Zeroing In On Enlightenment

Zeroing In On Enlightenment by Ajahn Brahm I've had three requests for the subject of this evening's talk. As many of you know that I encourage people to give their requests for the Friday night talk. So I don't just give a talk on what I think you should hear, but you can actually ask questions or suggest subjects. And that way it makes the whole evening a bit more customer focused. And today, the three requests that somebody asked me to speak about the middle way, another one asked me to speak about non-duality, and the third asked me to say something about what I talked about last night in the way I was a session on religion and science compatible together with David Blair and Abbot Placid. So the title of this evening's talk would be, um, How to Reconcile Religion? Uh, Buddhism, uh, duality and the Middle Way. It's not trying to do all three at once. Let's see what we can do. But it was an interesting session last night. This is because some people who tried to get in couldn't get in. Interesting session last night about, uh, trying to, uh, answer the dichotomy. It seems to be in our modern world between religion and science, because especially there are the fundamentalist religions who are having almost a crusade against science, and some scientists are standing their ground. People like Richard Dawkins, uh, and Sam Harris, uh, Richard Dawkins from Oxford, Sam Harris from us making some very, very spirited and very wonderful, um, accusations, you know, against, uh, religion, especially the, uh, very fundamentalist religions. And how does Buddhism fit into all of this? Usually Buddhism comes out with a good reputation from these, uh, debates, simply because that the Buddhist part has always been a one which has been willing to bend the bend the faith to fit the facts. It's my favorite saying about the religions and science, though there are some religions, even some science people, who will always bend the facts to fit their faith. In other words, whatever they see on the, um, the results from their experiments, whatever they see in the, uh, Reports written in the journals they'd always pick and choose and denying or rather, just not even acknowledging anything which challenges their belief systems. Whether there is a belief in how the universe was formed, or the belief in evolution, or the belief in their scriptures, or the belief in a Buddha or whatever, and I think that from the very beginning of Buddhism, we always were encouraged to, to challenge things. And certainly as I grew up as a monk in Thailand, I was also encouraged to challenge. And there wasn't this idea of an authority figure like an agent who was infallible. We all know that sometimes even Ajahn Chah made mistakes because or rather, he may have said the truth, but I misinterpreted it and thought it was a mistake. And understanding that was that we never talked these people to be infallible authorities. And instead we used our own investigation, our own personal experience. But as Professor Baer was saying quite eloquently last night that sometimes personal experience cannot be trustworthy because many people are deluded, they're in denial. And sometimes we may really think we saw that pink, uh, that pig fly. But, you know, really it was just some advertising gimmick. Or we were rather under the influence of substances which Buddhists should not be under the influence of, but. Nevertheless, it's sometimes that people are deluded. And one of the interesting things about Buddhism is just how we actually pursue that truth. Because one of the great differences between the scientific method and the Buddhist method and and also the so-called religious method, uh, is I gave the simile and I think I mentioned it in the first book, which I wrote, Opening the Door of Your Heart. And it was an anecdote which came when I gave a panel discussion in the old Perth Observatory, which is in Kings Park now, the very, very old one. There was some celebration, and I was on a panel with a couple of other scientists and, uh, this Catholic lady, uh, she asked this question in the question time and is one of the best questions I've heard, because it was an honest question which wanted to find out a deeper truth about her experiences of religion and life, because, she said whenever she looked through a telescope at the heavens, she always found that her belief structure, her faith, was challenged. And it is true that once one looks at the stars at night or looks at some galaxies, it really does challenge as many of the understandings and ideas and frameworks of our existence are things like how small we are, or how insignificant we are, and how arrogant we can sometimes be thinking we are the center of things. And it obviously it does challenge many of the religious beliefs. When you look at some of those stars and galaxies, they are literally. Thousands and millions of years old. And now if you look in some books, sometimes we say the universe only began 6 or 7000 years ago, and these are thousands of millions of years old. So it does a challenge one's beliefs. But I made the observation at that time, many years ago, that when a scientist looks through the other end of a telescope, when you look in the big end and look to see who's watching, then that's where science often gets challenged. Now, who's actually doing the watching? And this is the way of basically mysticism. Like a religion, like Buddhism is always looking inwards, not so much exploring the universe out there, but exploring the universe inside. Well, the last little quip which I made when people were, uh, the three panelists myself, uh, David Blair, the professor of physics at UW, and, uh, Abbot Placid were asked the meaning of life. And, uh, Professor Blair, quite interestingly, started talking about the search for extraterrestrial life and thereby comparing our meanings and looking for aliens in outer space. And I made the, uh, the comment at the very end. The part of Buddhism is looking for the alien insight. And it was a very interesting comment because it is alien in a world we don't really know all that well, we're not really understanding who we are, what's doing this. Watching it is very alien, you know, it's that sort of the weird beings in, in a space, you know, we're not quite sure what they are, but that has always been the search of, like Buddhism. That's where we find the truth instead of looking outwards, looking inwards. And that is a fundamental difference between, uh, science and Buddhism. But nevertheless, uh, it's not incompatible because we can combine what's inside with what's outside. We can understand who's looking. We understand sometimes how we watch and why. Sometimes we get things wrong. But the whole path of this Buddhist path is actually finding out, you know, exactly who's looking and maybe that might understand sometimes the wonder and the awe of the physical world, which sometimes is like a religious experience, to see the huge amount of stars in the sky and to see their beauty just to understand where we all came from. And certainly Buddhism has no problem at all with the evolutionary theory. Only we take it much further, because now, when we were asked