Meditation and the Mind | Ajahn Brahm

Meditation + the Mind Transcription Okay, just coming back in now. So this evening's talk is going to be on the mind and meditation and in a series of talks about the teachings, the basic teachings of Buddhism. This forms a very important central part of Buddhist philosophy, but it also affects the Buddhist pract us and the way the Buddhists behave in the world. And you should maybe all know, even if you've read little about Buddhism, that Buddhism started because a person who was later become the Buddha decided to practice meditation to learn about calming the mind and eventually to sit under a tree, which was called the bodhi tree. Eventually, Bodhi means enlightenment in northeast India. And through his meditation, he became fully enlightened. And the experience of that enlightenment, the truths which were found out through that practice of deep meditation, became the philosophy, the teaching of what we now know as Buddhism. So that experience under the Bodhi tree, the experience of deep meditation and the experience which is repeated by many, many people ever since, now forms a core teaching of what we now know as Buddhism. That teaching of focusing deep within oneselves, getting to understand the nature of the mind, also means that from the very earliest times that Buddhists them always accepted there were six senses for the human being. It's a strange thing that many of the Buddhist teachings actually influence early Western European culture, as I was talking about last week in the history of Buddhism. And even the early Greeks had an idea of six senses. But somewhere along the line we lost one of those senses. And the sense we lost was a sense of mind. And I think with it we lost a lot of understanding about the inner world as the European culture tended to become more outward looking in developing their worlds around them, rather than developing the world inside of them. But certainly in Buddhism they started off with six senses, the ordinary five senses which we know about in the Western world sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch. Plus this wonderful 6th sense called the mind. And because they started off with acknowledging that such a thing existed, that the investigation, understanding and comprehension of the nature of that mind became almost second nature to the Buddhists of that time. And it became second nature which was investigated and proved again by meditation, which was actually going inside, going actually to find out one's mind to understand its nature and its needs and what the mind was really all about. And as an ex physicist, I'm always quite interested and fascinated by what I read in journals, in journals of science and journals of psychology about what people think is the mind, because the Western view of the mind is something very, very different than what the Eastern view of the mind was. Even interestingly that when I first went to Thailand as a mind, you asked people actually where they were, and they'd always point to this insect, their heart, their mind, whereas for Westerners, you ask where they are, they always start putting their head. It was very interesting, but I think because Western culture thinks so much and Eastern culture felt much more than they thought. I think these days, I think the Western culture has actually come down a bit into their hearts and not so much in their heads anymore for most people. But even Westerners these days, let alone scientists, actually doubt the existence of a mind. And there's been many experiments which have been done. And one of the ones which I always like to bring up to actually to show people what the nature of the mind is according to science and how it fits the nature of the thing we call mind for Buddhism. And by talking about what the nature of the mind is, then we can actually talk about meditation, which is the developing and understanding of that mind. This particular experiment was done about 1214 years ago, in 1989. It was reported in Science magazine or could have been Nature, I'm not quite sure. And this was an experiment done by a Professor John Lorber in Sheffield University in the north of England and. I use this quite frequently in my talks to describe not only the nature of the mind, but also one of the reasons why I gave up science in order to practice Buddhism. This professor had his field of expertise, his field of research, his field of research on the nature picture of the human skull and whether the different shapes of the skull would actually affect people's health, personality, long age, length of life, or whatever. And so whenever he saw students in his campus at Sheffield whose was slightly misshaped because of a deformed skull or abnormal skull shape, he would invite them onto his program, his research program. He would offer them a few pounds to join in the research. And that was the inducement for many students who had a hard time paying their bills at the Bar Touchy to join his program and. And in particular, that one day he saw a young man who was an honors student in mathematics whose skull shape was slightly abnormal. Even though other people would probably not notice this, this guy was the expert and could see that this was not a normal head shape. And he invited a young man onto his research program. And one of the first things which was done as part of the research was to give the young man a CT scan, what sometimes called a Cat scan of his head, that he just map his brain. The problem was that when the CT scan came out, the doctor, Professor Lorber, found this boy didn't have a brain. He had no brain at all. And he became known in those circles as the Boy with no Brain. This was not just a rumor. This experiment actually happened and was repeated some years ago when I was in Sydney. I was being driven to an appointment by a young man who was a GP who, because of the stress of that profession, had taken a year off and he was learning some meditation. So he's offering to me to a meditation center at the same time to discuss his meditation. And I actually mentioned this to him. This experiment done by Professor Lorber and this Boy With No Brain, which was printed in one of the journals of science, and he remarked that he'd had the privilege actually to see the CT scan himself. And. And he said it's been done several times. He said that there s no fault of the machine, that this is actually true. There's a real boy who has no brain. But he told me in more detail that what this boy has is what s called a reptilian brain stem which, according to medical science is usually not enough to even survive the first few days of birth. Most people with this condition usually die just either before or just after birth. But it's not really enough to keep the main bodily functions of breathing, heart, those sorts of things going. It's certainly not enough to keep the high brain functions of thought and speech going at all. It certainly is ridiculous even to think the person could actually grow into an honest student in mathematics with no brain. And this doctor he confided in me, he was saying that when he was at university, when he saw this, the word was going around just how much problems how many problems this was making for the research community in medicine. Especially those researchers who are trying to find a link