Dhamma in English 2014 & 2015

— 194 — Dhamma in English 2014 & 2015 but you know that someday you will be separated from your money. If you don’t think like this, you will cling to your money; you don’t want to lose it, and when the time comes when you have to lose it, you will feel very painful. This is what you have to do; you have to investigate the things that you cling to. When you cling to something, you will have a desire to have it to stay with you all the time, but nothing will stay with you all the time. You have to teach the mind that everything that you have, one day, sooner or later you will have to lose it. Once you keep teaching the mind this way, you will look at things in a different way. If you don’t think in this way, you will think that everything will stay with you forever; it will never part from you, but when the separation suddenly happens, you will never be able to stop your mind from being hurt. If you keep thinking about it many times until you don’t forget, you will prepare yourself for that eventuality, when separation happens. This is the purpose of investigating or contemplating the true nature of things, to get rid of your delusion that everything will go on like this forever, everything will be good and well, and if it doesn’t go well, you can always ask for blessing. But nothing will be like what you think about because one day everything will disappear. You investigate everything that you love, everything that you cling to, like your father, mother, and especially your children. You don’t cling to your father or mother that much because you know that they are old and they will die, but to see your children die before your eyes is very heart breaking, yet you have to accept that no one can predict who is going to die first or last. This is annica, anattā: you cannot control things, and anything can happen to anybody anytime. Keep thinking like this, then you can prepare your mind to face the truth when it happens and not to react to it in a heartbroken way. When the Buddha expounded the Four Noble Truths to Venerable Añña Kondañña, he understood that whatever arises will have to

— 195 — 17 | Laypeople from Malaysia, November 5th, 2015 disappear (cease). Everything – the body, money, people, things – comes and goes, rises and ceases, so when he understood this, he was not affected by the disappearance of things or people because his mind could accept it, because there is no other way. You cannot stop it from happening and to be hurt by it, is a fool. People cry when they lose their loved ones, but can crying for help bring them back? They don’t know how to stop the mind from being heartbroken because they cling to those people. They want the deceased to come back and this will cause them to be heartbroken. If you know that you are going to lose them and you have prepared yourself for that, when it happens, you don’t feel bad: you will not be heartbroken. That’s why you have to contemplate aniccaṁ, dukkhaṁ, anattā that these three characteristics exist in everything, animate things or inanimate things, human or animals, things such as your clothes, and all other things. They come and go. When you know ahead of time and when they go away, you don’t feel bad because you are prepared for their disappearance. You can only do it for a certain length of time and then your mind will lose that clarity and calmness and you want to think towards the opposite way, and when that happens you should stop your investigation and go back into samādhi to regenerate that clarity and calmness of your mind so that you can go back and see the truth again. If your mind is not clear or calm, it is clouded with desires, it doesn’t want to think of losing money, losing your loved ones. When you have delusion, simply by thinking about losing things or people, hurt you. When you have desire, just the thought of losing something will hurt you even before it actually happens. When you feel hurt from your investigation, then you should stop. You should go back to your samādhi to calm and clear your mind again from the delusion, then after that you go into your investigation again. Keep doing it until your mind can accept the truth. Once you can accept the truth, you don’t have to

— 196 — Dhamma in English 2014 & 2015 investigate anymore. If you know that you are going to lose your son or daughter today and you won’t cry, you won’t feel sad, then there is no need to investigate anymore. Lay (F): When I have an answer to my question, is it from the knowing mind and not the thinking mind? Than Ajahn: No, it is from the information you have learnt in the past, the Dhamma talks you have heard before. If you ask questions and no answer comes out, then you have to look for the answer. That means you don’t have the answer stored in your memory. So you have to increase your knowledge by contemplating the impermanent nature of things, the suffering nature of things, the no-self nature of things, and this will be the answer to all your questions. Lay (F): I can’t understand very well the last chapter from Luangta’s book which is the citta. Than Ajahn: You have to go through your body first. Right now the attachment to your body blocks your perception of your attachment, of your citta. First you have to get rid of your attachment to your body before you can see the citta and your attachment towards it. It is like a banana of which you first have to peel the skin before you can see the meat. You have to get rid of the attachment to your body and once you have passed that level, then you can understand the attachment to the citta. You have to see it from the point of practice, just to think about it now is not possible because you don’t see the citta in the first place. You have to have samādhi to be able to see the citta. Even that, you still cannot understand the nature of the citta if you still have problems with your body. So first you have to get rid of your problem with your body, and once you don’t have problem with your body then you can see the problem of your citta.

— 197 — 17 | Laypeople from Malaysia, November 5th, 2015 The first three levels of enlightenment deal with the body. The Sotāpanna, Sakadāgāmī and Anāgāmī have to investigate the body, to get rid of the attachment to the body. Once they have gotten rid of the body then they will come face to face with the mind. It is not important to know now. Now it is important for you to get rid of your attachment to your body. You also have to get rid of your attachment to sexual desire towards the body. That’s why you have to investigate asubha. After you have passed the investigation of the pain and death of the body, the next level is to investigate the asubha nature of the body so you can get rid of your sexual desire. Once you get rid of your sexual desire then you have nothing to do with the body. Once you see the body as asubha, ugly, loathsome and repulsive, you will not have any desire for your body or other people’s bodies, your husband or your wife’s body. Lay (F): When I start to see the 32 parts, I can imagine that my body is filthy. Than Ajahn: You should use this to stop your sexual desire when it arises. This is a tool to counter your sexual desire. Sometimes when you don’t have sexual desire, you might have to arouse it so that you can test your knowledge of asubha whether you can get rid of it or not. You have to test it, right? Because you don’t know whether it is permanently stopped or not as you haven’t used your knowledge when it comes up. You can think of a person you want to have sexual contact with and when you have the sexual desire towards that person, then you see whether you can use the asubha that you think you have developed, whether you can stop your desire or not. Once you know how to use it you will not be afraid of your sexual desire anymore because anytime it comes up, you can always get rid of it. Sometimes when you investigate asubha, you are blocking the sexual desire to arise but you haven’t gotten rid of it yet but you

— 198 — Dhamma in English 2014 & 2015 might think that you have gotten rid of it. Luangta said that when you think that you don’t have any sexual desire, you have to prove it to yourself so you have to arouse it and see if you can use your asubha contemplation to get rid of it. Luangta said the asubha and subha are not outside but inside your mind. When you think of subha, you can make the desire to come up, and when you think of asubha, you also can stop your desire. Most practitioners can be deceived because when you contemplate asubha they are merely blocking it, preventing it from coming up but you don’t know whether you have completely gotten rid of it. The only things to prove it, is to let it arise and chop it off. Lay (F): One day when I walked in the park, I kind of saw that blood was oozing out from a person back, so I did not dare to see that person and I walked back home and did not dare to walk to the park again. Why is this happening? Than Ajahn: Because your mind still has aversion towards asubha. Your mind is not strong enough. You don’t have strong samādhi. If you had strong samādhi then your mind would not have reacted to whatever you saw, no matter how bad it might have been. So you have to develop strong mindfulness, strong samādhi in order to look at asubha. You have to look at a dead body, dissect it up and see all the organs under the skin. If you don’t have strong samādhi, sometimes you might faint. Every year new monks here will go to hospital to see the dissection of the body and one of the monks fainted when he saw the body because he didn’t have samādhi. That’s why when you want to see something strong like asubha or dead body, you need to have samādhi or else you won’t be able to look at it because your aversion is very strong. Your aversion is a defilement, vibhava-taṇhā: you don’t want to see things that you don’t like. Your defilement prevents you from looking at it, so you need to have more samādhi.

