The Ten Ox-herder Pictures

The Ten Oxherder Pictures by Ajahn Brahm

Transcription

As many of you know that this evening at our Buddhist society, we're celebrating Chinese New Year. It's very fortunate being a Buddhist, because we celebrate three New Years every 12 months, Western New Year. Now, the Chinese New Year and the South Asian New Year for the Thais, Sri Lankans, Cambodians. So by celebrating three New Years every 12 months, we should be three times as old as everybody else, thereby having the benefit. You can claim your pension from the Australian government to the age of 22. That'd be very nice to be able to do that. However, I don't think the Australian government understands such things. But nevertheless, it's nice to be able to celebrate all these wonderful, different cultural, um, festivities. And I was trying to think of a suitable subject for the talk this evening. And apparently it's supposed to be the year of the ox. And so I was thinking something to do with ox's for this evening's talk. Many of you know I went to Cambridge, so I'm not really all that happy with Ox and Oxford's. That's the enemy as far as I'm concerned. That boxes are always supposed to be stupid. Which explains, you know, that other university. But I did remember when I was a young Buddhist, I used to go to any Buddhist thought because in those days when I was growing up, just, uh, it was so hard to get any, uh, Buddhist, uh, influence. So any monk or nun or anyone is giving a talk on Buddhism. I'd go there. So in those days, I was very ecumenical and in fact, that I did go to Zen retreats, Mahayana retreats, Tibetan retreats, of course, the Theravada retreats, any retreats, even many of you come here. You don't really care what type of Buddhism it is. And sometimes we make a distinction between big vehicles and small vehicles. And we're supposed to be the small vehicle, which I really call these days environmentally sensitive vehicle. It's cheaper on petrol, easier to find parking with small vehicles. And but today I remember just part of the so-called big vehicle, uh, the Zen tradition. They had the ten ox herding pictures. And I thought, okay, why did I give a talk this evening about the ox herding pictures, which is for those of you who don't know, this was like a a pictorial way of Explaining the meaning of life in pictures rather than words about the person's search for meaning and discovery of meaning and what you do next in a tent. Upsetting pictures. But this is not going to be, as you might expect, the standard picture explanation. This will be, of course, a giant bronze about finding the ox. And what do you do with it afterwards? This is also important because every time I seem to come here, you talk about the nature of things and how to deal with the problems of life. And sometimes you wonder, what does a man know about those problems? Know when people come and ask you about the problems at work. And of course, I haven't got a job. They asked me about their financial difficulties and I haven't got a bank account. They asked me about their marital problems and of course haven't got a wife that bothered about their kids. Haven't got kids either. So what would a man know? What experience would a monk have? And the reason why the monks are sitting up here, or sometimes nuns giving talks, is because what we know is about the nature of the mind and how it works. It is as if that we spend our life looking at this mind, searching for this mind understanding this mind, realising this mind and understand it from that. You could actually understand all the solutions to the problems of human beings. And so sometimes you sit up here and you talk about certain types of problems. Now, like last week, talking about the importance of simplicity in life, what a wonderful thing it is. There's an economic downturn. Now you've got a good excuse and reason to downsize and be simple. It's much easier to go on a diet when you can't afford to eat out. And it's amazing when you haven't got so much money to spend. You don't have to spend so much time in the shops to have more time for yourself and for your family. When you go in the mail all afternoon, and it also means that we can actually have a list of just examples of simplicity means more peace, more fun, more freedom. Forgiveness, you know, means we don't have to spend all the time eating ourselves up with anger and revenge about who did what to whom. These are like examples which I was saying last week about how to use our mind in a more wise and effective way. So we can actually talk about the symptoms of the problems in life. But this evening we go a bit more deeper into where we get all this wisdom from. I've often said here that my whole purpose of sitting up here and giving a talk is to try and get rid of you. In other words, to teach you enough about Buddhism, about some, about the nature of things so you know everything which needs to know. You don't have to come here ever again. And often I say, I must be a terrible teacher, because more and more people come every year and it's usually the same. Old people keep coming back year after year after year. Either you must be really stupid or I must be a terrible teacher. Either way, if I was a school teacher and people had to keep on repeating the class year after year, especially somebody for 20 years or more, then I get the sack. Incompetent teacher. But nevertheless, the whole idea is not to be some sort of priest. Which means I've got the power and I'm not going to share it with you. You have to come through me. That's not what Buddhism is. Buddhism is actually empowering you. Everything which I know to give to you every ability which I have to show you how to do the same. So nothing is held back. Everything is shared. And that way that you too can understand just how the mind works and be free of all these difficult problems in life, because we know we experience things in life and there can be some wonderful, pleasant experiences. There can also be some very, very painful experiences in life which are very hard to bear. We feel and what we feel, we react to, we think about. And if we can react and think about our feelings and our experiences in an action of skillful way, we don't get into these terrible holes of depression and anxiety and anger and guilt and grief, which can really be so cruel to a human being. So I know, and I'm sure many of you appreciate this, but there's physical pain which we have to deal with in life. But no matter how agonizing and cruel that physical pain is, it's nowhere near as as devastating as like the mental turmoil which people have to experience from time to time. Physical pain, suffering