Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 104-minute teaching, Ven Kaye Miner examines the roots of relational suffering through the lens of attachment and emotional extremism. She opens with a grounded breathing meditation to settle the mind, then explores how attraction, repulsion, and indifference shape interactions with family, friends, and strangers. Drawing on the historical example of the Buddha’s journey from indulgence to asceticism and back to the middle way, she argues that our habitual swings between desire and aversion—especially within attachment—create instability in relationships and prevent genuine contentment. The talk traces attachment through parental bonds, sibling dynamics, and chosen friendships, showing how even love can fragment when twisted by the brittle mind of attachment. She contrasts attachment with genuine love and compassion, which can tolerate faults and survive emotional fluctuations. The core teaching: mental clarity, built on ethical restraint, is the only ground from which we can observe and eventually release the patterns of attachment that keep us cycling between extreme emotional states. Practical for anyone seeking to deepen their intimate relationships and understand the Buddhist perspective on desire and the mind.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 2011 01 24.mp3
UUID: 2b2b2145-b8d2-4279-9ad0-b5d435f3dd79
Teacher: Ven Kaye Miner
Collection: Mindfulness with a Heart (Ven Kaye Miner)
Date: 2011-01-24
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 104.2 minutes
Words: ~8,170
Right. So I wish to welcome everyone here. This is a continuing course on just some issues dealing with everyday life, mainly with attachment. This seems to be a common theme. There is a common theme running through these talks.
But just before we start, I think it’s probably good we do a little bit of breathing meditation just to relax a little bit. So just sitting in a comfortable position, Back reasonably straight, but comfortable. Hands relaxed. We’ll just do a little bit of breathing meditation. So in this, we’re just watching the breath.
Very difficult just to watch the breath. So we’re just watching, noting when we breathe in and breathe out. And one of the easiest places to watch the breath is just on the inside of the nose. We can sense the contact of it, our breath. We can also as we breathe in, if it helps, we can use a mantra like ‘Bud’ where we breathe in and ‘dho’ when we breathe out.
And the main thing we’re trying to do is just really relax the mind. The body is relaxed. So we want the mind to settle as well. And any thoughts that come up, we just let them go. Just let them disappear into the distance.
Just keep our mind gently on on the breath. I would just stop the meditation there. Relax for a few moments. So tonight we’ll be discussing relationships and this also follows from last week where we talked about extremes, avoiding extremes, harmful extremes. We were talking about the two ways we can interact with the world around us.
Either there’s really three ways it’s either we’re attracted to objects or repulsed by objects or we’re neutral towards them. So no matter what we’re doing in the world generally an object fits into one of those categories at any one time. Often we go through all three phases with neutral, attracted, repulsed and maybe back to neutral. So we tend to go from one extreme to another. This is our common experience of those around us ourselves and we tend to because of this process of going from one extreme to another it’s something that tends to agitate or disturb our mind and prevents us from really achieving a level of happiness and contentment.
It’s something that’s not easy for us to see either because often our emotions are very subtle, they arise quickly, they pass away quickly, we don’t necessarily see the connection between one thought and the next and just why a feeling has arisen towards say another object or a person and so on. The mind changes so rapidly it’s hard to keep up with it. In fact a lot of what occurs is almost subliminal and it’s only when it really, know, strong feelings for instance become apparent that we are often compelled to take notice of the object that’s generating that strong reaction. So this issue of extremes interacting with the world around us and finding that we take an extreme position we either detest or hate or are repulsed by something and on the other hand we either we see something is very attractive we need to obtain it to be with it own it possess it is our ongoing common experience and we tend to wander or we wobble or move from one extreme to the other. Now historically in India this was something that the Buddha himself Sometimes his life is divided up into two periods and in the first period of his life he was born a prince in his family family, family.
His father was a republic, but his father was like a king in this republic in northern India two and a half thousand years ago. When he was born he was indulged of course, as we indulge our children. He lived in luxury, good food, good companions, good teachers, good clothing, and so on. For the first twenty five years he had everything that he wanted and he pursued those objects and enjoyed them. He got married, had a son.
Then around the age of twenty five he suddenly had some doubt about whether indulgence or just sating the senses was a good thing or not. And then he decided he needed to renounce. He needed to find out what the deeper issues in life were. He needed to pursue those issues to develop an understanding and then he renounced the kingdom and he went to the other extreme of austerity. And for six years he lived by a river and he survived on a few grains of rice and lentils perhaps a day.
