Uncertainty | Ajahn Brahm | 6 November 2020

as always after the meditation always some people have to leave we'll also see how many more people come in so this evening in profit more people came in that went out yay so anyway for this evening's talk as usual just trying to think of something which i haven't talked about before which is impossible i'll be giving talks here for how many years and not only here other places as well but i thought what came up in my mind today was to talk about one of the the characteristics of buddhism you know the deep characteristics which a lot of people misunderstand if you understood it won't be much point talking about it about the factor of anita which many people say impermanence but i'm focusing on a part of that word which my teacher in thailand adjunct would often sort of focus on and emphasize called uncertainty and there was a direct translation of that word uncertainty things which are not reliable predictable that the fact that life is like a book you don't know who did it who's responsible just like these uh books which i used to read as a kid about to see what's going to happen next the life is totally uncertain and it was wonderful that you didn't know what the last chapter of the book is going to be you didn't know just know who was responsible who's going to win and who's going to lose because that is the nature of life totally uncertain what does that do to people a lot of times that people just get so tense when they cannot know what the future is going to be but many of you who are old enough now to know that you cannot predict the future you don't know what's going to happen and in a sense that makes life far more interesting if your life was all predicted and you could find out you know who you were going to marry and when you're going to divorce why are you laughing relationships are uncertain as well how many kids are going to have what they're going to do where they're going to end up you know who's going to win the election who's going to lose the election who's going to all the uncertainty of life and that can cause a lot of people a lot of stress and suffering why it's because we don't accept the fact that life is unpredictable and uncertain and there's too much in our world which we cannot know and own so that lets us when life is very uncertain we accept that actually life becomes one of these wonderful adventure books rather than something you always know what is going to happen in the end and in fact in life in real life there are no endings there are no needs that prince charming and cinderella may fall in love and ride off into the sunset happy ever after they don't say what happens when cinderella has her first baby and prince charming has to change the diapers and doesn't really like doing stuff like that and where they have arguments and stuff and they don't have enough money to live in their palace or whatever happens but the uncertainty of life is something which we can fight against and resist or we can accept as the adventure of our life and of course those stories which i learned about uncertainty they weren't reassuring at first and he understood how to live with uncertainty and how to value that uncertainty and even celebrate uncertainty when you celebrate uncertainty you cannot do too much predictions of what's going to happen next i know people love predicting things or trying to predict things and i remember going to hong kong one time and they took me to this street where all the fortune tellers were and i looked at those fortune tellers and they were just so ill dressed poor and some of them were out in the rain and i realized my goodness you call that a fortune teller they certainly can't tell their own fortune how on earth can they tell yours so but also if they could tell you a fortune you know sometimes people say i'm you're a good meditator surely you must be able to tell the future please i'm really struggling with paying the bills surely you know the lottery number do monks know the lottery number coming up next week if they did i wouldn't tell you that's if they did okay i'm not saying anything but sometimes the why sometimes they do say that ghosts and spirits can tell lottery numbers as your dad tell this story last week about the did i tell the story about the man who was at home and heard the sound someone told him go to the casino does that last weeks no you don't know this one well it's amazing because this this guy he was at home by himself he was just not just relaxing at home his wife was out at work and he heard the sound go to the casino who said that no one was at home but he heard it again go to the casino and he thought must be some spirit for some ghosts as i say that ghost can be really really helpful sometimes so he said well why not so he got in his car went to the casino and as he was going through the entrance of the casino he heard this voice again say go to the roulette wheel go to the roulette wheel he heard it but no one else did so he went through a net wheel and he sat down and then the spirit said pour ten dollars on number seven ten dollars on number seven if that was you what would you do yeah that's what he did he put 10 bucks on number seven and then the the croupier spanned the wheel threw the ball in ran around and went and he landed on number seven he won a lot of money wow and he could hear the spirit say yes yes it's wonderful put all the winnings on number 12. put everything on number 12. hear the spirit say that very clear no one else did so he put all the winnings on number 12 and the creepier turned the wheel through the pawn round and round and round it went and and the ball landed on number 12. yeah yeah you heard the spirit say does this ever happen to you and so he then heard the spirit say put all