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So for this evening's talk, I did take a request to talk about the deeper aspects of sadaar of faith. Some have called it faith, but that word had a bad meaning for me when you were young. You see, all sorts of people had all sorts of different faiths in some very dodgy ideas. And because they had that type of faith, it was almost like a sickness, and it was almost impossible for them to overcome that sickness. And it is really weird and strange things with their lives. You can see some of the benefits of that faith. It gave them direction.
It gave them their works of bothered too much about things which went wrong. But nevertheless, there was something which I saw which you couldn't really reconcile with a wise way of living a life. And so it was much more inspiring to come across the idea of confidence rather than faith, that confidence was a belief which was supported by experience, by reason, by something. And faith was something which was without that
foundation. I think I remember just when I was young, reading about the different ideas of faith in the world, one of the things I read, I think it was from Thomas Aquinas, who said that we believe because it's irrational or because it's illogical. And to me, that was kind of like a cop-out, didn't make any sense to me.
But nevertheless, that type of faith, you was wondering why do people have such faith? And some of those faith which people have. And one of the things I noticed, I mentioned to someone a few days ago, there was when I was a young monk, I believe, this event happened in Jonestown in, I think, in Guyana, in South America somewhere, that just this guru, I think it was kind of a Christian guru, he got all his followers to go down to the, what it was going to be, the idyllic Shangri-La on the north coast of South America. And to have an idyllic community, that in the end, they decided that everyone should commit suicide.
And there's this mass suicide down there, all believing that that was the faithful thing to do. And these weren't sort of crazy people, these were intelligent people. And it kind of let me see very clearly just the dangers of faith when it's not supported by some kind of reason or some kind of experience. But even those two things supported by reason, experience, sometimes even that, you know, is not good enough. Because you can sometimes talk to some of the people and they can give amazing explanations of why their faith is the correct faith and everybody else's faithis wrong.
And it's kind of, it's a waste of time to talk to such people with such extreme dogmatic faith. But nevertheless, sometimes it's kind of interesting how can people justify and live with something which seems to you to be so illogical. But then, later on in life, when I was even studying in university, when you came across, you know, theoretical physics, quantum physics, the nature of the galaxy, and even there, you know, you came across some people like Stephen Hawkins who could not believe in the existence of a mind, a magitta. And even someone who was so powerful, rational, such a powerful mind, even someone like an Albert Einstein, could not accept a quantum theory. That's where he said that in his understanding, God does not play dice. That was just his way of explaining, couldn't understand that nature of reality.
And so even highly intellectual people, still the reason is not enough to find the truth. They're obviously wrong, and that later on they're proved wrong. And because of that,
that is reason enough for faith. One thing which I did like from science, and something which I tried to insert and keep in my understanding of faith or confidence in the past, the practice, and everything else, is, I think I've mentioned this to many of you, I remember that we found of the Royal Society in London. There was a science society, and the person who founded it, they made this kind of basic rules for understanding science and proving scientific theories.
And that was like the way, for your negativity, in other words, whatever theory you proposed, once you proposed that theory, I think it was Francis Bacon, and once you proposed that theory, you had to try your hardest to disprove it, not to prove it. Because to prove it is amazing just how you can bend the data, and you can skew the experiments, ignore the things which are telling you this is not right. Ignore all of that because you want to prove things. But when you put it out to try and disprove it, find the thoughts with it, if it can be tested by all that plotting and poking, then it's more likely to be truthful. You can never actually prove that something is right, they were positing. All you can do is to prove it's definitely wrong, and this is the best theory we have, the one which has withstood so many challenges.
And I always remember that, and I tried to keep that in mind when I started to become a Buddhist, when I started practicing meditation, when I started looking at all the theories and the doctrines, I wasn't trying to prove anything, trying to disprove it. Is this really true? There's such a thing called the law of karma, how does it work? Is it really true that people have got reborn? I tried to poke holes in it, and I welcome other people poke holes in it, because that's really the only way that I could trust that these ideas could be true. Remember, I never said they were true, could be true because I try to disprove them so often, and the editors can't find a way to disprove them.
