Buddhism can help the people to clear up or to go through their own karma, their own psychological process in order to become clean and clear within themselves so that any problem can be overcome easily. And as we know now, the world is changing, and the technology of the world does not really help us to have the perfect mental health. We have all the material needs, all the conveniences, but still life is unhappy to some extent.

[01:07]

And many of us go to analysts, psychiatrists, psychotherapists, but what even is the best psychotherapy if we can understand and know how to apply their teaching to the daily practice in life. Surely the Buddha was the physician, the great physician of the world, as it was said that when he was born, the eye of the world has arisen. for the eye of the world, also reason giving light to humanity. And each way of analyzing or analyzing the light, the problems, is always concerned with four main aspects.

[02:27]

of life, of all the things. The first thing is to know what it is, so what it is, what is happening, to understand clearly what is happening now to life, what is the fact And then the second is how that track or how that happened. What is the cause? What is the condition for the arising or the coming to be of what if or of the fact of the event of the situation or whatever you have to say. Then the third aspect is concerned with the ending, the cessation of the thing that has arisen. Then the fourth one is concerned with the way, the method of remedy, the method of killing.

[03:45]

putting an end with the difficulty to do this speech. And these are technically called the Noble Truths, Four Noble Truths in Buddhism. The First Truth and the Third Truth are really closely connected what it is connected with the ending of it, the ending of itself. So you can see now the end begins at the beginning. And then the Buddha himself declares to all of his followers

[04:47]

when he was in the forest one day. He was in the forest with a certain number of monks, and we picked up the needs on the ground and showed them to the monks, saying that, What he knows is compared to the leaf of the tree in the forest. But what he teaches is compared with the leaf in his hand. Because only I can pull up. He said, why? Why he does not read all he knows? Because many things he knows will not lead to realization, not to enlightenment, not to the ending of suffering in the world.

[06:00]

So he didn't waste his energy to teach. But the things he taught was concerned with the problems of life, the ultimate reality of life. And then he said so in some places that freedom from what one knows will bring about the ending of the difficulties. Or one can never be liberated if one is free from what one knows. Now we have to think about this very clearly, whether we are free from what we know freedom from the known is more important than anything else because if we are not free from what we know, we create attachment.

[07:10]

We are attached to what we know, what we see, what we experience. When we carry We carry with us all the things we know, so our heads become very heavy. We don't travel lightly and freely. So if we can put aside all we know, then we just live with the moment of awakening so that we can become free and light in our journey through life. Attachment is connected with fear. You know when you are not free from what you know.

[08:12]

If you want to be free, you may feel that You cannot have security if you don't carry your knowledge, your experience. You may feel empty. We are afraid of emptiness. We are afraid of clearness. We are afraid of losing. our conditioning so that we can go on and on in circle. But if we are free, we don't have fear. The Buddha said, the one who is wise has no fear.

[09:19]

and it has no body. It means it has no attachment. So non-attachment is regarded as a virtue in life because it is connected with freedom, freedom to be. And freedom is The only cake in Buddhism, like we see, has only one taste. That is the salty cake. And Buddha said, from his teaching, there's only one taste. That is the taste of freedom, liberation. So we have to drink it and feed for ourselves. It's not a matter of... learning about it or knowing about it without experiencing it.

[10:20]

So we can say that the aim of learning and studying Buddhism is to put it into practice, to live it in our life. Otherwise, we create a big gap. between what we are and what we know. Knowledge can create conflict because one is not what one knows. What one is is different from what one knows. Then the conflict arises to not. But we can see now in life we need some kind of devotion or surrender. We have to surrender ourselves to what we do when we don't have conflict.

[11:31]

When you have a bug, surrender yourself completely to having a bug. When you are working, surrender yourself to the work. So you can have complete devotion to what you do, and then you can live fully in the present with what you do. There is no room for any conflict or difficulty to arise. Each one is fully in the present. But again, like we live a kind of moralistic life, it's a form of surrender. Surrendering oneself to the rules. It's very important to surrender oneself to the rules, to the precepts. Or surrender oneself to the law. It's a form of devotion.

[12:36]

If there is complete surrendering, purely, life will be very joyful and energy will not be vested, dissipated. Then energy can be used for creative work. Creative not in the sense of creating material things, not necessarily that way. Creative in the sense of being joyful, happy, having the sense of life, the sense of living, the feeling of a person. So when we have these feelings, we are creative. Well, creativeness embraces both action and non-action. And surely the balance between action and non-action is the balance of living.

[13:51]

We know how to be active and how to be passive, when to act and when not to act. When this is involved, we practice the practice. the understanding and the constant awareness. Otherwise, we cannot know when, which is not a problem. And sometimes we find it very difficult when we are in such a helpless state, because there is a tendency of longing for help, looking for external support. But Buddhism teaches us to rely on ourselves. As Buddha said, be a lamp unto yourself. Be a redwood unto yourself.

[14:54]

Be a light unto yourself. So you are your own light. You are your own redwood. You have the lamp with you. Just use it, then we can be free from the darkness of ego. You can understand when there is light, there is no dark. Darkness disappears immediately, then there is light. But when light has gone, darkness comes. Like the setting of the sun, disappearing of the sun creates the darkness, then we have the night time. So the same thing that when we have clear understanding, we have insight, we overcome ignorance. So this speech is involved with the way of practice, the way of living.

