Automated transcript, estimated accuracy about 92% for this source; report an error.
Words the recogniser was unsure of are underlined with dots. Use “Report an error” beside any passage to tell us what the teacher actually says.
Key passages
The teacher's own words, quoted from the transcript below and chosen automatically as representative.
- 5:03
I'm just questioning. And one thing in meditation, you're beginning to break down the conditioning of the mind, which does think in terms of life and death, as if they were death cancelled out life. There's life which is... conscious experience within a human within a body and then there's death which is the absence of consciousness or
- 5:33
the whole process mental physical process stops and decays and that's death which means that implies a kind of a total end of something that was once living and is now dead. So that's a kind of dualistic thinking. We think of life and death as opposition, one opposing the other.
- 7:44
But it is very clear that the Buddha was pointing to the realization of the deathless. And this, so it's a realization, it's a recognition, a direct knowing. immortality, of course, is another that, it means deathless, of death, isn't it? Immortal. Mortality is death, imm is a negation of death.
- 17:18
But the experience is experience of no thing. Emptiness, they say. I oftentimes use the word emptiness or selflessness, non-self. In Theravāda they emphasize anattā, non-self. The realization is nothingness, selflessness, emptiness, desirelessness, unconditioned, unborn, uncreated.
- 42:02
wasn't his kind of charisma, wasn't any of these conditioned things that were temporary and relative to situation, but getting beyond just the attachment to those, those qualities or those conditions, was the love of the truth. Or the love of the ultimate reality, or the love of God, or the love of the Dhamma. So that love then taken away, as we transcend projecting, creating attachments to things that we love, people that we love, when we stop that, when we let go of that,
Transcript
0:00 I want to welcome everyone on this sunny Sunday. Report an error in the passage at 0:00
0:14 This is the first of this year's Sunday afternoon reflections on dhamma or the way things are. And so to make it clear where I'm coming from, there's no attempt to tell you how things are. Report an error in the passage at 0:14
0:38 What I say is... It's a reflective thinking rather than doctrinal positioning. To make the difference known that in the Buddhist style we're trying to open the mind up. We're not trying to condition the mind. We're not trying to convert or put anything on to you or intimidate. Or try to argue a point, convince you of anything I might be saying, but to stimulate the mind towards the questioning, pondering, reflecting ability, contemplating. Report an error in the passage at 0:38
1:27 And even though this is quite ordinary for us, and so much of our social conditioning is to take positions and to think, Have fixed positions on almost everything. Not to contemplate the meaning of existence or the purpose of life or what life is about or what love is or what is death and all this, but to have various views and opinions about it. Report an error in the passage at 1:27
2:09 And I know from my own social conditioning that one was. expected to have opinions. Report an error in the passage at 2:09
2:20 if you didn't have opinions, then of course it you were stupid. So even sometimes you had opinions you didn't necessarily agree with, you felt unless you an opinion on something, somebody might that you really didn't know anything about anything. Report an error in the passage at 2:20
2:42 I to form opinions sometimes. Half-hearted views and sometimes very strong views, very emotionally charged opinions that one would get very aggressive about. But in the spirit of the dhamma, then we're beginning to look at that, that need to defend ourselves, need to prove ourselves in some way. Feeling that somehow we have to, we've got to become something, we've got to get something we don't have. We generally feel the way we are, we're not good enough, there's something wrong with us, and therefore we've got to do something to make ourselves better, but oftentimes feeling that we wouldn't succeed anyway. Report an error in the passage at 2:42
3:42 So a lot of modern life seems to be merely an attempt to just distract the mind. Modern materialist countries like this provide us with a wide range of distractions or just keeping the mind occupied. The news, the gossip, the telly, all the different things available to us, push-button society in which the mind easily can absorb into things that Report an error in the passage at 3:42
4:19 Do not, we don't have to reflect on them, they merely just seem to absorb our attention. Report an error in the passage at 4:19
4:30 This title for this Sunday is Life is Love, so this isn't meant to be a kind of inspiring talk, but contemplating just these very words, life and love, And what we really mean by them, or what maybe our own definitions of these words maybe are too narrow. Report an error in the passage at 4:30
