2563.01.08 Real World - Inner World by Ajahn Jayasaro

[Music] so um one of the one of the phrases that we hear a lot is the real world and it often seems that the people who refer to the real world most often and with most confidence are people who don't really have much idea what they are talking about or what that phrase might mean so we find that people who have no real inner world have no interest in investigating their mind and are therefore restricted to a narrow band of experience um tend to be convinced that that is the real world so in my work in education one of the um problems or obstacles that arose from the beginning was many parents would say well it saw very well giving children a spiritual dimension to their life it'll make them um good people and may be peaceful adults but would it really equip them for life in the real world so sometimes i would ask parents what do you think the real world is and they would often refer to things like cutthroat competition and this is hard truths of living in the world today but i think that we only ever are able to to experience um you know a certain slice of life in society and the idea that there is just one thing called society and it is our duty to or it's wisest to adapt to it and try to excel in it it's not a very sound one let's say there are many different societies nestling within the larger society and that we have a choice in which of these societies to associate with but so much of our understanding of the world is based upon concepts and conventions and slogans and pre-packaged ideas without any real fresh engagement with what it really means to be a human being in the present moment or the 21st century if you will and as buddhists we we feel the need to expand our understanding to include the inner world and the and the mind is as the buddha said the source the forerunner of all things so how can we really understand the world we live in how can we be sure what is the real world without coming face to face with its source the mind so the mind is is um a problem in modern science that with all the huge sums of money that have been spent on neuroscience and research into the brain that there is still complete blank as to what consciousness is there are certain theories but um they're more like religious beliefs um they're not based upon um any uh clear data so for instance if you were to ask scientists if if the mind is merely the byproduct of chemicals and the nature of the brain then in the evolution of life from the time of the big bang until now at what point did consciousness arise and how did it arise what is the mechanism by which chemicals can give rise to consciousness they have no answer to this so means there's a big hole in the whole scientific and so-called rational view of the world scientific theories where do they come from so we can enhance our senses with technology enhance our vision so that we can explore other solar systems we can enhance our vision so that we can penetrate to the atomic and subatomic level we can enhance our hearing we can enhance our sense of smell and so on and we can thereby increase data to an incredible amount but in the analysis of data in the creation of hypothesis and laws and so on and so forth that's not there in the data that's something that's created by the mind so i think it's from my point of view the the scientific viewpoint is of course um you know one of the best things that ever happened to the human race and the advantages and the benefits of it are enormous but it's not the complete path to understanding it's it's a restricted path it's it's probably taking on too much because our life begins and ends with the subjective and science at least as we understand science these days doesn't have much to say about the subjective but it's a big step from saying that science can't really deal with the subjective to saying that therefore the subjective can be put to one side and is um is unnecessary to a complete understanding of life so as buddhists or buddhist scientists if you will buddhist explorers then we feel that a true understanding of life and understanding what this mean this word the real uh the real world and what that might mean uh entails an understanding of the subjective and a direct experience of the inner world and that without that direct experience of the inner world we're floundering and we're a sustainable world in which we can flourish for a lifetime to come so meditation is is a key feature of this inner exploration and it is i think important every now and again just to stop and ask yourself what what do you think meditation is what's meditation for why why do we meditate because um the resistance that we have sometimes to meditation um the fact that we do periods of enthusiasm and then periods of of um unenthusiasm um is based upon i think like a an unclear and view of its the role that it should place in our lives and a lack of understanding of the benefits of meditation so the the the causes kind of misunderstanding is it's it's a kind of magic pill that um you meditate and all your troubles will go away um that's certainly not the case um necessarily and in in um in case of indeed with people with certain mental problems uh meditation can make things worse if in a meditation center or a monastery someone develops some uh psychotic um symptoms similar go a bit strange you don't tell them to meditate more you tell them to stop meditating and you get them out in the garden do some gardening or go to the kitchen and do some cooking and do something for other people some meditation in the buddhist sense to to really um be part of the eightfold path and lead to liberation to be founded on on right view right right understanding and when when people meditate in order to get something