(upbeat music) - This podcast is brought to you by Free Buddhist Audio, the Dharma for your life. Our work is funded entirely by donations from our generous listeners. If you would like to help us keep this free, make a contribution at freebuddhistaudio.com/donate. Thank you and happy listening. - So, yeah, we're going to be exploring. Well, I'm going to be exploring. Bliss, within a Buddhist context, the blissful mind. The mind in the sense, in the Buddhist sense, of not just our cognitive mind, but the heart as well. This word chitta, mind, heart. So, covering both quite a broad sense. And quite a broad sense of bliss as well, incorporating happiness, pleasure, joy, rapture, and contentment. So, one of the first quotes I came across when I was thinking about this topic was Aristotle, who says, "What constitutes happiness "is a matter of dispute?" Which is, it is, isn't it? What makes us happy really varies from person to person. If I asked all of you what made you happy, what your most blissful experiences are, would probably have quite a range. At the moment, my five-year-old nephew, what makes him blissfully happy, is his Xbox. I don't even know what one of those is. So, it's not something that makes me particularly happy. And then the monk philosopher Matthew Rickard. He suggests that the absence of conflict in our minds or in our life is what creates happiness. So, I'll come back to this a bit later, this sense of an absence of conflict. So, perhaps for some of us, happiness is a temporary thing, perhaps magic moments, moments where we feel that everything comes together. There's just a temporary state of grace, not necessarily a religious sense of grace, but just this sense of, on a family picnic, on a sunny day, after a piece of good news, just a sense of knowing that you're happy. So, Catherine Mansfield, the writer, she has, I think it's not sure if it's a novel or a short story entitled Bliss. So, I thought I'd read you just a section of it. She says, "Although Bertha was 30, she had moments when she wanted to run instead of walk, to take dancing steps on and off the pavement, to bowl a hoop," this tells you the era of it, "to throw something up in the air and to catch it again, or to stand still and laugh at nothing, at simply nothing. What can you do if you're 30 and turning the corner of your own street? You are overcome suddenly by a feeling of bliss, absolute bliss." As though you'd swallowed a bright piece of that late, bright afternoon sun, and it burned in your bosom, sending out a little shower of sparks into every particle, into every finger and toe. That's lovely, isn't it? So, what gets in the way of us feeling like that more of the time? Not necessarily bliss, but contentment, ordinary happiness. So, from the Buddhist perspective, happiness, bliss, it's quite a complex thing. Happiness isn't the goal of the Buddhist life, but it does sort of weave its way through the experience of happiness and the experience of bliss and contentment. We actually talk about the bliss of nirvana, the bliss of enlightenment. That's how it's described. But the goal isn't happiness. Happiness is more a byproduct of practicing the spiritual life, the spiritual path. The goal is more about freedom, which I think Sagaragosha talked more about last week. But the Buddha did have a lot to say about pleasure, bliss, happiness. So, in terms of what's stopping us, feeling happiness more of the time. In Buddhist terms, it comes down to not getting what we want, and getting what we don't want. Those two things. So, what we tend to want is to have pleasant things happen to us and to people that we care about. And what we don't want on the whole is to have unpleasant things happen, stress, difficulty, dissatisfaction, or have those things happen to people that we care about. So, we often also want to feel differently. Not only have the externals be different, but the internals as well. Those moments, when we're not happy, there's often quite a resistance to that, not wanting to be upset, or angry, or depressed. Or sometimes we want to be different. We wish that we were a different sort of person, a more sociable one, a thinner one, a fitter one. So, it's often a feeling of dissatisfaction with ourselves and our world. A sense of a struggle with how things are, and with us being part of how things are, how we are. So, we can spend quite a lot of energy trying to get what we want and trying to get rid of those things that we don't want. So, there's a little quote from Orya Mountain Dreamer who says, "What if the question is not why am I so infrequently the person I really want to be? But why do I so infrequently want to be the person I really am?" I'll read that again. "What if the question is not why am I so infrequently the person I really want to be? But why do I so infrequently want to be the person I really am?" So, we don't want to suffer. We want things to go our way. But is it realistic to expect that life delivers in that sense that we only have enjoyable or pleasurable things happen in our lives? I'm sure you'd agree that it's not realistic. And at some point suffering or dissatisfaction, disappointment