of your winnings on number 23. all of your winnings are number 23. and of course you know who wouldn't put all the winnings on number 23. he put it on number 23 and by this time a crowd had come and they were all looking and watching because this was a big bet and if it went on number 23 oh it'd be a lot of money he won so he bought all all the money on number 23. and even the croupier was a bit concerned losing so much money for the casino but anyway he spanned the wheel and he threw the ball in round and round and round it went like it was going around forever it took such a long time and everybody around the roulette wheel was silent they're all really excited what would happen it went round and round and as the wheel stopped he fell in number 23 and then jumped out into the one next to it and then he heard it very very clearly oh [Music] said the ghost see if a ghost makes mistakes you can't trust him because he was stronger than the spirit's wisdom is uncertainty you never know what's going to happen next but anyway so with the uncertainty of life it gives us a greater sense of adventure peace enjoy whatever's happening in life it cannot be predicted but anyway attention always used to say what his uh prediction of someone's future because people would always harass him to try and get him to use his powers to help he did have marvelous powers and i know that could read minds and all sorts of stuff what that chance i could do so what he one day did this guy came up to him and he said ajah [Music] can you please read the lines on my palm tell me my future now john charles says straight away we don't do that can't do it no won't do it and that is when the man came up and said but but you just gave talks on gratitude and i've been helping you for so many years giving you donations bringing you food giving you lifts to places i've helped and served you i've worked for your buddhist society so many years surely that that's something you can do for me just read the part the lines on my palms and tell me my future so ajay said yes i'll do that for you oh because he knew that gentile would not make any mistakes and ajahn chah was great he never made a mistake at all he read that guy's future perfectly what he did first of all he took his hand and he started tracing the lines on his palm one after the other and every now and again he stopped and he looked he looked at the guy he looked back at the hand and the guy was really scared other times he went another line he looked and smiled thought the guy after about 10 minutes of reading the palm on this poor man's hand the man was just so excited he was totally wound up imagine that was you you're with a person like a buddhist saint who's going to tell you your future exactly what's going to happen to you how amazing that would be and he could trust it that this you know was a monkey wouldn't lie when he finished adjunct looked at him and said your future yes yes yes yes your future sir yes yes what's my future going to be and i don't make any mistakes say that yeah i know you don't make mistakes get on with it what is my future he said sir your future yes it is future is uncertain and that judge i wasn't wrong it's totally right and that was not just a joke that was examples of you know these great teachers telling stories which were amusing which also had incredibly deep meaning now your future is uncertain if it was fixed i mean you could do nothing with it it's just like you're in a prison of fate rather than somebody who could act speak do something be kind to make a very lovely future the uncertainty gives opportunities certainty is almost like a death when there's uncertainty there's always things which you can do to change the future to make it better it's not fixed it's not certain we can always change things and that's becomes a wonderful opportunity for you people why don't people accept uncertainty because of people's fear what happens if everything goes wrong have in your life so far things gone totally wrong i remember adjourned bromali he's next door now he reminded me of an occasion when things went wrong for me totally wrong and that was for all those years and dennis remembers this good old president all those years building up bodhinyana monastery and i've mentioned many many times of just laying the bricks myself just doing the plumbing and just all things passing and and getting the approvals and building this huge monastery down at serpentine and it was what was it um january the 31st i think 1991 i think it was the hottest day the hottest temperature ever recorded ever recorded in western australia on that day now it stands at number two the hottest day in western australia in this area 46 point something degrees before the bus fire came and it's a huge bushfire came into bodhinyana monastery when i was there and it was very huge and dangerous trees were exploding like bombs going off the crown fire and we had to be evacuated but i got in the news that evening i think uh dennis you saw me on was it channel seven on channel nine or something yeah yeah i made it on the channel seven news but anyway so we were evacuated and as we evacuated you could see on top of the hill just the devastation like explosions like a wall going on up there just the trees because they're all um gum trees eucalypt trees in that type of heat all of the the oil evaporates and it forms this sheath around the trees of a mixture of gas and oxygen and just a spark a little spark and it goes bang and i remember at that time i was only number two mug but jacqueline was away when this happened and when he came back he didn't know we'd been evacuated so he tried to get up the hill the kingsbury drive and all the authorities the police and the rangers said you can't go up they said but i have to get