Freedom: The Path to Happiness

I had a request for a talk yesterday. I, which I promised I would give today. Where someone who is asking the question. Is happiness really possible in our modern life? Or are we always going to have to have suffering and problems and difficulties in our life? So it's, uh, I talk about happiness and, uh, obviously that many of you know that, uh, Buddhist monks are supposed to be the happiest people in the world. Uh, that was, uh, the findings from Professor Davidson of Wisconsin University. And that's objective. In other words, that was find on a, uh, functional magnetic resonance, uh, scan of a person's brain. So surely that, uh, Buddhist should know something about happiness in its causes. And for those of you who know basic Buddhism, that's the whole purpose of the Four Noble Truths. The basic teachings of the Buddha know the heart of this thing we call Buddhism. You know, you may say, and it's accurate to say, it's all about the four noble Truths. And you also know the way I've been teaching these four noble Truths for many years now is to re-arranging the Four Noble Truths. And talking about happiness is cause sometimes we aren't happy and why we're not happy. As for our noble truths, happiness, the cause of happiness that sometimes we're unhappy. Why we're unhappy. And that to me made so much sense when I was a young man, because really, I thought the essence of all religions was, you know, basically the answer to two questions. You know, what is happiness and how do I get it? If I knew those two answers, then you'd have all the religion you really wanted in the world, because all the other theories and philosophies and theologies and all that sort of stuff was all very well to talk about. But what I was really concerned with in my life was, you know, the problem of happiness and suffering and how to overcome the suffering and find real, true happiness. So the question of, you know, is there real happiness in this world? You know, if a person experience, I can say, yes, there certainly is real happiness, true happiness. But it's also fascinating in my life's journey to find that that happiness lies in places where people just don't even look. And it's because we don't look in those places that many people will live their whole life and never actually experience the deep, peaceful, wonderful happiness which were possible in life. But first of all, I'm sort of saying about what happiness is and how to get it. Now what? I sort of start talking, uh, in this little, uh, presentation today about why is it that sort of people have problems in life. You know, what is the the cause of unhappiness in life? Why do people keep getting into these unhappy states? Certainly there is part of life which is beyond one's control there. The difficulties and pains of life, the death of a loved one, the disappointments in one's career, the problems with one's children, the arguments with one's partner, the pain and sickness in the body, or just the basic, uh, getting caught in traffic jams when you run away to the Buddhist society. The basic sufferings in life are there, but they're not the real sufferings. The point is that, uh, one of the things which the Buddha says is it's the attachment carrying those burdens around more than they should be. And that's where I'm going to start this talk today. Why is it that people get attached to suffering? That's basically what it is. Many years ago, I was privileged to give a talk at a grief and loss conference in Observation City. It was a national conference on grief and loss or run by some psychologists and psychiatrists. And I remember giving a presentation there just after there had been a presentation by the parents of, I think, here at Glen and one of the young ladies who was killed by the Claremont killer. I still not found who exactly did that. And they were expressing just their pain at the loss of their daughter. I think a young girl, I think she was a lawyer, successful, beautiful, who just disappeared one night. And her body was found some time later by the Claremont killer, whoever that was. And apparently that that session, which I did not attend myself, created a great feeling of suffering and angst amongst the. The people in the, uh. The conference and I came along with my usual positive attitude and how to deal with this this notice my positive attitude because I had lived in Thailand for nine years. And it's one of those, uh, sayings which comes from my experience in nine years of, if you like research. And my research was actually attending funeral after funeral after funeral, cremation after cremation, because our monastery in Thailand was a local cremation ground, we hung out with the ghosts, which was actually a very peaceful place to stay when I was wandering and wanted to get away from people because when I was a monk, I like a bit of peace and quiet. Ajahn Chah always used to tell us that when you want to stay somewhere at nighttime, ask the local village where the cremation ground is. There'll be like an open area of forest and you go and stay there. It's the most peaceful place because the villagers are too scared to come and visit you. So I really loved those ghosts for protecting me. They were like my bodyguards, my minders, to keep all the people away so I could meditate quietly and peacefully. So good on you ghosts. But that particular forest monastery was banana charred. That was like a ghost monastery because had a cremation ground there. But also I used to see there are so many funeral services. Again and again and again. And because you were dependent upon those villagers for your arms, food, you'd see them every morning. You go into their their village. And these were the people you grew up with. I remember just as I was nine years in Thailand, mostly that monastery, when I came over here, uh, to help start this monastery over in serpentine and help support this, uh, Buddhist society of Western Australia. I think it was about 4 or 5 