Very very little until he became quite emaciated. In end he hardly had the strength to stand and after six years he realized that not only was the extreme of indulgence not the path but also the extreme of asceticism or depriving oneself of the objects or the senses. That also was not the way. There needed to be a middle path between those extremes. Understanding that middle path, seeing that middle path is very difficult.
It’s very subtle. Also understanding the middle path between attraction and repulsion similarly is not easy for us to find because we tend to go to one extreme or the other. And those extremes really tend to indicate that we don’t understand our own minds when they arise. You know, how they function, whether they’re valid, whether they’re reliable. Can we rely on them?
Are they good for us? Are they bad for us? When a state of mind arises often we follow it. If it’s attachment we’re a hundred percent attachment. And we just follow that along without really investigating always: Is that good for me?
Is it beneficial to me? And when the mind of repulsion arises, oh okay we take that a hundred percent. We don’t examine it. We don’t look at it to see is it something that I should accept as it stands? Or you know should I step back from it and see and really investigate check on it see whether it’s of use to me?
Right, so this is often our experience we go from one either a hundred percent attached to things or a hundred percent repulsed by things. It’s hard for us to find a balance in the center that is free from the extremes of attraction and repulsion. Actually we often think when something attracts us it really is attractive and when something repulses us it really is repulsive. And we don’t question that attitude, that mindset that judges that object. So this is our normal experience day to day.
We tend to be buffeted by these minds, these mental attitudes. So this sort of tending to wobble between one extreme and another tends to be the way we engage with inanimate objects around us. But even more importantly it’s often how we engage other people. Often we don’t really have the leisure to step back and ask ourselves: Is this working for us? Is this producing the goods?
All this energy I put into attraction, the repulsion, is it bringing me much of value? Is there any value in that process? It all seems quite self evident to us that the way we engage the world just reflects the world as it is. And of course this has an immense effect on our relationships. Our relationships are really formed in this framework.
So this we need to investigate. Of course for us as individuals living in the world engaging with other people all the time, you know, we have parents, we have children, we have brothers and sisters, we have wives, we have husbands and so on. We have a whole array of other beings who are close to us that we need to interact with all the time. We’re forced to interact with all the time. So this interaction which is a you know in a way it’s a statement of our relationships and our current state of our relationships is extremely important and as much as possible we want harmony in this process.
As much harmony as we can bring to it we need to survive. Right, so we need to investigate how our relationships come about. In a sense there’s two types we have. We have the relationship with our parents and we don’t have much choice about that. We’re born, they look after us and we form close bonds with our parents.
They’re very important to us. In fact this often there’s no one dearer to us in this life than our parents, our father or our mother. They look after us without them we wouldn’t be here. But we have issues with our parents at the same time and the issues come about through this whole area of attraction and repulsion. From a Buddhist point of view, there’s no one kinder than our parents, for instance.
Now this may be our experience it may not. Maybe we don’t have such a good relationship with our parents, but for instance in Tibet it’s almost a given that one’s mother is the prime example of someone who’s kind to us. But that may not be our experience that may not be quite how we see things. For instance our mother is someone that bore us in her womb for nine months and of course any mothers here know the difficulty of bearing a child, carrying a child for nine months and the child is like a parasite, you know, lives off the mother. The mother’s got to eat more.
The blood circulation goes through the fetus. The mother is really closely linked with that child and really has to give, forced to give. And in that particular when we think about it we’re all in the womb at one point there’s probably none of us here who were miraculously born. There’s four types of birth. As it said in Abhidharma, there’s womb born, egg born, heat and moisture born, and miraculous born.
All of us are womb born so our mother has supported us. If she didn’t look after us at that stage none of us would be here. So we have this relationship with this person and they gave know everything they they may have even given up smoking cigarettes during that time or maybe not alcohol during that time maybe not but anyway often they took extra calcium tablets and did all sorts of things we don’t even know about. You know? So they’re very kind to us.
So that relationship is almost like a primal relationship. Actually the mother and father both are very kind without them we wouldn’t have this physical body which comes from the ovum and sperm of our parents without that we wouldn’t have this physical body. Oh really we’ve taken it from them. True?
That’s where it came from. From a Buddhist perspective our mind is our own. Our mind we’ve had from beginning this time, our physical body comes from our parents. It’s like a great gift to us and that body was nurtured in our mother’s womb for all those months and so on. So that in a sense is our first relationship in this life, our mother.