up this i know you can't another tree exploded bang and i said do you want to go up there he said no it's really dangerous i remember bombarding reminding me that when that happened i thought well that's it all that hard work that was i don't know how many years 83 we started that nine days back it's been later than that 91 but anyway all those huts i'd built the main hall the dining room i thought why that's it it's all been destroyed huge bushfire we didn't have any aerial bombing in that day we didn't have anything but i remember that night we were evacuated and i thought oh well it's worth it it didn't matter that it all went wrong what mattered to me was we gave it everything we had tried our best and then oh well we could always build another monastery that positive attitude and uncertainty was wonderful maybe it was because of that the following morning when we woke up and the ranger came to pick me up to know to take me to see what was left and what we saw what was left everything was perfect the trees were decimated and there's no green anywhere and for those who've been to bodhinyana monastery you know there's so much trees and bushes everywhere you can't see very far but when all the greenery was burnt off you could actually see all the huts like in the distance even because there was nothing obstructing them it was really an amazing sight to see but the most important thing was everything had survived and i do remember just because i was in charge with the bushfire recovery there and just with the head guy from the bushfire brigade in perth came along and i took him around to see the non-damage remember him coming to one of the a-frames and as we looked around there he looked underneath it because it was just on stilts and so you could look underneath it looked around it he just examined it so much and then he stopped and looked to me i always remember his words he said brahm this should not be here but it was it has survived the uncertainty you don't know what's going to happen whether the building's going to survive or not survive but the point was as far as i was concerned either way was fined by me if it was burnt off we'd rebuild it if it was destroyed then we'd rebuild it so if it wasn't destroyed we'd just celebrate and that was a wonderful thing to do i just i always remember just though with that interview it was on channel seven or nine or whatever but after and then like they asked me what was like being in a bushfire when things were exploding all over the place and it was dangerous but then afterwards i got a call from that the lady who interviewed me on live tv for the news and she said can you come and give a talk on another show we're doing i said why and she said because she couldn't understand she couldn't believe why we had no trauma at the end of that event why i wasn't scared why i wasn't crying oh we almost died we've lost everything she never sort of experienced that before so i actually made an impression on her losing everything without any anxiety then i asked our committee should i go on this show and apparently it was a show called this is many years ago the hinch report and apparently that was a bit of a dodgy show apparently so i couldn't go on the tv i missed my opportunity because don't remember these little occasions of no good fun but because you had an understanding of uncertainty so you never know what's going to happen next you can never know because of that you give opportunities for little miracles to happen like the saving of bodhinyana monastery you got little miracles to happen like the the purchasing of our nuns monastery which was totally impossible when we saw this land which we had no money to buy not enough anyway but then we auctioned it was on auction and where is he eddie at the back there he was totally irresponsible but so lovable because he over bid and it was actually just at the cut-off price so we managed to get that it was looking at uncertainty in life can we afford it treasurer said no i said who knows that's the uncertainty part of it so sometimes you can use uncertainty for your benefit and for the benefit of a much better course instead of always trying to predict things work things out and crunch the numbers and think this is what's going to happen sometimes you know that the world doesn't work like that the real world sometimes gives you so many surprises the unexpected part of life so many people i know should be dead they had these sicknesses and illnesses which were terminal but there's something about just how you know your life lives and ends what actually keeps making it keep going on the story which comes up was good old ted and he was one of the first people in the hospice over in murdoch and i went to go and see him there because he was as his his daughter was a buddhist and when i went to go and see him in there it was only like a one-way in and out in a box sort of hospice you know you're supposed to go in there just for palliative care look after you until you pass away but i always remember his story i remember this because it tells me a lot about the uncertainties of health and especially of diet because poor old ted the first night in the hospital his doctors his nurse said what do you want for for dinner this evening and ted replied well you know i've got diabetes so i can't have any sugary stuff i've got cholesterol so i can't have any oily stuff i've got hardened arteries i can't have any salty stuff and gave all this list of stuff which he could not eat because of his health and the nurse said what on earth are you talking about ted you are not gonna die of diabetes you're not gonna die of a heart attack you know your cancer is going to kill within about three or four days so you can eat whatever you want and old ted his eyes went wide