Dhamma Talk Video 110: Retaining our Humanity, nay, Heavenliness

Here’s a 46-min recorded video Dhamma Talk (115MB .mp4).

Topics:

• arahants, and their ability to master and control the courses of their minds; There sure seems to be a lot of mental illness and overdosing on drugs in Canada and the USA, despite some very recent positive statistics about Quality of Life, Happiness Index, and overall Healthiness of places to live; Framing, and being careful to keep one’s spiritual priorities straight

Dhamma References:

• AN 4.35 - “Vassakāra.” An explanation of how the Buddha’s mind has attained to mastery with having attained Nibbana:

  “I think what I want to think and do not think what I do not want to think; I intend what I want to intend and do not intend what I do not want to intend; thus I have attained to mental mastery over the ways of thought.”

• MN 20 - “The Removal of Distracting Thoughts.” A similar explanation of an arahant’s mind, and the mastery it wields:

  “This bhikkhu is then called a master of the courses of thought. He will think whatever thought he wishes to think and he will not think any thought that he does not wish to think. He has severed craving, flung off the fetters, and with the complete penetration of conceit he has made an end of suffering.”

Other References:

• I posted some group photos and an explanation of the 2023 “Silent Mentor” Asubha meditation event in Kuala Lumpur.

• “The Teen Mental Illness Epidemic is International, Part 1: The Anglosphere”

• “Americans’ IQ scores are lower in some areas, higher in one”

• “American IQ Scores Have Rapidly Dropped, Proving the ‘Reverse Flynn Effect’”

• “Companies like Uber and Amazon use AI to pay people different wages for the same work, a new study finds”

• AI suggested 40,000 new possible chemical weapons in just six hours

• I went hiking up Taiping’s big hill in town, called “Bukit Larut”, (AKA “Maxwell hill”). It took about 7 hours to go up and down, not incl breaks, then walk back 45 min to where I was staying.

  The cool air was very refreshing once at about 3000ft elevation - at “the Bungalows”, the most scenic lookout spot with nice landscaping, picnic tables, and flowers.

  My photos, full-size can be seen here.

  When I finally returned back to where I was staying, I was completely wiped out. It was an “8-Plaster day”:

  

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License:

• My work (video): Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Digital Signing and Checksum (of the .mp4 video file above):

• GnuPG signature: Ajahn_Subharo_Dhamma_Talk_Stream_110.mp4.sig; search for GnuPG pubkey 0x28e15963710c0624 here.
• SHA256sum: 19439e1d2975da41e211275cdcfad2a7cc940797a3dc6879c0295bae529be39d