a question on the origin of this universe, and what's the Buddhist idea? You know, I was mentioning that it's, uh, straight out of the books that in Buddhism that this is not the first universe that has been there has been many, many, many before and have been many afterwards. And I gave a similarly that, uh, maybe a thousand years ago, people in Europe thought that Europe was the center of the world, had no idea of places like Africa or China or places like Sri Lanka. There's many Sri Lankans here, or Thailand or China, certainly not Australia. And they thought that was the center of the world. It was a flat earth, and that was the very middle. And I was very, very arrogant to think like that. And of course, later on, people discovered there were other, uh, continents with other races and other people and other religions, and there was a wonderful, uh, part of discovery to find out that, you know, say in Europe it wasn't the center of the world or in China, the China wasn't the middle country, as they called themselves. That we were on around Earth. And of course, later on, we always thought that the Earth was the center of the solar system and the sun, and everything revolved around our Earth until we found out that, no, it's the other way round, that we are just one planet amongst many. And then we found out that this planet is just on the end of a pretty unremarkable solar system, one of many, one of hundreds and thousands of millions of other solar systems. But we think still have the arrogance. And this is where I asked Professor Blair to go the next step. We still have the arrogance that our universe is special, that this is the only time there's been a universe like this, and this is a special universe. It's like the middle universe and understanding Buddhism. Yeah, this is just another universe. Here we go again. Nothing special. There's been many universes like it before. There have been many universes like it afterwards. It's a big picture. Oh. Big bang. So what? There've been many big bangs, so there's nothing special anymore. And I call that the big picture, which is a wonderful way of describing just this huge, uh, vista which Buddhism has. It's a huge, much bigger than just one universe. Whenever we think that this is special or unique or alarm bell should really ring, you know, that's arrogance. That's eager. So obviously there have been many universes before, many universes afterwards. And here we go again. But looking inside of us, we can understand that why we take these things as being special? Because the path of Buddhism especially, is actually just seeing just just how this universe inside and in universe outside that they can reflect each other. It's almost like what you see outside through the telescope gives you some idea of what you see inside of of your own mind when you look the other way to the one who's watching. Because now most of the universe is empty space. It's incredible just how empty it all is. And that's actually what we say about the inner world, too. That's also empty. You go deeper and deeper and in and you find just how Spacy is inside. That's why when you go into meditation, they call it spacing out. But you know, you're just going in and this is just what it feels like, just a complete emptiness. Just before I came in here, that somebody asked me and how they should address me. And just for a joke, I said, you should reject me as your emptiness. Not His Excellency or Your Reverence, or. But your emptiness. That's how you address a Buddhist monk or Buddhist nun. But, sir, it's interesting, actually, to find out, you know, who this thing was watching, because that's an important part of science to find out actually who this is and actually ending this whole process of rebirth. One of the things which Professor Blair said last night, which was very fascinating and very inspiring when you looked at it one way, was that when you look upon ourselves as like the whole journey of our genes, and we've arrived at this place because of our parents and our parents parents and have all these group of people. And they said, he said an interesting thing. Every one of your ancestors have been fertile, which is why you're here. And if one of those ancestors weren't fertile, you wouldn't be here. So you're very, very fortunate to be here. But when I said no, he was saying that, I thought straight away that myself and Abbot Placid, we are both infertile. With celibate. And where does that actually put us? And I thought afterwards that a good answer to that was that, you know, in the whole journey, an evolution of genes. You know, you get to this the perfection of the genes. Evolutionary is actually to be the celibate monk, because that's the best genetic program you can possibly have. And the reason why monks are celibate is because if we did procreate our genes, it would all be downhill from that time on. So that's why the Darwin evolutionary theory that gives the summit of genetic genetic evolution as the monk or the nun. And that's why they're not celibate. That's why they're celibate and their genes. Anyway, such spurious theories. I'm sure I get a few emails about that one. But the whole point of science is always like looking outside for the truth. And the path of, uh, religion really should be looking inside for the truth, and especially the mystical religions, which are really supposed to be the the original religions, the mystical ones, where you didn't try and organize yourselves into this big organization, but, you know, you're just going inside. And everybody had their own path of inner understanding and inner realization. So this wasn't like a revealed path, because once you have a revealed path, it becomes put into a books and the books become worshipped, and then it becomes these dogmatic religions where the books which really should have a use by date, put on them, just like on the cartons of milk. Whenever you write a book, you should be best before. And maybe 1 or 2 years afterwards because things are always changing. But the path of Buddhism has been what we call one of the Gnostic religions. The Gnostic religion means that the inner knowledge, inner understanding rather than revealed truth. The Buddhist teachings are always like guidelines, like maps, guidebooks, handbooks to find out for yourself. And that's a wonderful way of looking at this path. But to be able to find out, you know, how what is the truth? Because that was a question which was hanging in the air, uh, after last night's talk, you know, is how do you find out the truth? The scientific method is actually to do these experiments, to collect the data and actually to analyze those data and come to some sort of conclusion and have other people test that out, see if they can replicate that experiment and get the same data and get the same answers. Whereas the path of Buddhism is is like your own experience becomes almost more important. And there was one question which somebody asked last night, and we promised we'd answer it tonight because they said they were going to come here to this talk is when I was mentioning just what I say is the truth, scientific proof and truth of rebirth or reincarnation? I said, how can you