years before I had a chance to go back to that village. And as soon as I went back there, now, getting back into that monastery in the late afternoon, the first time the villagers knew I was there was when I went on arms around. And see all these, uh, ladies and men. When they looked up such a bum. They start crying because he did become part of the village, as one of them had gone away for about 4 or 5 years and come back again. And that's actually how close we were knitted into that community. And I mention that point simply because it establishes the fact that I didn't just see these people at the funeral services. I saw them before I saw them afterwards. These are the people I knew, and I never saw grief. I never saw people crying. I was actually once, I must admit, in all those nine years at once, I saw a tear. Maybe there's 1 or 2 drops of tears fall down the cheek of one lady who lost her husband. But apart from that, there was no solid grief like you see here in Western Australia. And it wasn't that it was suppressed, it was just people saw this from a different attitude. They weren't so attached to their loved ones. And to me it was a revelation. And what I said at the conference that there is a difference, a separation between grief and loss. Loss will always be there. But grief is an added extra. And seeing a culture and that north is part of Thailand had not been affected by any other Western influence. So it was like a pure old Buddhist culture. And we actually saw just how that pure Buddhist culture related to her death. It was a revelation to see that there was a society where grief basically did not exist. And it showed me that our grief is a cultural addition. There is another way of looking at it. And why is it that we attach to that sort of suffering? And basically, it's the same reason you may not agree with me this, but I'm challenging you here. It's the same reason why it is that we go to see these weepy movies. Because we liked to cry. We actually encouraged these emotions inside of us. We like to feel emotional. There is a lady who comes here. She's not here this evening, thank goodness. But she once told me that her mother would always love going to see these wimpy movies, his Chinese movies, since he described them to me. Apparently the Chinese movies. And there's enough people from Malaysia, Singapore, here, Hong Kong that you know what I'm talking about. Boy meets girl. But boy never gets girl. Either the family or the Imperial Army or some other tragedy gets in the way. And in the end, sort of boy and girl sort of, you know, are killed or separated and they know that's going to happen. Every movie is the same. It's always a sad ending. And so her mother would come back from the weekly trip to the movies with red eyes. She'd been crying all the way through and all the way home. And she asked, what the heck do you do that for? I said, because it's nice to cry. Oh, it's so sad. It's so enjoyable to feel sad. Now that's not so funny because at this conference, there's all these key experiences which I have in my life. And it was after I gave that little presentation on how to look at life and death in a different way, so you don't have to be sad. A lady came up to me and said, what's wrong with being sad? Because she had lost, uh, a close relation in tragic circumstances, and she'd been grieving about 5 or 6 years, and there's no way she would give up her grief. But I saw in that lady she was attached to grieving. That was her. That was her persona. She would go to conference after conference, therapist after therapist. It was her identity to be the driver. That is one of our big problems there. Sometimes we form our identities. We attach to that suffering. And that's me. We become the victims, and we enjoy in a perverse way. Being that victor, we enjoy the grief. It's one of the sayings of the Buddha, which you see again and again and again in the original teachings. He's saying all these negative emotions like grief, like anger, like jealousy, even like fear. He said, there is a delight there. If there wasn't a delight, then people wouldn't get into the fear, into the jealousy or into the anger. Because you know that when you feel angry, sometimes people do feel the power. And it's like a heroin or like a meth. Methamphetamine. No, you're you're empowered at that time. There is a delight in those states, which is why people get into being angry or into being violent, into being jealous, or actually even into being grief. There is a delight there. And this is one of the wonderful sayings of the Buddha, because there is a delight there. That's why people will attach to those things. But the reason why they don't let go is because they see the delight, but they don't see the danger. You know, with anger, yeah, you get a high, but you have to pay for that afterwards, just like a drug. And many of the other negative emotions which we have like jealousy. Yeah. You get a sense of, you know, being the one left out, but you have to pay for it afterwards. Grief. You feel that? Yeah. That you are the victim. But my goodness, how much you have to pay. And it's those attachments to those negative emotions, and especially the attachment to the pain of the past that stops us being free to be happy. This morning I went to a little conference run by the Celtic Education Society or Centre. It was for the the teachers in the Catholic education system and it was about reconciliation and forgiveness. And there's some very good speakers there, from an assistant commissioner to Michelle Stubbs who's a coordinator. Think of the victims of child abuse. Is like a huge problem in our modern society. How many people have been sexually or physically abused when they were children? And how the heck do we deal with that? And what was being suggested was, and this is an interesting thing, that many of those victims of child sexual abuse feel that they need to have their day in court to be heard, to have their pain acknowledged, and