I had a request for a talk yesterday,
which I promised I would give today,
for someone who is asking the question,
"Is happiness really possible
in our modern life,
or are we always going to have to
have suffering and problems
and difficulties in our life?"
So, it's a talk about happiness
and obviously, many of you know that
Buddhist monks are supposed to be
the happiest people in the world -- that
was the findings from Professor
Davidson of Wisconsin University.
And, that's objective
in other words, that's what they
find on a functional
Magnetic Resonance (fMRI) scan of a person's brain.
So, surely that Buddhists should know
something about happiness and its causes.
And for those of you who know basic
Buddhism, that's the whole purpose of the
Four Noble Truths.
The basic teachings of the Buddha, the
heart of this thing we call, "Buddhism."
You may say, and it's accurate
to say, it's all about the Four Noble
Truths, and you also know that the
way I've been teaching the Four Noble
Truths for many years now, is
rearranging the Four Noble Truths
and talking about: happiness, it's cause,
sometimes we are happy, and why
we're not happy.
Those four Noble Truths:
happiness, the cause of happiness,
that sometimes we're unhappy,
why we're unhappy.
And, that to me made so much sense
when I was a young man, because
really I thought the essence of all
religions was basically the answer to
two questions: "what is happiness"
and, "how do I get it."
If I knew those two answers, then you'd
have all the religion you really wanted in the world.
Because all the other theories,
and philosophies and theologies
and all that sort of stuff
was all very well to talk about,
but what I was really concerned with
in my life, was, you know, the problem
of happiness and suffering
and how to overcome the suffering
and find real true happiness.
So, the question of, "is there happiness
in this world," from personal experience
I can say yes, there certainly is.
Real happiness, true happiness.
But it's also fascinating in my life's journey to find
that that happiness lies in places where
people just don't even look.
And it's because we don't look in those places
that many people will live their whole
life and never actually experience the deep,
peaceful, wonderful happinesses
which are possible in life.
But first of all, I'm sort of saying about
what happiness is and how to get it.
Now all this -- is start talking -- in
this little presentation today, about why
is it that people have problems in life?
What is the cause of unhappiness in life?
Why do people keep getting
into these unhappy states?
Certainly there is part of life
which is beyond one's control,
there are the difficulties and pains
of life: the death of a loved one,
the disappointments in one's career,
the problems with one's children,
the arguments with one's partner,
the pain of sickness in the body,
or just the basic getting caught in
traffic jams when you're on the way
to the Buddhist Society.
The basic sufferings in life
are there but they're not the real sufferings.
The point is, that one of the things which the Buddha
says, is it's the attachment --
carrying those burdens around
more than they should be.
And that's where I'm going to start
this talk today.
Why is it that people get
attached to suffering?
And that's basically what it is.
Many years ago, I was privileged to give a
talk at a grief and loss conference
in Observation City.
It was a national conference
on grief and loss
all run by some psychologists
and psychiatrists.
And, I remember giving a presentation
there, just after there'd been
a presentation by the parents
of, I think, Ciara Glennon, one of the
young ladies who was killed by the
'Claremont Killer, ' (still not found
who exactly did that)
and they're expressing just their pain
at the loss of their daughter.
I think a young girl, I think she was a
lawyer, successful, beautiful, who
just disappeared one night
and her body was found
sometime later, by the 'Claremont
Killer, ' whoever that was.
And apparently that session (which I did
not attend myself) created a great feeling
of suffering and angst amongst the
people in the conference.
And I came along with my usual
positive attitude on how to deal with death.
It's not just my positive attitude,
because I had lived in Thailand
for nine years and it's one of those
sayings which comes from my experience.
In nine years, if you like research,
and my research was actually
attending funeral after funeral after
funeral, cremation after cremation
because our monastery in Thailand
was a local cremation ground.
We hang out with the ghosts.
Which was actually a very peaceful place to stay.
When I was wandering, you wanted to get away
from people 'cause you know,
I was a monk I like a bit of peace and quiet,
Ajahn Chah always used to tell us
that when you want to stay somewhere
at night time, ask the local village
where the cremation ground is,
it'd be like an open area in a forest
and you go and stay there.
It's the most peaceful place
because the villagers are too scared
to come and visit you. [laughter]
So I really loved those ghosts
for protecting me, they were my
bodyguards, my minders to keep all
the people away, so I could meditate
quietly and peacefully.
So, good on you ghosts!
But that particular forest monastery
Wat Pah Nanachat that was like a ghost monastery
because they had a cremation ground there
but also, I used to see so many funeral
services, again and again and again.
And because you were dependent upon those
villagers for your alms food, you'd
see them every morning.
You'd go into their village.
And these are the people you grew up with.
I remember, just I was nine years in
Thailand mostly that monastery,
when I came over here,
to help start this monastery over in
Serpentine and help support
this Buddhist Society of Western
Australia, I think it was about
four or five years before I had the
chance to go back to that village
and as soon as I went back there,
getting back into that monastery in the late afternoon,
the first time the villagers knew I
was there, was when I went on Alms Round,
see all these ladies and men
and they looked up,
"It's Ajahn Brahm!" and they'd start
crying because you did become part of the village.
