Ringkasan dibuat dengan bantuan AI • Belum diverifikasi
Dalam sesi tanya jawab langsung dari Birken, Ajahn Sona menjawab berbagai pertanyaan seputar praktik Dhamma, dimulai dengan refleksi Vesak dan pentingnya Buddha, Dhamma, dan Sangha. Ia membahas bagaimana Buddhisme menawarkan hukum moral yang presisi tanpa memerlukan Tuhan, sehingga makna hidup dapat ditemukan melalui pemahaman Dhamma. Mengenai pencerahan, ia menjelaskan bahwa parinibbana hanya mungkin setelah pencerahan penuh, dan pengalaman sotapanna adalah momen yang dapat dikenali secara langsung dengan perubahan pandangan yang mendalam. Dalam konteks kebenaran dan persahabatan, ia menekankan pentingnya berbicara jujur meskipun menyakitkan, memilih teman yang bijaksana, dan memahami kamma sebagai hukum sebab-akibat yang tidak sepenuhnya deterministik. Ia juga memberikan nasihat tentang menghadapi gangguan dari makhluk halus dengan menyaring pesan mereka melalui Dhamma, serta membedakan aversion yang sehat (berbasis kebijaksanaan) dari kemarahan. Untuk latihan meditasi, ia menyarankan pendekatan bertahap dan penyederhanaan hidup untuk mengatasi perasaan terjebak dan kesulitan adaptasi. Ia menjelaskan asal-usul aturan monastik dan sila yang berakar pada praktik pertapa dan nilai moral India kuno. Mengenai konsentrasi, ia membahas cara mengatasi kesadaran diri yang mengganggu, serta merenungkan parinibbana sebagai realitas tanpa syarat yang melampaui bahasa. Terakhir, ia menjelaskan berbagai objek meditasi dalam Satipatthana selain napas dan memberikan saran praktis untuk memulihkan energi saat lelah. Pesan utamanya adalah pentingnya memahami Dhamma secara mendalam, berlatih dengan bijaksana, dan mengintegrasikan ajaran dalam kehidupan sehari-hari.
Welcome to our live stream Q&A. I'm Ajahn Sona. We've been away for a while.
I hope some of you have watched the 15 talks that I gave on Cool Head Warm Heart.
Sometimes we suspend the live stream Q&A in order to put up a series of talks on a certain topics
and it will happen from time to time. We like to mix it up. The whole channel has, I think now,
more than 400 videos on it. And the ambition here is to create a kind of encyclopedia of Buddhism.
Not necessarily all schools of Buddhism, but primarily the Theravada or the
early suttas and history. So it ranges quite widely from brief explanations of the core
teachings. You can see a series on the Eightfold Path, each path factor explained. And you can see
then that I develop it into medium length and in depth. And some factors are gone into exhaustively.
And I don't mean that you get exhausted by listening to it. I mean that we explore it
in every detail completely. So even certain individual characteristics of the path,
for instance, equanimity, I've given 12 talks on equanimity, loving kindness,
right view, all kinds of aspects of the path. I'm particularly
vigorous about right effort as well, I think that's been poorly represented in the general
teachings and presentation of Buddhism in the West. And I'm trying to correct that.
One valuable thing, when I started this project of questions and answers, I imagined
and I thought it was very ambitious to aim for 500 questions and answers. Now I think
we've exceeded 1500 by a long ways. You can also find references to this on our website.
There's a kind of a catalog of these things that you can search. There's a search bar for
questions and they will come up and the answer which has been given on YouTube will come up.
There are also podcasts, versions of the of the live streams and the talks. I think Apple, Spotify,
Spotify, Apple, various podcasts. You can access this in in all kinds of ways.
So I think we have accomplished our goal there today.
Today is
Vesak, which is marks the anniversary of the Buddha's death, his birth and the day of his
enlightenment as well. And so this is a very important celebration throughout the Buddhist
world or let's say more not quite a celebration. We're not celebrating his death are we?
We're recollecting it.
We're just celebrating his death.
recollecting with gratitude the appearance of the Buddha in history and the brilliant teachings he
left behind called the Dhamma and his organizational capacities to organize a Sangha,
a community of full-time professional monastics and organized in such a way as to last as long as possible through history.
And it has. You can imagine 2,500 years of all kinds of uncertainties, wars and changes of political structures.
You've seen at times in world history,
whole Buddhist countries wiped out or replaced by different kind of tyrannies and wars and new fangled ideas.
