The Buddhist Hour Radio Broadcast Archives
Buddhist
Hour
Script No. 369
Radio Broadcast live on Hillside 88.0
FM
for Sunday 20 February 2005CE
2547 Buddhist
Era
'Persistence and Restraint', continued, and
'Meditation on Impermanence'
We continue now with the next part in our series of
transcribed Buddha Dhamma talks by John D. Hughes during a five day
Bhavana course in June 1988 at the Buddhist Discussion Centre (Upwey)
Ltd.
The talk is entitled ‘Persistence and Constraint’
which we read in part last week. This will be followed by the second
part of the talk titled ‘Meditation on Impermanence.’
The authors of today's script apologise for any errors or
misunderstandings that may have occurred in the process of
transcribing and editing the talks from the original audio tape
recording.
If you tuned into the Buddhist Hour last week,
Sunday 13 February, you may recall the talk ended in the following
way:
Projects should be formulated for throwing all possible
light on the relative modifiability of human traits and abilities. It
should be noted that the observed consistency or apparent
non-modifiability of a trait does not prove actual non-modifiability.
Lack of knowledge concerning effective training methods or static
environmental conditions may result in apparent non- modifiability of
traits at a given time in a specific culture.
However for
purposes of prediction this distinction is unimportant until such
time as discovery of better training methods or social change result
in the possibility of modification of a particular trait.
What
that means is there are, you are in a culture. It's an Australian
culture, which means it's a multicultural culture. You are in a post
industrial society, you are not in a peasant agrarian society and you
have got an enormous amount of cultural artifacts behind you. Some of
which are of benefit to you and some of which are a great hindrance
to you.
We now continue on from last week.
Some of your
culture you have acquired is a great hindrance to you, and until you
can discriminate, until you can classify what your culture is and you
know what parts of your culture are a hindrance and what parts of
your culture are of benefit to you you don't know which part to
discard. And it may be that under the present conditions in 1988 the
environment is not suitable for you to discard certain of your bad
cultural habits.
So, for example this culture here in this
room is very suitable for modification of certain things but it's
totally unsuitable for modification of other things. The reason for
that is, for example, we endeavor to keep a fairly constant
temperature here, so it's not too hot and it's not too cold. We
endeavor to keep, you know, the air fresh. I open and shut the
windows. We endeavor to keep you well fed. You know, well, drink
supply. We endeavor to see if you're too tired, I tell you to go and
rest. If you're too irritable I take you for a walk in the garden.
But in certain situations, whether you're hungry or thirsty
or tired or whatever, you get sometimes in an event where you must
perform or fail. And it's not always possible to modify the
environment if you want to go into certain areas. So you've got to
persist, have that word in your, you've got to have a mind that you
can switch on, persist. You've got to have a mind that will exercise
restraint, stop. And those minds have to be appropriate to the
factors of what you are trying to do.
So because of the length
of sitting the quality of persistence is necessary. Because of the
need to be in certain jhanas the need is to constrain the mind inside
the body. So Aaron, for example, can keep his mind inside his body
for reasonable amounts of time now. Whereas for the first weeks or
couple of weeks or whatever it was, I lost track of the time, his
mind was out all over the place.
So you've got to, you've got
to, when you write a plan of what you want to do you've got to know
what traits and abilities are needed for that plan. If you haven't
got the traits and abilities needed then it's no good saying, "I'll
do that plan tomorrow", because your learning curve time might
be a month or whatever long that takes. So it's no good saying "I'll
go outside the door now and get a suntan", because the
environment is it's night, there's no sun. So until you see that your
environment has a ... the biggest effect on people, believe it or
not, is the weather. Because if you went outside and it was snowing
you can't operate, if you go outside and it's too hot you can't
operate. You forget about simple things like that.
Also in
meditation if the light is too bright it breaks your mind. You never
meditate in very powerful direct sunlight because the light actually
breaks your mind. It's some phenomena. Now, therefore you've got to
become realistic and you can't become realistic until you've got the
traits and abilities that know what the word realistic means.
