In silence, you find inner peace and wisdom. Meditation is a central part of Buddhist teachings, teaching people to find out truths for themselves and to find ways to cope with the challenges of life. Meditation is about having insight into the big picture, about understanding and realizing the truths of life for yourself. When you become one pointed in time and focus in on the silence, you have all the time in the world because you’re free from measuring time in a point you can’t measure. Too much happiness in life is based on things which are unreliable and could change at any time, so it’s not really happiness. True happiness comes from within – unconditional happiness. Delusion is thinking things we take to be real are actually not real. When we meditate we often go into the center of things to find the origin of things. In meditation, you will get deep bliss, and the ebbs and flows of that bliss will allow you to explore your mind deeply. You may get memories of past lives, as well as a deep understanding of the law of karma. Buddhist meditation leads to enlightenment and a better understanding of the law of karma. You don’t need to spend a lot of time in deep meditation to experience past lives, but you do need to still be present and have power over your mind to ask about them. The point is that if we don’t know what timelessness is, then we’ve got no perspective of this thing which we call time. And when we’ve got no perspective, we get ruled by time. Getting other perspectives and going into timelessness provides that other perspective, then when we go back into the time world, we see it in a completely different way.

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This dhamma talk was originally recorded using a low quality MP3 to save on file size (because internet connections were slow back then – remember dialup?) on 14th February 2003. It has now been remastered and published by the Everyday Dhamma Network, and will be of interest to his many fans. If you like the Ajahn Brahm Podcast, you may also like the Treasure Mountain Podcast and / or the Forest Path Podcast which are also produced by the Everyday Dhamma Network.

These talks by Ajahn Brahm have been recorded and made available for free distribution by the Buddhist Society of Western Australia. You can support the Buddhist Society of Western Australia by pledging your support via their Patreon page.