really i mean everything i can eat yeah and so the nurse sort of arranged for him to have this really greasy food lots of salt really sugary sweets afterwards and for about six days he had this incredible diet of all the stuff which his wife had banned in his kitchen for years and he went into remission honest story true and he walked out of that hospital or that hospice now that is not a cure which is recommended in the west australian health system but only uncertainty of how these things actually happen in this life and so when we we have we don't know what tomorrow is going to bring but we're open for surprises of life then that gives our life a much much much better um sense of happiness and joy when we don't think oh this is terrible we think we can predict the future can you predict your future there's many people here who come on my meditation retreats and sometimes i think they're terrible meditators and i get these amazing meditation experiences total surprise unexpected uncertain that's the nature of our life there's so much uncertainty we think we can control our future we can control our meditation we can control even our health we can control the day we're going to die can hear i've just known too many people who were supposed to be dead years ago but for some reason or another something happens and they recover people with tumors really bad ones and then something happens they found out why they had that tumor not the usual um explanation but something much deeper understanding the stress of their life and how to overcome that stress how to get beyond it past it how to get beyond the worry of life what is a worry anyway but believing in certainty in the future we don't know what's going to happen next so enjoy uncertainty and the fact that even when you just go on a retreat you do some meditation sometimes you have the most amazing experiences when you least expect them even your success in meditation is based on uncertainty you can't predict it you cannot force it you can't make it happen you let it occur rather make things happen so the uncertainty in life of course many people have the uh good argument but uncertainty we need to have some degree of certainty to know just we've got a place to go and stay this evening we've got a home a house sometimes i look at my own life and my home my house where i live my health no there are times there are times when especially when i go overseas or interstate sometimes i don't have a house or a home you don't know where you're going to sleep that night you trust other people will pick you up and take you to the right destination but sometimes it can be uncertain i still remember the story of ajahn sajata he was going to conference over in indonesia i don't know how he managed to do this but he flew to the wrong airport and he went to the airport and when he went through there's no one to meet him i wonder what the heck's going on and of course being a monk has no money no mobile phone what am i gonna do fortunately in his case anyway somebody recognized him don't just see your buddhist monk where you going he said it's supposed to be a conference here no conference on this town but i managed to find out where the conference was and give him another flight to go to the right place i don't know how that can happen but it almost happened to me once when i went to leave in london when i arrived at london airport my brother was supposed to meet me i came out and and then couldn't see my brother anywhere ah what have gone wrong because there's a mug you're in big trouble if there's no one there to meet you you know you've got no money you can't just eat you know you got nothing to do you just walk maybe it actually reminded me of another story which i haven't said for i don't think ever but there's some of our monks are just so good at practicing uncertainty not making plans because there's one monk he was a japanese monk a friend of mine and uh now with ajanchar and he decided to go and visit his family in japan but instead of actually just arranging everything he never even told his family he was coming his family lived up in the north of japan he just arrived at the airport in tokyo just got out of the uh the aircraft and just went to the customs and had his passport stabbed and then started walking just walked into tokyo and then just where he rested that night was just in the park in the morning got up and started walking again and you know we just had no plans no money first couple of days didn't get anything to eat but did you know go on arms round in tokyo and as he was walking somebody saw him he said who are you because he was japanese he spoke obviously perfect japanese language and then he said he was just a monk he's walking from the airport to visit his family and of course that was newsworthy he got on the news and after he got on the news the thai ambassador to japan saw that and so at last a real monk someone who doesn't make plans doesn't have money to survive somewhere and sleep outside and just walk and just living with the uncertainty of life and that she took him under her wing and just really looked after him and she later on became the ambassador thai ambassador to australia so you know she came here a couple of times that was suchitra and that's where she got her faith in buddhism again seeing a really good monk practicing in a good way and so even one of our marks did that some years ago arrived at perth airport i knew he was coming sometime but he didn't tell me the day he was coming or the time he was coming he said he just wanted to just try just living with uncertainty and see what happens so he arrived at perth airport no one to pick him up no money or credit card or anything just started walking and i think he got to about 50 meters outside [Music] outside