And then we’re born and mother feeds us, looks after us, cleans up the mess till we leave but often doesn’t complain when we keep her awake night after night. If her mother didn’t love us she probably would have drowned us after the first week. No one knows really like the mother just what, you know, the suffering that is required in order to bring a child into this world. And we’ve survived those early months and years in mainly in dependence on our mom. Also my father he couldn’t sleep probably during the nights when we kept them up both awake, we wouldn’t go to sleep, so on and so forth.
We were a pain in those days. We don’t remember. From our side we tend to think that oh well I was worth it. Who wouldn’t want to look after me? Was a little gift to my parents or whatever.
Anyway we have this relationship with our parents so that relationship is really primal and that relationship itself is buffeted one way and the other by attraction and repulsion. Often we love our parents but we hate certain things, we’re attached to certain things and it’s often quite confusing for us how to relate to our mother and father. Often we forget their kindness as well as we grow up which is a great pity because parents have spent so much time and energy to train us. They taught us how to speak, taught us how to eat, us how to walk and so forth. So that level of relationship is incredibly important.
We forget about it all the time. We’re busy with other things. There’s no way in a sense that we can repay that kindness. We can’t give there’s a hundred thousand dollars, that’s for the genes, that’s for the DNA, and also look at it as rent for the first eighteen years that I lived. No, I’ll give you an extra two years of rent there, food probably came to this amount and so on.
Just are difficult to put a monetary value. We can’t. We wouldn’t be alive today without them. How much can we put in our life? Okay, so this is an example of one of our important relationships in this life.
And then also we have our brothers and sisters. And again mixed bag as well. We have often a lot of rivalry with our brothers and sisters and our relationship may not be as good as it should be. And again why is this? What are the underlying issues there with our siblings?
Actually it is quite important for us although we put them to one side we’re always having to you know keep in touch and talk and discuss issues and meet at Christmas and or avoid Christmas whichever the case may be. And there are lots of relationships with our brothers and sisters can be like a minefield. Why is it like a minefield? Why is it so problematic? Why is our relationship with our parents so problematic?
Our cousins, our uncles, our aunts it’s all problematic. Well maybe not all there’s often good things there but so what we’re looking at here is just the nature of our relationships and trying to take a step back from the hard front line of the relationship and find perhaps more a central, central, more balanced approach to dealing with these people, other people around us, those that we are related to. For instance our parents, brothers and sisters, cousins, uncles, aunts, grandparents, children, children’s children and so on. Even if we just had that field of beings to concerned about that would be enough work for one lifetime. But on top of that we also have friends and as I say we can choose our friends we can’t choose our family So we have another field of relationships outside of our family that we have an affinity with, we’re attracted towards.
Some of them remain friends for our entire life. There’s not that many. Many we’re friends with to begin but then later something happens and they become strangers or enemies. And so there’s this whole area of relationships that exists outside of the family. Much of our time and energy is taken up with just balancing these issues a lot of energy goes into thinking about our relationships.
A lot of time is spent dealing with relationship issues And of course we all know this. Much of our life is right there with our relationships. Often we do okay, we can manage and things generally turn out okay and we can laugh about it at the end and so on. Which is good if we can keep it on that level and even if we’re lucky enough we can keep talking with everyone in the family and even with our friends. That is good.
But it’s also good if we can take it to another level and have a look at perhaps what are some of the deeper issues, the more underlying issues with our relationships. To do that, to be able to stand back a little bit requires a certain detachment which is very good for us to contemplate. I think last we talked about the three extreme the two extremes of attachment, repulsion and then sort of a neutral in the middle type attitude. Last week also we mentioned that attachment often it’s really from attachment that even hatred tends to arise from attachment, which is of great importance to us. Because if we can find methods of stopping us from getting angry, generating resentment, of becoming clearer in our relationships this will be better.
Is that true? Is it possible to upgrade our the way we think about our relationships? Or is it not really really possible? It’s our mind is so set in its ways at present that we can’t do very much. There’s a Tibetan saying like Gom na le la ru la ru droge dre which means through familiarity, everything or anything becomes easy.
If we practice, we do something enough times it becomes easy. What’s difficult to begin with, it seems impossible in the beginning, it’s difficult, but if we keep practicing it gradually it becomes easier. Anyone not accept that? Okay, well you might. It’s okay.
It’s yeah. It may becoming or to change the mind may take many lifetimes. Mind is often likened to an ocean liner heading in one direction across the ocean and to actually stop it and turn it around may take twenty kilometers or something. The mind is a little bit like that. We have such strong habits that Achieving what is difficult in training the mind may take a long long time lifetimes to achieve.
