A Talk About Nothing | Ajahn Brahm | 16 July 2021

and this evening's talk of course as was mentioned this is the last friday night talk when i'd be here i taught anchor bamali into coming next friday to give the very last double talk of the season even though we're doing an entry to the reigns ceremony on sunday the real range retreat starts just on the sunday week so anyways i'll get him to do some work i was jealous of him because he was in quarantine for for 14 days coming back from sydney so anyway i missed out on quality in this year but for months we don't really call it a burden we call it a free meditation retreat have a nice quiet time it's interesting that whatever you do in life you can always see some positive part of it and that's one of the great things i see of life is you can't change life but you can always change your attitude towards it if it's really really cold that's wonderful because in the cold you don't get any flies or many ants crawling around and you can always put on some some rugs or something to keep yourself warm and a lot of time not many people like traveling when it's really cold so i like the cold and when it's very warm i like the warm too because when it's nice and warm you don't have to have the burden of lots of clothes and hats and other stuff you have to put on top of yourself so i never think of what's wrong you think what's right with whatever happens in life and when you get sick as i mentioned many many times oh you should never say there's something wrong with me doctor i'm sick your sickness is the way that your body reacts to things like um infections or viruses or stuff that's the way it heals so and you get many advantages of being sick you can stay in your room and people feed you you never get away with that when you're healthy you don't have to go to work you don't have to you don't have to go and give a talk it's been such a long time since i've been sick isn't it i'm always giving talks but but anyhow you always see the positive side of things but the talk for this evening because this is the last talk of the season for me i caught it last time it's not really the last talk because what happens next is that people say i'll have a lovely retreat hachan brahm just go and meditate a lot and just do nothing but you know there's how many monks down at buddy now can you 23 who's got to look after them who's going to teach them that's my job so i still give talks but to the monastic community and my job is to give them really nice talks let them really understand meditation you know meditation is such an easy thing to do i can't understand why people don't sort of do lots and lots of it is doing nothing it's not a wonderful thing to do to do nothing would you like to do nothing spend three months doing nothing what a wonderful thing because we don't have to don't know how to do nothing do you you're all very good at doing things but doing nothing is something are you either feel guilty about or you don't know how to really get into it we just just really enjoy and really just allow nothing to take over nothing is an amazing part of life i'm gonna i didn't know what i was gonna talk about tonight but i'm going to talk tonight about nothing i think it is i'm going to start with one of the old stories which i loved this story because it was one of these unexpected moments but physical so you can understand it you know a lot of times you can tell sort of uh intellectual stuff spiritual stuff before this the five that the six something else and all that the seven looked like uh seven magnificent seven wasn't it was a big movie long time ago seven samurai that was it but no instead of all this number stuff and some of you don't like mathematics and so it's just an arithmetic class a double okay no it's not arithmetic class but i like getting to like stories because in a story that can really reveal so much more information and that was a story of when i went down into guatemala when i was young somebody was asking me about this because you know between finishing universe between finishing school and going to university i had this amazing nine months of free time so you know it's really poor in london this was in 1968 69 got a job and it earns a little bit of money and they went over first of all would you believe it if you could imagine this in those days i had lots of hair big hair out to here i wear that honestly where the hair finished that's where my beard started and it was called like it was like a doughnut i don't know look just a hole in the middle i had my guitar and a little backpack and i went hitchhiking over north africa very adventurous thing to do must have driven my mother so crazy but i was actually a very responsible young man and then after that went over to united states and there's nine months free time backpacking but the most nicest thing about that was you go to united states it was just like uk it's just like europe it's just no real difference and i really just wanted to experience more about life so i went down to central america that was really cool it's the first time i went into rainforests i remember just i'd always seen in these pictures in the library books about these pyramids in the middle of the jungles of the yucatan peninsula in guatemala or the southern south uh east yeah southeast mexico i always wonder what they were there for the civilization had disappeared before the spanish came in so no one knew exactly what they were up to and that was brilliant it's one of the reasons why i don't like to have or give like too much intellectual knowledge allow people to go to these experiences in the mind and experience it for yourself so you're not told what to believe which means your mind is free to paint the picture for itself and so anyway i eventually found my way to this big uh pyramids in the yucatan peninsula the first place i went to was this place called tikal and it took days to get there i'm going to tell you something about the story of how i got there because otherwise what happened there won't make sense it's a very great spiritual moment for me when i this happened but actually to get there you know from guatemala city and this was in 1969 so nothing much was there it was an old city but there's nothing much with infrastructure like trains or anything i got like an old bus to get to the port city on the caribbean coast i remember even there you were stopped by the the army the bus was stopped all the males had to get out and there's a machine gun trained on you because you know there was insurrection somewhere in the jungle there and when i got out i didn't know whether i was going to be able to get back in again afterwards or will i be shot to pieces these days it's