But the Buddha, the Dhamma, the Sangha still persist.
The Buddha himself as an embodied Buddha is gone.
And as he said at his death,
neither gods nor humans will see me after my death.
So what we're left with is the Dhamma.
And fortunately, he also said, whoever sees the Dhamma sees me.
So if you really want to see the Buddha, it is by seeing the Dhamma.
And the Dhamma is present in everyday life.
The truth of the way things are is available.
It's not in any particular country or time or place.
It's timeless and it's available to the wise.
It is not available if you haven't opened certain eyes of wisdom.
But when you open this eye of wisdom, you see it.
Like other kinds of knowledge, it requires teachings and exploration and investigation.
And then eventually it becomes clear.
So everybody in this audience is listening,
has experience with some kinds of knowledge that you learned as a child or in your teens or as an adult.
All about the world.
All kinds of interesting things.
Mathematics and physics and biology and psychology.
All of these things and practical crafts and arts.
And you realize what this process is.
And you realize that a person who has spent time and investigated,
turned it over in their mind and understood things,
sees the world in a different way than the person who has not been exposed to this.
So this is what the Dhamma is.
It's kind of the queen of all the arts, crafts, sciences and forms of knowledge.
Because it delivers one thing.
It delivers freedom.
Freedom from suffering.
So, Mehta, let us begin with the first question.
Yes. Yes, Ajahn.
Let's see here.
So the first question today is from Vladimir from Belgrade, Serbia.
I notice that my mind constantly seeks refuge in the idea of a supreme being or some kind of ultimate certainty.
In Theravada Buddhism,
how does one learn to let go of that need without falling into a sense of emptiness or loss of meaning?
I would also like to seriously begin the path within the Theravada tradition.
So I would be grateful for any recommendations regarding practice, approach and books for someone who is just starting out.
Yeah.
The idea of God is embedded in the Western mind for sure.
And in the Middle Eastern mind.
Buddhism is fairly unique in that if you consider it a religion,
it doesn't have a reference to, you know, a creator God.
And it doesn't require belief in such a God for the creation of meaning, purpose in life.
But Buddhism says that, you know,
we're not in conflict with the better ideas of God.
Most of the, when we speak of God, everybody has different definitions.
But certainly if God is some sort of idea of goodness,
and God and good are very closely aligned,
those words God and good have common roots in the language.
And the Buddha says,
if God is good and you're good,
then you shouldn't have anything to quarrel about, should you?
So Buddhism has very strong confirmation that the world works,
the universe works in a very precise way and lawful way.
And one of the laws is the law of karma.
And we could substitute it as the laws of ethics or morality.
We don't require a moral lawgiver.
We don't require God as the source of these things
or as one who is judging over us
any more than we require that for physics.
How the universe works, according to physicists,
is that it's very precise and lawful.
And we can have some knowledge of these laws.
Buddhism would say indeed the entire physical universe is lawful
and doesn't require anybody keeping track of everything.
But also the moral dimension is lawful and very precise
and doesn't require anybody to make judgments or keep track of it.
It is just simply a law of the way things work.
Morality is built in.
It's built in to some degree in the hearts of humans.
It is also known by other means.
The psychological, the emotional experience of loving-kindness,
the emotional experience of compassion,
of sympathetic joy,
these are manifestations of the laws of karma
or the laws of morality.
We experience them in the heart.
They're intuitive.
They're very hard to precisely logically establish.
You can see that the whole of Western philosophical history
is an attempt to define what is the good
and why it is the good
and why everybody must agree that it is the good.
However, it falls out of the possibilities of logical,
logical argument.
All of the sciences tell us what is,
but they don't tell us what we should do.
They tell us what is, but they don't tell us what we should do.
It's this other law which is only known by intuition and emotion,
the laws of morality and ethics,
that are the way we access this particular law.
When you lose the concept of God,
it doesn't mean that you lose the concept of meaning and morality.
Indeed, it just becomes more crystal clear
because most of the definitions of God are very vague and hard to grasp.
Whereas the laws of morality and karma
are, you can formulate them and you can commit to them,
and you will get a positive feedback if you do.
Okay, so let's go to the next question.
The next question is from Ermina from Poland.
Can one attain parinibbana without enlightenment?
If so, are there any specific instructions in the suttas?
No, you cannot.
You cannot attain parinibbana without...
enlightenment.
Parinibbana is the death of the fully enlightened person.
So, according to that definition, you've got to be fully enlightened.