to have some sort of retribution. Our society did ask for more than retribution, asked for punishment. Jail sentences. Long jail sentences. Some people would want no corporal punishment or even executions. But I'm part of that debate. I was sitting next to a Catholic priest who told me an anecdote for the United States, where some of the relations of a person who was, I think, killed, murdered, attended the execution. Of their relations. Loved one's murderer. And after witnessing the execution. Came back and said the execution was too fast. It should have been slower. Huh. That really sort of hurt me so much. They wanted pain. They wanted suffering in the person who killed their other child or relation or whatever it was. He never gave the details. What is it? A human being wants to harm others because they have harmed us. I say that this attachment to being a victim, attachment, you know, to or this cultural way of looking at things. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, though, is still very, very strong in many people in our society. And when I was asked, you know, what does Buddhism think about things like that? I sort of quoted a, a book, uh, which I read as a student, which changed much of the way I looked at, you know, being a victim. Or crime and Punishments. And I've mentioned that here before, but it's a wonderful book. I've written over a hundred years ago. It's called Erewhon by Samuel Butler. And apparently that really influenced the great British playwright George Bernard Shaw and changed the way he looked at some of his social problems. And the reason why it was a very effective argument now against the way we treat sort of, if you like, criminals or people who've done harm with punishment, was that it used the satire it envisions envisaged a society in which what we call crime today is looked upon as being a sickness and therapy. Therapy. Therapy is the only response to crime. If somebody steals, they go and see a doctor. If somebody rapes, that's looked upon as being a sickness. Punishment is not really looked at at all, but somehow a rehabilitation of trying to work out and remedy that sort of glitch in human nature. But when it came to health matters. If you were sick and ill, that was because you were careless and you were punished. And part of that book, a chapter which I will always remember, was of a court scene in which there was a poor man who had a cold, and when he had a cold, as many colds going around right now as a cough already you'll be in trouble in this society. Because he had a cold. He was in the dark, charged with being sick. And the. Because he was sniffling and he had no defense. And so the judge pronounced him guilty of having a cold and he, uh, before he gave a judgment, a sentence or in the punishment, he said, this is not the first time you appeared before me. You were here last week or three weeks ago with a cold, I warned you. Then if you don't eat better, take better care of your health, let go of your stress. It's your responsibility to be healthy, and you have been negligent and your cold is causing a danger to other people. You're being heedless. You're not caring for others. You're spreading your germs to other people. That's not appropriate. You should be punished. Three years in jail for having a cold. Being a repeat offender. There's some logic to that. In a sense, you know, if you are sick isn't your responsibility to exercise and eat well and keep yourself healthy? And if you are sick, you are a scourge on society. You are robbing it of this resources. You, heedless, are scallywag reprobates, delinquents for always having colds. And they were punished. Now, obviously what that really made very, very clear to me is that the double standards which we have. Why is it that when we're sick, no one gets punished for being sick? And what's the difference between some of the behaviour of human beings which we call criminal? So when I was asked I about what do we think in Buddhism about punishment, it was very much the case that, yeah, sometimes, just like a sickness, you do need quarantine to be put away so you don't harm other human beings for the time. That sickness is still strong in you and you're still a danger to others. But when you're in quarantine is never looked upon as being a punishment. It's always looked upon as being rehabilitating to try and take that problem, to work with it so it's no longer there, and you stay in quarantine as long as you are contagious. A danger to society. In the same way. Why don't we look at that as penal reform? To stay as long as you are a danger to society, but not looked upon as being a punishment, look upon as being a problem which needs to be healed. No punishment but rehabilitation. That's how I understand Buddhism over the many, many years of being a Buddhist, and also how I understand the positive way forward. But why is it that people want don't want that they want people to be punished for their way. They've hurt us. And I think it's very much that we can't just understand deeply why it is that people do these terrible things, why they make these mistakes. They have a deeper understanding and also have a deeper understanding, not just where these crimes, these hurts, these harms come from, but how in the future we can lessen the chance of harm and hurt them. Being attached to being a victim does not help. And sometimes I just wonder why people want punishments of others. When if you're a Christian, you know that God will punish afterwards. What do you need to punish for? If you're a muslim, Allah will look after it. If you're a Buddhist, karma will look after it. And if you don't believe in any religion, you know that person will have to go into psychotherapy for many, many years afterwards, whatever it is. No one ever escapes from the problems of their bad behavior. There's one also one of those insights which I had from experience of visiting prisons many times in the early part of my life here in Western