comes to us all. It might be quite minor annoyances. The tickets have all gone for this concert we really wanted to go and see. Well, someone pips us to the post for the last parking spot. Or our suffering might be on a much bigger scale. The loss of a job or the death of someone that we love. Our own health or ill health, mental health or physical health. So, we all suffer or experience dissatisfaction or unpleasantness. It's a fact of life, you could say. Even with a life where we feel really blessed, there are still those things that are difficult that either happen to us or we experience or that happen to people, that we care about, or we're affected by things that happen in the wider world. So, suffering is a part of life. Suffering is in some relationship to the happiness in our lives. So, to look at the role of happiness in our lives, we have to also look at the role of suffering or dissatisfaction. We have to look at how we relate to suffering, to dis-ease or dissatisfaction in our lives. How do we respond to it? So, this term, I'm talking about suffering, the Buddhist term is dukkha, dukkha. And it is quite a complex, in a way, a spectrum of experience from really, really difficult, painful experiences to just those annoyances that happen in our lives from time to time. So, the Buddha talked about two main ways we react to suffering or unpleasantness in our lives. You could say that they're very close together, I've separated them out, but there's quite a relationship between the two. So, firstly, one way we react to suffering or unpleasantness, we move towards something pleasurable, to replace an unpleasant experience with one that's more pleasurable. And the second thing we might do, and this is to a certain extent based on temperament, we might just try and push the unpleasantness away, just remove ourselves from it. So, I want to read you a bit of a story about what's a dialogue between the Buddha and a king, a king known as King Bhimbisara. And it's a dialogue about who was the happiest between the two of them. So, the question arose, which of them was the happier? Was the Buddha happier than the king or was the king happier than the Buddha? Of course, the king was quite sure that he was the happier of the two by far. He said, "Well, look, I've got all these palaces, I've got this army, I've got this wealth, I've got all these beautiful women, I'm obviously happier than you. What have you got?" Here you are sitting underneath a tree outside some wretched hut. You've got a yellow robe and a begging bowl, that's all. Obviously, I'm far happier than you. But then the Buddha said, "Well, let me ask you a question. Tell me, could you sit here perfectly still for an hour, enjoying complete and perfect happiness?" And the king said, "Well, yes, I suppose I could." Whereupon the Buddha said, "Okay, could you sit here without moving, enjoying complete and perfect happiness for six hours?" And the king said, "Well, that would be rather difficult." So the Buddha said, "Could you sit for a whole day and a whole night without moving absolutely happy the whole time?" And the king had to admit, "Well, no, that would be beyond me." Then the Buddha said, "Well, I could sit here for seven days and seven nights without moving, without stirring, all the time experiencing complete and perfect happiness without any change whatsoever." So I think I must be happier than you. So they seemed to have different criteria for happiness. So the king's happiness was based on sensuous pleasures, pleasures experienced through the senses. His palaces, his harams, fine foods and drinks, many fine clothes, many slaves to do his bidding, and many elephants which accord him, particularly high status and wealth. So when the king is asked to be without his props, he doubts that he could be happy. His happiness is based on seeking pleasure through his senses, fulfilling his desires through the touch, touch, fine sights, smells, tastes, and also through, in Buddhism we have the five senses, but the mind is known as the sixth sense. So we can get a lot of pleasure through our minds, through various memories, through the thoughts that we think, emotions that we feel. So the Buddha's happiness is based on none of these things. Material, he has very little, but he's perfectly content, experiencing what they say in the suttas, the peak of pleasure, sitting, doing nothing for hours on end. So he doesn't get bored, he doesn't get restless, he doesn't want to do anything to distract himself, go and have a little walk down to the local village. He just sits completely present and completely content. So with these two types of happiness, we can make a distinction between freedom of desires, the freedom in a sense to have what we want, all the things that we can think of that will give us pleasure that will make us happy. So freedom of desires, external things. And freedom from desire, freedom from the mental state that wants all these things. And in Buddhist terms, we talk about craving, state of craving. So in one of these, the freedom of desire, you give rain to the tendency, the craving tendency, that seeks gratification