I was one of them, had gone away for about four / five
years and come back again.
And that's actually how close we
were knitted into that community.
And I mention that point simply because
it establishes a fact that I didn't
just see these people at the funeral
services, I saw them before,
I saw them afterwards.
These are the people I knew.
I never saw grief.
I never saw people crying.
It was actually once, I must admit, in
all those nine years, that once I saw a
tear, maybe just one or two drops of
tears fall down the cheek,
of one lady who lost her husband.
But apart from that, there was no
solid grief like you see here in Western Australia.
And it wasn't that it was
suppressed, it was just people
solaced in a different attitude,
they weren't so attached
to their loved ones.
And to me it was a revelation
and what I said at the conference,
that there is a difference, a separation
between grief and loss.
Loss will always be there.
But grief, is an added extra.
And seeing a culture -- and that northeast
part of Thailand had not been affected
by any other western influence
so it was like a pure old Buddhist culture
and when you actually saw just how
that pure Buddhist culture related to a
death, it was a revelation to see that
there was a society where grief basically did not exist.
And, it showed me that our grief
is a cultural addition.
There is another way of looking at it.
And why is it that we attach to that sort of suffering?
And basically, it's the
same reason (you may not agree with
me on this, but) I'm challenging you here.
It's the same reason, why it is that we go to see these weepy movies,
because we like to cry.
We actually encourage these emotions inside of us.
We like to feel emotional.
There is a lady who comes here,
she's not here this evening, thank
goodness [audience laughter], but she
once told me that her mother
would always love going
to see these weepy movies,
these Chinese movies and she described them to me.
Apparently the Chinese movies, there's enough people here from
Malaysia, Singapore here, Hong Kong
that you know what I'm talking about --
boy meets girl, but boy never gets girl!
Either the family or the Imperial Army
or some other tragedy gets in the way
[audience laughing] and in the end,
boy and girl, are killed or separated.
And they know that's going to happen!
Every movie is the same.
It's always a sad ending.
So her mother would come back from
the weekly trip to the movies,
with red eyes, she'd been crying all the
way through, all the way home, and she
asked, "What the heck you do that for?"
"Ah, 'cause it's nice to cry.
It's so sad
and so enjoyable to feel sad."
[audience laughing]
Now, that's not so funny, because
at this conference, there's always
key experiences which happen in
my life, and it was after I gave
that little presentation
on how to look at life and
death in a different way, so you don't have to be sad.
A lady came up to me
and said, "What's wrong with being sad,"
because she'd lost a close relation
in tragic circumstances, and she'd been
grieving about 5 or 6 years,
and there's no way she would give up her grief.
What I saw, in that lady, she was attached
to grieving.
That was her persona.
She would go to conference after
conference, therapist after therapist,
it was her identity to be the griever.
That's one of our big problems there.
Sometimes we form our identities,
we attach to that suffering, and that's
'me.'
We become the victims.
And we enjoy, in a perverse way, being
that victim.
We enjoy the grief.
There's one of the sayings of the Buddha
which you see again and again in the
original teachings, he's saying all these
negative emotions, like grief, like anger,
like jealousy, even like fear,
he said there is a delight there.
If there wasn't a delight,
then people wouldn't get into the fear, or
into the jealousy, or into the anger.
'Cause you know that when you feel angry,
sometimes people do feel the power.
And it's like a heroin or like a
methamphetamine.
You know, you're empowered at that time.
There is a delight in those states,
which is why people get into being angry
or into being violent, into being jealous
or actually even into being grief.
There is a delight there.
And this is one of the wonderful sayings of the Buddha.
Because there is a delight there, that's why people attach to those things.
But the reason why they don't
let go is because they see the delight
but they don't see the danger.
With anger, yeah, you get a high,
but you have to pay for that afterwards.
It's like a drug.
And many of the other negative emotions
which we have, like jealousy, yeah you
get a sense of being the one left out,
but you have to pay for it afterwards.
Grief, you feel that, yeah,
that you are the victim.
But my goodness, how much
you have to pay.
And it's those attachments to those negative
emotions, especially the attachment to the
pain of the past, that stops us being
free to be happy.
This morning I went to a little conference
run by the Catholic Education Society or Center.
It was for the teachers and the
counseling education system.
It was about reconciliation and forgiveness.
And there's some very good speakers there
from an Assistant Commissioner to
Michelle Stubbs, who's the coordinator,
I think, of the victims of child abuse.
It's like a huge problem in our modern society.
How many people have been
sexually or physically abused when
they were children.
And how the heck do we deal with that.
And, what was being suggested
was and this is an interesting thing, that many of
those victims of child sexual
abuse feel that they need to have their
day in court to be heard, to have their
pain acknowledged, and to have
some sort of retribution.
Our society asks for more
than retribution, asks for
punishment: jail sentences,
non-jail sentences.