Australia, visiting prisons so many times and getting to know some of these people spending years in jail. Never once did I find a prisoner who had no conscience. They would act as if they had no conscience and think, yeah, when I get out of here, I'm just going to rob as many houses as I can. I don't care about the system. I'm just going to bear with this until I can get out. But when I got to know some of these prisoners, there would always, in every case, expresses how bad and terrible they felt about what they'd done to others. It wasn't a case. They never felt deep inside the hurt which they had given to others. They always felt it. There was always remorse. It is usually it was a tough guy syndrome. They did not want to express it. So there is always a punishment comes there. If someone has done something bad to you, they are going to hurt. It's what we call the law of karma. It has to come back to them. And that is not whether you are a Buddhist or a Christian or whatever. Now that's a law like the law of gravity. You don't have to sort of believe in that or not believe in it. It happens irrespective of your beliefs. But we don't need to punish others. Instead, we can let the whole thing go. Unless we let them go, then we are a victim for the rest of our lives. It doesn't matter who has harmed, hurt, abused you until you can let that go. You're always the victim and you could never be free. It's just how we can reach that point of letting go. And sometimes just to think we need to confront that person who's harmed us. We need to fix the situation ourselves. We need to be acknowledged. We need to be heard. Sometimes that cannot be achieved. And if it's not achieved, then what? Sometimes you don't need to be hurt. Sometimes you don't need to confront the person who's harmed you or hurt you. You are always free at every moment, independent of others, independent of the judicial system, independent of where that person is harmed or hurt or abuse you is. You're always free. To let go at any time. These attachments which we carry around. We choose to carry them. We don't have to. The experience of seeing how grief was not a part of the Buddhist culture. Hundreds of years old in northeast Thailand taught me that many of the things I thought were normal, natural, and had to happen were not normal. Natural had to happen. It's just the way we've learned to deal with the problems of life, and we can relearn them and do things in a different way. If someone has harmed and hurt you, why not let it go pretty quickly? I've often said this is just a start of understanding how to reconcile. Let go. Forgive. Let go. Move on. Often said that when someone calls you an idiot and you keep thinking, why did they call me an idiot? I'm not an idiot. You should not call me an idiot. You've allowed them to call you an idiot three more times. Every time you remember that, you're allowing them to call you an idiot another time. So why not when they call you an idiot? If you get it straight away, then I only call you an idiot once. They're wrong, you know they're wrong. And the proper. I think many of you would accept the wisdom of that. And maybe you've heard it enough times. You've done that already, as people call it. Either call you foolish, they call you ugly, they call you stupid. You just forget it straight away. Oh, for those of you who don't know this wonderful saying. Imagine if they call you a dog. What should you do? Look at your pal. Very good. You got there first. Excellent. But no, that's not what I said. If someone calls you a dog, you should look at your bottom to see if you got a tail. If you ain't got a tail, you're not a dog and a problem. And most of the things which people say about you aren't true because they don't know who you are, what you're doing. So that's a great way of stopping the problem. But what a lot of people do, they keep thinking about it. Every time you think about it, you allow them to call you a dog another time. Now that's easy to understand. But what about someone who's really hurt you? Really abused you, even, like sexual abuse as a kid? Is it the case that every time you remember that you allow them to abuse you again? Every time you really bring that up? Why is it we can't let it go straight away? It's hard, but with an inner strength and a strength which is not coming from willpower, but from wisdom. Power, from compassion. Why do we allow ourselves to be victims? To be made victims? I don't just saying that out of theory. Many, many years ago, there was her disciple. Uh, this was in the time of the the Armadale group. Out of the Armadale group who came out to me. Actually, one of her friends said, you better talk to her because she's in big trouble. And what the trouble was was she found out her husband was sexually abusing her two children. She had missed it. And I told her why she missed it. Because what? You loved that man. And when you love her, man, the signs are there. But you are in denial. Because the whole idea that the man you love is abusing the children you love. It just is so hard to reconcile that it's so hard for the mind to fit those two together. So she just denied the signs of sexual abuse of her children by her husband. It was found out by the school, investigated. It was true. The guy went to jail, the marriage was over, and I was counseling her, counseling her on these Buddhist principles. She had been meditating enough. She understood the basic idea of karma letting go and not being a victim. And she took it on board. She said she could never live with that man or love him again. But she's not going to allow him to make her suffer anymore. She completely let go. Wished him well and eventually moved to the UK, and I kept in contact with her and her kids. But before she left, it was compulsory at that time. Probably still is for her to go for counselling and for kids too. I was sort of quite amused that after going to counselling for about 4 or 5 weeks, she came to complain again. Look, this