Peace in Me - Peace in the World (Dharma Talk in Hamburg, February 7)

Thay Phap Nhat

I would like to tell you a story that is taking place several hundreds years ago. In that time, the surface of the earth was covered by thorns and sharp stones, and the people's feet were often hurt by them. The King wanted to protect his people, and therefore he invited several wise men to come to his palast in order to find a solution for the problem. One of the wise men suggested that the whole earth could be covered by carpet, so the thorns and stones could no longer hurt the people. The other wise men also liked that idea. But it seemed that it was impossible to play out that idea., because oodles of carpet would be needed. Luckily another wise man had another proposal to offer: Each person could get one pair of shoes. The thorns would not be removed, they would still be there, but the people would be protected from injury by their shoes. The king liked that idea, and everyone agreed. This story reminds me of the peace in oneself and the peace in the world. We have the idea that we want to make the whole world become peaceful, and that is really a good idea.

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The happy inner child

Kurt Heller/ pixelio.de

 Sometimes we have an image of ourselves that we get caught in. We don't know how we can liberate ourselves from that image. Maybe we have created that image when we were a little boy or a little girl, when we were living together with our family. During that time we have also been hurt by the people living around us, and that is why in everyone of us there is a wounded inner child. Our teacher does often invite us to embrace that wounded inner child, so that the wounds within us can heal. But I can also see another aspect It is true that we can come back to our inner child, take care of its wounds and in this way we can reconcile with our inner child. But if we focus only on the wounds, we might forget that in everyone of us there is also a happy inner child living beside the wounded inner child.

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Your Inner Master

A person who has achieved enlightenment, we may call „awakened“. It means that this person is awake. When we are in a dream, the things around us will not be clearly visible for us. When we wake up from sleeping, we often cannot remember the content of our dream, because the things in the dream are not clearly perceivable for us. It is the same with our day dream. If we live our life, and we are not able to see the things around us cleary, then we are actually dreaming – although we are awake (in the sense of not sleeping). How can we become truly awakened, like the Buddha? We call the Buddha an „awakened“ being. „buddh“ means „awake“, and the name „Buddha“ means „the awakened one“. The Buddha was also called „Gautama“ - that was his name.

As I am not an intellectual person, I don't have much knowledge. I am a lazy monk – I know that very well. I don't know how the right side and the left side of brain are working – maybe I will learn these things one day. But I know very well how our consciousness is working. Our consciousness is a very powerful tool. If we know it deeply, we can achieve a lot, and we can use our full potential.

Questions & Answers 3
from the Seminar „Peace in daily life“ with Thay Phap Nhat

Q: Are there actually no emotions in the present moment? Is there no emotionality in what is happening in the present moment?

A: There is no seperation between the absolute level and the relative level of reality. The present moment includes the emotions that are arising in it. We can observe in the present moment that a strong emotion is coming up. We know that the emotion is there, and it will not vanish just because we know it. 

Furthermore we can observe that because of this strong emotion we want to say something. In some cases we are able to calm down and we refrain from saying something. Also this is observable. In the present moment there are three things always present: Our body, our mind and the environment. When there is an emotion arising in us, this emotion belongs to the realm of the mind. While it is arising, we can at the same time observe our body. If for example there is anger coming up, we recognize that our face is becoming red, our heart is beating faster and our breath is getting shorter. As we are observing these things, our body will calm down again. The more we observe our emotions, the more experience we have in dealing with them, and the better we will understand them. 

Once we know our emotion well enough, it will still come up, but it will not be as strong as before. After some more time we will recognize: „If I continue to talk with this person, my strong emotion will come up again.“ Thanks to this realization we will know when to withdraw from the conversation. In this way we can keep our inner freshness alive. In order to be successfull in this practice of looking deeply we need some training. 

The more we observe our emotions, the more we can understand them. This is not only true for anger, but for all kinds of emotions. In the same way we can learn to understand the situations in our life, and thanks to this we have the opportunity to choose the direction for our life. Our mind is like a CD-Player. If our CD-Player is playing a music that we don't like, why don't we change the CD?

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