 This is the 60th episode of Patterson in Pursuit. It's my conversation with Pra Mahā Shanam Kham Prakāi, a Buddhist monk in Chiang Mai, Thailand. Hello my friends, and welcome to another special episode of Patterson in Pursuit. Last month I was in Thailand, trying to learn about the basics of Thai Buddhism. It was an interesting time in Thailand. I wound up getting lost at a couple of Buddhist temples. I got food poisoning, as is so common in Thailand. But fortunately not all my efforts were in vain. I did get to have some great conversations. This one you're about to listen to came from the Wat Chedi Luang, which is known as the Temple of the Great Stupa. This interview we're talking about the thing that I always talk about with everybody, the basics. What's the purpose of meditation? Are there different types of meditation? Does Thai Buddhism offer insights into the nature of the mind? What about the nature of the self? After the conversations I had with the monks in Thailand and with Keho Nishikaki in Japan, I decided I'm going to take up this meditation thing. Just over the past couple of weeks, I've been practicing a bit of meditation so far so good. I'm actually very pleased with the results of daily meditation. I'll tell you guys more about that later. Before I start the interview, let me tell you about the sponsor of this episode, Praxis. If you guys have been following the news, you know that right now there are a bunch of crazy crusades taking place on American campuses. It seems like many students and faculty and administration have completely lost their minds. This is resulting in the credibility and prestige of academia imploding. It's probably well overdue for that. But up until fairly recently, there's not been an alternative to the academic system. We've all been taught that in order to be successful, in order to get a job, you have to first get a degree. Unfortunately, things have changed. The company Praxis is all about bypassing the archaic and overpriced academic system. It's about taking people who are interested in creating value in the real world, giving them three months of professional training that is immediately followed by six months of a paid apprenticeship in the real world right away. Plus, after you complete their program, they contractually guarantee you a job offer. Right now, the average Praxis salary after graduation is $50,000 a year. It's a totally superior product. I couldn't more highly recommend it. So if you're interested, if that sounds like something that resonates with you, go to steve-patterson.com slash praxis, P-R-A-X-I-S. All right, so I hope you enjoy my conversation about Thai Buddhism with Pramaha Shanamkom Prakai. Now, a fair warning about this interview. I might ask, Steve, why does it sound like you guys are talking into a 1950s radio through 210 cans? And the answer is because there was a bird outside the window next to us in the interview that was chirping every oh five seconds or so. It had a very loud and obnoxious squeal. So in order to get this episode to the point where I could even listen to it, I had to do some audio finagling. So while you're listening, just make up a story and let's say this took place in a dangerous jungle. And I could only carry along an old cassette player to record the conversation. Of course, that's not true at all, but it'll just help you adjust to the audio quality a little quicker. First of all, I want to thank you for sitting down and speaking with me. I know I kind of sprung the interview on you, but this is a great opportunity for a Westerner to be able to talk with practicing Buddhist monks about some really some of the basic questions in your worldview and what you are accomplishing here being a monk in your training. So where I want to start is this area of meditation. So I had a conversation the other day with another gentleman here and I had a conversation when I was in Japan with a Zen Buddhist and both of them were saying that meditation is really central to Buddhism in general and to like the daily life of a practicing monk. So for meditation, what is the purpose, I guess it's a good place to start. What is the purpose of meditation? The purpose of meditation is to get rid of the emotion, to get rid of the emotion, and also to understand the emotion. So this is the purpose of the meditation, but it depends on what meditation we are practicing because there are two main kinds of meditation that we can practice. So each meditation also can lead into, they have their own purpose for meditation. For example, when we practice the focus meditation, the result is calmness. If you want to be calm, you don't want to, we don't want our mind buzzing or we want to be calm or we want to be more focused on something. For example, if we have so many problems with thinking, I cannot stop thinking, so we can go to focus meditation. It can help us to be more focused. And Anathakaya is about mindful meditation. Mindful meditation is about we try to put awareness on our feelings, thoughts and sensation. This is the main goal of meditation. At the end, we understand our feeling and accept our feeling. So for the first type of meditation, the focus meditation, how is that different in terms of what you do? Do you deliberately try to focus on one thing when you're sitting, is this a moving meditation? Yeah. There are 40 techniques for focus meditation. It depends on our nature of mind. How do we know our nature of mind? So sometimes we need to practice for three days and then the teacher can recognize or can give advice to us so we can know that. So basically, when you get into the temple, you will see monk chanting. So that's also