A little example of that, which I haven't talked about much except for people I sit next to, when I did become a monk in Thailand, they were very poor remote monasteries in the poor country, in the backwaters of that country. The northeast of Thailand was regarded as a backwater, the country Hicks were up there, but nevertheless, you understood their culture after a while, and you really valued that, but one thing we didn't have in the monastery was adequate medicine. I remember somebody coming years ago, and they were telling me about the fact they were like homeopaths, and homeopathic medicine was cheap, it was easy to store, and didn't have any bad side effects, that if it didn't work, it didn't do you any harm. I thought it was a wonderful thing to have as a monk.
I don't think I had enough time in that occasion, not enough understanding of the local dialects to learn about the different types of herbs, which are out there in the forest, and they had all sorts of amazing qualities to them, but nevertheless, you could understand the writings about homeopathy, and it was cheap, and you could keep it for a long time, and that's what I kept for so many years when I was in Thailand, that was my medicine. There was so many wonderful experiences. I tried to disprove it, but then a few times that's all you had, and I couldn't understand how it worked or why it worked,
but just quite a few times, it was some amazing results. The only one time I was bitten by a centipede, centipedes in Thailand, aggressive, they crawled towards you, and they'd just bite you, and that was in the middle of the night. I felt somebody in your hearts, there's so many holes in the hearts, you can't block anything out, the floorboards, and then the planks which make your walls so many holes, so that anything can crawl through. I remember even once, this is by the way, but it's an interesting story, once I was just talking with one of my friends, that was Adjana Minindra, Adjana Pramani, and he said, it would be lovely to have a cup of tea in the morning or something, and just
because I had some tea, I made him a cup of tea at nothing, 2.30 in the morning, the
bell went at 3 o'clock, and it's hard to make that tea, but I decided, no, I'm going to give him a treat. So I made some tea, and when I heard the bell, I was already up, I went to his heart which was next to mine, and as I was going in there to knock on the door to wake him up with a nice cup of hot tea, and sweet as well, there was a banded crate crawling under his door. A banded crate was one of the very venomous snakes over in the northeast of Thailand. There wasn't a sort of a huge one, but it was big enough to be able to buy it and just cause a lot of damage if it bit him.
So anyway, when I woke him up, so the good news and bad news for you, the good news, I got a cup of tea, the bad news, the banded crate has just gone into your heart. It's amazing how quickly you woke up. I'm not quite sure for what, but the banded crate has went into a corner and say he was safe. But nevertheless, it was so little medicine or treats at that time. So if anything did bite you, like this, what you'd call the centipede bit me, went under my robe, that was my blanket on a grass mat on the wooden floor, and I felt something bite me, flicked it off just with a flick of my foot, and then got the flashlight out, had a look, it was a centipede, and I looked at my toe and had the two puncture marks there.
It had actually bitten me or stung me or whatever you call it. And I'd heard from so many other people, even ex monks, I remember this one monk, he became eventually quite famous and started Guy A House, after he disrobed, and that's in Devon. And he said that was the worst pain he'd ever felt in his life, even though he went to a hospital banging his head against the wall, he hurt so much. So I heard those stories, and when you hear it from a monastic, then you kind of take that all seriously. And so I thought my goodness, this is really going to hurt. So I took some of my homeopathic medicine straight away, just little sugar pills which you put on your tongue and just allow to dissolve in your tongue and just swallow it.
There's no pain at all. A couple of times things like that happened, and I got down to how they happened, and I thought that for somehow or other, without any faith, at first tested it out, and to try and disprove it, and it worked brilliantly for me anyway. It was things like that, they served us believing these things, test them out first of all. And of course I did find a great teacher like an Ajahn Chah, but how can you have faith in an Ajahn Chah? He teaches some things, other people teach opposite things, how can you choose which teacher is correct? So you listen to the teachings, but either teaching is correct.
When you're a young monk, you don't really know. You can read the sutas, but the sutas they had over there, and this was true, they were locked in a cabinet. We weren't allowed to have the key to read them. It would have been no good anywhere, they're all in Thai, and even the ones which were in Pali, they were in Thai script. But there's only later on we managed to get some of those sutas and vinnia in English from the Pali text society, but even those translations, are they all that accurate? So later on you
realized the only way to dispel
that doubt of what you're reading is that what the Buddha meant to say was actually to learn Pali. So I'm very grateful that now Vinnable Sunyo is teaching Pali, and if you really want to stay as a monk for a long time, those over nuns want to stay as a nun for a long time, and just check out some of the understandings you have of meditation and dhamma. It's wonderful to actually learn the Pali. And that was an eye-opener for me. I must admit, when you started reading the Pali for yourself, the sutas in Pali for yourself, you read and read and read it, they weren't that hard to understand.
