Aging, Illness, Death, & Separation - Morning Session

This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Ajaan Geoff Daylong @ Sati Center - Aging, Illness, Death & Separation (Part 1) - 09/18/2021. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

The following talk was given by Ajaan Thanissaro at Unknown Location in Unknown City, Unknown State on September 18, 2021. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Introduction

Okay, so it's 10:30. I'd like to welcome everybody to this Sati Center event. I also want to point out the San Francisco Prison project, where we meet and study Ajaan's teachings, is also a co-sponsor of this event. We've upgraded our Zoom link to accommodate 500 people, and [unintelligible] actually funded that, so thank you for that.

Please keep yourself muted. If you have a question, you can go to the reactions, or use other ways on Zoom to raise your hand. When Ajaan Thanissaro asks for questions for the morning, I'll be calling on you to ask your question, and then in the afternoon [unintelligible] will be calling on you. Remember afterwards to put your hand down and also to keep muted.

One more quick announcement: if you feel inspired to give a donation to the Sati Center, go to their website or write a check. The important thing—why I'm making this announcement—is two things. One, 95 percent of all donations for this event will go to Metta Forest Monastery. But the other thing, more importantly, is to put down what the donation is for. There's a space on PayPal to put down what the donation is for because the Sati Center has a great deal of programs going on these days through Zoom. If you don't put down where it will go, it makes my life as treasurer confusing.

So with that, I would like to turn this over to Ajaan Thanissaro.

Guided Meditation

Okay, let's start with some meditation. Find a comfortable position to get into. Close your eyes. I'll give you some brief instructions for the meditation to begin with, and then ask that you meditate while I talk.

First, start with thoughts of goodwill. Goodwill is your wish for true happiness. Your true happiness, true happiness of all beings, because true happiness comes from within. There's no conflict there. So start with the thought: "May I be truly happy. May I understand the causes for true happiness and be willing and able to act on them."

And then spread the same thought to others. Start with people who are close to your heart: your family, your very close friends. May they find true happiness too. And then spread those thoughts out in ever-widening circles: to people you know well and like, to people you like even though you don't know them so well, to people you're more neutral about, and to people you don't like. Remember that the world would be a much better place if everyone could find true happiness within. Spread thoughts of goodwill to people you don't even know, not just people, but living beings of all kinds: east, west, north, south, above, and below, out to infinity. May we all find true happiness in our hearts.

Now bring attention to the breath. Take a couple of good, long, deep in-and-out breaths. Notice where you feel the breathing process in the body. Settle your attention there, and then ask yourself if it's comfortable. If long breathing is comfortable, keep it up. If it's not comfortable, you can change. Try shorter breathing, or in short, out long, or in long, out short; heavy, light, fast, slow, deep, shallow. You can experiment for a while to see what rhythm and texture of breathing feels best for the body right now. Or you can simply pose the thought in the mind each time you breathe in: "What kind of breathing would feel good now?" See how the body responds.

If your mind wanders off, just drop whatever the thought is, and you'll be right back at the breath. If it wanders off ten times, a hundred times, just keep coming back ten times, a hundred times. Don't get discouraged. Each time you come back, actually reward yourself with a really good breath. When it feels gratifying deep down inside, then of course, why stop with one?

Now as the breath gets comfortable, the next step is to be aware of the whole body as you breathe in, the whole body as you breathe out, to give yourself a good solid foundation. A good way to build up to that whole-body awareness is to go through the body first, section by section. A good place to start is down around the navel. Locate that part of the body in your awareness. Watch it for a while as you breathe in and breathe out, to see what rhythm really feels good there. If you notice any tension or tightness in that part of the body, allow it to relax so that no tension builds up as you breathe in, and you don't hold on to any tension as you breathe out.

Then move your attention up to the solar plexus and follow the same steps there. One, locate that part of the body in your awareness. Two, watch it for a while as you breathe in and breathe out to see what rhythm of breathing feels good there. And then three, if there's any tension or tightness in that part of the body, allow it to relax.

I'll let you continue going through the body at your own pace: up through the chest, throat, into the head, down the shoulders to the arms, down the back to the legs. Do that at your own pace, and you can go through the body several times if you like, until you're ready to settle down. Then choose any one spot in the body that's most congenial. Focus your attention there, and then think of your awareness spreading from that spot to the whole body. If you can maintain that whole-body awareness, fine. If it begins to blur out, go back to the survey of the body section by section again. Meanwhile, I'll talk.

Aging, Illness, Death, & Separation - Morning Session

Aging, illness, death: in Western Buddhism, these are sometimes treated as peripheral issues of interest only to people who are already old, sick, or dying. Part of Buddhism could be called the cult of the present moment or the cult of the here and now. I mean that it focuses on the problems of finding happiness and ease in the present as an end in and of itself. In this context, issues of aging, illness, and death are only tangential. When they are addressed, we're told, "Take the lessons you learned about being okay in the present moment, and learn to be okay about aging, okay about illness, okay about dying."

As for the question of what happens after death, it's usually treated as something that's in bad taste. In fact, some people say the question of what happens after death is not even worth thinking about; it's best left as a mystery. On the grounds that no one can really answer, it's better to accept the mystery than to try to find answers to things you don't yet know.

When we compare this to the Buddha's original teachings, it's very ironic because it has the priorities backwards. And it's worse than ironic; it's a mistake on two levels.

The first level has to do with the role that aging, illness, and death played in the Bodhisattva's^[1] original motivation to find the Dhamma^[2]. When we look at his life, we see that issues of aging, illness, and death were central to his quest for awakening. It was because of these things that he looked for the Dhamma to begin with. He wasn't looking simply for peace in the present moment. Even though in his twenties he saw the fallacy in the sentiment that says, "I don't need to be taught how to die, I want to learn how to live," he realized that if you don't answer the question of what happens after death, it's hard to answer what a well-spent life is, or what a skillful use of your life is.

It was because of his desire not to suffer from aging, illness, and death that kept him on the path. It was because of his success that we have the Dhamma. In fact, you could say we have the Dhamma because of aging, illness, and death—because of one person's desire not to suffer from these things ever again. The texts tell that he saw that aging and death must come from birth. But then the question is, is birth repeated? Is it going to happen again? Is it something you have to prepare for again or not? And once it happens, do you have to suffer from it? These are the questions that remained unanswered until the night of his awakening.

The answers he gave after the night of his awakening come into two sorts: one is how not to suffer even when aging, illness, and death are still happening; and the other is how to find a dimension where there is no aging, illness, and death at all. That's what we'll be talking about today.

