Akusala

0:06The Buddha called the mind radiant, pabasarang. And to be clear, he wasn't implying that the mind had substance or luminosity. if you went in a dark room with the mind it would light up the room it was a figure of speech that has been misinterpreted but he simply meant that the mind is pure pure like a radiant gem crystal clear like a crystal clear pool of water There are no defilements inherent in the mind. It was a literary tool, oratory tool. When he said the mind is brilliant, he was trying to make a point that our ordinary experience of things is not defiled.

1:34It's not unwholesome. It's not bad ever. It's not good ever either. It has no ethical quality to it whatsoever. It's innocent. No matter what we see or hear or smell or taste or feel or think. Even our thoughts are innocent. which is an important point because quite often we feel guilty for having certain thoughts, for imagining certain situations. But our thoughts and our imaginations are not entirely caused by our inclinations. Thoughts can come based on past habits.

2:38At any rate, the thoughts themselves are ethically inert. So really, there's nothing wrong with the world. There's no problem in the world, in our world, in our lives, except for three very small, tiny details. There are only three things that are wrong with the world, wrong with our world, wrong with our minds. These are called the akusala mula, the roots of unwholesomeness. Mula means root. And by root is meant base of a mind. So an important quality of the mind that roots it on either side of the fence.

3:56If a mind is rootless, then you can't say it's good or bad. But if it's rooted in one of these three things, these three make it bad. One of the three there, lobha, desire, dosa, aversion, and moha, delusion. Or in colloquial speech, we'd say greed, anger, and delusion, these three. These are what's wrong with the world. All problems can be boiled down to these three from a Buddhist perspective. It's not easy to see this. It's quite likely to be contested.

5:10Not a very appealing teaching when we think of all that's wrong with the world. We want to say there are so many other things wrong with this world. How can you trivialize the evil of the world? Ignore all that's wrong with this world. This sort of opposition is likely caused by our investment in solutions. We know what's wrong with the world. Anyone will tell you what's wrong with the world. And they'll offer up all sorts of solutions, maybe economical, societal, political.

5:59And none of these are actually getting at the root of the problem. Through the practice of mindfulness, it's a crucial shift in perspective to realize that there's nothing wrong with experience. Experience isn't the problem. It is what it is. It's not worth clinging to. There's nothing about experience that is worth getting upset about, and worth getting excited about. The cause of suffering is not our experiences, it's our relationship to them, with greed, anger, and delusion.

6:57So, greed Greed is our desire, liking and wanting. And there's no question, there should be no argument as to whether greed can be a problem. Obviously greed leads to addiction, it leads to rapaciousness. It leads to manipulation. It leads to ruin for those who become gamblers, for those who are addicted to the point of obsessive consumption. But it has more subtle ramifications. I don't think anyone with a basic appreciation of the state of reality has an argument against rapacious greed, that somehow it can be okay or benevolent or innocuous.

8:29But what about Romance? What about a love of food? Music? Poetry? Art? What about a love of friendship? A love of family? What about these likings? Well, we can see some of the ways that some of our subtle desires have led to ruin, have created great suffering in the world. For example, the climate. the environment. We're seeing the results of seemingly innocuous greed. Everybody wants stuff. But all this stuff, getting what we want when we want it, has actually made our world less comfortable, has made the planet a less comfortable place to live.

9:43We've polluted our own air, water, We've destroyed our natural environment, made it ugly. There's no question that the world is uglier because of our rapaciousness. There's no question that Greed has an effect on health. Our love of good food makes us fat, makes us unhealthy, leads to diabetes, heart disease, cancer even. But it goes even deeper than that. We're not as happy as we think we are. Take love of family, for example. When we put romance, we'll just skip romance because it's a little easier to see how disturbing that can be.

10:47If you've ever been at the receiving end of a breakup, you know how much stress and suffering is involved in this intense anguish, not being able to get what you want, to put it very simply. But family, take family. Seems like a good thing, you know? You should love your family. What's wrong with that? It's one of the least threatening forms of desire, of liking, of attachment, let's say. Seems pretty innocent and even wholesome. Family is important, people will say.

11:39But consider, what makes your family special? What makes your family worth your attachment more than somebody else's family? What makes family? For some people, family is people unrelated by blood. And they call those people family. Friends become so close you call them family. Close family becomes someone persona non grata. You no longer consider them family based on their character, based on their actions and so on. But my point is what benefit comes from seeing certain individuals as special?

12:35Why is that a good thing? What's so good about that? How is that better than, say, having a friendly attitude towards all beings? That's the greatness that we stress and we focus on in Buddhism. The greatness of universal friendliness, universal appreciation and cordiality and kindness, compassion. I don't want to say caring, but it looks a lot like caring. Kindness is a little more innocuous, a little more proper. Imagine if the whole world was family, if you just saw everyone as you see your family.