Some people would want corporal punishment or even executions.
But, on part of that
debate, I was sitting next to a Catholic
Priest who told me an anecdote from
the United States, where some of the
relations of a person who was, I think
killed, murdered, attended the execution
of the relation's, loved-one's
murderer.
And after witnessing the
execution, came back and said,
the execution was too fast.
It should've been slower.
That really hurt me so much.
They wanted pain.
They wanted suffering in the person
who killed their -- I don't know, child
or relation or whatever it was -- he
never gave the details.
What is it in a human being
wants to harm others because
they have harmed us?
I say that's this attachment to
being a victim, attachment, you know, to,
or this cultural way of looking at things,
an 'eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth'
is still very, very strong in many people
in our society.
And when I was asked, "What does Buddhism
think about things like that," I quoted a
book which I read as a student, which
changed much of the way I looked
at being a victim or crime and punishments
and I've mentioned that here before,
that there's a wonderful book written
written over a hundred years ago
it's called "Erewhon," by Samuel Butler.
And apparently, that really influenced
the great British playwright George Bernard Shaw.
It changed the way he looked
at some of these social problems
and the reason why it was a very
effective argument against the way
we treat "criminals," or people who've
done harm, with punishment,
was that it used the satire.
It envisaged
a society in which, what we call crime
today, is looked upon as being a
sickness and therapy, therapy, therapy
is the only response to crime.
If somebody steals, they go and see
a doctor.
If somebody rapes, that's
looked upon as being a sickness.
Punishment is not really looked at at all.
But somehow, a rehabilitation
of trying to work out and remedy
that glitch in human nature.
But, when it came to health matters,
if you were sick and ill, that
was because you were careless
and you were punished.
Part of that book, a chapter which
I will always remember, was of a
court scene in which there was a
poor man who had a cold.
And when he had a cold (there's
many colds going around right now
[directed at audience], there's
a cough already, you'd be in trouble in
this society), because he had a cold
he was in the dock, charged
with being sick.
And because he was
sniffling, he had no defense and
so the judge pronounced him
guilty of having a cold and he,
before he gave judgment, uh, sentence
sorry, the punishment, he said,
"This is not the first time you
appeared before me, you were here
last week or three weeks ago with a cold.
I warned you then, if you don't eat better, take
better care of your health, let go
of your stress, it's your responsibility
to be healthy and you have been
negligent, and your cold is causing
a danger to other people!
You're being heedless, you're not
caring for others, you're spreading
your germs to other people,
that's not appropriate, you should be
punished: three years in jail for having
a cold, being a repeat offender!"
There's some logic to that.
In a sense, you know, if you are sick,
isn't your responsibility to exercise
and eat well and keep yourself healthy?
And if you are sick, you are a scourge on society.
You're robbing it of its resources.
"You heedless scallywag,
reprobate delinquent for always
having colds."
And they were punished.
Now, obviously, what that really made
very, very clear to me is that the double
standards which we have.
Why is it that when we're sick,
no one gets punished for being sick.
And what's the difference between
some of the behavior of human
beings which we call criminal.
So when I was asked about what
we think in Buddhism about punishment,
it was very much the case that,
yeah, sometimes it's like a sickness,
you do need quarantine, to be put
away, so you don't harm other human
beings, from the time that sickness is
still strong in you, you're still a danger to others.
But when you're in quarantine,
it's never looked upon as being a punishment.
It's always looked upon
as being rehabilitating.
To try and take that problem, to work
with it so that it's no longer there.
And you stay in quarantine
as long as you are contagious,
a danger to society.
In the same way, why don't we look at
that as penal before... to stay as long
as you're a danger to society.
But not looked upon as being a
punishment, looked upon as being
a problem which needs to be healed.
No punishment, but rehabilitation.
That's how I understand Buddhism,
over many, many years of being a
Buddhist, and also how I understand
a positive way forward.
But why is it that people don't want that,
they want people to be punished for
their way they've hurt us.
And I think it's very much
that we can't just understand
deeply why it is that people do these terrible things.
Why they make these
mistakes, to have a deeper understanding
and also have a deeper understanding
not just where these crimes, these hurts,
these harms come from, but
how in the future we can lessen the
chance of harm and hurt.
Being attached to being a victim
does not help.
Sometimes, I just wonder why people
want punishment of others, when
if you're a Christian, you know that God
will punish afterwards, what do you need
to punish for?
If you're a Muslim, Allah will look after it,
if you're a Buddhist, karma
will look after it, and if you
don't believe in any religion,
you know that person will
have to go into psychotherapy for many,
many years afterwards.
Whatever it is, no one ever escapes
from the problems of their bad behavior.
It's also one of those insights which
I had from the experience of visiting
prisons many times in the early
part of my life here in Western Australia.
Visiting prisons so many
times and getting to know
some of these people spending
years in jail, never once did I find a
prisoner who had no conscience.
They would act as if they had no
conscience, and think, "Yeah, when I get
outta here, I'm just going to rob as many houses as I can.