— 199 — 17 | Laypeople from Malaysia, November 5th, 2015 Lay (F): In my meditation, when I was alone, the mind talked to me and I didn’t know what to do. Than Ajahn: It is your sankhāra, thoughts. It is just the mind playing tricks on you, that’s all. Sometimes there are two persons thinking opposing each other, one is Dhamma and the other one is defilement. They are the same, the sankhāra. When it thinks in one direction it is one person, when it thinks in another direction it is another person, but they are the same. It comes from the same source, the sankhāra. You just tell yourself that they are anicca, dukkha, anattā: sankhāra – anicca, sankhāra – dukkha, sankhāra – anattā, sometimes you can control it, sometimes you cannot. It is not a problem if you leave it alone and don’t react to it, but the problem is that you react to it. You don’t have enough knowledge. That’s why you don’t know what to do and that’s why you need more Dhamma. What is inside you is something you don’t know, so when you go inside, when you see something new, you don’t know what to do with it. You are used to reacting to things, so when you see things that you like, you react positively. If you see something you don’t like you react negatively. But the true way is to face it and not to react to it, but just acknowledge it, just be aware of it. Just know that whatever it is, it comes and goes and you cannot control it. If you want to control it, you become unhappy. Lay (F): Your book is so easy to read and easy to understand. Than Ajahn: The truth is very simple but our delusion wants to make it complicated. You need to do a lot more practice and listen to the Dhamma for the wisdom that you can use in your practice. You have to bring the wisdom of Luangta into your heart. Right now, it only enters into your memory which sometimes will fade away right away, but if you bring it into your heart, it becomes wisdom, then it will

— 200 — Dhamma in English 2014 & 2015 always be there and you will always have Luangta with you all the time. I am just an interpreter, a middle man, carrying the message. Lay (F): When I was at Luangta’s funeral, one lady told me that there was no more Luangta around, no more talks. Than Ajahn: I translated it many years ago, in 1979. The talks were for monks. I did it because when Luangta gave Dhamma talks there were some western monks listening to it and after Luangta gave about 40 or 50 minutes talk, then Than Paññā would recap the talk for about 10 minutes. So I felt that there are many things missing in the recap, so I asked Than Paññā the tape. I switched on the Thai version on a recorder and then switched it off, and I translated verbally and recordered it on another recorder. It is easier that way and when I finished translating it, I gave it to an English monk to type it out and when he finished typing it, I read it again. The version that you heard is the version that has been grammatically corrected and I read it and recorded it again, so it might not sound as good as saying it from the heart. I translated it many years ago but it was never used because Luangta was still alive at that time. Now then people start to listen to it. At first I felt disappointed because after I translated it, I thought people will listen to it but no one actually listened to it until now when Luangta is no longer around and people start to appreciate it. May you all progress in the path towards Nibbāna in this life.

— 201 — Than Ajahn: You are the maker of your happiness or sadness. Nobody else can make you happy or sad but you don’t know that, so you rely on other people to make you happy or sad. Layperson: Isn’t that natural to rely on other people (to make you happy) such as your wife, your father, your mother? Than Ajahn: It is in a way but at the same time it is unwise to rely on other people because you can rely on yourself. You have a better thing to rely on, better than to rely on other people. You yourself are the most reliable thing in this world because it is always with you. It is natural to rely on others because everybody is doing it, so you think it is natural. The truth is, it is not natural, the real natural thing is to rely on yourself. Lay devotee: How many people are not doing it (relying on themselves) as opposed to those who are doing it? Is the rest of the majority doing it? Than Ajahn: You have to look at the result of what you do. The vast majority ends up in sadness when they lose what they 18 Laypeople from USA November 17th, 2015

— 202 — Dhamma in English 2014 & 2015 rely on. But the very minorities, the very few people who can rely on themselves never have to be sad because they always have themselves to rely on. When I say relying on themselves, I do not mean relying on the body. I mean relying on the mind. The mind is the ultimate self. The body is just a servant of the mind. The body is something the mind relies on due to its ignorance. The mind doesn’t know it can rely on itself and it will be better off to do so, therefore the mind relies on the body. When the mind has to rely on the body, it has to rely on other things in order to maintain the body. Lay devotee: In reading your book, I find it very hard to grasp. There are two separate things, the mind and the body, and it is the mind that controls everything. The self is your mind. It is hard to grasp. Than Ajahn: I know. It is the mind that is doing all these talking, it is not the body. The body is only taking the command from the mind. You have to think first before you can say what you want to say. The one who thinks is not the body, but the mind. It is so simple but we never look at it. Lay devotee:It is so simple, when you said it. (laugh) But it is not something I would naturally think about. Than Ajahn: I know. It takes an enlightened mind to realize this truth. For ordinary people, we will never be able to know this truth. I didn’t know it until I started reading the teachings of the Buddha. The Buddha said you are not the body, the body is not you. You are the mind, the one who knows, the one who thinks, the one who feels. Unfortunately we cannot see this. The mind is invisible. Actually everything that we do, the mind who is doing everything we do. We eat, we talk, we dance, we sing – it is the mind

— 203 — 18 | Laypeople from USA, November 17th, 2015 that is doing it. The mind is using the body as the tool, as the medium. Lay devotee: The one thing that I can’t grasp is that my body is getting old, it is aching, it has many problems, but my mind still says that it is not me, I am not old. Than Ajahn: Yes, that’s the truth. We always feel the same way, think the same way. Your mind isn’t aged because it has no form, it is invisible. How can you make something invisible deteriorate? It is like an empty space. Can you change an empty space? The empty space around us never change. It is always there. It is the same with the mind. The mind is like an empty space but it can feel, it can think, it knows. So this is what you have to do, to discover your true self. Once you have found out about it, you have nothing else to do. Lay devotee: It is never too late to discover, isn’t it? Than Ajahn: Never. Because one day, sooner or later you have to come to this realization. It is just a matter of how long this will take. Eventually you will get tired of this cycle of birth, aging, sickness and death. When you get sick, get old and die, you lose this body. Your mind will go and look for a new body. It is just like when you got this new body, when you came to this world 73 years ago. It is because you lost your old body in your previous life and because you still need a body to rely on, so you came and took birth in the womb of your mother. When you got the body, then you have to look after it, nurture it, take care of it so that you can use it to make you happy. But this body will go through the same process again. It will grow up, get old, get sick and die again and after that you go and get a new body again.

— 204 — Dhamma in English 2014 & 2015 One day you will get sick of it, just like the Buddha. He got sick of this cycle. He was hidden away from the truth of life. He was living in the palace and his father wouldn’t allow any sick people, old people or people who are dying to go to the palace, so he never saw these. But one day he wanted to see what was outside the palace. When he went outside, what he saw was an old man, a sick man, and a dead man. So he asked his attendant: ‘who are these people?’ The attendant said: ‘they are you, that’s what you are going to become’. So when the prince looked at his future, he became scared. And he did not want to go through this cycle. He then saw another person, a holy man. He asked his attendant, ‘Who is this guy? What does he do?’ The attendant said, ‘the person is a holy man, he is looking for a way to get away from getting sick, getting old and dying’. The sight of the holy man aroused his interest to find out whether it is possible not to get sick, get old and die. Then he found out that in order to do it, he has to renounce his worldly life, his wealth, his physical happiness and go seek spiritual happiness. One night after he heard his wife gave birth to his son, he decided that it was time for him to leave home. That very night, he left without saying goodbye to anybody. He knew if he had tried to tell anyone, they would not have let him go. So he had to sneak out at night. Lay devotee: You were saying that the prince got tired of this cycle, so what did he do? Did he stop the cycle? Than Ajahn: He tried to find out how to stop this aging, sickness and death, and he found out that in order to stop this aging, sickness and death, he had to stop being born, he had to stop the birth. Birth is the one that causes old age, sickness and death. If there is no birth then there is no aging, sickness and death. So this is the logic that he went through. He then found out that the cause of his birth is his desire, his desire to find happiness