between the brain and the human mind. Because here was an example of a boy who. Maybe 19 or 20. Completely normal in every way. In fact, the only abnormality that he was more normal than usual. He was bright, he was intelligent, he was socially well adjusted. He had no problems. There was a boy who certainly had a mind, but he didn't have a brain. And this was always the case with the Buddhist under understanding of the mind. The mind being something quite independent of a brain. And this is something which people can find out through the path of meditation. Now, at this point, when I usually tell this story, I like to ask my audience to just do a little exercise, a little experiment themselves. Could you please move your head back to pause like this? Can you hear any splashing? I want to find out if you maybe also be someone who hasn't got a brain fluid, because that boy wasn't alone. There were other people found also, obviously, this very rare, but all you need is one, two, three or four people who haven't got brains but have got minds to know that this thing we call a mind is something completely different, separate. Independent of the scene we call the brain, because you can have a mind without a brain. There's also other nice little anecdotes of people who have managed to get into deep states of meditation. And there's been a couple of people who've managed to get into such a deep state of meditation, and because of the circumstance is they found themselves in hospitals with machines put on their brains to see what was happening inside while they were in a deep state of meditation. One man who used to come here some years ago, he was an English a Palmer who visited visited Australia and came to live here many years ago. And he came with a big smile and face one day and said, I finally done it. So what have you done? He said, I got the EEG flat. What do you mean? Sure. You mean the ECG? The ECG is actually the machine which monitors the heartbeats and. And many of you may have seen in the movies or the documentaries that when they put those machines on a person s heart after had an accident or a heart attack, if the line on the monitor is dead straight, it means that their heart is not beating. It's usually the time when the alarm bells start to sound. The person s has got heart seizure. The heart isn't moving. And I've known people before who ve been able to do that through the meditation gets so still. The heart doesn't need to pump. They're not dead. They're just so still in meditation. He said, no, no, that was easy. Did that months ago. He's got the EEG lax, which is what measures the brain activity. And he managed, through his deep meditation to still his mind so much that when he had an EEG E, which measured the brain activity put on its head, it was absolutely flat. The brain wasn't working. With a big smile, he turned around and he pointed to the back. He said, See all those people back there? Those are my nurses and doctors. They really want to check out this meditation business. It's weird. But that was only one story. The other story, which was even more impressive, was of another Australian man who comes here every so often. He's not here today, so it's good that I tell the story in his absence that one day he was meditating at home. He would only usually meditate maybe 30 or 40 minutes at a time, but on this occasion, he went into his bedroom and hadn't come out after about an hour and a half. So his wife went into the bedroom to see what he was doing. And when she entered the bedroom, she saw her husband sitting so still that she couldn't even see his chest move up and down. She couldn't perceive any breath coming or going out. She thought that he had some sort of heart attack. So she called the ambulance. And the ambulance came in a few minutes and the medics rushed out of the ambulance into the bedroom and checked his pulse. When they could find no pulse, they immediately put him into the stretcher into the back of the ambulance with the sirens blazing and roaring, rushed into Sir Charles Garden Hospital, where he was put in the emergency room straight away. And again the machines were put on his heart and then on his head. The ECG measuring the heart activity was again one flat line with the alarm bells ringing. And the EEG was also flat. He was technically brain dead. However, this particular man was fortunate that he wasn't sent to the morgue straight away simply because the doctor on duty happened to be of Indian descent. His parents had migrated to Australia a long time ago. And even though he was brought up in Australia this doctor had heard tales from his father about whole men and women going into deep meditation in India and being able to suspend all their life activities such as heartbeat and breathing. And the only strange thing about this man was even though his lower half of his body was as cold as you'd expect a corpse to be the up half of his body was still warm. So the doctor decided to try and get his heart going again by putting on those little pads through which you put an electric shock. They're called defibrillators. And apparently, many, many times a doctor tried to resuscitate this man passing electric shock after electric shock through his body. And you may have seen in the movies that when such a shock is put through a body the back arches and the person lifts up off the table. It's a very violent way touch you to heal or get the body going again. And nothing works. And. And only after I'm not quite sure, I don't think he told me. It was half an hour now with a doctor trying to resuscitate this person. Only then did he decide to come out of his meditation. When he opened his eyes and bent up, he asked, what am I doing in here? Where's my bedroom? Goth because all that, all that time, from the time he sat meditation him to the time he owned his eyes, he was not aware at all of the world outside. He couldn't feel those medics picking his body up and putting in the stretcher. He couldn't even feel the electric shocks going through his body. He couldn't hear the sound of the silence when he was completely removed from the world of the five senses. When I asked him what he was feeling at the time, his very words were all I felt was incredible bliss. There was a case of a person who went into such a deep state of meditation that his brain stopped, and so did his heart. What this actually tells us, and this is actually part of the Buddhist understanding of the nature of the mind, is that the brain can stop, the heart can stop. For the mind is something independent which can continue on. It shows us what the nature of this mind truly is. The mind can inhabit this body and can make use of it, but is completely independent, and it can do without it. The other example which people may be more familiar with as examples of people who have what we call in the west these days, out of the body experiences, which was even described by the ancient Buddhist texts, texts of a person who uses what the Buddha called a mind made body and. And the Buddha used a similar like it's drawing out the body from this one, just as you would draw was it a reed out of its sheath. And the reed would actually have the same shape as the sheath which once surrounded it. In the same way that a person with a mind made body would actually have the same appearance, but of a