We’re full of habits and the current way that we interact with people we’ve done for a long time. It’s often said we’ve done it for many lifetimes already. So no wonder it comes as second nature for us to just engage the world as we do. Like from a Buddhist point of view anyone you go down to the beach and when you’re walking along the beach you look down and there’s lots of sand on the beach. And it’s said that we’ve had more past lifetimes than all the grains of sand on the beach or Glenelg, Australia, other countries in the world.
We’ve had more lifetimes than that. So it’s no wonder our current habits are strong. And so our current mindset is very fixed. True? Maddening isn’t it?
It’s like as one Tibetan Geshe used to say our mind is a bit like an old leather shoe that’s been left out in the weather for many years. It’s really, you know, fixed and set. Have to apply the butter of compassion for a long time to soften it. Really the one ingredient that will slowly soften the mind is compassion, the best one. At present we’re pretty hard in our attitudes towards other beings.
Not very forgiving, very tolerant, very rigid, fixed, that’s an enemy, that’s a friend, they’re a stranger. Fixed. Developing compassion not very easy. See a stranger? Like for instance compassion we don’t compassion doesn’t naturally just arise for us when we see another person.
Our children yeah, we have some natural compassion for our children. We look at them and you know this aspiration may they be free of problems, they be healthy, free of sickness, you know, may they have you know a good good start in life so on that tends to come naturally to a parent. But when we look at a stranger it’s not there. It’s hard to generate compassion. Hard to generate love and love and compassion are the two really useful states of mind.
Just they soften you know this diamond strong hard attitude we have to the rest of the world. It’s really Does it Is that true? Are our attitudes towards others a bit unbending, little bit hard, unyielding. Why is that? Why don’t we just naturally have compassion for other beings?
Are other beings worthy of compassion? We probably have some doubts about that. Strangers, we don’t know them. Why should I be compassionate? If I knew them and they were a good person, well maybe I’d like them a little bit, but it would depend.
You know, I’ve got standards to keep up here or otherwise. How do we think about these things when we see a stranger? And by far the majority of beings on this planet are strangers to us. We go to another country and they’re all strangers and we don’t have much concern about other beings. We go to India, we see beggars on the street and we run the other way.
It’s not as if we’re overwhelmed by compassion for other beings quite naturally. Perhaps we would see that weakness as well. There’s many many facets to the way we think. But in the end in relationships what we want is the fact how things actually are and we want an adequate and mature and valid response to the world around us. True.
We don’t want to be deceived by other beings. We don’t want be used by other beings. We don’t want some sort of weak compassion that would allow us to be abused and so forth. We want something in our own interest. But most of all we really need to I guess look more closely at the other beings who we are in a relationship with and see just how we do relate to them and what is the basis of this relationship.
Now last week we were talking a lot about attachment and often attachment is the basis or does form a basis of our relationship with others. Although then again attachment is one facet we have various attitudes to other beings. But a good one, a very central attitude is that of attachment and that’s something that we often our relationships are built on attachment and that’s one that we should seek to understand. Within Buddhism the attachment is one recurring theme. It’s always coming up: attachment.
Minimize your attachment. Don’t go down the road of attachment. Don’t go too far into sensory indulgence. Protect yourself. Don’t become too desirous of things in the world.
There’s the fire sermon the Buddha once I think in Gaya which is a little town in India he gave this talk on fire and the gist of that instruction was The world is on fire. The senses are on fire. The eye is on fire. The ear is on fire. The nose is on fire.
The tongue is on fire. The body is on fire. Objects of the sight of one’s eyes are on fire, sounds are on fire and so forth. Why are they on fire? They’re on fire due to attachment, to hatred, to ignorance.
What that means is that we’re susceptible to being attached to everything and because of that it’s like we don’t have any it’s as if our senses are on fire. They’re consumed with attachment. We jump from one object to another to another attached to this attached to that attached to that and to that and mind just jumps from one thing to another. Our ear jumps from one object to another. Our nose jumps from one object of attraction to another.
And because of that the mind finds no peace. And that’s why often the state of liberation is likened to a cool state. A state in which the senses have been cooled. The fever of existence has been has been cooled. So of the three within Buddhism three poisons are highlighted and they’re really the three.
The Attraction to things a poison. Repulsion to things is a poison. And being ignorant about things is like a poison. Why is it a poison? Difficult for us to understand why it’s like a poison because we never experience uncontaminated happiness.
