Namo tassa Bhagavato, Arahato Samma Sambuddhasa, Namo tassa Bhagavato, Arahato Samma Sambuddhasa, Namo tassa Bhagavato, Arahato Samma Sambuddhasa, Buddhang Dhammang Sanghang Namassami.
Very good. I know that it's lovely to have the monks from Kuzr to be Harvard here today as well as the
some of the Bhikuni Sangha from UK, from Dharmasava and also from ISavi.
Have you got a name for your Vihavanal?
Patachara.
You still Patachara. Okay. Same name. Very good.
So I know that many of you just already asked me how was my retreats.
And quite frankly, it was quite a few days ago when I came off that retreat.
It really is in the past. But one thing which I will always let you know that when you go on a retreat,
it's by yourself in solitude for such an even just a short time.
15 days is only a short time. And compared to that six months which I did some years ago.
But when you do go on a retreat, sometimes it's quite a shock when you come off the retreat
and you just go down and see all those people who actually come to this monastery and support us.
It's actually quite shocking. I mentioned it seriously to see how many people come here for this talk
and to try and share the dumplings a beautiful thing to do.
But of course, as you all know, you'd always prefer just to stay in the hut on the retreat from either cave.
And the reason for that is that when you're in a solitude,
you can spend so much more time developing peaceful states of mind.
It's like you're not disturbed. And it's not as if that you're in control of anything.
That's one of the things which I always remember from the Anatollah Khanna suta.
It'd be wonderful if the mind could be controlled.
You can say, oh, may it be peaceful, may it not think, may it do this, may it not do that.
But of course, it's not yours. And that's one of the beautiful things.
When it's not yours and you really realize that, you see it very deeply,
you understand its full meaning, it's much easier to let it go.
But even though you let it go, it's still influenced by others.
A lot of times the five senses, the six senses, so the five candours,
they're almost like belonging to nature, not to a person.
And when you know that, you really know it, it means you never need to feel
that you're somehow inadequate. None of us are inadequate.
We're just not there. We never need to think that we are geniuses.
We are great meditators. There's no one does the meditation.
When you are sitting in your hut, you let go.
It's one of the reasons why it's really clear to me years ago,
if you want to develop deep meditation, you do have to disappear.
You can't do it.
And I can never figure out that when people say they put lots of energy
and striving to get into deep meditation,
I don't think it's really that deep.
And it can't really hold it, because the very nature of deep meditation is stillness.
And just using Ajahn Chah's great similarly of the leaves on a tree moving,
the only move because of the wind blowing or something else disturbs it.
The nature of the leaf is to be perfectly still all by itself.
And if you try and hold that leaf perfectly still, it will move.
Because you cannot hold anything still. The nature of the body, any doctor or any medical practitioner knows,
your body is always moving. There's blood pumping through it.
And there's so many other things that agitate this body.
It's not in your control.
So you cannot hold things still.
All I can ever do is, in realising these sutras,
the powerful teachings behind them is to leave it alone, to disengage.
And the sutta we were just doing now, nibidar, to turn away from it.
And you can turn away from it.
I know one of the things, I'm not quite sure why this idea came up during my retreat,
but there's some of the things which I've been teaching even years ago,
when sometimes people say that everything is connected.
I remember just giving a talk in Berkeley.
There wasn't actually in Berkeley, there was some event outside of Berkeley.
I forget exactly the organisation. It was a Buddhist organisation.
And they had myself, they had a Tibetan who was supposed to be interpretive for his Holiness of Dhanalama,
and a Zen monk. And a nun as well.
And it was Zen monk and a Mahayana nun.
But anyway, once we started talking, it was just getting really boring,
and people were thinking, oh yeah, you ought to agree together.
So then I said, look, all this rubbish about, we're all sort of interconnected.
I don't know where that came from, the Buddha never said it.
And that really sort of stirs things up, which is a wonderful thing to do.
What's the point of giving a talk if you can't take one's understanding deeper,
which means sometimes challenging some of those ideas.
And it's true that most of the day you can feel you're interconnected,
which is one of the reasons why we talk to one another, help one another,
serve one another. And it's a beautiful thing to do that.
But if you carry on like that, and that's all you ever do,
you just end up just getting reborn again.
Maybe you're very good at serving, you can get reborn into heavenly realms.
But that's not what the Buddha taught.
I always remember just simple stories from the sutas.
Just from the life of the Buddha.
One of the greatest temptations which Marla put before the Buddha,
you know, is be the powerful leader of the world, the so-called wheel turning monarch.
You can do that, and you can turn this planet earth into a beautiful harmonious place.
That was like the fantasy.
But at least the Buddha saw that that was impossible, just a temptation.
And you cannot be a leader of a monastery, a teacher, a leader of a Buddhist group,
or anything, and get that perfection.