can be sort of dealt with. You know, it's going to pass sometimes it's a medicine. You can take this. And I know it's a paradox. Or even extreme medicines such as morphine or whatever, you can deal with physical pain. As a mentor. Emotional turmoil and pain and difficulty. That is the one which hurts the most. And I know of my experience dealing with the community for so many years. People go crazy or sometimes commit suicide not because of physical pain, but because of emotional pain. It's that emotional pain in the way we react and deal with the difficulties of life, which is why people actually come here. This is actually learning about this is the most important thing to learn about in life, to understand how your mind works so that you can have some freedom, at least some understanding of how mental pain arises and how we can avoid it. So we don't have to suffer so much inside of ourselves. It's such an important thing to understand this, because it can be walking past the person in the street. They look healthy, they're well, they're rich, they look good the next minute, you know, they've killed themselves. And how many times, you know. Maybe because it's my position, doing funerals and talking to people. So how many times people have told me that some have committed suicide? They never thought it was going to happen. They didn't know anything was wrong with them. They looked so good. They had so much going for them in life. And it's because on the outside they look healthy, they look well, but it's the mental stuff going on inside which you can't see, which no one knows about physical pain. You can get compassion because people can see you're hurting the mental pain. They can't see it. It's very hard to give empathy to something which you can't visually see or touch. There's a mental mental difficulties of life which are the most important. So if you want to do something with the mental difficulties of life, we have to understand what this mind actually is. And this is actually part of those also adding pictures actually to find out about this mind, they say the first picture is likely to see how the ox and they used the ox as a symbol for your mind. It gets a bit more complicated afterwards. But you know, it's a very good symbol for the for the mind and ox, because it's big and it's stubborn and very stupid sometimes. You know, I'm sure that that's beyond our understanding that some of the stupid things which I've done in my life and some of the city ideas which we have and just really wrecks our happiness. So seeking the ox, you know, our mind, and then actually finding some trace of that ox is picture number two, and then glimpsing it and then actually capturing it as number four. So the first journeys of the ox herding pictures, actually seeking out your mind exactly what it is and finding out what it is. Because once you know what this mind is, then you can actually do something with it. You know, you can train it and tame it, which is, you know, number five and six of the Oxford pictures. So a lot of people, they want to sort of try and train and tame their mind. And there's a bit of a nuance here, a bit of difficulty here, which you probably find. But first of all, you've got to know what you're trying to train for. So what is this mind? To understand what this mind is. I like to give like a simile of like a garden. Why do we call something a garden? You call it a garden? Because certain things are seen in the garden. The trees, the flowers, the ornaments, the lawn. That's what you call a garden. A garden is defined by what it contains. Perfect. Of course, having a garden. And you've just got sort of shops and you got sort of food stores. That's not a garden. That's a now that's a garden is defined by what it contains. In the same way, you can very well understand a mind. What is the mind? You define a mind by what it contains. What's actually the the landmarks, the objects of the mind. Now you've got the things like, you know, thinking you've got the happiness and suffering, and you've obviously got the emotions of the mind and the joy, the love, the fear, the anxiety. These are all the objects which actually define what the mind actually is. You know what a mind is by the objects which live in it. In the same way you know it's a garden because of the flowers, the borders, the trees, the grass. Because that's what how you know what a garden is. So can I get some understanding of what a mind is by what it contains? Where is the mind? A lot of times that people go searching for the mind in the body or in the head somewhere. But a lot of times in Asia, people thought the mind lived in the heart. And it was a I was there at the time in Thailand when the first of these heart transplants were made, and people were really philosophically challenged because they thought, wow, if you have a heart transplant, you take one person's heart and put it into someone else. When they come out of the anesthetic, all they wake up to be the owner of the heart or the owner of the body which contains the new heart. Who would they be? And of course, we all know the answer now that it's the same old person. Although I've got a couple of minutes to tell a few stories, because I know we got a book some years ago of like people who had heart transplants. It's not as as cut and dried as that, because it was a few stories of people who had heart transplant, and they carried some sort of memories of the previous owner of the heart. There's one amazing story. Was the young girl had a heart transplant. It must be only about 10 or 11 years of old. And after the operation, very good success. When she was sent home afterwards, though, she started having nightmares. Recovered nightmares. The same scene in the nightmare all the time. So she told her mummy. Her dream was that she was attacked in a dark street and killed and murdered. And it was so recurrent that her mother sort of went to the doctor and said, there's something weird going on here. My child has got the same dream night after night, and she wakes up screaming. And of course the doctor said, oh, it's just the trauma of the operation. You know, it's a very private operation. It might have done something to the brain, but she'll get over it. Just forget about it. Take another Panadol or something. I shouldn't say things like that. I get trouble with the doctors in this audience, but usually they say if it doesn't go away within two weeks, come back again. We'll do some more tests. But I get away with that. But anyway, it didn't go away, so she took it further. So it came from recurring again so that she had some contacts in the hospital. So she did a little bit