Extract from SMPLY THIS MOMENT!

by Ajahn Brahm
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6 THE OPENING OF THE LOTUS

3rd May 2000

This is the first talk I have given since teaching the annual nine-day retreat for the
local lay Buddhists. I always have a wonderful time on those retreats. It is a time
when all my attention is focussed on meditation, and on the Dhamma. One of the
things that became very clear to me on that retreat was that there is no difference
between the Dhamma and meditation. One should incorporate as much Dhamma as
possible into the way one meditates. If you can incorporate all your understanding of
the Dhamma into the meditation, then this is a very powerful and effective way to
gain the goal in Buddhism.

I find it’s not possible to separate these two things. Thinking that meditation is
somehow separate from the teaching of the Buddha, or that the teachings of the
Buddha are somehow separate from the meditation practice, will not lead to success.
The Dhamma and meditation go together so beautifully. One of the things I taught
regularly to the lay meditators during the retreat was, ‘When you are meditating
remember the basic teachings of the Buddha!’

The Teflon Mind

Keep the Dhamma in mind as you are meditating; particularly keep in mind the Four
Noble Truths as an indication of what you should be doing when you are meditating.
In particular I focussed their attention on the second and third noble truths. The
second noble truth is craving or more especially kāma tahā, the craving for the five-
sense world, the craving to be, which includes the craving to do, and the craving for
annihilation. These invariably lead to dukkha, to suffering.

So how can you expect to become peaceful or get into a deep meditation when you
are following the path of the second noble truth? You can only get into deep
meditation if you remember the third noble truth, which is the ending of that craving,
the path to Nibbāna. The path to Nibbāna is the path to the highest bliss, the highest
peace, and it is achieved through cāga pa inissagga mutti anālaya. These four Pāli
words mean giving up. Cāga is giving away, pa inissagga is renouncing, forfeiting,

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mutti is releasing and anālaya is not letting anything find a roosting place in your
mind, not having a place where things can stick. I told someone this evening that,
“With a ‘Teflon mind’ the thoughts and ideas don’t stick, they just slip away”.

With these Dhamma teachings in the mind it becomes very easy to succeed in
meditation. You understand what you are doing and that helps the meditation. You
begin to understand what it is you are doing that is obstructing success in the
meditation. As far as this meditation is concerned, if you really practise the third
noble truth, if you really do let go without exception, freely opening up and not
having a place where things can stick in the mind, you will find the mind opens up
and becomes very peaceful and quiet. The mind goes through the stages of meditation
all the way into the jhānas. It’s the natural unfolding of the peaceful mind.

So often when we’re practising our meditation, we are following the second noble
truth instead, that is craving. It is concern for things in the world, and thoughts about
the past and the future. It is thoughts about family, thoughts about our health;
thoughts about our comfort and our bodies, thoughts about the sounds that other
people are making, thoughts about heat and cold, thoughts about what you’re going to
do tomorrow, thoughts about when you are going to do it, and where you are going to
go. All of those thoughts are the concerns of the five-sense world. In Pāli they are
kāma tahā: craving for comfort, for satisfaction, for fulfilment, for success in the
world of the five senses.

We should know now from our own experience and through the Dhamma – the
teachings of the Buddha, the four noble truths – that this concern is not the way of
peace, of happiness, or of release in one’s meditation. It will only produce more
suffering, more frustration, more disappointment, and more pain in the mind. This is
what is meant by ‘cause and effect’. We know where this path will lead us if we
follow it. So we should know that whenever there is pain, frustration, or despair in
the mind we have to work back to find the craving which is the cause. Learn from
your mistakes. Learn from the wrong attitudes of the mind. Don’t be foolish and
generate suffering, suffering, suffering, for your whole life and through many lives,
through many world cycles. Don’t be stupid, learn from experience. If it’s suffering,

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if it’s despair, frustration, disappointment, or whatever, it is something to do with the
first noble truth. The craving to be always comes from the illusion of self, attā.
People often have very strong egos and a very strong sense of self from pride. They
are the ones who find it very difficult to meditate.