counselor will not understand. I've moved on and the council is still saying you hate your husband. Don't. You said no, no, I don't hate the husband. But let him go. You hate him, don't you? No, I don't. And she came because she could not be free of her counsellor until she admitted how much she hated and wanted to kill her husband. And so I had to write this letter to the counselor about Buddhist psychology and how Buddhists relate to these things tightly, to free her. And I didn't write this letter easily, because if I got it wrong, then she this lady would be suffering later on down the track. But because I knew her. Because I taught with her. Because I'd counseled her myself. I knew that she had moved on. She did not have that anger. She didn't go to this process of victimhood, which is expected in our modern culture. She moved through fast and so gained her freedom fast. And I really salute her because what she did by moving from sort of that incredible hurt her whole life, being devastated, she moved so quickly through that not into forgetfulness, not into ignorance. That didn't happen, not into denial that, yeah, that happened. That was an awful thing to happen. But I'm not going to allow that to hurt and harm me anymore. Because she moved into that sort of freedom. She took her two kids with her very quickly. They too, followed their mother's lead. Were not going to be victims and moved on. There are other ways of dealing with these terrible abuses. On the other person example I have again is the story of my own father, who told me that he was before the Second World War. Born and brought up in Liverpool and a very, very poor family, as most people were in those days. And his father was a plumber who would go to work before he came home and spent most of the time in the pub spending the money, giving only pittance to my my maternal grandmother, my paternal grandmother, so he to look after the kids and as soon as we'd come home drunk, would get out his belt and whip any kid who came in his path for no reason or another, and then set on his wife. Which is why my father, you know, in my presence, he said, look, I'm sorry, son. No, your grandfather was a bastard and he hated him. But the other thing he told me was that whenever he was under that belt himself, of being sort of beaten for no reason at all, except his father was drunk. He made a resolution, he told me, determined if ever he gets through this and has kids, he will never hit them. And that's what happened. There's no way that my father could hit us. My mother had to be the disciplinarian, and even she didn't do it very well. And he became this incredibly loving father. He was a person whom that story I told you about. No. Taking me down a side street of Acton in London and telling me. Look, whatever you do in your life, son, the door of my house will always be open to you. What I later interpreted as being whatever you do in your life, wherever you go, the door of my house, my heart will be open to you. This unconditional love. And that was a man who suffered tremendous physical abuse as a child. There is other ways of dealing with these things, and I look at that as a way forward. Whereas if we carry that abuse around with us, we become victims. We are stopping ourselves being happy. We don't have to, which is if it happens, great. But there has to come a time, some situation where we let go. Sometimes that letting go does happen when no, we face the person who has, you know, been, uh, hurting us, creating that problem. We face them and we hear them acknowledging that sometimes there is a letting go there, and maybe that might be the only way, the best way. But sometimes that way isn't there for us. If it's not there for us, then we can do it ourselves. We can move on by letting go of this burdens. And when we say that, you know, is the happiness in this world, unless we drop those attachments to the pain of our lives, to the disappointments, to what went wrong, to the heart, the hurt and the harm. If we can't drop those attachments, how on earth can we ever be free? At this conference this morning was a very impressive, um, young Aboriginal leader. I forget her name. Noel was her first name. She was actually a basketball star or something, but, uh, she was, uh, saying very interesting things. So if our Prime Minister, John Howard, says sorry. So then what? She was telling her students she teaches at Clontarf. Have you got to wait until the government says sorry before we can reconcile and move forward? Why leave them that sort of power? Why do we do it now? I thought that was a very inspiring and wonderful way of taking responsibility for ourselves, for our moving out of our victimhood, rather than waiting for someone else to do it forward for us. Whether it's the government, whether it's the courts, whether it's karma or whatever. Why can't we take responsibility for being free and say, I forgive, I let go. I will move on. I'm never going to allow anyone else ever again to control my happiness. You've heard me say that before. It's a very simple thing to say. Don't allow others to control your happiness. It's a very powerful thing to say. It's very profound. And you can see just how much of our lives is controlled by others. And part of what is am I say is always empowering. Empowering you to take control of your happiness. And it can be done. So often we look for solutions in controlling others or the problem lies with my abuser. The problem lies with the government. The problem lies with some somewhere else. The problem lies with my husband. The problem lies with my cancer. The problem lies with my loved one has just died. You can also try and fix up the world by fixing up all those people around you who hurt your harmed you. Perhaps you'll die before that problem is solved. Perhaps even you get reborn many, many times. You'll never find that freedom, that happiness at peace. Fortunately, you don't have to go that path. There's one beautiful message