different staff. People have had out of the body experiences. Also understand just how the mind is completely separate from the body. About a year and a half ago, Lancet, which is the journal of the British Medical Association, published an article by some doctors in the Netherlands who had actually researched people who had out of the body experiences and actually reported their findings in one of the most prestigious medical journals, which we have. Their conclusion was consciousness survives dead. Because out of the body experiences are happened when a person was clinically dead, not when they were alive, but clinically dead. It only just happened that these people were resuscitated and so could actually come back into the body to tell the tale. One of the favorite stories of mine, which I like to tell about out of the body experiences was recorded from, again, England, where there was a very wealthy lady who was having what was supposed to be a minor operation which developed complications. Because she was a wealthy lady, she had one of the best surgeons, but not just one of the best surgeons, one of the most Spencer's surgeons as well. And so her surgeon was always very polite to her, except on the occasion when she almost died, because in the panic of the operating theater, when the lady had actually technically died, the doctors and the nurses panicked. And the doctor, in his desperation, shouted out, don't give up on me now, you bitch. That's what he said. Fortunately, they managed to bring her around again. When he went on his first post op visit, he said to his clients, to this lady who'd now recovered, saying, madam, we came very close to losing you that time. And she replied, yes, I know, but why did you call me that name a bitch? And the poor doctor was so surprised, how did you know I said that? You were dead at the time? And the lady proceeded to tell him exactly what had happened. The moral of that story is when somebody's dead, be careful what you say, they may be listening. And at some made body, which happens, even though that this happens when there is no brain activity at all, the brain is dead still. The mind is carrying on. And that mind still has the ability to see, to hear all that's going on. One of my disciples, when I used to go and teach meditation in prisons, also was able to leave his body. He was a Yugoslavian man and he told me that once when he was about a seven year old boy, he too was having an operation and during the operation he died and felt himself floating above his body and looking down. He said the strange thing was, even though was only a seven year old boy and had no knowledge of these things, he knew intuitively what was wrong with his body and why he had just died. He knew that the doctors were actually looking in the wrong place during the operation and he willed the doctors to look at the other part of his body where the problem was. He said as soon as that thought came up in his mind, the doctors actually turned their heads, saw the problem and thereby have saved his life. He said from that time on, he was always able to leave his body at will. That's why he said he didn't mind being in jail. Could always go watch a movie any night of the week and no one could stop him. That's a true story. So these are cases of, like and many of you may have actually experienced that, or at least known people who have experienced that, or we read books or seen documentaries. And how can that be? When the brain is not active? It actually is evidence. It is anecdotal evidence, experiential evidence, which actually shows that this thing we call the mind is independent of this thing we call the body. And this has always been part of Buddhism. And because of this in our talk, which I'll be given two weeks time, it gives the understanding how things like rebirth can happen. Because when you die, sure, the heart stops, sure, the lungs stop breathing, sure, the brain stops working. But we know there's other things which are independent of all that which still carry on it. And this thing which still carries on is called the mine. If anything it's the repository of our calm, the repository of our memory. It's the repository of our personality. It's also a repository of our happiness and suffering. That's why in Buddhism we call the mind the biggest thing in the world. It is the forerunner of all things. It is achieved as the number one. To show you what I mean a university friend of mine who became a British diplomat he had two daughters and he wrote to me once and told me of an interesting experience when his I think his youngest daughter went to primary school in her first year. In grade one when a teacher asked the children a simple question which was what is the biggest sin in the world? And one of the children put their hand up and said, my daddy. Because they're only like a five year old, six year old kid and you can imagine for such a small child that the daddy was very, very big. Another child put their hand up and said an elephant is the biggest thing in the world. It turned out that had just been to the zoo. And a third child put their hand up and said a mountain is the biggest thing in the world. And the daughter of my old friend put up her hand and said my eye is the biggest thing in the world. Eye. And. And that stopped the whole class. Even a teacher couldn't understand what this girl meant. What do you mean? Your eye is the biggest thing in the world, said the teacher. And this little five year old philosopher said, well, my eye can see her daddy. My eye can also see an elephant and a mountain and much more. If all of that can fit into my eye, then my eye must be the biggest thing in the world. That's very brilliant, and there's a lot of truth in that. It doesn't quite go so far enough. Because your mind can see things which your eyes can never see. Your mind can also hear things, real things and also imaginary things. Your mind can feel your mind unknown. In fact, everything which is can exist in your mind. If all that can fit into your mind, isn't your mind the biggest thing in the world? It, which is one of the reasons why people can't find the mind in the body or outside of the body. I'll tell you why. Another little demonstration, which I like to do. I like you now to put your hands up if you are happy. Can you put your hand up if you're happy? Only one miserable lot. Pull your hand up. Right up if you're happy. Right up. Okay, most of you are happy. Now keep it up. Haven't stopped yet. Now, with your index finger, can you please point to that happiness for me? Point to it. Locate it for me. Now, making a little point here with this experiment, were you imagining that happiness? You it was real. Next time you're angry, try and point to that angry anger. Where is it? Next time you're sad, point to that sadness. These things are real. You know, happiness is real, you know, sadness is real, anger, whatever. Why is it you can't point to these things? The reason is because these are things which live in the mind. This is part of the territory of the mind. It's an aspect of the mind. You can't point to happiness because happiness is part of your mind. How can you point to your mind when the mind is the biggest thing in the whole world? When you're happy, the whole world is happy as far as you're concerned because your mind is the biggest thing