Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 45-minute talk, Ven Sangye Khadro addresses a fundamental Western resistance: why Buddhism insists on suffering. She grounds this in daily life—the time we spend maintaining a body (work for food, sleep, exercise, cooking, dishes), the mental strain of loss, fear, disappointment—before turning to something unexpected: her observation that Tibetan Buddhist practitioners she met in India were genuinely happy, proving that facing suffering brings freedom. She then explains the mechanism: cause and effect, the mind as a changeable stream shaped by intention and attitude. Through concrete examples—how a teacher’s mindset determines student response, how attachment to external things creates false hope—she reveals the path to transformation.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 03 Basic.mp3
UUID: 4815c74a-6f30-4f76-8458-116b3d00e853
Teacher: Ven Sanghy Khandro aka Kathleen McDonald
Collection: Basic Buddhism (Ven Sanghy Khandro aka Kathleen McDonald)
Date: 1985 (exact day not recorded)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 44.8 minutes
Words: ~6,061
The body being, in a way, a burden has to be cared for. If you think about how much time and energy we spend caring for the needs of the body, we have to eat, and to eat we need money, so we have to work. Most of us spend at least eight hours a day working to get money to buy food. And then we have to cook the food. You have to buy the food, bring it home, cook it, eat it, wash up afterwards.
And then at least six, seven, eight hours a night, we have to rest the body and it needs exercise as well, so we have to go jogging or bicycling or swimming or aerobics or yoga or whatever to look after to take care of the body. Probably ninety percent of the time ninety percent of our time, in one way or another, is spent on taking care of this body. Also the fact that the body is so susceptible to pain, that the nervous system is marvelous. Again, it’s a wonderful thing, it’s marvelous. But it also means every part of the body, even a tiny you know, you stick a pin anywhere in the body, you’re going to experience pain.
The body is just like a walking wound, in a way. You know, if you knock it too hard or if you stick something sharp in the body, any place in the body, you can experience pain. And so again, have to spend a lot of time and energy protecting ourselves from pain, keeping ourselves dressed against the cold, against the wet, against the elements, against whatever might harm the body. We don’t really think like that, do we? We just go through life looking after ourselves, and we tend to think, Oh, life is great, life is okay.
Looking at it in this way, you can see it’s really a lot of work. It’s really kind of like a drag to have to carry this body around and look after its needs and and keep it happy as well. So but I guess we we don’t like to think about that because then it it’s it’s pretty well, what is what’s the alternative? You know? Else is there to do?
Commit suicide? Stop existing? We aren’t really presented with much in the way of an alternative, so we tend to just make the best of the situation, you know, and try to enjoy it as much as we can. So so that’s the the body, the suffering of the body, having a body. And then the mind as well.
Mind has a lot of suffering. Well, I suppose we could say the suffering of the body isn’t really it is mental suffering, is suffering of the mind as well, because the body itself doesn’t suffer. It’s only the mind that suffers. You know, in the mind, if we sit down and we look at the mind, and we just think about experiences that we have in a normal day, many, many experiences which are not happy, not positive, not pleasant experiences. We experience frustration.
You know, from the time we have to get up in the morning, it’s not all that happy. It’s not all that pleasant getting up in the morning. Know? I think we all like sleep and having to get out of your warm bed on a cold morning. Difficult.
That’s the kind of suffering. The suffering having to deal with or encounter people that we don’t get along with, experiences, situations that we don’t enjoy, like your job. Many people don’t always enjoy their jobs, but they have to do it. So there’s a lot of aspects in that that are unpleasant, that are painful, suffering. I can go through a list of the kind of experiences that we have: unhappiness, frustration, disappointment, loneliness, grief, loss whenever someone that we know dies or leaves us or gets sick, or when we have to part even for separate even for a short period of time, there’s this sadness, fear, insecurity, lack of self confidence.
You know, these are all just words, but they refer to experiences that that everybody has. Everybody experiences loneliness sometimes. Everybody has their fears, and we also have the ways that we deal with fear, which are often just more problems, like defensiveness and paranoia, worry, of the day that are not fully happy experiences, not, you know, not kind of peaceful and happy and clear and positive experiences. So so all of those experiences then are forms of suffering. There’s nobody, there’s no human being that is beyond suffering, that is free of suffering, even someone who is very wealthy, who doesn’t have to work, who doesn’t have to worry about money, or where their food is coming from, or cleaning their house, or whatever, things that we might not enjoy very much, Even even very wealthy people have problems as well.
