Letting Go of Control
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 3 ก.พ. 2019
- How much control do we really have? We'll look at some aspects of control that are real and useful, then we'll turn to some deeper aspects of control that the Buddha argued we need to overcome and let go of in order to live better lives.
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#dougsdharma #dougsseculardharma #buddhism #secularbuddhism
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Please visit the Secular Buddhist Association webpage!
secularbuddhism.org/
You speak in an academic way. For some reason i find this easier to understand maybe because i am used to university education. Thanks for this.
😄Well, I guess it's my PhD speaking ... glad you found the approach helpful!
Buddhists make a big deal out of impermanence and it’s connection to not-self, probably because of the concept of atman in the culture, but as a westerner unwilled or undirected thought really drives it home. Descartes said “I think therefore I am”, but what should we make of thought that comes out of nowhere during meditation? I remember thinking “where did that come from?” When it happened to me the first time.
Yes! Unwilled thought is a big thing, and we don't tend to be aware of it until we start meditating.
Fantastic talk! It really gets to the heart of it, and in a pragmatic way. An expression I like in this regard is, "Don't take yourself too personally."
Excellent expression photoistyx. Agreed! 🙂
@@DougsDharma graveyards are full of people that took themselves too seriously. Big heads and ego can get
You in trouble. It happened to my brother in laws. One was shot Dead, the other arrested for brandishing a 9mm at a hamburger joint.
I really enjoy this channel because this person feels like the less judgemental person in the world. Thank you 🤍
🙏😊
I do make many judgments but practice not to take any but a few of them too seriously. It is a practice!
I benefit greatly from going regularly temple and learning directly from the monks. That said, I also enjoy the spin you put on the teachings… very palatable for me, the lay practitioner 🙏
Glad to hear it, Nelson. Yes, I enjoy learning from monastics as well.
Wonderful!!!! Thanks a lot!
My pleasure, Fernanda! 🙏
Thanks!
🙏🙏
Didn’t think my browsing would land me at the Pali Cannon. Like hearing a great grad school lecture.
Glad to hear it Michael! Welcome.
What makes me here is kinda funny... I was watching, "was there a real jesus?"
Out of curiosity after watching the prompted documentary on my TH-cam, I search to see whether anyone makes a documentary on was there a real Buddha(?) I am a Buddhist and just want to see is there anyone got their say(badl) on Buddhism. So I got here and become a subscriber. Never got to see doubts, but yet got bonus watching Doug's videos.
Appreciate 🙏🙏🙏
Everything happens for a reason. Maybe Buddha guide me here becos I am kinda lost in my life.
You prolly dont give a shit but does any of you know a way to log back into an Instagram account?
I somehow forgot my login password. I would appreciate any tips you can give me
Thank you.
You're welcome, Rosemary!
What I take from this is an example of how the Buddha taught to deal with the issues of the world.
Yes I think that's right Steve, thanks!
Thank you Doug for a great explanation of a complex subject. As always enjoy your videos very much. Thanks again
You're very welcome Shantha. Thanks for the kind message! 🙏
@@DougsDharma You're gifted my brother in speaking well and keeping
It light and understandable. Namasta
This was excellent!
Glad to hear!
Thank you Doug:)
You're very welcome Sammy!
Would love if you had a podcast! Really enjoy listening to you!
Thanks Jillian, very kind of you to say!
It may be sad but it is also mostly true, that being the following: Social Constructs lead to Social Conditioning, Social Conditioning leads to Social Control in one way or another. Again well spoken Doug
Arrgh, this is so HARD to do. And yet, it is very worthwhile when we're able to be realistic about control. An excellent talk, thank you.
Yes indeed it's hard! Practice is simple but it isn't easy. So, you just keep on with it. 🙂
This subject has been at the fore in my practice recently, and I found this talk approachable, educational, and practical. Gave me new perspective on some questions that had been vexing me. Thanks!
My pleasure, Chris. Thanks for watching. 🙏
Thanks a lot my great teacher. I really appreciate you share your knowledge. Evangelina Cortes.
You know how Zazen allowed me to tame racing thoughts and live better with ADHD?
By giving them permission to race! Stop trying to lock onto one and make sense of it. Let them fly here and there until I've got the fidgets out of my system. Then suddenly, I can think in one clear, unified stream and not ten thousand disparate thoughts. That's all my racing thoughts are: they're just the mind fidgeting. A common thing in the inattentive subtype. So trying to stop them by force or thought stopping or focusing on just one thing or emptying the mind? I never made any progress. But a midnfulness practice taught me that fighting these thoughts was the wrong way. As my teacher said, sit by the overpass and watch the cars go by, don't walk over to the road and try to catch one. I've found a skillful teacher who knew how to explain it to me and fill in the gaps in my understanding.
Wonderful! Yes that's a great teaching.
A clear explanation, thank you!
Glad it was helpful! 🙏
one of the best talks yet. thank you for sharing this in a practical and approachable way.
