In this star Dharmabyte, an extract from the talk:Mindfulness of Reality, Kulananda takes us into the heart of the matter: everything is change. Itand#8217;s enough to make anyone think twice. Or a thousand times. And still get nowhere. But fear not and#8211; this is a clear, concise, eminently human and straightforward tour of the last of the traditional four levels of mindfulness. And Kulanandaand#8217;s approach is born of his experience of over twenty yearand#8217;s teaching on just this kind of thing. Ready? Then in we goand#8230;
Kulananda/Michael Chaskalson has published widely on many aspects of Buddhism and meditation, and runs a variety of mindfulness-based stress reduction programmes for use in personal and business life.
Talk given at Cambridge Buddhist Centre, 2000
[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] It seems to me that in some ways the simplest descriptions of reality are the most apt and most appropriate. It is, in fact, very simple. The business of being mindful of reality is very simple. It amounts no more, really, than to being realistic. That's what it's really about. We just need to be realistic. If we can think in those terms, rather than perhaps thinking in terms of mindfulness of reality or what is reality, then perhaps we can get our feet a bit on the ground and start to go somewhere useful and somewhere meaningful. It's important to think of being realistic, but what does it mean to be realistic? Here, again, we could launch off into abstruse territory, but let's keep it simple. To be realistic in the terms in which I'm using the term, I think we can think of just being aware of the fact that things are impermanent, insubstantial, and ultimately unsatisfying. If you can just retain your awareness of the fact that things are impermanent, insubstantial, and ultimately unsatisfying, then it will be much easier to be realistic about the way you lead your life. Now, when I say that things are impermanent, I may be saying a bit more than we tend to be used to when we use the term impermanence. Most of the time, when we speak about things being impermanent, we have this idea that you have something, say, a favorite coffee cup. You have this favorite coffee cup, and maybe even like my favorite coffee cup, it's porcelain. And being porcelain, the coffee just seems to taste nicer in it. It doesn't absorb quite so much heat, it's nice and thin, it's rather elegant. So you have your favorite coffee cup, your coffee tastes good in it. It's a pleasant thing to own, and one day it breaks, oh dear, oh well, everything's impermanent, there you go. And being a sensible, realistic sort of person, you just sort of grin and bear it, and there you go, you've done your bit about mindfulness of impermanence. It's not quite like that. It's not quite like that. When I say that things are impermanent, what I mean is, I don't have a white coffee cup. There is no white coffee cup to have, and there's no me to have it. Things really are impermanent, everything really is impermanent. And when I say impermanent, I mean impermanent, utterly impermanent, which means that there is no duration whatsoever. No duration whatsoever, anywhere to be found in this universe. Nothing endures even for a microsecond. So when we reflect on the fact that things are impermanent, something we need to reflect on to be really in tune with the idea of impermanence, is that things come into being and pass away in the same instant. Things come into being and pass away in the same instant. So it's not that something comes into being, hangs around a bit, and then impermanence gets the better of it and does away with it. It never really fully made it into being in the first place, because no sooner did it this perthing struggled into being than non-being overcame it. Things come into being and pass away in the same instant. Rather than being, we have becoming. Things are constantly becoming. So what this means is that everything is in constant flux, everything is constantly changing. There's no one moment of time, no matter how small, that is ever the same as the previous moment of time in any respect. Everything always changes. We hope you enjoyed the talk. Please come and help us keep this free at freebuddhistaudio.com/community. And thank you. [music] [music] [BLANK_AUDIO]