through experiences, amassing, acquiring experiences. So the freedom from desire, in a way we let go of that, that tendency to crave, to seek things. So King Bhimbasara seeking happiness, as I said, through trying to satisfy his desires. He is happy, but his happiness is dependent upon continually fulfilling these desires. Each new desire, as it arrives, and he's very lucky, he's in a position where he can get a lot of what he wants. But at a certain point, he won't be able to have what he wants, because we can't have what we want indefinitely. At a certain point, this fact of life, this sense of dissatisfaction, suffering, disease will arise in our lives, in his life. So without his palaces and riches, his trophy wives and elephants, he wouldn't be happy. I don't have a sense, myself, that perhaps he'd be a bit lost, in a sense of him floundering a bit. So the Buddha's happiness isn't dependent upon what happens to him. Whether he gets to eat his one meal a day, whether it rains and he meditates protected from the weather or not, he's not dependent upon those external factors to give him happiness. So he experiences freedom from desires, so there's a sense of him being emotionally and mentally free from chasing pleasure. So it's not that he doesn't have preferences necessarily. So he might prefer meditating when it's not raining, but prefer that he gets his one meal a day. But if he doesn't, it doesn't create unhappiness in him. His happiness isn't dependent upon it. So I just wanted to take a look at the place of pleasure in the Buddhist life. It's not all sort of duer and gray and about suffering. So what is the place of pleasure? Well, on the one hand, we all have bodies, we all have senses, and so pleasure arises quite naturally through those senses. We see beautiful sights, I see the sunset on the way home, cycling home across Jesus Green, catch the sunset, and it's a pleasant experience. Perhaps swimming in the sea on a hot day, drinking a good cup of coffee in a cafe with a friend. Yeah, various things that arise through the senses, hearing a piece of music that's enjoyable and pleasurable. So there's a multitude of ways that we experience pleasure. It just arises quite naturally. I think the trick is to let those moments of pleasure come and go to not try and hang on to them, if you like, and to be aware of how we're affected in a way by what happens through our senses. Sometimes I'm aware that of how my mood is affected by something as simple as whether the sky is clear and blue and bright or whether it's gray. That simple difference can be the difference in my own mind between having a pleasurable experience and an unpleasant experience. So it's actually considered important following the Buddha's path to have pleasure. And the Buddha in this way was quite radical actually on this point. It might not sound that radical to us that the Buddha's saying, "Pleasure's not a bad thing." We're really used to many, many different sense pleasures. But the culture that the Buddha was coming out of, well, the ordinary culture was perhaps like us but much, much less sophisticated. There was a lot of opportunity for pleasure. But the common culture of people trying to practice this spiritual life was one of a skepticism. So you had various ways that religious mendicants tried to practice esketicism. And esketicism was the way that was seen as overcoming the way to sort of have some sort of spiritual breakthrough. A bit like in the Christian context in mortification of the flesh to release the spirit. So you had matted hair, esketics, who... I'm not actually sure what they did beyond having very, very dirty matted hair. I suspect that they didn't wash. It was very common to eat very little, to starve the body. It was also quite a common practice to behave like various different animals, to spend years of your life behaving like a dog. It sounds very strange, but this was taken very seriously. Going around on all fours, barking, was considered a way to break through. I don't know that anyone ever managed it. One other thing that apparently people used to do was they used to go around like this. Right now you can do it in... I think it's... is it commune? The Tibetan exercises where you were tai chi, where you have very, very slow, you move very, very slowly. But apparently, if you hold your arm up like this for long enough, it will wither. And this was one of the common esketic practices during the day. So the Buddha was quite radical in his day. He didn't reject pleasure or joy, wholesale, but he did advocate a middle way, a middle path between indulging and the body and punishing the body. That he himself had practiced the esketic path for many years before his enlightenment and felt that it really wasn't taking him anywhere. What made the difference for him and perhaps modified his views and took him more closely towards the middle way, the middle path? Was he remembered an occasion as a child? His father, who was a sort of minor king, had taken him to the fields where it was his duty, the father's duty, it was the first day of the plowing. So he had to oversee the plowing and he left