— 205 — 18 | Laypeople from USA, November 17th, 2015 through the body. You want to see, hear, taste, touch and smell, so you need a body to do all these. If you can stop this desire then you wouldn’t need a body. In order to stop the desire, you must have something to replace it. He found out something better to replace it and it is the spiritual calm that can be achieved through meditation practice. If you can calm your mind to become totally still, you will experience another kind of happiness which is far better than the happiness that is acquired through the body. Once you have found it, you can then stop using the body to get happiness because you have a better kind of happiness. Lay devotee: How many people would you say have found that? Than Ajahn: Very few. But without the Buddha, there will be nobody who could find it. There were people who found this kind of spiritual happiness but it was not long lasting. The happiness only lasts when one is in meditation, but when one comes out of his meditation, his desire still arises. The Buddha found a way of getting rid of this desire permanently. The Buddha saw that this desire is the one that causes one to be born, get sick, get old and die. So he saw that the desire is the culprit of all of our miseries. When you see this, then you want to get rid of your desire. It is like having some kind of germ in your body. When you know that you get sick because of this particular germ, you want to get rid of it, right? It is the same way with the mind. Your mind is sick, your mind is miserable due to this desire. Once you can get rid of this desire then there will not be any misery because you don’t have to seek things through your body. If you seek things through your body you can only do it when the body is strong, but once the body becomes weak, gets old, or sick and when you can no longer do it then you become miserable. So when you see this, you come to the conclusion that

— 206 — Dhamma in English 2014 & 2015 you have to stop desiring for anything. You just enjoy the peace and happiness from your meditation. This is the fundamental teaching of Buddhism, to seek spiritual happiness and to abandon the physical happiness. In order to be able to abandon it completely and permanently you have to get rid of your desire by realizing that this desire is like germs in your body, like the HIV germs, or ebola which you want to eliminate, you don’t want to keep them in your body. In the same way, as long as you have the desire, you will still be miserable because you still want to have this or that thing through your body and when you cannot acquire it you become very unhappy. If you still have the desire in you – desire to see, to hear, to feel, to touch, then when you lose your body, you will still look for a new body. You need a body to do this. But if you have spiritual happiness, which is much better than physical happiness, then you don’t need the body. When you don’t rely on the body, then it doesn’t matter what happens to the body. It can get sick, get old or die, and it won’t change the spiritual happiness that you have because spiritual happiness doesn’t rely on your body. It relies on your ability to control your mind, to stop thinking, that’s all. Lay devotee: We are always thinking. It is very difficult. Than Ajahn: It is difficult but it is not impossible. We have a tool to get rid of your thinking – by concentrating on one particular object, either using a mantra, a word or counting. When you count, you cannot think about other things. Just keep on counting, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight… or just repeat one word, ‘ Jesus, Jesus, Jesus’ or ‘God, God, God’ or ‘Money, Money, Money’. Just stay with one word. Lay devotee: What method did Than Ajahn use when Than Ajahn started this practice, was it counting, or mantra?

— 207 — 18 | Laypeople from USA, November 17th, 2015 Than Ajahn: I used the body as my object of concentration. When I was not sitting, I was constantly observing my body with every action that I did. This is to develop my concentration while I was not sitting. I didn’t allow my mind to go anywhere else except being close to my body. Just watch my body. When I was eating, I was just watching my eating, when I was washing, I was just watching my washing. Whatever I did with the body, I just watched it. When I sat, I watched my breathing instead, because when I sat still the body didn’t move. The one thing that moved was my breathing. So, I just watched my breathing. I gave something for the mind to do, so that the mind didn’t have the time to go and think about other things. But it resisted, it didn’t want to focus on just watching. It liked to go and think about this and that. Sometimes I had to use recitation, I recited the sermon of the Buddha. The whole sermon took about 30 to 40 minutes. It kept me occupied with his teaching. His teaching can calm your mind because his teaching is about spiritual matter, it is about how to calm your mind. So sometimes I used that when I could not concentrate on my breathing. When I started sitting and watched my breathing, the mind kept thinking about this and that, then I used this thinking to think about the Buddha’s teaching. I recited his teaching. After you do that for about 30 to 40 minutes, your mind gets tired. It doesn’t want to recite, to think, it just wants to be still, then you can watch your breathing. When you watch your breathing, your mind will become calmer and calmer and eventually it will totally stop thinking and will relinquish itself. It will separate itself from the breath, it goes deeper until it doesn’t see the breath. So this is the process of bringing your mind inside. Right now, your mind is driven by your desire to go outside, to go through your eyes, ears, nose, tongue and your body because this is the way it usually uses to find happiness. But now you want to bring it inside to find a different kind of happiness.

— 208 — Dhamma in English 2014 & 2015 So you need this concentration to pull it in. The stronger your concentration is, the deeper your mind will go back inside. Eventually it will go to the centre of the mind and the awareness of the body and the breathing will disappear. The mind will be totally alone. You will then see that the mind just knows. The mind doesn’t think. When it stops thinking, the knowing doesn’t disappear. The consciousness becomes very apparent because you see what is left after you stop thinking. You find the state of happiness and peace. Lay people: For ordinary people, they spend most of their waking hours thinking about all sorts of things other than trying to concentrate only on one thing. Most people have to think about taking care of children, think about their job, so it is really impossible to do it. Than Ajahn: For most people it is impossible. Only very few people can do it. That’s why the Buddha has a Sabbath day once a week, a holiday for Buddhists to stop working for one day and go to the temple or stay at home and devote the time for spiritual matters. This is just a start. Once you experience some kind of happiness from the spiritual practice, it will encourage you to want more of it. Then you start to shift the direction of your life, from looking after your children, your money or whatever you have, to look after your true self, your spiritual self. This is how ordinary people like you and me do. We cannot suddenly give up everything and go live as a monk, with the exception for a very few people who in their previous lives had developed this type of practice. So when they come into contact with this practice again, it naturally attracts them. Otherwise for us, we are like trains that have to shift tracks. We have to slowly shift them one by one, but we can do it.

— 209 — 18 | Laypeople from USA, November 17th, 2015 Like today, you come and talk to me and then you hear something that you have never heard before. It is like learning how to scuba dive. You have never scuba dived before, but one day when you come across a scuba diving instructor and he teaches you the way to do it, it becomes so easy and so simple. So, when you can have another kind of experience that you have never had before, it arouses your interest and you want to try it. First you try it in the pool. You don’t go into deep waters immediately because you don’t know how to handle the diving gear yet. So, it is the same thing with the practice that I am trying to tell you about. If you have time, especially now when you don’t have anything to do, you should practice. No excuse for you. Lay devotee: In the past I came across it and then I got back to my previous habits, I got distracted. So when I read your book, I am going back to the practice. Than Ajahn: Yes, I know, because the old way dies hard. You can’t teach an old dog a new trick. (laugh) Lay devotee: Is it right for one to leave everything behind? Than Ajahn: It is not a wrong way for one to leave. You are still living in the world, you are just living separately from other people. You can still meet each other. You can visit him, he can visit you, he still can communicate with you. It is just a different way of life. But there are no family gatherings for Christmas or Thanksgiving etc. Those activities are all sentimental things which we are accustomed to. We aren’t attached to the sentimental thing – the one that lets you have continuous happiness. The family, or gatherings are just like sparks of happiness that last for a few days then you have to say goodbye because you can’t stand each other any longer (laughing).

— 210 — Dhamma in English 2014 & 2015 Just try to do what I taught you. Whenever you feel like you don’t know what to do, just sit, close your eyes and watch your breathing. Your mind might suddenly drop into calm and you feel that this is it. You never know. You have the best time in your life now. You have nothing to do. If you get bored, just watch your breathing.If you have nothing else to do, just watch your breathing. End of talk.