Sometimes one needs to develop humility, the ability to surrender. I notice that
people who have enormous faith are usually the ones who have an easier time doing
the meditation. They get into deep states of meditation because of faith in the
teaching and faith in a teacher. Faith in the Buddha is something that overcomes faith
in ones ego. Everyone has some sort of faith, some sort of belief, but so often it is
belief in oneself; in one’s own wisdom, in one’s own intelligence, in ones own
knowledge and that very often obstructs the progress on the path.

When I teach retreats I often see this. Some of the Asian meditators are able to go far
deeper in their meditation, because generally speaking they trust what a monk says,
they don’t argue with it, they don’t think twice about it, they just do it. They follow
the instructions and it works. In contrast many Westerners are so independent,
basically so conceited and arrogant, that sometimes we don’t want to follow what the
teacher says, or what the Buddha says. We want to find out in our own way what we
think must be right. When one is not yet a Stream Winner that belief in ones own
ideas and views is very uncertain, it creates so much of a burden, so much of an
obstacle in your monastic life. Be careful what you put your faith in. As you know
faith or saddhā, is one of the five spiritual qualities, the five indriyas. It’s very
important to have faith at the beginning of your practice because you haven’t grown
in paññā, in wisdom yet. When one has gained wisdom, then that faith is confirmed.
You are stronger in the faith because you have seen that truth for yourself. Ajahn
Chah used to say that when you have been a monk for five years you have five per
cent of wisdom. Someone asked, “Does that mean when you have four years as a
monk that you have four per cent wisdom?” He said, “No, when you’ve got four
years you’ve got zero wisdom”. What he said was very wise: if you’ve got zero
wisdom you have to accept it and do as you are told. Trust in Ajahn Chah and you’ll
go much further than if you trust in yourself. I’ve seen that degree of faith, that
degree of surrender, in some of the Asian meditators and because of that they follow

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instructions without question.

It’s amazing that with some Westerners things often go wrong with the tools and
equipment they buy because they don’t read the instructions before they plug in and
start using them. That’s the arrogance of people these days; they think that they are so
superior; they think they know it all. They have faith in their own abilities and that’s
why they are always falling on their faces. A person who truly has faith would read
the instructions, understand those instructions, and if there were any questions would
read it again until they understood the instructions, and then they would proceed. The
instructions are very clear, craving leads to suffering, letting go leads to peace.

So what do people do when they try to meditate? They crave to get peaceful. They
work hard to get peaceful, they strive, and they screw their minds up to get peaceful.
And then they just get frustrated and think, ‘I can’t meditate’. It’s true that you can’t
meditate. No attā, no ‘self’, can do the meditation: you have got to get out of the
way. Put the ‘I’ aside and then you find that meditation happens. You can’t do
meditation; you’ve got to just get out of the way for meditation to occur. It’s a whole
process and that’s precisely what the second noble truth means. It was amazing to see
in the retreat how stubborn people are. They will always try and do things.

One of the most powerful methods of meditation that I practise is ‘contentment’. I

don’t teach things and then do something else; all of the methods that I teach are the
methods I practise myself. Contentment means being happy to be here, wherever you
are. The reason contentment works is because it’s going against the second noble
truth and it’s fulfilling the third noble truth.

You have to be careful of ‘contentment’ because it doesn’t mean being content to

follow the cravings and the dhamma qualities of the mind. It’s a different type of
contentment. I always know when it’s real ‘contentment’ because I don’t move. If I
was not content then I would always be looking for happiness somewhere else. That’s
the opposite of contentment. Discontent causes restlessness, causes movement of the
mind, and causes craving, reaching out and trying to find something else to feed the
needs of the mind. If its discontent you get kāma chanda, sensual desire, the first

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hindrance. You want to find some better comfort, something happier and more
pleasant, you want to get rid of the pain in the body. Kāma chanda comes from
discontent. Discontent is ill will, it is not being happy with the meditation, with
yourself or with anybody else.

