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So thank you for allowing me to give a talk today. Even though my voice is not so sonorous as it usually is, I don't know if that's the right word sonorous, but as you know I had a sore throat for quite a few days, but it's about to disappear. But nevertheless, I thought it'd be nice to give a talk, especially on what to do in any of you who are sickly. This is just a small sort of irritation of the body, if you have a bit of a cold or a sore throat or whatever. But nevertheless, you know, the last few days,
of course you've been giving me lots of time.
Thank you for that. Allow me to go back after lunch early and imagine just even at night time, at June the evening. Sometimes it's hard to sleep at night if you've got a sore throat. Sometimes you will find it's coughing in the middle of the night. But nevertheless, I always remember just how the Buddha taught Nalaka Peter, Nalaka Mata, that was even though these two old disciples, even if you know that you are sick in the body, don't allow yourself to be sick in the mind. In other words, we just separate out the physical part of the world and the emotional part of the world.
I was about to say the mental part of the world, but I'd prefer to say that the emotional part of the world. This is one of the important teachings, which you learnt from so many years being a bikr, and being a forest monk for so many years. Of course, through our sicknesses as part of life, I have had a very, very lucky life with my health. And so many times that you always thought you're going to have an easy path.
I always thought that being a monk and living a simple life so you can keep healthy.
But nevertheless, it doesn't matter what you eat, no matter what exercise you do, no matter what attitude, which you have, everybody always eventually becomes sick, eventually dies. But nevertheless, I always remember that saying of the Buddha to make sure you separate those two thorns, the physical suffering and the emotional or mental suffering. And those two is so true to notice that the emotional part is much worse if you haven't trained a mind than if you are sickly, you can really sort of get negative and depressed. But if you have trained your mind, the physical part will be unpleasant,
nevertheless, the emotional part is very, very easy.
And this is one of the wonderful things, which when you are having physical difficulties,
sicknesses, not able to sleep that well, nevertheless, you can remember the teachings of the Buddha. You can remember the training which you have had in your life as a monk. You can always meditate in such a way that you don't fight the physical problems of life. I am an old monk now. Of course, I am going to have a physical suffering. And especially being right out there in front of people, they are working really hard and too hard really.
But nevertheless, trying to help others, look after others, not a mile in the weekend, here in the weekdays, many other places as well, that is hard work, but nevertheless, one of the things I've learned in my years as a monk is having these resources. No matter what happens in your life, in my own life, no matter how sick or lacking sleep, or you can't digest food so well, I don't know if any of you have noticed that I haven't been eating that much. Food was not so delicious the last few days. I thought that was a wonderful thing. Maybe I can lose some weight.
Unfortunately, I have got my appetite back again now and you don't lost anything. I thought a wonderful thing, if you're not hungry anymore, things just don't taste nice. Nothing to do with the cooks. It's just that that's what happens. What is tasty food? What is not tasty food? It's not inherent in the food you're eating. A lot of that is inherent in what you add to the food. And when you're sick, you don't feel, you want to eat much. But not just that, it's just that when you go back to your room, afterwards, it's very hard to sleep, but nevertheless, you can always sit down, cross your legs and meditate.
And I must submit to you that you've learned over those years, teaching others and teaching yourself how to actually to meditate, even though you are sickly, even though you've got sore throats, even though you are not much energy, nevertheless, you know how to be still. It's extremely wonderful resource to have. So you can go back into your cave, you can go back into your room. And it means you don't have a fear of any sicknesses. You don't fear of not being able to sleep. You don't fear about tiredness. All you need to do is you just sit there. And again, it is doing nothing. I know that sometimes people say, oh I can't blame. They've tried doing nothing. It doesn't work.
