It must be said again BEST DHAMMA ON THE NET

the most wholesome discussion all over the youtube

Thank you, Venerables. The danger of wrong view is very real and it’s here right now.

Thank you for this dissection of such subtle and misunderstood points.

Greetings from Egypt, First of all, thanks for your efforts, I've been watching and listening to your Dhamma Talks for nearly 3 years now, and it was and still is so helpful to me, I have a question: Can the answer to "Does the Arahant exist after death?", that he doesn't "Really" exist in the first place "before death" to be exist or not exist after death, and Arhant does exist only as a conventional term to these five aggregates which won't "become" again after breaking apart at the end of the life of the -conventional term- "Arahant" Sadhu Sadhu Sadhu

Looking forward to listening to this talk after I benefited very much on the last talk on views. 1) Is Bhante implying the same meaning when he says "views" as when we usually use the word "emotional beliefs" and also religious beliefs and faith. I am not so clear about what is implied by "views" but if it is implying emotional beliefs and religious beliefs and religious faiths then I would understand that I should put them secondly and put my restraint first. 2) I watched a video on the audio talks about Upadana. Is Upadana meaning whatever one assumes and believes becomes ones reality and one gets the corresponding results on account of once specific assumption and belief be that an assumption and belief in God (no matter whether God exists or not) or assumption and belief in misery or assumption and belief that I am happy and free. 3) Usually it is said change bad thoughts to good thoughts could we say change bad assumptions and beliefs (Upadanas) and bad views (Dithis) to good assumptions and beliefs (Upadanas) ,and good views (Dithis) ?

Hello, this video was suggested for me by the KZfaq algorithm. Currently, I'm engaged in the topics of meditations and chants. I want to learn more regarding both, so my question is whether this is a good platform for learning meditation ?

Existence is the problem. All existence is in realm of conditioned

Venerables, I listened to this video and felt it hit some core points and saw some things I haven't seen before especially towards the end of the talk. I felt the fear of losing the 5 skandhas. I don't mean to be confrontational or argue, but I need to ask clarification straight. Also English is not my native language, so pardon me if I may come across misleading or confrontational. My question: But isn't liberation (through understanding) also known and felt? If one hears some dhamma and feels great relief and ease because of it, and all the strong desire or hate that was present 5 minutes ago is gone, and one knows and sees that suffering is (temporarily) gone, and there is just happiness, to me it seems good, even though according to the video, those feelings are based on the 5 skandhas/heaps/aggregates which are unreliable and thus what is dependent on them is also unreliable. To me it seems that in such a state, the mind IS liberated (temporarily) from greed, hatred, and delusion, or maybe even further, from identity-view. If someone experiences "liberation", in the suttas it's written: he "knows, the mind is liberated", and surely he is also happy about it? (He must feel a happiness, because his suffering has lessened so greatly). Thanks for any answers! 🙏🙏 So my point was that referring to the simile mentioned in the video of the very nice friend who is really a murderer, I cannot see any danger in "noble happiness" or "fruits of the path". They are not a trap, even though they are feelings. They encourage on the path. But of course clinging to them holds an identity view, to the extent there is an identity view...

On a past dhamma video Ajahn mentioned something along these lines - When a thought such as a sensual thought comes to your mind ask - " Where did this thought come from?" , "Was it you?" "did you purposefully think about it?" This reminds me of the Bahiya Sutta ud1.10 If these thoughts does not belong to you, do you want to act in regards to that? Can you elaborate on how to endure these thoughts according to dhamma and suttas ?

KZfaq suggested this and I ended up listening to this. I have been here a few years ago…. Seems like the senior fellow has made some nice progress. If he really agrees with his own words then I wonder why he is living in a cave? To me the only reason is that he likes to teach/discuss what he has realized. Otherwise he should come back to real world and live. After all, what is he trying to achieve further? Which aggregate makes him suffer?

so our current existense is then based on a imagined/bhava self without which there is no birth then it is not hard to imagine a universal self dreaming/imagining this universe as a being into existence ?

Āneñja-sappāya Sutta (MN 106), (Conducive to the Imperturbable), explains these things in an interesting manner. First I'd like to explain that I'm just a layperson and may have misunderstood some things, so don't take this as "correct" or "truth", and I'm happy if corrected by the venerables! First the Buddha explains practices which are conducive to the imperturbable -state. In the end of the sutta the Buddha also points out that: “Then again, the disciple of the noble ones considers this: ‘Sensuality here & now; sensuality in lives to come; sensual perceptions here & now; sensual perceptions in lives to come; forms here & now; forms in lives to come; form-perceptions here & now; form-perceptions in lives to come; perceptions of the imperturbable; perceptions of the dimension of nothingness: All are perceptions." So that is an interesting point, if I understood correctly, all arisings can be seen as "perceptions" (not the same as the perceptions-category of the 5 skandhas). The perceiver itself cannot be seen. It (the subject) cannot even be grasped in any way, except that if a person is aware and present, he is conscious that he is aware (of things arising and passing, both internal and external). And of course the mind will try to "tag" it as a "self" too. Becoming identified with that perceiver, would of course be much more liberating than being identified with 'this personality', which is at the center of all troubles (and is conditioned). But the Buddha explains that if one welcomes, relishes, and clings to the equanimity attained by that practice of seeing everything as perceptions, then one's consciousness (and a self view, I presume) is still sustained by that "dimension", which the Buddha says is the "dimension of neither-perception nor perception", and also says that it is "the supreme sustenance". And he further explains how that clinging to that equanimity (and the identity sustained by that clinging to it) can be relinquished, but that instruction is of course for the "last steps of the path". We should not think that we can take a shortcut, by throwing out equanimity from the start ;)

Existance is a weird dream.