We never have a point where we’re really happy in a true sense. Attain a state of happiness that is pure, uncontaminated, beyond the world, transcendent, that type of happiness. Do you think such a type of happiness may exist? Yeah, it’s really hard for us to grasp what that sort of happiness may be and for that reason it said that our senses are like they’re on fire. They’re not settled, they’re not clear, they’re not happy, really happy.
And everything therefore is unsatisfactory. And this pervasive dissatisfaction. No matter where we go we dissatisfied. Is that true? Actually that’s not to say we’re complaining it’s just that even when we’re happy and the very happiest in this life there’s still at the back of our mind a little thought well this is not really what I’m looking for.
It’s not the I haven’t yet found it. Has anyone found that sort of happiness? Right. Yes, sometimes we approach and we seem to be approaching a state that is really really very pleasant and settled and calm and all inclusive, unruffled. I remember once in Dharmasala walking up the road, up this mountain and there was a jeep coming up and it stopped and offered me a lift and I get in and there was a BBC reporter in his jeep and he started talking and he was saying oh yeah I just had an interview with the Dalai Lama.
I said really what you ask him? And he said oh well I had this really good question I asked him what is it like to be enlightened? The Dalai Lama said, I have no idea what it’s like to be enlightened, but I’ve heard that sort of a relative level of enlightenment is just the ability to endure everything, to be unshakable, you know, to be completely settled in one’s life so that no matter what happens one is not really moved. That’s sort of a relative sense of what enlightenment is. But Okay so we’re just looking at attachment here because attachment is potential ingredient in our relationships that’s going to be very disruptive.
If we have no attachment in our relationships our relationships will be much firmer and steadier. It’s the attachment that is often regarded as like the disruptive element. And again we were talking about this last week that this is something that we need to just keep at the back of our mind and look at it when attachment arises to see whether the attachment is valid. Last week someone raised a question what is attachment? Attachment is this attitude that merely sees the positive attractive qualities of something.
Attachment only focuses on the attractive. If we have attitude that is just focusing on what is attractive no matter where we’re looking picture on the wall, the color of the paint, the smell of a flower, the sound of music That sort of if that attitude exists then that’s what attachment is. It’s hard to pick up because we’re not really we don’t normally train to watch for that. We tend to just stand back and say oh it’s attractive, attractive, fine, good. That’s how it is.
But that attachment and the desire and so forth that arises with that attachment is problematic. And why? Because it’s a one-sided view of anything. It’s an overestimation. It’s almost as if we’re saying that object is pure.
That object is there’s nothing wrong with it. It’s absolutely worth having. It’s pure. It’s almost as if in our life you know we’re always trying to find this level of purity this pure positive state and our attachment is deluding us into thinking the external objects around us are all pure and we just need to possess them and we’ll have that purity. Pictures on the wall, the smell of a new car, anything.
Everyone has their own range of attachments and that attachment is urging us to see those objects as pure. From a Buddhist perspective there’s nothing in our experience anywhere at any time that is pure. It’s all contaminated. It’s all faulty. Does that sound a bit pessimistic?
It sounds pessimistic to the mind of attachment. The mind of attachment will resist that. If we start claiming fault in this object or that object the attachment resists and wants to see it as pure and positive just the good qualities as if that object only possessed good qualities. But it’s also subtle and subtle therefore we don’t normally pick it up. We’re not trained to pick it up.
Probably a mother, yes, does have a certain level of attachment to their child. But that attachment that’s only focused on the good positive or the good features of the child hopefully is not as strong as love the mother has. Sorry. Yeah. Yeah.
Oh nothing wrong with children laughing of course not. What we’re looking at here is just attachment. And again one of the issues that we have is that we often we can’t separate love from the attachment because they appear very similar to us. And often we use the same word we say we love something. I love ice cream which generally means I like ice cream and probably indicates I’m attached to ice cream.
But this difference between love and attachment is so important to differentiate? What separates the two out? And again it’s this issue about the nature of the object and whether What is the difference? In brief what’s said to be the difference between love and attachment is that love will tolerate the fault of the person but the attachment will not. Love will bear to see the fault.
Love doesn’t what? Disintegrate as soon as the fault is observed whereas attachment is very brittle. Love is a bit like the butter that’s applied to the old shoe. The old shoe is a bit like the attachment. It’s brittle.