It does work if you do it properly. It's the only thing which actually works. You see it here in whatever's happening, it's already arrived. At this moment, it's already come. So it doesn't matter if it's unpleasant or it's painful or if it's difficult to do things. It doesn't matter. It's already here. It's only when you are starting to think of what you want next, what you want to get rid of, what you want to achieve, all that stuff in the future. That's where the emotional pain begins. The difficulties. I don't want this. I want it to be different. Why? It should be me. What all of those complaining? Every moment which you are aware in this moment, you learn so much.
That is by far the best dumber which teaches you that any talks or any books, you're actually right here you're dealing with things. And of course, sickness is no painful in the body. It's disappointed me. It doesn't give you that that success to be able to just walk on your meditation path or do what you would love to do, read or whatever. You can't do those things. Or you always can do. You can sit down there or you can just close your eyes and bliss out. But that always shocks me. Kind of. Shocks me. I shouldn't say shock like surprise is me. Doesn't matter how weak, sick, feverish or irritating your throat is or your nose is. It doesn't matter. It is in this moment. It's already a right. Here we are. And you just stay here in this moment. You don't want anything. It's easy to be content when you're having a good time.
When you're healthy, when everybody likes you, when you've got no problems or difficulties to solve. But looking real life is always difficult. It's always disagreements, always surprises, always stuff. But a lot of time when you have some sickness, that's really good. One of the, because I just turned around here and just blew my nose, always remembers one time when I went over to Canberra for the first time. I don't know how many years ago that was. Maybe about 40 years ago. Probably about right. 38 years. But when I went to Canberra, as the first time I went to that cold city and when I went there, I didn't have as much warm clothing on us I should have.
And even the first day I could start feeling, I had a little bit of a cold developing. A bit of an irritation, a bit of irritating nose having to sneeze. And that afternoon, very nice people who made sure I got something to eat. And they took me to Bundanoon to the Tamakayam monastery to show me around. And when I went there in the afternoon to the Tamakayam monastery, my goodness, because I was my senior to any of the monks there at the time, even this was about 30 years ago, or 35 years ago, even so that they kept on doing all of these little ceremonies. The ceremonies were so much. You couldn't just, okay, time to go now. I'm an evil. No, no, no, no.
We just want to just bow some more, show you some more, do this and do that. And it was quite sort of, what is it? Not annoying, but sort of irritating. You couldn't just get up and go. So anyway, so, and I finally did sort of have the chance to actually to get in the car and go back to Canberra. I was giving a talk that evening at Ventil Ticquan Bar's monastery. It was just a little haul at the time. He hadn't so developed the monastery yet. He was still very young as well. It was the first time I saw him. And that was just a, we were both young monks at the time. And when I actually went there, and I was, the best hall they had there,I put his hall, I didn't know what I mean to me, he's but a really good monk.
And so, when I went to give the talk there, I thought I would have enough time to have a cup of coffee or cup of tea to give myself some energy. But by the time I got to that hall to give the talk, I had about 15 minutes before the talk was to begin. So not enough time for a proper cup of tea. I didn't have some Chinese tea. No time for a shower. Go to a toilet, but that was it. And they had to front out to a talk. Quite a few people were listening at the time. And so, when I gave my talk, it was one, the first part of the talk was one of the worst talks I'd ever given. And the reason was that I started a sentence and then cough. And then continue the sentence and then sneeze. And you could not get any sort of ontinuity of your talk. The thoughts were not quite okay, but it was always interrupted every 30 seconds by just a cold. I always remember that. But then what I did, we were supposed to give a talk first, then a bit of meditation afterwards. So I decided to say, well look, let's do some meditation first. So we'll stop the talk.
I'll give like half a hour meditation and afterwards, once the meditation was finished,
then I can give the talk. I knew what I was doing, because I've done this many, many times before. So we stopped talking. Everybody was quite happy for me to stop talking,
because there was a really bad talk. We meditated instead, not guided meditation, just quiet meditation. And after half an hour, it was amazing. There was no more coughing, no more sneezing. My voice was clear. There was no irritations in my vocal cords. And when I gave the talk, it flew. It flowed so so seamlessly. And it was a brilliant talk afterwards.