And after a while you got the gist of it, just like when I learned Thai, you just heard Thai all day, every day, and then after a while the meanings got into your head. This
is one thing which Professor Water would say in his introduction to Pali, the best way
of learning a language-like part is read it a lot. Now every sutta you can find, a vinnia
pitica, because then you get to understand what those words mean, like a child learns,
and their mother or their father. They learn. And then those words as sutas are repeated, those themes are repeated so often, it becomes quite clear what they mean.
And you try and disprove them. Don't try and just protect your understanding. Challenge it, just like you challenge things in science. And only when you challenge it and challenge it and you can't find any sort of inconsistency with it, then you can actually say, well that looks like it may be true. But that you get confidence in the teachings. And then you get confidence in the teacher. I know one thing which Ajahn Chah would often say, he said that he was a person who taught people rather than teaching Dhamma. So he would say some things sometimes, and he described it like he sees someone leaning left.
And so he'd tell him to go right. And the next person would come up, he was leaning right, so he'd tell him to lean left. He'd say, oh you're being inconsistent. And he always pointed that out. Please remember that just what those teachings are there for. Those teachings are not there to pronounce ultimate truth as much as to lead you to ultimate truth. To that the confidence in the Dhamma. And it wasn't just the theory of it. The next thing we're coming to, which is really the most important part of this type of talk, is the practice of it. And that's again, those words I think I said this a couple of times in the last week or fortnight, I don't know how long.
When the words which he gave to his barber, Uparli, and also to the first bhikkhuni, stepma, Mahapajapati. Now how do you know what is the Dhamma? What is the Buddha's teachings? I actually have confidence in it. You may have heard it. But remember what it must have been like in those days. You didn't have books to check what the Buddha said. You just had your own personal experience, your memory, and what other people remembered the Buddha said. So you could have heard it for yourself and that would have a huge amount of importance for you.
But how can you really understand and have total faith and confidence that this is the word of the Buddha and the teachings of Dhamma? And that is when, I forget all of the words in this piece of advice, but he said whatever teachings, Dhamma, practice, you know, lead to a sense of like Nipidath. Now we are Aga, Neroda, Upasama, and Sambodi. There are a couple of other qualities in there which I've left out. But you know by what it does, how it works, especially by things like Nipidath, you know, just seeing the irritation, the burden, the negativity in much of what many people celebrate.
You see that. That's what happens. It's not you're getting into depression or negativity because when you see those things truly, it's nothing to do with you. It's just a nature of this world in which you live. It's nothing to do with your body. It's nothing to do with the mind. It's just how the mind works. It's basically out of control. It will have some suffering every now and again. And when people try and get rid of that suffering, they don't like it and so that I'm going to get rid of it, it usually makes them all suffering.
So instead of having this idea, there's a burden which you have, an extra burden to get rid of the difficulties of an up one because it's much more accepting and at peace with things. When you understand basically there's nothing you can do, quite often when people ask me these questions, you know, why do we have suffering and what's the purpose of it? And especially what's the meaning of it. I know that many people when things like they lose the child who dies tragically, they try to keep them alive but it doesn't work and they lose their child or other people die tragically or something happens to really good people
and they get very poor or they get alone or whatever or you get living in a country where people get bombed. And so why? What's the meaning of that? And I know all those years I've talked to people who have had great tragedies, it's finding meaning in it is so important. If it's meaningless, that just makes the suffering just almost intolerable. But the meaning of it is understanding, learning what this world is, understanding for noble truths, understanding this is not something that's gone wrong. It's just you haven't understood where this comes from, why it comes here and the way past the suffering, the escape from it. Okay, I would mention the word escape because when I decided to become a monk many years ago, many of my friends said, are you just escaping?
And I just got embarrassed by that word escaping because I never wanted to escape. I just wanted to face the truth, face the world. But then later on when you understand what Buddhism was, what meditation was, I agreed with them. I said, yes, that's the truth. I'm escaping. Anyone who is a prisoner in jail where you tortured, having a hard time, I recommend escaping. I don't know why people thought that escaping was intrinsically wrong no matter what it is. But after a while you challenged that. Like a good scientist would. Is that true? And you soon find out that many of those words are kind of false. When those ideas are false.