of the the the doors and someone stopped him in the car hey you're a mug where you going and so he said i'm going to certain time i'll give you a lift who needs taxis and you've got this lift all the way there so living with uncertainty he was actually also the mark had mentioned this story to someone today he was also the monk he was scheduled to give a talk at one of our groups which is in armadale in the armadale group and he was inviting down the monastery and that we had a very wealthy sri lankan man came to say hello and he came in a rolls royce so i think it's the only time we've seen the rolls-royce and burning down the monastery and so then it was on a tuesday afternoon and we said oh this month's got to go to the um the armadale group this evening would you like to give him a lift so he said yeah i can give him a lift so armada as many of you may know is a low socio-economic area and so it was really quite a first for a month to arrive at this group in a rolls royce and they never let him forget that is that taking a lift it's not mine anyway so living with uncertainty allows you to travel in rolls royces you don't know what's going to happen and that allows you to inspire people that you can you don't need to have too many plans what's going to happen in the future you'll see what happens next and you know that's sometimes just i know maybe i'm getting old now sometimes i look at bodhinyana monastery where i live and all the buildings which have been down there all the hard work of so many years and just you know to think how did that happen and sometimes if i started with a plan that plan would never have been finished but instead of having a plan you know you do a bit of brick work today a bit of plumbing tomorrow a bit of painting today day by day and then after so many years you have this incredible house called body known amongst where so many people can come and live and stay and practice and visit it's a beautiful place but it was never planned it kind of happened out of uncertainty it's the same with our life all you can do is display one brick of peace today and tomorrow you lay another bit of peace or kindness or wisdom the next day another one you don't know where you're gonna lay it how it's going to fit in you put it together and after so many years of your life so many uncertainties but just making peace with it being kind with it now being even joyful with it you have this beautiful edifice called the buddhist society of west australia or bodhinata monastery or damasaw it's wonderful that that's there's something which is organic about that how it evolves how the next day that something happens and you can go left instead of right instead of always making this huge plan of where you're going to go and how you're going to do it and where it's going to happen instead you just evolve day by day reacting in a good way so the only certainty which we can have is actually to making sure we do grow in these qualities like kindness and peace and love and joy because those are the qualities which empower us empower us to be able to to deal with any problems which happen in life any problems which occur in our life so you know the doctor comes and says you've only got a few days to live are you sure of course you're never sure too many people i've seen have not died and what certainty is there in life the only certainty there is in life is that even though somebody says that taxes and death the two certain things in life no they're not i don't pay taxes i don't have any money to pay taxes with that's not certain but the uncertainty in life far outweighs what is certain which means you cannot predict what's going to happen next you don't know i don't know what i'm going to eat tomorrow don't know who's going to come for the lunch tomorrow except for 10 nuns are coming tomorrow that's pretty uncertain if that actually happens but anyway there's so much uncertainty in life i accept that live with that embrace it celebrate it never knowing what you're going to do next and how it's all going to work out but enjoying every moment of it the one thing which i can do is to make peace with whatever happens to be kind to whatever happens or whoever you meet and be gentle to whatever experience occurs in your life to make peace be kind be gentle which for those of you don't know is a decent translation of the second factor of the noble eightfold path taught by the buddha make peace be kind be gentle so whatever you have to do with the knife that's not certain you don't know what's coming around the corner what interesting i recorded interesting interesting challenge is waiting for you but what you always know you can do is you can make peace with it whatever it is you can make that that lay that brick of peace you can always be kind to it you can always be gentle whatever happens to you in this life which means you can always survive and make it a wonderful experience but if you demand it always to to go in a particular way then you're asking for trouble you don't know what's going to happen tomorrow but you can always make peace with what happens tomorrow be kind to it and be gentle that becomes our life so what we're teaching here what we're learning here is equipping you to deal with uncertainty and not to not to deny the uncertain nature of life not to demand it always occurs according to the laws even laws of nature just one of the books which i saw today when i went to somebody's house for a wonderful diner was our book by uh called the was it the ten delusions of science but i remember that because when i was a student one of the best lectures i ever went to was by this gentleman who he was the location professor in physics at the time fred hoyle and he was incredibly brilliant and he was putting all these these