13:36People with flaws, individuals with flaws, but worthy of appreciation and respect respecting that they too have the potential to better themselves if given the opportunity. See, the world is not very equitable at the moment. If you look in rich societies like Canada, America, China, There's a great inequity in those rich countries, but there are also very, very poor countries, where there may be a few rich corrupt politicians, but the majority of people live in what we would consider to be abject poverty, without running water, without medicine, often without food.

14:42Yes, this occurs in rich countries, but we see in the world there are places where the norm is to live in abject poverty. And my point being that we do nothing. look after our own. Canada is my family. Canada, what a great nation. I was thinking today about, there was a story about someone who had been accused of murder. It was a person who a Nazi. There's a Nazi in Germany who just ran away from a trial and they've been, they've been charged with 8,000 counts of not murder, but complicit, complicity, complicity, complicit, being complicit, complicency, I don't know the word, complicity to murder.

16:05And certainly it sounds like a terrible thing that they were involved in. It was a terrible thing that it sounds like they were involved in. But it's interesting how we call that murder, which it was. And yet, when we go to war, war is never considered murder. This isn't at all to trivialize Nazi Germany, the Holocaust, that horrible thing like the killing fields in Cambodia, but we call it murder, but we kill people all the time. Countries kill people all the time.

16:45Soldiers kill people. Why isn't a soldier convicted of murder? I mean, it's a ridiculous question, or it seems like one, but it does bring up an interesting point that we don't see the rest of the world as actual beings on the same level as our country. It's implicit in a lot of things. We are kind often to take in refugees. Some of the monks here are refugees. When it comes right down to it, if you're not a Canadian citizen, You're not one of us.

17:30Just an example of how the world does do itself a disservice to think in terms of us and them. So just an example of greed not being actually all that useful. And I got quite a far field, but I was making a point that This is based on greed. It's based on partiality, which requires greed. The only way for us, and this goes for so many things, but the only way for us to overcome this us and them mentality is to give up greed. because you can't talk yourself into loving all beings.

18:20It's a mistake to try to force yourself to be kind, to practice metta meditation, as Buddhists often want to do, without purifying yourself from greed, because it's fake. It's artificial. It's temporary. It's not a sustainable solution. Someone can practice metta and be very loving and kind. But until they can give up this partiality, they're always going to prefer and be kinder to certain people than others. We haven't even got into talking about anger yet.

19:06But giving up greed is incredibly powerful. It's just one example of it. If we gave up greed, the environment would benefit. If we gave up greed, our political system, what would it look like if politicians were not so corrupt and greedy? What would it look like if we weren't so greedy when we voted and were more thoughtful and conscientious? What would our economic system look like if we were not so greedy? But most importantly, what would our mind be like?

19:40Imagine. No preference. Imagine being able to experience your life, your reality, without judgment, without partiality. The question, why is greed a bad thing, can only come from a place of ignorance. If you are wondering, what is wrong with greed, and you just can't see it, I tell you it's because the mind is unclear. There's no explanation I can give you to explain to you why greed, not on the same level of asking you to spend time present with your experiences, seeing them as they are to cleanse your mind, to clear up this fog of delusion and anger and greed to the point where you see how much stress it's causing, how it really limits you as a being.

20:58The more you cling, the more limited you become. Human beings are a good example. Apparently the story of why there are human beings, why there are earthlings at all, is because we were these luminous beings in the outer space. And then we saw this luminescent ball of whatever and got attached to it and clung to it. clung and clung and evolved through our clinging and become corrupted through our clinging and through our consumption actually, through consuming the energy from the earth, the thing that came to be called earth.

21:49Our own beings became coarser. The earth became coarser and coarser. And here we are. Here we are. And that's why we're stuck to this rock. The short version of the story of why we're stuck to this rock. Anyway, that's not probably very convincing to people who wouldn't believe such things, but it does present an interesting perspective. It certainly does fit with reality, the reality that when we cling, we become less. The more we desire, the less happiness we end up with.

22:27We cling and cling and cling. And the realm of what is acceptable to us shrinks. The realm of what we strive for, our horizons become smaller. mirror. So that's greed. Anger, anger, we can see quite clearly. They say that greed is hard to see the hard to see the the problem with greed the fault in greed but it's slow to change so it's bad most I mean it's hard to get rid of it's slow to change anger is easier to see it's more commonly faulted when someone is angry you don't hear people cheering them on not so much anger makes you ugly makes you sick greed can make you sick as I said but anger is a state of sickness an illness really your blood boils they say not literally but it does heat up your body It creates tension, stress, headaches.

24:28Anger is related to cruelty, required for cruelty. It's what allows us to go to war. Think of all that hatred. Of course, greed is a cause of war as well, but when it comes down to the killing, you have to be cruel. You have to ignore, repress your natural state of appreciation of life, because we don't want to die. We think of life as a positive, a happy thing. And we have to intentionally, knowingly, take that happiness away from others. When we kill, when we hurt, when we harm others.

25:22There are the more subtle versions of anger as well. Why is anger bad is not such a hard question to answer, but on a subtle level, Our anger can be directed even at ourselves. We have self-hatred, but ultimately it's simply the hatred of our experiences. We can have anger towards pain, anger towards the past, towards the future. Anger is easier to see the problem in, but still gets hidden with things like pain, even boredom, frustration. And anytime it becomes self-righteous.