It's the nature of the world to be imperfect.
And you can't sort of use your will to beat nature.
So instead we learn how to let go.
And it's still that, you know, in interviews and teaching many people,
say, well, how on earth do you let go?
And that's just one of those amazing questions.
How do you let go? And you can't let go.
What happens is this idea of the truth of things,
and the nature of, you know, who is this, what is this thing which does all this
willing anyway and does all this knowing.
And you see the fallacy of that, there's nothing there.
It truly is empty void, nothing that allows you to be able to let go properly.
Letting go properly is subduing the will, letting it go, letting it cease.
Just now, just now, just see a fire sermon, just know all of those six sense bases,
and the things connected with them, even the will connected with any of those six sense bases.
You get nibbida towards that. And that word nibbida is a very beautiful word,
and I love that word because it challenges people.
It's like a negativity.
It's like a emotion, an emotion, a coaster in emotion, which is turned off of things in the world.
It turns off everything, which is rejects.
There was the usual word which I use, I forget now, but it's all negative words.
And to make that simile very clear, I use, you know, the old simile of like Samsara being a wheel.
You're stuck in the wheel of Samsara.
Eventually you get enough wisdom, you know, to know Anichard Duke Anata.
If you really do know that, you know, there's suffering and there's nothing, nobody in here.
But a lot of times you just still keep sitting on that wheel.
And the idea of nibbida is when you see, you know, with real wisdom,
see things as they truly are, there has a consequence to it.
It pushes you off the wheel. You regard the wheel. It's not you.
It's not a negativity to do with the sense of self or being or ownership.
It's the sense of you just want to leave.
It's almost like a disgust for the world.
What am I doing this for?
I don't know, I shared this with a couple of people, but many, many years ago, you know,
I had some really nice dreams. When you're meditating a lot, if you do have a dream,
some of those dreams, you know, are quite sort of significant teachings of the dhamma.
I don't neglect all those dreams. I remember just one of the dreams I had so many years ago,
go off tangent.
I'd hear in Bodhinyana Monastery just before you woke up,
I dreamt that Ajahn Chah, he was still alive, but he was not talking.
And then he appeared in my dream and gave me this amazing dhamma discourse.
And while he was giving me this, never quite a while, in this kind of lucid dream,
and I made a resolution while I was in that dream.
I was wise enough, awake enough to do this.
And I said, I will remember everything which Ajahn Chah was teaching me.
Because, you know, this was after he stopped talking.
The last opportunity to get like a verbal discourse from him.
And then he finished the talk. I woke up really mindful, couldn't remember a thing.
It was so disappointing.
But anyway, this particular dream, it wasn't so much a dream of like a teaching,
but like an event.
And please excuse me, this is not sort of misogynistic or anything.
But I dreamt I was married.
And then in the early morning, I woke up and I just had, you know,
I had a realisation that this was just disgusting.
It wasn't so negative towards a person who was my wife then.
It was just a disgust, but you know what, the whole attachment thing was.
And I just walked away and never came back.
We said negative.
It was a, because I was such a creator, such a long time ago,
I was like morally conflicted.
Was that a correct thing to do?
But I couldn't sort of resist it.
It would just, you turn away from things which, you know, after a while with deep med,
deep meditation, you have nibidah towards.
You can't help it.
It's nibidah, as said, is the ejection seat.
You push the nibidah button and you leave the wheel of some sour.
And it's not something you do.
It's automatic.
It was something you did, then you can blame somebody.
But it's no one there to blame us.
This is the nature, the nature of this path we are on.
You keep practising and it's almost like has to happen sooner or later,
many lifetimes, but you find you're on a path which you have no choice on.
It's the thing about being interconnected for most people you are.
But those monks, nuns, they men and they women who meditate,
you learn how to disconnect.
That's what you do during the retreat period.
You disconnect from the whole world.
And the first you feel, I'm not allowed to do this.
Is this right?
You know, just abandon everybody and just go sit in your cave or your heart
and just be totally at peace.
What about all those people who are depending on you,
who are interconnected with you?
Keep having that delusion that's important to keep on connecting with everybody.
It just should become the same as everybody else in the world.
You may wear brown robes and have a bald hair, but what's the big difference there?
In fact, you're even more blameworthy than people in the world.
You know the dumber, you've got some opportunity.
So why aren't you following that opportunity?
And having that ability to totally disconnect from the world.
That's why, you know, those stories about monks and nuns who decide to disappear.
I kind of like that simile of that, I remember that one monk,
he used to be the secretary for Wapaw Pong.
And then having been the secretary, he just, it was just too much work
where him, he left, went into a jungle somewhere.
And then eventually became a good teacher.
And then he became the teacher of taxine, the type of minister.
