Bringing Wisdom to Life. Anita Carter

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      So many persons in our modern cultures who are not socially isolated, are well educated, and have affluent lifestyles frequently experience many forms of unhappiness. These include worry, stress, anxiety, insecurity, sadness, anger, frustration and depression.

      Australia, for example, has one of the world's highest rates of suicide, particularly among our youth, yet our biggest cities are regarded as being among the top ten cities in the world to reside in. Our material standards of living are among the world’s best. Yet our mental culture appears, by this criterion, to be nothing special.

      Buddhism provides the mental technology, the mind tools and methods we need to see our own mind with increasing clarity and understanding. This is the Buddhist approach to developing and maintaining a healthy mind and a good life.

      Whilst we may read about Buddhism, it is not enough for us to have an intellectual understanding or even respectful appreciation of what the Buddha found out. Just as looking at food on the table cannot cure us of hunger, merely appreciating Buddhist Teachings will not make us happy.

      As such Buddhism is sometimes referred to as a do-it-yourself religion because we need to apply the Buddha’s advice in our own life to experience any significant benefit.

      So where do we start?

      As we read or hear about Buddhism we need an active intention to find something worthwhile to apply in our life. And then we do apply it. We want to apply the instructions in the same way as if we have visited the doctor and then we go straight to the chemist so we can take the medicine quickly.

      What usually happens is we forget ninety percent or more of what we read within a few days. If we forget ninety percent in a few days why bother? Applying ten percent of what was heard will not work. It's an approach which is likely to result in only a very weak improvement. Then we may tell others "Oh, I tried that but it doesn’t work".

      Active listening and reading is the opposite of passive listening and reading. Passive reading can be considered as reading to "know" or find out about Buddhism through collecting information about Buddhism without any implementing any action steps, that is; without changing anything we do. That’s how we have often learnt things in our past. However, we won’t understand much about ourselves from listening to the Teachings of the Buddha (Buddha Dhamma) that way. What we hear must be translated into action.

      At the time we discover something new our mind has the best understanding of why we need to change our habit and adopt the new behaviour. The next day our sense of urgency to change becomes weaker, the day after less again. We are creatures of habit; our habit energy is often difficult to overcome. Our best opportunity to make a change, the best conditions to make a change is generally as soon as we understand clearly the need to change.

      If we keep doing what we've always done, we'll get the same results.

       Approaching the Buddha Dhamma

      The Dalai Lama has said many times that what all beings want fundamentally is to be well and happy. We did a survey of the students at a course we conducted on Buddhism to find out what they hoped to get out of the course. Most of their answers were to do with developing inner peace and happiness.

      Buddhism says you can certainly achieve long-lasting happiness. Ajarn Brahm, a famous Buddhist Monk who lives in Perth Western Australia, for example, says he has found deeper and deeper levels of happiness through practicing Buddhism. In his words he says he experiences "happiness stacked on happiness stacked on happiness".

      From the Buddhist perspective the key to achieving happiness is to understand the real causes of happiness. According to Buddhism it is not a mystery at all. The process of how and why our mind experiences happiness and suffering is what the Buddha found out.

      In Buddhism it is taught that there are two levels of reality. The first level is named conventional reality. This is the part every one of us already has understanding about.

      We operate successfully in the world by understanding conventional reality and building the skills and attitudes from childhood to relate to our life that way. However, Buddhist teachings sometimes refer to conventional reality as a deceptive reality because it leads us to believe that it is the only reality that exists.

      Buddhism says there is another level of reality called absolute or ultimate reality. This is the fundamental reality which is not so much to do with what appears to us to be happening from moment to moment, but more to do with why things happen, and how they happen.

      Let us explain this by using the example of the Buddha when he was young, before he set out on his path to enlightenment. His name was Siddhartha. You may know that he was a Prince who lived a wonderful life in a royal palace in Northern India. Whilst his living conditions were fabulous there was still discontent in his mind.

      He wondered about his life and the life of others. He was deeply affected by the things most people tend to accept as being just part of life; such things as sickness and old age, sadness and sorrow and finally, death. He saw these things as immense burdens and difficulties which we all must meet.

      His wife, father, children, in fact everyone he knew would have to face old age and death, and yet, at the same time, everybody he knew lived their lives seemingly unconcerned about these things. They were unconcerned because they believed there was nothing that could be done about it.

      Siddhartha, however, could not be unconcerned. He wanted to find out why the world was like that. He wanted to know what was the truth about life? What was really going on? What caused these different sufferings to happen in unequal measures to everybody? Was there any way that could be found which would stop suffering?

      This is where we get back to the difference between conventional and ultimate reality. Siddhartha was asking questions which could not be answered by understanding conventional truth. He had reached the ceiling, the limit of what conventional truth could say about the world.

      Even though some siddhas or yogis did perceive deeper levels of understanding than conventional reality, they could still not provide the answers to Siddhartha’s questions.

      You can read about the journey Siddhartha went on for six years as a wandering aesthetic, in search of what he had vowed to find out about life and, in particular, to know the answers to his profound questions. He wanted to understand why there is suffering in life.

      The culmination of this extraordinary quest finally came when his mind penetrated to the level of reality which creates our conventional reality. It is referred to as being an ultimate reality, meaning there is nothing further, nothing higher, nothing more than this.

      Not only did Buddha access the existence of an ultimate reality, he chose to spend the rest of his forty-five years of life Teaching others the method by which they could experience what he had discovered for themselves.

      From his perfect knowledge of both types of reality, conventional and ultimate reality, the Buddha described the engine that powers every individual’s experiences of suffering and happiness.

      Buddha saw that just as there are laws of nature which operate in the physical world - the many laws we recognise through science, there are also universal laws of nature which operate in the mental world.

      They are the natural laws of the mind.

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