Even what I was saying a lot recently in my meditation classes in town and in the word of the Buddha class, which I gave even last Sunday, just why I was of the view. I never had any faith in the fact that meditation or Buddhism could be fun. It can't be fun. You can't just be a monastic and just get into happiness. Because the sort of things I was taught in religion when I was young, no pain, no gain. You had to be tough and learn how to endure. Learn how to sit there no matter if your legs were just exploding in pain. And this is a good example of the first waysack, which I went to. It was read by Dr. Satatissa, a very famous Sri Lankan monk, when I was up in Cambridge.
He came up there to do a waysack day for us. And when he said the Buddha's inspiring resolution, I will not move from my posture. I will not change even a little bit of it until I get fully enlightened. Even if my blood dries up and my bones turn to dust, I will not move. Shall we do that tonight? Of course not. I tried that. I was only 18. That's stupid you were. I went back to my... I couldn't wait to get back after that talk to my room, sat down on a couple of cushions. And I made... I honestly didn't make that resolution. That's how dumb I was. You know what I thought at that time? I can recall this very clearly. I recall, yeah, well the Buddha was in India. I'm English.
We conquered India. We can do better than that. Total arrogance. I told him with it. So I sat down and made that resolution. I will not get up from my cushion until falling enlightenment, not stream winning, falling enlightenment. I've got to get it out of the way. I've got many other things to do in my life. At that time, I did meditate every day. I think once, maybe about 20 minutes, 25 minutes. That was my maximum. I did create a P.B. a personal best, I think, 35 minutes. That day. I was in agony sitting down. Everything was aching. Out of my eyes, my blood was still moving and dried up.
My bones turned to dust and I certainly wasn't enlightened. But at least I tried it. You learned a lot from that. Later on, your confidence and faith when you started listening and looking at the Buddha's teachings. And then in Pali, because there you know you just had much closer to what the Buddha said and understood the way he used those words. And you could see it in so many different examples. One of the things which I really found useful was learning how the Buddha used these words which were used metaphysically in ordinary life. You all know that Nibbana and the flame of a lamp is Nibbana, it is Nibbuta. I love that Simeyam. I saw that. Wow, that's what it means. It gave a much deeper understanding of these words which the Buddha chose to describe some of the most deepest of things.
Something was there which has gone out. It doesn't gone anywhere. It is finished. It was there because of courses. When the courses go, the effect disappears. It doesn't go anywhere. It was just this wonderful sense of being between existence and non-existence. It would just be a process. And it is the third way. The Buddha called the middle way. Brilliant. When you read it yourself, you have your own understanding of it. Some of you may argue with me. For a lot of times that is the Pali is very clear. Maybe the way I express it. You could try and find some better words for it. But nevertheless you get the understanding there.
And so this is where we start to understand that when the mind tests the stomach out, does it lead to turning away from these things in the world? Does it lead for the disappearing? It is a wonderful word like Viraga and the Nibbuta, a seasing. Yes, sometimes people do translate it. Viraga has dispassion. But that doesn't really cut it for me. Dispassion, that is already, are you dispassionate towards things? Because you all know that dispassion towards the pleasures of meditation is not part of the path. You start to enjoy the pleasures of meditation. The pleasures of a beautiful dhamma talk. The pleasures of seeing a really wonderful, compassionate act by somebody.
And when he saw that in someone like an Ajahn Shah, he was a happy monk. And all the time I was there nothing seemed to upset him. And that was a wonderful thing to be able to see, even though that many times people, please excuse me, but I still remember the time. A really crazy, I think it was half western, half Japanese Zen monk came to see Ajahn Shah. And he was talking with Ajahn Shah, and every now and again, he'd have, I forget what it was using, he'd have something to bang it on the seats, really loud. And then he'd carry on talking. And he'd bang this slipper or something on the seat again.
