Todayand#8217;s FBA Dharmabyte, is brought to us by Maitreyi titled: and#8220;Trying to Make Samsara Workand#8220;. Another gem from the talk and#8220;The Defects and Dangers of Samsaraand#8221; where Maitreyi looks at pleasure and suffering in the context of samsara and#8211; compassionate responses to self and other, and how to loosen the bondsand#8230;
Talk given at Tiratanaloka Retreat Centre, 2005
This talk is part of the series and#8220;The Four Mind-Turning Reflectionsand#8220;.
[music] Dharma Vites is brought to you by Free Buddhist Audio, the Dharma for real life. Our work is funded entirely by donations from our generous listeners. If you would like to help us keep this free, come and join us at freebuddhistaudio.com/community. Thank you and happy listening. [music] At the same time, we have some sense of what might be going on. We know to some extent that happiness doesn't come through possessing things. We are not consumed by acquiring wealth and fame. We have some understanding of how suffering arises and we don't expect to avoid it altogether. If nothing else, we have to die. Though rather than craving and grasping material objects or pursuing the perfect relationship, we have a more sophisticated approach. We try to fix samsara. We try to organize and plan our lives so we have the right balance of pleasure over pain. To fix our own experience of samsara, so it is palatable, so it has the right ingredients, some of which will be opportunities to practice the Dharma. This can take subtler and subtler forms so that we can find ourselves using the Dharma as another way of fixing samsara. So I'm just going to give you an example from my own experience some time ago. When I realized that I was feeling somewhat intolerant of people who happened to be other order members, who were acting in ways that didn't accord with the precepts, that is both precepts that I would not find it difficult to keep. So at some point in all of this, I recognized that intolerance was not itself a skillful mental state and is in fact a breach of the first precept. So I was struck by this and I thought, well, I need to explore this more fully. What is this all about for me? Because in one way it made sense because if we all acted in accord with the precepts, the world would be a better place, at least that F-WBO corner of the world that I spend a lot of my time in, so that would be better for me. I would certainly have a more pleasant experience. But behind this is my own conditioning, my socialist conditioning. I've grown up with a strong message that the meaning of life is to make the world a better place. And again, this is subtle because on the face of it, it resonates with the Dharma. There is a desire to alleviate suffering. But at the same time, it's limited. I'm still trying to fix Sanghsara and to fix my own experience of Sanghsara. And in so doing, I was going for refuge to ethics, albeit in a subtle way, rather than going for refuge to compassion, a true refuge, and having a compassionate response to unschoolfulness. So it's not surprising that I did this because the longer I practice, the more I am of the degree to which my own conditioning affects not only the way I practice the Dharma, but affects how I hear the Dharma, what filters it comes through. I was talking about this Devante recently, and he said, towards the end of our discussion, "Oh, well, the important thing is that you see how your conditioning affects you. That's already the beginning of change." So I was fortunate in this case to see through my fix before too long. Because when we don't, then there's frustration, disappointment, and maybe anger. We feel that we've failed, we feel inadequate, we undermine ourselves. Or we become even more determined to try another lifestyle, another job. We become frenetic in our efforts to keep all the balls in the air, to cover our backs to be one jump ahead. Or we blame the situation, the people we've been involved with. And if those situations, those people, have been the repository for our ideals, especially our spiritual ideals, then we can feel let down to the point of betrayal. I think sometimes this happens for people in relation to the order and the movement. We hope you enjoy the talk. Please come and help us keep this free at freebuddhistaudio.com/community. And thank you. [music fades out] [music fades out] [music fades out] [BLANK_AUDIO]