I don't care about the
system, I'm just going to bear with this
until I can get out."
But when I got to know some of these prisoners, they would
always, in every case, express just
how bad and terrible they felt about
what they'd done to others.
It wasn't the case, they never felt
deep inside the hurt which they'd
given to others, they always
felt it, it was always remorse there,
just usually it was a tough guy syndrome,
they did not want to express it.
So there is always a punishment comes
there.
If someone has done something
bad to you, they are going to hurt.
This, what we call, the law of karma,
it has to come back to them.
And that is not whether you're a Buddhist
or a Christian or whatever, that's a law
like the law of gravity, you don't have
to believe in that, or not believe in it
it happens irrespective of your
beliefs.
So we don't need to punish others.
Instead, we can let the whole
thing go.
And unless we let them go,
then we are a victim for the rest
of our lives.
It doesn't matter who has
harmed, hurt, abused you.
Until you can let that go, you're always
the victim and you can never be free.
It's just how we can reach that point of letting go
that sometimes, just to think
we need to confront
that person who's harmed us
we need to fix the situation ourselves.
We need to be acknowledged,
we need to be heard.
Sometimes that cannot be achieved.
If it's not achieved, then what.
Sometimes you don't need
to be heard,
sometimes you don't need to
confront the person who's
harmed you or hurt you.
You are always free and every moment
independent of others,
independent of the judicial system,
independent of where that
person who harmed or hurt
or abused you is,
you're always free
to let go at any time.
These attachments which we carry
around, we choose to carry them.
We don't have to.
The experience of seeing how
grief was not a part of the Buddhist
culture, hundreds of years old
in northeast Thailand,
taught me that many of the things I thought
were normal, natural, and had
to happen, were not normal,
natural, had to happen.
It's just the way we've learned
to deal with the problems of life.
We can relearn them
and do things in a different way.
Someone has harmed and hurt you,
why not let it go pretty quickly.
I've often said, and this is
just a start of understanding
how to reconcile.
Let go, forgive, let go, move on.
I've often said that when someone
calls you an idiot and you keep thinking,
"Why did they call me an idiot,
I'm not an idiot! You should not call me an idiot!"
you've allowed them to
call you an idiot three more times. [laughter]
Every time you remember that,
you're allowing them to call you
an idiot another time.
So why not, when they call you an
idiot, you forget it straight away.
Then they only call you an idiot once.
They're wrong, you know they're wrong,
end of problem.
And I think many of you will accept
the wisdom of that, and maybe
you've heard it enough times
you've done that already,
these people call you an idiot, they call you foolish,
they call you ugly, they call you stupid,
you just forget it straight away.
Or for those of you who don't know
this wonderful saying of Ajahn Chah,
"If they call you a dog, what should you do?
Look at your..." [audience - inaudible] bow [laughter]
(AB: very good you got there first,
excellent) but no, that's not what Ajahn Chah said,
If someone calls you a dog
you look at your bottom
to see if you got a tail.
If you ain't got a tail, you're not a dog,
end of problem.
Most of the things which people say
about you aren't true
'cause they don't know
who you are or what you're doing,
so that's a great way of stopping the problem.
But what a lot of people do,
they keep thinking about it,
every time you think about it
you allow them to call you a dog another time.
Now that's easy to understand
but what about someone who’s really hurt you?
Really abused you?
Even like sexual abuse as a kid.
Is it the case every time
you remember that,
you allow them to abuse you again?
Every time you bring that up?
Why is it we can't let it go
straight away?
It's hard.
But with an inner strength,
you know, a strength which is
not coming from will power
but from wisdom power,
from compassion,
why do we allow ourselves
to be victims?
To be made victims?
Now I'm not just saying that out of theory.
Many, many years ago
there was a disciple,
this was in the time of the
Armadale group, part of the Armadale
group, who came out to me
(actually one of her friends said
you better talk to her because she's
in big trouble).
And what the trouble was,
was she found out her husband
was sexually abusing her two children.
She had missed it, and I told her
why she'd missed it, "because, look,
you love that man."
When you love a man,
the signs are there but you are in
denial because the whole idea that
the man you love is abusing the
children you love, it's just it's so
hard to reconcile that.
It's so hard for the mind to fit
those two together.
So she just denied the signs
of sexual abuse of her children
by her husband.
It was found out by the school.
Investigated, it was true.
The guy went to jail.
The marriage was over.
And I was counseling her,
counseling her on these Buddhist principles.
She'd been meditating enough, she understood
the basic idea of karma and letting go
and not being a victim
and she took it on board.
She said she could never live
with that man or love him again,
but she's not going to allow him
to make her suffer anymore.
She completely let go.
Wished him well, and eventually
moved to the UK.
And I kept in contact with her
and her kids, but before she left
it was compulsory at that time,
probably still is, for her to go
for counseling and the kids too.
I was quite amused that after
going to counseling
for about four/five weeks
she came to complain again.
"This counselor will not
understand I've moved on."