It just isn’t tolerant of negative features. But at our level everything has faults. Everything’s got fault. Everyone here has got you know a whole range of hidden and unhidden faults just as we do. We have lots of faults we wouldn’t even admit to.
We’ve got lots of faults we don’t even know we’ve got. But our attachment makes us very brittle and it’s a major disruptive state of mind in our relationships. And the hate attachment will very quickly lead to hatred. Going from one extreme to the other. Now often in our lives we have a mixture perhaps of attachment and love together and the love endures whether we are attracted or repulsed by the person like a child.
Though our emotions are buffeted one way and the other still the love endures. Is that true? The love often remains even when know repulsion arises or attraction arises to that object. It is true it does survive doesn’t it? Anyway what we’re looking at here is just our state of mind and our state of mind is is not simple.
It’s not obvious and instantly observable by us. From a Buddhist point of view we have six main minds and fifty one mental factors and they can arise in various combinations at any instant. But the ones that we have to be careful of, the three poisons, are things that we really need to develop some expertise in to protect ourselves. And in a sense the worst of the three, the attachment, is the most dangerous. Because it leads into Does that make sense?
Can we see it in ourselves that when we’re attached to something we’re in danger of hating that thing? That the attachment is inevitably gonna lead to hatred. Because we’re gonna have that object, say another person, we’re really attracted to in the beginning, but then that attachment may have a certain resilience. But then once we start seeing the faults it quickly is undermined and we hate that person. True?
Is that our experience? Or we can have compassion like love will survive attraction and repulsion. It is like love and compassion if we could substitute hatred and anger, attachment, greed and so for love and compassion then we would be able to establish something of a middle path in our relationship. But it’s finding some degree of certainty on these issues that takes time. And that is it really depends very much on looking at attachment carefully and being aware when attachment arises and what are the results of attachment.
And in our day to day life attachment, because we have in a sense no protection from attachment, it arises in an unrestricted way and just we tend to be attached to everything around us. We don’t even notice it happening. So what I’m suggesting is that this attachment is one of the most disruptive elements in any of our relationships. And that it is possible to live without attachment and live in a happier way. Actually, what makes us think that we can’t live in a happier way is the attachment itself.
And unfortunately in our society there’s so much reinforcement of our attachment that we have great doubts about whether attachment is a good thing or a bad thing. But as it’s said in the fire sermon, the senses are as if they’re on fire with attachment. And the objects that we see around us is as if they’re on fire with attachment and for this reason we need to step back a little bit from our day to day lives and just watch the way we are affected by attachment. Does this make sense to anyone? What we need is a clear mind.
Right? What we need is clarity. Ignorance is like darkness and at present when we look internally it’s like dark. We can’t see. Why am I thinking in this way?
What’s the error? What’s the fault? What’s happening? I can’t see very clearly. It’s a little bit like darkness, internal darkness.
That’s ignorance. How we overcome ignorance is through developing internal clarity And how we develop internal clarity is through ethics. Really there’s not much choice if we want to develop a clear mind we need a a clear conscience. Because in order to see clearly internally and when we talk internally we mean the mind itself, what has muddied the waters is our lack of ethics. And so that unclarity is that disturbance.
Our mind is a bit like water that has various impure actions mixed in with it. That’s a bit like muddy water. In order to get those that mud to filter through to settle we need to practice ethics. And in general people do practice ethics and they practice on a, you know, on a broad level. At least on the level of physical action and verbal action we generally we don’t go around murdering people, we don’t rob from the banks, we don’t go out pillaging and raping and so forth.
Verbally we’re generally quite honest. We don’t lie. We don’t slander generally. Maybe a little bit here and there. Slander is a difficult one because slander can be true.
There’s true slander and false slander. True slander is when you know something that’s gonna divide a couple of other people or a group of people that’s true and you happen to mention it with the intention of creating a bit of havoc. False slander is a lie plus slander. And then there’s harsh words, you know, really expressing distaste with other people by swearing at them. Someone cuts us off in traffic and we give them the bird or we, you know, we put down the window and we yell at them or anything we use that coarsens the mind of another being.
Yeah. That’s like harsh words. And then just like the subtle level of speech of negative speech is just to engage in gossip without end. A little bit of gossip is probably okay but if we just engage in it all the time without any particular purpose then it’s not so positive. But generally in the world we practice to really, you know, quite a reasonable level of ethics.