Maybe they have more problems. You know? It often seems that the more you have, the more worries you have, the more the more the more problems you have because you have to not only do you have all this stuff, have to worry about it, you have to take care of it, you have to protect it, and so on. So many people find that a simple life- simple in a sense, material- materially- is much more pleasant, much more peaceful than a very well-being, busy life. So this is the first thing that the Buddha talked about after he became enlightened, which is interesting.
Tend to think, Oh, enlightenment. Enlightenment is such a fantastic experience, you know, the highest achievement possible for for a living being, you know, absolute perfection, bliss. And and and what does he what does he do? He sits down and he he says, Life is suffering. And that’s quite important, that’s quite significant, because the whole point of the Buddha’s teachings See, the Buddha discovered this experience of enlightenment.
He wasn’t always enlightened. He was like us before. He was an ordinary person who had problems, who was frustrated, who suffered, who lived, who died, and so on. Was just like us, just like every other living being. And he worked on himself.
He practiced, he meditated, he developed his mind, his spiritual potential, until he reached this state of enlightenment. The whole point of his teachings, the essence of his teachings, is how we can do the same, how we can also reach enlightenment. So everything he taught is part of a map a road map, you might say. They call it the path, but you call it a road map a way to get to enlightenment ourselves. The first thing that we have to do is to come to terms with suffering.
That’s why he started off talking about suffering, because we have to face and come to accept the reality of suffering. Because the tendency is that we don’t want to deal with We try to push it aside. We try to avoid it as much as possible. We don’t want to admit that we have suffering. Think in the West particularly, there’s well, it’s sort of a taboo, I suppose, to admit that you have problems and to admit that you’re not happy.
You know? Like, if somebody came came to your door and taking a census or something, trying to find out if you’re happy. How many people in Australia are happy? You’re probably likely to say that you’re happy. When we greet each other, we always say, how are you?
And the accepted response is, oh, I’m okay. I’m fine. It wouldn’t be proper to say, oh, I’m miserable. Everything’s terrible. Or even to talk about one problem.
It’s just not allowed, somehow. Unless it’s a really close friend, of course. If it’s someone you know really well, then, of course, you’re going to tell them all your problems. But in a way, it’s not really proper, it’s not really acceptable to talk about problems, to admit problems, to admit that things aren’t okay. With things.
You’re not really happy about things. We’re supposed to be happy. This is what everybody is telling us. This is what the media is telling us: the TV, the movies, the press. We’re supposed to be happy.
And if we’re not, there’s something wrong. Nobody wants to admit that there’s something wrong because that’s dangerous and it’s frightening and it’s threatening and we don’t know what to do. If there is something wrong, what do we do? There’s no alternative, there’s no escape, there’s no way out. Well, that’s not completely true.
There’s mental institutions. There’s the psychiatrist, psychologist. But they’re pretty much just they’re systems that are designed to push people back in, you know, try to get people to cope, to deal with just the way things are, and to be able to survive in the world, to be able to keep up with everybody else. So for many reasons, then, it’s very difficult, if not impossible, to just come to a point where you can say, I am suffering. My life is really miserable.
Unless, as I say, someone is if you think the way out would be suicide. Of course, a lot of people will feel their suffering so intensely and see no other way out so they commit suicide. But that isn’t really a way out from the Buddhist point of view because you’re just going to come back and have to go through it all over again. Okay. So Buddhism is often accused of being pessimistic because of this this all this talk about suffering, you know, because other religions, you know, will will emphasize the beautiful beautiful things in life, you know, the beauty in life, the the joy in life, the the joy of of relating to God, the joy of prayer, and so on.
They did they they don’t like to talk about suffering. So the fact that Buddhism talks about suffering makes it not look very good. It puts it under attack by people who don’t really understand it. And it is it is a difficult point to understand. You know, I when I first started to study Buddhism, I got quite depressed.
Because we’re asked to look at suffering, we’re asked to look at ourselves and to see, to recognize how much suffering there is. How you know, to look at all these problems of life, the problems of having a body, the problems of growing old and eventually dying, the problems of always being disappointed and never getting what you want or getting what you don’t want and so on. Just one thing after another to the life, you know. It’s very most people, I think, do go through an initial sort of period of depression when decide to get into Buddhism and to start to come to terms with their suffering. But it’s a healing kind of thing, it’s a healing experience, because as long as we’re trying to avoid looking at suffering, we’re not doing anything about it.