And the counselor was still saying, "You hate your husband don't you?"
"No, I don't hate my husband, I've let him go." [laughter]
Counselor: "You hate him don't you?"
Woman: "No, no I don't!"
And she came because she could not be free of her counselor
[audience laughter]
until she admitted how much she
hated and wanted to kill her husband.
And so I had to write this letter
to the counselor about Buddhist
Psychology and how Buddhists
relate to these things, to actually to free her.
And I didn't write this letter easily
because if I'd got it wrong,
than she'd be suffering
later on down the track.
But because I knew her,
because I'd talked with her,
because I'd counseled her myself,
yeah, I knew that she had moved on.
She did not have the anger,
she didn't go through this process
of victimhood which is expected
in our modern culture.
She moved through fast
and so gained her freedom fast.
And I really salute her,
because what she did
by moving from that incredible hurt,
a whole life being devastated,
she moved so quickly through that --
not into forgetfulness, not into ignorance, 'that didn't happen,'
not into denial -- but, yeah that
happened, that was an awful thing to happen
but I'm not going to allow that to
hurt and harm me any more.
Because she moved into that freedom,
she took her two kids with her very quickly.
They too followed their mother's lead,
were not going to be victims
and moved on.
There are other ways of dealing with
these terrible abuses.
And the other personal example
I have, again, is the story of my own
father who told me that he was,
before the Second World War,
born and brought up in Liverpool
in a very, very poor family
as most people were in those days.
And his father was a plumber
who would go to work,
before he'd come home
spend most of his time in the pub, spending the money
giving only a pittance to my
paternal grandmother
to look after the kids.
As soon as he'd come home drunk,
get out his belt and whip
any kid who came in his path
for no reason or another and then
set on his wife.
Which is why my father,
in my presence, he said,
"Look, I'm sorry son.
Your grandfather was a bastard."
And he hated him.
But the other thing he told me,
was that whenever he was under
that belt himself, being beaten
for no reason at all, except his father
was drunk.
He made a resolution,
he told me he determined
if ever he gets through this and
has kids, he will never hit them.
And that's what happened.
There's no way that my father could hit us.
My mother had to be the disciplinarian.
And even she didn't do it
very well.
And he became this incredibly
loving father.
He was a person who, in that story I tell you
about taking me down a side street
of Acton in London, telling me,
"Look, whatever you do in your life son,
the door of my house will always
be open to you."
What I later interpreted as
being, "whatever you do in your life,
wherever you go, the door of my
heart will be open to you."
It was unconditional love.
And that was a man who
suffered tremendous physical
abuse as a child.
There is other ways of dealing with these things.
And I look at that as a way forward.
Whereas if we carry that abuse around
with us, we become victims.
We are stopping ourselves being
happy.
But we don't have to.
Which is, if it happens great,
but there has to come a time,
some situation where we let go.
Sometimes that letting go
does happen when we face the
person who has been hurting us,
creating our problem.
We face them and we hear them acknowledging,
sometimes there is a letting go
there.
Maybe that might be the best way.
But sometimes that way isn't
there for us.
If it's not there for us
then we can do it ourselves.
We can move on by letting go of
this burden.
When we say that, "Is there happiness in this world?"
Unless we drop those attachments
to the pain of our lives,
to the disappointments, to what went wrong,
to the hurt and the harm,
if we can't drop those attachments
how on earth can we ever be free?
At this conference this morning,
there was a very impressive
young Aboriginal leader.
I forget her name, Norelle was her first name,
she was actually a basketball star or
something, but she was saying
(it's a very interesting thing),
so... if our Prime Minister
John Howard says sorry...
so then what.
She was telling her students, she teaches at ?Contell,
have you got to wait until
the government says sorry before we can
reconcile and move forward?
Why leave them that power?
Why don't we do it now?
I thought that was a very
inspiring and wonderful way
of taking responsibility
for ourselves
for our moving out of our victimhood.
Rather than waiting for someone
else to do it for us, whether it's
the government, whether it's the
courts, whether it's karma or
whatever.
Why can't we take
responsibility for being free?
Say, "I forgive.
I let go.
I will move on.
I'm never going to allow
anyone else ever again
to control my happiness."
You've heard me say that before.
It's a very simple thing
to say: don't allow others to control
your happiness.
It's a very powerful thing to say.
It's very profound and you can see
just how much of our lives
is controlled by others.
Part of Buddhism, I'd say,
is always empowering,
empowering you to take control
of your happiness.
And it can be done.
Too often we look for solutions
in controlling others.
Or the problem lies with my abusers, the problem lies with
the government, the problem lies somewhere else, the problem
lies with my husband, the problem
lies with my cancer, the problem
lies with my loved one who's just died.
If you want to, sort of, try fix
up the world by fixing
up all those people around you
who've hurt you or harmed you,
perhaps you'll die before that
problem is solved.
Perhaps if you get reborn many, many times
you'll never find that freedom,
that happiness, that peace.
Fortunately, you don't have to
go that path.