of the Buddha. You cannot really change this world. Well, you sure can change your attitude towards it. The abuse which you've had in the past. You can't change that. The pain, the difficulty, the loss. The person is just died. You can't bring them back again. That's obvious, but sometimes obvious. But we still think that way. We can't undo the abuse. We can't sort of get back that youth which we may have lost. We can't undo things. We can't change the world of the past. But what we can do is change our attitude in this present moment and this attitude change, which is the key. I've always found the finding freedom and happiness to find happiness and freedom does in our world, rather than changing the world first, so that sometime in the future we can be free. Where we can be happy, we can be at peace. And that's not a cop out, because sometimes people say, well, look, if you don't do anything, you know, there'll be more abuse, more cheating, more, uh, stupid governments, more wars, more child abuse, more crime. And and the psychology, which I know that the more time you have blame, the more time you have punishment, the more time you exert revenge. That makes the whole problem worse and worse and worse and worse. The more people you lock in jail. The more criminals we have for our future. The more you punish, the more people have resentment. The quicker you can forgive, the quicker there can be rehabilitation, not just for the victims, but the people who. Did those terrible things. Some few years ago. I should have kept this article because it was a brilliant article. It was concerning the killers of Jamie Bulger. Bulger, whatever. His name was, this young. Was it 2 or 3 year old who was abducted in a shopping centre in Liverpool, tortured and killed on a railway track by sin? Was it 8 or 9 year old children? And the whole culture of England at the time, especially driven by the tabloid press, was wanting the blood of those two killers. Even though they were very, very young, they had done a terrible, terrible thing to take the life of a two year old. And it's not just one person's death. It's all the tears and the anxiety and the stress and the devastation. All of the people who knew that child, let alone the parents. But what I never knew at the time, was pointed out in this article, was that at about the same time, a similar event happened in Norway, in the town of Trondheim, north of Oslo. Where I think two boys hold. Lord, I think a girl into the snow fields and had similarly killed her. And the similarities between the crimes were very close, but was very dissimilar. Was the way those two societies dealt with the problem? As many of you know, with the Jamie Bulger case, those two kids were put into some detention centre and the tabloid press just wanted them to be really punished hard. And the parents were just waiting for them to be released so they could kill them. And even the public just did not want them to be released. I read in the newspapers there was some idea of sending them to Australia, where there wouldn't be no new identities so they could live their life in the British public saying, no, they don't deserve any freedom. That's what I read with his other two kids the following day. After they were caught, they both went to school. Accompanied by psychiatrists and social worker. They were not put into any punitive institution. Very, very soon the mother and father of the child who died came to a closure, claimed to forgiveness and moved on in their life. Whereas the parents of Jamie Bulger have never moved on. As far as I know. And the whole town of Trondheim sort of came to a closure. They realised the terrible acts, but the only way to move forward is not to wish harm on the killers. And so many years later, one of the killers of that, I think, was a little girl in Trondheim was perfectly well-adjusted, having a successful life completed. The education had really moved on, and so did the family. And the rest of the town was one of the killers, still had social problems and some psychological problems, but nowhere near like the pain which was spread around England because of the Jamie Bulger case. To see those two separate accounts of a similar tragedy, one where there were many victims and their victimhood was, I dare to say, cherished and attached to and made much of. And the other one where rehabilitation was the the main aim and goal to see the effects of those two cases. I sure wish I lived in Norway than in England. That was the way forward, the way that everyone got healed, the way there was less pain, less suffering. So when we are not happy, when we are suffering, when we are not free, why is it that is because we don't know how to move on from the pains and difficulties and stresses of life. Now these are big. Haynes. Big problems, big sufferings. You probably haven't had to experience that degree of suffering. But if those people can move on and find freedom, why can't we? One of the great causes for happiness is ability to forgive, to let go, to move on. It causes happiness for the offenders. I don't mean because they got away with it. No one gets away with anything in this world, but it means that they've got a way forward and certainly a way forward for those people we call the victims. We have more freedom of happiness, which is why I keep telling. Why is it that we carry the shit around of the past and we don't carry the eggs? In that story of the two chicken farmers, which I won't repeat because I think I'll tell it every couple of weeks here. It's an interesting thing. Why is it a nature always to look at the past and collect the pain, to go to the movies and want to weep, to look, to be worried by watching too many soap operas? People haven't got enough worries in their life. They create more worries by watching what's happening in neighbours, by worrying who's going to watch, who's going to win the cricket, or who's going to win the soccer, or who's going to win the footy. And the