of, uh, uh, illegal, improper searching to find out where this heart came from. And she found out that the heart had actually come from a prostitute who had been killed and murdered. And when she heard that, she went to the police station and told the whole story. This is a dream of my daughter. I just found out the heart came from a murdered person. Thus her memory in dream matched any of the situation and in the circumstances of the murder and the police people. They investigated the situation where the original owner of the heart was killed. It matched the information they got from this girl after, you know, she had a heart transplant. The information she got from her dream was enough for the police to identify a suspect. Questioned him, and he confessed. They caught him. Very weird and strange thing. There was enough memories left in that heart. Tragedy to find the killer of the old heart. Weird and strange. But the one which really made me laugh the most was that an elderly woman, maybe in her late 50s. She had a heart transplant. What do you mean? Elderly in her 50s. Why are you laughing at his elderly? Come on. Because most people here in the late 50s. Come on, be honest. Go out of the. Way you understand the nature of the mind, how devious it is. And I used to have this, uh, this dharma class for kids that from 10 to 13, 14, about that age. And just as an interesting experiment in the class, I asked, how old is old? And I say, well, not like 20. 30. They said, that's getting on a bit. I said 40, definitely. That's. A teenager 40 is pretty old. 58. But anyway, where was I? Okay. Middle aged lady in her late 50s. She had a heart transplant, and after a heart transplant, her husband was actually very satisfied with the operation. Because I don't know why this happened. But she also got the heart of a prostitute who was killed. And her husband was very complimentary because her, his 50 year old wife, in his words, was very frisky. He was very satisfied with that. But for those of you who could have said your your geriatric husband or your wife to have a heart transplant because they're getting a bit sort of, um, uh, cold or whatever. It only lasts for a couple of weeks, then they go back to normal. So I would actually suggest that for any sort of sex therapy. Now, how did I get into this? I don't know, it was talking about how they asked about the nature of the mind. So what would happen if you have a brain transplant? And it's not going to be that long before they have a brain transplant? What would happen when you wake up afterwards? Would you be the person who's containing the brain, or would you be the person who owned the brain? Who would you end up be? Interesting isn't it? Let's find out about. Whatever. The bride is not the mind. I'm going to prove it to you. Now, this is an old little trick. I haven't done this for a long time. In the center. How old are you? At this moment, either you're happy or you're saying that I'm not happy. One of the two. If you're just in the middle somewhere, just make a choice. You're more happy than unhappy. Okay, now one of those two. I want you to put your hands up. Your right hand up if you're happy. More happy than unhappy. The left hand up if you're more unhappy than happy. One of the two. Okay. Now put your hands up. One of the two. Happy? Keep it up. Now. Now, those of you got your hands up. Right hand up. Now, with your index finger. Can you point to that happiness for me? Point to it. Where is it? Can't point to it. Where is it? Waving it around. If you're unhappy, where's that? Can you point to it? Where is it? Next time you're sad, can you point to it? Is your head sad or is your heart sad? Is your toes sad? Where does sadness the next time? Next time you're in love. When you're in love. He goes. Wonderful. Emotional. Where are you? In love. Is it your nose in love? The thing is, each one of these things love, happiness, sadness, grief and anger. You can't point to these things. You can't locate them in space. You can't locate them in the body anyway. The reason they don't live in the body. They live in the mind. As I mentioned at the beginning, these are the things which define the territory of a mind. Like a flower or a bush or a tree defines a garden where you find trees and bushes and a lawn. That's what a garden is. The place where happiness, sadness, fear, anxiety, grief, love, where those things live. That's called the territory of mind. You can't point to those things because the mind doesn't live in your body. Your body lives in the mind. This is the most important thing to do to find out this mine. And this is actually what those Oxford pictures do. You've got to search for the mine and understand what it is and where it is and how it is, which is basically the spiritual path, because it's okay to understand this body and the doctors understand this. What do you sort of understand this body? You understand a lot about life. Maybe not everything about life, but you know how life works just about there's something deeper inside which is more important, this mine. Because this is actually where all of the important stuff happens. Okay? You can be rich, you can be poor, you can sort of have a nice partner or be alone. You can have kids or, you know, not have kids who'd be a mug or whatever that doesn't make you happy or sad. Something else, the mind, the way you react to what you think about them, how you feel, thinks this is the most important part of life. And I gave a similar many similes. The first thing I'm going to give now, I usually just keep this for a meditation retreat, but share it with everybody. Now it's my simile of the Emperor. Once was an emperor. This emperor was very, very powerful. But no one knew who this emperor was because every time the emperor appeared in public, it was completely clothed with five garments. The emperor had boots which covered his feet, his calves, his knee. I don't know if it was a he, its knees right up to its thighs and overlapping the the boots with his long trousers which overlapped. The person came right up to this waist, had a jacket on the lower part of the jacket, overlapped the waist, overlapped the trousers, went right to his wrists and right to his neck. He had gloves which overlapped the rest of the jacket, and last of all had a helmet which completely covered the head and overlapped the top of the jacket. So every part of his or her or its body was covered. So no one ever saw who this emperor really was, because it was always covered in the five garments of boots, trousers, jacket, gloves and helmet. I never knew if this, um, uh, emperor was young, uh, middle aged 50 or so. Old girl or