And it is at the death of the fully enlightened person
that is meant by parinibbana, the final nibbana,
the ultimate nibbana.
Nibbana is the cessation of greed, hatred, and delusion
in this very life.
And the cessation comes only through understanding and wisdom,
knowledge, and that gives you absolute freedom from
the suffering generated by greed, by hatred, by delusion.
And that is the definition of what enlightenment is.
So these are inseparable ideas.
And there is no getting around it.
You cannot attain parinibbana without enlightenment.
The next question is from Third Silence from Poland.
Dear Ajahn, is the attainment of stream entry recognizable
at the moment it occurs?
Or does a person who has entered the stream only become aware
of that state later in retrospect?
Yeah, it's the moment it occurs.
But, by the way, so the person who is...
attains this first stage of enlightenment,
sotapanna is the Pali term for stage of enlightenment,
entering the stream.
It's often translated as entering the stream.
It is entering the stream which inevitably goes to nibbana.
You have now stepped into a current that is pulling you
inevitably towards full liberation.
So that's the first moment of that.
This moment is the opening of an eye, an eye of wisdom.
And it is in regard to these three characteristics of
impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, and selflessness, non-self.
The absence of a permanent, real identity.
So this opening of the eye of these things changes the way
you view reality and it deflates some drives.
So some natural drives in humans, even in animals as well.
Acquisitive types drives, which we would call greed.
We want, we want, we want.
We want things.
We want money.
We want all kinds of stuff.
We want sensory experiences.
We want power.
We want praise.
We want all kinds of things.
And this...
Have you noticed that not everybody is tremendously ambitious
or desiring this or that?
Some people want, you know, they want another red Ferrari
or they want a big house or they want $10 million.
They don't want a million dollars.
They want $10 million.
And other people say, you know, I don't know why you want that stuff.
You know, it's just stuff.
I don't know.
You'll see that some people have a more mature attitude
to these collection of things.
There's a natural process in life.
People, you outgrow the toys of childhood.
However, you know, you do see...
People who don't outgrow the toys of childhood,
they still have these toys.
They hoard them.
They put them on shelves and things like that.
They can't...
They're fascinated with things and collecting things.
Somehow this is...
They believe that it's going to fulfill them or make them happy.
Other people say, you know, this is just stuff.
They get a sense.
They become dispassionate about these things.
And they become less acquisitive about these things.
And then there's people who are angry.
They'll fly off the handle at the drop of a hat.
The slightest noise or slightest disagreement,
they fly into a rage.
Other people are serene and undisturbed.
So this is the process towards this glimpse,
this sotapana, this beginning.
It reveals this and deflates some of these
acquisitive and aversive traits in a person.
Both greed and hatred and delusion about the world
are reduced.
And it's because you have seen something.
It's not just that you're following instructions.
You see it yourself.
You've felt it yourself.
And that's an undeniable experience.
That person may not know that what just happened to them,
what they just saw, makes them so-called sotapana.
So they may not know the word or the label.
So in fact, the Buddha did say a person could be a sotapana
and not know it, not know the label.
Others could think they're a sotapana, and they're not.
They've had some experience, but it's not that experience.
It's not strong enough to qualify as that experience,
or it's a misdirection, or it's just wishful thinking.
I hope I'm a sotapana, but I wish I was.
But we shouldn't make it too mysterious.
It's a stage of maturity in relationship to the situation we're in.
This thing called life, life just goes by.
We lose everything in the end.
We lose our very body.
We lose everything that we like.
And in the meantime, the process is quite somewhat out of control.
Bad things happen to us.
We get sick this way and that.
We lose things that we like.
We get bad things given to us that we don't like.
We have a bad job, and on and on.
It's just philosophical reality, maturity,
about this thing we call life.
So that's what it is.
And then you said, is it delayed?
No, it's not delayed.
It begins right at a moment, but continues.
You reflect back on this transition of a new view of life.
You've glimpsed a view over the fence of a different way of being,
of a different relationship to reality.
And you just keep reflecting on it again and again.
It never leaves you.
You go back to it, and you reinforce it.
And that reinforcement pushes you on to the next stage.
It deepens the realization.
Okay, let's go to the next question.
The next question is from Alex from California, United States.
The Dhamma has distanced me from my former friend.
I told him the truth, saying that we were growing apart
and that I thought we should go our separate ways.
He has a different vision of life, means well,
but was pulling me away from the far shore.
It wasn't right to feign friendship, but he was really hurt.
