Episode Transcript
Ajahn Brahm – Power of the Mind
[ Robot generated transcrition – expect errors! ]
For this evening's talk, just something which has came up. I'm just going to talk about the power of the mind. A nice interesting topic, because while we've been meditating, that's what we've been doing, empowering the mind. I'm going to talk about the mind, its power, and how that power can be used for the benefit of happiness of not just yourselves, but all other beings as well. Just wait for the last people to come in and then start talking about the power of the mind. Sometimes when people look at religions, sometimes they wonder what the purpose of religions are, what the purpose of past like Buddhism are. And I just was thinking earlier on today that there's an old saying that it's not a very good Buddhist saying. They say you give a person a fish, you feed them for one day. You teach a person how to fish and you feed them for life. They also make lots of bad karma at the same time. But if you teach a person meditation, actually you don't just feed their body, but you feed their heart for many, many lives. And. And sometimes we don't realize this. That the power of actually feeding the mind. One of the problems with our modern society, modern world, is we're so materialistic. We feed the body, we train the body, we look after the body. But we're still not happy. There's still people with great emotional problems, social problems, who can't hold a relationship together, who can't even hold a relationship with themselves together, let alone with another person. They're not at peace with themselves. They're not happy. They have problems inside, they have guilt, they have anxiety, they have depression, they have loneliness. Even though they may be wealthy. I always remember that time I went to do a blessing ceremony in a house in Shelley on the riverfront, a huge mansion. And there was only one person staying in there alone, had no friends. Very wealthy woman, but had no one to share her wealth with. You could see. It was just so sad. Be much better to live in a small home's, west apartment in Bentley somewhere, and police have some friends there. At least that's how I would think. And so sometimes we look too much on the superficial nature of happiness in the world, thinking that happiness only lies in wealth and health. Not realizing that there's something much more important, which is our mind, our inner world, our heart, that which lies in the center of all of this. Because if that's not right, if that is hurting, doesn't matter how much wealth you have, no matter how healthy your body, no matter how good your prospects, you will kill yourself, you will die. Because the heart of the mind is sick. Which is why that we recognize in Buddhism, and you recognize this for yourself the biggest pain, the biggest suffering is always the suffering inside. Which is why that you can even teach a person how to fish. You can make them wealthy. But that still doesn't solve the problem. The problem is with the mind. And if people's minds are happy, if their minds are content, if they get it over the sicknesses of the mind, such as like ill will and anger towards themselves or others or towards life. Anger towards themselves is called guilt. Anger towards others can be envy. Jealousy or just plain old agro. Anger towards life is depression. All of these negative states of mind which come because we haven't learned how to feed the mind, how to train the mind. Now, first of all, that people even doubt in our western world that the mind exists. Which is why I have my party trick, which you can always play at parties when you're starting to have a discussion about spiritual matters. When people say that the mind is just part of the brain, you can ask them are you happy or are you sad? And if they say they are happy, then you ask them with the index finger. Can you please point to that happiness for me? I've done that here before, so I'm not going to repeat it again. But you can try it at home. Are you happy now? Point to that happiness for me. And people can't do that. I've done this in auditoriums in Malaysian, Singapore and have all these thousand people waving their hands up and trying to point to happiness, or trying to point to sadness, trying to point to anger, trying to point to depression. Are you depressed? Where is it? You don't imagine these things. These things are real, but you cannot locate them in space. You cannot locate them in your body. Why? Because these things belong to the mind. They don't belong to the body. The body lives in space. The mind lives in its own space, mind space, if you like. You know you're happy, but it doesn't exist in your body. It's not your brain is happy. You know, you feel, say, guilty, but it's not your brain feels guilty. It's not your nose feels guilty. It's your mind feels guilty. That mind is that mind is what contains happiness, sadness, envy, depression, lack of self esteem, peace and contentment. Also a part of the mind. It that's why when we start to understand the nature of this mind and its importance to our life and other people's lives, we learn how to train the mind to feed the mind, to empower the mind. Because once a mind is empowered. Then it can do huge amounts of things, not only for your own happiness, but can serve the world, can help, can do amazing things. Which is why I'm calling this talk the power of the mind. We come across the power of that mind, especially when we start meditating, because this is what meditation is doing. It's empowering it. Mateacher Rajyan Cha always used to say, and it's a very profound saying, that to exercise, to bring health to the body, you have to exercise it, train it, and feed it well, but especially exercise. That's why sports people have to do long hours in the gym, pushing up weights, training, running, because that's how you make your body fit and healthy. And that's why in schools and colleges, we always put a lot of effort into training the body to make it fit and healthy so it lasts long and we can do things with it. But we don't train our mind, because to train the mind, my teacher Ajan Chai, used to say, you don't train the mind by exercising it. You train the mind by stilling it, by calming it, by giving it rest. That's the way you train the mind and make it fit and healthy. The more you think, the more you move the mind, the weaker it gets. You try to gain wisdom by thinking. All thinking