Realistic means you can do what you want to do. That’s realism.
So although some of you couldn't read French ... you can,
can't you?.. you can... some of these can't read French, you two can,
I can. But it's not unrealistic to say I'll learn to be able to read
French. But it is unrealistic to say I will learn to read French by
tomorrow morning. Now just because you can't do something now it
doesn't mean... Leanne speaks Japanese .. it's (un)realistic to say
by tomorrow morning I'll be as fluent in Japanese as Leanne.
So
you see, when you set your goals you can set anything you like and it
is attainable in other words, it's no good saying, "Oh well, I
won't go to France, I can't speak French, I won't go to Japan".
Well, one of you could take Monty with you or Leanne with you ,or you
could hire an interpreter. Or you could learn French or Japanese. Now
if you miss out on one skill or trait or ability your project or your
goal will not be achievable.
For example, if you thought "I'll
go to Japan", and you get a name, and "I'll ask him to give
me $20,000 to build me a meditation hall", and when you get
there there is no interpreter, he doesn't speak English and you've
got one day before your visa expires, that's it. You should have
planned, you should have seen that, foreseen that event. Now that's a
very, very simple example.
In your planning, if you plan
correctly you can't fail, it's impossible to fail. The only thing
that will stop you is you drop dead. So correct planning, planning
isn't difficult as long as you've got persistence and start to
examine the possibilities. So that's the first factor and knowing how
long it takes to modify. If you want to modify your speech it might
take a year, say you learn to speak French or Japanese for example,
or even if you could learn to speak English.. that may take some of
you.... too hard.
I think you might take some years to be
fluent in English because you are under the delusion that you are
already.
Now the next one is you get to the development of
rational ideas. The criteria that you operate on planning is you must
be rational. Now if you, your ego doesn't like that, your ego,
remember, is totally absolutely unreal and irrational. Don't involve
your ego in planning because it's irrational. You know you say to
your ego "what's two and two?" and your ego says "how
much would you like it to be?". Your ego is irrational, it's got
no intelligence. So you've got to be rational. You need rationality.
So the point that attempts, attempts to, there's been major
attempts in psychology to rationally formulate psychological systems.
Now apart from one work which is used internationally by
psychologists it's like a check list. They give you cards with
certain key questions and then it's like an interactive tree network
and depending on the question they select the next question. They run
through a program and the end of that is they have diagnosed what
your psychological traits are.
But the problem with that is to
get the answer, the correct answer from the person. So there's been
many, many efforts to make rational equations if you like in
psychology and the basic thing is, although a lot of work's been done
on it on computers, the success rate is not perfect. So in some areas
when you come to make some assumptions about yourself even with the
best intention to be rational you'll have to accept that what you're
putting down is, at the best, an educated guess.
So what
you've got to do is develop a method, a rational method, of
interviewing yourself when you're planning. So you see it's alright
to write a marvelous plan that would work for some theoretical
person. But then when you've written that great plan call for
applicants, and you've only got one applicant, yourself. And say now
on this plan you get up at 4.00am every morning. "How do you
feel about that Mr. Hughes?' and I say "I wouldn't have that in
a fit" and I walk away. And of course I don't write plans which
involves me getting up at 4.00 in the morning. I have to write plans
that involve me going to bed at 4.00 in the morning. I'm quite
comfortable with those aren't I, Jo? But Melva, if Melva tried to
work my hours, she'd... you wouldn't write your plans like I write my
plans. See Melva gets up at at the crack of dawn by inclination. What
time do you love to get up at?
The student answered:
6.00.
Well that's the times when the sparrows wake up, twitter
and then fart. That's sparrow fart Leila. Well if she gets up to hear
the sparrow farts, if there's one thing I can't stand. If there's
one, there are people, they're not insane, there are people in the
world like Melva who love to get up early in the morning but they
burn out at night. Who likes to get up at 6.00 in the morning? You
do? All right. June do you like to get up early in the morning?
You're sane, join me. You're one of my mob.