What does the Buddha say about telling the truth,
even if it hurts others?
And should I write back and ask for forgiveness?
Yeah, you have to do this.
So the Buddha says qualifications for right speech.
Do I speak in accordance with the facts?
Yes, you're speaking the truth.
Is it beneficial?
Yes, it's beneficial, especially for you.
For your friend, it may not be beneficial at this time,
but it is beneficial for you.
And if it's unpleasant or pleasant, the Buddha says it,
so it must be true, beneficial,
and it doesn't matter whether it's pleasant or unpleasant,
one says it.
Your friend is hurt by this,
but that may be a beginning of an awakening for him.
He's saying, you know, maybe questioning his own values in life.
This was my friend, and my friend says,
I'm not living up to a higher vision of life.
I don't get what he's talking about,
but maybe I should think about it.
So sometimes this is the beginning of a thought process for your friend.
And at first they don't like it,
but maybe later on when they kind of get what you're talking about,
they may come and say to you,
thank you very much for doing that.
Nothing less than that would have pushed me in the direction I needed to go.
So yeah, sometimes these difficult conversations have to be held.
The first blessing in life,
that the Buddha recommends,
is to stop associating with the foolish.
And the second blessing is to associate with the wise.
So you can't really...
It's a great relief to unburden yourself from association with the foolish.
Sometimes we find it difficult,
because we have a lot of history with them.
They were really our friends.
We loved them.
They loved us.
But they just were not contributing to positive things in our life.
And they weren't open to moving along.
And so that is when we have to part ways.
And it's a profound thing in life.
But it has to be done.
The next question from the chat
is from Chris from Tennessee, United States.
If something bad were to happen to someone,
comma occasionally is explained
as a type of debt being paid from a previous life.
How is this not determinism?
Well, it is a form of determinism.
Life is not random.
What happens to us in this life
is not without history.
As we can see in this life,
we can trace all kinds of reasons
why things are happening to us
that were initiated at the beginning of our life.
You know, a person born with fetal alcohol syndrome,
like during pregnancy their mother drank alcohol.
And then they're going to be affected by that
the rest of their lives.
And...
We don't think that there's something random going on there.
The cause of the distress was during the time in the womb.
And so we can trace all kinds of causes back in time.
We see all kinds of reckless things we did as a teenager
that injured our body
and we're still gimping around on a bad knee at 60.
Because we did stupid things.
So there's no reason to think that
it can't precede this life.
And in fact, from a scientific point of view,
the biological point of view,
we clearly know that
all kinds, most of what we are,
precedes this life.
And what do I mean by that?
Am I speaking mystically about rebirth or something?
No, I'm speaking about genetics.
Your genetic structure goes back
to the beginning of biological life on the planet.
It goes back to blue-green algae.
You understand that,
just from a scientific point of view,
it's the history of life on the planet.
You can trace causal structures in this life
right back to, you know,
three billion years back.
We can even trace it farther than that.
From a scientific point of view,
everything that has arisen
is somewhat deterministic.
From the moment of the Big Bang,
which is apparently without biological life at the time,
but the biological life that evolves
must have come out of the physical,
the physical structures of life.
So the physicists tell us.
So is it a rigid thing?
Can you do anything about it?
This is the question.
Are you predetermined in such a rigid way
that you do not have any capacity
to alter the course of your life
in a positive direction?
The Buddha would say no.
You can alter the direction of your life
and while you're attempting to do this,
you will feel the conditioning processes very strongly.
You will be mystified by why you determined
not to eat too much yesterday
and then today you ate too much.
You swore that you would not overeat
and two days later you overeat.
You can plainly see that you are conditioned.
You are...
somewhat habitual.
But you can also plainly see
that these habits can be changed.
That the power of habits can be weakened
and actually eliminated.
And new habits can be set in place.
So more or less you're at a stage of...
As a human you're at a stage
where you can actually control
your evolutionary processes.
You recognize that you are
a creature of habits.
That there are laws at work.
And once you have knowledge of that
you can steer your life in a certain direction
by just implementing training processes.
So it's not wild and free
without meaning or purpose.
And it's not rigidly, completely determined.
And you can experience it
directly for yourself.
You can bypass the arguments
for predetermination versus free will
by saying,
yes, I can directly experience that.
I have tendencies,
habit structures
and I can alter them as well.
So that's the actual fact
and the practical stuff.