There's one beautiful message of
the Buddha, you cannot
really change this world
but you sure can change
your attitude towards it.
The abuse which you've had in the past,
you can't change that.
The pain, the difficulty, the loss,
the person who's just died,
you can't bring them back again.
That's obvious,
sometimes obvious, but we
still think that way.
We can't undo the abuse.
We can't get back that youth
which we may have lost.
We can't undo things.
We can't change the world or the past.
But what we can do is change our attitude
in this present moment.
It's that attitude change which is
the key, I've always found,
to finding freedom and happiness.
To find happiness and freedom
in our world, rather than
changing the world first so that
some time in the future we can
be free, that we can be happy,
we can be at peace.
And that's not a cop-out,
because sometimes people say,
"Well, if you don't do anything
there'll be more abuse, more
cheating, more stupid governments
more wars, more child abuse,
more crime."
And the psychology
which I know, that the more time
you have blame, the more time you
have punishment, the more time
you exert revenge, that it makes
the whole problem worse and
worse and worse and worse.
The more people you lock in jail
the more criminals we have
for our future.
The more you punish,
the more people have resentment.
The quicker you can forgive,
the quicker there can be
rehabilitation.
Not just for the victims,
but the people who
did those terrible things.
Some few years ago, I should've
kept this article because there was
a brilliant article, it was concerning
the killers of Jamie Bulger,
(whatever his name was)
this young -- was it two or three
year old -- who was abducted in
the shopping center in Liverpool
tortured and killed on the
railway track by some, was it, eight or
nine year old children.
And the whole culture of England
at the time especially driven by the
tabloid press, was wanting the blood
of those two killers even though
they were very, very young and
they'd done a terrible terrible thing.
To take the life of a two year old,
and it's not just one person's death
it's all the tears and the anxiety
and the stress and the devastation
of all of the people who knew
that child, let alone the parents.
But what I never knew at the time
was pointed out in this article
was that at about the same time
a similar event happened in Norway
in the town of Trondheim, north of
Oslo where I think, two boys
lured (I think) a girl into the snowfields,
and had similarly killed her.
And the similarities between the crimes
were very close.
But what was very dissimilar was
the way those two societies
dealt with the problem.
As many of you know,
the Jamie Bulger case, those two
kids were put into some
detention center,
and the tabloid press
just wanted them to be really
punished hard and the parents
were just waiting for them to
be released so they could kill them.
And even the public did not want them to be released.
I read in the newspapers there was some idea of
sending them to Australia where they
wouldn't be known, new identities
so they could live their life
and the British public was saying, "No
they don't deserve any freedom."
That's what I read.
With those other two kids
the following day after they were caught
they both went to school
accompanied by psychiatrists
and a social worker.
They were not put into any
punitive institution.
Very, very soon, the mother and father
of the child who died came to a closure,
came to forgiveness and moved
on in their life.
Whereas the parents
of Jamie Bulger never moved on as far as I know.
The whole town of Trondheim
came to a closure.
They realized a terrible act,
but the only way to move forward
is not to wish harm on the killers.
So many years later, one of the killers
of that (I think it was a) little girl
in Trondheim is perfectly well adjusted
having a successful life
completed the education,
had really moved on, and so did the
family and the rest of town.
There's one of the killers still has
social problems and some psychological
problems, but nowhere near like
the pain which was spread around
England because of the Jamie Bulger case.
To see those two separate accounts
of a similar tragedy, one where there were
many victims and their victimhood
was, I dare to say, cherished
and attached to and made much of.
And the other one, where
rehabilitation was the main aim and goal,
to see the effects of those two cases
I sure wish I'd lived in Norway
than in England.
That was the way forward,
the way that everyone got healed,
the way where there
was less pain, less suffering.
So, when we are not happy when we are
suffering, when we are not free.
Why is it?
It's because we don't know how to
move on from the pains
and difficulties and stresses of life.
Now these are big pains,
big problems, big sufferings.
You probably haven't had to
experience that degree of
suffering, but if those people
can move on and find freedom,
why can't we?
One of the great causes
for happiness
is the ability to forgive,
to let go, to move on.
It causes happiness for
the offenders, (I don't mean
because they got away with it,
no one gets away with anything
in this world) but it means that
they got away forward,
and certainly a way forward
for those people we call
the victims.
We have more freedom and happiness.
Which is why I keep telling -- why is it that we
carry around the shit of the past,
and we don't carry the eggs,
in that story of the two chicken
farmers (which I won't repeat,
because I think I tell that every
couple of weeks here).
It's an interesting thing,
why is it that our nature
always to look at the past
and collect the pain, to go to the
movies and once a week
to look, to be worried by
watching too many soap operas.
If people haven't got enough worries
in their life, they create more
worries by watching what's happening
in Neighbors, by worrying who's
going to win the cricket
or who's going to win the soccer or who's going to win the footie
and people love the nail-biting finishes.
Or if they don't like those
they go to these extreme
sports and sometimes,
I remember being in the airport
in Bangkok, and I saw on the
big TV screen there, some of these
extreme sports people were doing.