On the night of his awakening, he got his mind into the right concentration and realized he could use that concentrated mind in order to gain knowledge. The first question he asked basically was: is there anything after death, and if so, what? He saw that he had been reborn many, many times consistently—many, many eons of births and deaths. He saw his name, his appearance, what clan or species he belonged to, his experience of pleasure and pain, the food that he ate, and the way he died, again and again and again.

Now, sometimes this knowledge is dismissed simply as being pulled over from his culture, assuming that everybody in India at the time believed in rebirth. But that's not the case. It was actually a hotly debated issue. Some people said death was followed by annihilation. Others said it was followed by rebirth in which you stayed the same as you were before. The brahmins^[3] especially liked this one: if you're a brahmin in this lifetime, you're guaranteed to be a brahmin in the next lifetime. People in other castes were going to be in those other castes again to serve the brahmins. But the Buddha saw from his own knowledge that was not the case, that he changed through many, many levels of the cosmos, from the very highest to the very lowest.

Instead of pursuing that knowledge any further, he came up with a question: well, what is the factor that determines these changes? That became the second answer: his actions, his kamma^[4], based on right views or wrong views. Here it's good to look at his particular sort of knowledge. He freely admitted that other people had these kinds of knowledges in their meditation before him, but his knowledge differed in two respects—and also differed in terms of the questions he asked. The differences had to do with the extent of his knowledge: he saw much further back, so he could see larger patterns than they had. He also looked in more detail.

This relates directly to the issue of how he later came to teach the Dhamma. Because other people had this knowledge beforehand, in some cases they would see someone had done good in this lifetime and went to a good rebirth, or done bad in this lifetime and went to a bad rebirth. They ended up teaching that action was deterministic. In other words, your actions in the past will totally determine where you're going to go.

There were others, though, who saw that there were cases where someone had done good in this lifetime and went to a bad rebirth, or done bad in this lifetime and went to a good rebirth. These are the ones who taught that your actions had no impact on your rebirth at all. The changes in your rebirth are totally random.

But his response was to look at the issue more carefully. He noticed one thing that was very important: that in cases where someone had done bad in this lifetime and gone to a good rebirth, the person had actually changed their views before they died. In fact, at the moment of death, in some cases they actually acted on right view. And in cases where people had done good in this lifetime and gone to a bad rebirth, it's because at the moment of death, they developed a wrong view and acted on wrong view. This suggested to him that actions in the present moment can have a huge impact on counteracting the impact of your past. Not only present actions, but present actions in the mind.

So that's what inspired his third knowledge: to look at actions in his mind to see what actions in the mind were actually leading to rebirth. He wanted to see if there was a way you could actually end rebirth. It was here he began to look at the actions in and of themselves. This was the other part of the question that he asked: he didn't ask who was doing this or who was going to be reaping the results of these things. This is where other people had fallen astray, because they had noticed that there was rebirth, and the question was: what is there in an individual that remains the same from one life to the next? They got waylaid from the issue of aging, illness, and death, and started focusing on issues of "who am I?", "what am I?", "what will I be in the future?", "what do I have that is a permanent essence?".

Those who asked the question "who am I, what am I, what is a permanent essence to me" got waylaid. Whereas the Buddha stayed focused on the issue of what actions will lead to rebirth and further death, and can those actions be used to put an end to that? So he traced through all the actions that led up to death. This is where we get dependent co-arising^[5]. You have clinging, which is dependent on craving, which is dependent on feeling, dependent on contact, dependent on the six senses, dependent on name and form, dependent on consciousness, dependent on fabrication. And when you apply knowledge to fabrications—in terms of seeing their origin, their cessation, and the path to their cessation—that allows for the whole strain of actions to dissolve. It was in this way that he was able to attain the deathless^[6].

He learned two very important lessons here. One is that it is possible to attain the deathless. That answered the big question of his quest. There is a dimension in which there is no aging, there is no illness, there is no death. And it's done by looking at actions in and of themselves, rather than being concerned about who you are or who's going to be receiving the actions.

He also learned the causal principle that underlay all this, which as he said is that some of the impact on your present moment experience is going to come from your past actions, and some is going to come from your present actions. It's a combination of the two that basically creates your experience in the present moment. Now this is going to be very important as we face aging, face illness, and face death: seeing what we're doing in the present moment that is contributing to any suffering around us, and how we can put an end to that suffering by changing the way we act.

So the principles of kamma are not truly deterministic. It's not the case that you did something bad in a past lifetime and you're going to have to suffer now. There may be some physical manifestations that are going to come from that, but the mind doesn't have to suffer if it's skilled. This causal principle is what lies at the basis of all the Buddhist approaches to how you face aging, how you face illness, and how you face death.

It's also good to think about for a minute how much we owe the Dhamma to the Buddha staying on topic all the way through his quest. This is what he wanted to see: what can be done so as not to suffer from aging, illness, and death? It is the prime question of the Dhamma. We owe the Dhamma to the fact that he pursued that question all the way to the end.

When he taught, aging, illness, and death became primary topics. His two main teachings, the Four Noble Truths and Dependent Co-arising, are basically explanations of how suffering is brought into being and how suffering can be brought to an end. In both cases, when the Buddha identifies suffering or talks about what suffering is, he gives as his first examples birth, aging, and death. These are the big issues in life, and he's not going to shy away from them. He's going to take them on so he can put an end to these things.

That was the first mistake we see in modern Buddhism: not seeing the importance of the issues of aging, illness, and death in the Buddha's quest for the Dhamma. The second mistake is that if we ignore the centrality of aging, illness, and death in the Dhamma, we simply miss out on many benefits to be gained from fully practicing what the Dhamma has to teach. It's going to demand more of the practice than just focusing on being okay in the present moment. You have to be heedful in preparing for the future: one, to provide yourself with a good range of opportunities to be available at death; and two, to master the skills that you're going to need in the present moment so that when death or aging or illness does become a present moment experience, those skills will be ready.

When the Buddha talks about being in the present moment or being alert to the present moment, it's always in the context of mindfulness of death. So there's work to be done here that you need to prepare for. However, the focus is not so much on death in itself; it's there as a reminder. And then you get focused on the work of mastering the skills that you're going to need in order to figure out how you can put an end to craving, how you can put an end to clinging, and how you can put an end to the processes that lead to becoming, birth, aging, illness, and death.

Sometimes the question is asked: why bring in issues of death if you're going to be focused on the present moment anyhow? It's largely because issues of death bring a greater sense of urgency to your practice, and it's necessary to set higher standards. You can make an analogy with learning a foreign language. If you're planning to go to Brazil just for a vacation, you may learn a little Portuguese. Or if you're conducting Zoom meetings with people in Brazil, you would learn a little bit of Portuguese to read the signs and speak with them. But if you're going to go live there, and if you know that someone's going to pick you up and take you there and force you to live there for the rest of your life, you're going to put a lot more energy into learning the language and learning it well, because you know that your survival depends on it.

