it's not just, as they used to say, not all beer and skittles for monks. [laughs]

No beer, no skittles at all. It's at a monastery down at Serpentine, I'm

still teaching the other monks, and the novices, the anagarikas and also the

sisters from Dhammasara. I have been traveling a little bit

at the very beginning of the rains retreat to Sydney for a conference of psychologists.

And at the end for another conference in mental health in Singapore, and in the

middle doing something good for Australia with a big conference with all the

leaders of Australia, trying to give some good spiritual vibes to the people

who run our country. But in all of these things, one of the reasons they invite

say a monk to these things is actually because of the positive attitude and the

vibes which a monk gives.

I was contemplating at a talk which I gave recently that in psychology, in life

we're always asked to have a positive attitude towards things, towards

whatever happens in life, whether it's an economic crash or whether it's the

death of a loved one, or a separation in a relationship and all the ups and

downs of live. We all say that having a positive attitude helps enormously, and

of course there's plenty of evidence, just what that does to sickness and to

tragedy in life.

But what I want to focus on this evening is how to be positive, because sometimes

it gets really frustrating when people tell you to be positive, and you're not.

It makes you feel even worse when you're having a hard time they say "Come on,

be positive," and you can't even do that right. So, this evening's talk is "How

to have a positive mind," and the results of that attitude change in life.

Of course, you all know what's coming. The positive attitude all comes from

like training your mind, especially in slowing down, release the positive

energy. To understand that, there's a classic story and some of you may have

heard the story before but I usually tell it to milk it and squeeze different

understandings from the same story. One of those times of life which gave an

experience which changed much of the way you looked at things.

I noticed the experience of walking up the hill to Bodhinyana Monastery in

Serpentine. Now, many of you have been down there, hopefully some of you will

come down on Sunday for our Katina Ceremony. We bought that 25 years ago, 26,

I think now, and for about nine years, I'd gone up, and down, the road to the

monastery, always in a car, in some sort of vehicle. It was like one of those

days we had a couple of days ago, just warm spring morning.

I remember just coming back from some sort of appointment, and feeling just so

positive, so energized, and having plenty of time, I told the driver, "Drop me

off at the foot of the hill, I'm going to walk up today." Not for exercise so

much, just for enjoying the morning, I had plenty of time. So, I started

walking from the southwest highway, up Kingsbury Drive, to the gate of

Bodhinyana Monastery.

As I started walking I got very surprised. Actually, it was a shock. As I

looked around me, I could not recognize where I was. That hillside looked

totally different from what I remembered seeing looking through the window of a

car. It was totally different. I was seeing things which I never knew were

there. What I saw had more detail, had more depth of colour. It was just

basically more beautiful.

Of course that surprised me, and not being in any rush, not being in a hurry, I

just stood still. And as I stood still, the whole hillside changed again. It was like

evolving. As a monk you're not on any sort of psychotropic substances, you

don't take alcohol, although, during our rains retreat, somebody offered the

monks some chocolate cake, and, fortunately, before we ate it, one of the monks

looked at the little writing on the cover, saying it had alcohol in it!

Fortunately, we stopped in time, because sometimes you're not sure when you get

some chocolate cake sometimes they put the alcohol in there just for the

taste and then they cook it and all the alcohol goes, it doesn't matter. But we didn't

know whether it was put in before or afterwards, and so we decided not to take it.

We gave it to one of our visitors who was very happy to be a guinea pig [laughter],

Like a food taster. And when he came back the next week he said "That was a lot of alcohol."

[laughter]

It hadn't evaporated, it was a very good job we were very careful. Otherwise,

we may have gone to our monastery just after lunch in a rains retreat

and seeing all the monks singing and dancing and goodness knows what else.

[laughter] Which would not have done very much for our reputation, so you've got to be

very careful. So we don't take such things. We are sort of sober, mindful,

alert. So here I was having an experience, like sometimes you have in life,

when things become really weird and they start changing in front of your eyes.

But what had happened was, what I was seeing, it had more detail, more

information.

That hillside, you started to see little flowers, started to see rocks, and

just the shape of the rocks and the lichen on the rocks. And, just look at the

tree barks, and the whole tree bark was just amazing, beautiful. What was also

strange was that the colours, the colours of everything you saw, started to grow

more intense, more rich, more deep and more beautiful. The whole thing was

exquisite.

Of course, when a monk has experiences like that, we don't just enjoy, we sort-of

contemplate afterwards what the heck was going on. And I decided to analyze it

through science, and it became quite clear to me that, when you see things,

sight is a chemical reaction on the back of your eye, on the retina.