very boring being a monk but in those days it was exciting and then and then from the uh the coast on the guatemalan coast the only way to go further is get a fishing boat and this was one time when i learned about just why sometimes people are a dull when you meditate when you meditate a lot do you get so tired and sleepy no i hadn't slept all night when i well you know when you got this fishing boat early in the morning about one o'clock in the morning to actually to get you on the next leg of the journey and you saw the sun come up over the caribbean in the morning there's in 1969 and that was absolutely breathtaking the beautiful dawn the rise of the the morning sun with reds and golds and purples streaking over the caribbean ocean wow and there's no way i could fall asleep it was too beautiful that's one of the reasons why when we meditate you notice the very beginning i ask you to please notice how delightful your body is when it gets relaxed and how delightful pieces how delightful this being in this moment is the more delight you have and delight is there it's a beautiful thing to have like peace being inside not a problem in the world because you let go of the past where all the past problems live you let go of the future all those fears live it's like you you feel all of this ah it's gorgeous and once you delight in it you stay there and you get lots of energy and lots of stillness it's a nice place to be that's why doing nothing that's what happens doing nothing needs a pa makeover it's a beautiful thing to do and it's also very good for you as well because i always notice that you know just when if i feel tired i feel sick i do feel sick sometimes but i don't know what to do i don't go to the doctor that's just too too much busyness please excuse me doctors who are here i know some people trying to get me to go to the doctor for years but instead of instead of going to the doctor just go inside we know how to relax the body and get all this joy coming up oh my goodness that that is so healing do that so often you just go inside and just get lots of energy and it just relaxes all the body things get eased and all this energy goes to the right places remember this i'm just not my own experiences at this time about teaching on retreats and sometimes you know when you people do lots of meditation they just want to ask no somebody what's happening you have some weird experiences sometimes on retreats all good stuff but this was a time this woman she was oh a couple of experiences here that she was meditating and somebody tapped me on the shoulder and said i jumped open your eyes please this is this is emergency this is really important and she showed me one of the meditators in the back and this lady she was twisted around she was contorted you know sometimes i like to demonstrate you know what i'm talking about but i can't demonstrate that otherwise you'd have to take me to hospital she was really twisted extremely and of course you know thank you for letting me know this you know what's going on and so after the meditation you know i'd sort of asked to come over here in a minute and say well what's wrong and i said did you realize when you were meditating you were really twisted and unlocked and then she answered i said oh really i never felt a thing and that's weird stupid dad jumped up this sort of i understood what was going on you know what i asked i said oh when did you have your traffic accident and she looked at me huh i never told you that at last it's proof does have psychic powers hallelujah and i said artist no it's not psychic powers it's just the understanding of how your body and mind work together i said the reason you were twisted around like that that when you were getting still were you stopping controlling your body you let the body do what it needed to do was that you probably had a very very bad accident and the most common bad accidents these days are car accidents he said you were very tell he said yeah i came really close to dying been in the hospital many times but you know he said this is your body doing its healing you need to twist around like that in order to open those channels of energy so they could get to where they were needed you probably feel wonderful now and he said yeah i never felt so relaxed in my back for for days for months and stories like that which told me just how your body has ways of healing itself if you don't get scared and just worried about it let it happen and that's certainly what i always do whenever there's any sickness in the body i tried to not to do anything about it but to not do to relax to the max and let the energy go to where it's needed and that was an extreme case but i know that many other cases when people meditate you get into a nice deep meditation i don't mean just in the jar and you see beautiful lights and stuff you get peaceful enough what happens is you get what i call like hot spots in your body parts of your body are much warmer than is normal as usual and if that really happens again that's healing going to that place and so often you get little hot spots there don't be afraid just relax even more and let that hot spot stay there as long as you like it's amazing just how afterwards you find there may be a tumor there sort of something happening people have some weird illnesses and of course that's what i ask them to do when they have these weird illnesses i've never heard them before like the one which comes up now this guy in penang is a malaysian gentleman and he told me how i had this terrible disease a very rare disease where the best way could describe it is things in the brain were all tangled up physically tangled and he said he had one operation for that and it's really painful and very sort of unpleasant but he went through it and he thought it was cured it was very very rare and then when later on he had some aches and pains in his brain in his skull then they said again that it's reoccurred it's very very rare that it reoccurs but it's back again they showed him the ct scans and he was really scared because you've been through these terrible operations once you don't want to go through them again he's ah what am i gonna do and so i told him about meditating meditating properly and just relax don't be afraid don't try and cure it but care for it that's all the trick there when you try and cure things you get tense with it when you care for it you just allow it to be really relaxed and at ease and so he did that and i think straight after the what was supposed to be the operation he came back up to penang i think just to see me and just to thank me he said what happened so they took the ct scan again you know just before the second operation and they said the