It's the same with your practice of meditation. If you're meditating simply to enjoy the present moment, okay, you'll have one level of standards as to what counts as an acceptable meditation. But if you realize these are the skills I'm going to need when my body is beginning to fall apart, my relatives are crying, doctors are sticking things up into my nose and my mouth, and into my arms, and I'm going to have to maintain my mindfulness and alertness, my concentration, and discernment throughout the midst of that—okay, it sets higher standards for what's going to be acceptable.

To give an example, take the issue of craving, which the Buddha said is the cause of suffering around all of these issues. In modern teachings that are focused exclusively on finding a pleasant present moment, craving is defined as the desire for things in the world to be different from what they are. And so we're told that developing equanimity, patience, and contentment will be enough in order to not suffer from craving while we're here in the present moment. This relates to what one teacher once called the "third and a half noble truth": suffering may not be able to be put to an end, but it can be managed.

Well, the Buddha wanted to do more than just manage suffering; he wanted to put an end to it. You have to realize that at the moment of death, craving is going to come on really raw and really strong. The three types of craving that the Buddha identified as the causes of suffering are going to be especially strong as you're dying. You're being evicted from the body and everything with which you've identified as you or yours. Your craving for sensual pleasure as an escape from the pain of all that will be strong. If there's physical pain, you're going to be that much more desperate to just get away from the pain. If an opportunity for pleasure shows up, you'll go for it without looking at the fine print, without seeing: where is this going to take me?

Because after all, the Buddha compares craving at the moment of death to a fire: my house is on fire, and the fire is being blown by the wind to another house. The wind is blind. And so we can't let our cravings take over at that point; we have to be in charge. So we have to learn how to overcome them and not get pulled along with them. Because all too often as we go through life, as the Buddha said, we go with craving as our companion. We're used to going wherever it goes and believing whatever it says would be a good thing to do. We have to learn how to step back from it.

Okay, even though our craving for sensuality has to be put away, as for craving for becoming—which is the desire, basically taking an identity in a particular world of experience—this again will get very strong at the moment of death. You can't stay in this body any longer. You can't stay in this world. Where are you going to go? As long as there's a sense of "me" and "mine", "what will happen to me?", there may be a strong desire to find a new identity, to take on a new place where you can continue having an identity as a being there. The idea of annihilation is just too scary to contemplate in most cases.

In other cases, there is the craving for non-becoming. You're sick and tired of life, sick and tired of the suffering of aging, illness, and death; you just want to be obliterated, annihilated. But that's not going to solve the problem. As the Buddha said, what you think of yourself as having to be annihilated, or wanting to be annihilated, that in itself creates a new becoming. And you go to a becoming in which you're blotted out for a while, but that's not the end; you come back again.

So this requires not only that you learn how to have some control over these cravings, but you've got a real dilemma in this craving for becoming and craving for non-becoming, because each of them will lead to more becoming. The Buddha discovered that the way beyond that was what he learned in his third knowledge on the night of his awakening, which is: you look not so much at trying to destroy becoming or trying to maintain becoming, but look at the processes. Step out of the process a bit and look at the steps leading up to all the actions that lead to becoming, simply as actions in and of themselves, to the point where you can develop dispassion for them. And then that dispassion is what frees you.

Now this requires a lot of concentration and a lot of discernment. Simple equanimity, patience, contentment, and tolerance will not cut it at that point. As the Buddha said, if you're simply equanimous, you're not going to get the concentration you need in order to gain any really good discernment.

So keeping in mind the fact that you are practicing for how to die as you meditate will raise your standards as to, one, what is an acceptable meditation, and two, what you're looking for as you're trying to overcome the cravings that are getting in the way of your concentration and getting in the way of your discernment. In reverse of the modern context—which would rather see preparing for death as a tangential application of teachings that were originally meant to be focused on the present moment—what happens is that the present moment is viewed in the context of preparing for death.

When we meditate and focus on the present moment, we're learning to perform the duties of the Four Noble Truths. Aren't those precisely the duties that we need to master as we're facing death, so that at the very least we don't suffer from it? If we're going to be reborn, we can direct ourselves to a good rebirth, or ideally, at that point, as the Buddha said it is possible, if your right view is strong enough and your concentration and discernment are strong enough, that you actually don't have to be reborn at all. You're released into the deathless, which as he said is the highest happiness, the highest freedom, the ultimate truth.

So those are the basic lessons that we can learn from the Buddha's awakening, looking at how we're going to approach these issues of aging, illness, and death today. I thought I'd go about ways in which we apply these teachings to the process of aging and illness this morning, and then this afternoon we'll talk about death.

Keeping these larger issues in mind helps to encourage heedfulness, which the Buddha identified as the source of all skillful qualities. But this practice requires confidence. I mean, it's one thing to say there is no such thing as a bad meditation, and whatever happens in your meditation is okay. But once you start realizing there are skills you're going to have to develop, it can get kind of daunting. People can sometimes wonder, "Am I capable of doing this?"

We have to keep remembering Ānanda's^[7] advice. When you hear teachings like this, Ānanda's advice is: you know that someone has gained awakening, and your proper response should be, "Why not me? They can do it, they're human beings. I'm a human being. If they can do it, why can't I?" You have to convince yourself that yes, you are capable of doing these things. It requires dedication, more dedication than you might initially expect, but if you tell yourself, "Look, I'm not capable of doing this," remember: if you stick with the path, the skills that you master on the path will make you a new person. You change as you get more and more skilled. So you sitting here right now may not be able to gain awakening, but the you who will master these skills bit by bit by bit will be able to at some point.

In other words, you're going to have to learn how to give yourself pep talks as you practice. You look at the verbs that they use to describe the Buddha's giving Dhamma talks to monks and lay people, and there are four verbs altogether. Three of them are pep talks. It says he instructed, he urged them, he roused them, he encouraged them. The instructions are things you read about, but the urging, the rousing, and encouraging—these are things you have to learn how to do for yourself. That's an important part of the practice. Of course there will be a sense of self that develops around that urging, etc., but that's a skillful sense of self. At the point where you don't need it anymore, you can put it aside. Meanwhile, make good use of it.

Those are the general principles we'll be holding in mind as we discuss the topics of today. The two topics for this morning are aging and illness.

Aging

Aging is a foretaste of death without warning. It seems alien that your body, which used to be able to cross the room, is beginning to get out of control. The main themes that the Buddha talks about in terms of aging are loss of beauty and loss of strength.