boy? Gay, indigenous, Caucasian, Chinese, black or whatever. Didn't know who it was because I could never see the person. So the only way they could see it was actually find some time to take all those clothes off and find out what's inside. And that's the simile I have for understanding this mind. The mind is like the Emperor, but it's covered with what we call the five senses of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching. That's all we really understand about the world seeing and hearing, smelling, tasting and touching. And somehow we have to find out how to let go of these five senses so we can actually see the mind itself. See the emperor, the most important thing underneath. And that usually is the job of what we call meditation. This is actually how we find and search, you know, for the Emperor, our mind. Most of you are meditating before we started this talk. You can see when you let go of the past and the future, when you close your eyes, when you become still, you go deep inside. You may have noticed some of you close. Your eyes were closed. You weren't seeing anything. When you first close your eyes, you see blackness. But because calculus isn't moving. Nothing really going on there. Actually, the sense of site turns off. As long as those dogs stop barking because of the police with their sirens, you don't hear anything. After a while, you're sitting there and you can't hear anything. The sense of sound turns off, smell, taste turns off. If you sit long enough, you don't even feel your body. What are the five senses disappearing? And that's when you're getting closer to your mind. Which is why we meditate. To come close enough to take off all these garments. Who can actually find out what this mind is? This is actually these Oxford pictures of searching for the mind, of finding the mind, tracking the mind down until we can actually see this mind. Now, this is an important thing to do because this mind is actually the controller, the thing which keeps on telling us what to do. Criticizing us. There's a lot of the emotions are very negative emotions, as if there's some mind inside. You're always being critical, always putting you down. You do something and it doesn't work out right. You stupid mind, you stupid person. You start feeling guilty if you keep thinking negatively long enough. You start to believe that and you feel there's something wrong with you. You're guilty. You're bad. You're the worst monk who ever will live. It's the time of the Buddha. You stupid monk. Now, it's very easy to get into that, because sometimes you can notice yourself getting into negativity. Simply because all these thoughts go on in the mind and you believe them all the time. This is one of the first things you see in the mind. You don't need to believe all this stuff which goes on in the mind. It's like none of my business is like chatter. It's like static. It's like the sort of stuff you might listen to on the radio. Just stupid, ridiculous stuff. Building this retreat center over and over in the monastery. And, uh, because I have to go over there and look after these builders. They've got these radios on, and I just happened to be passing one of the the buildings that had a radio on, and they were talking about the Australian Open men's final, and I think was it Rafael Nadal won or something. And they're having a conversation that's on this radio program. But why is it that Rafael Nadal always keep putting out his pants? He said he's a great tennis player, but I think we should do something about him putting out his pants. And I think it's a wonderful thing that monks don't have to listen to this rubbish on radio all the time. What's that got to do with a tennis match? Putting people's pants or whatever? Well, I sort of see the idiocy which people listen to all the time. You can understand just how much chatter goes through, which is completely worthless. So when you understand the nature of your mind, this chatter goes on like that in your mind all the time. The stupid stuff. After a while we get to know this because we get to know our mind. Then actually we can actually see just the stupidity which goes, oh, we can just let it go. We see it. First of all, we're going to see it. First of all, once we see it's a stupid thing, we know what we're doing. It's very easy just to let it go. Oh, shut up, you stupid mind. I don't need to listen to that. So, start. You can find a little knob in the mind to sort of turn down the volume or the mute button. You can press the mute button in your mind so it gets shut up after a while, as you find that it's much nicer just to be silent inside. So you get into this mind, you start to mess around with it and you find that number one, you don't have to believe all these silly thoughts, and also that you can even have a bit of inner silence. And then you start to believe in the silence more than these ideas and thoughts which go on in the mind. Some of these thoughts you have on in their mind, just where do they come from? That's the other thing I sort of sometimes face. I thought, where did that come from? You can trace it back and know most of the thoughts I have are not my thoughts. They're just other people's thoughts. Their thoughts. With all the jokes I've had, none of them are original. As you all know that just something I heard a long time ago, you know, and many of them actually came from my father because, you know, he was a great joker. And, uh, you know, he'd always be telling jokes. And so because I heard that, because I was brought up like that, I got conditioned like that. So when I tell a joke, even if it's a bad joke, I don't really worry if people don't like it because I know it's not my fault. I blame my father. It's just conditioning, that's all. So understanding. We're understanding where all these things come from. Okay. Better to one of my my father's jokes very quick one. This is this is my father. Nothing to do with me, but it's a monk joke because he. Remember he used to come along one day and he said, uh, what fun does a monk have? What founders of mine have? The answer is none. Now, nothing to do with me that my father said that joke. I think you could get that. None. No, any or anyone. That's not true. With very good monks and very good nuns in this Buddhist society. But nevertheless, I was one of my father's jokes. And the reason I said that, because I heard it from him, I thought it was funny. So gets in your head all these little things which should come up. It's not. Does it belong to you? The wonderful thing to know in the mind that all of these things are just they just have their cause and effects. They're just passing through you. If