words to him ah sir i'm sorry to say this but there's something wrong with the ct machine the cat's going to have to do it again and they put him through the ct scan again i realized nothing wrong with the machine it's something they didn't expect the whatever the disease was grabbing up some of the stuff in his brain had actually unscrambled and it was perfectly healthy again so what the heck is going on they never seen that before that's what he did that sort of procedure in singapore and this is just one example of many like people who just do amazing things when you allow the body to relax and basically heal itself but anyway going back to central america i do go off track sometimes many thousands of miles but in those days you know to get us all over on trucks on fishing boats and just going through the jungles this was against 1969 and that part of the world was not developed at all and just going through the rainforest it was a real rainforest just you know with jungle on either side and there's a sort of thing you'd expect i really expected any moment tarzan to go swinging out of the jungle and go ah whatever tarzan does these days i also remember just getting one of the most beautiful breakfasts i've ever had just on these little bamboo and thatch restaurants on the side of the the river no roads or no cars or electricity or or anything like that there and i don't know if any of you like mexican food but this is like poor mexican food and it was just another chapatis it was beans black beans and a cup of coffee so simple but it was just so nutritious you know dogs running around nothing else and i always remember the simplicity that's also what i love like simplicity is so tasty sometimes we put too much stuff in food too much stuff in everything these days too many things in our houses and it just loses the sense of houses are for people not for things oh i'm just wandering off you again the first time i was in south in thailand in the northeast this was a remote part of thailand no electricity no i think obviously no tv or anything and going into the houses in north east thailand in the evening to do some buddhist ceremony and i went into those into the village with a few other monks you could see that every house on the little road going into where we were going to do a ceremony every they had an upstairs around it same like in cambodia as well exactly the same and upstairs and underneath was where the water buffalo lived and the whole family lived up top and they used to meet every evening and there was a light there the light was a kerosene lamp it was just a bowl of kerosene and a rag which they poke through the top of a toothpaste tube you know that that caught the made a nice wick and they lit that and it just it just floated in the kerosene oil and created a light but also created smoke which kept the mosquitoes away it's very very efficient but the most compelling part of that memory was to seeing the whole family sitting around that single light grandparents grand mars aunties uncles the fathers and mothers and their brothers and sisters and the little kids as well and every evening they sit like that nothing else to do telling stories some true probably mostly made up but they were together every evening just sharing their time together and when i saw that i thought my childhood was abusive we had a tv i wish we hadn't had that it's nice and simple people talking together and learning the beautiful social skills of just laughing and talking and being with one another so in some of those simple things of life try and recreate that in monasteries but it's hard but anyway just going through those rivers and eventually finding your way to these old ancient archaeological sites and there's hardly anybody there because it's just too hard to get to right in the middle of the jungle and what you saw there was these huge pyramids now of course i was i was only seven no i just turned 18 18 at the time fit healthy people sometimes don't believe that but i was fit and healthy and thin and handsome and young years ago but anyway so what do you do you want to climb one and there's no one there to stop you because there's i think there's one archaeological archaeologist there but that's about all i saw lots of monkeys and you know other animals and stuff but only one other human i think i saw and so to climb up it's a long way up what happened when you got to the top of that pyramid i there's no guidebooks or anything to tell you you know what it was all about there's no shops or anything so but what i did when i got to the top there ah that was amazing because i had no information i wasn't told what those things were supposed to mean it was obvious what they were for because at the top there's a little like little hat little room but what was so impressive was when you got to the top you were above the tree line of the jungle you could see the horizon in all directions there was nothing this is why the nothing thing comes in there is nothing between you and infinity in all directions you just look and see the horizon stretching way beyond what you could reach it was a sign of letting go of nothing hawaii is that priests experts monks nuns sometimes stand in between you and the infinite we try to explain it to you explanations are not needed you just gotta get something to get up on top of that pyramid and see beyond your world see beyond what you've experienced what you've known what you've been taught see emptiness in all directions nothing there no gods no priests no nothing and that was one probably one of the first times you experienced the spiritual profundity and depth and inspiration of something like nothing and that's one of the reasons why that you revere nothing we put so many so much stuff on the shrines would be wonderful just to have nothing at all on that shrine totally empty what would you do you put something on it even a sign don't put anything on here that's putting something on it what'd they do when they got this beautiful have you been mountaineering okay there wasn't that big mountains over in the uk where i grew up but they went up many of those mountains you know what they do when you you have mountains you get to the top of the mountain and someone's put a flag up there or they put a bunch of rocks up there and they carve on there my lane name before was peter betts peter betts was here do you want to say that for so instead to really respect like a mountain isn't it best to leave it alone because what usually happens you start with putting a flag there the next thing you put up there is a coffee shop which sells souvenirs that's really terrible if you get to the top of the mountain you found out there's a big coffee shop