his son sitting on a field under what was known as a rose apple tree. And the child, the Buddha to be, was very happy here. He spent all day in quite spontaneous meditation. There was a quality of openness and relaxation, just sitting on this blanket under a tree, watching in the distance this plowing taking place. Highly pleasurable experience and highly concentrated. And he recalled this experience after he'd been doing esketic practices, very unpleasant esketic practices for a long time. And he recalled how different the feel, this feel of openness and relaxation and pleasure was to the painful, straining, enduring feel of his esketic practice. And he wondered if this rose apple experience was pointing to another, perhaps more helpful way to follow the spiritual life. So it was quite a turning point for him. And he realised, the Buddha realised that he didn't need to be afraid of pleasure, didn't need to avoid it completely. But he could still make a distinction between happiness that was arising from sense pleasures and happiness that was arising on the basis of spiritual practice, which was more in the pursuit of freedom, pursuit of enlightenment. So that's how the Buddha was thinking about pleasure. And Sanger Akshita, our own teacher and the founder of the Tree Retina Order. He has a rather lovely perspective on pleasure in the spiritual life. He talks about pleasure, even sense-based pleasure, can have an effect on the mind that's quite refining, it's quite softening. He can help the mind be more expansive rather than contracted, more pliable and open. Less in the grip of craving, which is quite a force in the mind, this desire to reach out, to grab things that we want, to try and draw things that we want towards us. So in this sense of pleasure that refines the mind, it helps take the mind beyond its everyday nature. It's sort of the worker-day mind, so it can lift us up. So the arts are one of the ways, the main ways that he talks about here, seeing paintings in a gallery, a really good film, a really good book. And it can have a refining effect on us that's very pleasurable and it just feels very different to say watching things, just watching a few things on TV or reading pulp fiction. Or communication when you feel it's a really meaningful exchange between you and somebody else. Communication about our own values can have this experience, bring our own sense of satisfaction for goodness. And poetry, I mean he's a son Gretchen himself has written a lot of poetry, but I think poetry just really points beyond points to something beyond the senses. So I'm just going to read you a few words from William Wordsworth. It's an excerpt from Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tin Turn Abbey. And he says, "And I have felt a presence that disturbs me with the joy of elevated thoughts, a sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused, whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, and the round ocean and the living air, and the blue sky and in the mind of man, a motion and a spirit that impels all thinking things, all objects of all thought and rolls through all things." So poetry can evoke things in quite a mysterious way. The other ways that we can talk about pleasure, a sense of pleasure that refines the mind, is in nature. It's possible to be just become very absorbed out walking and perhaps we sit down for a little while. A very full experience, and the Pope John Burrows says, "When I go to the woods or the fields or ascend to the hilltop, I did not seem to be gazing on beauty at all, but to be breathing it like the air." So there's a sense of absorption, absorbed, not separate, just really at peace at one with the landscape. So come back to that sense of absorption a little bit later in relation to meditation. So talked about happiness arising or the Buddha talked about happiness arising from the practice of the spiritual life. So one of the ways of doing that is to bring this sense of refining our mind through the sorts of pleasures that we partake of. Another way of refining the mind, of bringing the mind to a place of happiness is through practicing the ethical life, a good life. So through practicing generosity, through practicing through kind acts, through being honest, not crooked in our dealings with other people, telling the truth, having a clear conscience, there's a sense of ease that comes from these things. Doing things that help others. A different way of living when we're looking at what we can do that will help others. A sense of feeling in connection with others and a sense of that creates feelings of self-worth and expansiveness in us. And for myself I definitely feel a difference to when I'm in that sort of mode, when I do feel more open, more expansive. And when I'm in, I think they call it the sort of threat-oriented mode, feeling a bit protective, a bit not quite trusting other people. And it's not in a gross way, but there's a sort of closeness to my mind rather than thinking the best of people, just being open to people. So I think to feel this sense of ease and relaxation that comes from feeling okay about ourselves and okay