is like a satellite orbiting the object. You think about things, around things you never actually penetrate to the heart of things. The more you think, the less you see. It's an old saying, but when we stop the mind, when we make it still, not only do we see deeply, but we gain great power of the mind. I understand this because when we meditate, what we're actually doing and this is an important part of understanding what meditation is all about, what we're doing, we're calming half of the mind and we're keeping the other half very, very active and powerful. The two parts of the mind which you've heard me say before, the two parts of that which we call the mind are the passive and the other one is the active mind. The passive mind is sometimes called mindfulness awareness, alertness, knowing, consciousness. All these words which point to that part of you inside which can hear these words, that which is seeing when you're looking at me, that which is feeling, and that which can hear the thoughts going through your mind. That's a passive part of the mind. If you call it mindfulness alertness, knowing, consciousness, you can understand what I mean by the knowing mind. And there's another part of the mind which is the reactive mind. That which reacts to what I say, that which reacts to what I do, that which moves into thoughts, into ideas, into complaining, liking, controlling, managing, manipulating all that active doing part of the mind, which is why I called it the doer, the active part of the mind. With most people these days in modern Western society, the active doing mind takes up all of your energy. You spend so much of your energy thinking, managing, fixing up faults, controlling, manipulating, getting by doing this, because there's so much to be done, so much of the energy goes into that doing, controlling, managing, fixing the active part of the mind that literally this heart. Anything left for the knowing, for awareness, for alertness. So much so that our alertness, our knowing, is very, very dull. Not only are we only half awake when we're seeing, we're only half seeing, half hearing, half knowing, half feeling, because the energy in that part of our mind is so depleted. Not only we are only half knowing and half seeing and half feeling, we're not really fully, deeply knowing and seeing because the knowing has got no energy, but also the knowing, the knowing, the energy of the knowing is what we call in mind science inner pinas. It's a strange thing that people who are depressed, people who have a lack of inner happiness, are dull in their senses. When you're depressed, what you see, you see dullly. What you feel, you feel dullly. What you know is like known in a mist. You cannot penetrate deeply. But when you're alert, when you're happy, when you're uplifted exhilarated, then what you see, you see far more richly, far more deeply. The more energy goes into the knowing, the more happiness you have in the mind and the more clarity as well. Inner happiness is energy of the mind. Which is why that sometimes one monk in Thailand said this. It's not a very good saying, but I'll repeat it. He said that life looks so good after a strong cup of coffee. What he meant was he was borrowing energy and putting into the mind. And when the mind was energized, everything looked so nice and so wonderful. But unfortunately, that caffeine or coffee is just borrowing energy, which you have to pay back later. And this is the problem. But with meditation, you are actually empowering the mind. And the mind is getting brighter, seeing more deeply, but also becoming more happy. This is actually why, a few weeks ago, the University of Wisconsin found that Buddhists were the happiest people in the world. Science proved. So if you say, why I'm a Buddhist because Buddhists are the happiest people in the world. And why is that the case? Because more and more the energy goes into knowing and less goes into doing. Buddhists are notorious for their passivity, for the ability to let things go and not to react so strongly to the difficulties in life which come along from time to time. We become more accommodating, more peaceful, more passive. And because of that passivity not always controlling, manipulating, complaining you find you have much more mental energy to know and to see. As a young man, I must have been certainly a Buddhist in my previous life because I knew, even as a young man that I was very alert and a very happy young man. In fact, I remember once when I was about to become a monk and I was going to this Thai temple in London and I was wondering where I can become a monk. And one of the monks in the Thai temple said, Go and speak to this guy. He's just come back from Thailand. I spoke to him, and he didn't really give me much information. I found later on he'd actually come from Ajan Char's monastery. When I saw him a few years later, I said, Why didn't you tell me about this monastery? And he said, Because I never thought you were serious. Not serious? I've been in bulk almost 30 years now. Why do you think I was serious? He said, Because you were too happy. You're always smiling. You thought you had to be in great pain and suffering to want to become a monk. The only reason to leave the world because you're having a hard time. No, that's not the point. I left the world because I was having a good time. But I wanted a better time, that's all. And that's why I keep staying as a monk. But he thought I was so happy even then. I was happy as a layperson. One of the reasons was because I was very alert, had natural mindfulness, not such a controller. This is one of the reasons why I've found out the power of the mind. Even at school I was alert when the teacher was giving a lecture. I was actually listening, fully listening, without thinking about the party coming up later on that day. Without complaining, complaining, without controlling, without manipulating. I could listen with full alertness, in quietness. And that's why I got a great memory. I thought every kid had a good memory. That's what you think, that yours are normal and natural. But afterwards you find out what memory is all about and. Memory is like having a sponge, like your brain being a sponge. The only way it can soak things up is if it's dry. It's got no more water in there and it's very, very dry. It soaks up everything. And that's similar of being like a dry sponge is that you're not thinking anything yourself. You're not