up there and a cable car on the other side of the road which takes you straight up it takes why is that not i really objected to that because sometimes why do we need all that stuff can't we just respect emptiness and nothing in this beautiful nature where nothing is disturbing it just as it was centuries ago a millennia ago we don't add to it we don't take it away because it's perfect as it already is we don't try and cure it we care for it it's one of the reasons why that when you're announcing it's coming onto one of my birthdays soon sometimes people always ask me what do you want that jumper can i give you a gift i've served you looked after you been kind to you for such a long time do you want to give me something and a few people have got the message you know what they do they get a nice little box they wrap it up and give it to me and when i open the box you know what's inside of it nothing ah that's just what i wanted how do you do that and it's beautiful just nothing the emptiness of life but anyway going up that pyramid you can see what it would have been like you know for someone who never had a tv never had schooling never had read books never went to a church or a temple or moscow anywhere and they were taking up the temple for the very first time as a young man or a young woman that's what i imagined standing on top of that pyramid not being told what to do and when to come down i just was enjoying myself freedom time was not important and just doing stuff was not important there's no rules up there's nowhere else to go except just to look all around and just being up there and feeling also the coolness because in the jungle if you've been in jungle rainforests it's very close and very damp and it's hardly any wind goes through lots of insects like mosquitoes and stuff you got the top there because it's above this tree line you get the winds blowing it was so refreshing up there no mozzies it's nice and clean air and it was just nothing was there and i loved that that was really a religious experience imagining if i had just been a young kid going up there for the first time seeing infinity for the first time what is infinity nothing between you and the infinity direct contact so little by little you appreciated the simplicity but it's hard to be simple in this world because when you have nothing people want to give you something put stuff on the shrine put stuff on the on the uh the mountain tops build retreats in the desert let the desert be free nothing there little by little you understand that nothing is very profound so profound when people ask you all these years being a monk what have you attained you say nothing some people will just be upset at you what you've been doing all this time just lazing around sleeping all the time oh crack now instead of nothing nothing you can't contain you can't put in a box really real nothing nothing is free nothing is something you can't own nothing is something which again is around everybody have you ever noticed when you walk into this room this whole many of you been here well every friday for for weeks months years i don't know when you come in this room what do you see you see buddha statue carpets people you see monks nuns or whatever you see the walls you see the lights you see thee you see things we've been conditioned by our upbringing to only notice things but have you noticed the biggest thing in this room is the space between us all what surrounds us it never separates us it's what joins us together it's around users around me the emptiness in this room the nothingness in this room and that's really hard to notice and hard to preserve because we've always been conditioned brainwashed learned how to notice things rather than how to notice nothing the space between people around the people themselves but of course you know once it's going the space between your thoughts around the thoughts themselves this is an old meditator's trick but i love doing it first time i did this was in singapore in a brie called about 3 000 people and people said oh we can't meditate we've got two busy minds we're always these are executives business people it's very tough in singapore to get by and to make a dollar and to keep the dollar and whatever else they're trying to find and keep said we can't meditate it's waste of time oh oh [Music] there's another thing which there's always noise around oh is there can you hear the space between the noises that's amazing after a while you find that so delightful and that's actually in this little exercise i did for these singaporeans 3 000 of them simple just ask them to please be aware when i'm speaking always you know listen to what i say but also there's a reaction to what i say sometimes i say something stupid oh yeah i've heard that one before oh yeah that's not very smart oh i don't agree with that you have a reaction in your mind but now what is the reaction in your mind as i'm speaking now because you'll start to notice many gaps between my words in those spaces what was happening inside nothing was happening and it felt so peaceful it felt profound i know that was the first time many of those three thousand they were business people first time they experienced some silence stillness peace there it was again so simple isn't it now see if you can remain still for half an hour if you notice his beauty and destroy it's good qualities it's so easy to stay there you don't need to give it a name you don't need to try and capture it peace is very shy if you mention her name she runs away they never love to be captured they will escape at the first opportunity you know peace you can't own it these are little things which you feel that's why doing nothing should be the most easiest thing in the world to do if you say how do i do nothing you know we feel guilty if we don't do something why so sometimes it's a weekend i don't know what you're doing tomorrow can you have even an afternoon free to do nothing sit in your garden if you've got a garden off around if you've got a veranda somewhere and see how difficult it is to do nothing because i said the first person i made a simile up years ago the first person sits in their garden or sits on the veranda okay i'm doing nothing so get up a book and read this and that's not doing nothing reading a book okay sorry so they put the book away and they're looking at their garden and we're thinking oh that bush over there that needs to be pruned and that flower there that bed needs to be watered that's doing stuff planning it seeming to sit there and say even though the flower bed doesn't need watering even though the the lawn needs raking even though the tree is almost falling over not now the only time you can really do nothing