From discontent people often go into sloth and torpor just to escape, because they
can’t face the present moment or the present life. One extra hour in bed in the
morning means one hour less you have to meditate or one hour less you have to face
the cold world. Restlessness, worry, or remorse are obviously discontent, doubt is
discontent, as is the desire to know, to figure things out. Shut up and be peaceful!
You know everything you need to know. All the five hindrances are born of
discontent. In the Nalakapāna Sutta (MN 68) it says that only when you achieve the
jhānas are the five hindrances, and interestingly discontent and weariness overcome.
It’s interesting in that sutta to see that the Buddha linked the five hindrances and
discontent, and how the five hindrances plus discontent give rise to weariness, and
heaviness in the body. Weariness makes it so hard to drag yourself out of bed in the
morning, out from under those nice warm covers.

If our meditation is going well, if we have overcome the five hindrances, we have
energy and the heaviness of the body disappears. During the retreat it was often hard
for me to stop skipping around the place, because when you are enjoying yourself you
want to get up earlier and earlier. That’s just the way of the body and the mind.
When the mind has energy it is no longer weary. Discontent is at the heart of the five
hindrances, and it’s also at the heart of the second noble truth.

From discontent craving arises. So check your meditation. Ask yourself, ‘Am I
content where I am, or do I really want to get quickly into a jhāna ?’ ‘Do I really want
to get quickly through the next stages?’ ‘Do I really want to get quickly through this
talk and get somewhere else?’ Be careful of discontent because it causes so much
restlessness, so much inner activity and thinking. I’ve noticed before that if I’m
listening to a beautiful talk it brings me so much happiness. I’m silent inside because
I don’t need to speak, because the talk is so beautiful. I’m just listening to it and
getting high, having a wonderful time. But if we don’t like the talk, or discontent

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comes into the mind, then we start thinking, fantasising, dreaming, or falling asleep.
Discontent has moved us away from what is happening. We all make use of escape
mechanisms that we’ve stupidly built up over lifetimes rather than face the present,
rather than face what’s happening now. We are always trying to run away; that’s
restlessness. That habit can very easily manifest in our meditation: instead of facing
up to what’s happening, and developing contentment in the moment, people run away.
They run away into thinking, philosophising, dreaming, and fantasising. That’s not
the way to meditate. That’s the second noble truth and it only leads to suffering. You
should know that by now.

Following the Instructions

Follow the third noble truth of letting go. When we say cāga or generosity, we are
giving up and abandoning; that means surrendering, forsaking, pa inissagga. What do
we have to forsake? We have to forsake our old views, ideas and conceits. This is
hard to do because we are so stubborn. One of the monks, sitting in with me during
the retreat interviews, asked me, “Why do you think it is that people come on retreat
and get all these good results, when sometimes monks at the monastery, can meditate
for years and not even experience a nimmitta ?” Some of the people on retreat lead
very busy lives. They don’t have much time to meditate, certainly not as much as the
monks and anagārikas. In the monastery you only have to do two hours work on five
days of the week, whereas these people work forty, fifty, or sixty hours a week, plus
all the other business they have to do. In those nine days of meditation it was
amazing to see how many of them achieved decent meditations and even had
nimmittas arise. So I said, “It’s because some of the monks are stubborn” and that’s
quite true. Sometimes instead of just listening and following the instructions, so often
we want to make our own instructions.

Instead of listening to what the Buddha said we want to interpret it to suit our own
ideas. That’s the stubbornness in Westerners. And I can understand it because you
have to be stubborn to become monks in the first place. You have to go against the
stream of the world to become a monk, so that stubbornness is sometimes inherent in
monks. Nevertheless, if one uses one’s intelligence and experience to overcome that
stubbornness – to just be happy with simple duties, to renounce and to let go – then

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you can get into deep meditation. But you have to renounce and let go stage by stage.

That’s why I teach meditation in stages. Let go of the past and the future, just be in
the present. By the simple process of being in the present moment, so much
restlessness, so much thinking, and so much of the craving stops. I’m not only saying
this about a novice meditation or a preliminary meditation – if I were to say things
like that people would think, “Oh, I’m much more advanced than that, I’m going to do
the deeper meditation not ‘present moment awareness’, that’s kids stuff.” I still do
present moment awareness meditation myself. I employ it at all stages of meditation.
It's wonderful how powerful it is.