Jumping over the logical conundrums
which are presented,
which is probably
more an indication
of the failings of logic
that we can't sort out
between free will and determination
or rigid determination.
The Buddha is what we would call
a pragmatic philosopher,
a practical philosopher who says,
yeah, stop arguing about that
and realize that you can
do something about it.
Now do it and you'll find out
that you can do something about it.
So that's where he leaves you.
The next question is from Stephanie
from British Columbia, Canada.
Beings from a higher realm
are impinging on my life
and have done so for years.
It's very disempowering and upsetting.
What do they want from me
and how do I deal with it?
Sometimes I'm happy they're in my life,
but other times I feel encroached upon
and frustrated.
Well, if they're from a higher realm,
they're not wishing you any harm.
And so if you feel that
beings from another realm
are impinging on you
and encroaching on your well-being,
then you need to not listen to them.
You need to turn away from that.
But sometimes wise people
give you advice that is hard to carry out
and frustrates your immediate gratification.
And that's why we actually go to wise people,
is to make us better,
to increase our well-being.
And sometimes we have to suffer a bit
before we feel better.
So we have to give up certain habits
that are easy to fall into, etc.
And that's why we listen to them,
because we're unhappy
and we want to become happier.
However, sometimes we go to people
who are claiming to make us happy,
claiming to be wise,
and they give us bad advice.
So we have to discern,
should I listen and follow this person's,
this being's advice,
or should I not?
Is it in line?
I'm a Buddhist.
I'm giving you advice from a Buddhist perspective.
So is it in line with Dhamma?
Is it in line with the ethics of the Buddha?
That will lead to well-being.
And I'm not just saying that out of personal experience,
although it has been my personal experience
that my whole experience of life
has improved by listening to Dhamma.
But millions and billions of people
over 2,500 years' lives
have improved by listening to Dhamma.
So it's a pretty reliable source.
It has been practically proven
in this very life
by many millions of people.
So that's the way to solve this problem
when mysterious being feel present and so forth.
You got to ask yourself,
should I listen to them or not?
Are they in accordance with Dhamma or not?
Yeah.
The next question from the live chat
is from Jason from British Columbia, Canada.
Is there such a thing as healthy aversion?
In other words,
a strong inclination to rightfully avoid
unwholesome situations and people?
Yeah.
Yeah.
We should not mistake it as,
when we say aversion,
we shouldn't be angry.
It's not anger that helps us avoid bad company.
It's wisdom that helps us avoid bad company.
It is wise to avoid certain things.
It is wise to protect yourself.
You don't step too close
to the edge of the cliff.
You see people,
you know,
going to the edge of the cliff
and looking over
and people,
other people staying,
you know,
six feet back from the edge of the cliff.
It's wise to stay six feet back
from the edge of the cliff.
You don't know whether the edge of the cliff
is solid or not.
So it's not,
aversion is not the word,
it's wisdom.
You need to be very concerned for yourself
because nobody else can take
the kind of care of yourself that you can.
And you should be
unwilling to associate with certain situations.
Certain kinds of foods will make you sick.
Don't eat stuff that makes you sick.
Don't go to places that are unhealthy.
Don't hang out with people
who are dangerous,
greedy,
silly,
foolish,
this is all to be avoided.
But it's not by
any sort of strong
ill will towards them.
It's simply goodwill towards yourself
that helps you do this.
Yeah.
The next question from the chat
is from Duztexmex.
Dear Ajahn,
as a full-time lay practitioner,
I feel I'm in this iron cage of aversion
and can't get out.
After staying at a local monastery,
it was a little too intense.
Do you have any advice?
Yes.
This,
you know,
I have lots of experience with this.
I consider myself
or I considered myself
a fairly disciplined person.
I did all kinds of,
you know,
sports and music
and things like that.
I went to university
right through graduate school
and I knew how to study
and I,
you know,
I did all the exercises
and this kind of stuff.
But when I came to,
finally,
meditation in monasteries,
it was another level of the game.
It's extremely demanding.
And what I,
you know,
I teach this now.
I have been a monk for 37 years now.
And I,
right now,
as we're doing this livestream,
we actually have a group of people in retreat
at the monastery as well.
So, you know,
we were all up at 5 o'clock this morning.
We're meditating
and we'll be meditating again this evening.
And it's silent.
There's no speaking.
And we have restricted meals.
There won't be a supper,
a little bit of tea or something
in the evening.
You know,
this is quite a different way of being
from ordinary people.
So, as with all things,
it's a bit of a gradual process.