one kind of meditation. You need mantra, you need chanting, and then you say it, and then your mind is focused on one particular thing, that is focus meditation. And also Anathakaya is that when you're breathing in and breathing out, you observe your breathing in and breathing out from you, you're feeling the air, the touching, your nose, and then you go down into your lung. And then you feel that when it comes out, there's also one kind of meditation. So even though we're feeling something, we don't go to those kind of feelings. It's like a replace our thought. Replace those thoughts that we consider is worrying or we think a lot. You replace it with something. For example, we can count two. For example, I can count one, two, three, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, five, one, two, three, four, five, six, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. and then come back, one, two, three. This is also one kind of meditation, focus meditation. We just focus. We don't care what we hear, we don't care what we see, we don't care whatever happening around. We just, you know, when you walk, you just, you know, left, right, left, right. You don't care anything before you, behind you, the past, the future. You don't care about it, but you hear with your step left and right. This is focus meditation. You don't care anything all around you. So the focus meditation is focusing on the one thing, whatever it is, whether it's counting or walking. And this is different from the other type of meditation, which is where you're not focusing on one thing, you're just focusing on your feelings as they arise. Mindful meditation is all about, you know, it's like a moving meditation. You know, it's all about, you know, whatever you're hearing or you see, and obvious, you know, your mind, your attention, go to whatever, for example, now you're hearing, now you are feeling some pain, you know, you might feel so many things at one time, but whatever, obvious, you know, you can go to that and observe it. It's not focusing, it's just observing. Observing, yeah, just observe. Let it work, don't try to mend it, don't try to do anything with it, just observing. It's like a watching television or it's like a watching movie. You don't try to do anything, you just, okay, you just watch it, you know, let it work. And let it, you know, we observe the birth of feeling, the appearance, what is it, the duration of the feeling, this is the duration of the feeling and the disappearance of the feeling, whatever happening, for example, pain, okay, now I feel pain on my leg, now you feel it, more than hearing or more than seeing, so you go into that and then you observe the birth of that and then, okay, now, okay, I feel pain, so then you observe duration, how it works until it disappears and then it let it go, so another one, you can go to another thing, for example, you know, sometimes we don't know, we don't aware anything that we are doing, we just let it work, as usual, as we, as we, you know, how can I say, as we, you know, like a normal day, you just wake up and do everything, but we never observe our muscle, our feeling, so sometimes we get, we are very tense on our shoulder, we get backache, headache, so, and then we never observe it, so when you observe your mind and observe your body, you can release the pain too, and when you know the pain, and then, sometimes when you think a lot, and then you feel like a tense on your, on your muscle, and then you don't know, you just, oh, I want to take a medicine, so, and then you take medicine, okay, you release your pain, but instead of taking medicine, you can use meditation technique to release the pain too, when you have a tense, you, you read, even reading a book is a good thing, but when you read a lot, you can have a, you know, eye aches, and you're very hot with your eyes, so, and it connects to your brain, when it comes to, to, to eye, hot, and you can feel like very tense on your, on your head, and when you observe, and then you close your eyes, and you observe, wow, now the muscle in my brain is very tense, very tight, so I want to observe, and I want to release it, okay, now you just, okay, now it's, wow, this tense, and then you try to release, it, it release, and then you can be, you know, normal, you know, normal state again, yeah. So, would it be fair to say that the focus meditation is about maybe calming your mind? There's lots of different things going on, so you just choose one thing, and you focus on that. Mindful meditation is about being aware of what's going on in your body with the purpose of getting back to a state of calmness and relaxation, so that's what the purpose of the mindful meditation is, okay, so you said before with the headache example, this is very relevant for me, because I deal with eye pain, it goes from my neck to my eye, so if I observe it, and I just think, okay, I'm not, I'm just going to be aware of it, how do you make that transition from, this is where the pain is, to this is how I relax that part, because I don't know how to relax if my neck's really tight. We have to accept that the pain is also one kind of effect that we, because of our behavior, we read a lot, or we use our brain, our eye a lot. So, but the thing that we cannot stop doing it because of some time, okay, the boss tell that, okay, you have to finish in one hour, even though you are very tired, you cannot, you have to go beyond your ability, so and then when you go beyond your ability, the effect is that you get pain when you do exercise, so if you do normal exercise, it's no problem, but if you increase the weight, you can get pain, and also the same thing that