— 211 — Than Ajahn: Any questions you want to ask? Lay (M): I would like to know how to deal with lust? Than Ajahn: Are you married and do you want to get rid of your lust? Lay (M): I want to be able to control it better. Than Ajahn: You just have to contemplate asubha. Try to make it as your daily practice. In the morning before you go to work, you meditate and after that you contemplate asubha for a while, go through the 32 parts of the body or imagine how the body decomposes. Study the unattractive aspect of the body. The unattractive part of the body is there but we don’t like to see it. You can go through the 32 parts of the body, especially the internal parts of the body under the skin. Visualise the skeleton or the organs. If you cannot visualise it, you can use the pictorial image in the books. You then try to commit it in your mind. Lay (M): Do I practise it when I go out and do my daily activities? 19 Laypeople from USA November 26th, 2015

— 212 — Dhamma in English 2014 & 2015 Than Ajahn: Yes. You do it especially when the lustful feeling arises. You have to look at the unattractive side of the body. If you only look at the attractive side of the body, it can arouse your lust, so you have to counter it by visualising the unattractive aspect of the body. It is like a gunslinger who has to be quick in using his gun. In order to be fast, he has to practice. So you have to practise it until it becomes a second nature to you. As soon as the lust arises, you are able to use this contemplation. You need a calm mind in order to be able to contemplate it effectively. When the mind is not calm, you have aversion. So you have to try to have some calm, then it will be easier for you to contemplate. If your mind is not calm, the defilement will block your contemplation. You can alternate between your samādhi practice and your contemplation practice. Lay (M): For daytime, do I use Buddho? Than Ajahn: That is used to gain samādhi. You need to develop some samādhi so your mind is calm enough to be able to contemplate. If your mind is not calm, you will be pushed to think about other things. When the mind is agitated, the mind doesn’t like to think about Dhamma, it likes to think in the way of kilesas . Without samādhi, you may only be able to contemplate for a few minutes then you will give up and think about other things. If you have samādhi, you can contemplate much longer. The goal is to contemplate as much as possible until it sinks into your mind. Right now the asubha is just a memory and it can disappear very quickly. You want it to go beyond your memory, you want it to go inside your heart. The way to do it is to practise it all the time. This is not easy if you are working. You need to practise full time in order to develop samādhi and be able to contemplate it effectively. But try it and see how much you are able to do it.

— 213 — 19 | Laypeople from USA, November 26th, 2015 The goal is not to forget the unattractive part of the body and to be able to use it when you see a beautiful object so that you can have a balanced view. Right now, your view is lopsided. You only see the attractive side of the body, you don’t want to look at the unattractive side of the body. When you see the attractive side, you are aroused, but if you can see the unattractive side of the body, you can squash your lust. Basically you have to keep doing it, alternating between samādhi and asubha contemplation. After you come out of samādhi, you do asubha contemplation and after you are tired of contemplating, you go back into samādhi. Because after you contemplate for a while, your ability to contemplate will diminish and you may start to think about other things. So, when you are not contemplating on asubha or whatever your chosen subject, then you should stop the mind from thinking by going back into samādhi to regenerate the strength of mind (regain mental calm). Just do it back and forth until you know you can overcome your desire. - End.

— 215 — Layperson: I am interested in learning more about meditation. Than Ajahn: Mediation is for the mind, while medicine is for the body. The problem is not with the body. The problem is with the mind. When you are not happy, the unhappiness is in the mind. Similarly, happiness is in the mind, and not in the body. Your mind is not happy due to its delusion. It is attached to the body and doesn’t understand the true nature of the body. So, when the true nature of the body starts to reveal itself, this causes painful feelings in the mind. When you get sick, it is not the body that is hurt, but it’s the mind that is hurt because it never thinks that the body will get sick or will have to eventually die. So when that prospect comes upon the mind, it doesn’t know how to cope with it. With Buddhism we have the tools to examine. We use the mind to accept the truth of the body and not to be hurt by the nature of the body. We can separate the mind from the body by the methods of insight meditation and meditation for calm. We need these two steps, these two kinds of meditation to make the mind calm. The next step is to use the teachings of the Buddha to teach the 20 Laypeople from Scotland, November 26th, 2015

— 216 — Dhamma in English 2014 & 2015 mind to understand that the mind and the body are two separate things. Whatever happens to the body doesn’t happen to the mind. The body gets sick, gets old and dies, but the mind doesn’t get sick, get old and die. But due to ignorance or delusion of the mind, it doesn’t know itself and takes the body as itself. So, the mind thinks that whatever happens to the body is happening to itself. The goal is to educate the mind, to let the mind know that it is not the body and that it (the mind) can be just as happy with or without the body. The way for the mind to be happy with or without the body is to meditate to calm it down. When you meditate, you pull the mind away from the body. Right now your mind relies on your body for happiness. This kind of happiness is brief. It is not lasting because it relies on the body which is not lasting. So when the body becomes stressed, the mind becomes upset and disturbed because it doesn’t want this to happen. It wants to continue to have the body to enjoy life. So what we have to do is to find an alternative way to enjoy life without using the body and meditation is the way to get to this enjoyment. In order to be successful in meditation, you need a tool to bring the mind into peace, into calm. Right now your mind is constantly moving, thinking all the time. From the time you get up to the time you go to sleep, you keep on thinking. And your thinking is based on delusion and ignorance. Your thinking is based on looking for happiness through your body. So you want to stop this thinking. If you can stop your mind from thinking, then your mind will become peaceful, at ease and happy. It is a different kind of happiness from the kind of happiness you used to have from your body. It is what I call mental happiness, not physical happiness. In order to get this you have to pull your mind away from your body, to stop your mind from thinking. When your mind stops thinking, then your mind will become peaceful. This is the first step of meditation, to get the mind to find enjoyment without

— 217 — 20 | Laypeople from Scotland, November 26th, 2015 relying on the body. This is another kind of enjoyment that you can get from the mind itself. All you need to do is to stop your mind from thinking and what you use to stop your mind from thinking is what we call mindfulness. Mindfulness is to focus or concentrate on (tie the mind to) one particular object, so it can stop the mind from thinking about other things. There are many different objects that you can use to tie your mind to. In Buddhism, the most popular way is to recite the name of the Buddha. It is called a mantra, just repeating a word. In Thailand we use the word Buddho, Buddho, which means the Buddha. This is because Thais are raised to respect and to rely on the Buddha to think that he is our saviour, so when we think of him, our mind becomes at ease and peaceful and calm. So for most Thais, they like to use Buddho, Buddho as the object of mindfulness. You can do it all the time from the time you get up to the time you go to sleep. If you only do it when you start sitting in your meditation, it is not going to be enough because your mindfulness will not be strong enough to stop your mind from thinking. So in order to stop your mind from thinking when you sit in meditation, you have to start before that. You have to start from the time to get up, try not to think about other things except for the things that you are doing at the moment. Just focus on whatever you are doing at the moment and repeat a mantra to bring the mind to stick to the activity that is happening at the moment. This is what we call mindfulness. When you get up, you watch your body and observe every movement of the body activities. This is what we call mindfulness of the body, which is using the body as the object of the mindfulness, in order to prevent the mind from thinking about other things. If you can persist in developing mindfulness then you will be able to stop your thinking when you sit down. When you sit in meditation, you can use your breathing as your object or focus of concentration. Just watch. You don’t need to