5:03 I'm just questioning. And one thing in meditation, you're beginning to break down the conditioning of the mind, which does think in terms of life and death, as if they were death cancelled out life. There's life which is... conscious experience within a human within a body and then there's death which is the absence of consciousness or the whole process mental physical process stops and decays and that's death which means that implies a kind of a total end of something that was once living and is now dead. Report an error in the passage at 5:03
5:55 So that's a kind of dualistic thinking. We think of life and death as opposition, one opposing the other. And so life is identified with the conscious experience of our own bodies, the fact that we are alive now, we are conscious, we can feel, we can see, hear, smell, taste, touch, think. Remember, imagine, use our minds for various tasks. We can move about. And so life is identified with the body and consciousness through the senses. Report an error in the passage at 5:55
6:47 And then we perceive death as when all this process stops. The body stops, the consciousness ceases. And the body decays, and that's death. Report an error in the passage at 6:47
7:03 But yet in religious terminology, sometimes we talk about eternal life or deathlessness or immortality. Report an error in the passage at 7:03
7:17 And Buddhism sometimes is identified with a kind of atheism, meaning a kind of denial of anything like... Eternal life or immortality, these kind of words oftentimes are associated with other religious approaches. Report an error in the passage at 7:17
7:44 But it is very clear that the Buddha was pointing to the realization of the deathless. And this, so it's a realization, it's a recognition, a direct knowing. Report an error in the passage at 7:44
8:07 immortality, of course, is another that, it means deathless, of death, isn't it? Immortal. Mortality is death, imm is a negation of death. Report an error in the passage at 8:07
8:25 yet immortality in the English language oftentimes means a of romantic view of immortal Like a soul or a separate thing that lives in a conscious separate form forever. Report an error in the passage at 8:25
8:45 And I know that from my own religious background before becoming a Buddhist, there was definitely a feeling, an encouragement to think in terms of an immortal soul, a deathless soul that was unique, that would go on and live forever, for eternity. And so this, of course, as I grew up and started questioning all these concepts, that didn't make sense to me, and personally didn't appeal to me. Report an error in the passage at 8:45
9:20 I never felt that as a person, as a separate being, that there was anything in its separateness that was worth carrying on forever. Report an error in the passage at 9:20
9:33 Any thought I had, the body itself, the... There didn't seem to be anything when I investigated that you would want to last forever in terms of the conditioning of the body or the mind. Would I want to be Ajahn Sumedho forever? Or would I want to be male, masculine forever? Report an error in the passage at 9:33
10:03 What would you want to live forever? If, you know, in terms of... What of your personality or the sense of yourself as a separate being? Report an error in the passage at 10:03
10:22 And I recently attended a funeral in California where the Master Xuanhua, a Chinese Mahāyāna monk, died last June. And I knew him very well. He visited here in England, I think, about five years ago. And whenever I would go to... California, I'd usually visit him and stay a few days in his monastery. And he was always, he was a teacher that would emphasize the fact of coming out of nothing and returning to nothing. Report an error in the passage at 10:22
11:06 And so I went to see him before he died in the hospital where he was in an intensive care unit and he was in a coma. And so you could see he was still breathing and they had all this technology, all these machines, tubes going into him and kind of pumping him with air and putting things into him and draining things out of him. Report an error in the passage at 11:06
11:32 And he was, you know, alive in the sense, in our terms, in the way we usually think of life. He was still breathing, but he was in a coma, so you couldn't say he was conscious in the way that we're... We usually mean conscious. But the perception of that he was still alive was there. So I asked some of the monks, I said, what do you expect him to die? Report an error in the passage at 11:32
12:01 What are you going to do when he dies? And nobody wanted to talk about it. We're going to try to keep him alive. Report an error in the passage at 12:01
12:13 So you torture the poor thing with running tubes into him and kind of forcing this kind of This life, what we think is life, into him by pumping him full of things, just to have the feeling that he's living, our teacher is living. And then about a week later, as I was in Seattle, the news came that he'd died, which didn't surprise me. Report an error in the passage at 12:13
12:49 And so then I phoned a monk I knew, his chief disciple, and And of course the idea of Master Hua being dead was something that they knew inevitably was going to happen, but the mind didn't want to think about it, wanted to think in terms of he's alive rather than he's dead. Report an error in the passage at 12:49