amazing heretical views out onto the into the world such as i'm not sure if i'm going to over your heads but the law of gravity the universal gravitational constant big g that he was saying why should it be constant why should it be a fixed number and then this time later this gentleman was actually found out that it wasn't constant people people assume it is but it's not there's too much uncertainty even with fundamental laws of physics and i say that as a physicist and i say that because why do people deny that when the evidence is strong that even fundamental laws of physics aren't certain because when you allow uncertainty into life it makes you feel a bit vulnerable a bit scared you don't really know everything which is happening and being able to have kindness and our peace and gentleness that is what equips you we're dealing with strange stuff so even the uncertainty of things you don't know and don't understand which you'll never know and understand things like ghosts are you scared of ghosts if so why because ghosts can be some wonderful beings who do really help and reassure and one of the last stories is a story which i didn't tell last week when i was telling lots of stories about ghosts and i had permission of the gentleman involved to tell the story because the beautiful story it was the story of which happened just around the corner from here in nile way in not omar and this gentleman he lived alone in his house and he was a arranger for the one of the shires and he uh told me that when he woke up in the middle of the night he saw his mother standing at the end of the bed his mother lived in essex in england he said it was the first and only time he'd seen a ghost it was his mum i didn't see her just like in a vision it was very clear like she was really standing there like a full human being but he said the most wonderful part of that experience was she was smiling at him and he was receiving his mother's love he knew it was a ghost because she was on the other side of the world but just laying in bed that just will lend up against the back rest of the bed the light was on they're just looking at his mum and she was smiling at him for about five or six or seven minutes and then she faded away disappeared he knew his mother must have died so what did he do what does an english man do in such a situation makes himself a cup of tea i don't know why they'd do that so he made himself a cup of tea and as he was drinking the tea the telephone rang he said sister pete pete mum's dead said yeah i know she just visited me what and it was totally true that's you know she'd seen he'd seen his mum as a ghost for about five or six minutes expressing her love to him and he to her silently that beautiful experience it's uncertain what would you do if you saw somebody you loved who just passed away would you be afraid would you say no no no no or would you accept the uncertainty and be able to enjoy by making peace being kind being gentle with whatever you experience so that's how to deal with the uncertainties of life okay so that's enough so now we have the questions from overseas or from here i know that one time one person here they sent a question from the floor but they could never get that question answered so they asked it online from latvia sri lanka united arab emirates and brazil first of all from latvia how to help people who are way too concerned with world issues politics for example and even fight others over uncertainty in how things will progress this politics is sometimes it's important to actually to vote and to do the right thing but the monks were getting involved you know with what happened in what was happening or happened i don't know what's how i sorted out in you united states and why we can't do anything about it even today somebody asked me adjunct could you please chant chant chant so one of the candidates gets over the line i said i can't do that why not because when i ever did shining for somebody i was actually chanting to make them happy if i was trying to make them happy i said may you both lose they don't have the responsibilities i still remember you know many of the politicians i met uh was it john hyde he used to be the the representative for perth and he was really helpful in this society here and also with the thai community and eventually you know lost his seat and that's the best thing which ever happened to him because you know a few years later after he lost his seat i was in bangkok giving a talk and this guy came up and said do you remember me and i said no please don't be offended if i ever say that you come up to me and say do you remember me and i say no because i mean many people can't remember everybody and he said i know it's not it was john hyde he said i was john hyde as soon as he said i could recognize him yeah you look so much younger and he did he'd lost in about five years when he wasn't in politics so you know sometimes you look at politics and say isn't there a better way i don't know but anyway sometimes that people get just so worn out but anyway he was just got a job with the united nations over in bangkok and was having a wonderful time anyway with worldly issues politics of someone even fight others over uncertainties of how things will progress fighting others what happens when we fight who's right and who's wrong sometimes you might say we're both wrong there must be some other ways i mean what was it what winston churchill always used to say george or john don't worry in other words no just talk things over from sri lanka lay people need to continue with planning and think about certainty up to a limit yeah i think we that take that limit a bit too far otherwise it'll be hard to earn a living in the corporate world kindly advise you have some plans but i remember