adding to what the lecturer is saying. You're open, quiet, silence, listening, mindful, with all the energy going into knowing and no energy at all going into reacting, sitting there with complete listening, passive. That's the way you learn. That's the way you're open to the world. You can't be talking back to the world and listening at the same time as a similar I give in meditation retreats now. Modesty and serpentine. Many years ago, six Thai people were cooking food for us in the kitchen. When I went past, I saw six Thai ladies talking. There's only six ladies in the kitchen. And I started figuring out if six people are talking, who can be listening? And the answer was no one was listening. This is what happens in life. Everybody is talking, but no one is listening. They're talking inside. So when the teacher is teaching something, people are thinking they're talking inside. That s why they never listen. That s why we never remember. Listen to the times when you always remember things. It's called traumatic incidents in your life. If you have a terrible accident, isn't it the case that you actually see it happening in slow motion before the car hits? Isn't it right that you always remember that occasion? You're traumatized. You can't get it out of your mind. Why is that? Is because at that time you'll pay full attention to what's going on. You have to, because this is dangerous and. The more attention you pay, the easier it is to remember. This is actually why you can see the power of the mind. When you put all the energy into knowing, it means it's very, very easy to remember. Not only easy to remember, but easy to recall for those people doing examinations or the examinations of life, remembering the instructions and what to do. This is why people who meditate empower the mind, have great memories, but so not only just to get great memories, also the more that we empower the mind just through stillness, through silence, just the more the mind can do things, the more malleable it is, the more workable it is. In particular, one of the most important things of our mind is actually to understand and to know exactly what's going on in this world. Why is it that we have all the problems in life? And what should we do about them? So often that the suffering of life, according to Buddhism, comes from they call it ignorance, I'm a bit more gross. I call it stupidity. I always remember that one of the great sayings of Voltaire, this French philosopher and playwright who once said the only way to really understand, to fully understand the mathematical concept of infinity. Is to contemplate the extent of human stupidity. He was acidic, but people laugh because that's very true. That's how stupid we are as human beings. Have you been stupid? I've certainly been stupid many times in my life. I try and control things which are completely beyond my control. I try and do things which are completely beyond me. And some times when I fail, you suffer thinking it was me who done this and I'm hopeless, I'm useless. A lot of times that is what we call stupidity. And the way to release from the pain of life is through wisdom, through understanding, through knowing, through understanding what's going on in our life. All the times that you suffer. Why, when you look at sort of life, when things go wrong, what do you expect? Thing is, our expectations are not in line with reality. We expect all of our loved ones to always like us and sometimes they don't. What do you expect, people? We expect our husbands, our wives always to be just what we like them to be. What do you expect? We expect people to live forever. What do you expect? As we taught here many times before, even sickness, we always expect to be healthy, which is a silly expectation. When anyone is sick and they go to the doctor, they should never say, there's something wrong with me today, Doctor. I'm sick. They should say, there's something right with me, I'm sick again. There's nothing wrong with being sick. It's not against the law. So why do we say, there's something wrong with me? When we understand the truth of the things this is part of life. We get sick. The sickness is actually the body trying to heal the viruses or is trying to sort of mend a broken bone or to do whatever else it is. It's just the reactions of the body. This is the body. Does it's natural to be sick? It's also natural to die. What do you expect? You can't just expect people to live to 60, 70, 80 years of age. People die at all ages. So when anyone rings you up and say there's a close relation of you has just died, you should say, yeah, I expected that. Shock me. It's true, isn't it? If you actually understand the truths of the world, people die at all times. And it's the stupidity, the ignorance would think, no, this doesn't happen. When you go to the doctors and they give you an examination and say, you've got cancer, why does it surprise you? Are you somehow different than other people? It happens to others. Why shouldn't it happen to you? Instead of why me? The Buddhists say, why not now? You can actually see that a lot of times the pain and suffering of our lives is coming from not accepting and understanding the reality of our life, instead of actually knowing it clearly. Passively. When we react to our knowing, we distort it all the time. We don't see what is there. We just see what we want to see. We see life as it should be rather than it is. And that's where the problems of life come. So when we take away the energy from the controlling, the knowing, the manipulator, that which bends life to try and suit us, we stop and just know passively. Let's find out what life is all about. With no vested interests, with no preconceptions, with no wanting it to be this way and wanting to be that way. Let's see it as it truly is. That is actually what passive awareness does. And it's a very, very powerful mind state because it starts to see things as they true are not as we want them to be. When we see things as they truly are, there's a great relief comes to us freedom from the stupidity of life. The reason why we suffer is because of the war which goes on. I call it the war inside. It's the war between the way we want things to be, the way we want our to be, the way we want our children to be, the way we want life to be, the way want the weather to be, the way we want our footy team to be, the way want me to be and the way things are. You what happens in that war, the