is in this present moment because right now it's already here and it's perfect enough you just let it be people say how do we let things be do nothing i do nothing just let it be let's have some trust that's my job is trying to to make to sell the product i remember i actually get into trouble doing that like selling nothing can you sell nothing encourage it so you can appreciate its beauty and its benefit sometimes if you tell that to the people you live with you say you know what are you doing just sitting on the veranda there you say i'm doing nothing oh great can you please come and help me because nothing is not appreciated these days so that's why those of you been on meditation retrieves with me you know the little tricks if you're like husband or your wife your friend or someone says what are you doing there if you just say doing nothing that doesn't really cut the ice with them so you say i'm watching the trees grow trees do grow you know and you've got to really watch them for a long time before you see them grow it's just a good excuse to learn how to do nothing and it's very healthy for you we know how to do things we're very good at doing things what happens when we do things a lot of time make a big mess of things you don't know how to do it i know how to do it you do it the wrong way i do it the right way if you don't do anything at all you can't make mistakes see what it's like having a weekend a day off how many times have you had a day off probably never since you were born always doing something so see if you can know the art of doing nothing relaxing letting peace come inside of you that's all there is peace and stillness sometimes people feel that you're gonna go asleep but that doesn't happen as i said real peace is very beautiful and delightful it's like a diamond it glistens that's the same with the piece it's so beautiful delightful you can't take your eyes off it it's gorgeous and you can feel its effect on your body and on your mind freeing relaxing how does your mind feel a lot of times it's just tight and tense i know that feeling as well because i'm a senior man i have to do lots and lots of stuff and just know recently just arranging stuff for people coming on quarantine starting the range retreat soon there's so much stuff to do but i also got my cave over in bodhinyana monastery that's one thing which is open for inspection on the opening to the range day go see my cave and it's no reason why i love that cave because it's silent inside it's underground this mug built cave it's very comfortable cave it's like a five-star cave it does have electricity i've got to admit and a cork for a call for sorry a cork tile floor but when you go inside you can't hear a thing often say the monks might be going crazy outside i don't care because inside you can't hear anything and it's silent and it's dark everything gets so peaceful there's nothing in there so little by little you learn just how to respect nothing you know these days we have buddha statues on the shrine in those early days they never had buddha statues they had like an empty seat or a footprint but no buddha was there why because it was just showing just the power of like emptiness nothing being there things vanishing and disappearing and how beautiful and how inspirational that was because it was beautiful if you really appreciate nothing and what happens it becomes incredibly powerful you know where you can go to sleep or get tired when the mind is just paused in the stillness of nothing that's one of the reasons why oh my goodness i keep going on that's one of the reasons why the one of the the deepest teachings or probably the deepest teachings which ajahn gave to me years ago just talking about this the other day at monk's monastery and you know your teacher you always try and look after them but you know sometimes you can overlook you can look after them too much which is one of the reasons you know sometimes i reject say this is enough because so the example there okay here we go if you don't remember this one was on one talk this is quite a few years ago here at dumbo local center in amara i coughed and then i saw a couple of people go out and they came back in at the end of the talk they said i just been to the shop to get this medicine for you it's really important i don't want you have a cough that's very nice of you he said you will take it so okay they put it down there and then someone else got another medicine oh this is homeopathic medicine it's really really good it really helped me you will take it won't you they put it down there then someone got some uh some herbal medicines and someone got some ayurvedic medicines some got some allopathic medicines someone got some psychopathic medicines i don't know there's so many types of medicine and i was stupid enough at that time i said okay they gave it to me you can't just disappoint them by not taking it oh exactly yes then i was really sick but sometimes you got really nice hearts but sometimes came for people too much but anyway so and when i jumped i got sick instead of actually well it wasn't really about caring for him that was part of it but he was my teacher so we built a sauna for him in this monastery now saunas you may think we're created in sweden or somewhere but you know that saunas were mentioned as a general a building in the monasteries in the time of the buddha it was one of the buildings they had there fire rooms they called it saunas so you know it was invented in india a long time before we got to north america and not our europe so anyway we read that one of the nice things about being a western monk it's easy to learn these languages like party sanskrit and stuff because you've got you've been trained like that to learn those languages and then you read it yourself and you rebelliously not say hey someone told me about that it's there see it must be right so we built one i was involved in that so we built a sauna for our teacher i must admit i didn't spend too much time in there because i was english but those german monks had they made it so hot in there i don't know why but anyhow it's imaginative would go in there and he was going there once a week it wasn't just now to look after him you know just like the love and care for someone who taught you but he would come every week and give us give us a talk it was just a means to get him to come in so if you want me to give a talk uh octane if you want me to give a talk in table okay during the range retreat one make sure i'm sick number two make a sauna here but nobody joking but what happened once like these talks which are given especially by great monks like ajahn chah my teacher in thailand you know some of those talks are so boring