we do in our life, when we increase the number of, usually we have to sleep like six hour or eight hour, but we sleep just only two, no, that is the effects of our behavior, so to make, to bring it back, that too, the way that you can do, okay, you have to be back in the same habit that you don't go to the limit, so if you have that problem, for example, you can get an headache and I ached, okay, you can stop what you did, what you do. Okay, so in that moment, in that moment when I've got the headache, is there a way, are you saying there's a way with meditation to relax your muscles at that time? Yeah, you can do, you can close your eyes. Yeah. Breathing deep breath, deep breath, you know, and breathing in and breathing out for five time, just only five time, you can feel the relaxation. When you're breathing, or do you focus on, are you observing the pain while you're doing the breathing or you just focus on the breathing? It depends, it depends, you can observe your breathing in and breathing out, or you can just, you just, okay, breathing in and breathing out, and then you don't focus on breathing in and breathing out, and then you just go to hear. Now I want to relax, okay, for example, you know, I don't know, my shoulder is very tense, okay. I don't know, when you come to, I want to check from here to my feet, okay, from my head, okay, now, okay, what about my eye, is it tense? Am I meant something? I try to do something with my body or not now? If you try to do, you make it into the normal level of your eye, you don't try to close your eye, you don't try to open your eye, you just, okay, if you say that, okay, now I close my eye, you just close, not try to close, just close it, just make everything just normal state, you don't try to, okay, you hate, now it's very tense, tight, you just, okay, now I release it, and then come to here and release it. And you come and you observe for two or three times or five times until you feel that now I'm okay, yeah. Okay, so putting this maybe in a bigger context, you said at the beginning that part of the goal of meditation is to get rid of emotions or to move past emotions or have them quiet down on their own. In the broader context of the Buddhist worldview, is that part of the goal of practicing Buddhism in general, not just the meditation, but the whole philosophy together, what is it about? Is it about? To liberate ourselves. To liberate. To liberate ourselves from suffering. As a human being, we bond with imperfection, actually, so we need to understand those kind of suffering, for example, body suffering and mind suffering. So Buddha said that, okay, we can say that I'm healthy, I have a healthy body for 10 years, I haven't sick for 10 years or 20 years, but Buddha said that with your mind, every single moment you got suffer with your mind. So to treat those kind of suffer, you need to practice, you need to train your mind. It's our mind trainable. You can be trained. You can be trained until you make it habit and then it becomes you. You, your body and your mind are together, not, you know, not have conflict each other. For example, sometimes, so, okay, I have to go back into your question. What is the main purpose of Buddhism in general? So Buddha said that, okay, we need to go into, get enlightened nirvana, okay, we can say nirvana. What is nirvana? Nirvana means we understand the reality, we get enlightened, we enlightened person. What is enlightened person? Enlightened person means they, they might, you know, can go higher than happiness and unhappiness. So those, those people still have suffering, still have happiness and unhappiness, but those happiness and unhappiness cannot do anything with them. They can lead happiness, they can lead suffering, not let suffering and happiness, you know, push them around. And is the way that they attain that mental state through the practice of meditation pretty much exclusively, or is it about understanding the philosophy and the mental stuff, it's just entirely the practice? It's a matter of practice. Without practice, we cannot understand Buddha teaching. We cannot understand Buddha teaching by reading the book. We are practicing, we can understand it. Okay, some people can understand Buddha teaching too by, you know, you can read, but when you read you cannot understand right away. You have to come with yourselves and practice. And then when you truly understand with your own experience, that is the true understanding that Buddha said, okay, you are enlightened because you truly understand by yourself. So would you say that it would be impossible to separate the philosophy teachings and the books of Buddhism? It would be impossible to separate the core of Buddhism from meditation. No. So it's absolutely central. It's not really a philosophy. It's almost like the meditation maybe comes first and then the explanation of what's going on with the meditation. Is that fair? You can tour around. You can start with meditation first and then come to theory and you come to theory and go practice. It's either way that it depends on you. For example, in this one text, this one story, when the older people became monks, they asked Buddha what is the duty in the temple, in the religion? What is the duty in the religion? Buddha said there are two main duties that you can do. So if you are young and then you want to read, you want to study, you can go to study the text, read the teaching text. And if you are an older person and then you want to practice mind, you go directly to mind. It's either way around. It depends on your decision. So I want to ask you about this nirvana, this state of mind. You said the people who are