Here’s an 63-min recorded video Dhamma Talk (154MB .mp4).

Topics:

  • Tāyana, Tayana, Renunciation, Nekkhamma, Fanaticism, teacher-student relationship, balance, avoiding extremes, zealousness, monastic culture, seriousness towards one’s practice, not taking fads seriously, bandwagons, coming out of being gullible, impermanence, change, anicca, back-and-forth dialog, spiritual conversations with spiritual peers, not a sponge who absorbs, but teaches nothing, dominance hierarchy, prestige hierarchy, edification, enriching, dialogue


Sutta References:

  • SN 2.8 - With Tāyana. Preferable English translation of the verse section shown below found here:

    Having striven, brahman, cut the stream. Expel sensual passions. Without abandoning sensual passions a sage encounters no oneness of mind.

    If something’s to be done, then work at it firmly, for a slack going-forth kicks up all the more dust. It’s better to leave a misdeed undone. A misdeed burns you afterward. Better that a good deed be done that, when you’ve done it, you don’t regret.

    Just as sharp-bladed grass, if wrongly held, wounds the very hand that holds it — the contemplative life, if wrongly grasped, drags you down to hell. Any slack act, or defiled observance, or fraudulent life of chastity bears no great fruit.

Other References:

  • Nekkhamma - Renunciation

  • From pg. 8 of Dominance and Prestige: Dual Strategies for Navigating Social Hierarchies, by Jon K Maner and Charleen R Case:

    “A key characteristic of dominance is that, when one pursues a dominance strategy, deference is not freely conferred. High social rank is not willingly offered by other individuals; social rank is seized. Individuals with high social rank receive deference from other group members not because that deference is freely offered, but rather because it was demanded. When people rule by dominance, they tend to do so via fear, not respect (Cheng, Tracy, & Henrich, 2015). Dominance can be conceptualized as being primarily a property of the actor, in the sense that social rank is regulated by active efforts on the part of the person who seeks it.”

  • Don Juan allegedly said (according to Carlos Castaneda, but there is doubt from Antropologists):

    “You (a warrior) are a serious person, but your seriousness is attached to what you do, not to what goes on outside you”

    “The secret is not in what you do to yourself, but rather in what you don’t do”

  • Winston Churchill:

    “A fanatic is one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject”

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