with other people is quite a gift, is quite a feeling. So this sort of happiness is a fruit, if you like, a fruit of practice, a fruit of a clear conscience and of developing empathy and moral sensitivity. So I want to come on to talk a little bit about meditation. In a way this whole talk could have been about meditation. But I did want to include some other aspects of the path. So I mentioned being absorbed before, perhaps in an experience of nature, being absorbed in a film and this feeling of the whole of us being involved in that experience. And this is one place that meditation can lead us to this feeling of being completely absorbed. Meditation is called the most direct way of transforming the mind. So it's very important in Buddhist practice. So we can start off in a very very simple way and meditation can take us the whole way to the bliss of nirvana, the bliss of enlightenment. So we use meditation as one of the main tools to gain this freedom from desires, which you could say this freedom from desires is synonymous with nirvana. So Buddhist meditation aims for two things. Firstly, calmness and steadiness of mind we want to calm the mind. And the second thing is insight or this freedom from desires. So we start just by sitting down, we have our everyday mind, our worker day mind, and we sit down to meditate and perhaps we can choose different objects to focus on but a common focus for meditation is the breath. And at a certain point, and this is something you would need to follow through for yourself, the mind can become absorbed into the object, which in this case is the breath. So we become very engaged, very interested, fascinated with the sensations of the breath, with following the breath. There's a process of unification of our energies and integration of our mind and heart on many different levels. So there's a strong feeling of contentment in this experience and a strong feeling of being with the breath. The mind just doesn't want to go anywhere else. So like the Buddha with King Bimbisara, we're just happy sitting there doing nothing. I was reminded of a bumper sticker that I used to see in the past. I haven't seen it for a while amongst meditators. It says don't just do something, sit there. So the early absorptions, there's this sense of energy come together, integration. And then as you progress through the absorptions, and there are initial four, and then there are later four, things just get more and more blissful really. Extremely pleasurable, very refined states of consciousness. Consisting of factors of one-pointedness, that's all our energy being present on the one-point rapture, bliss and equanimity. Yeah, so there's a sense of consciousness that's characterized by these qualities of rapture and bliss. Stillness, concentration, sometimes quite physical rapture, physical tingles, shivers and settling into a more set burn, a sufficient of mental bliss and contentment. And finally into this very deep emotional stability and purity of equanimity. Sounds quite nice, isn't it? So well and good, not easy to access. If one is able to, that's great. But happiness being a byproduct of practice, this isn't the end of the story, this isn't the end of the goal. It's very, very pleasurable, very satisfying experience, but it doesn't last, and it doesn't affect any great change on us. It's based, the absorptions are based on certain conditions coming together that help us sort of unify, and then they're bound to disperse again. Things change, things move on, and we fall back, if you like, into our everyday state of mind, with its mix of desires and dissatisfaction. So, is that enough, a temporary or be it very pleasurable state? It doesn't protect us from the states of craving. We can still fall into that again. It doesn't protect us from habits of mind that cause us suffering. So one of the things that Buddha talked about was that when we suffer, we think that the only way to try and escape suffering is to turn towards pleasure. So to treat ourselves after a bad day at work, have a bottle of wine, or sweets for the kids, it starts for a young, doesn't it, when they fall over? Yeah, sweets to make them feel better. So sometimes this works, sometimes chocolate really does help, but sometimes the suffering is on a less manageable level. So when someone we love dies, how comforting is pizza, then? So I want to look at the other side of that, saying coin of craving, and on the other side is a version, so the sense of not what we pull towards us, but pushing away, pushing away unpleasantness, pushing away what we don't like. So there's another Sutra I want to refer to, this is called the Salatha Sutra, and it's the Sutra of two darts or two arrows. And it says it in ancient India, apparently one way that people used to hurt each other, wars or armies, was with these quite hefty darts or arrows. So the Buddha describes a scenario, and he said it's like a man being shot with one of these darts. So he gets shot by one, and then almost immediately that's followed with a second dart. So he says the first dart represents suffering, suffering that's inevitable, it comes along with being