enlightened are above happiness and unhappiness. So what is kind of the perspective of what the mind is? So if somebody is enlightened and they're in a nirvana state, is that a state that is only reached while they're living and practicing as a human? Is there some kind of transcendence that people get when they die? Actually the word nirvana is used with Buddha. And people who get enlightened, when they die, we call them nirvana. Okay, during a human being, if they get enlightened, we call that person an enlightened person. So you can be an enlightened person. And then when you die, we call that person, they go to nirvana, means they don't come back. So this is the end of the term. So what happens if they don't? So in Buddhism there's an idea of reincarnation. So when you die, you come back. When you go to nirvana, what is that like? Is it a place? It's not a place. And also nobody knows. Even Buddha said that nobody knows until you yourself get enlightened and then you die and then you will know. So this is his explanation. Even though he also gives the explanation and the words, it's like liberate, you know, peaceful. So this is, I cannot understand too. So how do you think he came up with the theory of nirvana? So if we were to say, why do we believe that nirvana is where you go when you die after you're enlightened? But it's not something we can understand until we die. How do you think he came up with that knowledge? You know, it's a kind of abstract idea or perspective over nirvana. So that's why as I told you that you need to reach nirvana and then get enlightened and then go to nirvana and then you will know what will happen. So people who get enlightened also, when the Buddha died, he passed away. There's also one monk who go along with the process that nirvana went. This is state of mind too. When he died he passed different kind of mind factor, mental factor that he go along. And those monks also come along with him and then he came back. So I think it's about the state of mind that does mind no produced. So when actually we produce our mind produced every time, so we die and born every time our mind according to what we see, what we touch or something like that. So when we still have the feeling, the emotion where we are a person who have hatred or desire greedy or something like that, we still have condition to reconnect or rebirth again. It's like a reproduced, our mind reproduced every time. When we hear something, we feel something and then reproduce. It's like again and again something like that. It died and born and died and born something like that. You said earlier that the mind and the body aren't necessarily separated, right? It's possible to separate mind and body in the higher meditation. So when we talk about happiness or suffering, we have two main kinds as humans that we can observe. For example, body suffering and mind suffering. So some teachers said, okay, you can suffer with your body what your mind still contains. You can suffer with your body as well as your mind suffered. You can suffer just only body but your mind contains. So you can never liberate yourself. So it's a matter of practice too. Not just only you know, you can separate or something like that. So it's a kind of practice and meditation. And when you go into a higher level of meditation, you know, you can get those kind of things. You can end you with suffer. You accept it, you accept your suffer. You don't try to resist your suffer. You don't say to yourself, okay, why me? Why I'm so suffer? We consider, okay, as a human being, we can suffer. We can be happy. So if we do our mind something like it, okay, we can let it go. So we accept it. When you accept it, your mind is still okay. Even our body is, my body, our body is suffer. Okay, I don't mind because it can happen. And also the happiness, we can acquire happiness through a sensual pleasure. You know, sensual, you touch, you get something, you drink water. It's content or you certify what you did. Or this is also one kind of happy through sense. So but this kind of happiness can lead into either way. Okay, if it's good or if we satisfy, we are happy. So if we don't, we are unhappy. It can either way. So it's not the ultimate happiness. So we have a higher meditation or higher happiness through our mind. Some people who meditate, when they experience happiness through meditation, they don't need those kind of happiness. For example, they don't need a car, they don't need a soft mat or those kind of things because they have the higher happiness than that. So nowadays we stick on just happiness through sensual happiness. But there is also happiness higher than that. For example, if you succeed in something, you can also be happy, even though you don't touch it. So that kind of state can achieve through meditation too. Then when you meditate and then you overcome some kind of suffer. For example, okay, now I'm so suffer and then you want to say that, I want to fight again with the suffer, with your mind. Okay, I don't want to stop, practice, I want to go, I want to move forward. So when you pass the state and then, wow, this is, I can do that. Even though this is very painful, very suffer, you can go over, you can pass it. So and then you feel, wow, this is happiness. So and then, you know, you pass the state of meditation more and more. And sometimes when you start, for example, meditation also can lead you into backside of meditation too. For example, it can, you might see very beautiful girl or you might see Buddha or you might see something that come along to you. You might go to the heaven, you might go to hell. If you don't need, if you don't have tissue, you