Helping

Heal The World

Make It A Better Place

For You And For Me And The Entire Human Race

There Are People Dying

If You Care Enough For The Living

Make A Better Place For You And For Me

It is AS IT IS!

Open your heart and open your mind,
Abiding in that Place,
Just a feeling of peace and calm, cool and unshakable.
Just a flowing of peace and calm, cool and unshakable.

Dhamma eyes are open, seeing it is just it is.
Coming and going, staying and leaving, rising and passing.

Nothing to hold on, nothing to push away.
No worry. Doing nothing.
Perfect peace and complete freedom.

YOU! Yes You!!

You are very important!

Our lives may be the only Dhamma some people will ever read.

Each action and decision brings forth influence, be it influencing people to wholesomeness or to further delusion. Let us Be wise and Mindful brothers and sisters, in living our lives and making moment to moment decisions!

We ourselves are the letters of recommendation or testimonials,written on our hearts, thoughts, speech and actions, known and read by everybody. You show that you are a living example of the Dhamma, a disciple of the Buddha, the result of our training in the Noble 8 Fold Path, written not with ink but with Metta-Karuna/ Loving Kindness and Compassion, not on tablets of stone or sheets of Ola leaves but on every act of our hearts.

Possessed

YOU ARE NOT YOUR MIND: The Greatest Obstacle to Enlightenment

Question: Enlightenment - what is that?

I love the Buddha's simple definition of enlightenment as a state where there is "the end of suffering." There is nothing superhuman in that, is there? It only tells you what enlightenment is not: no suffering .

He uses a negative definition so that the mind cannot make it into something to believe in or into a superhuman accomplishment, a goal that is impossible for you to attain. Despite this precaution, many Buddhists still believe that enlightenment is for the FEW, not for them, at least not in this lifetime .

Question: What is the greatest obstacle to experiencing this reality?

Identification with your mind, which causes thought to become compulsive. Not to be able to stop thinking is a dreadful affliction, but we don't realize this because almost everybody is suffering from it, so it is considered "normal". This incessant mental noise prevents you from finding that realm of inner stillness. It also creates a false mind-made self that casts a shadow of fear and suffering.

Thinking has become a disease. Disease happens when things get out of balance. For example, there is nothing wrong with cells dividing and multiplying in the body, but when this process continues in disregard of the total organism, cells proliferate and we have disease.

Note: The mind is a superb instrument if used rightly. Used wrongly, however, it becomes very destructive. To put it more accurately, it is not so much that you use your mind wrongly - you usually don't use it at all. It uses you.

This is the disease.

You believe that you are your mind. This is the delusion. The instrument has taken you over.

Question:I don't quite agree. It is true that I do a lot of aimless thinking, like most people, but I can still choose to use my mind to get and accomplish things, and I do that all the time.

Just because you can solve a crossword puzzle or build an atom bomb doesn't mean that you use your mind. Just as dogs love to chew bones, the mind loves to get its teeth into problems. That's why it does crossword puzzles and builds atom bombs. You have no interest in either. Let me ask you this: can you be free of your mind whenever you want to? Have you found the "off" button?

You mean stop thinking altogether? No, I can't, except maybe for a moment or two.

Then the mind is using you. You are unconsciously identified with it, so you don't even know that you are its slave. It's almost as if you were possessed without knowing it, and so you take the possessing entity to be yourself.

The beginning of freedom is the realization that you are not this possessing entity - the thinker.

Knowing this enables you to observe the entity. The moment you start watching the thinker, a higher level of consciousness becomes activated . You then begin to realize that there is a vast realm of intelligence beyond thought, that thought is only a tiny aspect of that intelligence. You also realize that all the things that truly matter - beauty, love, creativity, joy, inner peace - arise from beyond the mind.

You begin to awaken.

Dyed

The word for “Passion” in Pali is ‘Raga’ and this word evolved from a root word which means “to dye”.

The semantics in place here is fascinating for when one is caught in the web of passion; one’s mind is literally DYED by all the colours of the emotions. Nothing escapes, as all facets of our lives become permeated by this pursuit of sensual pleasure.

Similarly it is not easy to be freed of a dye, for once stained, it is a most difficult task for the mind to be liberated, just imagine how difficult it is to wash off the ink on our shirts stained by that leaked from a ball pen.