Now, some of the lessons we learn from the Buddha's awakening that apply to aging: one is your consciousness is supported by the body, but it does not need to depend on the body. Given that, when the energy of the body is down, the wise way to prioritize is to use it to work on qualities of mind that will carry over to the next lifetime. In other words, aging is no excuse simply to rest.

There was a series of Dhamma talks that Ajaan Maha Boowa^[8] gave to two women years back. One of the women had cancer, and she wanted to come to his monastery to learn how to meditate in order to deal with the difficulties of the disease. He told her, "Well, I can help you with issues in the mind, but I can't look after your body. I have mine, I know nothing about that kind of disease. If you can bring a doctor or a nurse along with you, I'll be happy to have you come." And so the woman had an older friend, an older woman—80 years old—who was a retired doctor, and so she volunteered to come.

So the two of them listened to the Dhamma talks for three months, and they recorded. He gave her a talk every night; they ended up with eighty-some Dhamma talks, and they made a recording of each. After they returned to Bangkok, the woman with cancer died after six months. And then the old woman, who was the doctor, suddenly found herself with this big pile of tapes. And so she said, "Well, even though I'm old, maybe I can transcribe these tapes." And so she consulted with Ajaan Maha Boowa, and he encouraged her. As she said later, an important part of his encouragement was: "As the body begins to weaken, focus on the goodness that you can still squeeze out of it before you have to throw it all away." I've always liked that expression: squeezing as much goodness out of your body as you can while you still have some strength.

And so the old woman, in spite of her failing eyesight, in spite of other weaknesses, was able to transcribe all 87 Dhamma talks. And as a result, we have these two huge volumes; they're among the best talks Ajaan Maha Boowa gave, they're the best Dhamma books. The lesson we learn here is that you want to develop strength of mind in order to squeeze as much goodness as you can out of the body as it weakens, so that you have the good qualities that will carry over. We'll talk about those good qualities when we talk about the section on death.

Given that your body is going to lose its beauty and lose its strength, the Buddha basically advises that you learn how to redefine your sense of what's beautiful at this age as the body begins to get decrepit. This is not simply a matter of getting old—I mean, some people are quite young and their bodies get decrepit and weakened, and so it's good to be able to know how to take advantage of that.

In terms of beauty, the Buddha—as the texts say—says beauty comes from beautiful intentions, honorable actions. They say virtue is beautiful even to old age. Your jewelry, your other things may not look good on you as you're getting older, that may look out of place, but the fact that you're a virtuous person—that will always look beautiful. Always keep that in mind, that's the beauty that's appropriate. And actually, it's the beauty that's appropriate at any age.

As for strength of mind that's emphasized to compensate for weakness in the body, the Buddha has two lists of strengths. Five in each, but there's some overlap between the two, and combined they give you seven.

The first one is conviction. Conviction that what he awoke to really was true, and what that means for your life in terms of the power of action in order to find true happiness. When you believe in that, then it gives you more and more encouragement to keep on wanting to develop more qualities and more strengths of mind.

The second one is shame. The shame that the Buddha is recommending here is not the opposite of pride; it's the shame that's the opposite of shamelessness. In other words, you see something that is dishonorable. You could do it, you might be able to get away with it, but you realize, "I just wouldn't want to do that." Shame is often defined as how you want to look in the eyes of others, and it's a matter of whose eyes you want to look good in. Here the Buddha is recommending that you want to look good in the eyes of the noble ones. What standards they have. And that, he says, is a treasure, because it will prevent you from doing a lot of unskillful things that you would later regret.

I've read cases of veterans from various wars that have been going on for the past several decades saying that as they get back home, they're haunted by visions of the children they killed and other atrocities they've done. And they said they'd give a million dollars to be able to go back and undo that deed. Well, a million dollars can't do that. But if you start out with a sense of shame to begin with—"this kind of thing is dishonorable"—you won't have that scar in your memory to begin with, in which case that sense of shame is more valuable than a million dollars.

The same with compunction, which is the next strength. Compunction here is realizing that your actions will have consequences, and the idea of doing something that would lead to suffering just doesn't appeal to you. In other words, you do care about the long-term consequences. You're not apathetic, you're not devil-may-care. You think seriously about what's going to happen down the line and take that into consideration.

Another strength is persistence. This is motivating yourself to stick with the practices, thoughts of heedfulness, thoughts of compassion—possible for yourself and for others. This is an important part of the practice: how you motivate yourself to want to do what is skillful and to abandon what is unskillful.

Another strength of mind is mindfulness. This is not simply being okay with what's coming up in the present moment. Remember, mindfulness for the Buddha is a quality of memory. You remember what's skillful, you remember what's not. You remember what enabled you to do what is skillful even when it's hard. You remember what enabled you to abandon what is unskillful even when it's hard to do that. And you learn to recognize what is skillful and unskillful in the mind as they come. This will be an important skill, because many times things can come up in the mind and they look okay to begin with, but as you get to know them you realize this mind state has its problems. You want to be able to learn how to recognize that.

The final two strengths are concentration and discernment. We'll talk more about these this afternoon, but the important thing is that you learn how to maintain focus. Once you make up your mind to stay focused on an object, you can get a sense of well-being there. This is good not only for keeping your mind focused and under control, but also to compensate for the fact that when you're aging there's going to be a fair amount of pain, there's going to be a fair amount of restriction on what you can do with your body.

There's a beautiful passage right near the end of the Buddha's life. The Lord is now 80 years old, and he says, you know, even Buddhas get old. There's nothing amazing at all, it's the way things are. He says the only sense of ease I have in my body right now is when I enter concentration. And this is a theme we'll be getting to over and over again as we go through the day: that when the body gets sick, or when the body gets aging, or when you're dying, there's going to be a fair amount of pain. And for most people, their only thought of escape from pain is sensual pleasure. Whereas if you have the pleasure of concentration, that gives you an alternative, a better place to go.

And then finally, discernment allows you to separate the mind from the pain, separate the mind from the fact that the body is aging. You're being realistic: "This body which I've identified with so long, which I've identified with however you identify your gender, being, etc., okay, it's going, it's going, it's going. I can't identify with this any longer. And it's not a loss." If you can see it that way, then it's a lot easier to face these things. Those are a few comments on using the Dhamma as you age. We can talk about it more if you want in the Q&A.

Illness

As for illness, this too is a foretaste of death, largely in the sense that not only your strength is restricted, but also you have to deal a lot with pain. Now remember, with illness we have to face that in line with the Buddha's teachings on causality that he learned on the night of his awakening: that some of the things that are happening in the present moment are the result of past actions, and some of them are the result of what you're doing right now.