might come along with, wow, now I get enlightened. But some teachers say that that your mind try to trick you. Yes, try to trick you. You need to, you need to go out of that one. You know, so that's why in a higher level of meditation, we need teacher who pass that stage. Sometimes you might see yourself before you and then you feel like, wow, this is me, that's me. And then you try to touch yourself so you don't pass the test, something like that. Okay, so I've got a couple more questions for you. It seems like what is totally central to what you're talking about is the mind. Is training the mind, being aware of what the mind is, what it's doing, how it's tricking you, how you can use it to overcome suffering. Question I've been struggling with for many years now is what is the mind? So if it's possible, if this reincarnation thing happens, then it implies there's some kind of difference between mind and body. When the body dies, the mind is still there and then it goes to another body or it gets rebirthed, something like that. So can you help me understand what that is? What is the mind? It's a really, really difficult question. I also, I also just thinking, what is the mind now? I have to say that I completely don't go through what the mind is. But in Buddhism, there are different minds. My, for example, some teachers say that, okay, there are 121 minds, that and good, all together, there's 121 minds. So when they say something like that, we can infer that mind is something that you feel right now. This is mind. Whatever you see and then you come up with you and then you feel, oh, I'm angry now, this is mind. You drink water and then, wow, I feel fridge. This is also mind. Whatever come up to you is mind. Okay. So there's one step behind that. If we're saying what the mind is, is feelings. There's still, there's an awareness of the feelings. So what is that awareness that observes what the mind is doing? Yeah, this is knowing. This is knowing. And also I still asking myself, what is that? When, okay, so when you are angry or when you feel something and then there is something, wow, now I'm angry. When, the problem is that when you know that you are angry, the angry turn the shape. You are not angry anymore. You turn into, wow, now I know that I'm angry. You are knowing it. This is still mind. So when you're aware, so you have the state of being angry and then you have knowing that you're angry, which is a different state. But what about the knowing that you know that you're angry? Isn't there one, there's still that... When you know that you're angry, angry disappear or still there? It would be different. Yeah, so your mind changes the shape. So in two different shapes. So it's like, you know, it goes and then changes, and then you know it changes, and you know it comes. But when you know that, it's good mind. The mind that will, except that you turn your mind into a different shape is still mind. Okay, so maybe this is what I'm getting at. When we're talking about the mind in that way, there seems to be a person behind all of this. So it's my feelings, it's my thoughts, it's my mind. There's this internal me being aware of all of these things. Maybe that's the self, maybe whatever that is. Concentration? It's like my personal identity or something. My name is Steve Patterson. That person is the one that's thinking the thoughts, is having the emotions, is feeling the things. What is that, the person? Actually, according to Buddhist methodology, you know, there is no self. Even though some scholar tried to discredit about, if Buddha said that there is non-self, it might be something opposite with self, opposite with non-self itself. But so when we talk about what is knowing, what we are doing, it might have something. Don't you think that what you know is the same with angry? It's just one kind of feeling. It could be? You know what you know, you know what you are doing, and when you know what you are doing, it changes that shape. You don't feel, you know, okay, this is angry here, and then now you are angry with like 10 seconds or 10 or 1 minute, and then now, wow, now I'm angry. So suddenly you know it, do I angry? So the shape of your angry change. So it's still the same mind, but different shape. Yeah. But even if we say, Buddha said there is no self. Who is the Buddha? Doesn't that imply that still he has a self? When we talk about self, he asks, if you say self, okay, for example, Buddha, what is Buddha? I don't know. Yeah, so for example, he tries to explain that everything is suffering impermanent in non-self. For example, they take the car, so if you say the car, okay, and then I take the wheel off. It's still the car, now it becomes wheel, and then if I take the element of the wheel into separate elements, and until the smallest element, where is self? At the end, there is nothing there. Even my friend, who practiced meditation over 8 hours, even though a teacher recommended not practicing meditation more than 50 minutes, because it might have the wrong, it might have the bad effect on our body and mind too. But my friend wants to know what happened if he practiced meditation more than 8 hours. So he suffered. So the first hour, 30 minutes, there's nothing there. And then at 40, you feel a little bit, you know, suffer with your leg, and more and more you suffer, suffer a lot. And then your mind tells you that, okay, now I want to stop. Now I want to stop. But you decided that, okay, no, I don't want to. So before that you think, no, you think that I want to stop, and then you said that I don't want. This is not the same time, different time, not the same mind, different mind. It born and die, and