I am reminded of an incident more than a decade ago. I was in Melbourne with my wife, and we walked into a pub one Friday evening [now before you stone me, please let me remind you that in Aussie culture, just about everybody walks into a pub on Friday evening!!!]. So there was the usual loud music, smoky air and girls were dancing on the table tops and bar counter. And they were stark naked! Yup, naked as newborn babies. We finished our drinks and left but the memory of that evening is still DYED into my mind.

I have since then stopped walking into pubs and am a teetotaler.

The point is the power of such emotions, and the word ‘Raga’ proves the point eminently. It is difficult to calm our minds, even more so to make it sharp and focused like a straight arrow. Hindrances arise out of our own making, we plant the seeds, and we reap the fruit. With all the distractions, advertisements, temptations of modern life, we must make great effort before we can succeed. To walk away from the mindless pursuit of MORE and MORE material things, and sensual pleasures is already to push oneself against the tide of modern society. To have a mind state of CONTENTMENT is almost certain to invite chidings and laughter from colleagues and friends; all on a lemming like march to consumer-dom. And frustration.

Once placed in isolation in the cool of a darkened room, our minds is seen to struggle and scamper about, to the safe resort of past pleasant memories, or to fantasies of even more pleasures in an imagined future. Or it relieves the nightmares of past horrors or whimper in fears of anticipated terrors. It simply refuses to be in the present.

This is mainly due to the conditioning of our minds. Even in our daily working lives, we live either in the past or the future. We are hardly in the moment and even if we are for a brief moment doing so, we quickly drift mindlessly away… again.

Another reason is that our ‘SELF’ is a mental construct, and this delusion can only succeed if we constantly give it an IDENTITY; and this “IDENTITY” is the memories of the past and the anticipation of what will happen to this “SELF”. In the present moment, in just THIS moment, there is just what is happening; breathing, thinking, emotions, etc…. it just is. We are at every moment holding onto anything and everything as “I”, “My” or “Mine”, or rejecting it, or even hating it. At every moment we reinforce this “I”, grabbing onto more and demanding more. As a result we suffer more.

To be able to let go is not easy, for one, our minds are so stained by much greed, our views are distorted and our efforts are geared for single minded pursuits of temporary pleasures. Hence to ‘let go’ goes against every grain of our modern 21^st century fibre. Thus for the one who is determined to walk this path, this person must have seen the Pain, Dissatisfaction and Sufferings of life. It is only with this, that the Herculean effort to re-condition his/her mind can be jumpstarted.

Do you see that First Noble Truth?

Then you may want to start letting go. Remember that DYES stick because of the bond between the DYE and the Fabric; once there is NO BOND, it goes away naturally.

That bond, that superglue, is our GREED.

Watch but not react

Our practice and mental cultivation in this life is to observe the way things are: suffering and the arising of suffering.

We should understand and acknowledge what suffering is, not just react to it.

In the second Noble Truth lies the insight to let go of desire.

The third Noble Truth is the realization of cessation. Cessation doesn't mean annihilation. When we let go of desire, it ceases. That's just Dhamma, the way of things. All conditions are impermanent, so whatever comes into being, falls away.

The focus of the third Noble truth is to realize the cessation of things. This is quite subtle and if we don't set our minds on practising for that realization, then we miss it all the time . Who notices how things end or cease?

We're much more interested in the arising conditions of life. Like sexual activities, delicious flavours and beautiful sights. We want pleasurable experience, an exciting lifetime with romantic relationships and adventures. So the arising of desire is what we tend to become dazzled and fascinated with.

But we can't stay fascinated forever, can we? We can only stay that way for a while: it reaches its peak and then we seek another exciting object to follow. This is what samsara is about. The endless seeking of some kind of new, absorbing condition to become . And then we get bored, disillusioned, depressed and uncertain.

Nobody wants to be bored. The thing is, when we live a life of just one exciting adventure after another, we get incredibly bored. We get bored with excitement too!

What was exciting yesterday is boring today, so we have to think of something even more exciting than that.

Understand and acknowledge that freedom is not from external but turning within the Mind itself. This is where we need to see what grasping is and letting go, and the cessation that follows.

But it's not a rejection of anything. It's a realization, where desire based on ignorance, is let go of.

We can actually see desire, then it ceases and there is the realization of cessation of desire - when there is no more desire, what is our mind like? This we have to really observe.

Mindfulness is the way to the deathless. We sit and watch, being able to observe desire - not suppressing or trying to get rid of it, not following it blindly. We turn towards that cool, calm position knowing and seeing, witnessing and recognizing the way things are.