actually say that? What's the evidence and the truth? And in science, you would actually demand some objective evidence for rebirth. In Buddhism, you would allow that objective evidence, but you would also have to compare it with your own internal experiences. And I think that sometimes that this question here of, you know, can we accept the fact of reincarnation and how can we accept it? Is a very good metaphor for understanding the difference between science and Buddhism, and how we can bring both of them together, how we can, uh, join the two paths of science and gnosis, understanding for oneself and having an objective reality as well. So when somebody asks me how I they they asked me, but I didn't have time to answer, actually. How did how are you so confident that reincarnation or rebirth actually exists? And it is a combination of the two, the evidence, the objective evidence from, you know, people like Ian Stevenson, who wrote many, many books about people who can recall their past lives and very really go into detail into, uh, analyzing, checking to make sure that those memories of their previous birth could not have been accessed by any other way. They had no possibility of knowing those details, very personal details, extensive details of names and places and habits and jobs and goodness knows what else. There have no way of knowing those details by any other way. And those details were accurate. There's many, many cases he researched to get a huge body of evidence, which was very convincing that these people had knowledge of previous lives, which they could not have gained in any other way. And the obvious conclusion afterwards was they had lived in those lives before they were reincarnations. But there's also there's other evidence which I was citing, and the famous one, which I've cited here many times, which I also put in my second book, the research of Professor Pim van Lommel, who looked at people who had died through cardiac arrest but were resuscitated again, and when they were unconscious when they were, and this is his words, clinically dead. In other words, that they had no brain activity whatsoever. At that time, they were conscious. Hearing and seeing what was happening to their body in the emergency rooms or in the operating theatre, and actually could remember that they had the the mental function of memory as well as sight and hearing, which shouldn't have happened. And in Professor Pim Van Rommel's papers, he was going into great detail about how that could not be explained as a secondary phenomena of the brain. The brain was just not acting at all. It was dysfunctional. Could not have been a brain generated consciousness. That's, you know, there's some very hard evidence there and it's evidence of such as that, you know, which I use as the objective evidence. But the more compelling evidence than the objective evidence is actually one's internal realizations. Now, what actually happens to you when you do go deep inside and find that truth from your own personal experience? And to be able to do that, you go into these deep meditations. Number one, you can see straight away the nature of a mind, you know, this sixth sense. And this is, you know, your experiment. There you are, coming face to face with your mind in the deepest of meditations. I'm talking here about the stage when your five external senses of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting and touching completely disappear so you can't hear anything. Someone's shouting, you can't hear them, you can kick, you won't feel it. But you're fully aware. But deep inside now there you actually you. First of all, you actually know very clearly just the mind is independent of the body. And the five senses. That's a very, very clear realization. Just an obvious thing, which is, is you can't miss it. What are you knowing? There is the nature of the mind, and you're knowing there's a personal experience which you repeat many, many, many, many times until you're very sure you know what this mind actually is. Uh, the simile, which I have used many, many times, but mostly on my retreats, is of the Emperor with the five pieces of clothing on, I imagine, an emperor, a very, very powerful individual. But he wears his big boots, which go up to his thighs. He wears his trousers, which cover the top of his boots. He wears a jacket which covers the top of his trousers, and which goes up to his neck and down to his wrists. He wears gloves over his hand, which covers the sleeves of his jacket, and a helmet which covers the top of the jacket. So with those five pieces of clothing boots, trousers, jacket, gloves and helmet, the whole body is covered and you can't see even a fraction of the skin. So you don't know if that emperor is male or female, old or young, Caucasian, Asian, African or whatever. Because you can't see what this emperor is because it's covered completely by the five pieces of clothes. And in that simile that stands for the mind, which is covered completely by the five senses of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching. And the only way to understand who that emperor is. Old or young, male or female. What race? Whatever is actually to take those clothes off so you can actually see the Emperor without all these coverings, and then you can see exactly what this powerful being is. And that's actually what one does in meditation to take away the, you know, the seeing, the hearing, the smelling, the tasting and the physical touch to make the mind so still that those things just, just fall away. And all you got left with is knowing, pure knowing, not hearing or seeing or smelling or tasting or touching, but just knowing in the mind inside, deep within. And by many, many experiences of that deep knowing. This is actually how you understand what this mind is. And it's very obvious when you see this that the mind is not going to die when you your body dies. And that's a realization which everybody will get once they see what the mind actually is. And the other way is actually to remember your past lives. And there is a very easy way of doing that in the deep meditations is when you get into such a deep meditation, or rather, when you just come out afterwards, you just ask yourself, what's my earliest memory? And when you ask questions like that, you will find, because your mind is very, very still and powerful, you will actually do exactly what you ask. Just a little suggestion like that will bring up an early memory. Now, I can't go into my past memories of a past life because that's against my rules. And if you want to check that out, go and look at the eighth budget here. So I'm not just saying this because I'm trying to deceive you, but that's one of the rules which I have to keep. Uh, usually I just keep these realizations to myself. But the way I get around this in public talks is to say what I got from the first time I tried this method, which was an early this life memory, and that was that the memory of myself in my baby's pram. And to describe the experience will give you some insight into how this whole process works. After a very nice meditation, deep meditation, I'm not quite sure how well I got this idea from. Certainly