and i'm being honest being totally respectful but honest sometimes i go on and on and on and on and on same old stories i've heard before but sometimes you know sometimes you just hit the spot and when so a monk like an attention really hits the spot wow that's just so inspiring and this time he gave this talk and it was really one of the most magnificent talks you inspired uplifted and just really blissing out so when he went after the talk to go to his sauna i just went around the back of the horn and just sat there meditating for a couple of hours oh it's just beautiful meditation because inspiration that's one of the best ways to get deep meditation a nice talk allow the joy and the happiness come in you feel wow this is really good you just want to cross your legs and close your eyes and do nothing you don't have to do anything the mind is just going in that direction just don't impede it let it go and it goes deep in inside when i came out of my meditation or just with lots of happiness inside i don't know if i'd told this story at double locker before monks died very well but when i came out of the meditation i was just really walking on air you do after good meditation mind really clear i thought i should see if i can do anything for my teacher so i went walking towards the sauna i was too late he'd already finished he was walking in the opposite direction and as he was walking towards me i s i saw him he stopped he looked at me now sometimes you know you're not really supposed to talk about like weird stuff like psychic powers and stuff but i don't mind saying this about ajahn chah this was a time i just walk into i had a very clear mind and you could actually you know you may still think i'm stupid here but this is true you could feel him as it were going inside your mind reading me weird i can't explain how else it feels because you know just he was inside checking me out and for once in my life i didn't mind because my mind was pretty pure after the meditation so there come in come in check me out you know what it's like you know if everything in your room is nice and clean when your mother comes to check on you or you got all your sort of your stuff done at work when this other boss comes and said how's it going you feel you know oh yeah come and have a look yeah look at my mind then afterwards he looked at me it's really it's weird to say but fierce but kind bravo alongside that's the full name ajahn brahm that came later on in my life you know brahma wang so it's a very long name so out of kindness you know just shorten it to brahm it's a much easier name much more cuddly but it does have it's like it's bad side effects and one of those bad side effects i'll go back to my channel story in a moment and one of those bad side effects was i gave a talk in mercedes college in but anyone here from mercedes college went to school there you did okay i hope this wasn't you but it's a catholic girls school and so i went to give a tour there on buddhism just know one afternoon and just know quite a few classes and the following day i don't know exactly what business i had in centrality's terrace walking down the road there but i was working doing something or other and then saw these mercedes school girls walking the opposite direction and we're gonna cross you know cross paths and they look at me and said hey you were the monk who gave a talk at our school yesterday i said wow you still remember me he said oh yeah we'll never forget you i thought how nice that is and i was really warm by you know like 13 14 year old school girls saying nice things to you you know it's really quite pleasing yeah you know what forget me now we'll never forget anyone who's called ajahn brah i say there's an m on the end i thought it was very funny i wasn't insulted i thought yeah okay good one i can use that in my talk because i've been using my tools for many many years now that jumper but anyway just with that and shy he looked to me and bumbling and the next thing he said was why that comes from a teacher respect enormously and i realized that what he was trying to do he'd obviously got inside check me out and realize had a very deep meditation which was true and so tried to help me become enlightened basically why and i replied i don't know i was a stupid young man i don't know but one of the lovely things would be in that tradition when you made a stupid reply did anything stupid that teacher would never criticize you never sort of hit you or anything he just thought it was just so incredibly funny he burst out laughing i always think that's one of the reasons why he had lots of western banks because we created so much humor for him some of the things we do so anyway he laughed but then he stopped laughing he looked at me and he said i will tell you the answer if anyone ever asks you again the question why this is the answer you can imagine how excited you get it's only just achieve and myself on the path no one else was around i was the driver i think the thai man was around and he said the answer the question why for one of the greatest monks and he said the answer to the question why was my me a lie that's thai and my me and my means there's nothing there's nothing that's the answer they looked at me and said pamela wang sir with lots of kindness do you understand i said yes yes and he said no you don't i was really high one moment right down on the ground in the pits next moment no you don't and then he walked off laughing but it was a very beautiful interchange i mentioned it many times in my life and i was remembering it as well why there's nothing for those of you who want to study deeper it's called anatan on self whatever you want to call it nothingness just like that beautiful nothingness on the top of the pyramid nothing between you and forever infinite nothing the answer to the question why do you understand you know i said no you don't that's why you have to come next week to listen to my channel for molly thank you all for listening okay please excuse me for indulging as usual i enjoy myself okay any questions from the floor here yeah okay if there is nothing why build more retreat center nothing why between bombs to create more sweet nothings in the world yeah okay next question okay yeah there's questions only here we go wow that's a lot fanatic yeah enough okay for singapore i have a lot of doubt and worry as well as low self-esteem keep agonizing over rethinking doubting decisions made changing them especially the life path vocation i'm on any advice please like doubt making decisions that's a very easy thing to do can didn't mention this recently did not last week when i was in oslo i just tossed a coin because that's when somebody asked me the