way things are and the way we want them to be. We try and change the way things are, the way life is. To suit ourselves, to suit our wants and desires. We actually try and change the world. We don't want death to be. We don't want sickness to be. We don't want the world to be cold so we have heaters. We don't want the world to be hot so we have coolers air conditioners. What I was saying when I went to Japan a week or two ago, they even sort of got to the point and they don't want the toilet seats to be cold, so they've got hot toilet seats over there. You sit down on the toilet seat and it's preheated for you. It's very nice. You don't want to get up again. That's why there's a lot of queues in public toilets. You too comfortable. Want to control the whole world. And where does that get you? Just gets you constipated. So the way the world is, the way we want it to be, that's where the war become war is. And so we always want to change the world rather than change our wants. What passive awareness? US, this way of meditation? Just knowing. Just knowing. Not trying to change things. See how it actually is. We actually change our wants to the way things are. We come in line with the world rather than trying to force the world into line with us. When we do this, we come to a sense of peace with the world. Ah, this is the way the world is. We don't want to control. We don't want to make things this way and that way. That old Chinese story I remember from some time ago, which comes to my mind, are these two Chinese hermits, two Buddhist hermits who lived up in the mountains. One lived on top of the mountain, and the one lived halfway down. And there were such wise people, such moral people, that when the Emperor of China was having trouble trying to find a prime minister, trying to find a wise and honest person to help him run his government when he'd gone through all of these mandarins and important people, all corrupt politicians never change and all stupid out for themselves. He thought, who can I trust? Who is wise? Who is moral, who is incorruptible? I can get as my prime minister? And he thought of these two hermits, these guys were moral, these were upset, and also they were really, really wise. So he went with a few of his soldiers up to the mountain to the top hermit and said oh, great hermit, oh wise one, o moral one, please, can you take up the honorable position of Prime Minister of the Chinese Empire? Can you please sort of help me run my nation? And as soon as he heard this, the Hermit never replied. He just went to the stream and washed out his ears. The Emperor got the message. That's not the sort of thing a hermit wants to hear. So he thought, uhoh, well, there's still another hermit halfway down the mountain. So he tried the second hermit. He went down there and he was about to ask the second hermit the same question. For the sake of the empire, for the sake of the people of China, can you take up the responsibility to control and to help manage our empire? But before the second hermit could even answer, the attendant of the first hermit came running down the mountain and told the second hermit say, please, hermit, don't use the water. There's something filthy in it. This at which the Emperor realized he's not going to convince any of these hermits and went back and got somebody else to be the Prime Minister. Because hermits wise, people know, just like controlling, managing others is just suffering. Imagine trying to control your children. Now imagine trying to control an empire. Oh, that's big suffering you. So why do you want to control yourself? Why do you want to control life, the great empire of life? When you do, you're trying to sort of go against the stream, the stream of old age, sickness and death, the things going wrong. Life is a mess, as I was saying that last week about life is a mess. There's always you tidy things up. What is actually the whole movement of life is actually mess it up again. You fix one thing and it breaks again. You fix up part of your body and something else goes wrong. You fix up one part of the relationship and there's other problems. Life seems to be going into, like, messiness all the time and. So a lot of times that we try and control too much and we never get any happiness that way. And also because we put all that power, all that energy into doing, controlling we get worn out, burnt out, we get worn out, burned out. We get sort of levels of depression and the results of depression are sort of ill will and anger. And when you're really depressed and having a hard time, as I say, you get up in the morning, you kick the dog. If you haven't got a dog, you kick the cat or you kick your husband or you kick your wife or whatever, you kick why do you do that? Because you're upset and unhappy so much. Ill will, anger, negativity always comes because you're burnt out, you're tired. Now imagine instead of putting all that energy into controlling, doing things, you put all that energy into this the knowing, the passivity, meditating, just sitting there, doing nothing, just being and being and being and being until after a while you find that being ness, the awareness, mindfulness, passive awareness gets stronger and stronger and stronger. Not only do you know more deeply what's going on, think oh, I'm stupid. Why did I do that? I wasn't seeing clearly enough. I was doing something else at the time. You, but also you get this huge amounts of energy coming up in the mind. Mind energy. You become empowered. Not only is this the secret of Buddhist monks being the happiest people in the world, because they're passive to put all the energy through meditation into their mind, that knowing gets empowered and the mind becomes bright and happy. But it's not only happy you can do was last Tuesday night, I think in Armadill, I was telling people about an experience which I had when I was going to visit Canberra to do some teachings many years ago. Canberra is very, very cold, and this was a cold time of the year. After a couple of days there, I got a cold. And that particular day, somebody was going to take me up to a tour of the part of New South Wales. I wish they hadn't have taken me, but they'd made all the arrangements. I just wanted just to go into bed and curl up and just try and sort of get rid of the cold. They took me all up here and up there all day. And we were late coming back to a Vietnamese temple. I was supposed to give a talk that