whether it's relaxation or peace or some people want to get psychic powers and and so on then they've set themselves up on the wrong track and meditation can actually be harmful to them rather than beneficial ajahn chah would constantly remind us that we're not meditating in order to get anything um it's in order to let go of things when i was a young monk we had this very confident and aggressive i would say christian american christian missionary they would sneak to she said and she said just take jesus into your heart and i said i've got more than enough in my heart already i'm trying to um let go of the stuff that's in there i don't think anymore um would really do me any good at all so um i i think this is what ajahn chah was was encouraging for us to look what actually is going on in heart so it's it's an exploration of the heart so there's no true peace without understanding we can't just bypass hindrances there's not some special technique if you find your technique your teacher your technique then you'd then your meditation will just sort of take off and you'll have no more problems because in the because there is of course no uh it's not a different mind that you encounter in meditation than the mind which um is with you in every moment of day in the daily life that is to say if you have some abiding defilements which manifest in your in your daily life then they will manifest in one form or another in your meditation and by looking at the mind in meditation you get some sense of what's going on in your daily life but you also have to be working on these things in your daily life um to um to really have the uh the power to be able to see them and work with them in meditation so this is kind of two-way process but some things are so deep seated that they really do take a long time and um so often meditators are impatient their time scales are wildly unrealistic if you've been accumulating defilements for a few trillion lifetimes you know a morning and evening sitting for a year or two is probably not going to be sufficient to alleviate that i'm not saying you need another trillion or trillion trillion lifetimes of meditation but it does take time in the in the time of the buddha then so many of those who listen to dhammatore as you know became enlightened the very least realized stream entry but there are a couple of points to reflect on here one is that to have been born at that time and that place they must have created just an incredible amount of barami and a spiritual maturity again a simile that ajahn chah once gave a means of a balloon this is this big balloon and he said well how can just a tiny little pin pop such a big balloon and similarly the the the mind of the sauerkraut the time of the butter it's like these these fully inflated balloons and the chichi of the buddha just like this tiny pinprick and the ignorance of the mind just pop like that but we're far away from those times and very few people these days one in millions even in buddhist countries has that kind of spiritual maturity it's it's hard work but if we can find some joy in the work itself in in treading the past and not be constantly looking ahead and when am i it's like the child in the car mommy mommy am i there yet am i there yet how much farther to go why are we why does it take so long and you know the father looks at the we've only gone about 10 kilometers you know it's um and we're like the child and and so there is a good analogy here of the kind of attitude to to to practice that is um most skillful and that is of swimming so the the the images of an island in the middle of a big lake and meditators are like um people swimming towards this island so the foolish swimmers constantly looking up how much further to the island how much further to the island so the english idiom like a watched pot never boils or watched kettle never boils so you know how the more you you keep looking ahead or as the child are we there yet to be there yet um you seem to go slower um just because of that craving to get there but that's not the only thing because by in the air if the image of the swimmer the swimmer lifting his head out to look at the island affects his swimming stroke and actually does make him swim more slowly so the wise swimmer set sight for the for the island and then his or her emphasis is on the quality of the stroke and then every now and again it will just lift his head up just to check am i still in line with the island and then go back to effort on the quality of the stroke and in our practice this is the wise attitude that we put effort into the quality of our our practice learning to motivate ourselves in such a way that our inspiration is not conditioned by the results of each sitting that we have need a bigger picture the again in in referring to analogy with with education and raising children in the old days in thailand and in india of course parents would have many children these days um have very few children in thailand maybe one two children and so the parents love and interest and fears and anxieties are all focused just on one one human being one child and so every little bump in their past of life is like a really big crisis for the parents and and then it's amplified by social media and talking with other worried parents so my advice to these parents is you step back a bit now it's like a river if you're traveling by car a river can seem to be winding this way i'm winding that way and you're so close to it you're aware of every little meander in the river but if you go up in a plane and you're flying over that river you can see it's more or less straight if you're very close to it then the wiggles and the meanders seem significant you stand back a bit and don't seem very significant at all and in spiritual