born and die, born and die, something like this. And then you feel that, okay, through the time, okay, ask him, what is the benefit of meditation with pain? He said, okay, I want to know, what is, when I commit, when he overcome, when he can do with his oath, he said, okay, I want to meditate at our, I want to do it. I have a long time to go. Okay, during your walk, you might get pain. So he said that, there is nothing behind pain. There's nothing behind pain. What does that mean? It means you learn to accept the pain. I asked him, what do you do with the pain? He said that, I cannot do anything. I cannot force the pain to stop. He just said, okay, when the pain that increased so much, I cannot bear it. I just, okay, I don't care about you. I don't care about you. I just let you go. I just come back to you. So, okay, when you come with bearing and bearing out, what happened to you? I forget the pain. And then, when he stopped meditation, he realized that, wow, even though I feel very painful, he's still pain, but when the meditation is, you know, his concentration increased, we call concentration increased. Your concentration, your mind is stronger than the pain that your body has. You overcome that. You don't feel that. Even you forget your pain. So at the end, you accept that, okay, there is nothing behind the pain, but pain is with you. You accept that. This is the matter of acceptance. So, last question I want to ask you, that's fascinating. I feel like I want to experience that kind of mental strength. You said a really interesting thing. You said, it's a different mind that when he started the meditation, there was one mind that had certain feelings and beliefs. And then an hour, a couple hours in, it's a different mind. Different mind. That is true. What I would put it is a different state of mind. But it still seems like it's the same person. So it is the same person experiencing two different states of their own mind. Right? But if that's true, maybe the mind is something that's not permanent, but there still seems to be that person, there still seems to be a self. It still seems like in that circumstance it was him experiencing these two states. Do you think that's not a correct way of thinking about it? Yes, not a correct way of thinking about it. If it's itself, if it's itself means not changing, so if it's not changing, means you can control it. So for example, if you are not happy now, so you can forge yourself up, stop, stop. But you cannot do it. If you say stop, stop, it's increasing, increasing. Because of this nature of mind, you can get resistant. So the way to do is that because of our mind changing, changing, everything is changing. So if this is the right view to look at everything, when it's changing you cannot control, you accept it. If you say that it's self means you want to control, you want to control, you want to mend it, you stop. So if you think like that, you can be unhappy. You can kind of give birth of another kind of suffering. Instead of okay, you accept that okay, when it changes, even though happening, okay, it changes, you cannot control it. So would you say that because the self seems to be changing, it's not really a thing, not like a permanent thing. If you think that self permanent things, so for example, my mother will be with me forever. What happens if she die, in reality she will die one day. So I think at the end neither has to either sell on a self. If you accept the reality, it's okay. If people think has self or non-self, if people said okay, I believe in non-self, but still they're still clinging on something. For example, if something lost or something died or you know, beloved one dies or they're still you know, painful with you and then they cannot move forward. They just keep their mind still oh, my mother is still here with me. She's still here, she don't die, she don't die. That person just still you know, ignore the fact, ignore the reality. So, you know... Could you say that while that person is living, there's still a self until there isn't at some point or is that at every moment it's changing? Every moment changing. Looking at our mind it's changing even though we have we come up with self. This is the wrong thought. This is not right view, not right thought. You know, as a full path that the first one is light view right thought should come first. If you say that okay, we have self if you think like that, it cause another path. If you think like, okay, there is no self, it's not self, it's changing you can go another path. So, we are what we think. So, the way to go. Okay, so let's say I agree that thinking there's a self leads towards some kind of suffering. That doesn't necessarily mean it's not right. So, it might be the case that we do have self and because of that, there's necessarily going to be suffering until we die. What do you think about that idea? Do you think that the end goal of the Buddhism to overcome suffering is maybe more important than whether or not there is actually such a thing as the self? So, it's something we might tell ourselves. Yeah, okay there is self, so that's why you should not worry about things. For example, right? So, put it this way, if you believe if you're attached to the self, it causes suffering. So, don't be attached to the self, even though in reality there might be such a thing. Okay. What do you think is that kind of the position? Are you making a claim that in reality there truly is no self? Or are you saying that if you believe there is a self, then it causes suffering? Very difficult to do adjustment on this kind of too, but I think what leads us into suffering? So, if you think that, okay, if you