evening. By the time I returned, I'd been out all day, no time for a shower. About ten minutes before, I had to give a talk, and all these people had come, maybe 60 people, 70 people, and I was coughing, sneezing, my eyes were running. And, you know, it's like when you start a cold, you feel terrible. You got no energy at all. I asked them for a cup of tea and all they had was a bit Chinese jasmine tea. I couldn't get a cup of coffee because it was a Vietnamese Mahayana temple. I like Teravada tea. In other words, tea from Sri Lanka. I call that Teravada tea. I got this jasmine tea and I felt really, really weak. And I started giving this talk and it was hopeless. Every sort of few seconds I had to sneeze or cough or just wipe the water from my nose was dribling out in public. It was very embarrassing. But worst of all, you just couldn't keep your train of thought because you felt so tired and weak. So after ten or 15 minutes of this, I said, let's stop. Let's meditate, let. And everyone was quite happy to do that because they couldn't understand what I was trying to say. And so we meditated for half an hour and so I relaxed, I let go, just went into the moment, went into silence, went into my breath. I'd completely put all my energy into the knowing and not into the doing at all. And after half an hour, not exaggerating half an hour, the cold had gone and I gave this really brilliant talk, smooth, articulate. All the ideas were flowing on quite lovely without sort of any break, and it really impressed people. So how'd you do that? The power of the mind. This is what you can do. You put all the energy into the knowing, the mind becomes bright and powerful and the mind can do some amazing things, especially when you have to give a talk and all these people have come and you really feel tired or you've got a sickness, you can stop that and just give a beautiful talk. The mind becomes powerful in this way. It becomes bright. And it's not only just to start to control some of these things in the body. You can actually start to heal some of these sicknesses in the body. The Buddha says the mind is the forerunner of all things. It's the most powerful. It's a chief. The mind is sick. You know how that makes the body sick? The mind is depressed, upset the body's love to get all these illnesses. The happiness of the mind increases the immune system, so they say. It strengthens it. It gets all these endorphins flowing through the body. Now, medicine knows that happiness is the way for good health. What is that? Happiness is the energy of the mind. You put lots of energy into the mind through your meditation. It's a great way to be healthy, to be energetic, to be powerful in this mind. So if you have any sicknesses many times people practice meditation and they use the power of their mind actually to focus on parts of the body which are sick and. And the way you do that is once you've got energy in the mind, you feel its power, because you've been very, very still, very, very quiet, and you start to feel the mind brightening up and getting some happiness, even some bliss coming up. Then you can focus that energy on that part of the body. Maybe a knee, which is hurting, or maybe your heart or a breast with a cancer or anything else like that. You can focus on that area. Only when you're still you got energy and power and you can just bathe it in beautiful energy, not with negativity, but with this beautiful, like, kindness, acceptance, peace. The power of the mind. You can feel you can do this. The mind has got that energy. When you put it down there, it's amazing what it can do. The mind is that powerful. I remember when I was young, if I was playing soccer in the streets of London and I sort of fell over and grazed my knee, I'd always go to my mum and she would kiss it better. She'd put all the germs of her mouth on it, but it would never get infected, it always get well. Why was that? Because the power of belief and kindness. I believed it would work. It was an act of kindness and always got better, never got infected. This is actually what happens. The power of the mind is that strong. So if you can actually use that power of the mind, this is what you can do. There's old stories I told of that people who taught themselves to death. A story of that guy who got caught in the back of truck in the United States some years ago. Refrigerated truck. On a Friday night. He was cleaning up a wind caught the door of the truck, slammed it shut. He was caught in the back of refrigerated truck all weekend, banging on the doors, shouting out. But he was the last one out in the yard. No one heard him. And he wrote his last words on the piece of paper because no one can stand more than a couple of hours in such subzero temperatures of a refrigerated truck. They found him on the Monday morning dead. But he'd written all these letters. He said that he realized very quickly when he couldn't escape, that he was going to die. And he wanted to give something back to medical science. He wrote he wanted to tell people what it was like to freeze to death all the symptoms. So in great detail, he recorded the symptoms of somebody freezing to death. And that's actually what they found written on a piece of paper on the Monday when they opened the the truck and found him in there dead. And those symptoms were classic symptoms medical science knew those symptoms very well already. The only strange thing was that the refrigeration unit wasn't turned on it was ordinary temperatures but he'd thought himself to death. It that happens. The other case, which I thought I told these stories before, but people I think this is the first time you've heard that for a while. The other story was a very famous story which was done in England about 103 years ago, just the turn of the century as a man who was condemned to death by hanging in a jail in Brisk. Still, the day before the execution. The evening before, two psychologists had permission from the government to go into his cell and to lie to him and say that the law had been changed. He was still to die, but he would have his throat cut in the morning. He wouldn't be hung. The poor fellow was faced without all night the following morning he would die by having his throat cut probably never slept all night. In the morning they came for him, tied his hands firmly behind his back, put a hood on him, a blindfold, and led him to the place of execution. What he didn't know was the place