life um this every single meditation you know is was it a good meditation was it a bad meditation i feel so low today as really bad meditation or i really feel good to have a good meditation this is like the parent that's overly concerned with the single son or single daughter so it's it's not that we're not um assessing and learning from our experience in meditation that is definitely part of it reviewing experience and learning from it but it's better to to um also look in terms of things of a year six months or a year to see patterns and trends um developing um if you're uh tend to be someone who likes to doubt a lot then that too close analysis um can increase the doubt a lot is this really the right technique for me am i really doing the right thing should i perhaps try something else that's not that that's not an illegitimate question it's a reasonable question but it's not a reasonable question to be answered as asking yourself every day you know give yourself a reasonable period of time a few months and then ask the question so right view um like i would rather um someone once came to see me in the monasteries rather rather rude person it's not really you get rude people come to monasteries in thailand i must say this person was rather kind of rude and and he said so so what do you get from meditation what's the point of it what'd you get from it and i said well what do you get from going to the toilet i said it's not you don't go to the toilet to get something you but you feel a lot better afterwards you know after you've been in the toilet i said it's like you're learning as a again similar point with the missionary you're learning how to abandon the unwholesome that's the first um thing that you want to do it feels good you feel just how unnecessarily burdened we are um the buddha's famous simile of the poisoned arrow i mean life's already uncomfortable you're just having a body it's uncomfortable you know how long can you be comfortable in this body not very long at all the um i was i was reading i recommend a book um recently published called the body by bill bryson who's an excellent uh author and he wrote this book called the body and occupants guide and has some uh really uh wonderful passages and information in it he was talking about the spread of bugs and microbes and they hadn't expect i don't quite know understand the mechanism of this but they insert it into somebody's nose just you have to bear with me here like an artificial snot producer so this artificial snot producer had a like a chemical trace in it and then this man went to a party and they wanted to see this um whether traces from this artificial snot that was coming from this man's nose would spread and how far it would spread and then after a couple of hours this party they did the trace and it was everywhere all over the furniture all over people's clothes and i mean not not large amounts i mean it's not like you know something that you could see with the naked eye um but the uh the amount of times that as human being uh just we we touch our face this is this is where drink um bugs are passed through the hand so you know the the most at home you're gonna catch a cold the most likely place is the family computer from the keyboard um so our bodies are so naturally uncomfortable and discomfort is the natural state of the body and that's why we're always moving here and moving there and we're touching our face and it's a little it's not going just tiny little thing and then you touch this and somebody else touches it and then that makes it um so being human being having a human body it's stuka this is the you know people say oh that's that's a kind of uh pessimistic way to look at the world and it's not saying life is miserable but we're saying that there is always this sense of slight discomfort how how long can you sit completely still without having to move your body how long before you need to go to the toilet the bathroom um get hot you know the range of temperatures in the world from what -30 to 40 or 45 it's going up now isn't it but within that within that range of temperatures as a human being how how comfortable can you be what's what's the band within which you can be comfortable what from 10 to 30 maybe something like that it depends on clothing doesn't it those of a naked human body um from temperatures from minus 30 to 40. there's there's not much space there to be comfortable i was having discussion monks once with the monk what temperature do you think the heaven realms are so my my proposal is about 25 degrees centigrade i think it's a heavenly temperature but you know there's you get you move away from 25 and and you're starting to get uncomfortable already so there is this just natural discomfort which we we have to be patient with but the buddha and the buddha refers to that is like being shot by an arrow but because we we're not aware of what's going on and we just we naturally react to anything that makes us uncomfortable and want to get rid of it the the buddha refers to the poison on the tip of the arrow so we're constantly making bad situations worse or making uncomfortable situations more uncomfortable than they need to be because of this lack of awareness of what's going on in the body and mind so now we're this is this is the real world that we live in you know it's not the real world of competition and making money and and all those the real world is this body and this mind the real world is we have a body which is demanding and ungrateful you know what could be more ungrateful than your body you think of all that you do to look after it from the day you're born you wash it you comb its hair you do this you do that you give it food the best food you can find nice things to drink you know you do everything