in the whole world. So it's not as if the mind is in the body. Your body is in your mind as with all the universe as well. That's why in Buddhism one of the basic teachings of Buddhism was the mind of the forerunner of the whole world. It is achieved. It is a number one. That's a little experiment for you. Your mind is the biggest thing in the whole world because everything can fit in it. That's why happiness can never be pointed to in the body. Because happiness doesn't live in the body. Happiness lives in your mind. So it tells you actually what's really important in this world. That is why as Buddhists would pay much more attention to the mind than even the body. Because if you get your mind right, get your mind happy, get your mind peaceful, get your mind at ease, usually the body follows suit. Many people can come to this center here to learn meditation, sing, because they have physical problems. Problems such as obviously stress cancers. In many cases of people who have meditated after they've been diagnosed as cancer with cancer, surprise, surprise, the cancer completely disappeared. One of the extreme cases was a fellow who was from Armadale, he is quite old, big smoker, short of breath. Went to the doctor, had a lung X ray and the doctor showed him the results of the X ray. His whole lungs were completely shot, cancer all over them, lung cancer, far advanced. And basically the doctor said go home, talk it over with your wife, come back in two weeks and just tell me what you want to do. But basically it's too far gone now. So like many people, he knows something swamp, but would never admit it. And so he went back home completely shocked, basically ready to die. Talked about with his family and was basically going to just let nature take its course, waste the time. He's not going to chemotherapy or radiotherapy. So he went back to his appointment. Weeks later, the doctor insisted on taking another lung X ray just to see how the thing in progress. And when he went into his specialist specialist. Afterwards, he saw his specialist just looking at the X ray and shaking his head. And this man thought straight away, it's worse than he thought. It's got much worse. That's why he's shaking his head. No hope. So he said, well, doctor, let me know straight spell and I know the truth. It must be very, very bad the way you're shaking your head. And the doctor told me, said, that's not what I'm shaking with my head. I can't believe it. Have a look at this. The lungs were completely clear. We showed in the X ray two weeks before. In a space of two weeks, this incur lung cancer completely vanished. Because he was meditating. Strange things happen because of the nature of the mind. The mind is so powerful that it can not only cure you, but it can also kill you. Over a hundred years ago there's a very Talbot experiment was done in Bristol jail in England, which I like to tell people about because it shows the power of the mind actually to kill. The particular man in question was condemned to death by hanging because of some crime in those days. It was the year 1899. People could be executed for some very small things and this was a poor man who was about to die. A couple of psychologists had permission to do this experiment. He was going to die anyway. So they went to his cell the night before and told his poor man that the English law had been changed, that he still had to die, but not by hanging. They told him the following morning he would have his throat cuts and that's how he'd be killed. It was a very gruesome scene, this experiment. It's. They let him think about that all night. In the morning, when the guards came for him, they put a blindfold over him, tied his hand securely behind his back and led him to the place of execution where some priest gave him some last rites. They read out the sentence and they performed the execution. What he didn't know, because he was blindfolded, was they didn't take him to the normal place of execution. They took him to the prison washrooms. And as one of the psychologists put the blade of a knife across his throat, he couldn't see that it was a blunt end of one of the old fashioned razors. He felt cold steel against his throat then, never even scratched him. The same time, when the psychologist turned on a tap to give the impression of liquid coming out from somewhere, he fell to the ground and died right there. There was no injury on him. He died because his mind concluded he was having his throat cut and that's why he did die. That is how powerful the mind is. If you think you're going to die, you do die. The mind is so strong. The body lives in the mind, not the other way around. That's why, as Buddhists, we pay so much attention to the mind and not so much to the body. Obviously, we look after the body, but the mind is so important, which is why the meditation is very much cultivating our minds. People come sometimes to meditation is to get rid of their stress. And the stress is not so much in the body, but in your mind. It's more real than the pain in the body, this pain in the mind. That is why that we have these practices of meditation, such as, like lovingkindness, to actually to take out away the negativity which lies in the mind. The way of lovingkindness. Meditation is very powerful because it says to whatever you're experiencing, the door of my heart is open to you. No matter what's happening, no matter what's going on, no matter what you do, the door of my heart is open. It is a letting go, a relaxing, a freeing which gets rid of the stress of I don't want this. There's a famous story in Buddhism which describes this way of cultivating kindness in the mind. It's a story of the emperor who came in. So the demon who came into the emperor's palace is found in the udana, which is part of the Buddhist scriptures. The story goes like this, that one day an emperor was away on business and a demon came into his palace. This demon was so ugly and so frightening that all the guards who should have been looking after that palace froze in terror, allowing this demon to go right in to the throne room and sit on the emperor's chair. As soon as the demon was sitting in the emperor's chair, the ministers and the guards came to their senses and said, get out of here. You don't belong. Who do you think you are? Get out. And at those unkind words, the demon grew an inch bigger, more ugly, more smelly. And the language got worse. And that made the people in the palace even more incense. They shouted, Get out. You don't belong in here. Who do you think you are to sit in the Empress J? Get out of here. Every unkind word, deed or thought, the demon again grew an inch bigger, more ugly, more smelly, more it's been going on a long time. When the emperor came back when the emperor came back, he knew exactly what to do. That's why it was the emperor. When the emperor came back, the scene was huge. So ugly, so smelly, they even make maggots sick. And his language was disgusting. But the empire knew exactly what to do. Instead of saying, Get out of here, you don't belong, which is what everyone else was doing, he said, welcome. Thank you for coming to visit me. Has anyone got you anything to drink yet? Or anything to eat? One of those few kind words this demon grew, and it's smaller, less ugly, less offensive, less money. People realized what their mistake was, so