Santavajri begins with her realisation that a motivator for her spiritual practice has been a quest for happiness. Touching on the themes of righteous indignation, spiritual bypassing, empathy, non-violent communication, envy and exploring apology, confession and working with betrayal, Santavajri poses the question as to whether we can forgive ourselves and move towards unconditional love for all beings. Excerpted from the talk Forgiveness and Happiness, part of the series Women's Area Order Weekend at Adhisthana, 2018. ***
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[music] Dharma Bites 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. [music] Okay, so originally when I was given my brief for this talk, I think the idea was to talk about these verses, but it was also to talk about forgiveness. So I'm going to kind of talk about that, but really, I think what this talk about is about happiness. If you've been to Tirat Naloka on a transcendental principle retreat recently, you'll know that towards the end of the retreat we do this thing in the last pooja where we all read out our favourite sentence or our favourite bit from the survey. And this is the bit that I, nine times out of ten, this is the one that I choose. This is from Banti from the survey. Happiness can be attained either when existence accords with our desires or when our desires are called of existence. True, the second alternative is difficult, but the first is impossible. If we cannot gain happiness bit by refashioning the world, we shall have to find it by reforming ourselves. So I think this was a very major motivator for me when I decided to learn to meditate. That's how I first came in contact with the movement. I think I realised I was unhappy to some extent anyway, and I wanted to be happy. That was the bottom line. And I think the fact that I chose to learn to meditate was a sort of a tacit intuition that I needed to reform myself instead of continuing to try and refashion the world. So I often think that, you know, when we talk about the five emphases of the Dharma life, the spiritual death one, I often think that a little bit of spiritual death or insight actually does come into play in our first involvement with the Dharma. The fact that we choose to do that is a little spiritual death, I think. I think we seek out the Dharma because probably on some level we've started to see that conditioned existence is unsatisfactory, however dimly that little insight might be. And of course refashioning the world doesn't mean necessarily refashioning the physical world or the organic world or whatever. It tends to mean refashioning other people, doesn't it? Refashioning the world means changing other people. So that's the thing that we start to realise that it's not going to be so easy to do. Maybe we need a different strategy. So again, when I started to learn to meditate, I think I was very, very struck straight away by the metaphor. It was the second practice I was taught, but it really, you know, sort of hit me very, very strongly. And I always had someone to put in the fourth stage. There were loads of people that I loved to hate, and I felt I was absolutely justified in doing so. Famous people and less famous people, I thought that I was in the right, they were in the wrong. But at the same time, I think I did understand, again, just sort of dimly, intuitively, that hating them was making me unhappy. So ill, will and resentment were very strong hindrances for me when I first learnt to meditate. And certainly when I first went on the GFR retreat, Sautirat Naloka, I remember once I started to get a handle on the ten precepts, and we started to do confession. It was always the ninth precept. It was always the hatred, one, the ill will, one that came up. Everything seemed to boil down to that. And it still does come up to some extent, but I must say, I'm happy to say this, that it comes up a lot less than before. It's actually dwindled to some extent, so, you know, the Dharma works, I suppose. I'm not saying I'm completely over it, by the way, but I do feel happier as a result of feeling less ill, will and resentment. We hope you enjoyed today's Dharma Bite. Please help us keep this free. Make a contribution at freebuddhistaudio.com/donate. And thank you. (upbeat music)