So an illness comes. As the Buddha said, there are some illnesses that no matter how much medicine you give them, they're not going to go away. Other illnesses, even without treatment, they will go away. But then there are those that will go away if there's treatment, and will not go away if there's no treatment. And it's for the sake of that third group that medicine is given to everybody.

It's the same with your mindfulness and your concentration. Sometimes it is possible through the power of mindfulness and concentration to make an illness go away, or at least weaken. Other times, it's because it's an illness that comes from strong past kamma; the illness itself will not go away, but you can learn how to put the mind in a position where it doesn't have to suffer from it.

My teacher had a student one time; she had cancer. It was one of those cancers that just kept moving around the body. It would hit this organ and they would cut out that organ, then it would move to another organ and cut out that one, then another one. This had been going on for about ten years. I happened to visit her one time right after she had had a kidney removed. She was sitting up in bed, looking perfectly fine. And I asked her, "Is there any pain?" And she said, "Well, yes, there is." She said, "But I don't send my mind there." She stayed with her meditation word, Buddho^[9]. So even though she still had the kamma that she had to suffer from the cancer, the fact that she was able to train her mind meant that she didn't have to suffer in the midst of the cancer.

So we have to remember this. The Buddha talks about even when you're sick, even though the body may be sick, the mind doesn't have to be sick. And there's a parallel between mental illness and physical illness. As the Buddha said, the primary physical illness is something that happens to everybody every day: i.e., hunger. You don't have to be old to get hungry. And the primary mental illness is when you're clinging to the five aggregates^[10]. Remember the word for clinging in Pali is the same word as for taking sustenance or feeding. So there's a parallel between our illnesses, that we're feeding on things. There's a constant lack in the body, and there's a felt lack in the mind. The practice is going to be aimed at getting rid of that sense of lack. Maybe you can't get rid of physical hunger, but you can get rid of mental hunger. That's what we're going to be focusing on.

In dealing with pain though, the trick is learning how not to cling to it. And the good path to follow there is to think about the four steps in the tetrad on feelings^[11] in mindfulness of breathing. The first step is to breathe in and out sensitive to rapture, and breathe in and out sensitive to pleasure. This parallels a lot with Ajaan Lee's^[12] recommendations on witnessing pain in the body: that you don't focus immediately on the pain itself; you focus on other parts of the body that you can make comfortable with the breathing. So you're giving the mind another place to stay. And then after the breath has gotten comfortable in that other part of the body, then you can think of that good breath energy spreading through the pain.

Right now, this moves on to the next two steps, which are to be sensitive to mental fabrication, and then to calm mental fabrication. Mental fabrications here are the factors with which you shape your state of mind in the present moment, and the Buddha identifies two: feeling and perception. So first you're using this comfortable feeling in one part of the body to deal with an uncomfortable feeling in another part. In some cases you can actually make it dissolve and go away. Other cases you can't, but there's a greater sense of relief, and also a different perception of your relationship to the pain. You're not simply sitting there as a victim of the pain; you're taking a more proactive stance toward it. And when you're more proactive, it can't shoot you down. It's like someone's trying to shoot at you, and you're moving around all the time; it's much more difficult for them to shoot you.

That's one perception you hold in mind. But you can also look at the actual perceptions that you apply to the pain. This is where Ajaan Maha Boowa's instructions on dealing with pain again are very useful. You ask questions about it. Is the pain a solid block? Is the pain the same thing as the part of the body in which you find it? Part of you may say, "Of course not," but then there's a part of your mind that might say, "Well, yes, actually that's how I perceive it." You have to remember that we started dealing with pain back when we were children, before we even knew language. Our ways of understanding pain or our ways of dealing with pain often come from that period of life. And so we have to understand the strange perceptions and assumptions that we developed at that time; you have to ask some strange questions.

So one of them is, is the pain the same thing as your knee? If there's a pain in the knee, is it the same thing as the knee? Can you see them as separate things? The image I like to use is of radio waves going through the room. You set up a radio in one spot and you tune it to one frequency, and here in San Diego you might get San Diego, you might get Tijuana, you might get Los Angeles, you might get Phoenix. The radio doesn't move, it's in one spot, but there are these different frequencies going through it at any one time. If you can learn how to see the pain as one frequency, and the physical elements of the body—earth, water, wind, and fire—as another frequency, that helps to weaken a lot of the sense of how the pain is impinging on you. As you see them as separate, the pain becomes much less of a burden.

You could also ask yourself, is the pain a solid block, or can you see it as individual moments of pain coming and going? When those individual moments come, are they coming at you, or are they going away from you as they appear? I find a useful perception to hold in mind is that they're actually going away.

Years back I was in Singapore. I was being treated with a traditional Chinese treatment for back pain. The doctor was rubbing oil into my back. At first it felt good, and then it got more and more raw as he worked harder and harder. And then he took these bamboo whisks and started beating me. And it didn't seem like he was going to stop anytime soon. My first thought, of course, was, "Okay, what bad kamma do I have? I'm going to just go through this." And I said, "Well, looks like he's not stopping, and I'm not going to be a wimp and say stop." So I said, "Wait a minute, this is a good opportunity to relate to the pain in the right way." And I began to see each time he hit me, the pain was going away; it was not coming at me. And that way the pain didn't impinge on the mind at all. It's like sitting in the back of a station wagon facing backwards as you're going down the road: as soon as something comes into the range of your vision, it's going away.

So if you look at the perceptions you have around the pain and see if you can replace them with better perceptions, this way you're not just resisting the pain through gritting your teeth and force of will, but you're actually using your discernment to change your relationship to the pain. And that way you don't have to suffer so much from it. Because remember, it's these two factors of feeling and perception that shape your mental state. And so you find some alternative pleasures to focus on, and then you try alternative perceptions. You focus on those two issues around any pain in the body, and you find that you live with it a lot more easily.

And then watch out for any other perceptions that come in, especially the mind's conversation around the pain about how much longer it's going to last: "This is going to kill me! Am I going to die from this pain?" Just say, "Well, this is not helping at all." "How much longer will it be here? How long has it been going on?" Don't think those things. This is where being in the present moment is a good thing. But you want to be in the present moment with a lot of discernment, so when pain comes up you're not afflicted by it.

So those are some of the lessons we can gain from what the Buddha has to say about aging and illness, looking at it within the context of how he found awakening and the lessons he learned from his awakening.

So, if you can give me just five minutes I will be back, and we can have questions.

Q&A

Question: I have a question related to... oftentimes I've heard during meditation practice, you said something along the lines of "just stay there, there's nothing else you have to do, there's nothing else you have to think about." But I think at some point there is something you have to do, and I mean, the Buddha had a question. It seems that there must be certain questions you should maybe be turning to at some point in order to make progress. Not just exactly along the lines of what you said, not being okay with the present moment—I mean, just being okay with the present moment is not enough. How do you know which question you should be turning to at what point?