So you need to,
outside of the monastery,
before you go to a monastery,
you need to experiment for yourself.
You start having a regular
daily meditation schedule.
Maybe one day a week you
give up having dinner.
You,
you turn,
you don't,
set aside a day of the week
where you don't watch television
or listen to music.
Things like this.
Simplify,
get used to it over time.
What you're doing is sensory withdrawal.
You're withdrawing from the ordinary
indulgences that people live.
Now you see people who are extreme,
over-indulgers.
You know this phenomenon of hoarding
where people fill an entire house
with all kinds of
bric-a-brac and
sometimes garbage.
Somehow they see this as valuable.
So the ordinary person doesn't do that.
But they,
there's a bunch of stuff there
that they could empty their closet.
There's a bunch of stuff in the garage
that's just like,
why hang on to?
You haven't opened,
you haven't used that thing for 15 years.
And,
you know,
we have,
we're indulgent.
And we snack at the wrong time.
You know,
an ad for pizza comes on at nine
and you gotta have some pizza.
You know,
this kind of stuff.
That's the indulgent life.
And monastic life,
the dhamma leads in the other direction
where you,
you start to impose some self-discipline on yourself.
But it's not,
it doesn't happen overnight.
You feel frustrated and trapped.
It's too much.
So this is too,
it was obviously
too much of a demand on you.
So,
figure, okay,
let me spend a year or two
working up to this
until I feel quite
at ease going into a schedule,
a low sensory
disciplined schedule of time.
And it might take me like two years
of gradual development.
And I'll actually feel better
when I can do this.
I will feel better,
but I can't do it too suddenly.
Yeah.
The next question from the chat
is from Quesitor from Melbourne, Australia.
When the Buddha began teaching,
were the monks following
five or more precepts?
When the Buddha began teaching,
the first group of people that he taught
were a group of five monks that,
they were already monks,
but not Buddhist monks.
They were general ascetics.
And they had been living in a,
with a philosophy of great deprivation,
a very severe asceticism.
They were committed to celibacy,
that is no sexual activity whatsoever,
extreme minimalism in terms of just,
just eating just to survive,
minimal clothing,
no social life at all.
And this,
this was the convention of the time.
There were numbers of them,
hundreds, perhaps even thousands,
that lived this life.
And this was called the Samana
or the renunciant life.
These were the first disciples of the Buddha.
They didn't need to be told the basic rules.
As time grew, went on,
new people,
and there was more converts to Buddhism,
there began to be some that joined
who didn't have much experience in this
and they didn't know where the guidelines were.
So they didn't know what a Samana was.
They didn't know what a monk was.
So they would transgress these boundaries,
the normative boundaries for a person
who has left society.
And then the Buddha would say,
that's not the Samana life.
That's not the life of the renunciant,
the monk.
You don't do those things when you're a monk.
So this is the gradual laying down
of the rules of conduct for monks.
And there are traditionally,
we say 227 rules.
By the end of the Buddha's life,
he had laid down 227 rules,
which every two weeks we rehearse.
And today is, by the way,
the full moon of Vesak.
Every two weeks on the new moon and the full moon,
the monks, when they're in groups together,
they recite these 227 rules
to remind themselves.
It takes about an hour to recite these.
And they must confess the transgression
of any of these rules to each other.
And some of them are very strong rules,
very severe rules,
that if you broke that rule,
you would no longer be a monk
and could not be a monk again
for the rest of your life.
Other rules are serious,
but not causing disrobing.
And you would have temporary
suspension of your seniority
and you would have to undertake certain practices.
Others are just confessional.
It's good enough to just confess it
and to confirm that you will endeavor
in the future not to do that again.
So this is the development of these rules.
For the lay community,
the five precepts
of not killing, not stealing,
no sexual misconduct,
no lying,
and abstaining from intoxication
from drugs and alcohol.
These were not unknown
before the time of the Buddha.
This was considered behavior
of a noble person.
This is an upright citizen.
Upright people don't kill and steal
and commit sexual misconduct and lie
and then are not drunk or stoned
out of their minds.
This is not the behavior
of a sensible moral person.
And so the Buddha also promoted
those five precepts for lay people as well.
And one voluntarily undertakes these.
It's a good way of life.
You will not be sorry.
If you undertake these,
they will lead to a good reputation in society
and perhaps enhanced peace of mind for you as well.
Next question.
Yes, the next question is from Ryan
from Montana, United States.