Ajahn Chah never mentioned it. I just asked myself, what's my earliest memory? That was a question I asked, and straight away I got a smell in my nose and there was a very strange smell because that smell was not in the room in which I was sitting, but it was a very clear smell. And with that smell came this recognition of what it was. It was the smell of my baby's pram. And with that smell and the recognition was my baby's pram with my eyes closed in meditation, I was back there in my baby's pram with full recognition, exactly where I was now. You were seeing with the the eyes of the mind you were smelling with the, the nose of the mind, you might say. Because now my mind, my eyes were closed and I was in a closed room. But you were back there again. It's not a dream, but a very, very vivid experience of being back in a place many, many years before. And in that experience, you could explore. You just wanted to see, now, what was this and what was that? You could see the plan and visualize it. But what was most interesting with that experience, those first experience, was that it was the smell which I recognized first of all, and the smell was dominant. Now, I had never actually done any much biology at school. I was mostly doing physics and chemistry and maths at school. My biology was only 1 or 2 years, I think, and I never knew just that in the growth of a human being, a baby's first prominent senses, a sense of smell, a baby recognizes its mother and its surroundings by smell, not sight. And that's what doctors told me afterwards. And that's what I remembered at the time. That's actually how a baby knows it's well through the sense of smell more than anything else. And of course, that's an experience which I know is true because I could get back to that state as if you were a baby right now, and you can come out again and go back into your body. And here you are, a sort of grown up man. Many, many, many years later for those sorts of experiences which you repeat to earlier times, actually show you that yes, you can access your previous lives. And such a thing, because it's your personal experience and it matches the object of experience. And yeah, this is true. That's how you believe in rebirth. Or rather not you believe, but you take it as almost like a knowledge, not on faith, but on personal experience, which is supported by objective results, objective data. It's fascinating to be able to do this. And there you come at a sense of truth. It's personal experience plus tested by the, uh, the data of other people's experience in life. And it's an experiment which, like in science, is replicable. Anyone if they had the commitment and put in the time and put in the skill, could also get to those stages of meditation and could also recall their early life or their even previous lives. It's a fascinating thing to do. That's why I've been talking about that a lot for the last few years, to try and get more people to remember such things. So the idea of rebirth becomes more common in our world. But more than that, it just gives an idea of actually how we find out the truth. But to be able to get to those deep meditations, to be able to find a way of personal realization of truth. Now the Buddha actually started talking about like a middle way. The middle path is just a balanced path, because to get to such deep states of inner stillness, so you can actually see what's going on inside. If you force yourself too hard or get too slack, it just never works. And that's why that many people, when they start doing their meditation, can understand what we mean by the middle way. Because if you struggle too hard in your meditation, what happens? You just get stressed out. And you get even worse than when you, when you before you started meditating. And that's a very, very terrible thing in this Western world where we're trying to encourage people to meditate more and more and more. And some Buddhists, they meditate and they're even more angry after they meditate than they were before. That's not doing much for our marketing campaign. And it's nothing to do with meditation. You're just not getting the middle way. Right. And there's other people. When they meditate, they fall fast asleep. And that's not really getting very far either. But there is always this wonderful little balance of the mind. And it's that balance which is the most important thing, which is what we mean by the middle way. However, just finding that balance is very, very, very difficult. You understand what the balance is by just how much peace you get afterwards. For example, that now we have things like in Buddhism, our precepts, there's a general morality and people say, yeah, the fifth precept, you know, not taking alcohol or drugs. They say that's extreme these days. You got to be moderate, be a moderate drinker. Yeah. I'm not going to go and get drunk, but I'm not going to just have no alcohol at all. I'm just gonna have one glass. And I say, that's the middle way. And when I hear arguments like that, you know that you can't actually argue directly. So, you know, you use like irony and you say, yes, actually, I can understand what you mean. It's the same with the first precept. And not killing, just moderately kill people. Same with stealing. I mean, just not stealing at all is just an extreme. So just steal a little bit. Maybe once every Friday, but not every day of the week. And the third precept of adultery. Yet is a middle way, a little bit of adultery. Now, when you when you start talking like this, you could understand that sometimes I'm not sure why when we have these five Buddhist precepts, we're not deliberately killing a living, being, stealing, committing adultery, lying, or alcohol. It's only the alcohol one people actually want to have the middle way. But the whole idea of like, you know, the virtue and why it's the middle way in Buddhism is actually because it's like a harmless life. Now you're not harming others, you're not harming yourself. In other words, you're clearing the path of difficulties and problems. And what basically bad karma is the bad karma part of it, which is a problem. And bad karma is like unskillful karmas, just things which cause more problems in life. And it does. Committing adultery causes more problems for you in life. A little bit of pleasure, but a huge amount of problems afterwards. And same with like killing or whatever. It just causes problems in our life. You know, you can see just, you know, was it George Bush's, uh, was it not? Was it preventative? What was the word he is sorry. Preemptive. Yeah. Preemptive strikes and just the sort of problems that that gave, you know, to our world. So it's like the idea of being of harmless in our world, creating few problems. So it gives us an ease which is part of the middle way. And understanding that this is actually making life more simple, more easy, more free of problems and obstacles, gives a great insight in what we mean by the middle way, how we develop our path of inner investigation. Because, you know, if you are living a like a heedless life, you know, taking drugs or alcohol, you might isn't clear enough to find out what's going on. And if you're not spending