But that level of ethics is not going to clarify the mind beyond a certain point. What then is muddying the waters for us is our mental ethics. The hard one. You know the physical and the verbal ethics is like having dirty cloth and to get the really hard stains out, you know, it doesn’t take so much to get the coarser stains out, get the dirt out and so forth. But then we bring it out, see we get the subtle stains.
That’s like the mental stains in our actions, the mental impurity. And what’s that? That’s all the hatred, the anger, the resentment. All of that’s very difficult to purify. It’s hard for us to clear the mind of these habits.
So therefore there’s a certain level of built in obscurity in our mind because of our negative habits. But if if we’re able to practice ethics, what is ethics? Ethics is just not harming others. They’re not to harm them physically, verbally or mentally. So giving up harming others is how we settle the mind.
We just have to give it up, rid our teeth and absolutely I’m not gonna harm another thing. But to do that requires incredible fortitude because the habits are so strong If we you know, it’s like almost every there practices in Buddhism, you know, every hour you make the absolute determination. You’re not for the harm and other being. And you just keep doing that. And gradually the thought makes an imprint.
Otherwise, we’re, you know, harm harm harm. We don’t worry about it. Anyway, need a clear mind in order to be able to see attachment and how it functions we need the mind to be as clear as possible. We need to purify the mind. One of the most the worst possible attitude that we can have that will upset the mind of course is anger.
And often we’re in a state of anger. Not necessarily full blown anger but anger that dies down like a fire that dies down to the ember stage. Right? We tend to walk around. Our lives are are experienced through a haze of anger.
And it’s like an embers that are just there waiting for the wrong remark, the wrong look, the wrong gesture and so on. And instantly full blown anger. It’s there. Why is that? Because the it’s like we have the ember state of anger.
Just there all the time. You know, we’re like a it’s often said we’re like, you know, someone with a a bad wound on their arm. You know, might have a you know, something’s festering, really sensitive. Big boil, you know, like something huge. We just got a light bandage around it, and we can’t even touch our arm.
It’s so sensitive. And we’re walking around in a crowd and people are continuously bumping it. We’re a little bit like that. We get angry at everything. Someone just has to look at us, touch us, say a word to it, and we’re angry.
In relationships were like that. It just takes one word. We’re so close to our husband or our wife. They just have to give us one look or the tone of their voice. That’s it.
And we yell. We’re yelling at no control. Why is that? Because our anger is like, you know, something that we, you know, it’s like a dies down to an ember state, and we carry it around as if it’s some valuable, you know, protector. We don’t even recognize them, let alone attach with anger as well.
We tend to treat them as our maybe the two of them together are some valuable states that we have with us all the time. Beware. Don’t come too close. You’re going to get attached, or you’re going to feel my wrath. And it’s a bit as if in a way that’s interpreting the world for us.
That anger is very similar to hatred. As if we’ve got these these poisons that you know we’re potentially gonna indulge in it any moment. Unfortunately, our mind is unclear and we cannot see the danger. We just cannot see the danger of indulging in anger. And when we harm people, and our ethics decline.
My the mind becomes a bit more unclear. And being more unclear than you, more susceptible to attachment, and more susceptible to hate. It’s very this is saṃsāra within the being driven from one extreme to the other, and we can’t really see why. And we try and practice some method. That’s why our existence is often likened to someone trying to push a boulder up a mountain.
And it’s heavy, and it’s a lot of work. And we just have to be distracted for a moment, and the boulder rolls all the way down. A moment of anger and ugh. We can destroy a relation. Make ourselves unhappy for months too.
And to repair it might take a years of work, a lot of sacrifice. Repairing the damage is often far more difficult than not doing it in the beginning. And so in in our relationships, we there’s a lot that we need to be careful of. Even to just keep ourselves on an even keel so that we’re not going to an extreme, let alone actually helping other people.
Just to be a little have a little bit of happiness, a little bit of peace with heart. So as much as possible, we need to just keep an eye on what’s happening in our mind. A bit of attachment there. We can guarantee. We know that we’ve got a lot of attachment.
Really the root of that kind of unhappiness is and why our relationships are problematic. Does that sound feasible? It’s funny. We’re masters of attachment. We’ve perfected attachment.
If anyone needs to know about attachment, then we could be like sages who attained the enlightened state of attachment or the unenlightened state of attachment. You know, like, we could be world teachers of attachment. We’ve got such experience. And not only that, hatred, we’re pretty good at as well. Resentment, anger.
How to get angry? But often these states are in, like, our anger. We often don’t notice it, and it’s often you know, like, we keep it within a certain boundary, which is good. We can hide it, keep it you know, we can keep it to a certain level. Very good.