Look, I reckon the
world, at midnight the good world starts because all the people who
get up at 6.00 in the morning have gone to bed. At 1.00 the world's
getting better and better because the people who get up at 7.00 in
the morning have gone to bed. By 2.00 the world's perfect and do you
want to hear a figure June? Five percent of Victorians get up after
9.00 and I have days when I'm in that top five percent. To me they're
the top five percent. To the sparrow farters they're the bottom five
percent. It depends on your perception.
Alright so you've got
to be realistic. If you write a plan and it's detailed enough you'll
obviously put what times you're going to do it on. You've got to put
on what times, because a planner means I'll be there at, you know
twenty past ten, or, a weekly planner which you should all do every
week for the rest of your life. You should plan your work, you should
plan your study, you should plan your sleep and you should plan your
pleasure. You must have high grade pleasure. If you don't have high
grade pleasure you'll go into a dried prune and one of the things
that most of you don't know, you don't know how to have high grade
pleasure.
Michael and June show symptoms occasionally of
getting into high grade pleasure. And apart from me I think that's
it. Tell me your version of high grade pleasure and I'm not going to
have it's getting up at 6.00 in the morning. That's work.
This
concludes the talk “Persistence and Restraint.”
We
now continue with the next talk in the series, which is entitled
“Meditation on Impermanence”.
Jocelyn, this is
called Samsara, keynote word SAMSARA. The world. Now there is two
worlds, your personal self-habit, which arises as the result of your
wholesome and unwholesome kammas, which is intentional actions in
past lives - and that's why our lives are different. Each of you are
different. Now, the difference is so startling when you understand,
all this life you have never had the same combinations and
permutations. Ever.
So every split second of your life you've
been in a, an unstable flux which is your own Samsara. If you ever
think, if your ego mind ever over talks and says "I've felt like
this before "IT IS WRONG! You have never, if you only knew at
the fine level, you have never experienced this moment and that's one
of the beautiful things about being bright, because you can never be
born because of the combinations and permutations. So I get into an
event, the event changes, I don't have a mind that says "here I
go again" once around the gas works, twice around the gas
works.
Everything is in absolute startling fresh, so the end
of boredom comes when you understand this. If you have, as you all
have had, the ego saying to you "Oh I've been there, I've done
that, Oh boring, boring, boring", that is an example of the ego
unreal because in fact, it is impossible for you to recreate the
combinations of this. There are 108 types of feeling, ranging from
pleasant to unpleasant, this is just one classification.
In
another classification there is 108,000. There are 121 types of
consciousness, there is an infinite - or not for you though, there is
a vast number of sanna perceptions, future imaginings, remember sanna
is future imaginings and past memory. And the sankharas you've
churned through this life you couldn't even measure. If you take...
your body of course is in flux, never the same for even a second, the
body you walked in with here tonight is different to the body you've
got now.
Now, you can never ever in this life have the same
packet of five groups. Impossible, CAN NOT DO! You can't make a
single thing on your body permanent, or your feelings, or your
consciousness, or your sannas or sankharas... you can't make anything
permanent. Even your sanna, your memory, normally when you remember
what happened half an hour ago, if you can remember that far back,
you saw it with partially ego cloud, you misunderstood it, and that's
why when you play the tape through a second time you seem to pick up
something different from it. If you play it through a third time, it
would be different. It's you are changing, you've forgotten one
thing, you are changing. You are impermanent, dukkha and anatta.
You're in a .. it's not just the outside world that's changing,
you're changing, you're changing.
But, you change in a
manner, driven by results of your wholesome and unwholesome kamma,
which was made in ignorance. And you change in ways you don't want to
change in. Minnie doesn't want to be minus a sense of humour. Minnie
was feeling despair earlier, she didn't want it but she created the
kamma in the past to bring this about.
Now, if you plan, and
you persist, and you exercise constraint you'll never generate kammic
packets that you don't want. Now your plan is like this, it's for
this life, it's for next life, it's for the one after, the one after
that and the one after that. For as many lives as you have to come,
you lay down the plans in this life.