I remember seeing... they were
doing these motorbike races on ice!
That's crazy!
What idiot would actually
race each other on these ice tracks
and sure enough, one person
came off the bike (they had to
have spikes on the wheels)
and got spiked.
Whoa, what do they do things like that for?
Why do people do that?
Because people like to suffer.
Why they like to suffer,
they like the thrill, the excitement
there is delight in suffering.
Be careful.
If you delight in suffering
there's no way you can ever
be happy.
If you attach to being the victim,
if you just want the thrill
of being hurt, or being on the edge
of being hurt, however can
you be free?
So, one of the ways
of happiness in this world
is able to notice why one can't
detach from that which is
genuinely painful and difficult to
bear with.
Why do we become the victim?
Why do we become the sad one?
Why do sometimes we become the sick person?
This is interesting, in some monasteries
I've been in, you see people become
sick and sick and sick and sick,
and a lot of monks say it's because
they want to leave, they want to
disrobe, that's the only way they
know how of doing it.
They actually become attached
to being the sick one
that's their persona.
It's called ego attachment.
It creates a sense of self.
This is one of the things the Buddha
kept on pointing to.
Who do you think you are?
What do you take as your self?
What is your ego?
If you had wrote a list of who you
were, what your attributes were,
not in theory, but in practice
and you wrote them down
how many of those things would be
the angry person, the victim, the
person who was abused,
the person who was divorced,
the person who was sick,
the person who's had the mastectomy?
How many of you take that
to be your self?
There's a problem there,
because the Buddha noticed
if you identify with being that,
if you become that, you repeat it.
This is the sense of identity,
it's one of the reasons why
when I did go into prisons
to visit prisoners.
Again, I've never
called them criminals, as you've
heard me say before, there's
people who've done crimes
and I kept on telling the people
in jail, "You are not a criminal.
You are a person who's done a crime. You're not a criminal.
You're something bigger than that.
Never think of yourself as a criminal.
You're a person who's done a crime.
Don't identify with that terrible act which you did.
If you make that sense
of self with your crime, if that's who
you think you are, you are the burglar,
you are the killer, you are the rapist,
you become that.
Which means when you get released you'll do it again.
Because that's who you are.
You're the rapist, you're the killer,
you're the adulterer, you're the
child abuser.
This is psychology, which I know
because I've gone deep into my
mind and seen the way that minds
work.
If you're -- you make an identity
of who you think you are, that's
how you relate to the the world.
That's who you become.
That's what you repeat.
That's what's expected of you,
so of course, that's what you do.
And there we get the repeat
of the harm and the hurt
again and again and again and again.
Why my father never
thought of himself as the abused
child, so that's why he never
repeated the abuse on me.
Why a person who just forgives,
lets go, does not become the victim,
becomes free and can live.
Last story, was a story which -- again
many of these stories you've heard here before
but, I usually try to bring them
together in one talk which is on
this one subject, simply because it fits
and this talk goes outside and gets
put on CDs and it's nice to be complete --
and this was the story of those two
Australian soldiers meeting together
in a reunion, they'd both been in the
Second World War, they'd both been
in Singapore, the fall of Singapore,
and both been put in P.O.W. camps.
Well, one met the other, and said,
"Have you forgiven the Japanese yet
for what they did to us and our friends?"
"No! Never!
How can you forgive that??"
said one of the soldiers.
"What about you?"
His friend said, "I forgave years ago.
But you, my friend, are still in the P.O.W. camp."
I love that story, simply because
until you forgive -- until he forgave
what those guards, those soldiers,
did to him and his friends,
in the camps in Changi on the
Death Railway in Thailand
on the Burmese border.
Until they forgave, they were still
being tortured.
They're still in the camps.
They can never be happy.
His friend had let go and therefore
he was free.
So when it comes
to happiness, you don't have to be
controlled by what others did to you.
You don't have to be limited,
in prison, in jail, by the crimes which have
been perpetrated on you in the past.
You don't even have to worry about
the crimes which you've done,
I'm not talking about against the law,
but the harm and hurt which you
have done to others.
I don't know how many people feel guilty about
some of the things they've done,
I've mentioned a few of those things
I've always felt guilty about: playing
my Jimmie Hendrix records too loud
to my father while he was playing his
Sinatra records, never really, sort of
being a really good son to
him; never selling those
encyclopedias when I was a kid,
getting someone actually to buy
an encyclopedia, just a rubbish book.
I don't know why they even bought that,
but I made them buy it.
And all the terrible things you did as
a kid, gee, what did I do those for?
It's so easy to feel guilty about the smallest of things.
Why not, why can't we just let them
go, learn from them and move on?
Until you do, you can never be
free and never be happy.
And this is not a small thing.
You can never really be virtuous
and good until you're free.
And as far as meditation is concerned,
no matter how many people I've taught
meditation to, when they get to a
certain point in happiness and peace,
they can't go any further, and they kept
coming back with the same complaint,
"I don't think I deserve to be so happy.