We’re not dealing it in realistic way. It’s still there, and we’re going to have to confront it sometime. Most people put it off until the moment of death, and then it’s too late, then it just becomes like a great big wave. Instead of constantly running away from suffering, avoiding it, not wanting to deal with it, it is so much healthier to come around, to face it, to confront it, to accept it. And if the Buddha stopped at that, if he only taught suffering and that was it, then of course philosophy would be very pessimistic.
But he didn’t stop at that. He went on to explain how to get out of it. He went on to offer an alternative to suffering, alternative which I haven’t encountered in any other system: you know, the possibility of enlightenment, the possibility of getting totally beyond suffering such that you’ll never experience any more suffering. That’s the alternative that we have. But getting there, you have to start with turning around and facing your suffering, facing your fears, facing your problems, accepting the fact that things aren’t okay in your life, things aren’t okay with yourself.
And when you can do that, like I say, it’s difficult, it’s painful, it can be quite depressing, but it’s very healing. In a way, if you’ve got something wrong in your body, you’ve got pain down here in your in your somewhere in your gut, and you don’t wanna you don’t wanna think about it. You don’t wanna think, oh, it could be cancer. You don’t wanna even think that. You know?
You just want to ignore it. Maybe it’ll go away, you know? But if you go on like that, it’s not gonna help, is it? It’s not gonna you’re not doing anything to to deal with the problem, to help the problem. And it isn’t gonna go away.
It’s just gonna grow and get worse, and more and more problems will develop. But if you can come to the point of accepting that, going to see the doctor, getting a diagnosis, if there’s something that can be done, if there’s some kind of cure, treatment, regime you can follow, doing it, putting yourself into it. It may be painful in having accept that you have such and such a disease, but you’re doing something about it. You’re being realistic about it. In a way, you’re being positive about it, because you’re trying to do something about it, you’re trying to heal it.
So it’s similar in a way. I think most people wouldn’t react that way if they had a pain in their body. They would try to consult a doctor, get a diagnosis, do whatever they can to deal with it. It’s similar in this idea of suffering, the mental and psychological suffering that we experience. The most realistic, most positive way is to accept that it’s there, not pretend that it isn’t there, not ignore it, not hope it will go away, and so on.
Accept that it’s there, and accept the diagnosis, and do something about And also, like I said, when I first started studying Buddhism, was quite difficult. It was hard. It was really depressing to think about suffering, to look at myself and see all my suffering, see all my ugly things in my mind, the things I was doing, the attitudes that I had were very unpleasant. I was really quite surprised. At the time I was in India, I was living in a community of Tibetan people.
I looked at these people and I thought, These are all people who believe in Buddhism, who are practicing Buddhism, they’re the happiest people I’ve ever met. How come? How can they believe in suffering and still be happy? How can they be you know, following this system that talks about suffering and talks about death and forces you to look at those things? And they’re and they’re they’re not depressed.
They’re not, you know, going around with long faces and and heavy heavy like they’re carrying heavy burden. Because, well, the thing is, when you can come to terms with suffering, you are much happier. Naturally, you’re much happier. Because you’re being realistic, you’re following a way of life, you’re following a path which allows you to be lighthearted, to be free, to be clear, to be happy, to be peaceful. Before you reach enlightenment, even when you start practicing this path, it does give a kind of peace, kind of clarity and happiness that you don’t find ordinarily when you’re involved in trying to avoid suffering, trying to avoid problems.
You do go through this initial depression, if you have to go through that. You do come out of it and feel much better about things, I can say from experience. So, the first point, the first truth is that of suffering. It’s helpful looking at one’s own suffering and coming to terms with that is very, very helpful because then we can see what we need to do in order to get out of it. It’s also when we open up to suffering, it also enables us to be more compassionate, because you’re not only looking at your own suffering, you’re looking at the suffering of others.
If you can do that with wisdom, with an understanding of why there’s suffering, where their suffering is coming from, and this will be explained more. And so that it’s not just this overwhelming horror of suffering in the world, but you understand how it all works, then you can have compassion. You’ve got much better relationships with others because you can understand their I mean, basically, we all have the same problems. Every person in the world has the same I’d say we all have a mind. The basic elements of the mind are the same for every person.
They’re just in a little bit different arrangement. That’s why we all have different personalities and different experiences. But basically, we all have the same things. We all have anger. We all have desire.