What happens with most people is that when they see something, they move on to

another image almost immediately. So, the image on the back of your eye doesn't

have time to properly form, and the colors don't come out. They're just maybe

10 percent of what's there, and the detail is all smeared, because the image

does not have time.

When I walked, I was going slower. The images on the back of my eye, the light

had more time, so you could see a much more full picture with more detail, and

the colours were deeper because they had more time to manifest.

It was just a simple physiology of sight which was occurring.

And, of course, when I stood absolutely still, only then did my eyes have all

the time they needed to form a full picture. And for the colours, which were out

there all the time, to be fully represented in the image on the back of my eye.

And for my mind to have time to explore it fully, to appreciate it, and to

taste it 100 percent.

Of course, I realized a very good simile of why people don't have a positive

attitude in life, why they don't understand life. Because, too many people

live life as if they're in a fast car, looking through the window, always going

on to the next thing, and pretty quickly, too. So, what we're experiencing now

doesn't have a time, we can't feel it fully. We're about to feel it, we get

five percent or one percent of the sensation, and we have to move on to something else.

Sights, tastes, feelings, everything, we don't have time for it to fully form.

But when we do go slower, when we do move more gently through life, when we get

out of the fast cars of life and just go on bicycles -- but, bicycles can be

too damn fast. Get off the bikes and walk. Don't even walk, but walk slowly.

What happens is, you find that your senses, at last, have time, and the mind

has got the opportunity to explore whatever comes into your senses. You see

things more fully. You get more information, more detail.

The surprising thing, at first, for me -- but, now I understand that this is

part of this experience -- that what you see, what you feel, what you taste,

what you know, becomes more and more beautiful. Ordinary grass becomes this

green which is like alive, vibrant and rich. It's an intense green. But, when you're

going through the window of a car, it's pastel, simply because you haven't

given it time.

When I had experiences like that, of course I realised that that's basically

what happens when we slow down in meditation, when you go on a retreat or you

just take time out in life, or you learn to move more slowly through your day

whenever you can, and you do have many opportunities. What happens is, you feel

more, you get more information, and what you see becomes very rich.

It's the positive psychology, because sometimes that hillside might be just,

oh, not enough trees, not enough grass. It's just all... just Aussie bush. It

should be like some garden, like some Japanese garden or an English garden or

whatever - no. When you really slow down and stop, you can see the beauty there.

Now, imagine you could slow down and stop and see the beauty in some other

things in life, which were going too fast to truly appreciate.

For example, in my fortunate life as a monk, I don't just hang out with prime ministers like in

this place in Hayman Island. Sometimes I hang out with murderers and rapists

when you go to prisons. It's amazing as a monk. You see just such a range of

human beings.

When you go and see rapists, murderers, thieves, some people who have done some

terrible, terrible, terrible crimes, it's amazing what happens. Because you

know how to go slow, you can look at a person and just like that hillside, you

see the grass becomes so beautiful. See the rocks, you see features in there

which you've never noticed before. You see just the bark on the trees. The

tessellated texture becomes exquisite.

So, you look at someone who's murdered a child, and you see things there which

most people will never notice. You see their exquisite beauty.

That's a great test. It's easy to see the beauty in the hillside. But to see such beauty in

such people locked up in jail for many years is more of a tough ask.

What happens when you do that? When you have such a positive attitude towards

life, you can see beauty in the most unexpected places. What happens is, and

it's happened many times, so often that I notice this is really useful.

That prisoner, that murderer, that rapist, they feel that someone is respecting them.

And that's an amazing change for someone who's done such an act. The

person comes in to where they've been confined, to their place of

imprisonment, and it is a mental torture, and they respect it.

And it's such a strange experience for them to have someone who looks at them

and sees something beautiful and good that they too start to change the way

they look at themselves. If I can see something in them, and they respect me

for being honest and truthful, then they think maybe that such beauty does

exist in them. And they start looking for it themselves.

The murderer starts to see an other part of their being. The beautiful part.

When that starts to grow and prosper, you find that when they do get released,

they are healed. The reason, the sickness, the cruelty, whatever it was, that

pain which allowed them to do such a thing, is now gone. And in this life and in

future lives, they will never do such a thing again. It's amazing what happens.

This whole attitude was reinforced when last weekend I was teaching at a

conference of the Institute for Mental Health in Singapore. Those from

Singapore, a few here, the old Woodbridge Hospital, which now they've moved and

renamed because maybe it had a bad association with mental sickness.