On the retreat I also taught ekaggatā citta, this mind that has gone to one peak of
being; one peak in space, one point in space. Instead of looking at it that way, look at
this meditation of ekaggatā citta as being one peak or one point in time. Focus not in
space but in this moment in time, centred in the peak of this moment, right in the
middle of past and future. If you look at ekaggatā as one-pointedness in time you will
get much deeper in your meditation. You will really understand what this meditation
is all about rather than have some sort of spacious awareness or focusing your
attention on the ‘tip’ of something. This is where you can get into beautiful
contentment, just by being in the moment.

If you are fully aware in the moment, silence emerges from within the present
moment. You don’t need to go looking for something else, or move on to the next
stage of meditation; you move into the next stage of meditation or rather the next
stage of the meditation moves into you. But watch it: if you ‘let go’ you will
experience mutti, which means freeing, opening up. The Buddha said that as a teacher
he had a mutti fist, an open fist, he didn’t keep anything secret. One way to
understand what that Pāli word means is, instead of gripping the meditation object in
your fist, you just open it up. That’s mutti, that’s release, that’s openness. That’s the
reason when people open themselves up to the breath, to the silence or to the present
moment. They begin to get some understanding of the third noble truth.

You are not controlling, you are not manipulating, and you are not doing so much

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anymore. All that controlling, manipulating, doing, is part of the craving to be.
Craving is born of the illusion of ‘mine’, mine to control, and mine to order. Leave
all that alone – that only leads to suffering, to pain, to more discontent, more craving
and suffering. It’s a vicious cycle that we can get into. Discontent producing craving,
craving producing dukkha, suffering, and suffering and discontent produces more
craving. It’s so hard to let go! Once you find the ‘let go button’, you will find that in
the present moment silence just emerges from within.

The Buddha used the simile of cool water for the jhānas. Cool water doesn’t come
from the North, South, East or West of the lake; it comes from within a spring in the
middle of the lake, drenching the pool with this beautiful cool water. That simile
applies to all stages of the meditation. You just have to stay in the present moment
and this beautiful silence wells up from within that experience, within that moment,
within that mind; it comes from within and cools everything down, it makes
everything so silent.

Skilful meditators have the experience that they don’t make the mind silent, the
silence just arrives. You will find that you cannot make the mind silent; ‘you’ cannot
do that. I can’t meditate to gain silence; the ‘I’ has to go away. Silence comes in its
own time. When you are ready, when you’ve settled down enough, not doing
anything, then mutti means that the claws of the mind have opened up enough so that
the silence can come in. Then in that silence – if you wait long enough – the breath
will arise, especially if you have done meditation on the breath before.

Doing Less and Less

As a young monk, I always tried very hard to watch the breath. When I first came to
Perth, I wasn’t as skilled as I am now with breath meditation: I would watch the
breath for forty-five minutes with great difficulty; it was just too hard to keep the
attention on the breath. But then I developed the ‘letting go’ meditation, saying to
myself ‘just let go’. As soon as I did ‘letting go meditation’ the breath appeared very
easily and I could watch it for the next half-hour or so if I wanted to. It really struck
me that by trying to focus on the breath I had difficulty, but if I just let go and didn’t
care what came up in my mind, the breath was right there. The breath was easy to

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hold in the mind’s eye and I was still. It showed me that it’s often hard to watch the
breath if you try too much. When you are trying, that’s craving – craving to be or to
do something – and that leads to suffering. You can’t get success in meditation that
way. If only I’d realised and kept the four noble truths in mind when I was
meditating, I wouldn’t have wasted so much time. I would have just been peaceful.
When we’re letting go, contented, and silent, the breath arises within the silence, as if
the breath is just there. We don’t have to force the mind onto it, we don’t have to
control it, we don’t have to worry about where we are going to watch the breath – at
the nose, at the stomach – we don’t have to worry about what we should do with the
breath. The breath just comes by itself when it’s ready and we’re just sitting there
watching it. The whole process of meditation is to try and do less and less. Try and
do more of cāga pa inissagga mutti, just allowing the mind to open up.