And I'd say, what the heck are you trying to do? I'd say, I'm trying to enlighten you. That's a really crazy people who visit Ajahn Shah. But nevertheless, he thought that was a tradition. And Ajahn Shah, he would never get upset or angry. He thought it was always really funny. He would laugh a lot. And as being with somebody and seeing them test it out, I wouldn't test out Ajahn Shah myself, because there's not plenty of other people doing that. I would just watch and observe. And that increased my confidence in him as a teacher. And when he sometimes made mistakes, but then when
he made mistakes, he would shrug his shoulders. Was it here or in Nala Maha, I told that story of, I think it was in Nala Maha, about Ajahn Liam.
He was basically Ajahn Shah's closest monk and took over as being the boss of the teacher at Waipong after Ajahn Shah passed away. And it was Ajahn Liam who built the crematorium, which was later turned into a stupor for Ajahn Shah. And it all went wrong. I will never forget how Ajahn Liam responded and reacted when this little Mosely crematorium for his teacher, the famous Ajahn Shah, the king was there in the morning with the whole royal family. Lots of TV cameras were there, but when they actually lit the funeral pie, everyone had gone to bed. But I stayed out for that. I was so happy to stay out for that because actually I didn't have a bed to go to anywhere that too many months.
I decided to stay up all night. It was my teacher, his cremation. So anyway, that later on in the night, the fire was lit and it got hotter and hotter and hotter. And then the metal in which the body was being burned got so hot and it cracked. And all these flames were shooting out. You've all seen that Chadia stupor in which Ajahn Shah was cremated. I mean, that was a huge big structure and it was all engineered by Ajahn Liam. So he didn't have any degrees or anything, so it was just a village and boy. So expecting it to fall over any time. But nevertheless, it held and many other monks got the hoses out to hose it down. So it did actually survive. But what Ajahn Shah, what Ajahn Liam did, what really impressed me was worse staying up from.
He just took one look at it, all went wrong, probably going to collapse and this was his great teacher. And he let his great teacher down. He must have thought that, I'd have thought that. I thought it was going to go. And then Ajahn Liam just went back to bed and rested. And we could you do that? And a big tragedy happened when the biggest events of your life, your teacher died cremation and you just say, you're responsible, you made mistakes, big ones. And he just went and crashed out. I know many of you are able to do that these days. But for him, it's the ability to let it go. That was very, very bad.
When you see events like that, that's actually when your faith turns into confidence. It's tested. You see those teachings in the sutas. You see those teachings in a vaniya, but now you see it actually happily does it. And that is inspiring. And it's not just in one teacher. That's why one's faith, confidence, sadhash, never be in one teacher. First of all, the confidence should be in the dhamma, the teaching itself. Does it work for you? Does it create peace? And then it should always be in the sangha, never in one monk. Because if it's in one monk, that's where we do get cults from. It doesn't matter how
great a monk, there's other monks who were fully enlightened as well. And I know how
the great opportunity of seeing some of those monks, seeing some of those monks were impressive, but not enlightened.
So there are more than one. You can have confidence in one teacher that is really dangerous. That's where cults come from. So anyway, you have confidence in the teaching, a few teachers, the dhamma, but one of the other things which we have confidence in is when we do practice, we do practice renunciation, we do practice the virtuous life, being good monks, simple living, peaceful. Because even you all know that that's important to be able to practice your meditation, to be able to practice so deeply that you become still. And even for myself, I still challenge myself, even just this afternoon.
I had a nice cup of tea and then sat down to meditate. It was a bit hot, still a bit hot today, but nevertheless I sat down and you felt, when it's hot, my body just doesn't like heat. It doesn't have much energy when it gets hot. I was born in a very cold country. And I remember sometimes just on the window, seeing icicles hanging outside the window, and there was no double glazing, it was just very thin glass and no heating. We didn't have central heating. If we got up in the morning, you had to light the fire. It was a coke fire, a coal fire at first. That's why you used to have all the smogs in London. But you know, you either had the choice of lighting the fire and creating some smog or freezing in your house. It was really cold. But I was used to that. My body grew up with that, so I loved the cold. And sometimes, you know, when you go visiting places like that, even the last time I was in Norway, Ajahn Brahmali, I was going to one of the monks there, his mother's house in Oslo,
and where I went there with Venerable Ajahnito, and we got out of the car in the car park and this housing, sort of many, many buildings. And it was maybe about ten minute walk to where the house was, and you had to walk in the snow. And again, I didn't have any socks on. And you're just crunching the snow. My feet are fine like that. I don't know what it is with my feet, but you feel cold, but it's not a problem at all. And so my feet can tolerate cold so easily. That's a sort of blood I have in my veins. So the heat is what really gets me, gets tired. But I knew, I have confidence in this, but I wanted to test it out again. If you sit there for long enough, does the energy come back? And of course it does. If you sat there after about an hour, then you were just having a wonderful time.