And then because, you know, that type of politics is always somebody trying to get favors
or trying to put you down.
So there's almost a campaign against him trying to prove that he had
some bad conduct.
And so when he was focused on the paper a few times, then he didn't disrobe.
He hadn't done anything sort of worthy of disrobe or, but what he did,
he just walked away and went into the forest somewhere.
He disappeared.
And I thought that's the example of a good person, a good monk.
And realized it's becoming too well known and too famous, too connected.
It's going to sort of bring you down.
But for him, he was wise enough to actually totally disconnect and disappear.
I don't know, I actually know exactly where he went.
All that monk I mentioned to you the first year I was at Wapaw Pong.
He was only, I was just recently ordained.
And he was quite a middle ranking monk.
And he bowed to every monk in the dana hall, dana sala, the dining hall, including me.
I didn't know why.
And he was a monk who had developed a psychic power of the divine ear.
He could hear conversations a long way away.
And they checked him out. The other monks had to do that to make sure that he's just gone crazy.
Is he claiming something he hasn't got?
They checked him out and they found it was true.
He had developed a deep meditation and the ability to hear conversations a long way away.
So after that, you know, he got quite proud.
The ego came in the sense of self as if it's like it's his meditation.
It was very similar to day wadata.
And so one day he decided to sit on Ajahn Shah's seat.
He thought I was good as anybody.
And that was a wake up call for him.
Ajahn Shah talked to him.
And the next morning he bowed to everybody in the hall.
And then took his robe and bow and disappeared.
Again, I don't know, whatever happened to him.
Only he had great meditation. He wouldn't disrobe.
He would just make sure that whatever psychic powers which he developed, he'd keep it to himself.
Because they were dangerous to disclose them to others.
Some people say it's inspiring.
It's not inspiring. It attracts them from what the real dumber is.
They read them, the peace, the stillness.
Teach that to people.
Don't sort of show the menu of the circus gimmicks of monks and nuns or lay people or anything.
So anyway, those are some of the experiences I've had of people disconnecting totally from the world.
So when you're connected, you think you may be able to help.
But it's wonderful. It's a great example to me.
I hope you can believe that that's pretty much what happened to those two.
When you go off into the forest or go into solitude to disconnect, it's a beautiful thing to do.
It's our tradition.
But it also means that we can't cut those cords.
Cut those cords, which we think to connect to the world, then we can help the world.
It's much more inspiring when you cut the cord.
When I did a long retreat, the six months retreat, of course I did have a sense of almost like guilt.
Am I allowed to do this?
Is this like robbing others of no mobility to teach them or to lead them and inspire them?
But so many of the disciples, monks as well, said, no.
It's an important thing to do.
Even we had a senior monk come when I started my retreat.
And that was not a gen plean.
And he wrote me this letter, which I still got. He got eaten by a lot of silverfish,
and eat the paper in your heart.
But I still got most of the letter intact.
And I decided not to come out to greet him.
I felt a bit guilty about that because he's a very senior famous monk.
I turned plean from Thailand.
And he wrote me this letter.
And I couldn't believe he wrote it in really good English.
I never realized he could write English so well.
And anyway, and he sent it to me and I kept it saying, no, this is a beautiful thing you're doing.
You know, you are surfing.
Buddha's home in a different way, in a beautiful way.
By actually practicing what the Buddha taught, you don't need to keep teaching all the time.
In fact, this is the teaching.
The teaching by example, to go off into solitude and be by oneself and develop the past.
When we see examples, they are examples of disconnecting.
And when you realize that that's important for us to do, you go into your retreat, into your room,
and you totally disconnect from the water.
I don't mean just turning off your computers, your mobile phones, but totally disconnecting from the past and the future.
It's a kind of nice word.
Sometimes people say that's so negative.
What about everybody else?
Then they may be able to disconnect as well.
By example, we really feel that the world is a difficult situation.
Of course, it's always been like that.
It's been much worse.
I had good fortune to be born after the Second World War in a place like London.
But there was still, you can still see the scars, you know, resulting from that war.
I just needed to talk to your grandma about the bomb falling in the house next door.
And not like a separate house.
These terraced houses were there's only a brick wall between the neighbors.
The neighbors got a direct hit and were instantly killed.
My grandma, she never actually said how badly she was wounded.
But I know my mother, her arms were lacerated by the glass flying through the air.
She survived.
But you could just see and feel just how dangerous this world was.
And even with all the best people in the world, sometimes you think,
oh, the leaders of our world are pretty hopeless.
But if you were that leader, would you be hopeless too?
I remember just of all things going to a soccer match once.
The team I was supporting were hopeless.
I said, go like you in my grandma can kick a ball straight than you can.
And I think the next day I was playing in a match.
And I found it how hard it was to kick a ball straight.