Therefore, your plans
have always got to include one other element that you've never
thought about. They must be growth facilitating for you. It's quite
easy to draw up a valid plan and the result is you become a narrow
minded parochial if you like. But if you are born in a different
country next life, the very style that you developed becomes a
cultural mismatch. You are already showing traces of cultural
mismatch from your past lives, because you are in 1988 in a post
industrial society in Australia.
One of the things that the
surveys show, and they have done many of these, is that Australians
as a group of people, and we are talking about a hundred different
nationalities, remember 3 million of them weren't born in Australia,
feel alien in their own country which is Australia.
Now you'd
say, "Oh well, if someone was born in Germany they came to live
in Australia ten, fifteen years, I can imagine they'd be alien".
But Australian's themselves, native born Australians, are feeling
their own culture is alien. They feel like a stranger to the culture
of Australia, it's merely that you've vagued off for years. You only
sampled a small amount of culture and that changed.
At this
point in the teaching, the recording was paused and the students
listened to the radio. During this time the radio was tuned from one
program and station to the next at short intervals. Following this
example the Teacher then explained to the students what was happening
to their minds.
So you see there's many, many cultural
artifacts available and obviously what you do you have to make
choices between what you want to do. Now in that case, you didn't
have a choice because the, the things were just switched from one
tune to another, one message to another. Now that programming, every
single thing you heard there, if you understood it, there was a
response on your mind and you made kamma, either, I want to hear more
of that, I want to hear less of that, I never want to hear that
again, or any sort of signal that came up on your mind.
The
teacher explained that when, for example, you listen to the radio if
it has a powerful, alluring affect on your mind because of powerful
strong kammic connections in the past, you'll find it very difficult
to resist hanging on and being unable to change from one station to
another. So if you are planning and something came onto the radio,
you might say, "Gee I like that", and you might just sit
there listening to it. And you would find it very difficult to turn
it off if it had strong kammic links with you. Whereas, on the other
hand if it was a part of your culture you wanted to lose you'd find
it easy to turn off.
So just notice that when you start to
alter your behavior, or alter your, or build abilities, you can't
rely on Samsara not coming along to interrupt you, because Samsara
came along to interrupt you by bringing you here. The fact you're
here was an interruption of your pre-planned vice or stupidity or
dumbness. Samsara brought you here, Samsara can sweep you away from
here.
But my advice is, alter your abilities, get your ability
to stay here, because it's ... or get here regularly or something.
Just meditate through that, see where that puts you.
This
concludes the talk “Meditation on Impermanence.”
May
you have refuge in Buddha Dhamma Sangha.
May you be well and
happy.
May all beings be well and happy.
The MP3 file
and text of the original teaching read on today's program will be
available at www.edharma.org during March 2005. Today's radio script
is available at www.bdcublessings.net.au and in the future we will be
upload all our Buddhist Hour broadcasts to the website as MP3
files.
This script was transcribed, prepared and edited by
Julian Bamford, Frank Carter, Leanne Eames, Leila Igracki, Evelin
Halls, Anita Hughes, Alec Sloman, Lainie Smallwood, Julie O'Donnell
and Amber Svensson.
References:
Recording Title:
Meditation on Impermanence
Tape 7, Side 2
Teacher: John D.
Hughes
Date of recording: 27 June 2005
Transcribed by: Lainie
Smallwood
Checked by: Lainie Smallwood, Frank Carter
CD
Reference 27_06_88T7S2A
File Name:
27_06_88T7S2A_JDHtranscribe.rtf
Buddhist Discussion Centre
Upwey (Ltd.)
5 Day Meditation Course
Recording Title:
Persistence and restraint
Tape 7, Side 1
Teacher: John D.
Hughes, Frank Carter
Date of recording: 27/6/88
Transcribed by:
Alec Sloman, Frank Carter
Checked by: Lainie Smallwood
CD
Reference: 27_06_88T7S1A
File Name:
27_06_88T7S1A_JDHtranscribe.rtf
5 Day Meditation Course
27
June 1988, 5.18 pm
Words: 3,337
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