of execution was just the prison washroom s there the two psychologists and a few prison warders and the governor of the jail and a priest, or someone acting as a priest asking for his last words gave him the solace of his religion. And then they carried out the execution. One of the psychologists drew the blade of one of the old razors people used to use to shave their face. Used to call them actually cutthroat razors. Only he drew the blunt edge of the blade across the man's throat. It didn't even scratch him. At the same time, one of the other psychologists turned on a tap close by. A man felt coal steel across his throat. He heard the sound of liquid running and he fell to the ground and died. He believed he was having his throat cut and he died as a result. Nothing wrong with him. This is the power of the mind. The power of belief, the power of the energy of the mind. If it can actually kill you, imagine how it can heal you. Imagine what it can do for you. That's why recently, when I was in Singapore, during the SARS crisis, I told people, look, fear is the biggest killer of human beings. If you believe you're going to get SARS, you will do it. Fear is what kills people. Because fear is a negative part of the mind. The positive part of the mind can be extremely strong. Just as it can kill you, it can also heal you and save you. But it's not only just for that. That power of the mind can also liberate. It can liberate you. Especially from those negative emotions which cause so much problem in our society. Why is it that too many people are angry? Why is it too many people feel such guilt inside themselves? Why do so many people just really get upset when somebody dies and have grief? Tell you why. Because they're lacking the energy of of mental energy, of happiness, of joy, of passivity. The more we manipulate and control our world, the more we're subject to the negative emotions. Because we are weak minded. All our energy goes into surviving, doing, making, controlling. You've got no energy left where it counts. That's why if you give yourself a few moments of peace all your anger and negativity will be lessened enormously. All the sense of lack of self esteem, depression, anxiety, grief, fear, anger, envy, jealousy. You give yourself a few moments of peace, real peace. The energies will come up in your mind, happiness will come and you'll find there's no cause for ill will. Ill will is a reaction to the unhappiness inside our hearts. When you're feeling good, when you're feeling happy, when you're feeling elated, you can't get angry at anybody. When you have a really good meditation, you feel on top of the world. People can tell you anything. Wives run away, children have all died, lost all your money, the house has been destroyed. Don't mind. Easy come, easy go. But when you're really tense, when you've had a bad day, when you're tired, you're depressed, one small little thing happens and you blow up. Because there's no power in the mind beyond becomes very, very weak, and the small vagaries of life just blow you around so hard. That's why the more one meditates. The Buddha symbol is like of one of these big stone pillars which I used to have in India years ago, still left there because they're so strong, buried deeply into the ground, which cannot be moved even by storms. Because you're buried deep in inner happiness, your own happiness, your own power, your own bliss of mind. So things of the world, they just cannot shake you. That's why you don't get ill will, you don't get anger, you don't get grief, you don't get despair, because you got this source of inner happiness within you which keeps you like a rock. But the greatest power of the mind, as I was saying earlier, is the power of seeing deeply these truths. The only reason why Magnus or Nun sit up here and have got the authority to teach like this is because the years that we've spent in meditation empowering our minds. So we can see deeply into the nature of things. You don't get wisdom from books. You don't get wisdom from listening to people like me. You get wisdom by shutting up, by being still, by going inside that stillness of your heart, by making the mind is so quiet that all the truths of the world become come reveal to you the important things. Whatever the mind looks there, it can see just so deeply, so powerfully. Recently, I think here or somewhere, I'm not quite sure where, I've been giving these talks, talking about that clump of bamboo after a meditation retreat. Every time a person gets into a deep state of meditation, when their mind become become still, when they become blissed out and there's enormous happiness inside, when they go outside afterwards, if they say, look at the stars in the sky, those stars are more beautiful than they've ever seen before. And. You look at a brick on the wall. My goodness, that brick is a work of art. Everything you see, you see in greater richness depths and beauty. It's a weird experience when this first happens to you what's going on? Why is the world look so beautiful? Why is it so rich? Because the mind is empowered through stillness. It's as if you've got muscles in the mind which you've never had before. You can see deeply into things. And those things, when you see deeply into them, you see their richness and their beauty. That's why sometimes when saying that clump of bamboo. My first meditation retreat in Cambridge as what was I, a 19 year old, I think, 18 year old, maybe, I'm not sure. Just after every morning, I was allowed to go for a walk. I went to the botanical gardens close by. I was supposed to be a walk, but all I could do was stand and stare at this beautiful clump of bamboo. Which looked so beautiful I couldn't move from it. After retreat was finished, maybe a week or two later, I decided to go back and visit my clump of bamboo which had given me so much happiness, which had entranced me for hour after hour for nine days. When I went back there couldn't see anything. It's just a bamboo or me. What's going on? Why now did it look me? But when I was on meditation retreat, it was one of the most beautiful things I'd ever seen. There was a bench next to it. I sat down on that bench and just stared. People must have thought I was mad and crazy. So on some sort of drug just open mouth, just staring. This beautiful club of bamboo mao couldn't see it anymore. I was realizing the power of the mind. Actually can see deeply into things and can see beauty