And it wasn't just the case of I got away with giving the talk when I should have been in bed resting. It was a point that I proved to myself that when you can meditate, that you can kind of not pay attention to the physical difficulties and irritations. You can meditate and focus on the mind rather non-the body. When you're focusing on the mind rather than the body, you just go in a different direction than most people. You're going into the nature of the mind. You can give a really nice talk. I remember my host at the time, he said, what do you think of that talk? He said, that was amazing.
How on earth could you do that? When you knew it was really sickly at the beginning,
and after half an hour of meditation, you were really focused and had the energy. I said, yeah, that's what happens. You learn how to let go of the physical world. And you just go into this mental world, the emotional world, which is by far more dominant. You all know what the Buddha said. The mind is a forerunner of all things. The mind is a chief. But you know what it really means. This is what you do. You get hold of that perception of mind, and it gives you so many more opportunities and ways of dealing with things. So many more ways. That's what we're supposed to be doing as monks.
Learning about the nature of the mind, not so much about the money. So after a while, we really do get our strength and our power and even our health, not physical health, mental health from the mind. Once you can access that, know what this mind is, the emotional world, in this moment is amazing to say how much power you can generate. That's actually one of the great teachings when I was in my cave on the night time when you couldn't sleep.
Because you know you're sickly. You can just cross your legs and it was strange. This is the nature of our human body. When I was just healthy, you crossed your legs. When you're healthy and cross your legs, you always have an ache here and a pain there. But when you had the sickness, it was as if that you weren't disturbing yourself with little aches and pains or different differences or whatever, you're far more focused. I remember just being able to sit for so long without any aches and pains in the body. It was kind of weird. It was much more comfortable when you were sick than when you were healthy. So anyway, it's also you know how to meditate with sickness.
The way you do it, it was just the best way to describe it, the old empressory questions. Now the most important time you really have to focus in this moment. I know that's just an old story which many people have heard so many times but how many of you actually got in that moment? Really got in sort. You don't really think about anything to do with the next moment or the moment afterwards. You're really in this moment. Then then, what do you watch? What ever's in the mind right now. It's so easy because you're already here. You always got something in front of your mind in this moment.
That's what you focus on. You are here. And this, you don't sort of go like judging or measuring or comparing. All those measuring and comparing, you do need past and future to be able to do stuff like that. But right in this moment, it's amazing just how you are right here in this moment. And you can't measure. Because you can't measure, you can't want. Because you can't measure, you can't be upset. You can't be irritated, you can't be disappointed. You can't just want anything. And that's where you get this beautiful sense of freedom. Beautiful. Okay. Bliss. That you are free. Free from this having to do stuff. I don't know about you. Paul van Orchandico, you've got sniffy notes too. You already caught it.
Hopefully that you can enjoy it like I am doing now. It's weird, isn't it? I'm just noticing. Because you know, I really miss moments in this talk after me. But I'm actually enjoying myself. Even though that I've still got a sore throat, which I'm sure you can perceive, and just still got an itchy nose with some snot coming out. But nevertheless, because you're in this moment and you're at peace with this moment, you're not trying to do anything or get anywhere else. And you are learning from this. You've been kind to it. It's amazing how free you feel. It's kind of weird. So this is the other part of the meditation. This is what, right in front of you right now, this is what you're aware of.
And you have this wonderful sense of respect to this moment.
Sometimes I say care, kindness, but it's also just respect. It's here already. So I'm just going to allow it to be. Open the door of my heart to this moment. I keep on saying this. Open the door of your heart to this moment. But that gives like a physical metaphor, which makes it more easy to do. You kind of imagine you got this door and it's not just to your heart, to your mind, whatever you wish to call it. You allow this moment to be. You don't want anything else. And you value this. You can see the respect in it. The respect is that you learn so much from these experiences. There's always something you're gaining from this.