they started going around getting him cups of tea. Someone rang or out for pizza for him. Someone gave him a foot massage, and someone massaged the scales on the back of his neck because it gets so sorbing a deal with such a huge head from every kind act. Kind deed or kind thought this demon, grinning small, unless I can get the fence of less smelly. So they really pile on the kindness so much that soon that Deem was back to the size when he first came in. And they kept on being kind until the demon was so small, so tiny, that one more kind act and that demon vanished completely away. That's how they got rid of that demon. The Buddha called that an anger eating demon. It eats anger and gets bigger, more ugly, more offensive, more smelly. The more anger you give it. In marriage, your husband can often be likened to an anger eating demon. He gets bigger and more ugly. But the more you say, Get out of here, you don't belong. Same to your wife. There's other beings, not even human beings, but things like cancers, which are anger eating demons. Get out of here, you don't belong. There's many other things in your life, things which you don't like, which can cause you stress. If you say, Get out of here, you don't belong. The way of developing the mind in meditation is to go in the opposite direction. The door of my heart open to you. Come in. I can be with you. I can be at peace with. Wife, husband, parent, child the door of my heart doesn't you no matter who you are, no matter what you do, no matter where you go, we develop this unconditional, undemanding love and acceptance. You can understand why that works because you're developing a mind which is at peace with things school rather than a war with life or rather a war with that part of life you don't like. This is why the development of the mind in this way gives you a huge amount of freedom. The world is within the mind. If the mind is free and at peace, your whole world becomes free and at peace. This is actually how the Bud were taught and how he was able to teach mums and nuns, lay men and lay women to develop their mind to be so peaceful and so still no matter what happened to them and. Even other people. One of my favorite persons from history was not even a Buddhist monk, but was a Catholic monk who often, obviously, must have been a very, very good meditator who knew his mind well, because when he was about to die being burned at a stake at many of the great saints in the Middle Ages. And he was being burnt alive. You know what that must feel like if you've ever burned your finger and how much pain that is. As he was being burnt alive at this state, watched by many people in medieval Europe, his last words, which he said were, turn me over. This guy's done. It's true. So I really admire that mug for two reasons. One, not only this is like a piece of toast or piece of barbecue meat or something. Turn me over this side. Because not only was he obviously above the pain. But also he had compassion for the people watching. It must be terrible to watch somebody who had burnt alive. They decided to crack a joke to cheer everybody up. Wasn't that wonderful? Wonderful thing to do. What that shows is actually how the mind can actually go so far above things like physical pain can actually transcend. So what we detest, what's difficult for us to bear simply by the training of the mind. So the whole of meditation is about developing our minds and my goodness, developing your mind, even in a small way, creates so many benefits. For one, the first time I personally realized the benefits of meditation was when I had final examinations at Cambridge, where I did my degree and those final examinations this was in 1972. I did my degree and. There were this was in theoretical physics. There was a three hour exam in the morning with 1 hour for lunch, followed by another three hour exam in the afternoon every day for six days. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, even Saturday without a break. That was very tough. However, I'd already even started meditating training my mind. So when it came to the hour for lunch, I never had anything to eat. Instead, I went back to my room and meditated for half an hour. When I meditated for half an hour, I let go of everything. Just carved my mind down. First of all, when I sat down, I always remembered the first thing which would come into my mind was a morning exam. Just to try and go over it again. Did I do that question right or wrong? And of course, you realized that you can't change the morning exam. It's done. It's a waste of time even thinking about it. So it's very easy for me to actually to let go of the past. The second thing which came up into my mind was the afternoon examination, the future, which I was worried about should I get out my books and do some more reading? But I knew from experience that every time I swatted up just an hour or two before the examination, every time, whatever I looked at would never come up. And. Because the future was just too uncertain. So I let go of the future examination. The Future next thing in that half an hour of meditation which came up was something quite shocking. I was actually so nervous, I was shaking. When I was paying attention to that, I could calm myself down. The last thing which I saw in my meditation was just how physically tired I was. So how mentally tired, because doing a subject like theoretical physics for 3 hours in a tough exam just drained me. But by relaxing, all my energies came back again through the power of meditation. I was developing my mind so much to be able to rest, so I rested for half an hour instead of eating and worrying because of that, when I went to the afternoon examination, I was rested, I was clear, and my friends told me I was smiling. That's what I was cheating. I was the only one smiling in the afternoon. And that was simply because I developed my mind and I did very well. It was one of the first times it just showed how important it was to develop the mind in stressful situations, as many other stressful situations I've had in my life as a monkey as there might be for you as well in your lives. So when you know what the mind is and how important it is, it's so important to develop that mind, to give it peace, to give it ease. Sometimes people don't understand how important it is. Again, people don't kill themselves because of physical pain. People kill themselves because of mental pain. Despair, grief, depression, lack of self esteem, worrying, fear those are all mental problems which are great causes of suicide in our world. Do you know of many people who commit suicide because of physical pain? So many do so because of mental pain. I make that point just to emphasize which hurts the most it's mental or physical pain. You know that the one which you can't endure, the one which causes you to commit suicide is the mental pain. Remember reading a book some years ago called Pistol Without a Name, though without a number, about a journalist in Argentina during the reign of the junta, where many left wing members of society, intellectuals and even journalists were taken into underground cells in military compounds and what tortured and killed. This was one man who survived the experience. He said that it was only later on in the Junker's time that he disappeared in the middle of the night, who was