Bhante Sujato left a career as a musician to become a Buddhist monk in 1994. He took higher ordination in Thailand and lived there in forest monasteries and remote hermitages. He spent several years at Bodhinyana Monastery in Western Australia before founding Santi Forest Monastery in New South Wales in 2003. Following Bhante Sujato’s wishes, Santi became a nun’s monastery in 2012, and he returned to live in Bodhinyana. In 2019, Bhante Sujato moved to Sydney to establish Lokanta Vihara (the Monastery at the End of the World) with his long term student, Bhante Akaliko, to explore what it means to follow the Buddha’s teachings in an era of climate change, globalised consumerism, and political turmoil.
Guided meditation of awareness of the messy mind, being aware of consciousness brings fearlessness. Dhamma talk on papañca with reference to The Honey Cake sutta MN18 and Concept and Reality by Ven. Ñāṇananda's analysis of MN18 16.1. How venerable Kaccāna presents a sequence where the self slowly emerges, creating the person who then is beset by papañca; nouns turn to verbs.
Guided meditation on sīlanussati. Dhamma Talk: SN22.1 Nakula's Father. Discussion of Sāriputta's analysis of what is meant by the Buddha's statement on coping with old age: “Even though I am afflicted in body, my mind will be unafflicted.”
Guided mettā meditation. Dhamma Talk: The ghost is not in the machine. The question of robots and the soul. The Buddha's views on the soul versus others at the time e.g. Brahmanism's atta and Jainism's jiva. Understanding things through relations and processes rather than substances or a soul. Self-awareness and purpose in robots, AI.
Guided breath meditation on the ease of thoughts stopping. Dhamma talk on Right Speech in the context of Twitter collapsing, the rise and fall of authoritarians and fraudsters, current large positive changes taking place. How might we use social media with Right Speech.
Guided mettā meditation to develop positive emotions, directed towards self and all beings. Dhamma talk on dependent origination in simple terms. Dependent origination answers the question: How does rebirth happen without a soul? We are neither completely fixed or completely fluid in how we are - we are conditioned; a continuity that connects past, present, and future. The Buddha’s great insight was that everything is conditioned. Daily life, high states of meditation, rebirth, and all kinds of experiences all follow the same processes. Ignorance and craving are the drivers of these processes.
Meditation on the arising of desire, the drivers of thought rather than getting caught in thought. Dhamma talk Part 4 on Satipaṭṭhāna: Principles (dhammā). The 5 hindrances and 7 awakening factors common to all versions of Satipaṭṭhāna. The novelty of this section builds on the previous sections and introduces causality; where the arising of things like desire come from, as well as how they come to end, and how they don't arise again using both observation and inference. Dhamma as natural principles that describe how the world works.