When I enter deep states of concentration,
self-consciousness kicks in
and pulls me out of it.
How can I work with this?
Yeah, the way to do this is
it's like a musician that plays on stage.
They get nervous and they ask,
what should I do about this?
Well, you should practice more.
You practice both playing on stage
and practice not getting nervous.
So it's something that is
the more you practice this,
the more it becomes a normal experience
and the less of a weird experience.
So you don't have
so-called self-consciousness coming up
because it's something that is
you've done before many times.
And so there's nothing to
cause this to happen.
But very typically,
when we first have new experiences,
we are uncertain about
whether we can reproduce them.
We get nervous and the very
anxiety or excitement about it
kicks the experience out,
kicks us out.
So this happens in teenage romance,
doesn't it?
It's so wonderfully exciting
that you say stupid things
and then ruin the date.
The secret is to go on more dates.
The next question from the chat
is from Logan.
Do you understand Parinibbana
as the mere absence of consciousness
and experience
or as an unconditioned reality
that is not simply nothingness?
Well, both of those seem to be unsatisfactory,
don't they?
These are two types of descriptions
that people have.
What we can say for sure is that
Nibbana is experienced in this very life
and it is only experienced,
Nibbana is only experienced
by a conscious being, right?
So in order for Nibbana to
have any relevant existence to us,
it must be an experience of consciousness.
So people who are
so-called fully enlightened
are walking around,
doing the appropriate thing.
They eat, they sleep,
they put on their clothes
and they meditate,
they talk to people as well.
So that's what we know
and what constitutes this Nibbana
is the cessation of greed
and hatred and delusion
and the replacement of that
with the factors of awakening
which are that the consciousness
is either serene
or in deep stillness.
The difficulties of life
have dissipated.
The kind of five hindrances,
anger and greed
and agitation and dullness
and sloth and doubt,
worry and flurry and so forth
are all gone now.
The person is in a
continuous state of well-being
and then they die.
And the description the Buddha gives is,
first of all, he says,
this is beyond, you know,
articulation in language
because language is developed
around human experiences.
So they talk about human experiences
and this is, first of all,
an extraordinarily rare experience.
Full enlightenment is a rare experience.
And so there's not a lot of language
available to describe these things.
Parinibbana.
Nibbana is said by the Buddha
as unarisen and therefore undying.
It's the deathless.
Now, that already blows our mind.
Like, what do you mean?
So you have to be humble in saying,
like, I don't get it.
So is it a consciousness,
some sort of consciousness
after the death of the Arahant?
Or is Nibbana some sort of element
which has nothing to do with consciousness,
but it's deathless, like space?
By the way, in Abhidhamma,
there are two elements
which are unarisen and undying.
And one of them is space.
Now, when you start to think,
even when we talk about space,
there's two definitions.
Space is that which occurs
between two objects.
Or others say, well, no,
it's not something between two objects.
It's just absence of consciousness.
It's absence of anything.
It's just space itself.
Try to conceive of space itself
without limits.
It's very difficult and...
Yeah, so it's a matter of language
and understanding.
And it's never been resolved.
So we have schools where people declare,
well, Parinibbana is where the absolute
extinction of all aspects of a being.
And others say, well, that can't be.
The Buddha talks very positively
about Nibbana.
So it must be some sort of condition,
you know.
But without all of the imaginable
experiences that we have in life,
you can't...
It's not about sights or sounds
or smells or tastes or touches
or even good ideas.
So when we eliminate those,
we're left...
hanging, aren't we?
In perplexity.
And I'm afraid that we...
The most honest approach to this
is allowing ourselves to be perplexed
or not pushing it too hard
and accept the fact that certain things
are quite unable by normal logic
and experience to be resolved finally
in a sensible way, you know.
The next question from the chat
is from Gregory.
Are there other Satipatthana meditation techniques
other than Anapanasati?
Can one make Dhammas a meditation object
other than through the breath, for example?
Yeah.
Anapanasati is mindfulness of the breath.
Satipatthana...
Patthana means foundation of mindfulness,
sort of...
focuses of mindfulness,
objects which you focus on.
The breath is merely one of them.
So the most...
The largest compendium of objects
for sati, for mindfulness,
is in the Four Foundations of Mindfulness,
the Mahasatipatthana Sutta.
And there you will see
the Four Foundations of Mindfulness.
These are the objects
you can place your attention on.
The first one is the body.
The second one is feelings.
The third one is the mind.