13:14 But the teaching impressed me that Master Hua was emphasizing coming out of nothing and returning to nothing. And so, even the word nothing is a word sometimes we don't appreciate, because in our dualistic thought patterns, we always, we conceive of nothingness as a kind of total blank, a vacuum, a void, with nothing in it and no potential for anything. Report an error in the passage at 13:14
13:47 It's like a sterile vacuum. And we say, from... Coming out of nothing, returning to nothing. We don't appreciate the kind of miraculous quality that that is pointing to. The arising, the ceasing from nothing to something and back to nothing. Because the somethings of life we give our allegiance to. We like something. We want things. We want... Report an error in the passage at 13:47
14:28 We want people, we want to have relationships, we want to have respect, or even just keeping the body alive. It's something. At Report an error in the passage at 14:28
14:48 least it's something we can understand and relate to. But nothing sounds very depressing, or like it's an annihilationist, a nihilistic... And yet in mystical experience, if you read Christian mystics or Sufis or in the Buddhist terms, the experience of God is nothing or the experience of ultimate truth is no thing. Report an error in the passage at 14:48
15:27 And this point sometimes is completely misunderstood and in popular religious teachings never even mentioned. Report an error in the passage at 15:27
15:39 Because usually we give eternalist views, like when we die we go to heaven and live forever happy, and if we've been good then we'll go and we'll live in a beautiful place with God and be happy and smile forever. Report an error in the passage at 15:39
15:56 And we're thinking in terms of just the pleasantness that we know about in this form, happiness. Beautiful things to see and beautiful sounds and all the best on the conditioned realm. We hope to live in a place where there's no pain, no suffering, only beauty and pleasure forever is a kind of childlike view of what would be nice, having ice cream every day. Report an error in the passage at 15:56
16:46 So with the mystical vision, When you get into going deeply into the way things are, getting beyond just the banal perceptions of social conditioning, the realizations aren't just trying to make everything pretty and nice and live in a realm of happiness. But the experience is experience of no thing. Emptiness, they say. Report an error in the passage at 16:46
17:25 I oftentimes use the word emptiness or selflessness, non-self. In Theravāda they emphasize anattā, non-self. The realization is nothingness, selflessness, emptiness, desirelessness, unconditioned, unborn, uncreated. These words convey A realization, because this is to be realized, it's something that you can know. Report an error in the passage at 17:25
18:07 A realization isn't a belief in some abstract idea, but it is something you can know, know in a very profound way, not know about in terms of having the perceptions of deathlessness or immortality. But it is real, it's reality, it's realization. So the religious path then is difficult for most people because our conditioned mind tends to see no significance. Report an error in the passage at 18:07
18:47 Unless we have a lot of kind of intuitive awareness and sensitivity already, we tend to settle down to a more vulgar... Report an error in the passage at 18:47
19:06 trying to life comfortable and pleasant and secure. Report an error in the passage at 19:06
19:18 in spite of all that and here in britain i think we've been fairly successful in making life pleasant and and enough of the good things Thanks for Report an error in the passage at 19:18
19:33 even at its best, even if, you know, even materialism at its best leaves one Completely dissatisfied. It's not satisfactory to us. Report an error in the passage at 19:33
19:47 Because there's a part of us that isn't being nourished in that. It's starving. Even though you might be well nourished on the level of organic food and physical comfort and good medical care and all the rest, somehow there is... That isn't enough for us. That is not satisfying to us. That can merely kind of, that's all right and there's nothing to, you know, it shouldn't be despised, but in itself there's a longing for the deathless, for the ultimate truth. Report an error in the passage at 19:47
20:32 And love then is, in its pure expression, is love of what is ultimately true. Not just love of things that are temporary and just emotionally, that we need them emotionally and hold on to things that we feel we love. Report an error in the passage at 20:32
20:58 Because everything that we love will be separated from. In some way, we're going to have to separate. Report an error in the passage at 20:58
21:11 Just like Master Shuenhua dying. I mean, We loved Master Xuanhua, but then he died. And so when I looked at him, they had his corpse, his body in a coffin that we could see, we could see the head. Report an error in the passage at 21:11