Ajaan Thanissaro: Well, the basic questions you want to ask have to do with the Four Noble Truths: where is the suffering here? What am I doing that's contributing to it? And the right time to ask those questions is when you're ready. And knowing when you're ready is, you try asking the questions and see what happens. Is your mind gaining insight or is it just getting blurry as you ask those questions? Do those questions rise spontaneously or not? In some cases they will, in some cases they won't. If you find that they're not rising on their own, you can give them a little push.

Ajaan Suwat^[13] once said that there are two kinds of meditators: people who think too much, and the people who don't think enough. So if you know you have a particular habit—if you think too much or you don't think enough—try to compensate.

Question: I have a question about the reading. The first one is on page 10, the faculty of conviction depends on the four factors for stream entry^[14]. Can you remind me what those are? I always think of stream entry as the seven factors for awakening.

Ajaan Thanissaro: This is much more basic. It starts out with finding people of integrity, then listening to the true Dhamma, applying appropriate attention, and then practicing the Dhamma in line with the Dhamma.

Question: Okay. And then the faculty of persistence: what are the four right exertions^[15]?

Ajaan Thanissaro: Oh, basically to abandon any unskillful qualities that have already arisen and to prevent them from arising again, and then to give rise to skillful qualities, and then to maintain them when they're there.

Question: I had a question on page 13... Can you help me understand that the eye is old kamma? Because what you see is a result of old kamma. What you hear... everything that comes through the six senses is kamma coming back at you. I'm confused because what you see is a result of what you're looking for.

Ajaan Thanissaro: Well, things that come in... if you're looking for a bird but there's no bird, you're not going to find it. But if you're looking to get angry, you're going to focus on certain things. The things that are there available to you, that's the result of old kamma. Now what you're going to focus on, what you're going to elaborate on, what you're going to create out of that—that's your new kamma. I mean, if I close my eyes and open them again and will that there's nobody on the screen, it's not going to happen.

Question: So old kamma is just what is available to us through the senses. But what we perceive is new kamma.

Ajaan Thanissaro: Yes.

Question: I wanted to ask you about the illness of the mind, as in dementia, and how that relates to someone having concentration or persistence, which seem to be going away with a friend of mine.

Ajaan Thanissaro: If someone's got dementia, the only thing that can help them at all is if you give them some mindfulness exercises to see if that can help stretch their mindfulness a little bit. Because sometimes there are cases where the brain is not cooperating, and whatever talents they had in terms of concentration or discernment in the past are going to be leaving them, in which case they're going to be more and more subject to past kamma. As a caregiver, or if you're helping them along, your job is to try to be their memory for them and help them remember good things that they've done.

Question: When she's agitated or scared, I can bring her back. Is that helpful? She knows she has Alzheimer's, she knows that she's losing her memory. So my bringing her to that awareness is helpful to her?

Ajaan Thanissaro: Yes. Bring her to the awareness of good things that she's done, anything that would lift her spirits. That's what you're going to need at that point.

We had an old man who was dying at the monastery one time, and to make a very long story short, he had cancer in the jaw. You could see that every now and then the pain would be getting to him, he'd start pushing his head back and forth, back and forth, back and forth on the pillow. His daughter was there with him, and because he had been meditating on the word Buddho, I told her, "Every time you see him do that, whisper the word Buddho into his ear." And he would stop, and he'd be okay for about two hours, and then he'd lose it again. It's okay, put it back in. She was with him all the way until his death, and she kept his mind in a good state all the way until he died.

If this woman used to meditate and she can't remember that she used to meditate, you don't have to talk about meditation, but just saying, "You did a lot of good things in the past, and everybody loves you for all the good things you did."

Question: In the talk you just gave, you spoke a little bit about people at the moment of death having right view or wrong view, and then they would correspondingly be reborn in a good place or a bad place. Could you maybe expand a little bit on that? Like say if you've been doing stuff that's been quite hateful, how do you then at the moment of death just have right view? Or is it kind of saying, "Oh shoot, I did something wrong, maybe I can do something better next life"?

Ajaan Thanissaro: That's a good step. Yeah, "I realize that that was a mistake. I recognize the mistake that I did, and I don't want to make that mistake ever again." That's right view. And an important part of right view which is often missed is that you have goodwill. This is going to be one of the themes that we're going to find this afternoon when we talk about the various hindrances that could hit you as you're approaching death, and the cure for a lot of them is goodwill, because goodwill is a type of right view: that it's good that everybody be happy and truly inside.

Question: I want to go back to the old and the new kamma. It's very subtle. Old kamma isn't necessarily bad kamma, is it?

Ajaan Thanissaro: No, it's good kamma too, yeah.

Question: But what if one finds oneself—and I see this in my work as well as in myself—repeating thoughts or memories that are not skillful or that are difficult, and I'm very aware of that. Being aware of it, I can put it aside. In other words, my mental actions can shift from, "All right, this is the past, this is the present now." What I've discovered is that it doesn't change the pattern once and for all, but it does bring me back to a whole different frame of reference. And I have to keep doing it over and over and over again, and I'm wondering if that's the beginning of a fresh kamma—I even like that better than "new kamma".

Ajaan Thanissaro: Yeah, it's fresh kamma in the sense that you're developing a new habit. And then the other thing is, when you see these things arising and you learn how to put them aside, then the next step is to ask, "Well, when they come back again, why do you go for them again? What's the allure?"

Question: But when I say, "All right, here it is again," and I bring myself back to something else, or I'm not going for the allure, is there something programmed in there that brings it back?

Ajaan Thanissaro: Well, that's what you want to look for, so that you can realize whatever it is that's bringing it back, you want to see that, understand what that is.

Question: In the readings, Ratthapala^[16] taught the four Dhamma summaries to the king. The four Dhamma summaries being: the world is swept away; there is no refuge; my favorite one, there is no one in charge; and the world is lacking and insatiable, a slave to craving. The king noted with interest that Ratthapala understood these things not because he'd gone through any particular hardship, but because the Buddha taught them and he recognized them as true. Some of us know the four Dhamma summaries are true through direct personal experience—kind of raw and harrowing direct personal experience. Some of us are practicing with post-traumatic stress disorder, and I'd like to know if you have any particular considerations or cautions that you'd like to convey to us.

Ajaan Thanissaro: What you've got to realize is if the world is not providing these things for you, you've got to provide them for yourself. And that's the message, that's why Ratthapala went forth: "Okay, what can I do? If you know the world is swept away, is there something in me that I can develop that's not swept away?" The world is... there's no one in charge, it offers no shelter. What kind of shelter can I provide for my own mind? Because if you simply think about how the world is horrible, horrible, horrible, it's going to drive you crazy. But yes, the world is not going to provide this, but the Buddha is telling me I have within me the resources that I can provide that for myself.