reading an article once from a business person who said but you have to in our modern world be able to i think they called it turn on a dime in other words to change your policy almost immediately because you know the world changes so fast and you know events happen really really quickly if you don't know how to adapt fast you know you lose okay like you know all the people who invested or wanted have their careers in hospitality and because of covid you know they can't have that career at the moment or in the aircraft industry or what was it in those um industries which had you know remember the old films you used to take you know and you had to go and take them to a shop to develop them kodak and as they had to sort of change pretty quickly because the world changes so quickly so you can plan but make sure as they said in this article if there are any plants make them out of rubber never out of concrete so you can bend them and change them as as quickly as you can to be able to be adaptable to the changing situations of life and certainty is just pretty much a delusion and that way you can you know understand uncertainty accept uncertainty and make a very good career out of it from united arab emirates how does one keep a positive attitude towards uncertainty about the future in a society where people are always worried and cons concerned about what might happen next what would it be like if we didn't worry and get so concerned about what might happen next it will still happen but if you didn't worry about it you'd be far saner more at peace more at ease with life instead of just wasting so much energy about worrying about things which you cannot change instead of thinking about things where you make no difference at all and instead of accepting the uncertainty of this life and that as human beings that you know we do have an amazing ability to change to adapt to so many different situations and circumstances of life even i still remember my family talking to me about the second world war in uk i was born just afterwards and they said there was so much destruction of that time so much uncertainty i don't know whether you're going to survive the day because of the blitz just to make the point even my mother and my grandmother were in a terraced house when the bomb hit next door and people next door the neighbors instantly killed my mother's arm was apparently gashed with the broken glass but they survived but it's at that time when the uncertainty of whether you're going to live tomorrow or the next day they changed a whole lot of the way that they related to one another in that world and they had they said it was the most wonderful time of no fun joy strangely they didn't notice what was going to happen next in their life and they couldn't plan because there's a war going on but there was some way that they weren't the worrying concern wasn't as strong as it is these days when there's small things happen obviously coving created a lot of uncertainty for people they couldn't plan so much where they're going to go what they're going to do and how they're going to do it but it was a hopefully it's a great teaching for us and there's many benefits which i'm sure each one of you have noticed and from brazil how to embrace our uncertainties sometimes this feeling is so strong that drives me to madness it's the uncertainties of life when you cannot predict life just like you know those days you know when there were wars there are still our wars in some places unfortunately but sometimes that when there's such gross uncertainties it sometimes arouses in human beings just another uh aspect of their kindness and ability to work together to forgive and to realize the nature of this world it never was this world never is so clear and predictable and safe i don't know how many of you like the cartoonist just reading cartoonist lunic but just the start of covid that he wrote this wonderful cartoon with a guy talking to a duck and of course the duck was far wiser than the guy and especially i kept a copy of that cut in somewhere in my room and where the the guy was saying oh life is so uncertain with kovid it's always been uncertain it's not covered in some other reason for it to be uncertain it's all going wrong life always goes wrong and so it was a sense of sometimes the duck was like more at ease and more accepting of the general nature of life for many many times we always try and and control the uncertainties of life in other words to put in safety procedures things which we can do when life tends to go wrong ways of we think of dealing with not to deal with uncertainties but to obliterate them and to make life nice and safe and sure for everybody i think that that is going against the truth of our world we do live in an uncertain world times are always uncertain maybe it's because i'm a monk that i can live with uncertainty with much greater freedom but the truth of the matter is as the buddha said and nature this world samsara is uncertain and if we can embrace that we don't go mad about the fellow from brazil was saying in fact we're much more at peace we try and deny uncertainty deny the truth of our world then that's where craziness comes in madness suffering is asking from this world what it can't give you and that certainty is what this world is unable to supply any questions from the floor okay so i think that's enough for this evening so thank you for listening and i hope you enjoyed it and i hope you have a wonderful evening but it's uncertain sorry son you

Channel: Buddhist Society of Western Australia

Views: 51,881

Rating: 4.9267116 out of 5

Keywords: buddhism, Dhamma, Buddha Dhamma, Ajahn Brahm, Dharma talk, uncertainty

Id: e5jq9w7tD_k

Length: 57min 47sec (3467 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 06 2020