21:34 And we were given a chance to kind of contemplate, meditate on this face, the face of his dead teacher. And actually in his coffin, in the hospital with all the tubes going in through him, He looked pretty horrid when he was alive. The last memory of him as living was kind of bloated face and tubes going in everywhere. Report an error in the passage at 21:34
22:03 And he looked pretty dreadful, you know, visually. But when he actually died and they put him in a coffin, in a refrigerated coffin, and he looked quite beautiful. Report an error in the passage at 22:03
22:22 His face looked very radiant in a way. And I kept thinking, I come out of nothing and return to nothing. Report an error in the passage at 22:22
22:37 And while contemplating this, of course, and actually my visual consciousness was focused on his dead face, just that kind of meeting, Unconscious experience seemed to mean a lot. The fact that one felt the reality of his teaching. I could see if I started thinking, oh, Master Hua's dead, and get caught up in my conditioning, my mental conditioning, then I would feel grief. Report an error in the passage at 22:37
23:21 I'd feel this sense of loss. He's dead now, I'll never see him again, and what are we going to do without him, and all the thoughts, the emotional thoughts that come from, say, the conditioning of the mind, and a sense of loss of a person, loss of someone you respect and love. You'd have this emotional feeling of grief. Report an error in the passage at 23:21
23:49 So grief then is just that, it's that feeling of loss. We experience grief a lot, even before somebody we love dies or leaves us. Just in everyday life, there's a certain amount of grief to it, losing something, a sense of loss or separation. When you're having a good time with somebody and you have to leave them, that sense of having to separate, that's an experience of grief, isn't it? Report an error in the passage at 23:49
24:23 It's a sense of loss because of the... Conditioning of the mind is very much like that. It will, you know, when we're caught into the conditioning of the mind, the emotional habits, the language, the perceptions, and so forth, then the separation from the love, that feeling is grief. Report an error in the passage at 24:23
24:47 But then when you let go of grief, not suppress it, but when looking upon Master Hua's body, his corpse, then... I changed my direction from thinking, getting caught up in thinking about him as dead, but remembering the teaching, coming out of nothing, returning to nothing. And suddenly this marvelous peace and even joyfulness came, rather than grief. Because it became very real to me that he was that... Report an error in the passage at 24:47
25:31 What had died was merely a conditioned thing. I mean, one created him into being something. A great Chinese monk, a master, an enlightened being, whatever. You could project onto him all kinds of perceptions. Report an error in the passage at 25:31
25:54 And he was 77 years old. He's Chinese. He couldn't speak English very well. Though when he did speak English it sounded a bit comical, but he had this kind of mystery to him. He never knew what he was, you know, what was in his mind. What does he think of me? Is he reading my mind? I remember one time I was invited to their temple in Los Angeles, and so I was... Report an error in the passage at 25:54
26:30 I was asked to give a talk one night, instruction on Buddhist meditation to the nuns, the bhikkhunis, in this temple in Los Angeles. Report an error in the passage at 26:30
26:44 And so I was sitting up in front on a kind of, it was their temple in Los Angeles, it was an old Baptist church. I was sitting in kind of where the pulpit was and giving this talk. And Master Hua kept kind of walking around looking at me and walking around the room and he'd stand off there and he'd look at me and then he'd walk to the back and he'd look at me and he'd walk over there and he'd look at me. Report an error in the passage at 26:44
27:14 He walked right up next to me and look at me while I was talking. Report an error in the passage at 27:14
27:29 But I didn't, I mean I was wondering what he was doing. Report an error in the passage at 27:29
27:36 But he was, you know, he was sizing me up just to see how, you know, how... What I would do, because I was talking about mindfulness, about meditation, I was giving instruction. Report an error in the passage at 27:36
27:58 Well, he seemed to have, he didn't, he tended after that to say very complimentary things about me, which I don't, which I of course appreciate. But anyway, he and I did, I felt a great affinity with him personally. These kind of ways of feeling about certain people that you kind of almost immediately take to and you don't know why. Report an error in the passage at 27:58
28:31 Why you take to that one and not another one. Anyway, that's unexplainable. Report an error in the passage at 28:31
28:42 But this emphasis on nothing and emptiness, too many people, it terrifies them. And when we talk about love and people... Report an error in the passage at 28:42
29:11 happiness, a way of looking at life that gives a quality and a beauty to our experience we don't feel when there's no love in it. Report an error in the passage at 29:11