you understand your mind like this. This is actually how we. We learn how not so much to train the mind. Because when you first start meditating, many people actually try and train the mind, make it different and see if you can sort of control this thing. Now for that. One of the nice things about Buddhism at the very beginning, it wasn't a control freak religion. It's like a compassionate let things be. Be kind. Be gentle. We never had these these, um, hierarchies or instruments of controlling people. That's one of the nice things I learned about Buddhism. You can do whatever you like. It's just about within reason, of course, but you never get excommunicated. You never get banned. I don't believe ever. Have you ever banned anybody from coming in here? So it's this nice little, gentle, accepting, embracing, sort of, uh, sort of religion. There wasn't any of this sort of controlling, especially not through fear. I never say anytime here that those people who don't join our Buddhist society are those people who don't have volunteer for the committee, because we need three new places for the committee next year. What an amazing thing to do. It's very, very good karma. And sometimes if I really was mean, I could say, if you don't join the committee before you die or you can have a terrible rebirth, things can go wrong. It's very bad karma. And give all this like fear about if you don't join the committee next year, these terrible things will happen to you. You lose all your money, you get sort of spots on your nose, your children will will be misbehaving and you have car accidents. Now that's sometimes that's what a lot of people do. No, it's actually to control people through fear, because we don't do that because there's no idea of controlling. And that's actually understanding just how this mind works. If you try and control your mind, it actually gets worse. Here's another little story. It's an embarrassing story, but I don't mind telling the embarrassing stories because, again, it's nothing to do with me. It's just conditioning, just the way things happened to be. But when I was six years as a mother, it was in Thailand. I found this beautiful monastery. I told us on retreats before, but not here. I think so anyway, but got bad memories because I am old now. I am over 50, that's all. So I was in this lovely monastery, perfect monastery up in the north of Thailand. You know, quiet, peaceful and nice support people. Didn't really bother you over there. And I was getting getting some really nice meditation, having a really sort of great time as a monk. Nothing to do. Just meditate all day. Peaceful, having a wonderful time. But I started to get restless. Now my my mistake when I started to get restless. To try and control my mind. Try to stop it. But what happened was the restlessness got more and more and more, and I found it more difficult to meditate. And the restlessness got so bad that I started thinking what I call an monkish thoughts. You know? You know what that means. No sex, old girlfriends, romance, anything. Because I wasn't born as a man. Because I keep telling people. So I started thinking, and I thought, I'm a monk. I don't want to think like that. So I tried to stop it. And every time I tried to stop it, it got worse and worse. And I was living in this monastery alone. There was no other monk to talk to. And one day it got so bad. I got so frustrated and so sort of painful trying to fight this terrible mind of mine. And I was losing it. So the only thing I thought of there was a big Buddha statue in the temple. Even I don't believe in any of the superstition. I had no other alternative. I took a bow to the Buddha statue and basically I said, help! I'd actually. An idea came into my mind. And the idea was, let's do a deal. Now, as a Westerner, that's what you do. You do deals. And the deal was this that I would meditate. I was doing breath meditation for all the day. But if I really wanted to think about, you know, unmarked his thoughts, I'd allow myself to think about anything from 3 p.m. to 4 p.m. every day. That was my monkish hour. If you like, anything goes. Anything. So I thought that was fair enough, because I thought that if I let my mind just play around for one hour the rest of the day, it would behave itself. So that's what I did. Of course, it never worked out as I expected it. My mind was still as difficult to control as ever or as think about stupid things. And by 3 p.m. I was really tired. If you fight the mind, you know, you really get really frustrated, tired. You lose a lot of energy. So I went up to my heart at 3 p.m. I had to keep the bike. And I'm very honest, Mike. If I make a promise, I usually keep it. At least I try my hardest to keep it. But 3 p.m. I went up to my heart, then against the wall with my feet. I was tired and I said, okay, whatever you want to think of mine now sex, romance, girls, anything, whatever you want, think about it. For the next 60 minutes. My mind watched every breath without losing one. It was so easy to meditate and I learned an incredible, important lesson from that experience. When you try and control your mind, then it goes crazy. When you let it go and let it be when your friends to it, then it behaves. The psychology of the mind. And this is actually how we understand how this mind works. If the problem is we try and control things too much, especially inside of ourselves. We don't train the mind. We actually let we ride it. It's actually I think that's the seventh of the. There are 6 or 7. I don't know of the Oxford pictures. We ride our mind. We run whether we allow it to go. The wonderful thing is when you make peace with your mind, when you're kind to the mind, all the problems tend to disappear. Which is why so often when people come with problems, they say, well, just allow that problem to be. And just on last Tuesday night, I gave a talk at Armadale group talking about depression because somebody asked that question. So one of the great things to do with depression is milk it for all it's worth, because, you know, you get many benefits when you're depressed. You don't have to go to work in the morning, but sleep in. Isn't it wonderful? All the rest of the house are going out to work and rushing around, getting dressed and getting their breakfast, and you can sleep and have a nice time because you're depressed. And we get a lot of sympathy from other people because you're depressed, poor thing. Never mind. Enjoy as much as you can. What I was saying there was actually counterintuitive because we were fighting the question we don't want to be depressed. I hate to be. I hate being depressed, seeing the benefits in these things, the