We all have the wish to be happy. We all have the wish to be loved, and so on. Basically, we all experience the same things. We’re just a little bit different arrangement. The more you understand your own suffering, the more you understand suffering in general, the more understanding you have of others, and the more sensitivity you have, and the more empathy you can have of others.
Not only does it help you in dealing with yourself, it also helps you in dealing with the world and with others. The second truth is the truth of the cause of suffering. Now, the law of cause and effect, or karma, is a really core view in Buddhism. And it isn’t just a view, it isn’t just an idea, it’s actual, reality. It’s just explaining the way things are, that everything in the world works by cause and effect.
Like in the external world, seeds produce plants which produce flowers and fruit, produce more seeds to produce more plants, and so on. Everything that we deal with comes from something else. This comes from a tree, a tree came from another tree, and so on. Everything is tied up in the law of cause and effect. Everything in other words, everything has causes.
Everything comes into existence because of causes and conditions coming together. We can’t find anything which just pops out of space. Everything comes into existence as part of a whole process, as part of a whole chain. Know, ourselves. You know, this this body came from the egg, the the ovum, and the sperm of of our parents.
And their bodies, in turn, came from their parents and so on, you know, all the way back to the monkeys. Where did it start? Little cells. You see, everything in a way is interrelated, interconnected, everything in the physical world. The same is true for our mind, our consciousness.
That is also tied up for part of the law of cause and effect. The way the mind works, it’s like a stream of energy that’s constantly changing. As it changes, there’s well, change in the terms of mind means different experiences happening, different experiences coming into the mind, depending on what has happened before. When we feel happy, that experience of happiness comes from other experiences. It’s sort of a combination of other experiences.
Maybe it’s a nice day, sunny day, you’re with a friend, someone you love, you go to the beach, everything works out really well, and you experience happiness. The experience of happiness doesn’t just pop into the mind from nowhere. It comes from previous experiences, and it is dependent upon external factors as well. The way the mind works is like stream composed of experiences that are changing constantly. Each moment, different experiences are popping up into the mind and going away, but bringing about or leading into other experiences.
So it’s a stream of different experiences which are all interdependent, influencing each other, depending on what came before and leading to what comes after. You can see that when you sit down and meditate. Do this practice of mindfulness meditation, where you just sit down and look inside and say, What’s happening in my mind? You can see this flow of different experiences happening, rising and passing away, rising and passing away, so on. As I say, it’s not like each experience comes out of nowhere, but it comes of it.
It comes about as a result of what’s happened before. And that’s why we can do something. We can change ourselves. Because if we set up the right conditions, if we train the mind- this is a term that’s often used in Buddhism- training the mind. Like we train the body, you know, we can train the mind to think in certain ways, to avoid certain kinds of thoughts, certain kinds of attitudes, certain kinds of emotions, and learn to develop and hold other kinds of experiences.
And in that way, we can slowly change the whole flow of the mind, change the stream, the way the mind is flowing, so that more and more we can experience positive things. We can experience happiness, love, kindness towards others, generosity, unselfishness, and so on. We can learn, we can train ourselves to have those kind of experiences and to have fewer and fewer of negative experiences like anger, hatred, obsessiveness, whatever, whatever unpleasant negative experiences there are. So it’s because the mind is like that, it’s because the nature of the mind is such that it’s just this constantly changing flow of experiences, that we can get in there and change the flow, change the direction, work on it, and eventually change it, totally transform the mind. I got into talking about cause and effect because the second truth says that there is a cause of suffering, or there are causes of suffering.
Suffering doesn’t just happen without reason or without it’s not like some people are lucky and some people aren’t. It isn’t like that. But whatever suffering experiences we have, as well as whatever happy experiences we have, have their causes. They have their causes, the things which preceded them, things which occurred prior and led into those experiences. So an experience of unhappiness, if we just pull out one problem that we have, that arise, arises because of prior experiences that we had.
And some of the causes we can see in this life, we know we can trace back to something that happened in our childhood, or something that happened more recently. But very often we cannot find the original cause in this lifetime. But we’d have to go to previous lives, because according to Buddhism, come into the world already with certain predispositions. People who have children will confirm that. They’ll say they can see, you know, in the child right from the time they’re born.