— 218 — Dhamma in English 2014 & 2015 control your breathing. You just leave the breathing natural. You just use it as an object of your concentration. When you sit, just close your eyes, try to feel your breath that comes in and goes out. If your mind is calm enough, you will be able to see the contact of the breath at the tip of your nose or around the upper lip (around that area). Try to focus on that point only, don’t go anywhere. If you cannot feel it, don’t worry, just be aware whether you are breathing in or breathing out and be aware whether your breath is long or short. It doesn’t matter whether it is long or short. If it is long, just note that it is a long breath. If it is short, just note that it is a short breath. Just be aware of your breathing and try not to let it go to think about other things. Layperson: I am doing it not for a long period of time, just about 20 to 30minutes. Than Ajahn: Yes, it is because that’s all your mindfulness is capable of doing, but if you develop stronger mindfulness then you can sit longer. You will become more adept at it. It’s like everything else you learn, like driving, playing tennis, playing golf. The more you do it the more proficient you become, so it is a matter of practice. You have to push yourself to practise as much as possible. Right now I am teaching you how to take care of your mind which gets sucked into the sickness of your body. Layperson: I am trying to recover my health. Than Ajahn: You have two problems at the same time. Your main problem is not your body. Your main problem is your mind because the pain of the body is not as strong as the pain of your mind and regardless of how good you look after the body, sooner or later it will create problems again. You can fix it this time and eventually a few more years from now you will face this same

— 219 — 20 | Laypeople from Scotland, November 26th, 2015 problem again until your body dies. Then your problem with your body will disappear. So this is the process of the body, which is going to happen regardless of what you do, it is just a matter of time. That’s all. Sooner or later. This body will eventually stop functioning. If you can fix it, no problem. I am not advocating that you don’t fix your body. Try to fix it but you should fix it in a way that doesn’t hurt your mind. What hurts your mind is the desire to get the body fixed all the time or to be able to fix it all the time. Maybe you cannot fix it, but if your mind insists on wanting to have it fixed, then it will hurt the mind. But if the mind accepts that, it is okay. Maybe it can be fixed, maybe it cannot be fixed. If I can fix it, fine. If I cannot fix it, fine, I can live with it either way. Then you solve the mental problem. Layperson: I accept my sickness but I am looking at meditation as something that I can benefit from. I’m not saying that it can cure my disease although there are stories that it can. Than Ajahn: It might have some effects on the well-being of the body. Because a calm mind doesn’t hurt the body like the agitated mind. But I don’t think you can cure your illness by meditation, otherwise those who can meditate can live forever, right? Layperson: I am trying to accept that this is my path. Than Ajahn: It is everybody’s path, we all have the same path. We all have to go through the same process of birth, aging, sickness and death. There is no exception. Layperson: I want my path to be a little longer.

— 220 — Dhamma in English 2014 & 2015 Than Ajahn: That’s the problem. When you want that, it creates stress in your mind. The way to do it is to accept it naturally. It doesn’t matter whether it’s long or short (life). We all have different causes that lead us to live longer or shorter. But it doesn’t matter because our true self doesn’t die with the body. If you believe in reincarnation, you will get a new body pretty soon. After you lose your old body, you will go and be reborn and it starts all over again. Before you had this body, you lost your previous body so you can come and have this new body. This goes on until you get tired of this cycle of birth, aging, sickness and death. Then you might want to find a solution to this problem, which was what the Buddha did. He was tired of this cycle of birth, aging, sickness and death. Eventually he wanted to stop this vicious cycle so he meditated and learnt from other teachers but they only taught him partially, not totally and he had to find a solution himself. Eventually he found the way to stop this vicious cycle of birth, aging, sickness and death. This is the gist of Buddhism, that is to cut off birth, aging, sickness and death. We can do this through meditation by developing mindfulness and calming the mind. Once your mind is calm, you will find happiness from your mind. Then you will know that you don’t need the body. Once you know that you don’t need the body to make you happy. The only thing you have to do is stop the desire for wanting to use the body to get happiness. That’s the next step. The first step is to discover the happiness you can have without the body. With that understanding, then all you have to do is to get rid of your desire for using the body to get happiness. Once you can do that, you then no longer need to have a new body. Then you cut off this cycle of birth, aging, sickness and death. And you will live with this mental happiness forever. Right now if you want to help yourself, you have to meditate. When you meditate, then your mind will become calm and you have discarded half of your problem, your problem of mental stress. Because your mind is constantly agitated for this or for that

— 221 — 20 | Laypeople from Scotland, November 26th, 2015 all the time and when it doesn’t get what it wants it becomes sad and unhappy. You can stop this by meditating. You can stop this temporarily. When you meditate your mind becomes calm. After you come out of your meditation, your mind starts to be agitated for this and that again. If you want to get rid of this agitation for good, then you need the wisdom of the Buddha. He discovered that this agitation for things makes you unhappy. If you want to get rid of this unhappiness, you have to get rid of this agitation for things, by looking at the things that you want as being harmful more than being beneficial. Because whatever you have, they are all temporary, they don’t last forever. When you get something, you are happy, but when you lose something that you are happy with, you become sad again. So this is the truth that you have to see all the time, that everything is not happiness. It doesn’t make the mind happy. Layman: Everyone chooses his or her own path in their lives. I have chosen the path to have a wife, children, career and I would not want to think that my wife and my family are my desires or distractions. They are certainly the elements that I would want in my life whether it is long or short. When you talk about desire, what are you referring to? Than Ajahn: Everything. As far as I have explained about desire, everything that you want is desire. Layperson: So how to reduce those desires? Than Ajahn: By not having anything at all. The only thing you need is to have mental happiness. If you don’t want anything other than the mental happiness, then you don’t have to have a body. If you want happiness from the body, from other people’s bodies, then you need to have a body. And when you lose what you get, you will get disappointed because everything is temporary, they don’t last forever, they don’t stay with you forever.

— 222 — Dhamma in English 2014 & 2015 Layperson: Is there any balance to be achieved here, whether it is all or nothing or is there any in between for a layman like me? Than Ajahn: Yes. As a layman you just have to accept the truth that everything is temporary. It is good when you have it. When you don’t have it, you don’t have it. But if you are willing to accept this consequence, then you can live with it. Accept what you have and accept that you will lose it. Intellectually we know that eventually we all will lose everything. When we come to the reality of giving up or losing things, we cannot be unaffected. We become sad. So, if you want to have a balance, you have to constantly remind yourself that whatever you have right now will be gone one day. And if you can accept this reality, when it happens it will not make you sad. Accept that everything comes and goes. Nothing lasts forever. But we tend to fool ourselves. While the things are still with us, we may say that it is okay to lose them. However, when it really happens, we cannot accept it, because of the fact that we are still clinging to what we have right now. It means you don’t want to get rid of it, you don’t want it to go away. Layman: But it is human nature that you will feel sad when you lose important people in your life, or lose your loved ones. If you lose a car or other things, it is okay. Than Ajahn: If you can live with sadness then there will be no problem. Just accept that happiness and sadness are the two sides of the same coin. Sometimes it flips one way and sometimes it flips the other way. Just accept it. If you want to have things then you have to accept that one day you have to lose them. If you don’t want to lose anything, then don’t have anything. When you have nothing, you’ve got nothing to lose.

— 223 — 20 | Laypeople from Scotland, November 26th, 2015 Meditation will make your mind strong enough to accept the truth. If you meditate, your mind will be able to accept the truth more easily than if you don’t meditate. So meditation can help you in this aspect. Maybe after you have lost so many things one day you might get fed up and you will want to give up everything. Right now you have to make your mind strong to accept the truth of life that one day we will have to lose whatever we have. If you can accept that then it’s fine. You can live with whatever you have. Layman: I believe in kamma. I consider myself to be a good person, since I have never committed a crime and I have always been a loving person to my family. I take care of my family members, respect and help my colleagues and workers. When something like this (sickness) happens to me, I feel cheated. Than Ajahn: This is not kamma. It is reality. Aging, sickness and death are the reality of life. Maybe kamma might have something to do with it, but we have done so much kamma in the past and we cannot recollect them all. Our nature tends to look at only the positive side of ourselves. We try not to think about the negative things that we did. Believe me that kamma is not cheating you. What you get is what you deserve, what I get is what I deserve. Think about it this way then you can feel happier. Besides, there is nothing you can do about it. This is what you have. Layperson: I come here not expecting the answer of everything but to get some kind of enlightenment or insight as to what meditation and Buddhism are, that in some way might benefit me as a person if I have a longer life. Than Ajahn: You are still confused with yourself and your body. You should consider yourself as a mind, not a body. You have