Glad it was helpful! 🙏
สาธุ!...อนุโมทามิ🙏🙏🙏
🙏😊
There was a stretch of time in 2017 when I was practicing daily for almost 1.5 hours. The states of mind I accessed were beautiful. However, this ability to meditate and access these mental stares daily paradoxically reinforced the sense of self within and got me anxious when the mind would not cooperate. It was humbling experience to see lack of control in a seemingly well trained mind.
Yes, I found something similar when I was meditating for longer periods. It's possible to get attached to one's own achievements, or even supposed achievements.
It's similar to a well trained dog. She's so well tempered, smart and trained in a proper way, but actually she's still a separate being with its own needs and aspirations, how strange it is, that our own mind fits so close in that description: some have an untrained mind, some cannot comfort it when it's not okay, others forget that it should have some freedom on its own..
Meditations are the distractions of Mara..do not take pleasure in any stage of Mediation..do not compromise...
Go all the way towards Extinguisment..
Wow, another great explanation. This is a totally new angle on "non-self" for me. Thanks again!
You're very welcome Andrés, glad you found it useful!
Great talk! I am troubled this week by a young child that went to school and shot his teacher. How do we square this with the notion of control in the Buddhist sense? On the one hand, the child's mind may not have the ability to understand completely the ramifications of taking another person's life, yet on the other hand, it is hard to imagine that even at that even at age there is no understanding that shooting another person is a bad thing. What's more, isn't a teacher's authority a proxy for a young person's control as they mature?
In my mind, it's hard to imagine that someone so young is in a situation where the forces to commit the act outweigh what one would expect to be "right action," in the sense of hurting someone in that way. What I have come to is that maybe I cling to the notion that people behaving to my assumptions. There are things that I don't know that somehow caused this child to behave this way. But this brings on sadness that we live in a society that cannot "control" our children to this basic level and that maybe this is something I need to work on. Thoughts?
Yes, I'd say that in all cultures we know instinctively that children have an undeveloped sense of self-control or understanding. The problem as I see it is about the availability of guns. A child should never have the possibility of carrying a gun around, and certainly not without close adult supervision.
Buddhism is the 2nd oldest religion in India after Jainism
Samrat Ashoka had constructed around 84000 Buddhist monasteries in India along with Pakistan Afghanistan Bhutan Nepal Cambodia Myanmar Sri Lanka
Namo Budhhay 🙏🏻
Appriciate your sharing and thank you very much! It puts the ‘pop ups’ in another way of looking at them, for me. I have a question, how do feelings of guilt relate to controle? And how to practice, letting go of guilty feelings? Thanks🙏🌸
You're very welcome esther! I haven't talked much about guilt, it's not an emotion that really exists in early Buddhism. What does exist is remorse, which is the appropriate attitude to have for something we've done badly. Guilt involves a grasping onto the bad deed, an identifying with it, which is unskillful. So one practice would be to work with non-self and consider how who we are changes from moment to moment. But this is only one practice. Hope that's helpful. 🙂
Doug's Secular Dharma Thanks! Truely helpfull. 🙏Sort of, gives room to more being free.....Maybe. Beautiful the possibilities of internet.....me here in The Netherlands learn from your teachings. The English word guilt feels somewhat , like, more detached, as the Dutch word (schuld), more free from the connotation, inherent in our culture. Made me right now think of a ‘guilty pleasure’ 🤗 wish you well being 👌🍀
You as well esther! 🙏
I personally prefer to think in terms of influence rather than control.
Yes, "influence" is a milder term that allows more room for life to get in the way.
How cool would it be to be In Control of giving up control
That would be cool. We can sort of inch our way there by being slightly in control of small things for a long enough time that we get better at it.
🙏😔
🙏😊
I would like to see a video on heedfulness. I feel like it is too often neglected in Western Sutric practice.
How do you view a practice around heedfulness? I ask because typical synonyms of "heedfulness" include "mindfulness", "attentiveness", and "prudence", which are central to early Buddhist practice.
@@DougsDharma I associate heedfulness with a level of spiritual urgency. The kind you get from reflecting on things like the inevitability of aging, sickness, and death and the level of unavoidable suffering that comes from being trapped inside Samsara.
Yes. I did a video for example about the five daily reflections, which serves the same purpose: th-cam.com/video/MEu4kzfUSDk/w-d-xo.html . The Buddha was famous for saying that we should practice as though our hair was on fire ... something that makes most sense from within a monastic context, but there you are. Many householders have enough on their plates and are working with stress and over-efforting generally so appreciate a more Zen approach to the dharma, which exists as well. At the end of the day it's a balance that each of us has to figure out for ourselves. 🙂
If you are interested you should read The Buddha and His Dhamma written by Barrister Dr BR Ambedkar
Because there are some books available with the wrong information
Or you can follow Mr RajRatnya Ambedkar on TH-cam
Namo Budhhay🙏🏻
Buddhism is the 2nd oldest religion in India after Jainism
Samrat Ashoka had constructed around 84000 Buddhist monasteries in India along with Pakistan Afghanistan Bhutan Nepal Cambodia Myanmar Sri Lanka
Namo Budhhay 🙏🏻
Where is the boundary/difference between not taking things(which) personaly and supressing emotion i.e if somethig bad is happening, if somebody is insulting us?