[16:01]

Now the way of practice in order to have life, to have clarity, to have the immediate understanding of things, and also to have a peaceful life, happy life, we have to do certain things. I mean, Buddhism, we take meditation as the heart of the teaching. Without meditation, there is no wisdom. And also without wisdom, there is no meditation. The words are closely connected. They go hand in hand. But wisdom is not knowledge. It is not information.

[17:12]

It is the seeing. Seeing things as they are without distorting or adding any opinions. It is non-verbal seeing with clear understanding. In Buddhism, they talk about meditation, which is the way of cultivating and developing calmness inside and awareness, or mindfulness. In Buddhism, we have, particularly in Theravada Buddhism, we have the two systems of meditation. The first one is called Samatha, calm, tranquility meditation.

[18:14]

And the second is called Nipatana, inside meditation. So the calm or tranquility meditation connected with a very strong concentration. One has to go through different stages of jhana, or meditative absorptions. And for the object of that form of meditation, we can take many things, at least 40 objects. or 40 techniques. We may take the breathing, or we may take the image of the Buddha, or we may take a color, yellow or blue or red or white, or we may take a kind of circle, a mandala,

[19:31]

circle or we can meditate by recollecting the virtues of the Buddha with characteristics of the Dharma and the qualities of the Sambha or we can meditate on death meditate on peace all these are in the technique of calm and tranquility because the first end And the final aim of it is to have calmness, tranquility, serenity by cultivating concentration. And we will talk about this in detail in the next lecture or in the future lecture. because it is concerned with different levels of consciousness.

[20:38]

And then the second form, which I'd like to sing or to explain to you tonight, is vipassana. Vipassana technique or method is based on awareness, mindfulness, The way of insight really is connected with the way of calmness as well. Because insight will be developed within mental calmness, mental tranquility. But the differences between the two systems lie in the final stage and certain techniques. Calm meditation will lead to the higher attainment of spiritual life.

[21:57]

But yet, awakening or enlightenment cannot be achieved. by that system. But it can be taken as the basis for developing insight. So that we say the end of calm meditation is the beginning of insight meditation. It was said we can go indirectly or directly We have a choice. But for those who would like to have a lot of experiences in the spiritual way of life, can go through the calm system of meditation. It can show many things. Even the experiences we will talk about in the modern world, experiences through the psychedelic drugs,

[23:06]

are not new in Buddhism, because by doing meditation you can have all the experiences, both negative and positive. It's like a way of going through oneself, taking the journey through life. And we can see that in life there are so many things that we don't see with our naked eyes. But when we look deep into our thoughts, we go into deeper and deeper levels of our existence and consciousness. We see many layers or many different levels of layers. So really we are very rich, rich beings. But if we just see our body and mind on a superficial level, then we feel we are poor.

[24:17]

Then we have to look into ourselves to see what is contained in this life, in this form of existence. Then Vipassana meditation is a direct way of approaching the ultimate truth. By this meditation, you don't have many experiences, but you have some. This system seems to cut off some experiences which would create attachment. I mean, when we have many experiences, we may be attached to some good experience and want to stay.

[25:25]

And that hinders our progress of starting the journey. But if your voice Experience will be just experience. Like driving along the road, you see many things, but you don't carry them with you. Sometimes you may carry some in your memory. But we understand that they are there. If there is no strong attachment, then you are free. So this inside meditation is the way of mindfulness of the good. Mindfulness or awareness can be practiced with every activity in life. It can be practiced with all the things within us and outside of us.

[26:32]

The only thing is to be aware, to be alert and awake. If we stay with alertness, awareness, we can see things clearly. We can overcome the perversions. At least we have three perversions which distort the reality. giving wrong information to our consciousness. The first one is perversion of perception. The perception cannot always be attractive. It can be a distorting process due to some impulses, some ideas operating in our head, in our mind. So perception also is produced through the senses.

[27:43]

Our senses can give us the false report if there is no awareness established at the moment of perceiving. So we may perceive things according to what is going on in our mind. Instead of seeing things out there, I have to live. But we see our reflection on things and say, this is things which could be wrong. So we have to be careful with perceptions, too. And the second conversion is conversion of thought. Thinking can be a distorting process, particularly thinking about the thing which cannot be thought about. Thinking about the unthinkable can create the false image.

[28:52]

And sometimes we may cross that image and stay with the false image. It becomes worse. Human mind has capacity to think. But if we think in the wrong way, it will become the greatest problem to understanding and communicating with other people. Because they say, oh, people don't think along the way I think. So I cannot understand people. People cannot understand me. This is really the greatest value in the communication because of the way of thinking. So Buddhism advises us to think objectively. Buddhism is a kind of objective religion, objective way of seeing things.

[30:01]

So to be equal, the self must be out of the work. And we normally perhaps we think in a vertical line. Or we think in the way of possibility. And thinking is very concerned with subjective idea, subjective reflection. Some people call it the ideals of reflection. Reflection of the subject. Subject is very limited in all cases. But if one allows oneself to think objectively, then the thinking will spring from understanding, from seeing.

[31:08]

It will not become the exception of the subject. This is kind of the real report.

[31:18]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_89.39