It's so easy from a distance to criticizing everybody else.
But if you're in that situation, you find just how hard it is to lead.
We all think it's easy.
But what you do is incredibly difficult.
And that's one of the reasons why each one of you here is wonderful to be able to disconnect from the world.
Even we were pretty disconnected when I was a young monkey in Thailand.
So disconnected from the world that often I didn't know what month it was.
And I'm not exaggerating this one year.
I didn't know what year it was.
And because we didn't have any calendars, we didn't need calendars in the forest, in the jungles.
You just knew when the moon was up.
You know, when were the four moons, the new moons, and times in between
when you'd have the apostodays.
And if you didn't count them well, you didn't know how to how many had gone past when you're living by yourself.
But I remember that time when almost like you didn't know what year it was.
So did not what day the month it was, or what western month it was.
And I was kind of scared at first, the fact that I disconnected.
But then I thought, no, it's wonderful. You don't need to know that.
It was like free of that.
And I still remember the time because you didn't see newspapers or have radios.
I remember that when one of the laypeople came in, this is in the Wat Nana chart,
and they came in and they said, oh, do you know your countries at war with Argentina?
I said, yeah, what's a punch line? They can't be true.
There must be some joke. You don't do wars anymore.
I said, no, it's true. I couldn't believe it.
You were just that disconnected.
Why would any country want to go to war with another country?
It made no sense to me.
Now, you know, you're much more connected because of internet and people talking to me.
Now you can understand why people go to war. Can I really?
Sometimes when you're just away from the world, it doesn't make any sense to you.
When you disconnect, you get much more clarity, much more wisdom, much more freedom.
Other people go to war, but you don't.
That's the way to end wars inside oneself, obviously.
And that's when you're at peace with things.
So when you have a retreat and you get this sort of nibbudah of disconnecting,
it's not really that you are turning off that connection between you and just the things of the mind.
It's just even that which knows these things gets turned off.
There's no one left in there.
You know, as a Buddhist, we always talk about non-self,
no one in emptiness, vacation, nothing there.
But actually, a lot of times you're not really doing it.
Because it's kind of a goal which people know is important,
but do you really know what the real goal is?
It's not just thinking it's non-self.
It's actually knowing it and behaving that way.
And one of the signs of that, if you've had some great experiences,
and you think you're a stream winner, why are you so concerned with you, how are you not?
There is a sign of a sense of self, if you're really concerned.
What you do, if you have these amazing experiences,
the main thing about a stream winner is your sense of self is gone.
The view that somebody inside who knows and does is vanquished.
I often tell, because I teach a lot, I call those two the two citadels of the sense of identity.
You've heard me say this so many times, the Noah and the Dua.
All the other things, you know, your achievements and knowledge,
all the stuff that you've had to endure, all the praise which you've got as well.
We have both.
And how on fair life is you get praise for things you didn't do,
blame for things which also you didn't do.
A lot of, all of that sort of stuff, that's not really to do with the core part of the sense of self.
The two citadels are the last two places, like in the similarly of people attacking a city.
The last two places, you know, which are hard to storm and overcome,
the idea of a Dua and a Noah.
And the Dua comes first.
It's almost inside the citadel of a Dua, there's a citadel of a Noah,
that's the last place where delusion tries to defend.
And I like first of all talking about the Noah,
and that's what meditation's all about, is calming that sense of doing.
You don't do meditation, you don't do letting go.
You see that there's no one doing anything anyway, so you just sit there.
And if it really is authentic, you know if it's authentic, because if you're sitting there
abadying the sense of doing the will, then it stops, nothing moves.
And people think, well, if I don't do anything, all these deframas will take over,
and it's just maras talking, stop doing things, it's a doing which creates the defarmas.
There are other defarmas, all the wanting, all the ill will,
or I don't know what else other defarmas is, all doing something.
Imagine just how peaceful it is, not have to do anything at all.
It is one of the reasons why, you know, when I became a teacher, many of you teachers,
sometimes you have to give talks.
And I refuse to give a talk.
If ever I give a talk, it's a terrible talk.
I don't give talks.
I get out of the way and let the talk happen seriously.
And by letting go of the sense of doing, this the talk just comes.
And very often, I just told myself when it works, it's not me giving the talk.
Adjensha gives the talk.
It's all, not just Adjensha, all the other people who have taught me, brainwashed me,
all those suitors which you've read, all those great discussions you've had with,
you know, other monks, all those other great monks and nuns I've had the fortune to visit.
They're the ones who are giving the talk.
What that does, it means that you don't own the talk.
So you can let it sort of come out and explore all sorts of different avenues.
Honestly, there are some talks which I've given, or supposedly given, which has really inspired me.
And I realized I didn't give that.
We only have to do that one come from.