The other simile that I have used before is a lotus opening its petals. Just imagine a
lotus opening up petal by petal. The outer petals are ‘present moment awareness’.
They reveal the next layer of petals, which reveals the next layer of petals, which is
called the ‘breath’, and that reveals the next petals, the ‘beautiful breath’. As you go
into a lotus the petals get softer and softer, more refined and fragrant. You are getting
closer to the heart of the lotus. That’s just the way it is – you don’t need to move onto
another lotus to get to the next stage of the meditation. If you throw away this lotus
that has already opened up so much, to try and get to the next stage, all you get is a
lotus which hasn’t opened up at all. If you want to move from the ‘breath’ to the
‘beautiful breath’ quickly, and if you throw away the breath, you just get a restless
mind and you can’t even stay in the present moment. Do this stage by stage making
the mind as cool and as still as possible, being careful that craving doesn’t come in.

If craving does come in don’t give it a place to stay, don’t give the chicken a place to
roost. The chicken is a great symbol for craving. Just leave it! When it hasn’t got a
place to settle down, any moment of craving will just disappear straight away and
nothing will stick to the mind. So you’re just watching the breath, making the mind
non-sticky, making it free and open. It’s just a matter of time before that breath turns
into a very beautiful and calm breath. It calms down by itself if you get out of the
way, because that’s the nature of things.

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Once the beautiful breath appears the whole process just happens in spite all of your
plans, intentions, manipulations, and control. Whether you think you can meditate or
you think you can’t, you think you want to or you don’t want to, whether you’re
afraid of jhānas or you’re not afraid of jhānas, whatever happens it’s just a process.
And as long as you don’t interfere with it, it takes you all the way into jhānas. When
the beautiful breath comes up it gives you a sense of pīti, the joy of meditation.

Many monks know that beautiful sutta, I forget its name now but I think it’s in the
A$guttara Nikāya, where it says that once pīti arises in the mind, the monk no longer
needs to make the determination, resolution, or choice, ‘May I now experience the
tranquillity of body and mind’. The Buddha said it’s a natural process, it has to
happen. It’s a natural consequence for one whose mind experiences joy that their
body and mind will experience tranquillity. It’s a natural experience once the
‘beautiful breath’ comes up, that the body is light and peaceful. The mind, instead of
running around all over the place and having this irritating restlessness, becomes
tranquil, still and peaceful. The Buddha said that for one whose mind is tranquil,
there is no need to make the resolution, ‘May happiness appear in my mind’.
Happiness naturally has to happen. It is an automatic process in one whose body and
mind is tranquil that happiness, sukha, arises!

So you just watch this happening, you just stay with the breath and it turns into a
beautiful breath all by itself. Sukha, happiness, arises in the mind; the lotus is
opening up. You don’t need to rush the process; rushing the process is craving, which
leads to suffering. We are opening up to the process, giving up, and letting go. The
Buddha continued by saying that for one whose mind experiences sukha, happiness,
there is no need to make a resolution, to determine, to manipulate, force or even
choose, ‘May my mind experience samādhi’. For one in whose mind there is this
happiness, their mind enters samādhi. It’s a natural course, it’s automatic. It’s a
process that just happens.

This is a very powerful and beautiful teaching of the Buddha. It is saying that if we
try, it doesn’t work, if we let go it works. If we crave it’s just more suffering and we
can’t get into these beautiful, blissful states. They are not stages of craving but stages

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of letting go, not stages of attachment but stages of renunciation. They’re actually
putting into practise the teachings of the Buddha, the four noble truths. It’s doing
what the Buddha said to do and experiencing the results, not as a theory but in our
own bare experience. Samādhi arises from the beautiful breath. The mind starts to
become still, sustaining its attention, because it is satisfied.

