Freedom: The Path To Happiness | Ajahn Brahm

Is it really possible to find happiness in our busy modern lives? Ajahn Brahm talks about the path to happiness in the context of our modern lives.

For those abused and wronged is happiness actually possible? Attachment to painful emotions, such as grief, anger, bitterness, the notion of a wounded self with a distinct identity: all these can become a perpetual prison...

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