But even keeping it just internal and so that no one else can see it helps us to a certain level, but beyond that, it doesn’t help. We’ve gotta get rid of it. Because what is this anger and hatred? It’s just something that stops us from being happy. When we’re angry, we can’t be happy.
We can’t even enjoy the food we’re eating. We don’t enjoy watching a movie. You see that I watch a movie, and there’s something in the background we’re thinking about. I don’t like this. I don’t like that food.
Why don’t I like that? Sit there. Was a nice movie to watch and listen. They did that. And they did that.
And then after that, they did that. And that as well. I’ve I’ve been such a good person. I this and this and this. We think about this justifying our resentment.
We’re, like, so skilled at doing it, and we don’t see the fault. It’s like and again, we don’t see the fault because our minds are unclear about is there any fault? So developing detachment is very good for us. It’s like a medicine. So we need an armory of of methods that we can bring to bear to eliminate attachment.
Lessen it a little bit. Take the edge off. So anything we can use is good. We could take, you know, like a small sticker, to remind us when we become attached. But what one thing we can do, for instance, is just remind ourselves that things have faults.
Everyone around us has faults. The carpet has faults. The table has faults. The stick has faults. All the cars on the road in Adelaide have faults.
All the houses have faults. The books have fault. People around us have fault. Shiny things have fault. Pleasant sounding things have fault.
Sounding things have fault. They’re not wholly faulty, but they have some fault. Just doing this even can be a benefit. I have fault. Just reminding ourselves we have fault.
That’s just how you I have a fault. Are there lots of big ones and small ones? That’s good for our pride. And pride is boosted, you know, it’s like it emerges from the attachment we have for ourselves. The attachment just looks at our good quality or what we think are our good quality.
And the pride then takes that on board and then thinks I’m better than the other person. Good to think about faults because then it stops the pride from really becoming out of control and it stops the arrogance from we get arrogant and so on. The pride is we have is pervasive, but we often don’t see it. We often see our pride as just a little less I am better. I really am.
I am better than that person. I’m much better than that other person. You know, I’m just a little bit better than that person and so on. We often think in this way and it’s all pride and we go to the fault in ourselves. And that’s rooted in attachment because we look at ourselves with attachment and only see the positive quality.
And again, as we were talking last week, we look at ourselves only at the positive, but we don’t see that internally we’re aging. We’re the faults like we age. And that’s hard to do because of our attachment. If we weren’t attached the aging process is not a problem.
We wouldn’t have to disguise how we look if we weren’t attached. And we look in the mirror and we are attached. Sometimes we can’t bear to look at ourselves because we’re attached to ourselves. Look at ourselves and oh. Why?
Because we’re touched. We’re attached to how we look in music. Hate the way we look today because we’re attached to how it was. We look at young people and we’re attached to youth. Oh, I wish I was like that.
We’re attached to youth. And it’s a real problem because there’s lots of young people around that we look at. We see them and, oh, wouldn’t it be nice? That’s because of our attachment. Why are they nicer to look at?
You know, it’s just because they’re younger. They don’t have as many reasons. There’s nothing that they’re doing from their side of What’s the quality there that we’re attached to? Is it that they’re you know, there’s some what is with you? What is the quality we’re attached to?
I don’t know. Just because they look great, and that’s really impressive. That’s alright. Because we don’t have so much energy, and we’re attached to having a being able to. Yeah.
We’re attached to the features of youth, from the perfect skin and the just the freshness and ah. No gray hair, no wrinkles. Yeah, they stand straight and look at them they’re so supple and they roll over and they don’t get aches and pains and we’re so attached to that. It’s like, you know, every time I see a young person, how wonderful. But what when we really look deeply, what is it we’re attached to?
Look at a young person there. They’re uneducated or they’re looking. Not much wisdom. Like in the paper the other day, it said that emotional wisdom peaks at one’s sixties. Right?
Emotional wisdom. Did anyone read that? See that? Oh, there’s something for the, you know, people in their fifties and sixties to look forward to. It could be.
Attachment could be there. You shouldn’t be attached to it. Even the wisdom. Yeah. Oh, can be.
Yes. Fear can be. Although fear itself can be good. It’s good fear and bad fear. It’s good to fear stepping out on the road without watching looking back.
That’s a good fear. Fear of cars, fear of trains, of bicycles, these things that prevent us from that in front of us is a good one. Fear of