positive side of these things. This is not the whole story. So don't go criticizing. Someone was being depressed. This was not just the whole answer, not even a fraction of the answer. There's many more things you should do. So this was just don't take it out of context, please. But one thing which is doing is saying, whenever you get any problem in life, instead of just rejecting it out of hand, maybe sort of seeing some positive part of it, and maybe when you see some positive part about the situations in life, which other times would be intolerable to seeing the positive, maybe just accept it a little bit and let it be. The wonderful thing happens when you start fighting things, and even when you start fighting depression, when you don't fight it, when you embrace it, it tends to weaken and loosen and disappear. Because as I meditate, I know my mind how the mind works. Depression. One of the understandings of depression is the low, low, low energy mind. Got so little energy that what you taste and see, bright colors, you can't see them. They're just washed out. Everything is like dull. Because the energy mind hasn't got any energy. And I know that nature of the mind. How it works is when you fight, when you do things, when you fight, you try and control. You waste energy. All the energy of the mind, the little energy you've got, you're wasting it, fighting it instead of actually wasting energy. Got to conserve energy. If you're depressed, conserve it by not fighting. Being still. Being kind. Embracing. Just letting things be. Because as my master said, attention. The Buddha said this, and I know this person experienced thousands of times. You don't have an energy in your mind. Be still. Don't do anything. And the energy starts to build up. That's why meditation you tell people, don't control the man, don't fight the mind. Just be still as peaceful as you possibly can and energy start to rise in your mind. It's beautiful mental energy. I know that so well. It's pretty easy to understand how meditation can overcome low energy states like depression, and even anger comes from low energy states as well, because sometimes we're grumpy. Sometimes you have to do so much in life, and people are never sort of appreciative of you. And you work so hard and you're just doing so much more than you're supposed to do for other people. And after a while, they don't appreciate you and you work so hard on life is so unfair. And why me and RA? And from that, the next person. Just one more thing. One more thing. And that's it. I'm going to give it to you. This is what happens. You're so tired and so sort of worn out, so battered and bruised by struggling in life. The next person says anything. You shout at them, you get angry at them. So much anger is just the result of a very tired, worn out, brittle mind. And so will you actually get some energy inside of your mind? Very easy. Just don't get angry anymore. Why get angry? Call me a pig. I just go oink, oink or whatever else you want to call me. So when you've got lots of energy, you'd be impossible to make angry. This is actually why sometimes we test out monks who think they've enlightened or got good meditation by deliberately trying to get them angry. This is just one of the tricks of the trade, you know? And I'm just trying to say you think you're somewhat as fat as you can be. Sort of enlightened. Just testing me about, you see. Did you get angry? Upset? Are these okay? Because if you're having a good time, a good. But I didn't get you angry. You may have noticed that, though. When you're low energy, you're sick. I had a hard day at work. Anything can sort of set you off. Can you notice a connection there? So what? Do you understand how this mind works? You can understand how to regenerate your energies. So you're not a person who gets angry at life and don't get negative at life. And all these other negative emotions which also come from like a weak, worn out mind like grief. So the last thing I want the person I love the most. They're gone. But you know, if you've got a lot of strength inside of a lot of energy and happiness in life, just one person, there's so many other people in life, so you don't need to worry about one person. I actually made this joke that I have a terrible Mike that was just going to a house for the dinner, and, uh, one person had a cancer telling me how expensive their treatment was, $10,000 or something to get some treatment. And I told him, you know, come on, be sort of, uh, reasonable. A coffin cost much less than $10,000. I got a very morbid sense of humor. So they took it. Well, they thought it was funny, thank goodness. Otherwise they would complain. But there they complain, I don't care. Well, I do care. But, you know, I just, I just in one ear, out the other because it's nothing to do with me. I just the way I was brought up. So that way you don't get upset with people criticize you. You don't get upset about grief, you don't worry so much, but you got lots of energy. Have you ever noticed just how the negative emotions just can't come up? You understand how this mind works. When you understand how this mind works, you get a lot of freedom. You don't fight. You don't have to be with it. Embrace it. Let things be. Basically love things. You really understand the nature of the mind. You understand the really deepest of truths. Now what love is, though most important, one of the most important emotions. I always say peace is much higher than love, but let's get to that later on. Are the most important emotions the one which people really sort of respect as a spiritual thing now is love. No matter what religion you are, you know, like love is something which is very high, respected. And you feel that this is this is important, this is real. This is close to the ultimate meaning of life. What is it? So here you understand the different types of love. Now you've got the love of just, you know, boy meeting girl and falling in love. And they say, ah, you know, you're my, my soulmate. The most important person in the whole world. For me, my whole life is just devoted to your happiness. That's the only thing I ever want in your life for you to be happy. My happiness is nothing. I just want to serve you. Does it last, though? Does it? Now that's like the romantic. But then, actually, you do get the selfless love. That's like how even the Buddha called out his simile for selfless love. Like a mother loves her child. Now, the mother would do anything for his child, even sometimes sacrifice herself for her child. And if not just human beings, you see, like the whales, you know, these terrible Japanese whalers who actually go after the calf because