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Talk: 2013-11_27 Dharma Talk.json Start_time: 00:49:30 Display_question: I would like to share how much this practice has supported me to become more of a master of my mind. Keyword_search: mind, brilliant, healing, meditation, unskillfully, senses, liberate, Buddha, Palo Alto, Stanford University, inner understanding, knowledge, technology, compassion, wisdom, liberation through non clinging, grasping, pushing away, Steven Spielberg effect, grasping, pushing away, freedom, Buddhist, deluded, ignorance, religion Question_content: Questioner: One of the things that sticks out for me, as you said, you talked about words. And getting caught up in words and interpretation of words and how much healing can take place, in just being still, and watching the mind. And how I'll use the word, brilliant, the mind can be. When I say how brilliant the mind can be, what I mean is, how brilliant the mind can be, and how we live better, we laugh more, we love more, we learn more, we give more. And we talked about our senses being able to have eyes, being able to hear, and being able to just experience life, the way we can. And how abusive I've been with my senses, how I see things. And the organ that I most abuse is, my mind. Processing it, unskillfully, and not becoming master of it. And meditation for me is, being able to become master of my mind, instead of allowing what's in my mind, to master me. Food, and the thinking, and causing myself just to be dis-ease with me, and dis-ease with the world, and just in the moment, miserable, and suffering. Meditation has been a way for me to liberate myself, even if it's for a second, or a minute, or an hour, and still on the path. Larry: Yeah. No, I would say the same thing. I think the Buddha would say the same thing. Because perhaps there's no one, or very few human beings, who don't start out not knowing about this. What's being taught here is not new. It's not like I originated it, or some very smart people went to a think tank in Palo Alto, at Stanford University, and they came up with this teaching. So, there have been cultures that valued inner understanding more than… I'm not against material. That materialistic spiritual dichotomy is useless. It caused a lot of trouble. But let's say they've been... had a high priority for, inner understanding. We have a much higher priority for, knowledge, conceptual understanding, and so forth. That's produced incredible things. Look at the technology we produce. But more, and more, as the technology becomes brilliant, wisdom has not grown in the same way, and compassion hasn't. And so you have an enormous gap between the power that technology, and science has released, and the level of wisdom, and compassion is, puny. And that's a dangerous situation, that the whole planet finds itself in right now. Break_line: So we start with ourselves, as you're doing. And that's great. Sometimes, if I can elaborate on what you said, the practice is called, a practice of liberation, through non clinging. And so most people think, well, the practice of liberation, like somewhere down the pike, after 30 years of hard practice, there'll be like a Steven Spielberg special effect explosion, and then you'll be liberated. There are dramatic openings that come. You can't make them come. But what's being said is, in a given moment, when you're neither grasping, nor pushing away, and just sensitive, aware without judging it, to what's happening, and then acting from that place, as you pointed out beautifully, that's a moment of freedom. You can feel the difference. It feels different. Maybe it's 3 seconds, maybe it's ten minutes. So that starts to add up. Break_line: Now, it's not our fault. Our parents, in the Buddhist language, were deluded. They did their best, and they produced, more deluded people. And their parents produced them. Even if they loved them, more than anything in the world. And so, this level of ignorance is, a human thing, and it's not exclusively Buddhism. In other words, all authentic religion. I would say not organized religion. The essence is, attempting to go deeper, than where most of us settle in, expecting the accumulation of certain things, to make life great. If we get more of this, more of that, more, more, if it worked, we wouldn't be here. Some of us have succeeded at that. Thank you. End_time: 00:54:34