where you never saw beauty before. You look at a carpet during a meditation retreat, like a little carpet like you're sitting on right now, and that becomes amazing. How wonderful that is. What's going on? It's not the carpet. It's your mind. Your mind is becoming powerful. Energized decides to see deeply into things. That's why after station people get into this amazing experience when everything becomes wow, look at this. This is amazing. And. But that's only just seeing the beauty of the world as who was it Yates said to see a world in a grain of sand, see a heaven in a wildflower, hold infinity in the palm of your hand, an eternity in an hour. See what happens when you meditate. Even a grain of sand becomes a whole world. An a small, tiny wildflower is a whole heaven which you can explore for days, years. Eons. There's so much going on there. So what happens with the power of the mind? But it's not just seeing the beauty in things. It's also seeing the truth in things. Most important thing about the power of the mind is if you really want to find out the truths of this world, the truths of this existence, what this world is all about, what you are all about, you need to have that power of the mind to find out. The way of Buddhism is a way of enlightenment. And how does that enlightenment happen? You don't get enlightened by reading books. You don't get enlightened by talking about Buddhism or talking about things. You don't get enlightened by listening to talks. You get enlightened by going in your mind. And by using the powerful mind to look inside and find out who you really are, or rather what you really are. What is this mind? Where does it come from and how does it work? Here you are going to what we called in budhism, the jewel in the heart of the lotus, the most valuable thing in the whole world. It is truth. Because the promise of truth is it liberates you once and for all from all the suffering and pain of life. Liberation. Freedom. That's why these words liberation and freedom, which people tout in philosophies, in sociologies and even in political ideas. Freedom. Freedom. Was Itzi in the French Revolution? Liberty. Egality. Fraternity. Freedom. Justice. Brotherhood. But freedom. What actually is then, with all of the movements of the world, with all of your movements towards being free? Have you ever felt being free? Do you really feel that you're a free person? The only time you really feel free, you'll find, is when you're at peace. Because because we're always under the control of our desires, our wants, our needs. So we never feel free. Have you ever got a free moment? Every moment is free if you let go of the past and the future. It's the past and the future which imprison the present moment, which squash it into being just a tiny area of time. But when you let go of the past and the future, you've got all the time in the world. Strange thing, the present moment looks as if it's only a tiny fraction of a moment long. But when you get into the present moment, you find it lasts forever. This is what freedom is. When you let go of things, you find freedom. The more you have, the more enclosed you feel. The more you do, the less freedom you feel. That's why we talk about the free world in the west. It's not free at all. You find with the power of mind what freedom true really is, is not the freedom of desires, but the freedom from desires. Small change, but makes all the difference between enlightenment and suffering. We think that to get all our desires met, to change the world according to our ideas, the freedom of desires is taken in the world to be real freedom. That's why the west tries to take away all of the obstacles to fulfilling your desires, to make every desire possible. It's called the freedom of desires. In those worlds, no one ever feels free. Even the millionaires and the billionaires have got all the power to get whatever they want, whenever they want. They never feel free. But you let go of desires and have moments of contentment. Moments sitting by the beach at sunset where you don't want anything in the whole world. It's called freedom from desires. And that is real freedom. That is where the power of the mind sees where happiness truly lies. Freedom is that power. Freedom from desires is the mind being passive. Freedom from desires, the contentment in the moment is where you'll find the happiest times of your life. It doesn't cost you anything. You don't need to get anything to be there. You don't have to do anything or go anywhere or get anything. All you need to do is to stop. And there you are. The power of the mind. And that's a nice place to end the talk this evening. So thank you very much for listening to the power of the mind. Okay, anyone got any questions about this evening's talk? Yes. When you go to sleep, okay, first of all, what happens to mind when it goes to sleep? It's still actually acting, but it's on a sort of very low, dull state. That's why sometimes we have dreams, but we can't remember them. Reason why we can't remember them is because the mind is very, very dull. In the sleep state. If you really sleep deeply, then you can just actually slow the mind down, actually stop it for a few hours. That's why you can really sleep deeply. And when you wake up in the morning, you're really refreshed. But a lot of times people wake up in the morning, they're not refreshed at all. They're just really tired again. No matter how much they sleep, they still feel tired because they don't know how to sleep well. That's why, if you really want actually to sleep well, sleep efficiently. When you go to bed at night, laying down there, do a little bit of meditation, present moment awareness, letting go of all the past and the future, everything which has happened today, good, bad, the whole lot, just throw away what's going to happen tomorrow morning when you wake up and leave that till tomorrow. Who knows? You might not wake up, you might die in your sleep. What's the point of worrying about it? People do die to sleep, you know, leave it all alone, say don't worry about anything and then be silent, stop thinking. Just doing those first part of the meditation, present moment awareness and silence. You sleep very, very deeply and very well because you go to bed quietly and you go to sleep carrying no baggage into your sleep. When you're thinking, worrying about past and future, you carry so much baggage into the sleep state, no wonder you're