29:25 our life is merely... A critical life, if we only see things in ways of what's wrong, what I don't like, what's wrong with me, what's wrong with you, what's wrong with Britain, what's wrong with the EU, what's wrong with Bosnia, and everything else. I mean, we just get depressed. Because that isn't developing a loving relationship, it's dwelling on things that are wrong. Report an error in the passage at 29:25
29:57 And things that are wrong, of course, they're not denying. We're not saying everything's right. But this sense of being wrong, if we dwell on it, if we fill our minds with what's wrong, then the result of that is a feeling of we hate ourselves because we dwell on what's wrong, what we think is wrong with ourselves. Report an error in the passage at 29:57
30:19 We dwell on what's wrong with somebody else. We dwell on what's wrong with Britain. With Europe, with America, with whatever. And when you just think, get obsessed with what's wrong, then you feel depression and despair. What else could you feel? Report an error in the passage at 30:19
30:45 Because you're deliberately filling your mind with negative views. And negative views, if that's what you obsess your mind with, then the result is Despair and depression. Report an error in the passage at 30:45
31:04 It's a natural feeling to feel despair. When we fall in love, using just the romantic images of falling in love, then we don't, in the sense of love, then we're not dwelling on what's wrong with anything. Report an error in the passage at 31:04
31:28 We tend to not obsess. It doesn't mean love. Blinds us to what's wrong, but it's no longer the thing that we're very interested in. We're more interested in the relationship itself and the feeling that love always has this sense of union and oneness. And it isn't discriminative. It's not trying to make a big thing or make a problem about even what's wrong with somebody or something. Report an error in the passage at 31:28
32:07 So love in terms of experience is greatly desired, but also it's an experience that we can also fear, because it does mean to love one has to be open to life. You have to put yourself in a kind of vulnerable state, where the critical faculty gives you the sense that you're protecting yourself. I'm no fool, the cynic, you know. Report an error in the passage at 32:07
32:37 I'm nobody's fool. I don't fall for that slushy stuff. You know, I'm going to see, you know, nobody's going to hurt me. So we can feel very much obsessed with intellectual, critical side as a kind of defense and protection, where love, and oftentimes we get hurt, especially when we fall in love. We're very vulnerable and we're easily hurt. So then we, after a few experiences of being bruised, hurt, mangled, abused, from being open and vulnerable, then we tend to seek protection, develop the hide of a rhinoceros. Report an error in the passage at 32:37
33:26 And there is that verse in the Dhammapada, go alone like rhinoceros. And I know monks that quote that all the time because they're so afraid. Report an error in the passage at 33:26
33:38 They say, the Buddha said to be like a rhinoceros. Report an error in the passage at 33:38
33:51 That's their excuse. The Buddha said it, so that's what I'm going to do. And of course it's out of context. And all metaphors need to be realized within their context. They're not absolutes. They're, uh... Report an error in the passage at 33:51
34:11 All metaphors fall apart eventually. I mean, it isn't to get reborn as a rhinoceros either. Report an error in the passage at 34:11
34:22 Buddhist said we should all practice so we can be reborn as rhinoceroses. Report an error in the passage at 34:22
34:31 Inspiring religion, isn't it? The Report an error in the passage at 34:31
34:48 thing that is frightening of being open and vulnerable as a person is that we do get hurt that way. If you are an open... Like innocence, isn't it? Children are very open because they're innocent. But they're also easily hurt. You can corrupt, you can harm children very easily because they haven't lived long enough to develop the height of a rhinoceros. Report an error in the passage at 34:48
35:21 They're not cynical yet. They're not defensive. And so they can be, one can easily abuse or... harm them, they are open. I think, one of the images we have of the present day where we hear so much about child abuse, isn't it? Where parents have sexually abused their own children is a kind of horrific image, shocking to most of us, because the ideal is that parents are to protect protect the children. Report an error in the passage at 35:21
36:00 That's what I was always brought up to think. They should be protecting you you're in that innocent phase so you aren't being to harmful things that can destroy you, shatter your life such an innocent age. Report an error in the passage at 36:00
36:26 we read about the war in Bosnia. Report an error in the passage at 36:26
36:35 The children that have lost arms and legs and orphaned in that just through this horrendous war that's been going on. We can feel such sadness. Just those images are credibly sad, pathetic to the mind. Because sometimes, especially around the loss of innocence, the abuse, the taking advantage, the destruction of the innocent to us, is something that one feels a great aversion to, a great indignation arises in the mind. Report an error in the passage at 36:35