people love the nail biting finishes. Or if they don't like those, they go to these extreme sports. And sometimes I remember being in the airport in Bangkok and I saw on the big TV screen there some of these extreme sports people were doing. I remember seeing sort of, uh, they were doing these motorbike races on ice. I was crazy. What idiot would actually race each other on these ice tracks? And sure enough, one person came off the bike and had to have spikes on the wheels and got spikes. Wow. What do they do? Things like that for. Why do people do that? Just people like to suffer. Why do they like to suffer? They like the thrill, the excitement. There is a delight in suffering. Be careful if you delight in suffering. There's no way you can ever be happy. You attach to being the victim. If you just want the thrill of being hurt or being on the edge of being hurt, however, can you be free? So one of the ways of happiness in this world is able to notice. Why one can't detach from that which is generally painful and difficult to bear with. Why do we become the victim? Why do we become the sad one? Why do sometimes we become the sick person? This is interesting. In some monasteries I've been in. You see, people become sick and sick and sick and sick. And a lot of monks say it's because they want to leave. They want to describe. That's only when they know how of doing it. They actually become attached to being the sick one. That's their persona. It's called ego attachment. It creates the sense of self. And this is what the Buddha, one of the things that Buddha kept on pointing to the who do you think you are? What do you take as yourself? What is your ego? You know, if you had wrote a list of who you were, what your attributes were. Not in theory, but in practice. And you wrote them down. How many of those things would be near? The angry person, the victim. The person who was abused. The person who was divorced. The person who was sick. The person who had the most to me. How many of you take that to be yourself? There's a problem there because the Buddha noticed. If you identify with being that if you become that, you repeat it. This is the sense of identity. It's one of the reasons why, when I did go into prisons to visit prisoners again, I never called them criminals. As you heard me say before this, people have done crimes. And I kept on telling the people in jail, you are not a criminal. You are a person who's done a crime. You're not a criminal. You're something bigger than that. Never think of yourself as a criminal. You're a person who's done a crime. Don't identify with that terrible act, which you did. If you make that sense of self with your crime, if that's who you think you are, you are the burglar. You are the killer. You are the rapist. You become that. Which means when you get released, you'll do it again. Because that's who you are. You're the rapist. You're the killer. You're the adulterer or the child abuser. This is psychology, which I know because I've gone deep into my mind and seen the way that minds work. If you all you make an identity of who you think you are. That's how you relate to the world. That's who you become. That's what you repeat. That's what's expected of you. So of course that's what you do. And there we get the repeats of the harm and the hurt again and again and again and again. Well, my father never thought of himself as the abused child, so that's why he never repeated the abuse on me. I, a person who does forgives, lets go, does not become the victim, becomes free and can live. The story was a story which, uh, again, many of these stories have heard here before, but I usually try to bring them together in one talk, which is on this one subject, simply because that it fits. And this talk goes outside and gets put on CDs and it's nice to be complete. And this was those story of those two Australian soldiers meeting together and a reunion. They had both been in a second World war. They had both been in Singapore at the fall of Singapore and both been put in POW camps. Or one way or the other, I said. Have you forgiven the Japanese yet for what they did to us and our friends? No, never. How can you forgive that? Said one of the soldiers. What about you? His friends said I forgave years ago. But you, my friend, are still in the POW camp. I love that story. Simply because until you forgive. Until he forgave what? Those guards, those soldiers did to him and his friends in the camps in Shanghai on the death railway in Thailand, on the Burmese border. Until they forgave, they were still being tortured. Who stood in the camps? They could never be happy. His friend had let go and therefore he was free. So when it comes to happiness, you don't have to be controlled by what others did to you. You don't have to be limited in prison, in jail by the crimes which have been perpetrated on you in the past. You don't even have to worry about the crimes which you've done. I'm not talking about against the law, but the harm and hurt which you have done to others. I don't know how many people feel guilty about some of the things they've done. I've mentioned a few of those things I always felt guilty about. I never played my Jimi Hendrix records to loud to my father, you know? But he was playing his Sinatra records, never really sort of being a really good son to him. Never sort of, uh, you know, selling those encyclopedias when I was a kid, you know, and getting someone to buy an encyclopedia was just a rubbish book. Don't know why they even bought that, but I made them by it and all those sort of terrible things you did as a kid. Oh, gee, what did I do those for? So easy to feel guilty about the smallest of things. Why not? Why can't we just let them go? Learn from them and move on. Until you do. You can never be free and never be happy. And this is not a small thing. You can never really be virtuous and good until you're free. And as far as meditation is concerned, there are how many people I've taught meditation