Gain maybe that's not the right word, but you know it's here already. And you know how to make peace with it. You can make peace with anything. Which is an amazing sort of trick to understand and to practice. And that gets you through even the most difficult of unpleasant experiences. Which means that you know you're never going to be afraid of a sickness anymore. When you are sick you still know what you can do, know what you can't do. And give nice talks and inspire other people. That's kind of my job. It's not my job. It's not even a duty. It's a love.
It's a wonderful way of making merit even if you're sick. To be able to give a talk and try and inspire people. Because each one of you, if you haven't been sick yet, you will be sick. It's part of our life. There's nothing wrong with being sick as I keep on saying.
So instead you actually are with this moment of sickness if you happen to be sick. And you learn how to be with it without any fear. Well I need negativity. I'm sure that's one of the reasons why any sickness never lasts that long with me. Simply because I don't feed it. I learned from it. I thank it. Respect it. Be with it. And have fun with it.
Have fun with it. If I want it to be anything different than what it is right
now. Then of course that gives that tightness, that stress, that negativity. And of course
that will make it really unpleasant. Be okay. And you know from all that stuff with the Buddha taught all the great dhamma teachings he gave that your body does not belong to you. It's out of control. You will get sick or you have got sick. Life never goes the way you want it to. Simply because you're out of control. So anybody who tries to control this world, try and control your body. It's this great dhamma teaching.
When you're sick you can't control it. It's part of the different phases of the day, phases of life. So once one sees that and accepts that,
again the of the two thorns, one thorn is totally removed. So you can be at peace and happy. And sometimes it's amazing when you go and see people are really really sick
and they never complain. They're at peace with themselves. They're at peace with this moment. So how on earth can you do that without any anaesthetic, without any medicines? How can you be so at peace? It's one of the reasons why I don't like curing diseases. Instead you care for them. It's only a small change. If I try and cure a sore throat or a cold or whatever, that's it's a negativity. And it's trying to control things. It's trying to take charge of things. It's feeding the ego in a sense of self. Caring it doesn't feed egos. Caring is compassion. It's opening the door of your heart. It's like a non-control. It's a non-doing. It is a letting go by caring for this moment And so that's actually how I often focus to overcome sicknesses to care for the sickness instead of trying to cure it. And that kind of works. So this is actually how I learn to go into sickness, not go past it, but go into it to be right inside of it. When I get right inside of it, you can have a sense of enjoyment. It's weird to say this.
There's being enjoying it, in other words, valuing it, seeing as it's important lessons that Damah, which it teaches you. It teaches me again, I'm not in control. These are just the body candor and the feeling, the weight of the candor, the perceptions and sankaras and windy-onners. Each one of these, each consciousnesses, they don't belong to me.
Maybe it really did belong to me. Then I went to zap and all the sicknesses, all the ill health would just vanish. Of course, it never does. Instead, you learn. You see it so clearly. And this is not theory. This is reality. You learn how to let it go. Let it be. It'll be peaceful. Once you get peaceful, I'm just noticing now, because I'm giving a talk,
even my words are disturbing my peace.
And I know that I just pause this for a second. Straight away, the body relaxes so much more. Any sicknesses or the irritations, the sore throat, or the itchy sinuses, excluding all this survival fluid. All of that tends to slow down and stop. That's actually what I do. What I will do when I go back to my cave after this talk, I go back and sit down. Won't sleep yet. I'm not tired. Sit down. Slow the body down. Don't do that through force. Do that through disengaging. All those little wheels which you tend to hold and to adjust. All those little these days you'll call it like the mouse on your computer. All those little things, the orders which you give, steering wheels and pedals and stuff.
All of those you take your hands off steering wheel, feet off pedals. They're metaphor and then you just allow things to be. You don't do anything. There's so many beautiful similes of letting go. But one of the great advantages of a sickness is that once you see and practice these ways of letting go, you find out which ones work. Well, what ones really are letting go. Or once you start to practice, the ones you try and test these ways of letting go out, you find out which ones work. What actually they are? What is letting go? There's letting go of any idea of the future or the past.