‘ve got a definite kind of personality. There’s a definite there’s a whole set of ideas and beliefs. Not ideas and beliefs, but likes and dislikes and just a whole personality already there in the child from the time they were born. They can see that, and they can see that that personality grows and develops as they go through life, But it was already there when they were born. So we come into the world, in this life, carrying with us a whole accumulation of predispositions, impressions from previous lives.
At the moment, we’re creating new impressions, new predispositions all the time. Whatever we do, everything that we do, everything that we think, everything that we say, is like planting a seed or planting an impression or a predisposition on our stream of mind, our stream of consciousness, and it stays there. It doesn’t disappear, doesn’t go away. It stays with us. And eventually, later on, maybe in this lifetime, maybe in a future lifetime, that when certain causes and conditions come together, that those seeds, those impressions will ripen and ripen in in the form of experiences.
So that that basically the idea of cause and effect or karma, That’s what it really means. It’s quite a They say it’s a very, very difficult thing to understand, to really see all the intricacies and all the fine deep points of the whole process. Only a Buddha, only an enlightened person can really be able to see the whole thing and how it works. So it isn’t for it isn’t really possible for us to to fully understand. But but we can check it out.
We can investigate it in terms of our own experience. If we just look at our lives and how we can influence our experiences, how we feel, how we experience things When I was a kid, my mother always used to say to me, You get out of life exactly what you put into it. And I really got sick of her saying that, but it stayed in my mind because it’s so true, you know? You know, if you want to live a good, happy, full life, if you want people to love you, if you wanna have lots of friends and you want, you know, success in what whatever you do, you’ve gotta make the effort. You’ve gotta, you know, put your energy, put your love, put your your commitment into your relationships and into your work, and so on.
On the other hand, if you’re dishonest, you’re dishonest with yourself, if you’re dishonest with others, if you’re always thinking in terms of how to get more, better, how to outdo everybody else, you know, very competitive, very selfish, self centered, then your life will your experiences will come out in a different sort of way. You won’t have many friends, and you probably won’t be very successful either. So then we do set we ourselves set up our lives according to the kind of attitudes that we have, according to where we put our energy, where we put our effort, where we put our priorities. We create our experiences. So even in terms of going over a period of years in our life, or even in the course of one day, we can see how we influence the experiences that we have, you know.
For example, if you sit down to do a meditation, you sit down and you say, Maybe you have to teach a class. For example, you’re a teacher. You have a class with children. And you get up in the morning and you think about your kids, you think about your class. And if you think about, oh, God, those kids, you know, and you really you really have this aversion for them, you have this aversion for your job, and and, you know, very negative kind of attitude towards it.
And you go into it thinking about just getting through it as quickly as possible, getting it over with. And not much love, not much care about the work you do and how well you do it, and the kids that you’re dealing with, and so on. Well, the the whole thing isn’t gonna work, you know. Your kids aren’t gonna learn from you, for one thing. They’re not gonna be open to you.
They’re they’re not gonna respond. They’re not gonna appreciate you, and you’re not gonna feel good about what you’re doing. You know? So the whole thing will be a failure, pretty much. But if you, on the other hand, decide you’re going to make the best of it, you really want to reach those kids, you really want to help those kids, you really put a lot of thought into what’s the best way of communicating with them, what’s the best way of getting through to them and getting them to respond and open up to you, and you really have a lot of care, genuine love and care for them and for the work that you do.
You really want to make the best of it, you meditate on it, you reflect on it, really work on it. Then, even in one day, you get up in the morning and you really think about it, plan for it and really put your heart into it, or meditate to get yourself calm, to get yourself prepared, open, clear, so that you can do the best job you can, the result will be probably quite good. Maybe not all the kids, but at least some of the kids will be open to you, will respond well, will learn from you, you’ll have good communication with them. If we think about that kind of thing, just if you think about in your own work or your relationships with people, the things that you do, you think about the correlation between your attitudes, your motivations, your intentions, how you go about doing it from your side, from your mind, and the result comes out. I think we can always see that it does work, that we do tend to create and influence the experiences that we have.
So that then is basically the law of karma, cause and effect. Okay. So in the teachings then, the Buddhist said that So, First of all, we look at suffering, we see the suffering that we have, we recognize the problems, the unsatisfying and painful experiences that we have in life. And then we look to the cause. We try to understand why these experiences happen, why suffering happens, where does it come from.
We can’t always see ourselves. We can’t always see what lies behind problems. The Buddha taught that, in a general way, all of our experiences of problems originate in the mind. More specifically, they originate in our negative attitude, our negative states of mind. And he pointed out the three main ones: greed, hatred and ignorance.