they know the mother would come afterwards to protect. Even though the mother's going to sacrifice her life. Do anything for a child. Let's see how selfless a selfless love you really do does not think of yourself. Think of the other person. And I've got this. This wonderful test. If you think that your love to your partner. Is it romantic love or is it selfless love in your partnership? In your relationship? Is it really about you? Was it really about them? This is the acid test. Imagine. Imagine your partner. They're not here this evening. They're at home. So you just come here by yourself. This is a person whose happiness is most important to you. You go home and find a little note on the door of your house or apartment from your partner, telling you they've run away with your best friend to Broome for a dirty weekend. As we used to say in the old days. How would you feel if that was your partner? How would you feel? That's your partner. You devoted your life to it and they've done that to you. They've run away with your best friend to a nice sort of weekend together in some sort of love shack in Broome. How would you feel? If, if if you thought, wow, I'm so ecstatic that my partner is having a wonderful, joyful weekend that they're even happier with my best friend than me. Of course, because their happiness is the most important thing in the world for me. I'm just so overjoyed. They're having a happy weekend. Could you do that? No no no no. So it's not selfless love, is it? Be honest about it. But real life is that selfless love. Just want other people to be happy and. Well, you're not controlling. It's not what I want. That's what I can give. How I can serve, how I can help, not what I need. That type of love is amazing. Sort of love. It's like a a letting go of that. Not about me. About all of us. But I'm just one person, but not the most important. That type of love is where you start to disappear. Now really, you do disappear. It's not what you want anymore. And that type of love again doesn't control. Those of you who are in relationships which are very controlling, it's very difficult. And it's it's not fun. It's not pure. There's something very lacking there, as you all know, because control is actually the opposite of love. Control is, you know, I just don't trust you. So I'm going to make sure I'm going to put the CCTV camera in a pie following you to work. That's of course, that's not love. That's not true. That's actually controlling. And you know that that's is something wrong with the relationship there when that sort of thing happens. But actually one of the, the most I may be talking about this a few days ago because actually one of our monks, you know, he did the stress test and his heart stopped for a minute. So he has got a problem with his bowel and said, as I found out what I asked him, yeah. Did you have a out of the body experience? That's so disappointing. He never had any other body experience at all. So talking about out of the body experiences and there's one of the members here is a long time ago. And he could actually leave his body because he was like a meditator for a long time back, and he could actually leave his body at will. And he was an air conditioning engineer. He got a contract up in Darwin for about 2 or 3 weeks, and his wife lived here in Perth. So it actually when he was up in Darwin, you know, after work, he would actually leave his body, you know, astral travel to Perth to check out, check up on his wife. That's really a control freak. And amazing thing was so his wife, because I knew his wife and talked to her and she said, you know, she could feel him when he was around. It wasn't playing around. He'd actually come to Perth. He'd say, you know, whatever his name was, get back to Darwin. I'm a good wife, don't have to worry about me. But that's, you know, some husbands are like that. If they could, they would. Most people can't say, okay. But anyhow. That's not what real love is. So we actually understand the mind. Do you understand actually, what the purest and most beautiful love is? To accept a person, no matter who they are, what they do. We call it the unconditional love. The door of my heart is open to you no matter who you are, no matter what you do. And that's a beautiful love. Ask no questions, demands nothing. Complete free and let him go. The door of my heart is open to you. No matter what you ever do. And actually, that was taught to me by my father. He didn't just tell jokes. Some of the stuff he did was just amazing, and that taught me what love really meant. Now you can see here this is something very deep, the nature of your mind. But you can do that not just to people. You do it to yourself. Obviously there was actually a big thing, a deep thing, a time of your life. And it has to happen to each one of you sooner or later, sooner, much better. Sit down by yourself. You say that to yourself with meaning. Whoever I am, especially whatever I've done in life. Because we're not saints. We've all done stupid things. Hurtful things. Sometimes, whoever I am, whatever I've done, the door of my own heart is open to me unconditionally. Coming. Beautiful feeling is as if as part of you which has been outside the part which is not very proud of the part which you know you'd rather not anyone see. It's like you open the door and you allow that part of you to come in. You're not that bad after you allow it. There's a huge amount of peace and a sense of oneness and unity, not a divide itself between the good part of yourself and the part you'd rather forget about at all. My heart's home to me completely. Let me go further than to lie. The cancers, the economic downturn, disappointments and stupid jokes you hear every Friday night. The door of my heart is open to everything. That's when you're really getting to understand about what this mind is and how it works. You're not sort of training the mind. You're riding. You're understanding. You're loving the mind. When you actually love this mind. This is when certain things disappear. They say the ox disappears next. Just leaving you. That ox was really disappearing. Is this control, this stubbornness of you, this huge thing which causes all the problem of the ox in your mind, the stubbornness which always wants to control and fight and get its own way. When that disappears, when you're craving and wanting and desires and all this stuff sort of start to lessen, become a much easier person to live with this. All this from what I want, what I need, what I need this, I don't want that. That's the stuff which causes all of the the business in the mind. What do you want anyway? What anybody really wants is just a