woman asked me he said no i got difficult and this is not a joke i jumped on she said don't say that to me because it doesn't work so i've got a very difficult decision in life life changing how should i make that decision then i looked at her and said well suppose it is should i marry that boy sitting next to me i didn't know them never seen them before in my life and she just put her heads in her hands that was the decision she was trying to make you know should that's an important decision in life you know you don't know really where it's going to work out or not you can try your very best and she was agonizing over that should i marry him or should i not marry him is it so easy take a coin as i marry him tell us i don't why not people think it's a magic bomb is crazy but the point was you're making those decisions heads up may marry him tells i don't when you do that it comes up say tales i don't how do you feel how do you react inside you think yes thank you coin or do you think two out of three because all the tossing the coin is doing is revealing how you feel how you feel inside getting that intuition to come up instead of your thinking because too often we rely on our thoughts which are often just distorted by fear or by wants or all sorts of other silly things the intuition is much more pure it goes deeper where places like fear can't reach you know what to do and this reveals it comes up his marry him yes it means that's what he really wanted to do in the first place but the other thing which i say people think i'm crazy i've never been married that probably explains all this stupid stuff i say but the other thing which i say is that it doesn't matter that much what decision you make what is really crucial is what you do after you've made that decision in other words if you decide to follow that path put all your energy into making it work so doing a new business look a good example like going out of this room here turning left or turning right which one do you want to go you find out the path always leads back in a circle because the other side doesn't really matter whether you go out the left door or the right door what is really important is what you do after you made that decision to make sure you don't wear yourself out making decisions you save the energy to after you've made the decision to make it work in my experience almost anything you can make work but a lot of times you make the decision and use all my energy should i should i should i should i not once you made the decision you're too tired to make it work low self-esteem it's wonderful if you're a buddhist you know there's no self anywhere so i've got high self-esteem low self-esteem i've got no self esteem i steal my no-self that's why if you ever go on a retreat at places like china grab meditation retreat we've got like two lines for people to get their food one is for the enlightened ones that's no self the service the ones who hadn't lied yet you had to go self-service i'm sorry i'm going to carry on to finish quickly well when a decision has been made it's made let it go for goodness sake that's why i always say that there's this word which somebody told me about about the infinite about the the ground of all being about just essential reality about god or nirvana or whatever they wanted to call it they called it the ineffable now the ineffable sorry hear that the ineffable anyone ever explain what it means like life is ineffable the origin of the universe is ineffable the ultimate reality is ineffable means you can't eff it it's in f of all i don't know what you mean by effing something but i know one bit i know one interpretation of that i'm not gonna say it but i thought that was a very useless word so i wanted to change that word from ineffable to ineffable that's a really useful word ineffable the past is ineffable for you to marry somebody else what it would have been like better worse who said who knows if you hadn't got that job you did if you hadn't come here this evening you're going to watch the tv or something what would your life have turned out like if if if the past is ineffable the future is ineffable i love that idea because it means you're so free of all just wasting your energy in your brain there's no trying nothing oh i should have done something else oh i shouldn't have done this so i shouldn't have done anyway next question victor chan from us is there a buddhist viewpoint on the covet vaccine is it a personal choice are we obligated to take the vaccine for the good of the community well you may know i've had my first astrazeneca a vaccine the reason i wanted that was because scott's den in it which is pretty buddhist that's then okay i got my second next week next friday is there a personal choice it's actually not personal choice i'm taking that because apparently once you get vaccinated you go traveling again i miss that going overseas and oh it's been such a long time since i've seen an aircraft from the inside no it's sometimes you look at your own body and mind does it do any harm to you it's very very rare that does any harm to anybody and it does apparently help people so i'm taking it so i don't know why other people don't take it and also that i've noticed i said there's a body not a monastery i've noticed that all the people who go to body nyana monastery not one of them has got covert so this is just not just facts statistics it's there to be anyway so from buddha's point of view compassion why not from myanmar i see many covet deaths around me in countries around lockdown conflict is outside and within how should i deal with all the suffering again you have suffering there with calvary but please look for the beauty some of the great sort of firm health workers on the front line just how much they give and sacrifice themselves for others that's inspiring sometimes when there is tragedies around the world you can always find if you look carefully enough see great inspirations happening some people die and some people very close to you die as well and people you know for a long time but that always happens all the time people dying tragedies tsunamis but why and can't we see some something beautiful there as well for the tsunami i'm going to tell the tsunami story now this is the crocodile story if you haven't heard this before but this always inspires me there was a gentleman who would uh on the way to work every morning we stopped by one of the lagoons this was in sri lanka and just take three or four slices of bread to give to the fish and then one day when he did this usual routine on the way to work just put three or four slices of bread for the fish he saw there was something else there was a crocodile came as well and he gave two pieces