taken to a place he didn't know, far underground, in some military complex, and taught his day in, day out. But he said the worst part of that experience and this is why I always remember this the worst part of the experience eventually released because he had contacts, friends in the United States who put pressure on the jumper to release him, and also because it was late on in the regime's career. And he said the worst thing which ever happened to him during those years of torture, or those months of torture rather, was when one of the prison guards handed him a letter from his wife and. He said that that was the worst mental torture. When he realized and remembered his life outside those prison cells, he blocked it out during the times of torture. So he had nothing to compare those terrible days with when he received a letter from his wife. All the softness, the love and the happiness of his family came flooding back and it was almost impossible to endure the torture the next few days. Now, can you imagine and understand just why torture us realize they can't break anybody through physical pain, but they know how to break you through mental pain. It mental pain is by far the hardest to endure, which is why we do mental development in Buddhism. Because when we can overcome the mental pain, the mental despair, the mental grief. The mental anger, mental feeling of hopelessness, then we have the way to find our happiness and freedom in life. The physical pain is very easy to endure any physical pain once we have the mind set right. Which is why we do our meditation in order to overcome these things, why we develop our mind, realizing the mind is so huge and so big, the biggest thing, most important thing in the world why buddhists for the last 26 centuries have found these beautiful techniques to develop the mind and overcome those sorts of problems. For example, one of the problems which often we have through bad mental training is a story which is probably the most famous of all my stories because this is a class for new Buddhists. Although many people like talk so much, they keep coming. Even you, Buddhists. One of the stories which I love to tell over and over and over again is a story of my Brit war in my monastery in Serpentine. Years ago. 20 years ago. We started off in Serpentine at Here, a small monastery. At that time, our Buddhist society was so poor there was no way we could even afford to even think about getting a builder. The land was empty and we had to learn how to build the huts ourselves because we couldn't afford a profession. Any money which was donated, this went into building materials. So I had to learn how to do things like laying bricks. My lady, my first brick wall at that monastery. Even though we didn't have money, we had time, so it didn't matter how long it took. I was going to make sure that brick wall was perfect. If I put the brick on, it didn't work out, I'd take it off and start again. It took a long time, but once that big wall was finished and I looked back and I stood back and had a look at it, that's when I got the biggest shock. I don't know how it had happened. Two bricks were out of line, and they were so out of line, they spoiled the whole wall. The wall looked terrible. Basically, I stuffed up. And there was one other mong there with me at the time who I asked, can we buy some dynamite and blow the thing up so I could start again? I think you can sympathize with me, empathize with how I felt. But he said, no, it had to stay. And I had to endure my mistake. It wasn't a mistake you could hide. There's a wall. And every time a visitor came to that monastery I'd always make sure I take them somewhere else so they wouldn't see my mistakes. And it took three months of pain and suffering, I think until a man came with me. I was showing them around, and he saw that wall. And what he said was, that's a beautiful wall. And my response was, sir, are you blind? Have you left your glasses in the car? Can't you see those two bad bricks? Now, what the man said was, yeah, I can see the two bad bricks, but I can also see the 998 good bricks as well. Again, turned me completely around was an experience which I always remember. Only when he said there was 998 good bricks could I see those bricks. For three months. Every time I went past that wall, my eyes would only see my two faults and were blind to anything else. Once it was pointed out to me, I could see there were more bigger than that wall than the two mistakes. Once I saw that, I never wanted to destroy the wall again. It was okay. I realized in the not just with walls, this is with life. Your husband, your wife, your kids, even yourself may make one or two mistakes and you want to disappoint the relationship. Kids, girlfriend leave them. They want to kill themselves, get a rope and hang themselves in the park. Parents can't understand. Why do you do that? It's only just one girlfriend. Many other girls you only spent 16 or 17. Come on. But for a boy or a girl at that time, that's all. They can see that one relationship which has gone wrong and. They can't be any other good bricks in the wall of their life. That's why, like me, I want to get through dynamite and destroy myself. That's how people suicide. That's how people get depressed and angry head up simply because all they see is the one I do mistake that they can't be anything else. That taught me just how we've got what in Buddhism we call the Fall rebinding mind. We just see what's wrong so much we can't see the other bricks in the wall. That's why we want to destroy. So the training of the mind is seeing these errors of psychology, if you like, these errors of the way we look at life. We train the mind to be wise. We want to see the whole war it you can become at peace with it. You're not denying those superbiks are there, you're just seeing a big picture. And to complete that story some years ago I told that story of the Count of the Port Association premises in Cottersland and. And afterwards, somebody came up who was a builder, and they said to me, please don't be so concerned about your two bad bricks. All bricklays professionals make mistakes. Please tell me a secret, he said. But in the building industry, when we make mistakes like that, we always call them features. And then we charge our house with an extra $5,000 on their house. That's a beautiful ending to the story, because after a while, the mind sees what was once the mistake you want to destroy your whole life over now becomes a teacher, which is so valuable to you in your life. Which is why the development of the mind doesn't just mean you become more compassionate, more accepting of life and the force of others. In the force of life, it also turns into fetus things which give value to your life. So this becomes the nature of the mind, the nature of life. Why? Meditation sort of opens up the mind rather than closes it, makes it the most important thing, because that's where happiness lies. Happiness lies in your mind, not in the world. So you make yourself a happy, peaceful, wise, kind, lovely mind. Wherever you go, you take that happiness, that love, that kindness with. The mind is the most important thing, said the Buddha. So the most important thing to do is develop that mind. And then, whether you are worldly rich or worldly poor, whether things go well for you in the world