Question: What I noticed, and it took me a long time to notice this because I've been doing it for years... I've been doing sitting meditation. And I would sit there, always with the focus, always with the intention of returning to the breath. But with post-traumatic stress disorder, there are alarm signals going off in the brain. The flashback film festival is rolling, your body is presenting all kinds of symptoms telling you you need to pay attention to this, something dreadful is about to happen. But the thing is, I keep returning to the breath, and I'd sit there and let my mind beat up on me for a while, I'd return to the breath, and then ding, the session is over, and I sort of pat myself on the back for just having endured a meditation session. Only recently I came to see that I don't get brownie points just for enduring a meditation session. That's torturous. We don't have to repeat what the Buddha did, he already discovered that self-torture doesn't work. With reluctance I said I need to try something different, so I started doing walking meditation in my house. I just pace the house. It's a different experience, I feel less threatened walking than I do sitting. The main thing is I have a greater sense of ease, and it's not quite the self-torment that sitting was. But I have this nagging sense that it's somehow an inferior kind of practice.

Ajaan Thanissaro: Ajaan Suwat is reputed to have attained awakening while he was walking. So it is possible.

Question: What's interesting to me, what I notice my mind doing when I'm doing walking meditation, my mind is doing a lot of planning. It's anticipating disaster and trying to come up with scenarios... "Okay, what am I going to do to meet that disaster?" I realized there's always going to be some guy with an axe or an atom bomb or something. The way to do it is to return to your own breath, your own body, and to find some pleasure in your own being in whatever way you can do it, whether it's walking, sitting, lying down.

Ajaan Thanissaro: I think this is a problem of right view. I mean, you're supposed to actually find the practice enjoyable, because that's your refuge.

Question: First of all, thank you for the explanation about the old kamma with the senses. One of the questions I had about the idea of going on to a new life, or to a better or worse place based on what you're thinking or doing when you die: people die unconsciously. Like they die in the middle of sleep, or they get shot in the head, or something happens such that they're not really conscious at the time. In that case, is where they go dependent on the state of their mind the last time they were conscious?

Ajaan Thanissaro: Well, they may regain consciousness right after they're outside the body. So there's a consciousness that could happen as they transition. But there are many... one thing, in my own experience, I had a near-death experience one time. I was electrocuted. It happened in the snap of a finger, but for me it was like five minutes. Everything slowed down very quickly, and I began to realize that there were a lot of decisions that I was making as I was going through that period. But the people who watched it happen said it was just a split second that I was electrocuted and I was able to pull away.

So I think when you're leaving the body, you're forced out of the body, the mind suddenly speeds up and it's conscious of lots of things that it wouldn't ordinarily be conscious of. So someone who dies in their sleep, they may wake up inside, "Oh, this is it, I'm going," and so they're making decisions.

The other alternative, of course, is that somebody was shot. My teacher had a student who was quite psychic, and her job was to drive around delivering oxygen canisters in southeastern Thailand. She drove past a lot of accident scenes. The police in Thailand are a little bit slower than they are in America to clean up after accidents, so you tend to see more accidents on the side of the road. She said she would drive past an accident and she would not only see the bodies on the side of the road but also the people corresponding to the bodies kind of milling around looking lost. And so she would always stop and basically enter into meditation, talk to them, say, "Okay, now it's time to go on. Think of the good things you've done, move on." Which is why when someone's had a violent death like that, it's always good to say good things to them.

Question: When I look at the world, I sometimes am very aware of "this is passing" or "this will be gone." In the Bay Area, where we live used to be underwater 5,000 years ago, and these houses and everything that people think are so permanent will be gone. Sometimes I think that's a helpful view, an awareness of the transience of life. And other times I think, "But it's so beautiful, it's here now. I'm lucky to live in a nice place where I'm not choking from smog." When is it better to be aware of the transience of it versus really enjoying and appreciating where I am?

Ajaan Thanissaro: It depends on your state of mind. If you're feeling down, think about, "This is a really nice place. Heaven on earth, the Bay Area." And other times when you're getting careless and complacent, then it's kind of good to remind yourself, "Hey, this stuff is going to go someday. What do I have that's of permanent value that I can take with me when it goes?" And you reflect back, "Well, it's my actions. The good things that I do for myself, the things I do for other people, those are things that are of real value." So if I'm reflecting as I'm walking around, "I pick up trash," or "I could help people who are suffering, who don't have a home," that's a positive thing. That's of more value than just sort of thinking about the world going away. Because as I was telling Susan just now, when you realize that the world is swept away, what is not swept away? Let's focus on that.

Question: I have a question related to the meditation word Buddho at the moment of death. It seems like it's very common among some of the teachers in the Thai Forest tradition to teach this word. When you teach, you kind of more focus on making sure we're paying attention to the sensation of the breath of the body. Buddho seems like a very helpful single word to snap you back into your practice as you're being pulled in all sorts of directions as you approach death. If we're not using a meditation word in our meditation, do you have any other suggestions for something that can snap us back as we're facing death?

Ajaan Thanissaro: Well, "breathe." If you've been focusing on your breath all this time, then there should be some really good associations with the breath. "Where's your breath right now?" That should be plenty. As you're dying, you're going to have to leave the breath, and you say, "Okay, where's the state of my mind right now?" We'll talk about this a little bit more this afternoon.

Question: I have a question regarding the strategies in dealing with pain. I've been mostly focusing on using the breath energy to go through that area to ease the pain, and usually it goes away. When do you recommend to use discernment to look into the pain, like how does it feel, is it solid? I've never had to use it so far.

Ajaan Thanissaro: Very well. I could say you're lucky in one way. Just sit for longer hours until there's pain that doesn't go away as you breathe through it.

Question: I was wondering, in your talk you were talking about that we should teach ourselves urging, rousing, and encouraging. To me these seem quite similar, so if you could give an example of these three, how we can in our own practice use these three different strategies?

Ajaan Thanissaro: Urging is saying, "This is a good thing to do. You should do it." Rousing is saying, "Come on, you've got the energy, you can do this. Are you just going to sit there and do nothing?" And then encouraging is more, "Come on, you really can do this, I really believe in you. Okay?"

Question: As a clinician and a meditator, I treat folks with anxiety disorder spectrum and OCD, and they often mention things like intrusive thoughts, thoughts that kind of seemingly come up that really don't seem to represent their inner desires. It seems like understanding those types of thoughts and the gratification that might come along with them is a little bit harder. I wonder if you can just speak to that and how to deal with thoughts that come along that aren't obvious what to do with them, or what the gratification is.