— 224 — Dhamma in English 2014 & 2015 got a lot of bodies already. The body is something insignificant. The significant one is your mind because your mind lasts forever. For the body, no matter how well you look after it, it will eventually come to an end. But you have lost your focus. You focus more on your body than on your mind. Layperson: In light of this moment when my body is in crisis, I have to focus on my body and I can’t just ignore it. Than Ajahn: I don’t mean to ignore it, but don’t over focus on it. Do what you can with it but don’t expect more than what you can do, because when you do, you will create trouble in your mind, making your mind unhappy because your mind cannot get what it wants from your body. That’s what I am saying. Layperson: It took me almost a year to know what to do with my body. Now I have a fixed task on how I should treat and nurture it. Than Ajahn: Maybe it is just a false alarm. Maybe it is not a cancer. Maybe it is just some supernatural being that is trying to test your mind. Layperson: I hope so but I am not so sure. Than Ajahn: Like I said, according to Buddhism, treat the body as it is, take it as what it is, take it as it comes, good or bad, short or long, just take it as it is. Don’t worry about it. It is insignificant. Fifty years from now, what will happen to the body? To your body? To your loved ones' bodies? We will all go to the grave eventually. But think of the mind that can always be at ease by itself regardless of what happens to your body or other people’s bodies, wouldn’t it be better? I might emphasize more on the mind, because I know it is better, but you might emphasize more on the body because you think that it is better for you.

— 225 — 20 | Laypeople from Scotland, November 26th, 2015 Layperson: My body is in crisis, and if I ignore my body for the next year or months, I will die, as simple as that, so I have to focus on my body to find a way to recover. Than Ajahn: Just don’t worry about it. Layperson: That’s very difficult. Than Ajahn: If you can do that, then your mind will not be hurt. Lay 2: What are the ways that you can recommend, so that one can try to reduce thoughts about the body and have more calm? Than Ajahn: Stop thinking. Try to focus on something to prevent your mind from thinking. Usually your mind thinks about your own body or of other people’s bodies. We never think that the body will get sick, get old and die. That’s the problem. So you have to think that the body will get sick, get old and die, not just your body; everybody’s body are the same. If you want to think, you think in this way. It makes your mind feel better, it will stop your mind from resisting the truth. Right now the mind doesn’t want to look at the truth. Your mind wants to have what it wants, which is eternity. Getting things, makes it unhappy. And having nothing, makes it happy all the time, without having any unhappiness or you may have it but will be able to let go when the time comes. For example, I still have my body, and I have to be ready to let it go also. If I am ready now, then I don’t feel bad. Whatever happens, it happens. When you are not ready, when it happens, you become sad, you become unhappy. So it is a matter of acceptance. Layperson: I feel I have reached that point on a certain level when I was in the hospital where my mind has already planned out the eventuality. So in my mind I have already accepted whichever

— 226 — Dhamma in English 2014 & 2015 path that is going to be. Now three years later, I am still here, my body is still functioning. I am still trying a way to recover. I have had some benefits from my meditation, but I know it is just temporary, through luck. Than Ajahn: You should let your mind relax and be at ease, and not be so stressed. That’s the purpose of meditation. For the body you need some kind of therapy and medicine and there are new ways of treating cancer coming out every day. Maybe the cure is already there and you just don’t know, so keep searching. You can google and search. All the information available on this earth is on Google. You have to consult the experts too, not just Google alone. Maybe you can consult the professionals to get the information. End of discussion.

— 227 — Lay (M): What is the difference between mindfulness and awareness? How do we practice them in our meditation and cultivate them in our daily life? Than Ajahn: Mindfulness is paying attention to one thing, like paying attention to certain activity you are doing. This is being mindful. Usually your mind doesn’t like to pay attention to one thing for a long period of time. When you do one thing, your mind likes to think about other things – this means having no mindfulness. If you have mindfulness, you pay 100 percent attention to whatever you do at that moment. So this is mindfulness of the body – you are using the body as the object of your mindfulness. You watch every activity of your body, from the time you wake up in the morning. You pay attention to your body. When the body is lying down, you know that it is lying down. When the body is getting up, you know it is getting up. When the body is standing up, you know that it is standing up. You always watch your body. This is being mindful. This is the way to develop mindfulness. You need mindfulness to bring the mind to samādhi. If you don’t have mindfulness, your mind will think about this and that. 21 Laypeople from Malaysia December 10th, 2015

— 228 — Dhamma in English 2014 & 2015 If you can force it to pay attention to your body, then it cannot think about this and that. But in real life, it is not easy to force your mind to pay attention to your body activities all the time. It is a matter of patience and continuous development of mindfulness. As you continue to try, you will improve. Your mindfulness will become stronger and eventually you are able to continuously pay attention to your body activities or any other object you want the mind to pay attention to. When you sit in meditation, you pay attention to your breath. If you have mindfulness, you are able to pay attention to your breathing. Paying attention to the breathing means to just be aware of the breathing. You don’t need to force or manipulate the breathing. You use your breath as your object of your mindfulness. When you are breathing in, just be aware that you are breathing in. When you are breathing out, just be aware that you are breathing out. If your breath is long, just be aware that it is a long breath. If the breath is short, just know that the breath is short. If the breath is fine, just know that the breath is fine. If the breath is coarse, just know that the breath is coarse. You just know, there is no need for you to manipulate the breathing. If you can continuously keep watching the breathing without thinking about other things, your mind will eventually drop into calm. This is called samādhi. When the mind drops into calm, sometimes the body and the breath disappears from your awareness, and all there is left is just the awareness itself, the one who knows, the knower. The knower is the real characteristic of the mind. When the mind stops thinking, everything will disappear except for the awareness. Your thoughts rise and cease, but your awareness never ceases. The awareness is always there but you don’t know it because your thoughts block you from seeing the awareness. Without the awareness, you won’t be able to know

— 229 — 21 | Laypeople from Malaysia, December 10th, 2015 what I am talking about. It is the ‘one who knows’ knows that I am talking to. It acknowledges everything I said and also acknowledges everything that you think about. The awareness doesn’t rise and cease; it is always there. It is just that you don’t get to see it because it is blocked by your thoughts. What you usually see is your own thoughts, not the awareness. The awareness sees the thoughts but does not see itself. When you stop thinking then there is nothing left except the awareness itself. This awareness is the true mind. Layperson: Does it mean when my samādhi improves, my awareness will improve too? Than Ajahn: Yes. You will be more aware of things around you and you will learn how to use the mind in productive and profitable ways. Right now you don’t know how to use the mind in a profitable way, you are using it to hurt yourself. The mind doesn’t know how to behave properly. The mind is being deceived by the delusion. It doesn’t know where the true happiness is. The delusion deceives the mind to think that for the mind to be happy, you have to have material possessions, people, or things, but all these things are temporary. You gain them and then you will lose them. When you have them, you are happy, but when you lose them, you become sad. So you have to re-educate your mind to think that the true happiness is to be found in samādhi, in a calm mind, in being alone, in not having any possessions, things or people. This is what you have to teach the mind after you have samādhi. If you don’t have samādhi, the mind doesn’t know where the real happiness is. But once you have samādhi, you will know that the real happiness is found in being peaceful and calm.