We notice that the mind needs some satisfaction. If it does not get that satisfaction in
the meditation it will seek satisfaction in the company of others. It will seek
satisfaction by looking for projects to do. It will seek satisfaction in writing books. It
will seek satisfaction, eventually, in disrobing. The mind seeks satisfaction if we
don’t give it happiness; in meditation the mind will always go somewhere else. So
the only way to keep the mind still is through the satisfaction of sukha, that stillness,
that sustained attention of the mind which is called samādhi. This is where sukha and
samādhi work together, folding around each other, supporting each other.

The mind begins to sustain its attention effortlessly, as a natural process, and the
happiness increases. It is like the happiness of being released from a very demanding
boss at work. It’s the happiness of being released from debt, released from sickness,
released from jail, having found one’s way through a desert. It is release from the five
hindrances. This is the sort of happiness that starts to come up in the meditation and
that happiness leads to more samādhi, more ‘staying with what’s going on’. When the
breath starts to become ‘beautiful’ there is no more in-breath, there is no more out-
breath, there is just breath. The meditation object is becoming more and more refined,
more and more simple. There is just the continuous feeling, or rather the one feeling
of this moment. You are so focused in this moment, so ekaggatā, one-pointed in time,
that there is just the feeling. You know it’s the breath beginning, the breath ending,
the middle, the end, in-or out-breath, but it all feels the same. It is just breath!

That’s what I mean by the ‘beautiful breath one-pointed in time’, just one experience
only. From that stage nimmittas well up from within. At times people have a
problem at this stage of the meditation: should we stay with the nimmittas or should
we return to the breath? Sometimes the best thing to do is just to remember the
metaphor of all these things rising from within, like the cool spring of water welling

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up from within the lake in which you are now. Allow that nimmitta to come right
within the centre of this breath happening now. If the nimmitta is not strong, you can
only just see it with the breath around it – the cool fresh water in the centre with the
warmer water of breath on the outside, like a ring. You are still aware of the beautiful
breath but with the nimmitta in the middle. This is what happens if the nimmitta is
strong enough: there is a flow of cool beautiful water, powerful enough to push the
breath right off the edges of the mind, and all you’ll have left is the nimmitta. If the
nimmitta is not strong it will sink back again and just the warm waters of the beautiful
breath will remain. You’re not ready yet. Whatever happens, it’s a natural process
and all you do is watch. The Buddha said it’s a natural process; you do not need to
make any resolutions, it happens all by itself. In fact it’s best if you step out of the
way as soon as possible. That’s why we call them ‘stages of letting go’. So allow
each stage to come up within the next, to come from within the stage you are in now.
It’s like a lotus opening up. The inner petals of the lotus are within the ones
appearing to you now.

Mutti is just opening up the stages of meditation, opening up the beautiful breath, not
abandoning it, not trying to get rid of it but opening it up. You open it up, you
abandon what’s caging it, what’s keeping it from going further – open it up and you
find the nimmitta starts to be very brilliant. What you do next is the same thing again.
From that nimmitta, from the very centre of the nimmitta, flows the cool beautiful
water of jhāna. You don’t need to move towards the nimmitta or do anything. Just
allow the nimmitta to be there at the very centre of the experience. In the same way
that the breath is pushed to the edges of your mind by the beautiful cool waters of the
nimmitta, so, using the same simile, the jhānas just push the nimmitta to the edges of
the mind. The nimmitta is gone and you’re left with the jhānas.

The Ending of Everything

If we want to go to the second jhāna it comes from the very centre of the first jhāna,
pushing out the first jhāna like the cooler, purer water coming from the spring pushing
the old pure water to the edges of the spring and then out from your perception –
that’s how samādhi happens. You find that this only happens when you take
relinquishment as the central theme (ārammaa) of your meditation. In the Indriya

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Sayutta there is something that impressed me as a young monk. It must have been
twenty three years ago, when I saw this. It says that the mind which has the
ārammaa, the mood, the inclination, of vossagga, easily attains samādhi, easily
attains ekaggatā citta, it reaches one peak. Vossagga and pa inissagga are pretty much
the same words, vossagga means abandoning, giving up and opening, freeing, doing
nothing. All of these Pāli words are part of the meaning of the third noble truth.