Letting this moment be exactly as it is. Not interfering with it at all. This is nature. I've often said that my body doesn't belong to me, it belongs to nature. And part of nature is it gets sick sometimes. That's the truth. It's a dumber. It's obvious. So you never get negative. How can you be negative and upset about what's just a simple cause and effect? But what I learned from being with Anaj Anjaya, being, you know, reading all these great suitors, the reporter, and developing deep meditation, you actually find out how true this is. Just don't do anything. You leave this moment alone. Let it be. Then you find everything becomes so peaceful and so safe and so easy.
So you don't ever need to get upset. But whatever happens in this world, to your body, or to a monastery, at this moment, you know, I've seen many, many of the trees
looking at them from my walking path, all getting brown, dying. But please, I've seen this before. You know, the lack of water, the bodies. It's amazing just how I trust nature. It doesn't go the way I expect it to. But eventually, just those trees after many years will start to come back again. Our job is to look after the forest and the nature.
But that's not our main job. Our main job is actually to develop our wisdom and our kindness to free our mind. What are we here for?
This is not a nature reserve. That's secondary. The main purpose over here is to be able to learn how to penetrate the dumber and free ourselves from old age sickness and death. And how do we actually do that? And it's just the same old way of renunciation, letting go, kindness, gentleness, and learning how to be still. It's a wonderful thing to know. It doesn't matter just how tired, how old, how sick, how weak, whatever's happening. You can always do nothing. You can always be at peace. That's one of the things I remember turning out to send to too many years ago. And he thought this was a brilliant teaching.
And I just learned how to be silent. You learn how you talk too much. Learn how to be still. You realize you've been moving around too much. Be kind. And you find your judgment of others is being way too severe. How much mental anguish do we get from judging others or feeling that we've been judged? How much tiredness do we get from fighting this world? And how wonderful it is just to let this moment be and feel all that energy come back again. See the forest regenerate. See your body feel more alive and peaceful but powerful. How wonderful it is to appreciate the silence inside your mind. That's something doesn't matter how irosic you are. You can be in your kutie, in your cave.
Silence is always available for you. That's one of the three qualities which I like the best, the silence. I've got used to it. That's my friend. That's my colleague. Yes, I'm in my cave. But I always go to sleep with silence. Wake up with silence. Meditate with silence. Because it's silence, all those thoughts and ideas, all the stuff which we use to argue with is just not available for you. So I always make this almost like wool when I go in my cave, silence. I'm not the head monk when I'm in my cave. When I go out and go to the office, okay, that's when I have to make decisions and do things. But when I'm in my cave, there's silence. You can actually almost feel that silence.
'm not exaggerating. You go in my cave. You can actually feel it. It's like thick with silence. There's nothing going on. There's no words. There's no thoughts. There's no love abandoned the thought-finding mind. I've abandoned the praising mind as well.
The whole lot. So you're still. Nothing moves. What a great resource that is. When you're in a room, under your cave, and nothing is moving. There's no sound in my head. Perfectly peaceful. I'm going to be careful talking like this. As soon as I start talking like this, you can kind of feel it inside of me. I just don't want to talk anymore.
It's like here years and years and years ago, I mentioned this to a few people.
One of the chants we would do in this hall here, we do the chant which was the four
ramu wihawa chant. There's no spreading, matter, and a career number due to a pay cut to the four directions up and around everywhere. One of the things which hopefully you do as well is when you are doing the chanting and you know what a chant is, you understand it. Many of you have learned partly. If you haven't learned partly, you can understand what these chants actually mean. And I'm doing this with those four ramu wihawa's. Oh my goodness. You know, my mind just went with them. And you know, I think I sometimes I got to the karuna, but usually I stop to the meta.