for your body and it doesn't show an ounce of gratitude all it does is it gets old gets sick and then it dies um i was talking to venerable uh we when we first arrived he was talking about the yellow page teachings and he says your yellow page teachings is things that makes things come true you know this is for it um and then we're talking about and giving him a prediction for his life and i said okay i'll give you a prediction for your life you're going to get old you're going to sick you'll die and he said thank you jan my parents never told me that they don't do they i mean parents don't usually tell children that but it's an important thing to know so how do we stop making a bad or a difficult situation more difficult than it than it needs to be and how can we find peace within that it's not like finding peace away from it you see it's like the idea of pieces you go off into this realm this is what people think meditation is if they don't meditated before it's like you're living in this difficult world and you meditate and then you can just shut it all off and just go into this lovely little mental space um and so people say oh well that's kind of um escapist and irresponsible um and you're not sort of taking full responsibility for yourself in the world and so people have this is a classic we call straw man um argument it's you know creating this false um childish idea a naive idea of what meditation is and then criticizing it and so it's meditation we have to say well that's not really what we're doing in meditation uh when meditation is we're we're developing the tools um by which we can understand our experience more clearly and the and if we're looking at the results of meditation in terms of ability to access these very refined mental states and just disappear into another realm yeah then um you can feel pretty frustrated that's not going to happen very easily but um you should be able to observe that if we're following the path of the buddhist training and education the eightfold path you know so you're a little bit more aware you're a little bit more awake you're a bit more patient you find um this that keeping the five precepts is is not a struggle anymore you just find it hard to imagine why you would ever break any of the precepts you this hirotapa this wise intelligent sense of shame wise intelligence fear of consequences of breaking precepts become more powerful the sense of kindness and and interest and commitment to helping others these are the kinds of things that meditators should be noticing in themselves so if you think oh i've been meditating for a long time and i still when i sit i get sort of sometimes kind of agitated and sometimes sleepy yeah yeah that's that's quite possible but that doesn't uh negate your your effort it doesn't mean that you're wasting your time [Music] um look at the big picture of of your life and your relationships with the people around you and the overall decline of negative mental states and the overall increase in positive mental states this i think is is a better way of looking at it so you notice in terms of sensors we've talked about the other day about sensitivity in some ways you become more insensitive and and my i am i have this image if you know if if any of you probably don't watch cartoons anymore but you probably did at one time in your life or you watch them with the kids you know in the cartoon where where the hero some somebody shoots a bullet and the bullet just goes right through them and out the other out the other sort of cartoon and it's a bit like that when you've been meditating for a while somebody says something really nasty to you or something really unpleasant happens and you oh that went right through me just like in a cartoon and you think wow if somebody has said that to me or treated me like that a year ago i would have been so hurt i would have been so angry i would have been and it's not i don't feel nothing i just feel a little bit but you know it's that's that's a huge change that's taken place um so there's a kind of insensitivity um to the lokodamas so gain and loss and status and decline of status and praise and criticism and um pleasure and pain the the mind is less sensitive to these things they they affect the mind much less than they used to at the same time you become much more sensitive to the cruelty and and to and to goodness um so i i know many meditators just find they can't watch the news anymore they just the crudeness and the the violence and the anger is just it just hurts their hearts too much so they become much more sensitive to to that um and much more sensitive to goodness and can you can i think most meditators will will um have seen this himself you just find goodness and kindness and generosity so moving sometimes you find tears in your eyes so the things are quite mundane ordinary events but just to to to recognize that goodness because when you start to meditate and you're you're really at the coalface as it were you know of reality is like how do you deal with these negative mental states you know even as a meditator and someone with real um commitment it's so hard to let go of this anger and jealousy and all these negative mental states so so how so how much harder for someone who's not even um committed to to reducing them doesn't even see them as a problem [Music] and then you you see how difficult it is to cultivate um wholesome and beautiful states and and how beautiful they are when they arise and then when you see them elsewhere it's just ah that's just so lovely you know you never realized i think before you meditate and you're looking within just how beautiful generosity and kindness and altruism is i i was telling story um yesterday or day before yesterday about experience i had on this um tu