I don't think I deserve to be at peace.
I don't think I deserve to be
enlightened," basically.
And really that's another dagger to my heart.
Why not? If all I do in my life
as a monk, teaching here Friday night,
going overseas, if that's all I ever
give to you, the conviction that
you deserve to be happy, that you
deserve to be free, that you deserve
to be enlightened.
You don't feel so guilty, you don't attach to those
painful things in the past.
You are free.
You can let go,
both other people's harm, and
your own harm as well;
be able to forgive yourself and forgive others.
What that means
is giving yourself the gift of
freedom.
No one else can do that for you.
Look, a Jesus can't forgive,
a monk can't forgive, a Buddha
can't forgive, a God can't forgive,
only you can forgive you.
No one else.
All these other people
they can encourage, they can teach,
they can lead, they can inspire,
but in the end it's up to you.
One day, one day you'll do that.
This life, the next life, or some life,
you'll look at all your past, all the
hurt, all the harm, and let it go.
Say to yourself, in those words of
my father, "Whatever I have done
in my life, what other people
have done to me, the door of my heart
is open to me, fully, absolutely.
Happiness, freedom, come in."
To be able to invite freedom in,
invite happiness in.
There's a liberation there,
which is why very often the Buddha
called those enlightenment
experiences liberations.
Freedom from suffering, freedom from pain,
freedom from the past!
Why do we carry the past around,
so heavy on our back? Because
that's what being a victim is.
I was telling people in Melbourne,
I just came back from Melbourne
on Wednesday night, just reminiscing,
'cause someone asked, "What was
it like being a monk in Thailand
many years ago?"
I was reminiscing
about one of the most wonderful times
I had in Thailand.
When after five years I left my monastery
with all my possessions on my back
(and that wasn't many possessions).
You had to walk and you had
no place to go, you could go to
any monastery and have a bed
for the night, any village in the morning
with your bowl, and get some food in it.
You're completely free.
Any tree you could just sit
underneath it, put your mosquito net
there, meditate, sleep.
It was literally like being a bird,
but better than being a bird,
a bird always has to hunt for their food.
For me, I knew any place,
any village I went to, there was food
there for me.
And it was such a freedom
because I was attached to no place
and to no thing.
Every crossroads I got
to I could go forward, go left, go right,
or just turn 'round and go back.
I had no duties, nothing compelling
me to go in any directions.
No duties, no burdens, no things
to do, no unfinished business.
This complete freedom is physically
the most freedom I've ever felt,
and everything you owned,
you had with you: my bowl,
my mosquito net, an umbrella,
water pot, spare set of robes
and that was all.
You could wander
wherever you wanted.
It was so much freedom.
I always remember
that that's the same freedom which you
can have in your mind at any time.
Any crossroads you come to in life,
go whichever way,
'cause you're not burdened by the past,
you're not carrying baggage.
How much baggage do people carry
in this life?
Mostly it's the baggage of our past,
our history.
What happened to you,
who did what to you, who said what,
if you want happiness, let go.
Free your past, at very least,
free the pain of the past and keep
the happy memories -- at least that way
you're carrying enjoyable baggage --
but even better to leave it all behind.
There is such a thing as happiness
in this world and the happiness
is no one else's responsibility,
it's yours and that happiness
is there for you at any moment
at any time.
There's a door, which
is open from the cell which is
sometimes what your life feels like,
being in a prison of your past,
of what happened to you,
of your body, your pain, your sickness,
this pain which has happened to you --
That's like being in a prison, but it's
a prison whose door is always open,
always open, it's just sometimes we
don't know how to walk through it.
Sometimes we think we're not supposed
to walk through it.
And here I tell you,
walk, be free, let go.
There is such a thing as happiness in
life, there is such a thing as freedom,
there is such a thing as forgiveness
and reconciliation, there is such
a thing, there's such love that you can
free yourself and free others and let go.
And that freedom and that love is
not a copping out of life, that is the
heart of a positive response.
Free yourself and you show
the way to freedom for others.
And much of the pain and
the cause of pain in life -- as the
Assistant Commissioner said today,
something like 80 or 90%,
he was saying of people in prisons
in Western Australia have themselves
been victims of child abuse.
Because they could not forgive,
because they could not let go,
because they could not find freedom,
now they're in jail
having also caused pain to others.
So what is the way forward?
I think I've shown it to you:
to have the guts to see things in
a different way, to free oneself.
You don't need to feel grief,
you don't need to feel that pain.
You can walk out whenever you want.
It's called freedom,
the path to happiness.
That's the talk this evening
on is it possible to be happy?
Yes, that's one of the ways how.
Audience: Sadhu, Sadhu, Sadhu!
Ajahn: Ok, so any questions or comments?
I hope it's been challenging,
I hope a few people disagree with me.
Otherwise, I didn't challenge hard enough.
Any comments or questions
about the talk this evening?
Maybe that's just something for
you to contemplate... see later on
if it makes sense or not.
No, no comments, questions? Ok