to now get to a certain point in happiness and peace. They can't go any further and they kept coming back with the same complaint. I don't think I deserve to be so happy. I don't think I deserve to be at peace. I don't think I deserve to be enlightened, basically. And really, that's another dagger to my heart. Why not? If all I do in my life is a monk teaching here Friday nights or going overseas, if that's all I ever give to you. The conviction that you deserve to be happy. That you deserve to be free. That you deserve to be enlightened. You don't feel so guilty. You don't attach to those painful things in the past. You are free. You can let go both other people's harm and your own harm as well. They ought to forgive yourself and forgive others. What that means is giving yourself the gift of freedom that no one else could do that for you. Look at Jesus. Can't forgive a monk. Can't forgive a Buddha. Can't forgive a God. Can't forgive. Only you can forgive you. No one else. All these other people they can encourage. They can teach. They can lead, they can inspire. But in the end, it's up to you. One day, one day you'll do that. Is this life? The next life of sunlight? Look at all your paths. All the hurt, all the harm. Let it go. Say to yourself, in those words of my father, whatever I have done in my life. Why do people dance to me? The door of my heart is opened to me fully. Absolutely. Happiness. Freedom. Coming to bear. To invite freedom. Invite happiness. There's a liberation there. Which is why very often the Buddha called those enlightened experiences. Liberation. Freedom from suffering. Freedom from pain. Freedom from the past. Why do we carry the past around so heavily on our back? Because that's what being a victim is. I was telling people in Melbourne, I just came back from Melbourne on Wednesday night just reminiscing because someone asked, what was it like being a monk in Thailand many years ago? And I was reminiscing about the the most. One of those wonderful times I had in Thailand when after five years, I left my monastery with all my possessions on my back. And that wasn't many possessions. You had to walk and you had no place to go. You could go to any monastery and have a bed for the night. Any village in the morning with your bowl and get some food in it. You're completely free. You could any tree. You could just sit underneath it, put your mosquito net there, meditate, sleep. It was literally like being a bird. But better than being a bird. A bird always has to hunt for their food. For me, I knew any place, any village I went to, there was food there for me. And it was such a freedom because I was attached to no place and to no thing. Every crossroads I got to, I could go forward. Go left, go right, or just turn around and go back. I had no duties, nothing compelling me to go in any directions. No duties, no burdens, no things to do. No unfinished business is complete. Freedom is physically the most freedom I've ever felt. But everything you owned, you had with you. My bowl, my mosquito net and umbrella, water pot, spare set of robes. And that was all. You could wander wherever you wanted. There's so much freedom. I always remember that's the same freedom which you can have in your mind at any time. Any crossroads you come to in life goes every way because you're not burdened by the past. You're not carrying baggage. How much baggage do people carry in this life? Mostly it's the baggage of our past, our history. What happened here? Who did what? To you? Who said? What do you want? Happiness. Let go! Free your past. Her very least. Free the pain of the past. And keep the happy memories. At least that way you're carrying an enjoyable baggage. But even better to leave it all behind. There is such a thing as happiness in this world. And the happiness is no one else's. Responsibility is yours. And that happiness is there for you at any moment, at any time. There is a door which is open from the cell, which is sometimes what your life feels like being in a prison of your past, of what happened to you, of your body, your pain, your sickness. This pain which has happened to you. That's like being in a prison. There's a prison whose door is always open, always open. It's just sometimes we don't know how to walk to it. Sometimes we think we are not supposed to walk through it. And here, I tell you, walk. Be free. Let go! There is such a thing as happiness in life. It is such a thing as freedom. There is such a thing as forgiveness and reconciliation. There is such a thing as such. Love, that you can free yourself and free others and let go. And that freedom and that love is not a copping out of life. That is the heart of a positive response. Free yourself and you. So the way to freedom for others and much of the pain and the cause of pain in life. As the assistant commissioner said today, something like 80 or 90%. He was saying of people in the prisons in Western Australia have themselves been victims of child abuse because they could not forgive, because they could not let go, because they could not find freedom. Now they're in jail, having also caused pain to others. So what is the way forward? I think I've shown it to you to have the guts to see things in a different way, to see oneself. You don't need to feel grief. You don't need to feel that pain. You can walk out whenever you want. It's called freedom. The path to happiness. That's the talk this evening. Oh, and is it possible to be happy? Yes. That's one of the ways. How? Okay, so any questions or comments? I hope it's been challenging. I hope a few people disagree with me. Otherwise I didn't challenge hard enough. Any comments or questions about the talk this evening? Maybe that's just something just for you to contemplate and see later on if it makes sense or not. No. No comments questions. Are some are some good of the word. Dying ago and dying to be what day me? So our custom a a a part of the mana Masami. Seperti panel a horse a a song. Sung Kang mama.