I couldn't go on. And I remember Ajahn Jakaro, he took me aside,
I said, why do you keep stopping in this chant? There's only a few monks in those days. So he really stood out. He said, haven't you learned it? I mean, forgot it. I said, no. I know it really, really well, but it's just so inspiring. When you start talking like this or chanting like it, and the mind refuses to make any noise. It just feels the silence, feels a piece and a joy and a beauty, the bliss. And then off it goes. So he stopped chanting after that. Out of kindness to me. Nevertheless, that's also what happens sometimes when I start talking about silence. It's just like one of these amazing words that it resonates with my mind. I can't stop it. The silence, that's one of the reasons why when I do these guided meditations in Nalamaa center, and you start talking about silence when the guided meditation, I can't go any further. Sorry.
Because I'm talking about the silence, you feel it. And it shuts everything down. You can't have any words anymore, any comparisons, any judgments anymore. It's silent. It's beautiful.
And that's one of the reasons why you get into deep meditation from that point of silence .And I remember just giving this talk in what Bana Chah of all places many years ago when I visited. And then I said, I'm going to give you the sermon on, I think there's a second or third-cent patriarch, you know, that when you stop making comparisons, I know I was going backwards a bit. And I said that Lord Kelvin, one of the founders of the World Society is mostly of science in the UK at the start of the Industrial Revolution. Now this is my science and engineering backgrounds. And he was saying the only way that we can have technology to control nature is to learn how to measure things accurately first of all.
And so, you know, I saw in science and physics had all these standard units of weight and measurements and time. And you had to have these standard, say, measurements or weights. A lot of them were kept in Paris. And they were an important guard because no one wanted to mess around with these things. They were standard measurements. And if they were changed, they would really mess up what we call technology. So anyhow, somebody once asked me that question, what happens if, you know, we, what do you think about that? As a Buddhist, the technology has had some
bad side effects. So do you think that was a good idea? Measuring everything accurately,
first of all. And of course, it's quite simple to see what would happen if you stop measuring things accurately. There would be no means of control. If you didn't have sort of, you know, a standard foot rule or something, your clocks, you know, were all individual. You didn't know what's an accurate time. What would happen? No one could be late. No one could be early. There'd be a greater sense of freedom. So anyway, I remember just contemplating that. And not just with time or space. Imagine if you didn't measure your meditation. You didn't measure this. You didn't measure insight. Imagine if you didn't measure anything because you couldn't measure it.
All of you who heard me talk about genres, there's sometimes, even right now, there's people just who are just arguing about what is a genre, what is a genre. I honestly, I try not to get involved too much. A lot of time is because all that measurement is counterproductive. It's just causing just too much measuring and arguing. There's a mass thing which meditation should be about. Instead, we learn just how to not to measure. Just be still. See how still you can be. See how much can disappear. So never measure anymore. We're free. The nice thing about that, it's not really a side effect. It's the main thing about this is that when you don't measure how on earth can you strive?
How on earth can you want something? How on earth can you get upset about something? It's only when you measure and how many of those measurements are accurate? How many times do you get things wrong? It's what happens when you measure. You've got limited information. You're not really quite sure. You jump to a conclusion and that's where all this suffering comes from. If you can't measure, it means you can't want desire, just can't arise. That's one of the reasons why when you stop all measuring, it's just so easy to get into deep meditation. This happens. You can't stop it. You can't stop it. It's a funny way of saying it. It's just like the default state. The default state when all electricity goes off, it's dark.
If there's not another idea of default state, oh, I'll just say if you're not sure, if you run out of water, then there's no water from the taps. It's default. This is one of the reasons why when we're really still silent, you can't want anything. You stay there long enough, that's where you bliss out only afterwards. You go back and afterwards and say, what the heck was that? Then you can make sure if you want, but not while before you get in there, don't measure first, measure afterwards. Anyway, I'm not sure, but it feels like the usual time. So I think I can finish off now. Is that a good idea? Thank you so much. You're so tight. You can do that as well if you wish. And I'm a young.
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