And it was usually for, sometimes it's nice to check it up, but later on,
whether that one come from.
And I remember that when Adjensha gave that simile, or when some other monk, Adjens Tate,
said that, or even Adjens Mahabur, he'd get some lovely talks sometimes.
All these monks which I heard, or even that German monk,
so I don't use his name.
Is that a thank you?
You don't need will, you just make the question.
It just comes such a, that was a lovely occasion.
Just tell that story again.
Just now visiting Sri Lanka for the very first time.
I went to Nyanarama.
Is that the right way of calling it?
Where's your armour?
Where'd you armour?
See, you're very important here.
You can't go anywhere.
Where'd you armour?
There's even Vennelpia Dassi.
And anyway, that we found out all these other monks were there.
So the first time I met a Vennelpica Bodhi,
and Vennelpica Bodhi said,
oh, there's a Vennelpianna women who is here.
Would you like to say it's pay respects?
So I went inside this room to pay respects with another monk,
and a lay person who was with us.
And I think I'm out for an hour.
And Vennelpica Bodhi, where you been?
I remember that.
Vennelpica Bodhi said, I just told him, I said,
Vennelpianna women gave us a wonderful dumber discourse,
one of the best I've ever heard in my life.
I shouldn't have said that,
because Vennelpica Bodhi was really jealous.
He never gives me any talks at all.
Look at all those teachings which you were given.
That's where this talk comes from.
I don't do it.
You can let go of your sense of self,
and that's what you do when you meditate as well.
I don't give a talk.
That's how I meditate.
When you meditate, you just don't do it.
Sometimes an idea comes up.
Where comes him?
I don't know.
You're trying too hard.
So you stop.
You relax more.
One of the things, because I was meditating many more hours
than I usually have opportunity to do,
you've started to feel your body getting tense.
This is one of the things which I got from my retreat.
Please don't take this as a negative for those of you who are sick
or those of you who have got flus and stuff or getting old.
Sometimes when you were trying too much,
I saw the body just needed some exercise
or needed some other way to relax it, to open it up.
And that was one of the obstacles to the meditation.
It is reinforced.
This idea is not impossible to get into jarners
when the body is tense and sick,
because I know this monk who dipped out when he had scrubbed life for us.
It's supposed to be impossible.
I can't make claims, okay?
It is this monk who wasn't me.
What do I reckon with me about that afterwards?
You know what I'm talking about.
But it's more difficult.
And how easy it is just to relax the body,
to relax and let it become really loose.
But if you do that and you have got lots of other problems,
you're going to get into some Marty quickly.
Because if you get in there quickly, that stillness,
it's like the body vanishes.
When it really vanishes, it just can't get to you.
It can't sort of, it can't even feel the body.
And that's wonderful when that happens, even though,
I remember telling that story of Greg, his name was,
I don't mind saying his name now.
It's probably dead now, I haven't seen it for years.
But it was given defibrillators when he was in China,
sent to the hospital.
Those are electric shocks, if you are aware,
you certainly feel those.
That's what they do to torture people.
But for him, you couldn't feel a thing.
So sometimes, again, it's a weird thing also,
just how, when you get into some meditation,
that doesn't make the body very healthy.
But again, that deep meditation, first of all.
But anyway, it's much, much easier when the health is reasonably good,
and the body can feel at ease.
It's one of the reasons why I do a lot of kaya gatta sati,
mindfulness of the body, first of all.
Maybe not in the ways which Ajahn Chah taught me,
but certainly to be mindful enough of my body at the very beginning.
To give it the best possible chance, to relax everything.
And it's possible to do that at the very beginning.
But I also remember that just sometimes,
remember many years ago, having some really nice meditation,
sitting for five hours, and then you sort of started coming out
of the meditation as an aching the knee, and literally just sat.
I mean, with nothing kindness.
I never actually practiced, well, I did quite a bit of practice on nothing kindness,
but when you have samadhi, that nothing kindness is easy.
When you're really still, you just zap.
With kindness.
And it's so strong that the aches and pains disappear.
That's one of the things which sapping my knee, which was aching,
you were doing on your retreat a couple of weeks ago.
And I just say zap, because maybe I saw too many superhero movies like Batman and stuff
when I was a kid.
But that's kind of what you do.
You go on an ache somewhere, zap.
And I was always amazed at how powerful that is.
So once that meditation really starts to take off,
it's like nothing kindness and stillness, they all kind of merge altogether.
You can't really tell the difference between those two practices.
And you just make use of whichever one is needed at that time.
So anyway, this is what happens when you get still.
You can relax the body.
And of course, when you relax the mind,
how can you relax the mind when you want something?
It's very simple to see when you have lots of deep meditation.
The difference between a mind which is like free and just at peace.
And a mind which is tight, because it wants something.