Well it's something you have to feel, if you're aware of what's going on inside you. If you have emotion but push it down, because you don't want to deal with it, then that's suppressing it. If on the other hand you simply don't have any emotional reaction to someone insulting you, then there's nothing to worry about. Many of us I think may be somewhere in between, but tending towards the former: we get emotional but don't want to deal with it.
Hey doug, any dhamma teachers who you would recommend to study the works of?
Well personally I'd start with people like Bhikkhu Anālayo or Bhikkhu Bodhi, although they are traditional believers and I'm secular. They are both however very knowledgeable about the early material as well as being kind and good people. There are many, many others as well such as Andy Olendzki or Bodhipaksa.
You meditate to let go
What is that which has partial control?
I'm not sure I understand the question Leśny. Can you elaborate a bit?
@@DougsDharma you speak about having partial control (or not having perfect control), which implies some degree of freedom and agency, which can be seen as the self. In other words, self is that which has partial control. If not, what is the basis of differentiating between uncontroled change and controlled change?
If there is something that can consciously change the causal chain, isn't that a good definition of an agent?
Ah yes Leśny. This is what we might term the "conventional" self. Indeed, the Buddha says we should take refuge in ourselves. That's what he means: we should take refuge in our own ability to put skillful effort into our practice.
But doesn't this contradict anatta? If we had full control (or no control), self wouldn't be visible. Having partial control is the only configuration that implies an actor, makes it "visible".
As I understand it, there is just an illusion of self having a partial control, where in fact everything is fully causal, and there is no control at all, hence anatta. As you said, self is just a convention, delineated on a causal flux. Understood this way, there is no letting go of control, as it was never there, just letting go of the idea of control.
The idea that we really have no control is one that the Buddha specifically rejected; it's the view of Makkhali Gosāla of the Ājīvikas. You can see my video on the Buddha's competitors here: th-cam.com/video/aoxagmtSHI0/w-d-xo.html In general anatta doesn't mean there is "no self"; it means that there is nothing permanent that makes up our selves. We are always changing. I also have a video on non-self if you are interested in a deeper look there: th-cam.com/video/gSZjKKuvHEQ/w-d-xo.html
Doug, would you say that (to some extent) Buddhist teachings seem to coincide with philosophical materialism? The 5 aggregates and the notion of non-self point me in this direction.
Thanks for the question Chris. I’d say early Buddhism corresponds to a kind of analytical deconstruction of the self. But it isn’t materialist: four of the five aggregates are mental. Also the Buddha specifically argued against the materialism of one of his competitors: th-cam.com/video/aoxagmtSHI0/w-d-xo.html
Control is just an idea that useful for the ego
In India some people claim Buddhism is originated from Hindusim... No No No
In ancient times there were only 2 religions that is Jainism and Buddhism
Sanskrit is originated from Bhagwan Buddha's Paali language
Bhagwan Buddha has taught us Vipassana.. Meditation
Nalanda university is the 1st university of India
Only Vedas are older than Buddhism
And in Vedas you won't find the word Hindu
You can watch Mr RajRatnya Ambedkar on TH-cam
He is uploading videos of The Buddha and his Dhamma..in English
I learned a couple of things. You really didn’t satisfactorily get to the heart of the matter in 26 minutes which I consider wasted. And as a secular humanist, I have no interest in spending time on Buddha’s specifics other than as an academic matter.
Sounds like it's not the approach for you then, William. Glad you learned something from it though!
Doug's Dharma Thanks. My apologies for being rude. I get the secular Jew tradition because of the recency of the holocaust. And I’ve been vaguely aware of secular Buddhism for a long time but just not that interested. I was looking for concise stripped-down help.
I finally found an article in psychology today that addressed my concerns in two very concise and helpful pages. And I found a couple Jon Kabbat-Zinn videos on mindfulness attitudes of “Letting Go” and “Acceptance” each around 4 minutes also very helpful. They all got right to the point quickly in ways I could understand and appreciate. Interestingly, one of those attitudes is patience which I obviously don’t have. I know Jon’s MBSR techniques are partly based on some ancient traditions but thankfully he didn’t go into the details and rarely does because they’re just not necessary to understand the techniques of mindfulness to effectively use them in the modern world.
I trained in the Maharishi’s TM which is also thoroughly secular in its’ technique and approach (more than less) but different in kind from mindfulness. TM training does sneak in some Hindu elements into the training rituals though. But I find even that hard to maintain a consciousness discipline as a practice although I try.