If that is the inclination of the mind, if that is what you are holding in the mind, if it’s
the theme of the mind, if that’s what the mind is tending towards, then you are tending
towards the third noble truth, and the mind opens up and the jhānas come all by
themselves. Never think ‘I can do jhānas’ or ‘I can’t do jhānas’ because both are
stupid statements. That’s why I get a bit peeved sometimes when people say they
can’t do jhānas, because if they only knew it, what they are saying is really technically
true. Get the ‘I’ out of the way and jhānas just happen. It’s not ‘I can do jhānas’:
jhānas just happen when you get out of the way, when you let go and you follow the
third noble truth.

For one who experiences samādhi there is no need to make resolutions, to choose, or
decide, ‘Oh, may I see things as they truly are’ (yatā bhūta-ñāadassana): it’s a
natural process, it happens as an automatic consequence, for one who achieves
samādhi. You are seeing truly all the insights that come up from the process of
meditation which produces jhāna. It is blocked by the second noble truth but what
produces it is the third noble truth. You are actually experiencing those two noble
truths for yourself; you’re seeing the heart of them, the meaning of them. You’re
seeing what the Buddha was pointing to when he talked about those truths: not just
ideas but actually seeing what craving is. You’re not just having ideas about letting
go of craving, not just ideas about what cāga pa inissagga mutti anālaya means, but
you’ve actually done it. You have cāga-ed, you’ve pa inissagga-ed, you’ve mutti-ed,
you’ve anālaya-ed, to anglicise those Pāli words. You’ve done it and that’s the result.
You’ve let go and this is the bliss of letting go. This is the reward. You are seeing
things as they truly are. That’s the reason I get a bit disappointed sometimes when
people say, “Oh, Ajahn Brahm just teaches jhāna, just teaches samatha, he doesn’t
teach insight practice.” That’s a ridiculous statement. Anyone who teaches jhāna

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teaches insight and anyone who teaches insight teaches jhāna. The two go together.
You’re seeing through experience, not just through thinking or theorising.

Experience is worth so much more than any thoughts, ideas, books, or words. The
theory and the words are only pointing to the experience that I’m talking about now.
You experience these states of deep meditation and then you know what the absence
of craving is, because you’ve seen craving disappear. In the worn old simile of the
tadpole in the lake, only when the tadpole grows into a frog and leaves the lake does it
know what water is. Only when you’ve left craving behind do you know what
craving is. These are states clearly said by the Buddha to be beyond craving,
blindfolding Māra, where Māra cannot go. The Buddha said these jhāna states are
pregnant with wisdom; wisdom follows naturally. That is why the Buddha said that
from samādhi you do not need to make resolutions. It happens naturally. That’s why
after you’ve emerged from a jhāna you don’t need to say, ‘What shall I do next?’
Shut up! Just allow the process to happen. Have faith and confidence in what the
Buddha taught. You just go along for the ride and see what happens next.

If it’s real insight, yathā-bhūta-ñāanadassana, seeing things as they truly are, as

opposed to seeing things as they seem to be, it only happens when the five hindrances
are abandoned, usually after a jhāna. When this happens, real insight gives rise to
nibbidā, the rejection of the world. Seeing things as they truly are one gets nibbidā, a
distaste for the five senses, negativity towards those things, aversion towards those
things. It is the mind disengaging from the five senses when craving has been seen,
and letting them go. Seeing things as they truly are! Sasāra is seen very clearly to
be dukkha and out of that seeing arises revulsion for the wheel of sasāra, pushing
one off the wheel. It is a beautiful Pāli word nibbidā. Basically if you don’t know
what nibbidā is you haven’t yet seen things as they truly are! This is part of the
process. You can’t say, ‘Oh, may I experience nibbidā. Oh, may I not experience
nibbidā – I don’t want to leave sasāra, I want to stay for a long time; life is good,
life is fine, and it’s nice being in the monastery’. Nibbidā happens whether you like it
or not. It’s not part of a self. It’s not part of what you want or what you don’t want.
Those things have to fade away and disappear. If you see things as they truly are
that’s the reason you can’t make any Bodhisatta vows. Nibbidā just happens, it

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pushes you out of sasāra whether you like it or not. ‘Seeing things as they truly are’
is the force that ends rebirth. You don’t need to make any resolutions; it’s a natural,
automatic process.

