
Ajahn Brahm is a regular speaker here in Bangkok, I remember seeing him talk at AUA a couple of years ago and I attended a wonderful meditation workshop he held a few days later in the WFB headquarters on Sukhumvit. He was back there again yesterday, and though I missed the meditation sessions, I did manage to make the evening talk, 'Not me, not mine, not a self'.
Despite Ajahn Brahm's lively and accessible style, it's not an easy topic, and one I've often felt there is slightly too much emphasis on. These advanced teachings are suitable for many of course, but sometimes it seems to me that every English-language Buddhist speaker that comes to Bangkok wants to talk about anatta, and so those of us at the back of the class get rather overlooked.
However, Ajahn Brahm did a wonderful job of bringing the subject down to earth and pointing out its relevance in our everyday life. You are not your body, he said, you are not your intelligence, you are not your job or even your gender, so relax, let go. There is no you, and nothing is yours. There is nothing to feel proud of and nothing you can't let go of.
Not even your will, he continued, is yours, not even your consciousness, it is a bus without a driver, and you simply don't exist. I was glad when in the question and answer period a Thai woman admitted to her confusion and fear in the face of this teaching, and asked Ajahn Brahm for something more positive. "What" she said, "CAN we hold on to?"
"Wisdom, virtue, and peace", he answered, and then told what I thought was his loveliest story of the evening. Five children are each given a wish, and the one with the best wish wins. The first child asks for a burger and fries. The second child, having had longer to think about it, asks for the whole restaurant. The third child, outdoing even that, wishes for a billion dollars.
The fourth child has had longer to come up with an even better wish, and so asks for... three wishes! The third of which would always be three more. Thus, amazingly, the forth child manages to attain an infinity of wishes. Finally the fifth child is asked for his wish, a wish superior to even an infinity of wishes, and he asks for... contentment. Enlightenment, Ajahn Brahm said, is like this.
Link:Littlebang: Ajahn Brahm
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ျဖစ္ႏုိင္တာက အႏုျမဴရူပေဗဒ (Nuclear physics)ရဲ႔ လုံး၀သစ္လြင္တဲ့ ကမာၻဟာ ေရွးရုိးသိပၸံရဲ႔ ျမင္ကြင္းရဲ႔ အျပင္မွာ ရွိေနခဲ့ျပီး အဲဒီကာလတုန္းက ျမင္ေတြ႔ျခင္းခံခဲ့ရဖူးဟန္ မတူဘူး။ အဖန္ဖန္ေမြးဖြားျခင္းနဲ႔ အနိစၥ၊ ဒုကၡ၊ အနတၱ ဆုိတဲ့ သုံးဖက္ျမင္က လြန္ေျမာက္ေနတဲ့ ျဖစ္ရပ္ေတြကုိ ေရွးရုိးသိပၸံက လက္သင့္မခံတဲ့ နည္းတူ အႏုျမဴသိပၸံဆုိတဲ့ သုံးဖက္ျမင္လြန္ ျမင္ကြင္းကုိလည္း ေရွးရုိးသိပၸံက လက္သင့္မခံခဲ့ပါဘူး။
၁၉ ရာစုအကုန္မွာ အႏုျမဴသိပၸံ ျဖစ္ရပ္အခ်ိဳ႔ဟာ ေပၚလြင္ထင္ရွားလာျပီး သကာလ ေရွးရုိးသိပၸံရဲ႔ ျပည့္စုံျပီးသား ေလာက မွာ ရွင္းလင္းခ်က္ေတြ ရွာဖုိ႔ မျဖစ္ႏုိင္ေတာ့ဘူးလုိ႔ သိပၸံပညာရွင္မ်ား ေတြ႔လာၾကတယ္။ ၁၈၉၆ မွာ ဟင္နရီ ဘက္ကြာေရး( Henry Becquerel) ရဲ႔ ေရဒီယုိသတၱိၾကြေတြ႔ရွိမွဳ က ေရွးရုိးသိပၸံေလာကကုိ ေျခမႊပစ္ခဲ့တယ္။ ေန ကုိ ႏွစ္သန္းေပါင္းမ်ားစြာတုိင္ ပူေအာင္၊ ေတာက္ပေအာင္ လုပ္ေပးတဲ့ အႏုျမဴ သတၱိၾကြျခင္းဟာ ေရွးရုိးသိပၸံပညာရွင္ ေတြကုိ စိတ္ရွဳပ္ေထြးေစတယ္။
ေနေရာင္ျခည္ဟာ အခ်ိန္တုိအတြင္းမွာ အကၽြႏု္ပ္တုိ႔ အသားအရည္ကုိ ညိဳေမွာင္သြားေစတယ္။ ဒါေပမဲ့ မီးဟာ ကာလအၾကာၾကီး ေတြ႔ထိေနရတာေတာင္ အသားအရည္ကုိ ညိဳေမွာင္ေအာင္ မျပဳႏုိင္ဘူး။ ေနေရာင္ျခည္ရဲ႔ အသားညိဳေမွာင္ေစတဲ့ အက္တမ္ ဆုိင္ရာ ျဖစ္စဥ္ဟာ ေရွးရုိးသိပၸံက လက္ခံထားတဲ့ အကန္႔အသတ္ရဲ႔ အလြန္မွာ ျဖစ္ေနတာကုိ ေတြ႔ခဲ့ရတယ္။
ေရွးရုိးသိပၸံရဲ႔ အားနည္းခ်က္ေတြဟာ ပုိမုိသိသာလာတဲ့ တုိင္ေအာင္ သူ႔ရဲ႔အကာအရံကုိ ထုိးေဖာက္ ဖ်က္ဆီးပစ္ဖုိ႔က မလြယ္ပါဘူး။ သိပၸံပညာရွင္ေတြကုိ မရဏလမ္းဆုံးမွာ တုပ္ေႏွာင္ထားတဲ့ ေရွးရုိးသိပၸံရဲ႔ ( ေဖာ္ျပခဲ့ျပီးျဖစ္ေသာ) အဓိကခ်ဳပ္ခ်ယ္မွဳ နွစ္ခု မရွိေတာ့ျပီျဖစ္တဲ့ ေမာ္ဒန္သိပၸံကမာၻ ကုိ ေခၚေဆာင္ဖုိ႔ရန္ အတြက္ အုိင္းစတုိင္း (Albert Einstein) ထက္မည့ံ တဲ့ ပုဂၢိဳလ္တစ္ဦး ထြက္ေပၚလာဖုိ႔ လုိပါတယ္။