And that confidence is important for me. The confidence in creating the causes for some nice meditation. I've been a monk for a long time now, been meditating for 55 years. And also you've experienced a lot. You know what those causes are. So that's where you have confidence in them. You start meditating and you feel, I just want to get up and just lay down or just have another cup of tea. But instead you just continue. Patience requires confidence. That patience is an important quality which we have. We don't ask for things straight away. You build them up. So you start with being the, but then after a while, the, the gets weaker and weaker and the body gets
stronger, the mindfulness gets more powerful.
It always gets to a kind of a turning point where you start to feel joy and happiness. Your mindfulness is strong enough to start to have pitisuka coming up. And once you get to those stages of meditation, the pitisuka is coming up, then you know that you're going to have a great time. How do you know that? It's not just because the Buddha said, the Rajan Jā said that. You know that that's what the Buddha said. So the Buddha said, certainly, Suki no jitang samādhi yati. I told you that because it meant so much to me, that phrase. When the mind is happy, it gets very, very still. Gets into jānas and stuff. When you have a happy mind.
So the job is when you start to see that mindfulness and that happiness starting to arise. Yeah. You're on the right path. That's a confidence which you have. You're not faith because you've done that so many times. You can see this is a path. This is the way. You know what's basically going to come next. Okay. Especially when the present moment, that's true. If you start anticipating the future, you slow it down and mess it up simply because when you are planning something else, you can't really enjoy what's happening right now. That's a little phrase which I keep on reminding myself. And then the reason why I'm saying this again is because when the mind does have some degree of samādhi, some stillness, and I always test it out by how much joy and happiness is in the mind. That's kind of my lituous test. If it's kind of still but no joy, no infinite, that's not enough.
So I just carry on being patient. But once you do have that joy and happiness in the mind, that's when you realize that the mind is now mindful. And whatever you look at, whatever you hear, whatever you know in your mind, you tend not to distort. Your five hindrances have been weakened and maybe even totally gone. And when the five hindrances have been suppressed, that's what you see here, smell, taste, touch or no. You can have four-facing. Faith is not really the right word. Confidence. This is real, it's true. And again, I've only got so many stories and I do give talks a lot so you've heard these stories before.
But that time, I mean this was many years ago, but it happened in this hall here. I wasn't ahead monk at the time. There was just a nice meditation and after the meditation, I think we could meditate for a couple of hours if we wanted. It was just come together, meditate to see what happens. At the end of the meditation, I started, I don't know where it came from, just the thoughts or the idea, what is my earliest memory. And I jump on my nose, you all know that I cannot tell about past lives. But just as I use this as a loophole, please tell me if I've made a mistake and I shouldn't say this. But it was real, I don't make it up.
You got your early life as a baby in a pram. You know, as a sitting here and I was reliving that. Sometimes I think I'm pushing the edge to it, but I think it's worth it simply because it's a great experience to explain that when I had that experience, similar ones as well, that you realized there was no doubt at all that what your experience was real. Crazy to think it's real. You know, middle age or late middle age monk sitting here, I'm not in this middle age at the time, and remembering being a baby, clearly being able to explore my pram. And at first I thought, maybe that's just a fantasy,
maybe that's just because I wanted to, but I did check it out as well. Still had that idea of, now I should check everything out to make sure I don't just confuse myself, just wanting to believe, and the thing which reinforced, I'm not saying proved it, reinforced the fact this was real. I say that because I actually knew it was real. I'd say that in a moment. Explained that was the fact that everything which was around me, including my mother, I could recognize by her smell. That was my dominant sense at that time. Not what she looked like, but how she smelled. That was kind of weird. I wasn't, I was a physicist at university, not an anatomist or sort of an anatomy. Something to do with
atoms, isn't it?