— 230 — Dhamma in English 2014 & 2015 Your desire for things and people will destroy your peace and happiness. When you see this truth, then you know that you have to resist your desire. In order to be able to resist the desire, you have to use the wisdom of the Buddha, to see that everything is not happiness. Everything which you think can bring you happiness, is in fact bringing you suffering. It brings you suffering because it doesn’t last. Everything is temporary. For example, you think when you have a wife or a husband, you will be happy. But when he or she leaves you, dies or separates from you, you become sad. This is what you have to contemplate, to teach the mind that everything which the mind thinks will bring you happiness is actually bringing sorrow to you because everything is impermanent. Everything comes and goes. Nothing lasts forever. Sooner or later, one day you will separate from everything you have. Dukkha means to experience aging, sickness and death; to separate from things that you love; to face the things that you don’t like. It is mainly the attachment to your five khandhas. This is suffering. You don’t know that the body doesn’t belong to you, therefore you are attached to the body. You think the body belongs to you. You then have the desire for the body to last forever. When it doesn’t last forever, you become unhappy. So you have to teach the mind the truth that the body doesn’t belong to you, it doesn’t bring you happiness, it brings you sorrow. It is better to let it go and to be willing to get old, get sick and die. When you have no attachment to your body and let everything be, you will not be sad. This is the step you have to do after you come out of samādhi. That is to teach the mind the real truth – the truth that everything you possess which you think brings you happiness will in fact bring you sadness. So you must get rid of your desire for wanting to have anything. You will then remain peaceful and happy forever.

— 231 — 21 | Laypeople from Malaysia, December 10th, 2015 Lay (F): There are different levels of samādhi. Can Ajahn explain which level of samādhi we need to have in order to gain the happiness? Than Ajahn: The level of samādhi you want to develop is appanā-samādhi, where the mind becomes concentrated and becomes one. It stops all the thinking activities. And all there is left is just emptiness, the one who knows. This is the level of samādhi you need to have because it will give you the strength to resist your desire. It will also give you the real happiness, the peace of mind. By having appanā-samādhi, you will then gain this kind of real happiness. Khanika-samādhi is the same kind of samādhi as appanā-samādhi but the duration of concentration in khanika-samādhi is shorter. When you start your practice, you will first experience khanika -samādhi. This is because you don’t have strong mindfulness. Your mindfulness can only bring your mind to a calm state briefly and then it will pull you out of that state due to the resistance to your desire as your desire is still very strong. When you have developed stronger mindfulness, your mind can stay peaceful and calm for a long period of time. And this is the kind of samādhi you want to have, to keep the mind peaceful and calm for as long as possible. Lay (M): Do we do it in daily life? Than Ajahn: First you want to experience calm in your meditation. Once you come out of samādhi, you still remain calm. But eventually when you start thinking and start desiring for things, the calmness will disappear. If you want to maintain this state of calm, after you come out of samādhi, you have to control your thinking. You don’t let the mind think in the way of desire. You control the mind to think about anicca, dukkha, anattā.

— 232 — Dhamma in English 2014 & 2015 However, as a layperson, it is not possible to do so. As a layperson, when you are working, you always think that all things are permanent. You think that good things will last forever. So the practice contradicts with your way of life. In order for the practice to stay in harmony with your way of life, you have to become a monk. In this way, everything goes in the same direction. Right now, your practice and your way of life are contradicting each other; you experience a tug of war. When you go to temple, you find peace but when you go back home, you find yourself desiring to have this or that. You then get agitated and you suffer. After you practice for a while, if you want to move forward in your practice, you realise that you have to adjust your way of life, otherwise you will not progress in your practice because your way of life and your practice are running against each other. So, you have to adjust your way of life and make it go in the same direction with your practice. This is what usually happens to everyone. When you first started, you didn’t know that the practice will bring you peace and happiness. You then realised that practising on part time basis can only give you this much result. You realised that you need more time to practise otherwise you won’t be able to get more result. Right now you can only do it on your day off like on weekends. On weekdays when you have to go to work, your way of life and your practice go in different directions. So you are going back and forth and you will not able to get far. If you want to go very far, you have to go in one direction. The other samādhi, upacāra-samādhi, is the level where one is experiencing all sorts of nimittas. When your mind becomes calm, the mind starts to have other psychic activities like the ability to read other people’s mind, ability to see things which you normally can’t see with your eyes, ability to see celestial beings, etc.

— 233 — 21 | Laypeople from Malaysia, December 10th, 2015 This kind of samādhi is not good because it doesn’t bring you peace and happiness. This is like watching a movie. Instead of going to watch a movie with your eyes, you go to watch a movie with your mental eyes. If you have this kind of upacāra-samādhi, you should ignore it by using mindfulness to bring your mind to appanā-samādhi. You continue with your meditation. If you are watching your breathing, you go back to observe your breath. If you use a mantra, Buddho, you go back to recite the mantra. If you have strong mindfulness, you can pull your mind away from that kind of samādhi. If you follow what you see, you will immerse in what you saw. You won’t get the peace because your mind still has the desire in what you saw or what you felt. So when you come out of samādhi, you don’t feel rested and won’t have the peace and happiness. You don’t want this kind of samādhi. Anyway, from what I heard, there are only a few people who have this type of ability. So don’t worry about it. Lay (F): After I listened to Ajahn’s talk, I have a kind of feeling inside me. What is this? Than Ajahn: What kind of feeling did you experience? You have to know it because I don’t know what kind of feeling you have. There are three kinds of feelings: good, bad or neutral. They keep on changing. Don’t get attached to them. Just be aware of them. If you experience good feelings, don’t desire for them to last because they will not last. If you have bad feelings, don’t desire for them to disappear because you cannot get rid of them. They will go away by themselves. All you have to do is just be aware of the feelings and don’t be attached to any of them. You can make a certain kind of feeling happens to you. If you want to have peaceful feeling, then you have to maintain mindfulness. The stronger mindfulness you have, the more

— 234 — Dhamma in English 2014 & 2015 peaceful and calm your mind and feelings will be. If you want to stop any bad feelings to arise, then you have to stop your desire because all bad feelings arise from your desire. When you want to have something and you cannot get it, you feel bad. If you don’t have any desire to have anything, it doesn’t matter whether you get the things or not. So try to get rid of your desire, then you can get rid your bad feelings. Try to develop mindfulness, then you will get good feeling, a peaceful feeling. Lay (F): Is sati and sampajañña mindfulness and awareness? Than Ajahn: Awareness is not sampajañña. Sampajañña is continuous mindfulness. Awareness is the one who knows. When the mind enters into singularity and becomes one, awareness will appear. The one who knows is already there but you don’t see it. When the mind is active, you cannot see the one who knows. When the mind stops all the activities, the one who knows will appear. Lay (F): What is it when the mind is aware of thought that arises? Than Ajahn: That is mindfulness. Lay (F): Is the knowing mindfulness? Than Ajahn: It is very hard to separate mindfulness from the knowing. The knowing is always there but sometimes it is not with what you are supposed to know. So you need mindfulness to bring the knowing to know what you are supposed to know. Lay (F): Are mindfulness and continuous mindfulness together? Than Ajahn: They are those that pull the mind together towards inside. Your thoughts want to pull your awareness to various activities outside. If you want to bring it inside you need to have mindfulness.