all the time just running away from the police, that's not going to help you either. It's one of the great things, like being a Buddhist and keeping your five precepts. People aren't afraid of the police. And yeah, it's great when they go home from the Friday night. People actually enjoy being stopped by the the booze bus because they just love seeing the sea, seeing the look on the policeman's face. When you say you're coming home late on a Friday night and you've got a zero reading, especially on our New Year's Eve parties, which we have here. When I asked people to please go and find a booze bus on New Year's Eve, or rather early on New Year's Day, and their your 1:00 in the morning, you're coming up from a party and they test your alcohol level and it's absolutely zero. You should see the look on the policeman's face then, because you've been to the party here where we don't have alcohol. So it gives you the sense of, you know, you're fearless in this world. You've got nothing to hide. So it makes life very, very easy when you're virtuous and moral and you can actually talk to your wife, talk to your husband. You've got nothing to hide. What a wonderful thing that is. And it gives an idea of what the middle path is. And even when you sit down to meditate, you know there's still are too many people sit on the floor here. I'm sorry. Sometimes it's because we haven't got enough chairs, you know? But we try and make sure that even when we're meditating, it's like a middle way. So our body is comfortable and we don't always have to hurt ourselves because there is a thing in religion where you think the more ascetic you are, the more pain you have, the further you get. You know, no pain, no gain idea. But that's nothing to do with Buddhism. There's no ease. No ease, no, please. It's the Buddhist idea. No pleasure. Now understanding that, you know, to actually calm everything down so you can actually allow these five senses to disappear. You can't excite them with pain or too much pleasure. We've got to somehow just give them some sense of comfort. And that middle way is like discomfort without exciting the senses, either with no too much pleasure or without sort of exciting them with the problem of pain. We try and get this middle way, or our body, our physical feelings, you know, it is just nice. That's why we now try and have a comfortable place to sit. Not too hot, not too cold. When I was a young meditator, people used to think, the more ascetic you are, the more monk you are. And they expected us, you know, to sit in the middle of the jungle. Not on any cushions at all, but just on the hard rocks, and just have mosquitoes sort of bite us all evening and not to have any sleep, not to have any food, not have anything at all. Now, thinking that, you know, the more ascetic you are, the more austere you are, the more likely you are. Are you going to get into these deep states of meditation? And then sometimes you have some of those people in religions. You know, the flagellates, you know, the people who sort of do incredibly ascetic practices. You know, fasting and not sleeping, thinking that that way, you know, the tough guys, they're going to get into some sort of enlightenment experience. But that's you can understand that there's something going wrong there. It's that ego is trying to force a mind into some sort of enlightenment state. So please be very careful as sir, as they support as people who, you know, go and listen to people don't go to the really ascetic people because some of those people are psychotic and very, very dangerous people to be around. And the people who say, sit down and don't move. And if you move, they'll whack you on the back with a stick. And that's going a bit too far, especially here, because we'll be sued, I'm sure. But there's another way. It's not being indulgent either. Just finding this nice comfort of the body, which is the middle way. So it's actually letting go of the problem. So you're not physically in pain, but you can actually be at ease, which is why that when people come and see and I like our monasteries in serpentine and in Ghana, sometimes people say, what are you monks and nuns doing living in huts? You should be just living under the trees, just like the Buddha is sleeping out there in the cold and in the wind, in the heat. You should be tough guys and tough girls. You'd namby pamby cream puffs. But I found from bitter experience doing things like that. But you know all you have. Or actually what happens is you just get tense when you have to endure pain. And there's enough pain in this body as it is. You know, we don't have to seek it. We want to try and ease the body so we can let it go. It's the same with the food we eat. We try and make it easy. So this middle way of Buddhism is a very gentle path. And maybe that's one of the reasons I was quite popular, even in those days. You don't actually ask very much of you physically. Just like an ease of the body. So you can sit down with a not bloated stomach. Not an empty stomach. Sit down and allow everything to fade away. So a simple lifestyle, if you possibly can. Because the more simple you live your life, the more freedom you tend to have. There's an old adage that you know you don't own your possessions. Your possessions own you. And it's usually the case is the more things you have in life, the more things you have to worry about, and the more things you have to worry about, the more things you have to think about. And sometimes you hardly have any freedom in the mind. You're always worrying about fixing things, cleaning things, sweeping things, washing things, and never having any free time for yourself. Now the possessions actually do own you. They take up all your time. So simplicity is a wonderful factor of the middle way. And it's also a wonderful way of, you know, being socially responsible in these days with global warming. You know, to consume less, have less, you have more time. You find out you have more money. At the end of the day, you don't have to spend so much. So this way is a way of the middle way. And because you have a middle way, it's not just with the middle way of, um, you know, your comfort and possessions. It's also the idea of going into the middle of things. As I often say, in this path of meditation, you go into the middle of time, you go into the middle of the side as you go into the middle of the breath, which is middle of your body, and you go into the middle of the breath, which is a beautiful breath, the middle of the beautiful breath. You find this beautiful light always going inside. And that's another meaning of a middle way, which is where you find the truth in the center of things. Not going out, but going in. When one does, this part of meditation is not only you actually get to a state of like pure mind, but you get a powerful mind as well. A very, very alert and penetrating and perceptive mind. People when they meditate. Sometimes they think that at last I can think straight. I can think clearly. A lot of times I think I just like this morning when I must have been. I got out of bed this morning. I was very, very dozy and dull because I'd been, you know, very busy the day before and