think like that and then you are happy, you get away from suffering because you tell yourself something like that. Okay. If there is some people who can do that, is there any person who can do that? Like, okay, now we have self and we tell, for example, they might have some power that can help us. You are a self, you are whatever happening, I will take care of you or something like that. I guess maybe a simple way for me to ask is if there were a choice between understanding the true nature of what exists and being free from suffering, is the Buddhist position to say, even if we are tricking ourselves, or even if we are deceiving ourselves to say there isn't a self, we are doing that because it results in us overcoming our suffering. So it is almost like if I lie to myself and tell myself that there isn't a self, then I am happier and therefore that makes it okay. Or is the claim that in reality the truth of the matter is regardless of how it affects our suffering, there is no such thing as a self. Does that make sense? There is no self? When you say there is no self, is that because that is a true claim that there is no such thing? Or is it because there is no claim that there is no life for that? We don't say because to make ourselves happier because when we look at everything, they give a definition too why there is no self. Not because of we try to convince ourselves to be happy that there is an explanation that I told you that for example feeling, for example object thing that you see if you say self, for example self means I this is appearance. What about I take the skin off what about I get into the bone and you distinguish bone off. Why is self? Why is bone? This is just only the word that we come up with. So at the end there is no such thing. So do you think it's when I am talking about self and we're talking about self do you think we're just making that up? Do you think it's a trick that our mind is playing because it seems like I'm a person I have a point of view I have a perspective I have a name I guess Why is that going on if there is no such thing? Because we build it up we build it up. But we build it up means as a human social human society we build history we build Thailand, we build England, we build America we build the world we build the world and then we put a label into you into me, into this is Thai this is monk but at the end there is no monk, there is no you there is nothing. There has got to be something right? Yeah you want to be something but I mean we want to be something we want to be something so when we say we want to be something so now we create something so we want to do something to want something to get what we want so when we do that it affects your life for example I want to get rich but I don't know how I just go to you and I take money from you so you are unhappy I can be happier but still I still feel unhappy with what I did we try to do it when we say what I want so we don't accept reality reality okay we try to accept reality as a human being okay we are going to die don't forget that we are going to die so we can be healthy we cannot be unhealthy so if we think like this so we can accept the reality this is the reality if we accept the reality we can leave it reality if we try to resist the reality for example the water flowing you try to block the water oh I don't want water I don't want water because water can flood my feel or flood my liver I want to take water away so water is a part of the world you cannot stop it so you can leave it water water is water but there is a place that you can stay apart from water so this is a kind of my too our mind is working if you want to stop you can get resistant so the way to do is that you can guide a mind so when you say that there's still something when you say the water is water that means there is water there has to be some kind of reality no water is not water I don't know how to make it when you boil water it changes into something else so there's nothing there's nothing non-self that's hard for me to understand me too I try to understand too but it convinced me a lot when I said okay when I think like this I feel release for example I can let my house clinging on okay we trust each other we trust when we understand okay we can until we die we can we cannot be suffered for a very long time so when we understand for example we go to some person who we don't know the cause of that I read one book that he said this one man he he gets into the subway in the underground and then he came along with his two children and he don't control his children he just let them wander around playing with other people anger on him angry on him that why don't you take care of your children why you let them play so and then one man came up to him and talk to him like okay why don't you take care of that that man said okay to tell them that their mother passes away so and when you understand reality of him you are feeling change from angry into wow now I have a sympathy on him so this is my sometime to know reality except their reality can violent into you know peaceful or you know better life too that's a really great note to end on I really appreciate this conversation this has been great thank you so much for spending your time here too and I love it it's actually something that I only been doing it 10 or 15 minutes a day I've seen benefits and I pretty much look forward to it every day now as for the philosophy of Buddhism and the non-existence of the self well I have my own thoughts but I'll wait to share them at length when I do an interview breakdown of this episode so that's all for me today I hope you guys enjoy the rest of your week