or they don't go so wealthy. If your mind is at peace, then you can still be happy. No matter what happens to you in pain, in health, alive or dead, you have that happiness, because the mind is bigger than all of that. So that's the little introduction about the nature of the mind. And Buddhism and meditated to go on for hours talking about this. Because the mind is a huge area. Human beings have explored this whole planet. The one place they haven't really forgotten is inside of themselves, the nature of the mind. That's what marks do all the time. Looking in, exploring our mind is fascinating, what you find in them. It's also very, very beautiful and very clean and. So this is what we mean by the mind and meditation in Buddhism. I hope you enjoyed the talk of season. So now I've got any questions about the mind and meditation? This is interesting. When many people have asked me that I've been telling this story for don't know how many years and even people have heard a story. When I go to Singapore and Malaysia and people have come over especially all the way from Malaysia to actually define my wall. They come into my monitor. Where's the wall? I can't find it anymore. Those two bad tricks have disappeared. Now. It's a fascinating ending to that story. It's as if that when you had Ill being upset about two bad bitch. What was it called? Exaggerating a fault. They weren't such people after all. But at the time, I thought they were terrible. Some years ago, this 14 year old girl came to me. She wanted some counseling. Now, one of the reasons why they come to Buddhist Bank for counseling because we're cheap. They came to me for counseling, and she said father said she been with many other psychologists, psychiatrists, and no one could help her. So she came up to me. She was obviously very embarrassed and very shy. And eventually I asked her, what's the problem? Come. What's the problem? This is a 14 year old girl said, my problem is I've got my nose is too big. That's her problem. She had too big a nose, she thought. And I decided no. Any young monkey this time. I decided to be a scientist. I looked. I didn't actually touch the nose or get a rule about but I mentally measured her nose and actually said, well, actually, your nose is actually quite average. It's not the most beautiful nose in the world, but certainly not the most likely. It's just a normal nose, an average nose. What do you expect? It's a nose. That's all. It didn't help you at all. Because she'd exaggerated it and because she'd exaggerated it became a huge nose. When I was a young, like in Thailand, you know, sometimes you'd be out in the jungle meditating and in that jungle there were these big animals, many things animals, tigers and elephants and you knew that these animals were around. There's also small animals as well. Happens so often. You close your eyes and meditate. You'd hear the sound of one of the animals coming towards you and you think, this is a big one or a small one? This is a small one. You just came on meditating and as it was coming closer, you realized that this was not a small animal. You were listening carefully, you're checking your ears and your mind as it came really close. You think, My goodness, if it is a tiger, it's a huge one. That's what it's about. Nowhere in the world could have been a small animal. And so you opened up your eyes in fear. There's this tiny mouse. It wasn't even a big mouse. It was a tiny it happened so often and you wonder why it was the little tiny mouse making a small noise. Why my mind thought it was a big tiger or an elephant and. It actually sounded like an elephant because the mind exaggerated it and made it to feel like an elephant. Make it sound like an elephant. That little nose. That poor girl had a mind exaggerated it to her it was a huge nose. Why problem we have in life becomes a huge problem because our mind exaggerates. Why two bad breaks become the whole war. This is a psychology of life which when we learn how to train our minds not like shouting minds, we just train our minds to be like wise, to be rational, to be able to train our perception to be the truth, rather exaggerating things then we've become far more free in life. We don't worry so much. Don't you worry about small things. Tiny things afraid of small things and tiny things. It's the way the mind exaggerates the. With why, like, Buddhist psychology has become so it's actually was always so profound. It's now being discovered by psychologists and psychiatrists in in Europe and in the United States. It works so well. Many sort of people just was who won. The months before I left, apparently, in harvard saw these, some of the professors and holders of chairs of psychology all really into buddhist psychology now, simply because it knows the mind so well, always has done, and just knows how to deal with the problems of life through trading the mind. Any other? What's? What? Yeah, come on. Is there? Yeah. Okay. For reincarnation, I'm going to invite you to come in two weeks time. Because that's a subject, another talk. Are you going to be here for them? Great. Okay, so you can reincarnate in two weeks. We'll talk about reincarnation then. But that is one person's mind separate from the others. Yeah, this is separate. They are separate from each other. Your mind is your mind, my mind, this mind, we influence one another. So because we influence one another, that if you develop happiness in your mind, you actually buy your own happiness. You create happiness for others. But if you don't train your own mind, it becomes of a miserable, selfish, rat bag. Then you create a lot of misery and rat baggageness for others. So this is why it's part of our concern, not for ourselves or others, actually, to be kind, be peaceful ourselves and out of limit. Not really, because it's interesting that limits are all about measuring the measurements, all about the world, about universes, even about time. Time is like measuring. Time is a distance between two events in time. But in meditation to actually define the mind. One of the first things which we do, which I alluded to in the story of the examination which I did, we actually come to what we call the present moment, abandoning all past and all future and come to this moment we call now. The strange thing is when a person actually meditates and comes to that stage of meditation where you're fully present gives think there'll be no time at all because there's no past, no future. You're squashed into the small space of now for the experiences of having all the time in the world. When you're in the present moment, all the space in the world in the now because they're not measuring anymore. We measure good and bad, success and failure. We stop measuring those things. We feel confined. There's no freedom when you give up those measurements. You let them go in deep meditation and you feel there's so much space without being pushed and pulled by the demand for praise, by the quest to be acceptable, to have esteem, if not one's own esteem, esteem of others. You find yourself being free and being at peace. So really that the mind is measureless has no limits, can't be measured. So this is actually why it goes against measurements which are part of this world that makes sense. So I like you know, sometimes you get mystical when you start talking about the mind because