human with having a body. So it's the physical pain when we've had an accident, an illness, part of getting older, and especially as we get closer to death, we have physical pains. And because we have a body, because we have senses, we'll suffer in some ways, because we have pain pathways and a nervous system, it's inevitable. We also suffer mentally, and this is represented too by the first dart. So again through our senses, unpainful, unpleasant painful sights, say we witness a car crash. There's an almost instinctual flinching from that unpleasant experience, we see a dog being mistreated, which happened to me quite often in Burma. Painful sounds are a very loud noise, bad smells, rough textures, the whole gamut of things that are like this first dart, they're just inevitable. And through our minds as well, through the sixth sense, we can suffer loss of grief and happiness, unpleasant memories. So then we come on to the second dart, what the second dart is all about. This is where we come back to the territory Matthew Rekard was talking about conflict, creating suffering. The second dart is the point where conflict arises in our minds. And the second dart is pretty much entirely mental or emotional. So I read you a little bit from the sutra. Having been touched by that painful feeling, he resists and resents it. Then in him who so resists and resents that painful feeling, an underlying tendency of resistance against that painful feeling comes to his mind. Under the impact of that painful feeling, he then proceeds to enjoy sensual happiness. And why does he do so? An untaught worldling amongst, that's someone who's not practicing the spiritual life, does not know of any other escape from painful feelings except the enjoyment of sensual happiness. So that's what I talked about earlier, I was thinking the only way to escape from suffering was to turn towards pleasure. But the first part of that reading, having been touched by that painful feeling, he resists and resents it. So this is about, the second dart is about how much we resist what's already happened to us. Resist by complaining, by going over the misfortune in our head, getting angry about it, blaming ourselves, blaming others. So there's a sense of a version of not wanting, pushing away. We don't want what's happened to have happened. But the reality is that it's already happened and by adding a version and resisting, we're allowing that second dart to land very soon after the first dart. So it's very common within the second dart to create a narrative around it, and that narrative just brings in more and more suffering. So we get, we're on holiday, perhaps a really lovely holiday, this did actually happen to me, about 10 years ago I went to New York for a week, fantastic. And I got a cold on the plane, on the way over. So there can be all those things going around our head, why now? It's such a drag, it's going to ruin the holiday, I'm not going to have as much energy. And this story, which is all going on in my mind, can take over from the reality, can actually affect my mind, I can start believing it's all going to be ruined. But the reality really is that I feel a bit tired, my nose is sore and running, and my throat is sore, so quite specific symptoms. But hey, I'm in New York. So we can be aware of what's actually happening and what's happening in our mind, which is just a reaction to an element of our experience where there's suffering. Just another example of whether the story can really get going, perhaps someone criticizes an aspect, one aspect of your work, and perhaps you're quite sensitive to criticism, so take it badly. And then the story gets going, they've always disliked you, and now you won't get the promotion that you were thinking for because you won't get a positive recommendation from them. And then you won't be able to make the mortgage payments because you need the extra money, and then the things that are already a bit sort of dodgy with your wife will mean that she'll leave. So we can go a very, very long way in our minds with these types of stories and create untold amounts of suffering. But the reality is that someone's criticized one aspect of our work. And it's painful, it's painful to be criticized. But that's the first start, the first start is that criticism and the response, the initial response we have, oooh. So the trick is to be with that painful moment, that bit of suffering without adding to it, without, if you like, the darts, it's not just the second dart that can land. The bigger the story gets, in a sense, the more darts land, the dart of self-blame, the dart of worry and anxiety, the dart of anger that arises, I'm going to storm into her office and tell her what I think. So there's a sense of a choice point between these first and second darts. So just to say, it doesn't mean that we're passive to our suffering, if we have a headache, we take a painkiller. If we see injustice or we feel like the criticism was in just, in this example, we can challenge that. We're not resigned, but we're aware, we start to become aware of where we're adding suffering. America meditation teacher Jack Cornfield