gave that talk at UW. When I came back, I was quite wiped out. And so when I woke up in the morning, I was very, very dull. And you can understand when you die, you're not really quite sure what you're doing. You've got very low mindfulness. Yeah. But as I sort of started exercising I got my mindfulness back. But you can understand sometimes that people know what they see, what they hear, what they think is very, very dull. It's like living in a mist. And when you meditate more and more, you actually you're giving more energy to your mind. And this knower inside starts to wake up. You know that the meaning of actually Buddha is the the awakened one is instead of enlightened one. Now the root meaning is much, much closer to the awakened one. It's like waking up from asleep, seeing clearly. And to be able to do that, you need like a powerful mind. And the powerful mind is not gained by thinking, thinking, thinking, thinking. The great teaching of Buddhism is that the mind becomes powerful. The more you develop stillness, the more still your mind is, the more energy it receives and the stronger it gets. And those are the beautiful experiences which people have when they find this. Follow this middle way of like, like comfort, but not indulgence and going into the middle of things because what they actually find is that the mind wakes up and they can see more. They've got more energy inside. They've got a more powerful mind, and a more powerful mind can seize things. And what it sees become actually more beautiful, more interesting. It's a great thing to actually start meditating and start enjoying it. You see things more deeply. You can actually understand your partner much better because you're more awake to them. You're more awake to your body so you can know work through its sicknesses and diseases much better. You can understand how it gets stressed out, even how to sit properly so you don't get to too many aches and pains is how you move properly through life instead of, you know, moving in a sort of very, very unaware state and thereby wrecking your knees and wrecking other parts of your body. You become more alert. What we call more mindful and mindfulness is not something you force. That's not the middle way. It's this. This beautiful comfort. By ease, by stillness, by having few problems. The mind starts to get energized. And I've often actually noticed that when the mind gets lots of energy and power and the mind when when it's very, very dull, it can understand what depression is in our modern world and why there's so much depression these days is because our minds are just so damn tired that we're going through a mess most of the time. So what we see, what we feel is just like with no really dark glasses over our mind, everything is dull and gray. The colors are washed out, the feelings are just numb. Even the sound is boring and it's nothing to do with the life outside. Life outside is actually very interesting and beautiful, but we just can't see it simply because our minds are so tired we're half asleep. Or maybe even more than that 80% asleep. 90% of sleep is called depression. But the more we actually meditate, the more we start building up energy inside of our minds. It's just simply through stillness. The more actually we get some some power inside, we wake up, and even the partner we living with, we find is far more beautiful than we'd ever expected. This is literally true. You appreciate things more. You see more things, you feel more deeply and you know more fully. This is what we call talking about the arousing of the power of the mind to see more deeply, to experience more fully. Ever notice this in those moments in your life when you've been still, that you've felt more deeply know the quality and the texture of life? A great poet is writing the best pieces after moments of stillness and relaxation. Now artists, musicians who can actually really create out of that stillness. And it's not really creating out of the stillness. It's the mind has become powerful because it's empowered. It can see, it can feel. It's at last, like, you know, you have this force with you that you can actually do something. And as you get deeper in these sort of meditations, you go through this middle way, going through the center of things. And that center is always where the store point is. And staying in that stillness, the mind wakes up so much that that's where at last it can actually see what's going on. And once you understand what the powerful mind can actually be, you go on some of these meditation retreats. And my goodness, when you look at sort of a leaf, it's just so incredibly green. There's so much going on there. It's amazing. It just grabs your attention for hours. Sometimes just a simple leaf or just you taste the food and it's just so delicious. I just feel the wind at last. You can feel it properly. These are moments when you realize you're waking up at last. You understand that this is a sort of mind which you need to see. Truth. This is actually how you find out. Know what the truth of things are not by the external experiments. The external experiments and gathering the data and analyzing it are only things which support the truth. You can check your own experience by, but your own personal experience would always be just the final judge of what's true or not true. Which is why we need to ask you to wake up. To empower our minds so we can actually fully see exactly what truth is for ourselves, and then check that against the data of other people about the data of science and see what it is. And this is actually where it's interesting in science, when we actually check these things out and compare notes in The Mystic and the professor, because that's actually where you can see, yeah, what the mystic has seen. That's what the professor knows. When I was one of the things which we were noticing when I was just saying about the nature of reality and the nature of the mind, you know exactly what you see when you go very, very deep in meditation. When I mentioned that, please call me. You know, your emptiness is not fully a joke, because that's actually what one sees when one goes deep in the mind, deep in meditation, just a beautiful emptiness at the heart of this knowing process. It's a process without a core to it. In the same way that this universe is like a process without a core to it. And I was just making the, uh, the observation from the inside of deep meditation that, look, the only way you can have, like, a universe like this, many universes, one after the other. You know, because one of the basic laws of science is, you know, the conservation of energy. You can't just make energy out of nothing. You know, it just changes its form, that source sometimes, you know, as Einstein found out, can go into mass and mass back into energy. So where did all this universe energy come from? And I say, the only way that you can get something out of nothing if there's nothing here right now. You know, if there's, you know, something which we call negative energy. And so they know from nothing, we get like a, a positive energy in negative energy with a zero sum. And I think you've heard me say that here quite a few times