And when you know the difference between the two, you know,
again, how on earth can anyone get some deep meditation when they want something?
They go, all the wanting.
You don't hold the leaves on the tree still.
You just guard them and make sure that nothing can disturb them.
You're in your cave.
And just the doors are locked.
You've got a blanket around you, you're sitting down there.
You've got no idea what time it is.
And I was only eating one the other day during that time.
I gave up all tea and condensed milk.
I don't know why you laugh at that.
I knew you would.
I'm back on it again now, but...
But the nice thing was the freedom of time.
I had no one to could actually call and make an appointment for something.
You know, nothing to get up for.
Go to bed at any time.
Get up at any time, meditate at any time.
I love that kind of freedom from the time schedule.
Because probably more than any of you, because you're seeing your monkey,
you've got so many appointments.
Even almost... I feel I have to be there at breakfast time to give the blessing on Tuesdays or Fridays
and to take phone calls.
You have to be there at lunchtime.
People expect you.
You have to be there at tea time in the evening, or sometimes I disappear.
Sometimes all those duties and jobs, which the senior mark has,
but for me it's just such a great difference being able to have no jobs or duties at all.
You want to sit in your cave and just not want anything.
Of course, that was the most important part.
Have no aspirations at all.
I didn't need aspirations.
I had inspirations and explorations.
That's enough spirations.
Sometimes they stopped.
So this is just actually... You just let things happen.
You let the meditation happen.
You get one of the Anna Gaurik, or not the Anna Gaurik,
because one of the young monks said they decided on their retreat just to let meditation happen.
I kind of like that idea.
So the minds often want to meditate.
It really wants to sit down and be still because it's restful.
Meditation is better than having a sleep in bed.
You have a sleep in bed.
I don't know about you, but sometimes you toss and turn.
You know, if you had too much tea or coffee,
well, you know, something's happening in the monastery,
you've got to find a solution for it and you haven't let it go yet.
But when you meditate, sometimes...
Because I didn't need much meditation during...
Sorry, much meditation didn't need much sleep during my retreat.
It was nice to be able to get up in the middle of the night and just meditate.
Then if you felt sleepy, you lay down.
If you didn't, you carried on meditating.
It didn't matter.
These days, I am concerned, I just rest enough.
Because otherwise, if you're very sleepy and someone asks you a question,
sometimes your reply is not clear.
But it's wonderful just when you can rest whenever you like.
When I could rest whenever I like, I didn't want to rest.
I found out that sometimes, when you go to bed, it's out of fear.
And fear, what will happen if I don't get enough sleep?
So when you take that fear away, it becomes natural.
And fearless, you don't need to sleep so much.
Why do people need to sleep?
Often you don't need it, sometimes, or just in case.
It's out of fear, rather than actually nature.
And there's times in your day and in your life when you do need some sleep,
you're sick, or the body asks you to rest some more.
And sometimes you don't need it.
That's one of the reasons why to keep it natural, wisely natural.
But anyway, this is where we're weakening our will.
Weakening our willpower.
I think that's quite nice, because that goes against the grain,
much like disconnecting.
The willpower is what connects us to others.
The will also creates time.
And when you have no will, it stops for a long.
I know, for gaps, that's as if time vanishes.
It doesn't have any meaning.
And often you can think about that logically.
But when you want something, you create the future.
A place where the wanting can land.
Like Bower.
Existence.
In the widest sense of that, when you don't want anything,
a sense of Bower, a landing place in the future for your goal to exist.
Kind of vanishes.
And the ill will.
That's always connected with the past.
It creates time. When you don't want anything in the world,
you don't move, you're just here.
It's like time has lost its major meaning.
It's almost like Bower gets disintegrated, mostly lost.
So it's amazing just to totally abandon that will.
Just to give up.
And that sense of non-self develops.
Of course that becomes letting be.
You're not trying to get rid of anything.
You're not trying to get any more.
Just what you have is good enough.
This is good enough.
When you want something more, you can't enjoy what you already have.
I think eight one of you, you live in this monastery,
you live in Jana Grove right now. You know this is more than good enough here.
It's incredible just how we live here.
I know some other people in the world think, oh no, just,
we should have air conditioning and H. Kootie.
You know, we should have like a menu for tomorrow's food.
So you can actually choose what you're going to eat tomorrow.
That'll be a good idea.
Adjuncts and tutti.
That'll be a good idea.
Yeah.
But that is good enough with so much food.
If anybody always finds something you can eat.
But that lack of craving is amazing just how much pizza brings to you.
It's one of the reasons why I was just talking with some of the earth right.
Because we're apparently going to have some of the Sri Lankan,
we have as Sunday school kids come.
When's that supposed to be?
Venerable Dhamma Deeper?
Fifteenth.