And the fourth one is
what we call Dhamma categories,
which are basically
drop-down menus
of portions of the teachings of the Buddha,
such as the five hindrances,
the five aggregates,
the five khandhas,
the body, feelings,
consciousness, perception, and volition.
Six sense bases,
the eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, and mind.
Seven factors of awakening.
The Eightfold Path itself.
These are what are called Dhamma categories.
These are all objects for mindfulness.
And in the first category,
the mindfulness of the body
is one what's called
a body amongst the bodies,
among the bodies.
There is a body among the bodies,
and that body is the breath.
So there are nine objects
for the body,
for body meditation.
Breath is only one of them.
You know, dividing the body
into four aspects,
four elements of,
of earth, water, heat, and air,
is a way of contemplating it,
looking at it as
what happens to it when it dies.
You can divide it into 32 parts
to see all of the,
what a body is,
kind of like on an autopsy table.
All kinds of directions
for mindfulness,
aside from the breath.
So, Len, one last question.
Yes, Ajahn Sona.
We'll do one last question,
and I wanted to take a quick second
and just announce for folks,
there's going to be an event
this Friday online
with Ajahn Sona.
That's this Friday, June 5th, 2026.
This is with the
the Ottawa Buddhist Society
in Ottawa, Ontario.
And it's going,
it's not going to be on YouTube right away.
It's through Zoom.
So it's a,
a Zoom Dhamma talk
and a question and answer.
And I will put that
on the screen here.
So this is their website here,
and I'll
drop the link in the,
in the description.
The link says Ajahn Paavaro,
but I assure you it's Ajahn Sona.
And that's this Friday.
It's 7.30 p.m.
Eastern Canada time.
So that's UTC minus four.
So if you're here in British Columbia,
that's going to be 4.30 p.m. for us,
or you can go ahead and
convert it to your time.
And it looks like
the folks there are asking
to contact them for the link.
So feel free to do that.
And we'll also post the link
later in the week on our website,
and we'll send a newsletter out
announcing this.
So feel free to join Ajahn Sona.
The Dhamma talk will end up live
eventually,
or sorry,
the Dhamma talk will end up
on YouTube eventually,
but will not be live on YouTube.
It'll be live on Zoom.
And I believe they're getting
the Zoom large meeting.
So there should be enough room
for everybody
if you want to join.
So,
so I will go ahead
and cut over to Ajahn.
Ajahn Sona,
and we'll ask the last question,
which is,
yes,
from Yorkshire,
United Kingdom.
Dear Ajahn,
what is a skillful way
to respond to bodily fatigue,
especially when struggling
to keep up with household
and other necessary tasks?
Yeah,
you have to,
you have to know whether
it's bodily fatigue
or mental fatigue
disguised as bodily fatigue.
And quite often
when our deeper issues
are resolved,
we will have more bodily energy.
So one way to re-energize yourself
is to think of things
that make you joyful.
And even if nothing's going on
in your life,
people you know,
that you care about and love,
if you think about their,
something good
that's happened to them,
that sometimes invigorates you.
And sometimes,
even just strangers
anywhere in the world,
the good things happening to them,
you can borrow from their,
their joy and happiness
and it'll give you
new energy as well.
You can also just do some basic
restorations of energy.
One is a little bit of deep breathing,
a few deep breaths,
get some light in your eyes,
go outside
and look at the sky.
Get some light in your eyes.
Splash your face with cold water.
Take a shower.
Putting on clean clothes sometimes helps.
Because we are quite good
at doing sustained exercise.
Household chores should not fatigue us.
We can do a lot of those
for many hours.
And so you might question
whether it's really the physical activity
that's doing it.
And its roots may be in your psychology
and you need to cheer yourself up
by getting a positive vision of life
and getting positive thoughts.
And of course,
by watching this channel,
you will get many suggestions,
suggestions for that.
Particularly the talks on loving kindness
are very uplifting and energizing.
Now I will end that.
Now I want to mention that
the talk for the Ottawa Buddhist Society,
I have chosen a title called
Dependent Origination.
And I will be discoursing,
talking about dependent origination
to the Ottawa Buddhist Society.
And so if you can,
join in with the Zoom call.
And later on,
there will be questions available as well.
On Friday, this...
No, Friday, is it?
Yes, this Friday, June 5th.
Friday, June 5th,
at 7.30 Ottawa time.
Correct.
Eastern Standard Time.
Eastern Standard Time.
And 4.30 Pacific Time.
Yes.
So, that's it for today.