now, the basic emptiness of the universe. And when I said that, uh, Professor David Blair took the microphone and he said, yeah, that's exactly that's what we mean by the omega equals one. And he was actually saying that that's the sum total of the energy. If it's the negative energy and, you know, being the expert on gravity, you know, he's that's his main research and trying to find out what gravity is. And he's got his big gravity center up in Gingin. He said gravity is that negative energy. That's what gravity truly is. And he said, yeah, you're right. The sun comes out to zero. And so there in the physics theatre, the mystic monk and the physics professor. We shook hands in agreement a lovely moment. That's amazing. Actually, facts of science. This universe can come out of nothing because there's a balance of positive energy and negative energy. And so afterwards, you can go back to nothing again. It's a zero sum so it can come and go many, many times. If it happened once, why can't it happen many times? That's our argument for rebirth. I forget who was the philosopher who said that it could have been Voltaire, and he said the fact that when he said one of the reasons I believe in rebirth, I think Voltaire said, is that it's no more miraculous to be born twice than it is to be born once. And just like the uniqueness of a birth, that's like the uniqueness of, you know, like my country or my planet. And it just doesn't make any sense. If it happened once, why could it happen twice for 4 or 5 times? If this universe can be born once, why can't it be reincarnated again? The next universe and the universe afterwards? It's a beautiful little concept to see this amazing endless series of events, one after the other, called your many lives, or the lives of the universe, or the lives of the planets, the solar systems, everything. And how could it all happen? Because it's a zero sum. There's nothing there. But how does that work with our minds and our souls, who we are? And again, this is by far the most important question. This is what Buddhists start to investigate deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper through the power of their meditation. They look like these incredible Hubble space telescopes, which can look to the furthest ends of the universe, and the not the Hubble space telescopes, but the Buddha empowered meditation, uh, microscopes looking inside, you know, by powerful meditation, the jhana scopes when you look deep inside. And what do you actually find there? Just like this universe, the zero sum emptiness, the zero sum. Because. We have positive energy and negative energy in this universe. That's the duality of the physical universe. You combine them together and they come to the magic number zero and in your mind as well. This all is coming and going. The desire and ill will, the different poles of the mind grabbing and pushing away and all that. Grabbing and accumulating or pushing away. The duality of the mind where we measure things into what you like and what you don't like, into me and them here and there, and all that measuring of duality disappears. What happens next is very fascinating. I love linguistics, and especially the old linguistics, which the Buddha used to speak of the word for mind in the ancient language which the Buddha spoke is called mano, where we get a word from mind or mental from because most of our English is from the Indian Aryan languages. In other words, it came from India. The Indian languages and our languages had a common source. And the word to measure is man. 80 literally means what the mind does. And that was very, very clear. The link between mind and measuring a mind is function. What it does is to measure things. And when you stop measuring things into hot and cold, good and bad. Me and them. Past and future. When you stop measuring things and everything becomes very still and peaceful, the mind starts to disappear. When you stop measuring in the non-dual mind. And the only time you experience that non-dual mind is in the deep meditations of journeys. That's the only time, is it not a thought, not an intellectual exercise, but a state of deep stillness? When the mind isn't moving enough to measure and so the duality disappears. We call that the oneness of mind, or the one point. Illness of mind is only one thing there. That's why you can't have two. No duality. For the result of non-duality of singleness. Singleness cannot last very long. When singleness doesn't move, it disappears because consciousness cannot know for too long. Things which don't move. You try listening to a sound which is always constant and it will just disappear or fade away. You look at a blank wall with your eyes open. If you look long enough, the wall will disappear. Thus, your consciousness is programmed to notice change, not stillness. So after a while, your mind disappears from duality. You go to oneness, and for oneness you go the next step to nothingness. The final step. The emptiness. This universe started from nothing, and it got this singleness of the Big Bang, the singularity, which started this whole process and it multiplied into duality, into this diverse form of universe. But one day it will go back again into nothing. Just like you started from nothing. And now here you are. Your mind. Discriminating. Thinking. Making the life very complicated. But one day you go into such deep meditation that all the complications of your life will coalesce into the singleness, the singularity. Like the big bang of Janus, the singularity of the mind. And then it will stop altogether. Just like, uh, Professor Blair said, there's just a balance of energies in this universe. Sum total of zero. In you, there's a balance of movement. There's no one in here. Your sum total. The bottom line of you is here. Isn't that wonderful? No one here. What a great place to end on. Nothing at all. Okay, so here we go. Hope you all enlightened by now. When asked about what the meaning of life was, I know said they asked each one of us, can you please say you know in a couple of words, what is your understanding of enlightenment? And I answered. Enlightenment in Buddhism is being so content. You want for nothing. So nothing finished? Okay. Anyone got any comments or questions about this evening's talk on all sorts of stuff. I think I actually did quite well because I did mention, uh, Buddhism and science, middle way and duality. CE managed to somehow rather fit them all together. Anyone got any comments or questions about the talk this evening? Yes, from the back. Of his voice. He had 50. Okay. That's okay. Yeah. Oh. That's fine. Yeah. Okay. So we're back in William, where? We had to make sure everything. Yeah, I think the accommodation quality. Yeah. I think it's like the the evolution of, like, religious ideas or like the evolution of God is there. Was it? Karen Armstrong I wrote in her book, like The Short History of God. It's a wonderful little title to show how even, like a God could evolve or how ideas could evolve. And it's true that there will always be some fine tuning of those ideas. But at this basic laws like a science and a like quantum theory or the law of gravity or whatever, and they're always