No, I won't go there. And then I remember telling that story to some of our pediatricians, and there was confirming that, that when a baby comes out of the room,
his dominant sense is a sense of smell. Recognize you by how you smell. That was kind of interesting. And then I remember at the time there was the feeling of no doubt at all, which was weird. And that's actually, it took me about so many years to come to the conclusion that of course it felt real, because the fifth hindrance had disappeared, the hindrance of doubt, that's what it's like when doubt vanishes. And I bring up that simile again and again and again,
because of all the things which I've said so far, does that really help you understand
what doubt really is? Can't. No more than the old simile, the tadpole can't know what
water is, but when tadpole becomes a frog and jumps outside of the water, and there's
no water there on dry land, then the frog knows, ah, that's what water was. And that's
just like, you know, Ajahn Brahm just jumping out and just remembering an early life memory, that there was no doubt. And so now you kind of know exactly what doubt is. The feeling of it, the texture of it, the existence of it, what it actually does. And that was kind of an eye opener when you realize what was going on.
Problem is it's so hard to put those things into words, because many of the things which one experiences is in Buddhism, it just hasn't really got into the English language yet. And it was struggle to find appropriate words for these amazing sort of experiences. And even things like Jhanas, and then sometimes you try and find a word absorption, it doesn't really make sense, what's absorbed. What is Ajahn's Sujatas? It's absorption. That doesn't really make sense. Who else does anything? Illumination for Jana. Quikiness, courage. That's why I just prefer using the word Jana. It's a nice easy word and people get used to it after a while. But there's so many, so many qualities like that, like doubt. What we do is doubt. When you can actually experience it, disappearing, you can understand it.
You're not fantasizing about this, the doubt has gone. And you have this incredible clarity about whatever you look at. And that's one of the reasons why. Once again, when I give talks, you always end up talking about these deep meditation business, sorry, but it's just part of the path. It's the 8th of all paths. And that's in the final part of it. And one of its purposes is to give you the data and also the hindrances suppressed for a long time. That's one of the reasons why you get so much wisdom from those states of mind. You get wisdom about, what is this mind? I really wish that someone like a Stephen Hawking's could have got into a Jana. He had the brain, but just that data. What the heck is this?
And if he could have got into one of those Janas and really experienced it, when he came out afterwards, a wonderful thing about it is the hindrances have gone for quite a while. You can actually look back up on it and see it investigate and penetrate it and understand what it is and what doubt is and what mind is. And where all these different sort of religions or takes on different religions come from. And where this idea of people have so much faith in things like an original mind, which is like an eternal essence somewhere like a god or a supreme being, which you are or you're an aspect of a supreme being.
And all those things, why do people have those experiences? And it's two reasons. One, because they haven't got Janas, sometimes they think they have. But if you talk to them, is it really a Jana? Or if they do have the Janas, they didn't have the teachings to be able to really understand what those were. And how to make use of them. Remember just after those experiences of deep samadhi. And the Buddha said what you should do with them. You know, to explore things like Anitra Duka and Atala or Patti Nissa Gauruaga, Niroda. The people think that we were agarous dispassion rather than fading away disappearing.
Even little things like that, they're missing it. So you get someone with deep meditation and the knowledge of the teaching. The simile which I used was the map and the flashlight. The map is the dharma which you've heard and have confidence in. And the flashlight is a deep meditation so you can actually see clearly. So the doubt has disappeared for a while. And you have this other map, you can find the treasure. And that's while we're Buddhists. So we can understand what that treasure is. It's like that simile in the Maha Malunki Uputasuta that someone who hasn't got Jana, who said that simile was here. Someone who hasn't got a Jana can't even know what the Samyojina are. Especially the first five. Samyojina's, the feta, the lower feta sometimes it's called.
It's not that you can't overcome them. You don't even know what they are. They have
all these ideas of what they are. But you haven't seen closely which means the doubt
must always be there. So that's one of the reasons why the doubt is overcome in the five hat fetas. So when the five hindrances have been really weakened, you've got these openings of clear insight. And that is when those doubts are overcome once and for. It's a beautiful state of mind. So that is where you have your confidence and no one will be able to ever do otherwise or convince you otherwise. One of the reasons why some of the Sri Lankans years ago they asked me can say someone who is a stream winner ever disrobe. It doesn't say that in the suitors.
But I put my hand up and said no. So if you want your hopes on carry on, pay through to being a stream winner and you'll never disrobe. What do you recommend to them, Bumani? Okay. One thing which I didn't mention, which was kind of important years ago I said. Also remember to have sadhā in yourself.
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