says, we let go of the story and come back to the feeling, come back to the experience that we're actually having. So the first dart is termed inevitable, we can't avoid suffering, but the second dart is optional. Our reaction to our unhappiness, the suffering of pushing unpleasantness away, that's entirely optional. It doesn't mean that the first and second dart isn't a very, very strong habit in all sorts of ways. We experience suffering or dissatisfaction, disease, and we don't want it, it's so instinctual to push it away. But with meditation with spiritual practice, we start to be able to create a bit of space, a bit of a gap between the first dart landing and then maybe the second one just comes, there's a bit of a longer gap and maybe it doesn't go in quite so far. And over time, over time, we bring awareness to our own first dart, as Jack Cornfield says, if we can stay with, let go of whatever story is starting to develop and stay with the experience, then we create more awareness and more space. So learning not to react with a version and craving in our minds, our minds become happier and calmer. And from the basis of calm, we see more clearly and we understand the sense of how things really are. And even in these very simple examples, insight into how things are is not necessarily very complex and metaphysical. If we can see the story that we create and rather than believe the story that I'm going to lose my job and my wife, we see that as a mental construct that's creating suffering in our minds and come back to being able to stay with the painful feeling of having been criticized. There's potential for insight in that to see more clearly. So the bliss of Nirvana, the bliss of awakening or enlightenment, some enlightenment can be described in many ways, but one way is the extinction of craving and aversion. And the extinction of delusion, the delusion of self that they rest upon. Sometimes it's put in the suitors, the three fires are put out the fires of craving, hatred and delusion. So we're no longer reacting to suffering with a version and continually seeking out pleasure. But what remains or what grows during that process of putting out the fires, it can all sound rather negative or an absence and you might be wondering where is the bliss in all this. Well, hopefully I've touched on some of the more blissful parts already, but the path of practice through this path of practice of ethics and meditation leading to wisdom. We find a more meaningful way of living through becoming less dependent upon our desires, less dependent upon external, more a sense of being able to sit with ourselves and whether that is sitting with a pleasant experience of ourselves, say in nature, or an unpleasant experience of ourselves at the dentist. So through more of an acceptance of suffering, or the fact that suffering will arise in our lives, we don't add to it, we learn not to create further suffering. So whatever arises in our experience, we can meet it without reaction. So practicing ethics and meditation, we start to live our lives more in harmony with kindness, generosity, contentment, truthfulness, awareness and wisdom. And living from an open, thoughtful heart and an intelligent, responsive mind brings its own happiness. So perhaps the bliss I'm talking about is less akin to, you can see it's less akin to the pleasure, say, of excitement and more akin to contentment, deep, satisfying contentment. The Buddha talked about contentment as the greatest wealth, place of abundance, there's nothing lacking that we're seeking. So I want to finish with just two images that give us a flavour, a simple flavour of that happiness of heart and mind. And the first one is Sangerakshita, and the second one is from a suta, the Buddha. So it is difficult to talk about enlightenment, so just images I think can be quite helpful in terms of talking about that sense of happiness, freedom and awakening. So Sangerakshita says, "It's a path, a beautiful path that we should enjoy following. It's like going along a track among beautiful hills, the higher you go, the more beautiful the view, the more open everything becomes, the more you enjoy it and the more free you feel." And then the Buddha says, "There remains only equanimity, pure and bright, pliant, malleable and luminous. Just as if a skilled goldsmith or goldsmith's apprentice were to prepare a furnace, heat up a crucible, and taking gold with a pair of tongs, place it in the crucible." He would blow on it time and time again, sprinkle water on it time and again, examine it time and again, so that the gold would become refined, well refined, thoroughly refined, flawless, free from dross, pliant, malleable and luminous. Then whatever sort of ornament he had in mind, whether a belt, an earring, a necklace, or a gold chain, it would serve his purpose. In the same way, there remained only equanimity, pure and bright, pliant, malleable and luminous." Thank you. We hope you enjoyed this week's podcast. Please help us keep this free. Make a contribution at freebuddhistaudio.com/donate. And thank you. [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [ Silence ]
