there turning our back on old bad habits is primarily to do with the sort of people we choose to associate with or that we have as our friends because that will be the source of most of our knowledge and assumptions about the world.

So we need to be careful about the sort of people who are close to us or at least what we let brush off on us from those sorts of people.

The second group concerns the consolidation of the goodness in our own habits and outlook on the world especially recognizing the good habits we already have in ourselves and establishing a proper aim in life.

A third group of blessings moving up to the third level here is to do with how we can make a contribution to society by our skillfulness.

So being able to stand on our own two feet in terms of earning our living and avoiding becoming a burden on others in society.

The fourth level deals with what after we are able to help ourselves stand on our own two feet we can do to help other people close to us for whom we are responsible whether it be our family or our parents and divide our time skillfully between work life and home life.

The fifth level and it says there becoming a pillar of society is to do with helping beyond our own home and beyond our own family to become more of a person who gives something back to society which becomes possible once you've got your own life in order.

Beyond that we start to come to level six up to ten which had to do with working with the mind directly but the logic of these 38 blessings is that if you haven't got your own life in order yet it's very hard to work constructively with the mind because there's going to be so much turmoil in there.

So how does this system measure up to other ethical systems?

There are a lot of advantages that come from these 38 blessings in terms of the logic of the ethics which they use but I picked out 10 things which commend it as a system to guide us when we are thinking about things in an ethical way.

Different systems of spiritual knowledge in the world differ in their degree of comprehensiveness.

Some systems may fall short and deviate from peacefulness by fomenting attitudes that are no longer suitable for an age of globalization and tolerance.

Some systems lead their practitioner to shut themselves away from the world and to ignore social problems.

Some systems confine themselves to their own culture or language.

By contrast the 38 blessings of life we find an ethical system fulfilling the needs of spiritual knowledge in 10 different ways.

It is progressive and sequential,

Self-catalyzing,

Exhaustive,

Holistic,

Multi-level,

Non-discriminatory,

Multifactorial,

Facilitates practical outlook,

Involves transcendental values and highlights opposites.

38 blessings are said to be progressive and sequential because they are arranged according to the degree of difficulty in practice.

The easier ones come before the harder ones.

The sequence of blessings begins with outward practices like social graces but gradually leads to the more inward and subtle ones.

Following these sets of virtues gives one an impression of climbing up a flight of stairs leading to self-mastery.

If you don't associate with miscreants then you enhance your chances of associating with the wise.

The first blessing creates the conditions that lead to the second one.

At the same time you build on your respect of those who deserve it.

It all starts with the first blessing.

While you are working to develop the first blessing it is already doing the groundwork for the second and third blessings.

Therefore it's progressive.

One blessing leads progressively to the next.

By doing the first blessing you are committing yourself to many subsequent blessings.

So by practicing any one blessing it will eventually lead to practicing all of the blessings.

And by doing one you prepare for the next.

They are interrelated.

The logic is quite beautiful.

It leads you onward step by step.

It allows you to improve socially and spiritually.

It is like a self-catalyzing process in chemistry or a positive feedback loop in physics.

Self-mastery by the 38 blessings is a kind of upward spiral where you move towards nirvana which is the highest goal in Buddhist spiritual cultivation.

Starting from the simplest blessings and gradually perfecting yourself.

Second feature of the 38 blessings is that they are self-catalyzing.

When one kind of blessing arises or is practiced it will support other kinds of virtues to manifest themselves.

And the manifestation of any one blessing will lead to the development of the next higher blessing in the sequence.

The third feature of the blessings is that they are exhaustive.

All the other decision making strategies I have discussed in previous sessions can easily be accommodated within the 38 I mentioned here.

The fourth feature of the 38 blessings is that they are holistic.

Blessings assume the presence of a deeper unseen network of cause and effects which interact together in cycles of positive feedback for the ethical development of society.

Blessings can be used as a non-subjective social ethical checklist that cuts through egotism that might otherwise lead to superficial social changes such as an individual's prosperity for example being misunderstood as a sign of social development.

Because by this philosophy social development that is unethical is a contradiction in terms.

Also provides a holistic mirror to view oneself and one's own personality as one is developing.

The fifth feature of the 38 blessings is that they are multi-level.

38 blessings cover the full spectrum of human relations from the interpersonal through the family occupation and communal levels to the social.

They offer a holistic perspective of a world governed by interrelating conditions.

The sixth feature of the 38 blessings is that they are non-discriminatory.

The philosophy makes no distinction between men and women,

Lay practice and monastic practice.

The set of virtues is not restricted to a particular sort of person or society but they can be treated as a common goal that they are shared in a particular community or even by the whole of mankind.

The seventh feature is that the 38 blessings are multifactorial.

The 38 blessings are a means and model of ethics.

The ethics of the blessings escapes the rigid linear dimension of means versus ends in favor of a multifactorial causality model.

The weakness of consideration in terms of means and ends is seen when trying to establish definitions in a complex multifactorial situation.

Since problems found in society are almost always the vicious circles that make application of ethics difficult.

The blessings are both means and ends.

Since putting any one of the 38 blessings into action will contribute towards social development while at the same time indicating social progress.

Therefore blessings also help to avoid the dilemma of justifying unwholesome means by wholesome ends.

The eighth feature of the 38 blessings is that they facilitate practical outlook.

The practice of blessings effectively reverses positive feedback loops of decay through the setting in motion of positive feedback loops of development.

Firstly to check the downward spiral and secondly to turn the spiral upwards.

The blessings encourage personal commitment instead of passing the buck.

The ninth feature of 38 blessings is that they deal with transcendental values.

The 38 blessings of life do not focus merely on the values of action based on moral principles or intention for the actions but rather on the modes of relationships in society,

Environment,

Family relations,

Education,

Communication and spirituality.

Yet the scope of the application of the blessings can even expand to cover the whole of the human race with all lives sharing their part in a single commonwealth of ethics the global community.

The tenth final feature of the 38 blessings is that they highlight opposites.

By their nature blessings reveal their flip side.

The bad omens or social curses which are the sign that something bad is about to happen.

Where there is no development then there must be decay.

To this end the opposites of the 38 blessings signal the presence of deeper rooted possibly invisible social problems.

Comparable example in science might be the thermodynamic model of loss of enthalpy through the dissipation of heat.

These are the characteristics of 38 blessings of life.

In the sessions that follow each of the 38 blessings of life will be explained in turn.

The ideal way to practice the 38 blessings in the short term is maybe that you need to work with do's and don'ts to prevent you slipping into habits that are contrary to the blessings.

So that would be why you have things like rules and precepts to sort of help you get familiar with things which you need to avoid so you don't need to use too much reasoning.

Later on as you become more familiar with the principles behind the do's and don'ts you start to educate yourself to see the benefits of aligning yourself with the blessings rather than blindly following rules.

Later still you start to make them into your habits.

You start to internalize them more and eventually you'll be able to network to those around you with the same sort of logic as well.

That's ideally how we should practice the 38 blessings.

So this session I've introduced the logic of the 38 blessings to you.

For my next session we'll move on to the first blessing on the topic of not associating with what have rather euphemistically been called fools.

Hopefully as a result of today's session you will be inspired to develop spiritual knowledge in yourself through the study of the 38 blessings.

So for today this is me,

Brad Nicholas,

Thay Nessaro,

Signing off for this session.

So long folks and stay safe.