of bread to the crocodile as well and that crocodile would come every morning to get some bed the crocodiles you know they can eat people so anyway this was going on for a while and then one morning he had his bread he didn't have time to feed the fishes and the crocodile because the big wave came the tsunami and it just got hold of him and washed him out into the ocean and basically out to sea the cowards were so strong and he was struggling to try and keep afloat and apparently he grabbed onto one or two pieces i think one was a piece of furniture a chair to try and keep afloat but the current was so strong that it would actually rip whatever he held away from him and he's going further and further away from shore and then he grabbed onto a log of wood he could hold on to that he's big enough and just sort of rough enough to keep a grip on it and there is a subtle confusion and fear and he noticed that lock of wood was actually going the opposite direction to everything else everything else was going further and further away from shore and his block of wood was going closer to shaw and he didn't really figure out what it was because he was just so desperate to survive when he got close enough to the bank he could jump off the log of wood and climb up to the shore and only then when he looked he saw it wasn't a log of wood it was a crocodile now why did that crocodile do that now some people say oh maybe because he wanted some more bed the following day well i don't think that's the case you're kind to animals and animals are kind to you even crocodiles so i love that full story so you know from tragedies we sometimes get some amazing inspiring stuff from hong kong how do i how do i overcome my wanting to settle all past stuff and find a solution to it how do i let it go certainly fine closure thank you and happy birthday okay you know that i was saying which i mentioned i i mentioned this last week because when i went down to albany someone had actually carved that into a nice piece of wood and it was in my room where i was resting when i was in the albany monastery and that's the old saying don't seek revenge because karma will get the bastards anyway but sometimes people criticize me i'm probably shouldn't speak like that speak more polite but do you remember if i speak it polite of course you don't you add a little bit of spice to the the words and people remember it and it's true your buddhists can will eventually make its way around and sometimes you see the hardships they must really suffer for that so don't need to settle all past stuff find a solution to it you learn from it don't be so stupid next time to sort of marry a person like that check them out first of all or whatever it is or even better don't get married at all come on come on now that's a wonderful lifestyle anyway from australia to action during meditation i'm worried and i'm suppressing my thoughts instead of letting go how do i tell the difference if you're suppressing the thoughts you can feel the tension in your mind and the fear that if you let go those thoughts will come back it's a totally different feeling so if you let him go it's so peaceful just there's not a thought there you can come in if you want thoughts they're not there suppression can only work temporarily and it's not a real solution at all you don't suppress anything you realize that silence is more beautiful isn't it more beautiful than me speaking unfortunately there's one more question when monastics become too old to live independently in a monastery what happens to them oh we do have the voluntary euthanasia fortunately that voluntary euthanasia is allowable now so it has to be voluntary we just actually just talk to them and say come on do the right thing no what happens do they grow old and die in the monastery do they go to lay people's nursing homes oh crisis remember i'm 70 next couple of weeks there are a lot of times that you can care for a person and sometimes there's no way you'll do that you look after people and as i say it's amazing the health you can get with good meditation i'm not just saying this you know that i have been a very healthy mom for a long time now again the only reason why i take those covered medications medicines is for travel to prove it to other people but there's something inside your meditative it's very powerful you just know how to look at your body and just leave me alone for a couple of hours and it's all gone so that's one of the reasons why you take that medication too old to live independently in the monastery it was one of the oldest people in the world i think was in phuket hundred and it was 114 that monk in phuket it was in his late hundreds and you know he was he didn't have much it wasn't running around or going on a surfboard in phuket beach [Music] but he was just still fit and healthy i talked to people very clearly it's interesting old age what is it and sometimes as long as your mind is clear and strong which is what we do as especially monks and nuns we really train our mind you may think my tummy is fat but that's only because we follow the middle way but the mind is really fit and healthy that's the most important part when your mind is fit and healthy and that governs everything else so uh they die in the monastery yeah sometimes they're dying and money should go to a lay people's nursing home no i don't think i would do that how old are you now venable only 40. now we won't do that just learn to live peacefully and happily by yourself you don't need much attention but anyway i've got it all worked out for when i die because you see in my cave where i live so i'll just close the doors bolt them and just stay in there so you won't know is he alive is he dead or just suspended animation and that'd be great no to actually to raise funds whatever you want to do mr president doesn't disappear doesn't go he's still there oh is he not there he's gone to nothing from nothing to nothing thank you for listening very good because that came you can't get in there once unlock the doors there's no way you can get in there you can't borrow from up top you won't know beautiful way it's like it's like a mausoleum but it's already it's already there but okay now what we're doing next oh yeah uh we just bow three times aren't we okay and then we can go and do whatever you need to do any questions you come up afterwards if you really want to irritate me now you can come and leave it safe if you want oops you

Channel: Buddhist Society of Western Australia

Views: 43,881

Rating: 4.9296188 out of 5

Keywords: Buddhism, Dhamma, Dharma talk, Ajahn Brahm, nothing, peace

Id: u40j_OlBL2U

Length: 77min 3sec (4623 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 16 2021