dong walk from gaia to um to kusinara and the the fog had come down very sick you know you know this kind of north indian fog although uh not not pollution fog this is like fog in the countryside and and i i walked into a town and it was early in the morning just before six o'clock i think and two rather well-dressed elderly ladies um emerged from the fog in front of me now if you can imagine i'm sure this was their daily walk so what a surprise it must have been to them to see this big strange looking fellow emerge you know so oh he's wearing a robe but he's got white skinned and he's big and he's you know i think quite an intimidating figure probably you know emerging so suddenly and unexpectedly on a route which you're very familiar and what what impressed so much and moved me so much was that one of the women the moments that she saw me she pointed to my head because i'd lost my hat in a previous adventure and i was walking bareheaded and she she just points shut her shawl and so what she was saying obviously was cover your head you're going to catch a coal and and i thought if there's any kind of anecdotal evidence which would support the existence of altruism you're completely un you know disinterested care for fellow human beings fellow beings then then that would i think be my nomination that um she has nothing in it for her at all she didn't know her and she had a right to be somewhat frightened even by but not at all and her how is that possible that her very first thought seeing this stranger emerging from the fog was concerned that he might catch a cold she's never going to see me again in her life obviously and so these are things i think when you've been meditating then these are the things that impress you these are things that you remember um and your your sense of what's wholesome what's unwholesome and what's beautiful what's ugly these things evolve and and then the the the um the sensitivity which ultimately is most important is you become sensitive to the three characteristics of the impermanence of dukkha and ultimately if there is any um like surefire reliable indication that you're practicing in the correct way it is that your sense and your your um your your your sensitivity to these characteristics is improve is increasing the sense of the impermanence the unstable unpredictable nature of life so not expecting things to be a certain way you know when people who don't meditate something bad happens in their life i just had no idea i mean just out of the blue i mean who would have thought who would have believed who would have imagined it's so unfair you know these are the kinds of exclamations made by people who have never thought about impermanence and how things rise according to and pass away according to causes and conditions now we have how we'd like things to be and how we we think they should be but the law of karma and causes and conditions um we'll always triumph um so the we we become more and more tuned into this we we have less and less expectation we're not shocked in the same way at sudden loss or separation but what we we we feel sadness but it's not a toxic kind of sadness it's more you know you you cut yourself and it's going to take a time for that wound to heal up but it's got no dirt in it it's just a clean wound but you think it shouldn't be like this it shouldn't that kind of thinking that that kind of resistance to the way things are that starts to fade out so if you my one more analogy your end is i don't know if any of you are fans or have been fans of whodunits you know this uh uh like agatha christie and uh this uh novels and and movies and things um where the you've got like uh let's say you had um 40 people in a meditation hall and suddenly all the lights go out and the lights come on and there's somebody with a knife stuck out of them you know so who did it so so the whole the whole fun of these these kind of books is trying to work out who did it but you know before you start that there are going to be twists and it's not going to be who you think it's it is you know it's not going to be it's not going to be the obvious one and and the book is you know the merit of the book is often you know how many twists there are and how unexpected the twists there are how unexpected the twist oh i never saw that one coming oh i thought it was him and then he forced down a well or he's uh something like this so i i think it's quite a um a good analogy for for life you know it's like a whodunit i mean in a sense that there's gonna be all these twists and unexpected twists and um and you can't take anyone or anything for granted um it's and you can enjoy that you can enjoy the twists and because you don't have an idea that must be a certain way you know just allow it to be a certain way and you're developing the ability to be with that and to know that and the extent to which we can be the knower as you know be the knowing and ancient semado's phrase means we've become uh less demanding of life and more um courageous in the sense yeah whatever i'm ready you know i i've developed the resources that will enable me to survive this and flourish and learn from it okay that um maybe this morning talk and end at this point so we just have um 15 minutes for discussion or any

Channel: ธรรมะ โดย พระอาจารย์ชยสาโร/ Dhamma by Ajahn Jayasaro

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Keywords: พุทธเถรวาท, พระธรรม, ชยสาโร, ธรรมะ, พุทธศาสนา, บ้านบุญ, ปากช่อง, โรงเรียนทอสี, ปฏิบัติธรรม, Buddhism, Dhamma, teaching, retreat, Ajahn, Jayasaro, Bhikku, Theravada, Buddhist, Tradition, Bahn, Thawsi, School, Panyaprateep, ปัญญาประทีป, Buddha, Buddhadhamma, 2564, 2021, Aranya Vihara Trust

Id: JQ4IXw6K1eA

Length: 51min 20sec (3080 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 07 2021