Fifteenth. Okay. Fifteenth Rockton.
They're coming here in an afternoon.
Just, you know, to see the place and have a bit of exposure to sort of good monks and nuns and lay people,
whatever. I'm not quite sure what's happening.
But I always told him not to innovate.
He just teaches the Dhamma in the usual ways of doing it.
And that's what I did when I, you know, the first times just going off to
Rolling Stone, the primary school invited to give some talks to Rolling Stone
primary school kids.
They never told me it was year one and year two.
How can you teach them four noble truths?
They haven't known maths yet to counter four.
I think they had, but you don't want to be.
So sometimes, you know, you're courageous enough to put yourself in difficult situations and see what happens.
And that was the time I remember it was good fun.
I just asked the kids, the two class about 60 children there and all their parents were there,
so it was a very strong Christian area in Rolling Stone at that time.
And so all the kids were a bit sort of concerned about Buddhist monks teaching their little ones.
So they all came along to the session with me.
And then I asked the children, how many of you, 60 kids, how many of you do not like eating rice pudding?
And most of the kids, they didn't know what rice pudding was.
But it was at least like three or four children put their hands up.
They did not like eating rice pudding.
And it was, you could have trained the kids to do it better.
They all looked around and saw three or four kids with their hands up.
They didn't know what to do, so they put their hands up as well.
And in one or two minutes, every kid, all of them, they decided they didn't like eating rice pudding.
Put your hands down, kids.
Now, put your hands up again if you've ever eaten rice pudding.
At about two kids put their hands up.
And all the other kids, they laughed, and even the parents laughed as well.
You taught them, so I liked some dislikes where they come from.
Conditioned by others.
So it was a nice teaching of Buddhism.
Because of success with things like that, when I did that talk of even earlier younger kids,
actually our younger kids like that, and the kindergarten in Singapore on waste that time.
Can you please, especially, waste that time, teach them about waste that?
How can you teach like three-year-olds and four-year-olds?
There are five-year-olds as well, about waste that.
And that's when you did that Buddha Masati.
Imagine you're the Buddha, just born.
So you take seven steps and put out one finger.
Not that finger, kids.
And they could all do that.
It was like playing it out.
I actually never got to the enlightenment one.
Because it's under to the parenty bar, no one.
Okay, the Buddha becomes enlightened.
So sit down, you can see the big Buddha statue in front of you.
Cross your legs, close your eyes.
Put your left hand in your lap and right hand on top of it.
And kids are very easy with their body.
They can do that very easily.
Now imagine you're the Buddha.
I'd say this so many times, but I really get off on it. I'm indulging.
So it's not my will, okay? I can't stop doing this.
Imagine you're the Buddha.
Just freshly enlightened.
Imagine what they must feel like.
There's no more schoolwork to do.
No more homework.
No more sickness.
Nothing to do in the whole world.
Totally free.
Nothing more to attain.
Nothing to fear.
You're free.
And honestly, I could have stopped myself, please.
Otherwise I'll be here for the next couple of hours.
I get off on it.
Even I can just listen to that and concede.
They might not have to do anything anymore.
It's a letting go.
Letting go is always worried about what you have to do,
where you can get some food, whether you're going to be healthy,
whether the sickness is going to pass.
All of that is vanishes.
It's a beautiful sense of freedom.
It's a freedom from the will.
It kind of just imagining what it must be like to be fully enlightened,
to be a Buddha.
Under the bodhic tree, cold heat, you don't worry about that anymore.
What people say about you when they don't say about you.
All of those sorts of things.
Are you good enough? Are you too good?
All of that totally vanishes.
It's like a psychological and physical just healing.
It's all in just one moment.
It feels so totally free.
What are you free of?
Free of this will.
How to do something, to get something or to change something
or because it's your duty, because you have to, because who told me?
I'm not going to do anything.
And then you find that you feel like this taste of enlightenment.
Taste of freedom.
Having to change things, do things go somewhere.
You can feel that freedom and the just beautiful piece of it.
Then you know you've let go of a little bit of will.
So you let go a little bit of the idea of self which creates that sense of having to do something.
You've disconnected.
The more you don't exist, the more you've vanished, the easier meditation is.
So you don't meditate to get something.
I can't try to get on reminding me of this for years but I can't forget it.
You don't meditate to get something to attain.
You meditate to let go of things.
To have less, not more.
That's one of the reasons why to emphasise that.
I always tell that as a kind of a joke but that joke does condition you.
You'll lose us.
Every one of you.
So be a big loser.
A total loser.
You don't attain anything.
You vanish and the whole idea of having to attain something, having to get somewhere.
You're here, that's good enough.
When you understand what that means, it means that you don't try for anything.
You sit in your heart and just totally vanish and let go.
That's when letting go really happens.