37:20 So this realm that we live in, this realm of personality, of being somebody, something, we are that something, that somebody, the goodness, the... Report an error in the passage at 37:20
37:40 social security the whole lot we realize is something that can be taken away from us Report an error in the passage at 37:40
37:50 there's no security in this realm as a person the conditioned realm. mean, if you have all the money in the world, or whatever, still, can lose it. Report an error in the passage at 37:50
38:04 You can be the richest person in the world, but you can also lose it, and you know it. You can have a secure family with good parents and a beautiful place to live and suddenly lose it, like people in Yugoslavia. Report an error in the passage at 38:04
38:23 It's suddenly five minutes to leave their houses, and they have to leave within five minutes. Suddenly somebody stands at the door and says, leave, and you leave. Report an error in the passage at 38:23
38:34 And then you're separated from your... Report an error in the passage at 38:34
38:43 put in the state of not knowing and fear. Report an error in the passage at 38:43
38:49 terror. though these are things to consider, this could happen to us. Report an error in the passage at 38:49
39:00 it won't, it certainly recognized that possibility, I die, of having everything Every one I know, everything that I like, and that's suddenly taken away from me. And then death, of course, the death of the body, is that experience. You leave everything, separate from everything. All that is mine, beloved and pleasing, will become otherwise, will become separated from me. Report an error in the passage at 39:00
39:38 So that's why the Buddha was saying, do not attach, do not seek refuge. Or values in the conditioned realm. It's not a pessimistic teaching. It's pointing to the reality that this realm is like this. The conditioned realm, the body, the emotional things, the objects of our senses and so forth are relative and can easily be taken away from us. Report an error in the passage at 39:38
40:10 That's just the way it is. There's nothing wrong with that. Not trying to even complain about it, it's just the way it is. And so, in meditation, reflecting meditation, we keep reminding ourselves, this is the way it is. Report an error in the passage at 40:10
40:33 But the aim isn't to just think the way it is in a kind of passive fatalism. What's the way it is? Life is like that. It's not that. But it's moving to realize the deathless. is the aim of the Buddhadhamma. Or in terms of Christianity, union with God. These are the words or the metaphors or the symbols for that experience of realization, returning to the source, coming out of nothing, returning to nothing. Report an error in the passage at 40:33
41:19 And that nothing then is... Something that opens the mind rather than implies a denial or a kind of nihilism. No thing, no thingness. Because I felt when contemplating Master Hua's corpse that he wasn't really dead. The body was dead. But what one really respected and loved about Master Hua was deathlessness. Report an error in the passage at 41:19
41:56 Wasn't the body. Wasn't his personality, wasn't his kind of charisma, wasn't any of these conditioned things that were temporary and relative to situation, but getting beyond just the attachment to those, those qualities or those conditions, was the love of the truth. Report an error in the passage at 41:56
42:28 Or the love of the ultimate reality, or the love of God, or the love of the Dhamma. Report an error in the passage at 42:28
42:40 So that love then taken away, as we transcend projecting, creating attachments to things that we love, people that we love, when we stop that, when we let go of that, Then we begin to realize love or life itself or deathlessness. So even concepts like eternal life, which I used to scoff at and say, we don't believe in eternal life. Report an error in the passage at 42:40
43:20 When you contemplate and get beyond just the ordinary interpretations of those words or the emotional associations that you have with them, You begin to recognize a reality beyond the words being used. Report an error in the passage at 43:20
43:43 You realize the truth, not trying to interpret from the meaning of the word. The words themselves are there as a kind of reminder, but not to be attached to, not to be held to in the worldly way that we usually think. Like nothingness, Emptiness, no self, desirelessness, when we think in our worldly way, that sounds like annihilationism. Report an error in the passage at 43:43
44:20 It sounds like a bleak nothing, a boring kind of total vacuum. Eternal life then sounds positive, but eternal life is always based on positive images. Report an error in the passage at 44:20
44:40 On happiness and happy relationships and beautiful things. In heaven, are there any mosquitoes or wasps? Report an error in the passage at 44:40
44:59 Here at Amaravati, we have a lot of wasps. I was at the Leicester Summer School, just got back yesterday, a beautiful place in the botanical gardens, sitting there in paradise with wasps. Report an error in the passage at 44:59