These are called the three poisons in Buddhism. Greed or desire or attachment is that attitude of Well, it’s tied up with so many other things. It’s tied up with the idea that happiness and pleasure come from outside, come from external things: people, relationships, food, music, sunshine, skiing, and so on. That it’s external things, external objects or factors that give us pleasure. With that kind of idea, we have this attitude of clinging or attachment to those things that make us feel good.
Whereas, in reality, external things don’t really determine our happiness. They may influence our happiness, but the real cause of happiness lies within ourselves. It’s dependent on our own mind, our own thoughts and attitudes and feelings and so on. External things can influence that, but they cannot determine it fully. Like, for example, I really like sunshine.
And I always feel different when it’s sunny than when it’s cloudy and rainy. But it it it can also happen that I can be really happy on a cloudy day, or I can be really unhappy on a sunny day. So it’s not the sunshine, it’s not the weather that determines my state of mind. It can influence, sure, but the main thing is deeper. It’s inside my mind.
It’s other factors inside here that decide if I’m happy or unhappy. And it’s the same with friends. Our main objects of attachment are usually people, and we tend to think that people can make us happy or unhappy. Those people that make us feel good, that seem to bring beauty and love and joy into our lives, we need those people. We need them to be happy.
That’s what attachment is. It’s kind of an idea. It’s really more an idea, a concept that this person or this object or this kind of food or this kind of music or whatever, this kind of experience, I need that. I depend on that for my happiness. We may not say that.
We may not verbalize that, you know, but but that’s how we act. That’s how we behave. We we become dependent upon that that thing or that person for our happiness and tend to think that, you know, without that without that person, I won’t be happy. And so there’s all these songs written about that. You know?
It’s almost yeah. It’s almost an accepted view, you know, in in life that that falling in love with somebody and and living with that person and marrying that person and so on, having sex with that person is what we need to be happy. And it often looks like that’s true, but if we look more carefully, if we think about it more carefully, it’s not true. You’re not always happy with that person, are you? There’s problems, there’s difficulties, there’s definitely suffering and pain involved, you know, when you get close to somebody.
A lot of pain. You can also think of many times when that person is there and trying to cheer you up, you know, you’re in the dumps, you’re down, you’re feeling depressed, you’re feeling miserable, that person trying to cheer you up and it doesn’t work. And I mean, that that, in a way, is proof that it’s not the person that makes you happy. It’s it’s it’s something inside of you, something inside your mind. But people can help, for sure.
So attachment or greed or desire is that kind of getting attached or getting obsessed with a person or something, with the idea that that is a cause of happiness, and you need that. You become dependent upon that for your happiness. And so not wanting to be separate from it, wanting it to be there all the time, doing whatever you can, putting a lot of time and energy into making sure that it’s there whenever you need it, and Just having that grasping, clinging kind of attitude with regard to that thing or that object. Now we all have attachments. Nobody’s free of attachment, you know?
We can have many attachments. We can be varied. It can be attached to people. It can be attached to cigarettes or alcohol or drugs or food or music, particular pair of shoes or jeans or hat or particular kind of sport or, you know, something you do physically. It’s very, very subtle attachment.
Very hard to very hard to even recognize, partly because we don’t want to. You know? We don’t like to think that we’re attached to something or to somebody. We like to we like to think we’re independent and we’re okay. We don’t need it.
But but in fact, we’re the Somebody told me a story once that he thought he was quite free of attachment until he had a dream one night in which he dreamt that somebody broke into the house and stole his stereo equipment. He woke up very quickly from the dream and went running into the living room in a state of panic, and then saw that it was still there. But that made him realize that he he was still attached to his his things. So it’s really hard. As long as long as the things are there, you know, we can we can sort of fool ourselves into thinking that we’re not attached.
You know? But but as soon as you have to have to go without it or as soon as something happens to it or it goes away, disappears or is broken, and you feel this incredible sadness or anger or upset, then you can see that, in fact, there is attachment there. It happens when you go to when you go overseas, you know, and you can’t find the kind of food that you’re used to eating. And you think, oh, yeah. Like I said, as long as it’s there, as long as the supermarket’s down the road, you can go in there and buy anything you want, then it’s okay.
You eat, and you think, oh, I can take it or leave it. But as soon as you go somewhere and you can’t get something, you can’t get your