open to change. So you must always keep checking them out and seeing if they're they're true. But are things like the law of gravity has been pretty accurate and pretty usable for many, many centuries in the same way that if the laws or if the books are actually still usable, then keep using them. So that's why we look at like books, like, you know, the Buddhist books, the sutras, there's some parts of those aren't usable. And I keep on saying here, and I get into trouble for the Burmese because when I say the Abhidharma is way past its use by date, and it wasn't written by the Buddha anyway, so I get into trouble there, but I don't mind saying that I'm in strong enough position now that I don't mind getting into trouble. And actually, if I do get into trouble, I'm even more happy because then I won't get invited back. I can have a nice, easy life for a change. But there are some things which are still usable, so that's actually why that I keep like looking at those sutras, because I, I still find use in them. But now we do use those as a, uh, a framework. But that's why we still keep on writing new books. Like I wrote those new two new books about opening the door of Your Heart and Mindfulness, Bliss and beyond. And other monks will always write those books. So we still keep adding, changing, interpreting this way and the other. But the thing is, we don't look at those Buddhist books as the be all and end all of the truth because it actually says, you know, one of the things it says in there is actually basically don't believe me. This is if I remember that, uh, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The first word it had on the cover was don't panic. It's as if are the Buddhist sutras. You know, the word on the front cover, as it were. Don't just believe me. And that's so fundamental in no sutras that it actually stops them being used as like an ultimate truth. But they're always to be used as as guidelines, as pointers, as signposts. So I think I said that last week to know about the simile of the menu. And the guy went to the restaurant. Right now. Just very quickly, guy went into a restaurant in Perth and he very expensive restaurant, and the waiter gave him the menu which was on beautiful cod in Boston. Go. So the man ate the menu and paid and left, and he left as hungry as when he went in. A very stupid man. And that's what a lot of religions are. They just eat menus, they worship the books instead of actually using those books and what those books there for, and actually finding out what they're trying to be pointing towards. And certainly I think we should never, ever, um, you know, use the Buddhist sutras as menus and in terms of eating the menus or translating the menus into different languages and getting a PhD on menus. Now the menus are there to order food, nothing. The books are there as guidelines, as handbooks to read and find out how things work. But then to check that out with your own personal experience. Does that make sense? Okay. Yeah. Question. Over here. Where are you? Uh oh. Christianity. Um. Wow. Um. Not only that, I ain't like. That. But what? Obviously. Is that the prior? Um, yeah. You know, I think I might not have felt a little bit longer or happy around longer. Than you. Would. Um. See? The irony. Well, who the hell out early? Yes, sir. Are you talking about sort of some of the indigenous belief systems of our planet? And those indigenous police systems sometimes do have a huge amount of value, but we shouldn't just accept anything and certainly not Buddhism or wholesale because, you know, Buddhism has got some, uh, cultural accretions to it. Some of the superstitious things which Buddhists do from time to time. And there are those things which should or should also be challenged. And there's also things of indigenous beliefs which should be challenged just because it belongs to an indigenous belief, or any sort of religious belief, should not mean it's beyond challenging. And I think that one of the weaknesses of, you know, maybe our culture is sometimes because of political correctness or sometimes, you know, sheer fear. We don't want to criticise any religion or any person's religious belief or any sort of indigenous belief. And sometimes I think we don't challenge these things. Sometimes some very, very harmful practices can keep going unchecked. That. For example, I know the old payback system in Aboriginal culture. You know, that's, uh, that's the I think I'm mentioning this, though. I went to Curtin University to give a talk on human rights, and there was an Aboriginal elder there who told me a story here in Perth about, uh, an Aboriginal family, an indigenous family who lost their two sons, uh, because of a person who was drunk, driving a car at high speed, rammed into their car and killed his two very promising young Aboriginal youths. And amongst the Noongar community here, there's supposed to be payback. Trouble was that the person who was driving the car was also Aboriginal and because of their culture at the funeral, which was subtle, with a caricature of Fremantle at the cremation ceremony, all the families had to be be there, had a police presence as well, because they were afraid that the the father of the two young men who had been killed would demand his rights to have payback on the the father of the person driving the car. Now to the person driving. The car was in police custody so he couldn't get to him. So according to the culture would be the nearest relation would have to take the payback. And he told me what happened because everyone was so tense at the crematorium and during the ceremonies, the father of the, uh, the youth had been killed, got up in the middle and strode right towards the father of his boys killer. And everyone froze, expecting payback. A knife or a blow or something. Which was a man's right. But instead, this man just put his arms around his son's killer, or rather, his sons killed his father and said, I forgive you. And he said there was a magic moment in Aboriginal culture here in Perth, one of the first times, if probably the first time, they never demanded payback but had a change of culture. To forgiveness. So all cultures, all religions in that sense, have to look deeply inside of themselves is something they're doing, which is really way past. It's, you know, it's, uh, used by date and we can change. We should change. And they are changing. And the Aboriginal elder who told me that story said that man who was never much respected in the community before, is now a person that many of the Aboriginals go to for advice, that his gesture of forgiveness was so valid, even though it was countercultural, was so respected that their culture has changed. There's only a couple of years ago, so it's wonderful that we can do these things. We respect the best in each, but when is it and is something which is obviously which is going to be harmful and hurtful, whether it's in Buddhism, Christianity, Islam or indigenous culture, we have to sort of talk about it and challenge it. Uh. Somebody else. But why would I go one day? Happy one day. So I come back a lot more than my my son. Me. So party part of our talks are accustomed. No, Saka. No mummy.