45:17 We'd eat out on the lawn and then they'd go for your watermelon. And they'd drown themselves in your orange juice. You'd have to rescue the blasted things. And then just as I was coming back, one stung me right here. Report an error in the passage at 45:17
45:40 Heaven, they wouldn't have wasps. Report an error in the passage at 45:40
45:45 Unless you are a wasp. A wasp is an Americanism for the privileged elite of America. It means white Anglo-Saxon Protestant. Report an error in the passage at 45:45
46:01 And I'm sure in an American wasp heaven, that's all that's there. How Report an error in the passage at 46:01
46:17 boring that would be. I'd be stuck with a bunch of wasps forever. Report an error in the passage at 46:17
46:37 Reflecting on, say, love, to say, we use things like unconditioned love, or in Christianity, Christian love, or... What is it, even though we have, you know, we can see romantic love or love can, of course, mean almost anything now. It's used in all pop music. And so it's the most kind of ordinary word that's yet very powerful. Report an error in the passage at 46:37
47:11 I mean, it's a very powerful word, no matter how much it's abused or how... Valga, we might be with the word, you know, use it for just anything. Report an error in the passage at 47:11
47:41 But it is a word that we can contemplate. And so when I contemplate that word, just the L-O-V-E, English word, and taking it to an experience, say, that I can say that... From my own experience, not just hearing about somebody else, but from my own experience as a Buddhist monk, is there love absent from the life of a Buddhist monk? Report an error in the passage at 47:41
48:23 And so forth. Do we lack love as an experience? Report an error in the passage at 48:23
48:32 And how I tend to see this word now is seeing that this life itself is love. Because it's a sacrifice of the self and the selfishness. Sacrifice, it's willing to relinquish the world, the conditions, willing to let go. And a sincere endeavor to realize this letting go, this non-attachment. Not out of fear. Report an error in the passage at 48:32
49:14 of the conditioned realm, but out of love for the truth, out of a real aspiration for that realization of the truth. And that's something that we all can relate to, all of all humanity. Sometimes you wonder whether Ratko Madlik, Madlik, that he gets pretty bad press. press, if you have a name like Ratko, it doesn't go very well in a country like this. Report an error in the passage at 49:14
49:56 So then life Report an error in the passage at 49:56
50:22 itself, is it just being conscious, or is life just being conscious? Can we really contemplate life as deathlessness rather than as just consciousness within a separate form? I don't know, really. I'm just opening the question up. Report an error in the passage at 50:22
50:46 These are words. They're man-made words. So these words are... We can contemplate them, how to use them. And if life is just the... If death... And life are opposed to each other. Maybe that's just the way we think. The kind of way we're conditioned to perceive. He's alive, he's dead. That's it. But in terms of the religious aspiration and the mystical realization of deathlessness, then life takes on a different sense. Report an error in the passage at 50:46
51:27 The unconditioned. Because is the unconditioned dead? Report an error in the passage at 51:27
51:37 Is the nothingness That master hua comes from and goes back to is that dead? Is that deadness or is that life? And the condition that was born, grew up, grew old and died, that was consciousness, form and consciousness, that dies because it was born. Report an error in the passage at 51:37
52:05 So is the unconditioned or the ultimate truth, is it dead? Is it deadness? Or is death merely The simple ending of what was born. And then as we contemplate this through mindfulness and wisdom, we begin to realize deathlessness is reality. Not the facts of life where you're born and then you die and that's it. That's the kind of cynical hard line. Report an error in the passage at 52:05
52:46 But when you really pay attention and witness to your conscious experience, that's not how it seems at all. That's not what I'm picking up through when I'm really mindful. I can easily fall back into the old patterns of thinking and go along with the worldly attitudes because I'm used to that. Report an error in the passage at 52:46
53:14 That's how my mind works on the thinking level. But in terms of the insight and realization, that's not what I'm getting. Report an error in the passage at 53:14
53:30 So I want to end the formal part of this talk at this point, leave you contemplating that, and then have a break, a 15-minute break, and we can have some tea. And then for those who want to pursue this subject any further, you're welcome to come back and we will discuss it. Report an error in the passage at 53:30
Related talks
Talk by Ajahn Sumedho. Original at Amaravati Buddhist Monastery via Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/ajahn-sumedho-dhamma-talks. Licensed CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Transcript generated automatically and may contain errors; the audio is the authoritative version.
Talks of Ajahn Sumedho, archived on Internet Archive. More from Amaravati