— 235 — 21 | Laypeople from Malaysia, December 10th, 2015 Lay (F): What are sati and sampajañña? Than Ajahn: Sati is just mindfulness. It is not continuous. You can be mindful but the next moment you can forget about being mindful. If you have continuous mindfulness, it is called sampajañña. Sampajañña is not the one who knows. The one who knows only appears when the mind stops thinking. After the mind stops thinking, you can see the one who knows because that’s all there is left. The analogy is when you switch on the TV, you see the images projected on your TV, you don’t see the TV screen itself. If you want to see the TV screen, you have to switch off the TV. Your thoughts are like the images projected on the TV screen. The awareness is the one behind (underlying) the thoughts. When you turn off the thoughts, then all there is left is just the awareness. It is like watching TV. When you switch off the TV, what is left is just the screen, the glass. When you switch on the TV, you see the images on the TV, you can’t see the glass. So your thoughts are just like the images on your mind. You have to turn off the thoughts in order for you to see your mind, the one who knows. Lay (F): When and how should we reflect and contemplate? Than Ajahn: You can do them anytime when you are not in meditation. But it depends on your mindfulness whether you can direct your mind to reflect and think in the way of Dhamma or not. If your mindfulness is not strong, you won’t be able to direct your mind to reflect and contemplate, instead you will like to think about making money, going on holidays. This is normally how you think, right? So whenever you can bring the mind back to think in the Dhamma way, do it. If you have strong mindfulness, it means you have samādhi. Once you have strong mindfulness,

— 236 — Dhamma in English 2014 & 2015 it will be easy for you to direct your mind to reflect in the way of the Dhamma. Theoretically, what you have to do is to think in the way of Dhamma all the time when you are not in samādhi. But usually you don’t do it, right? Usually you think about where you are going tomorrow instead of thinking about anicca, dukkha, anattā. You hardly think about getting sick, getting old and dying. Your mind is being directed by your defilements, so you think about money, think about finding happiness with these or those people, these or those things, these places or those places. That’s all you think about. This is because you don’t have strong mindfulness to direct the mind in the Dhamma way. So first you have to develop mindfulness. When you have strong mindfulness, you can tell the mind to contemplate the nature of the body, the impermanent nature of the body, on anattā – not self. You need to contemplate a lot so you don’t forget. That’s the whole point. Right now you keep forgetting about the truth. You have been substituting the truth with the false truth. You think the body will last. You think the body will not get sick. You never think that the body will die. This is delusion, to let the mind forget about the truth. So you have to remind yourself about the truth as much as possible. The Buddha asked his attendant, Venerable Ananda, ‘how many times a day you reflect on death?’ Venerable Ananda replied: ‘maybe four or five times a day’. The Buddha said, “This is not good. You are being heedless. You are not being mindful. If you are mindful, you reflect on death with every breath. If you breathe-in but you don’t breathe-out, you will die. If you breathe-out and you don’t breathe-in, you will die. You should think in this way all the time. Then you are being mindful’. So this is what you have to do, to reflect in the Dhamma way in every breath you take.

— 237 — 21 | Laypeople from Malaysia, December 10th, 2015 Lay (F): When the mind sees the arising of the attachment and when the mind knows it, is this awareness or mindfulness? Than Ajahn: It doesn’t matter what you saw. The point is whether you can get rid of the attachment or not. That’s the point you should be interested in. The point is to get rid of your attachment. You can get rid of your attachment when you see it as anicaṁ, dukkhaṁ, anattā. Lay (M): We have been Buddhists for a long time. We practise dāna, listen to Dhamma talks and also meditate. But the progress is not very good. Could you tell me what needs to be done, so that we can make a steady progress? Than Ajahn: You just have to go to retreats and devote all your time to practising. That’s the only way to move forward. If you do both, practicing and continuing with your daily activities, you are in conflict. You will gain some but you won’t get much. If you want more result, you have to devote all your time for the practice. Time is an essential ingredient which will determine your progress. The result depends on how much time you devote for the practice. If you devote more time for the practice, you will get more result from the practice. If you give more time for your daily activities, then you will get more material things from your daily activities. You only have 24 hours a day. Everyone has the same amount of time. The Buddha and all his noble disciples devote all their time for the practice. So when you don’t do the same things, how can you expect the same results? Right now you come to Thailand and devote your time for practice. You can do this more often. In order to get more result, you have to give up your job, to work less. Why do you have to work so much? What you need to work for is just to support your

— 238 — Dhamma in English 2014 & 2015 life. You don’t have to be rich, and to have the stuffs that others have. All you need is just enough money to feed your body. So find a job that doesn’t require you to work for 5 days a week, like being a freelancer. Don’t be an employee of a company. As a freelancer, you can pick the day you want to work. You work just to earn money to provide your body with food and shelter. You don’t need much. This is what you have to do if you want to have the time to devote for your practice. Lay (F): Which posture is the most beneficial for meditation? Than Ajahn: You can do it in any posture. The posture is not essential. The essential factors are mindfulness and wisdom. People can practice in various postures, either standing, sitting, walking or lying down. When you first practice, you have to avoid lying down posture because you don’t have strong mindfulness yet. When you don’t have strong mindfulness, you will fall asleep and you will waste your time. For beginners, as they don’t have strong mindfulness, they have to stick to three postures: standing, walking or sitting. You can switch to those different postures as you find it appropriate. You cannot sit too long, stand too long or walk too long. You have to change your position in order to maintain your body health. If you just stick to one posture for a long time, your body can become sick. So you have to know how to balance it. The real practice is not in the posture but in the mindfulness and in your contemplation of the truth. These are the real determinants whether you can become enlightened or not, not in your bodily postures. Lay (F): Can we practice samatha and vipassanā in one sitting together?

— 239 — 21 | Laypeople from Malaysia, December 10th, 2015 Than Ajahn: Yes. After you come out of samādhi, you can contemplate without having to get up from your sitting. But you cannot do both at the same time. When you want to do samatha, you have to stop thinking. When you do vipassanā, you have to think. So when you do samatha, you don’t think. But when you come out of samatha, when the mind starts thinking, you can direct the mind to think in terms of vipassanā. You have to do it in separate sessions but you can do it in the same position. When you sit, your mind will start to become calm. But after a while, the calmness disappears, and then you start to experience pain in the body. You can use the nature of pain as your object of vipassanā, to see it as aniccaṁ, dukkhaṁ, anattā. When you truly see it, you then can let go of the attachment to the pain and your mind will not be affected by the pain of the body. This is vipassanā that you do in the same sitting position.

— 241 — Than Ajahn: What can I do for you? Lay (M): Why does my baby have many problems? Than Ajahn: This is normal. You are not the only person who has this kind of problem. According to Buddhism, it is his own kamma – something he did in his previous lives. He did something bad in his previous lives and he has to pay for it in this life. This can also due to accident. Sometimes it is the result of the birth process. When he was in the womb, the body did not function properly. The only thing you can do is to look after him as well as possible. Don’t wish him to be any different. You cannot change his destiny. The problem is in you, not him. You are worried. You are not happy. You want him to get better. You don’t understand that this is the way nature works, sometimes it is perfect, sometimes it is not perfect. When you get something that is not perfect, you are not happy and you want to change it to be perfect. The more you want it to be perfect, the more unhappy you become. If you accept that this is nature, this is the way it is, then you will not be 22 Laypeople from Iraq December 13th, 2015

— 242 — Dhamma in English 2014 & 2015 unhappy. This is the way we solve our problems, acceptance – accept the way nature works. Be happy with what we have. You can also think in a better light that his condition is not worse than this. Or you think that the condition only happens to this child, not to your other children. If you think in this way, you will feel better. If you want everything to be perfect, then you will be unhappy because it can’t happen. This is how we live the Buddhist way. We learn to live with what we have. Be happy with what we have. Try to do the best we can. If we can fix it, we fix it but if we cannot fix it, then we just live with what we have. He is just like an automobile. When you buy a car, sometimes you don’t get a perfect one, so you send it back to the factory. When the factory manager said that nothing can be done, you just have to accept it. The goal of Buddhism is to make ourselves happy, by accepting that everything is as the way it is. - End

— 243 — Than Ajahn: Is there anything you would like to know about Buddhism? Lay (M): People have two types of greed: to have more money and to have more time for themselves. Can you tell me about the greed to have more time for themselves? Than Ajahn: Greed can be good or bad. If you have greed to look after your body just to exist, this is good because you have to look after yourself. But if you want to have more than what you need, this is bad. It depends on how much greed you have. Buddhism teaches us to have the basic greed, to live with only four requisites of lives: food, shelter, clothes and medicine. The Buddha said it is okay to have greed to have the time to find peace of mind. Wanting to be rich, to have more than what you need, like having ten houses, ten cars, is a bad kind of greed because it will pressure you to work hard without any real value. One day you will lose everything that you acquire. 23 Laypeople from Finland December 26th, 2015