Buddhist Discussion Centre (Upwey)
Ltd.
Meditation on Impermanence
John D. Hughes
Recorded
Teachings
Buddhist Discussion Centre
(Upwey) Ltd.
33 Brooking St
Upwey, Victoria
Australia
3158
A.C.N. 005 701 806
A.B.N. 42 611 496
488
Phone: (03) 9754
3334
Fax: (03) 9754 3334
email: wbu@bdcu.org.au
Disclaimer
Teacher: John D. Hughes
Date of recording: 27/6/88
Transcribed by Lainie Smallwood
Checked by Leanne
Eames & Frank Carter
CD Reference
27_06_88T7S2i
File Name: 27_06_88T7S2i_JDHtranscribe.rtf
5 Day Meditation Course
Recording Title: "Meditation on Impermanence"
Jocelyn, this is called Samsara, keynote word SAMSARA - the world. Now there is two worlds, your personal self habit, which arises as the result of your wholesome and unwholesome kammas, which is intentional actions in past lives, and that's why our lives are different. Each of you are different. Now, the difference is so startling when you understand, all this life you have never had the same combinations and permutations, ever.
So every split second of your life you've been in a, an unstable flux which is your own samsara. If you ever think, if your ego mind ever over talks and says "I've felt like this before" it is wrong! You have never, if you only knew at the fine level, you have never experienced this moment and that's one of the beautiful things about being bright, because you can never be born, because the combinations and permutations ... so I get into an event, the event changes, I don't have a mind that says, "Here I go again, once around the gas works, twice around the gas works".
Everything is in absolute startling fresh, so the end of boredom comes when you understand this. If you have, as you all have had, the ego saying to you, "Oh, I've been there, I've done that, oh boring, boring, boring", that is an example of the ego unreal because in fact, it is impossible for you to recreate the combinations of this. There are 108 types of feeling, ranging from pleasant to unpleasant, this is just one classification.
In another classification there's 108,000. There are 121 types of consciousness, there is an infinite - or not for you though - there is a vast number of sanna perceptions, future imaginings, remember sanna is future imaginings and past memory. And the sankharas you've churned through this life you couldn't even measure. If you take ... your body of course is in flux, never the same for even a second, the body you walked in with here tonight is different to the body you've got now.
Now, you can never ever in this life have the same packet of five groups. Impossible, cannot do. You can't make a single thing on your body permanent, or your feelings, or your consciousness, or your sannas or your sankharas. You can't make anything permanent. Even your sanna, your memory, normally when you remember what happened half an hour ago, if you can remember that far back, you saw it with partially ego cloud, you misunderstood it, and that's why when you play the tape through a second time you seem to pick up something different from it. If you play it through a third time, it would be different. It's you are changing, you've forgotten one thing, you are changing. You are impermanent, dukkha and anatta. You're in a ... it's not just the outside world that's changing, you're changing, you're changing.
But you change in a manner, driven by the results of your wholesome and unwholesome kamma which was made in ignorance. And you change in ways you don't want to change in. Minnie doesn't want to be minus a sense of humour. Minnie was feeling despair earlier. She didn't want it but she created the kamma in the past to bring this about.
Now, if you plan, and you persist, and you exercise
constraint, you'll never generate kammic packets that you don't want. Now
your plan is like this. It's for this life, it's for next life, it's for
the one after, the one after that and the one after that. For as many
lives as you have to come, you lay down the plans in
this life.
Therefore, your plans have always got to include one other element that you've never thought about. They must be growth facilitating for you. It's quite easy to draw up a valid plan and the result is you become a narrow-minded parochial if you like. But if you are born in a different country next life, the very style that you developed becomes a cultural mismatch. You're already showing traces of cultural mismatch from your past lives because you are in 1988 in a post-industrial society in Australia.
One of the things that the surveys show, and they've done many of these, is that Australians, as a group of people, and we're talking about a hundred different nationalities, remember three million of them weren't born in Australia, feel alien in their own country, which is Australia.
Now you'd say, "Oh well, if someone was born in Germany they came to live in Australia ten, 15 years, I can imagine they'd be alien". But Australian's themselves, native-born Australians, are feeling their own culture is alien. They feel like a stranger to the culture of Australia. It's merely that you've vagued off for years. You only sampled a small amount of culture and that changed.
(At this point, John instructed a student to play some samples of different radio station for students to hear.)
So you see there's many, many cultural artefacts available and obviously what you do, you have to make choices between what you want to do. Now in that case, you didn't have a choice because the, the things were just switched from one tune to another, one message to another. Now that programming, every single thing you heard there, if you understood it, there was a response on your mind and you made kamma, either, "I want to hear more of that", "I want to hear less of that", "I never want to hear that again", or any sort of signal that came up on your mind. We'll switch off the tape so we can just get some comments. Switch it off Frank.
(Tape is switched off, and then on again.)
Difficult to, well if it's a powerful, alluring affect on your mind because of powerful strong kammic connections in the past, you'll find it very difficult to resist hanging on and being unable to change from one station to another. So if you are planning and something came on to the radio, you might say, "Gee I like that" and you might just sit there listening to it. And you would find it very difficult to turn it off if it had strong kammic links with you. Whereas on the other hand if it was a part of your culture you wanted to lose, you'd find it easy to turn off.
So just notice that when you start to alter your behaviour, or alter your, or build abilities, you can't rely on samsara not coming along to interrupt you, because samsara came along to interrupt you by bringing you here. The fact you're here was an interruption of your pre-planned vice or stupidity or dumbness. Samsara brought you here, samsara can sweep you away from here.
But my advice is, alter your abilities, get your ability to stay here, because it's ... or get here regularly or something. Just meditate through that, see where that puts you.