it's a fascinating and swear almost a system actually comes from you had a question then communication of one mind to another is actually not that uncommon. It certainly happens between mothers and their children sometimes you've been living with someone for such a long time you know what they're saying you know they going to do even though maybe a long distance away. That communication comes from almost like minds being attuned to each other by like tuning force and. And when one resonates, the other one knows a mind which is very, very still in deep meditation, because the best way of talking about this is like radio, is because there's no static, there's no interference. You can pick up very, very weak signals very clearly. So in deep meditation, you can actually pick up what other people are thinking and feel you, and you can actually communicate. It's one of the powers which develop from deep meditation, the ability actually to read other people's minds and know what they're doing. But please be reassured that any mugs or nuns or meditators who do this would actually restrain themselves from doing that, because, like, reading other people's mail is an invasion of privacy. They would never do that except for their very, very close disciples. Yeah, you can communicate with each other. You can know what the other person's thinking. First of all, in a general sense, you know, if another person's in trouble, so you feel that something's happening to them. You know, have a car crash or something, something shocks you, and you don't feel sunsor's wrong, something's up. Sometimes the opposite happens. Someone's having a lot of happiness. You feel you feel for them, that they're having a good time. So, yes, you can do that if vibrate the ng. Yeah, you can describe it as that. That's the metaphor which I use is just what I call, like, the resonance, which is the same frequencies and being able to contact each other on that way. But for most people, it's just on general feeling level, not on particulars. And only when there's extreme experiences which the other person person is undergoing. You can actually feel for them and feel with them, but it's also often with people one has been associated with for a long time. And. You know, that's what's happening to him. Animals are good on that as well. Animals can understand what's going on inside of you. One of the stories we say here, which is really interesting on these sorts of things, we've got a cat on our monastery called KitKat, was born about 16 years ago. Now, that little cat was actually born in certain time in our monastery, found in the hollow log. And so we looked after it because we're mug with softies. But after a year or two, like all cats that were killing birds, and we thought that having a cat in the bush is not the right place for it to be. So the only thing to do, even though I was attached to that cat, I admit it, that we decided we had to send it into town. We got one of our members who lived in Waterman, just by the ocean, north of here, agreed to take the cat. We had another cat as well, two of them. Now, this cat had never been sort of in the metropolitan area. It had been to byfrid to be what I call monasticized. So she didn't have any kittens, that's all. And even then she was put in the bag and put in the cage and was really out of it. That's as far north as a beating. So I've never been in the metropolitan area. Okay? That's certain. Even when cats go wandering, they don't go wandering 30 km into the southern suburbs of Perth. So this one day we got hold of the cat, obviously didn't want to go, had to put it in a bag, the Hessian bag. The this lady came, we put it in the back seat where your feet go. No way to look out the window. Taken up the freeway to Waterman's. She took the bag inside her house and let the cat out and kept it in the house for three days. And then it was on a Saturday, it was in the summertime. The very hot day when this happened. She let the cat out into the garden for the first time and this cat made a bolt for the gate. She ran after it, but the cat was too fast. Went down the street. She couldn't catch it. She got into her car and started searching for it, couldn't find it. There was a Saturday and I was actually on duty here in Nalamar. He rang me and telephone in there and told me your cats disappeared. I looked all over for it. Never mind. So I thought it might go back to the monitoring event because that sometimes cats can actually find their way home. Exactly 2 hours, give or take five minutes. 2 hours after it escaped at the front door of that house over there, I heard meowing, I opened the door, and it was Kit Kat. It was her paws, which is so hot and I gave it some milk to drink. It took care of a source of milk. Three sources of milk. I think we gave it in just about 5 seconds. The poor thing was so thirsty and. It amazed. A journey 6 km if you go in a straight line watermelon in 2 hours it crossed a freeway somehow. I don't know. They could actually buy a monk. This is 6 km. How do you think you could do that? So once it did that, that was it. The birds just have to put bad luck birds. That cat staying in my monitor. Still there. Very intelligent cat. The other cat was then also made a bolt for the gate but didn't know which way to go. So she caught that one. It's a lovely little story about being how you can resonate animals. That you know where you are and all the purse never been in the metropolis near it before and knew out of all purse where to find its friend where the mugs were. Good story, eh? So, yeah, you can resonate with each other. And that's all because of the nature of the mind. The mind is the body is in the mind, the universe is in the mind, not the other way around. That's why people can find these things just happen very often. Sometimes people get lost in snowstorms, in deserts. They find their way home. They feel their way home. It is know which way to go. Any other questions about or comments about mine? Sorry? Universal consciousness. There's no such real thing as universal consciousness except just by the way we interact with each other. So if you add up all the sums of the interactions, you can call that sort of sum total consciousnesses. Interacting minds. Just like all the ants in an antio, so all the minds interacting with each other. So. You. Okay. So I think I've gone over time again, so please forgive me. But it's interesting talk about the mind of meditation and if you want to know more, do lots more meditation. I don't know if you read the article in the Saturday paper today, but there I made one of my best marketing statements. If you really get into meditation, not only did it sort of you have lots of understanding, but it also gives you lots and lots of happiness, lots of bliss, even better bliss than sex. Interesting. Come and get you. Okay, so thanks for coming and the next talk will be next Saturday. Just to show in Buddhism, we're not so gender specific. We got is going to give the talk next week and we'll that going to be honest, core values of Buddhism here. So if you like to come next week, you see a nun giving a call, not just Mass. Again, thank you for coming. If you wish to stay for a cup of tea or some juices or something, I'm sure there'll still be some available in the reception area. So again, once again, thank you for coming.