Ajaan Thanissaro: Well, this is where it's good to think of the mind as a committee, and that you've got lots of different members in there that have some strange ideas about what they want to think about. For people who feel intruded by those things, you have to remind them: okay, this is normal, that everybody has members like this. Because a lot of people, this is where people start getting schizoid: they don't even want to admit that there's that side to their mind and they block it off. And so as long as they keep it blocked off they feel safe, and then it intrudes when their defenses are down. And so the proper attitude is, "Okay, I must have picked up something from maybe somebody else that's just kind of hanging around in my mind right now." Ajaan Lee's thing about the different consciousnesses in the body, that's a good one. So there's one part of the mind that you don't necessarily have to identify with, but it's there. It just meant, "Okay, this part of the mind likes this kind of thinking." You've got to ask, "Why does that part of the mind like that kind of thinking?" Even though you in the moment don't particularly care for it, you feel threatened by it.

The question is, do you feel comfortable engaging with them yet or not? You have to have a safe space inside before dealing with these things. And this is one of the reasons why we work with the breath: get the body as comfortable as possible so you feel secure in the present moment, so that you can take these things on. If you don't feel secure, you don't want to take them on yet.

And the other thing is just say whoever that is, whatever bit of that personality is personally, just have lots of goodwill. This is my teacher's way of dealing with spirit possession, and it works well with psychotic thoughts as well: just lots of goodwill. "What do you want? What's your problem?" [Laughter]

Question: Can I please get the list of the qualities that you listed out that are useful to deal with aging?

Ajaan Thanissaro: Well, there are two lists of strengths there. Putting those two lists together you've got seven factors.

Question: The other question I had was, it seems like at the moment of death, changing from right view or wrong view can actually guide exactly where you could be reborn. How much of a change in right view would be required? It seems almost like you could have gone all your life committing murders, killing animals, and at the moment of death you just say, "Gee, that was terrible, that was bad for me to have done that," and that immediately takes you somewhere else. That seems a little arbitrary.

Ajaan Thanissaro: You might go to a good place, but there may be some bad things happening to you at that good place. The kamma would have some effect at some point in time; it might shorten your lifespan for some while or something like that.

Question: I told a few Buddhists that I know that I'm not interested in being reborn. I really don't see any realm that attracts me. And they said, "Oh, you're just practicing aversion. And anyway, you're not a monastic." I just didn't know quite what to make of that. But it didn't seem relevant to me. Why would that make any difference, or does it? The problem I am having is that my job is so exhausting that I can never reach concentration. But it seems like you're saying that concentration is necessary. So I guess I have to make a decision about my job, is that where I need to go now?

Ajaan Thanissaro: You have to ask yourself, how much do you want to continue working on your job, and how much time do you want to have to work on your mind?

Question: In the suttas, the Buddha becomes ill, and some of his senior disciples do as well. One of the other monks recites the bojjhangas^[17] (factors for awakening), and then they get better. What are your thoughts about that?

Ajaan Thanissaro: That's one of those cases where the illness had to do with his state of mind in the present moment, and whatever past kamma there was involved in the illness was not all that strong, so just strengthening his mind by remembering those factors for awakening was enough to get past the illness. In those cases, they are arahants^[18]. For someone who isn't, give it a try. What qualities of mind would be skillful to induce in that person while they're sick? In some cases, it's thoughts of goodwill. See if that helps. Just think goodwill for all beings, rather than focusing on their personal pains and illnesses.

Question: I've been focusing on making my mind like earth. At first I thought that idea was to make it so that other things that happened to me, I could just be okay, that I can try to keep myself really stable. But then I realized it's so that when things in my own mind become visible to me or apparent to me, that I don't get upset. Can you relate that to this whole thing on aging, illness, and death?

Ajaan Thanissaro: There's a lot of negative stuff that is going to come up, both outside in terms of what the body's going to be doing to you, and then the thoughts that are generated within the mind. And if you're going to be dealing with them skillfully, you have to not be blown away by what is negative, or even what is positive. Because you want to see very clearly, "Okay, this is something I don't want to go with." And then understand, if part of the mind wants to go with it, what is the allure? What's pulling it in? And can I counteract that? If it's positive and giving you energy in the practice, go ahead and use it.

I was on a flight across the Pacific, and the kids sitting in front of me had the whole set of Ice Age movies. In Ice Age 2, there's one scene where the characters are floating in a boat in this fog bank, and all of a sudden these mermaids start appearing, and they're all very attractive. The animals kind of look dreamy-eyed at these beautiful creatures. And then as you look more closely at them, you realize that every now and then there's some sort of static in the picture, and inside the static you begin to realize they're piranha fish. I thought that was a great image. Things that look attractive, watch out!

Question: I want to go back to Eileen's question. For me, if I can't bring my meditation and working with my mind into my daily life, specifically my job which is working with some very difficult people... Here's an example: in my class now they just screwed up the whole first assignment, so I'm really angry. But of course I've been working with myself, so I'm not going to send them an email telling them how angry I am. If I can't apply what I do in meditation to my life, it seems to me not too relevant.

Ajaan Thanissaro: Well, your meditation has two functions. One is that you can live this life more wisely. And then secondly, that you really do have to prepare: what do I have to take with me when I go? You would have the wisdom to deal with your 18 difficult students. This is a decision everybody has to make for themselves: how to balance these issues.

Question: In conditionality, ignorance conditions fabrications. But what are those fabrications referred to there, because there is no consciousness there, there is no name and form^[19].

Ajaan Thanissaro: Well, it's basically another way of talking about name and form. You have in-and-out breathing is bodily fabrication. You have directed thought and evaluation is verbal fabrication. And then you have feelings and perceptions are mental fabrication. Now if you take those and move them down to the factor of name and form, you see them basically repackaged. So it's different ways of packaging what you are bringing to the present moment prior to sensory contact.

Question: You said for calming the mental fabrications, keep different images in mind, like water sprouting and spreading all over the lake. What other ways?

Ajaan Thanissaro: Whatever perceptions you hold in mind that help to calm the mind down, those are the perceptions you want to use. You can have different images of how the breath energy is flowing in the body. The perception of the breath energy originating in the body and spreading throughout the body, that's one. Another is that each cell is breathing, and so there's no one spot in the body that has priority over the other spots. That's going to be even more calming: every cell is breathing, every cell is awake and aware. Or you can have the perception that the outline of the body is gone and it's just space. These get more and more calming as you go down.

Well, thank you for your attention, and we'll be meeting back here at two o'clock my time, and we'll talk about death. Thank you very much.