tired, because you carry that throughout the night, tossing and turning, thinking, worrying. So this is how you actually can sleep well then the mind can actually rest in the morning when you wake up, you're refreshed again, you feel good how do you control your dreams? That's the best way controlled by letting go. I don't know why people want to control the dreams. Sometimes they want to sort of think of when we get old, we want to think we're young again. So we can play around with fantasies in our dream states. It or you can play around being rich or whatever. I don't know. But why do you want to control your dreams for? Isn't it much better just to be peaceful and quiet, have a really good rest? Especially we have to do so much in our world and our life. We're so busy, so much is asked of us that we really haven't got the time to waste time in sleep. We have to sleep well otherwise is that we won't perform well when we go to work the following day. So see if you can do just that. The first part of the meditation present moment awareness and silence the. It's like having a little child. They go to sleep they go into sleep very, very calm and peaceful. That's the best way to control your dreams, by having none? Is that what you're asking? Okay. Yeah. It's also actually that when you empower the mind with lots of peace during the day, you don't to sleep very much. Quite naturally, you tend when you do lots of meditation, you actually lessen your sleep needs. Because when the mind can rest in awareness, it doesn't need to rest in sleep. So the more you have a powerful mind, the less you need to sleep. You empower the mind in meditation? Yeah. The main difference is they cost a lot of money to go in there. This is two. This is free. They wear sharp suits and nice hairstyles. I'm bald without any with just an old pair of robes. And this is much higher quality as well. Because some people do that and some people succeed in that, but only if they've got supporting conditions. It's okay to will yourself for a goal, but you need supporting conditions as well. This is actually like the similar I say if you want to say to go to Paris, you can will, I'm going to go to Paris, I'm going to go to Paris. But you haven't got an air ticket. No one's going to let you on the plane. So you can have the great its goals, but you need the supporting conditions. Example I've known you for a long time. If you say, right, I'm going to sort of play footy for the West Coast Eagles, no matter how much you want to do that, I'm afraid you're too old, you haven't got a supporting condition. So this is the problem there with, like, goal setting. It has to be reasonable. You have to have supporting conditions. Not everyone can be rich, but everyone wants to be rich. And people actually these guys, actually, they exploit people's fantasies and dreams of wanting things which they can never have and. This is exploitation. That s why whenever people actually charge for these things, you can always say, what are they charging for? If these guys were so, so good at setting goals and being wealthy, why would they have to go all over the world working? It's like even people telling fortunes. My saying is, never trust a poor fortune teller. That so a lot of times people are stupid. And again, it's just a lot of those motivational. They're getting people to have some sort of power, but they're not using it for the right purposes. Instead of being wealthy, how about being happy? Instead of looking at the outside world, how about like empowering and sort of helping the inner world? Which is what? Buddhism, the Kubo ajans, these are the teachers of our tradition. Keep on saying you don't need to have a big mansion to be the happiest person in the world. You don't need to sort of have the most beautiful partner to actually to have a happy marriage. You don't need to have children who always become doctors and engineers to have a very lovely family. You can actually the happiness and the quality of society comes with contentment with the love the door of my heart is open. No matter who you are, no matter what you are, no matter who you are, no matter what you are it's letting go of design are kids children I love you no matter who you are, no matter how you turn out there's a love which doesn't control and you love yourself even though you're imperfect. Doesn't matter who I am, no matter how I do give a good talk a bad talk. I'm a great guy, I'm a stupid guy, I make mistakes, I'm successful or whatever be able to love yourself no matter who you are is contentment it that is where motivation should be going to the real happiness within wealth you leave behind happiness you'll always take with you wherever you go. Okay, so thank you for that question you just squeezed in. Go on. 15s Okay. They can only project anger in securities onto you. If you've got sort of a place where those anger insecurities can rest. If you've got, like, a perch inside where the bird can actually settle for a while, if they try and project things onto you and you just literally let it go in one ear of your mind and out the other ear of your mind, it doesn't settle there. So the insecurities, the anger, and the ill will, you just are at peace with it. When people actually project onto you, they need a screen to project onto, to find an image you can't project into thin air. And this is actually the less you have inside of you to react to these things, the more peace and more happiness, the less these things can stick. You get what we call like a teflon mind. People can shout at you and you can be at peace. They can be unhappy. You can soak up that unhappiness without keeping any of it. It's like if you're ever in counseling and listening to people's problems and troubles, as my teacher entirely used to say, you have to be like a dust bin for your friends. Allow them to put all their rubbish into you, but be a dust bin with no bottom in it so all all goes right through and you never keep any of it. So when people project or they chuck the insecurities, the problems, the difficulties into you, don't keep any of it. So you can dump as much as you like in here, but I've got no bottom in my dust bin. It just goes right through the bottom. So my dust bin is always empty. Always empty to receive more people's problems. Can't ever keep any of them. That makes sense. So be like a dust bin, but with a hole in the bottom. Okay? So thanks for listening to the talk to.