In The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker says: “Obviously, all religions fall far short of their own ideals”. I’m afraid the same could be true here of the “Arahant” ideal. While it’s a worthwhile pursuit to go along the Buddhist monastic path as far as it can go, we have to be careful to not forget that humans are animals, products of Darwinian evolution, and endowed with irreducible instincts- most importantly the survival instinct; which can be tamed, but not completely escaped. According to the evidence in about 1500 studies of Terror Management Theory (TMT) in the last 40 years, human culture itself is largely a symbolic byproduct of our survival instinct. Essentially, death represents insignificance & finitude, so culture invents/provides countless ways & roles in which humans can acquire personal significance & future continuity beyond the body - “heroism”. Or, of course, escapism through sensuality/heedlessness - “hedonism”. There’s also a 3rd typically mammalian way of dealing with survival threats which is called “felt security”, as when humans or other mammals touch or increase their proximity to each other in the face of perceived immediate danger. It’s by itself considered insufficient to deal with the full scope of death anxiety, hence the addition of “heroism” & “hedonism”. As animals with inescapable weaknesses/vulnerabilities, we are clearly limited in our ability to deal with things that threaten our survival- whether they are at the biological level (e.g. any good killer/torturer can have us eventually begging for our lives or to stop the pain), or at the symbolic level - things that thoroughly undermine our sense of personal significance. As Becker said: “If there were any doubt that self-esteem is the dominant motive of man, there would be one sure way to dispel it; and that would be by showing that when people do not have self-esteem they cannot act, they break down. And this is exactly what we learn from clinical data, from the theory of the psychoses, as well as from anthropology. When the inner-newsreel begins to run consistently negative images of one’s worth, the person gives up. We see this clearly in depressive withdrawals and schizophrenic breakdowns. I remember one psychiatric patient who had passed his life in review and concluded that he had been ‘kidding himself’ all along, that he really was nobody. The psychiatric resident did not take this symbolic balance-sheet seriously enough, and considered it merely self-indulgent, pessimistic ruminations-until the patient acted on his self-appraisal and leaped from a sixth- story window.” That is not to say that we cannot at an intellectual level, and even partially at an emotional level know that we *don’t* know what death is, that death/catastrophe can happen at any time; that we are at every moment “dying a little”, or that the symbolic significance granted to us by culture is largely a sham. But the point is that we cannot gain a full emotional perception of these things without running into our animal-anxiety limitations. Perhaps this is similar to what you had in mind when you recommended breath meditation instead of death meditation. Finally, the mystery we perceive in the cosmos and reality at large, which some have called “God”, or “Sunyata” tends to be too vague & abstract for the human animal to gain a sense of security and death-transcendence. Hence the *concretizing* of religious & more broadly cultural notions in the form of special concrete symbols, roadmaps, people and artistic depictions that work to add credibility to our wishful and limited notions of this mystery. To quote Becker again: “As Otto Rank put it, all religion springs, in the last analysis, ‘not so much from ... fear of natural death as of final destruction.’ But it is culture itself that embodies the transcendence of death in some form or other, whether it appears purely religious or not. It is very important for students of man to be clear about this: culture itself is sacred, since it is the ‘religion’ that assures in some way the perpetuation of its members. For a long time students of society liked to think in terms of ‘sacred’ versus ‘profane’ [i.e. secular] aspects of social life. But there has been continued dissatisfaction with this kind of simple dichotomy, and the reason is that there is really no basic distinction between sacred and profane in the symbolic affairs of men. As soon as you have symbols you have artificial self-transcendence via culture. Everything cultural is fabricated and given meaning by the mind, a meaning that was not given by physical nature. Culture is in this sense ‘supernatural,’ and all systematizations of culture have in the end the same goal: to raise men above nature, to assure them that in some ways their lives count in the universe more than merely physical things count.”

The problem is that the Buddha didn't have the necessary vocabulary to be more precise. Eg, zero dimensional, spacetime, conscience, fields, etc. 1. Yes, we exist the same, but without mind or body. We are zero dimensional entities that are outside of spacetime. Our presence remains, similar to our presence in a dream. Awareness+conscience+power of intent. It does have an answer. 2. The spirit is affected by conscience (maybe this is kamma?), it has a 'sense' of the environment, situation, and an ability to 'see' via awareness. And an ability to influence, or direct awareness via intent. 3. Self is the zero dimensional spirit. Maybe the Buddha didn't have our modern concept of spirit. It exists, but it does not exist as part of the material universe. It is background and it cannot be known in any objective sense. It has no thought or feeling, but it does sense things with a conscience. 4. We do not become something else at death. We remain the same presence as always. 5. What differentiates flesh beings is the consciousness the spirit is bound to. Where consciousness is a bidirectional field of the nervous system wherein sensory input is radiated and which awareness reads and intent writes to initiate thought or muscular movement or to maintain a focus, an attention.