bit of peace and a bit of love. That's all. That what? We just go into crazy ways of trying to get that. Instead we just. How about loving oneself? How about being at peace with oneself? You don't need any money to find peace. You don't need other people to find love inside you already, so you can't find a partner inside. At least you can love yourself. That's why, as a monk, I've spent a lot of time in solitude. But I'm never lonely. But wherever I go, I always have my best friend with me. Me? I can get away from other people, but I can never get away from myself. And I really mean this. You know, as a monk living in solitude, you learn how to accept yourself, be kind to yourself, and love yourself. The door of my heart is open to me. So to do that, I do this. Wake up in the morning. Who's the first person you see when you wake up? Not your partner. You. I always say in the morning. Good morning. Me. Here I am again. Have a great day. Why not? It's not a stupid thing to do. It actually works. But say good morning to yourself. Have a great day. Me? Here I am again. The last person I see before I go to sleep at night. Me again? Okay. We've had a great day tonight together. See you tomorrow morning. Have a lovely. Now I do that because, like, I love me, I've got that. I've got to stick with me. I've stuck with me. You can get divorced, you know, these days. But I don't know how you can get rid of yourself. No lawyers ever figured that one out yet. But give them time. So you could actually learn how to be except yourself. So that when you learn how to be love all this, a lot of you disappears a negative part of this, and then you really go deep, go so that even you disappear. Because a lot of love is selfless. You go to like the emptiness of the mind when everything becomes so peaceful. Isn't that nice? It's actually the love leads to the sense of peace, which leads to stillness. That's why I say the peace is higher than love is the light. Love is the path of peace. It settles all the business. It accepts people, accepts life. Who makes peace with him? We've got a choice. Make love or make war. And I don't mean sort of with armies. I mean with life. We make war. We get what Mr. Bush called collateral damage, headaches, migraines, cancers, heart disease, loneliness, anger. There's collateral damage of making war with life, especially making war with ourselves. We can make peace. So when we make love, sorry, then we have peace. We accept the differences in people. We accept the divergences of religions and ideas. It cares about what you believe in. We can still be friends. I don't care if you're a muslim or Christian or Buddhist. Mahayana, Hinayana. Small vehicle, middle vehicle or no vehicle. Bicycle or whoever. You know you can still love a person. And what's better? Why not? You see that that type of love that sort of completely transcends all the different dogmas and ideas and theories. When people think too much, that's when they argue and people are more still. That's when they come together in peace. Peace is what unites. So peace. Love leads to this beautiful. Peace is stillness outside of the inside. That's actually the eighth of the night. Any other standard source of text? You know what the source of things means. That's called dumb. Sometimes I don't know if you know what Dharma means is called Dharma loka. We keep on talking about the dumber. But dumber means the source of things. That's where everything comes from. Not like a god, but just the koi to understand how things work. That's dumb. So if you want to know what dumb is, what of it? Whatever you're experiencing now, going back to where it comes from. The source of this is called Dharma like. Good example. I used to watch these movies when I was a kid, and in these cinemas in London, people would always be smoking when they smoked. You'd see the whole auditorium was filled with smoke. You see, this cone of light on the screen was a movie and his cone of light. I would actually trace it back, look back, and I'd see the cone of light was originating from a little box in the back of the movie theater. Little guy was sitting there by this machine. It was just plastic, just with the light shining through it. When I actually saw that, it went to its source. I never got scared when the monster came on. I know it was plastic and like, that's what it was. But when I understood this, I understood what was going on. And so I didn't get sort of so, so caught up with the movie. When you understand the source of things. So we don't get so caught up with what happens in life, how you get the sad things happening on the movie. It's just like life going on. It's no big deal. So, you know, you sort of get cancer, no big deal. It's just a body doing its thing, just like happening. So you win $30 million in a lottery. It's just no big deal. Just more stuff. Just to make sure you remember the donation box in the back of the. I had a really bad. What happened? No, it's not a donation box. We don't have donation boxes in Buddhist temples. We have letting go boxes. And then the last of those. Last of those ox herding pictures. Having understood all of this yourself, having no understand what peace and love is. And of course, you just come back and share it with your friends, you know. No, you don't have to be a monk to be a teacher, a teacher. It is someone who shares their peace and their love with other people. The nice thing about that last I always remember that last photo is just a guy with just a a guy or a girl. Doesn't really matter just with a pole with his belongings on his back. Just a little bag. One of the signs of sort of getting there in the end is like being simple. You don't need that much to be happy. What you really need is a bit of peace, a beautiful idea of what love is. That's all you really need. That's the only possessions you really need. Wisdom, peace and love. So if you have those things in your heart and you're the richest person in the whole of the world, and if you have peace and love and a sense of wisdom in your heart, then there is no such thing as depression or economic downturn. That's just out there in the world. Inside, you're always secure, safe, free at last. So in this economic turbulent times, please understand what's most important if in your mind. And then whatever happens in the world, you'll be free, you'll be peaceful, you'll be happy. And that's something the economy can never take away from me. The ten ox herding pictures on this. This celebration of the year of the ox. So may your ox of a mind be understood. Be free, be liberated so you too can be an enlightened being. In this year of the art. Thank you for listening.