today I stand before you to explore a concept that holds immense power yet often eludes our grasp The Art of Letting [Music] Go because you see to be detached from the world in the sense that Buddhists and daoists and Hindus will often talk about Detachment does not mean to be non-participative you can have a sexual life very rich and very full and yet all the time be detached by that I don't mean that you just go through it mechanically and have your thoughts elsewhere I mean a complete participation but still detached and the difference of
the two attitudes is this on the one hand there is a way of being so anxious about physical pleasure so afraid that you won't make it that you grab it too hard that you you just have to have that thing and if you do that you destroy it completely and therefore after every attempt to get it you feel disappointed you feel empty you feel something was lost and then therefore you want it again you have to keep repeating repeating repeating repeating because you never really got there and it's this that is the hangup this is
what is meant by attachment to this world in an evil [Music] sense but on the other hand pleasure in its fullness cannot be experienced when one is grasping it I knew a little girl girl to whom someone gave a bunny rabbit she was so delighted with a bunny rabbit and so afraid of losing it that taking it home in the car she squeezed it to death with love and lots of parents do that to their children and lots of spouses do it to each other they hold on too hard and so take the life out
of this transient beautifully fragile thing that life is to have it to have life and to have its pleasure you must at the same time let go of it and then you can feel perfectly free to have that pleasure in the most gutsy rolicking earthy lip licking way one's whole being taken over by a kind of undula convulsive uh Ripple which is like the very pulse of of life itself this can happen only if you let go if you are willing to be abandoned it's funny that word abandon we speak of people who are dissolute
as being abandoned but we can also use abandon as the characteristic of a saint a great spiritual book by a Jesuit father is called abandonment to the Divine Pro idence there are people like that who just aren't hung up they are the poor in spirit that is to say they in spiritually are poor in the sense they don't cling on to any property they don't carry burdens around they're free well just that sort of spiritual poverty that let goess is quite essential for the enjoyment of any kind of pleasure at all so the concern of
Buddha as a Young Man the problem he wanted to solve was the problem of human suffering and so he formulated his teaching in a very easy way to remember all those Buddhist scriptures are full of what you might call memonic tricks numbering things in such a way that they're easy to remember and so he proposed he summed up his teaching in the form of what are called the four noble truths and the first one which because it was his main concern was the truth about dukka dukka suffering the next thing that comes up the second
of the Noble Truth truths is about the cause of suffering and this in Sanskrit is called [Music] trishna trishna is related to our word thirst it's very often translated desire that will do better perhaps is craving clinging grasping or even even to use our modern psychological word blocking when for example somebody is blocked and divers and hesitates and doesn't know what to do he is in the strictest Buddhist sense attached he's stuck but a Buddha can't be stuck he cannot be phased he always flows just as water always flows even if you Dam it the
river just just keeps on getting higher and higher and higher until it flows over the dam it's Unstoppable now Buddha said then dukha comes from trishna you all suffer because you cling to the world and you don't recognize that the world is Ana and anatman so then try if you can not to grasp well do you see that that immediately poses a problem because the student who has started off this dialogue with the Buddha then makes various efforts to give up desire upon which he very rapidly discovers that he is Desiring not to desire and
he takes that back to the teacher who says well well well he said of course you are Desiring not to desire and that's of course excessive all I want you to do is to give up Desiring as much as you can don't want to go beyond the point of which you're capable and for this reason Buddhism is called the middle way not only is it the middle way between the extremes of aesthetic discipline and pleasure seeking but is also the middle way in a very subtle sense yes don't desire to give up more desire than
you can and if you find that a problem don't desire to be successful in giving up more desire than you can