Seeing that the world has nothing to hold you, gives rise to virāga, the fading away of
interest in the world of craving, the letting go of sasāra and the letting go of the five
khandhas; including the letting go of consciousness. It’s not me letting go of sasāra,
it’s not me detaching myself from the world, it’s me fading away. It’s consciousness
fading away, it’s all sa$khāras, all saññās, all vedanās, all bodies fading away, and
that leads to the disappearance, nirodha, cessation. If someone is fading away they
don’t need to make a resolution, ‘May I fade away? May I cease? May
consciousness cease?’ You can’t make that determination, ‘May I cease?’ If you did,
that’s called vibhava tahā. That’s the annihilationist craving, the craving for non-
existence; you can’t do it that way. Trying to kill oneself, that is annihilate oneself, is
impossible, it takes a ‘me’ to kill me. It’s like trying to eat your head; you can’t eat
your own head, it’s impossible. This is why interest fades away and leads to nirodha.
This cessation is the ending of everything.

Sometimes people get afraid. It is bleak, thinking of Nibbāna as cessation, ending!

Whether we like it or not, that’s just what happens. We don’t have any say in it. So
there are no preferences, bleak or not bleak; it’s just a word to describe these things,
this is just nature. In fact it is only when people have a sense of ‘self’ that they think
it’s bleak. You know that beautiful saying in the suttas, ‘the Ariyas, who have seen
this, say it is sukha, say it is beautiful and happy, but the puthujjanas, the ones who
haven’t see this, say it is dukkha, suffering’. What the Ariyas say is ultimate bliss, the
puthujjanas say is bleak. That’s the difference between an Ariya and a puthujjana.

Nirodha leads to Nibbāna, cessation, the ending of everything, and it’s a natural
process. So this whole path of Buddhism is all about non-self. The more you can let
go and allow the process to happen and the less you rely upon ‘self’ – that
stubbornness of conceit and ego – the more peaceful, happy, and beautiful this path
becomes, and the faster you go to liberation. The Buddha said there are four types of
practice, the ‘fast and the happy’, and the ‘fast and the difficult’ full of suffering; the

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‘slow and the happy’, and the ‘slow and the difficult’ full of suffering. Whether it’s
fast or slow depends on the power of one’s indriyas. If you’ve got lots of faith and
confidence, which is saddhā, you will have lots of energy and you will have lots of
mindfulness; samādhi will come and wisdom will come. If you’ve got lots of saddhā
it’s a very fast path but if your cravings, your defilements, especially your illusions of
a self, are very strong there will be a lot of suffering. The stronger your perception of
self and ego – the ‘me’ – the harder this path becomes and the more pain it engenders.
So be selfless and let go of this sense of me and mine. Find out that it is only a
bubble, it’s an illusion that we’ve allowed to grow in our consciousness. Nothing is
stable there! You don’t exist – face up to it! It’s a great relief; so you’ve nothing to
worry about then. In this way the path becomes happy and fast. Fast into jhānas, fast
into insight, fast into Enlightenment! It gives you a lot of happiness and bliss to
follow that path, but it also gives you all the insights that you read about in the suttas.
You are following in the footsteps of the Buddha. The jhānas are the footsteps of the
Buddha.

All these things are to be experienced for yourself. If you get released you find that
Enlightenment is possible even in these days, as long as you follow the example of the
Buddha. It’s in monasteries like this that the Buddha lived; it is practices like this that
the Buddha practised. You can check in the suttas, and you will find that this is the
way. So don’t mess around, and don’t waste time.

May you all achieve Enlightenment tonight!

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