That's when meta happens.
How do you practise meta?
Become enlightened and it's easy.
It's not that hard.
Meditation is easy when you disappear first.
That's one of the reasons when you are on retreat.
It's a great place to disappear.
Just make sure if people leave food, they'll buy your door.
Fine.
Just make sure you eat it.
If you don't eat it, just throw it away because there was one monk here some years ago.
I think for three days, he put food outside his door and he never took any.
Eventually, I had to go to his heart and knock on the door.
I said, are you okay?
I think he told me to go away.
But he realised it wasn't actually stillness.
He was getting a bit sort of loopy.
I opened the door and I said no.
So I went to the workshop and got the angle grinder and cut through the lock.
I would do that because I wasn't so bardy.
He had a little bit of other stuff going on.
Anyhow.
That's when you let go of your sense of trying to achieve something, do something.
So just always just eat the food or if you don't eat the food, just please give it to the kangaroos.
We get like bunny rabbits here now.
So they're also pretty good at eating the food.
And then eventually, once that stillness happens, because you don't do anything,
patience is really easy.
Patience is always who wants something now.
Wanting vanishes.
So you just sit there.
You don't measure.
It's not about attaining things.
It's how much you can let go.
So you don't want anything in the whole world.
You just hear being aware of this moment.
Sometimes people feel that's, you don't do anything.
You don't get anything that's totally wrong.
The less you do, the more still you are, the more things vanish.
The best simile, which I usually just give on retreats, is another lotus flower opening up.
The layer by layer.
All it has is just the warmth of kindness and the light from the sun.
The light in the warmth opened the lotus.
And the deep you go, you go past the little level of opening up.
And then it becomes just quite easy, because those inner lotus petals are just gorgeous.
Which is one of the reasons why you just get past that first few stages.
You get the delightful breath.
I haven't said this for a while, but years ago I used to call that just the pivot point of meditation.
A turning point, once you get past that point, it all becomes totally automatic and just good fun, joyful.
You see, when you don't do anything, you just sit there perfectly still.
The mind opens up by itself.
Just go inwards all the time. You get deeper and deeper, more beautiful stages of mindfulness,
beautiful, peaceful breath, delightful breath.
And it gives you the confidence, the more still you are, the more beautiful it gets.
You just don't do anything.
You just sit there and just like this old movie, which many hour-huts meditators have been witnessing for thousands of years.
Just the joy.
Sometimes you think, why do people do this?
Well, they go into the jungles and sometimes it's quite harsh.
And just sit down and just enjoy this meditation so much.
And you can tell who meditates correctly, just by even how they teach.
If they teach fiercely, the scold people, they've got no peace at all in their hearts.
That's not going to work.
You teach with kindness. You are still. You are peaceful.
You don't ask anything from anyone. You don't even ask it from yourself.
You just relax to the max.
Get so peaceful, the mind just opens up for you.
Just like it waits for you to be peacefully enough, or when you are, it shows itself to you.
A beautiful mind.
And in that beauty gets so powerful, so deep, it starts to vanish.
You're not going backwards in meditation. You're going deeper inwards.
Once you have the stillness, the real stillness, and you may not think you're a long way away from this, but it will happen one day.
Once you have what the Buddha called the fourth Jana, you don't have it, but this is just what you're experiencing.
What else is left to go? The will has vanished. Totally.
It actually vanished beforehand, but it gets even more peaceful, more still.
And I always remember, I think the Buddha said that's when mindfulness is at its peak of purity.
And then, what is their left to vanish?
Of course, when the mindfulness is annoying, that starts to vanish.
And as that vanishes, even if it vanishes a little bit, it just shows you this thing we thought of as a no-er.
Somebody always watching things. That goes to just having a little bit of those experiences.
It just actually shows you these Buddha's teachings.
This is how we do disconnect from everything.
We disconnect from the whole world, knowing, doing, those things which sort of connect us.
Every time I do something, I'm connected to Ajahn Chah.
He told me what to do.
There are many other people as well.
When that vanishes, most of the connections are vanished.
And knowing, why do I perceive it this way or another way?
Again, that's what's connecting me to my culture.
One of that culture is.
But when that vanishes too, you're totally disconnected.
It's a way out of samsara, a way out of rebirth, a no more sense of guilt, a no more sense of not being good enough,
no more sense of being a failure, all that sort of rubbish thoughts which aren't helpful at all.
Totally go.
You're free.
And that really is what we're here for.
It's a purpose of a monastery.
It's a purpose of what we have.
It's a purpose of a society like the BGF.
We're there for there to be free, to disappear and vanish,
and not get reborn ever again.
And we'll happy?
I'm buying a lot of time.
See, it worked for him. He was so still.
He was so still.
I'm buying a lot of time.
I'm buying a lot of time.