26:40You make me so angry. What's the problem? You. Right? What's the problem here? You make me so angry. What's the problem? You are the problem. Totally overlook the fact that you're angry. Oh yeah, wait. If I weren't angry, there would be no problem. But you deserve it. I don't deserve that. How could you? How dare you? Our inability to accept reality. It's not necessary to get angry, to strive for justice, for example, to fight for justice even. There's no need to be angry with the Nazis in Germany.

27:32We can be horrified. I think that it's possible in some sense to be horrified, shocked. Those aren't a big deal. We should never be angry. We don't do any good by being angry. It's not better to be angry than to be, say, wise. I mean, wisdom is not going to say, oh, it's okay, you killed all those people, no problem. Wisdom is going to say, that was a very bad thing you did, just the same as anger, with or without anger. You don't need the anger to understand that it was a horrible thing that the Nazis did in Germany or the Khmer Rouge did in Cambodia or any other of the many atrocities that, what was done to the First Nations people in Canada at the residential schools.

28:29Today I think, or if it's tomorrow, I'm not sure, is the day of truth and reconciliation in Canada. Horrible things were done. Not just out of anger, but anger is required to be so cruel. And the third is delusion. Delusion is the worst of the three because it's both highly blamed and it's slow to change. Anger is quick to change. I didn't mention it. Highly blamed, quick to change. Delusion, highly blamed, slow to change. It's the worst. And you can't have greed or anger without delusion because they're wrong.

29:22And The only way they can arise is if you don't know that they're wrong, if you aren't clear in your mind that they're wrong. When they have an opportunity to arise, there has to be, at that moment, some sort of delusion. With a clear mind, they would never arise. And that's, of course, the great power of mindfulness, of vipassana, seeing clearly. And it's something that we have to remind meditators over and over again. We're not trying to fix our problems.

30:07We're trying to see them clearly. It seems a bit disingenuous because, of course, we're trying to fix our problems. In some sense, we're trying to fix something anyway. trying to fix something, but the way of fixing turns out to be very different from what we think. Our idea of fixing is doing something to fix. When the real fix is the change in perspective, the clarity that the true fix is freedom from delusion. So let's go through it. What are some of the big delusions out there?

31:01in the world, racism, bigotry, xenophobia, religion. Religion is a huge delusion. Think of Israel, the situation in the Middle East. There's this place, Jerusalem, that they've been fighting over for thousands of years. I mean, they've at least been fighting over for decades now. But the whole fight is over some ridiculous notion that it's unfathomable how much delusion is involved there. There's, of course, greed and anger, of course. Anger, bitterness, us and them, the enemy.

32:00The dehumanization of other humans, other beings. But so much delusion involved. Those are the big ones. We can see those. Arrogance on a personal level. Arrogance. Who likes an arrogant person? Conceit. Self-righteousness. People who are preachy. Buddhists can be very preachy sometimes. Just because you say you're Buddhist or become Buddhist doesn't mean you're going to be free from these kind of arrogance and conceit and self-righteousness. A good example of a good opportunity for a reminder that We should be thoughtful and respectful to our fellow Buddhists that they won't always be perfect.

33:00And we shouldn't overlook the good side. The Buddha said, put aside the bad side. Try and focus on the good in people and help nourish that. But on a personal level, we can see this in other people. We can see it in ourselves, especially when we start to practice meditation. It's ugly. Conceit, arrogance. But the worst or the most ultimate form of delusion is quite simple. It's just ignorance. Avijapachaya sankhara. All of our inclinations, good or bad, come from ignorance.

33:47There's nothing we need to do besides clearing this up. We spend all our time in meditation doing something very simple and it's so easy to misunderstand, to overlook it. It's so hard to really get what we're doing because, not because it's something deep or abstruse or complicated, because it's so simple. You miss it. When you're walking, what are you trying to do? You're trying to know that your foot is raising. But what else? What's behind that?

34:17What's the point of that? Honestly, the point is to give up asking what is the point. Because as long as you try to find a point in things, you're making more of them than they actually are. That's the whole point. That's it. Once you can see, seeing is just seeing, hearing is just hearing, then you will see clearly. Then you will be present. Then you will free yourself from all of this greed, anger, and delusion stuff that's caught up in ignorance.

34:53It comes because you don't see, because rather than having sati, meaning remembering what you're experiencing, being with what you experience, you make it into something else. You get lost in conceptualization. So, as I've said before, reality is quite simple. Understanding it is not an easy thing, but it is a fairly simple thing. And there's not much in the world that is a problem if we can focus on these three things and appreciate them. And most importantly, try to see our experiences clearly as they are, freeing ourselves from ignorance.

35:43The whole chain of causation leading us to sorrow, sadness, lamentation, despair, suffering. That whole chain of causality is broken. And experience is just experience. So that's the Dhamma for tonight.