After leading the group in paying homage and bowing to the Triple Gem, the teacher asked: who felt happy while paying homage to the Buddha? Who felt happy while showing reverence to the Triple Gem? Who felt happy while bowing? If we pay attention in each moment we do these things, we find happiness right there.

Happiness in Every Present Moment

When reciting "Namo tassa bhagavato arahato samma-sambuddhassa," there's no need to rush. Slow down, and let the mind become soft and reverent — happiness arises naturally. The same goes for bowing: don't hurry, bow slowly. If we pay attention in each present moment, we'll find happiness right there. We should recognize that every present moment is the most important time there is. Don't rush through it — learn to understand each moment happily and at ease. Even while listening to a Dhamma talk like this one, consider: is what's being said useful and beneficial to me? Is this something new I can build on in my life?

Why Doing Good Alone Isn't Enough

People cycle endlessly through samsara. Even those who do good, avoid evil, and purify their minds enough to be reborn as devas, Brahmas, or formless Brahmas must still eventually return to the cycle — as hell-beings, hungry ghosts, animals, humans, devas, and Brahmas — endlessly. Because of this endless cycle, the great being made a resolve to become one who fully understands reality, wanting to know why doing good and avoiding evil alone had never freed anyone from samsara. He had to build perfections across twenty incalculable aeons and a hundred thousand great aeons before discovering the truth: a natural force governs all beings. No matter how much good the people of the world do, they still cannot escape samsara, because these forces direct and control them without their even knowing that their lives are being steered by something else.

The Parable of the Baby Turtle: Instinct as Innate Inner Knowledge

The teacher offers the baby turtle as a stand-in for all beings. A baby turtle hatching from its egg has no acquired knowledge and no parents to raise it — it must fend for itself entirely. Yet it scrambles unerringly straight toward the sea without ever losing its way. How does it know that direction leads to the ocean? How does it know it won't drown once it enters the water? How does it know what to eat and how to survive once there? Asking people of every background — Thai, Chinese, Western, Lao, Indian — everyone gives the same answer: instinct. The Thai word for instinct combines "birth-origin" and "inner knowledge" — meaning knowledge innate from birth itself. Wherever a baby turtle is born, this same nature has guided it for hundreds, thousands, even millions of years.

But then comes the harder question: if turtles live by instinct, why does that same instinct let some die young, some in middle age, and some in old age? No two people answer this the same way. But the Buddha, who fully understood the world, answered that this natural force is real, but comes in three kinds: wholesome nature (kusala dhamma), unwholesome nature (akusala dhamma), and indeterminate nature (abyakata dhamma).

The Three Natures: Wholesome, Unwholesome, and Indeterminate

The wholesome nature aims to give people knowledge and understanding, happiness, success, fulfillment, rightness and goodness, good culture, and all the knowledge that exists in the world — whether in business, careers, or education at every school and university — all of it is the result of wholesome dhamma.

The unwholesome nature, by contrast, aims to destroy people and all beings utterly — and even after death, it doesn't relent, dragging them down into rebirth as hell-beings, hungry ghosts, or animals, imprisoned there for a very long time. The indeterminate nature takes neither the good nor the bad side, simply drifting along, squandering precious resources — time, physical vitality, and wealth — carelessly, producing neither benefit nor harm.

The Proportions of the Three Natures Within Each Person

Every life carries a mix of all three natures, in different proportions — some people have more unwholesomeness, some more indeterminate drift, some more wholesomeness. Someone dominated by unwholesomeness gets steered toward vice — drink, drugs, gambling — creating trouble for themselves and others, whether rich or poor. When the unwholesome proportion dominates, it can overpower a person completely: a wealthy person under its sway causes harm no matter how much they have, because it's never enough; a poor person under its sway may turn to robbery instead of honest livelihood, unable to be their true self.

By contrast, someone with a large wholesome proportion, even if poor, holds themselves together — waking to chant and pay respects, meditating and radiating loving-kindness, offering alms even with little to give, chanting again in the evening, content with what they have. A wealthy person with a large wholesome proportion uses their wealth to support others and set a good example for the world, as if the impulse to do good simply arises on its own. Someone dominated by the indeterminate nature is steered toward spending on entertainment, expensive goods, clothes, and furniture — because that nature has no interest in generosity, so it directs resources to be spent until nothing is left to help anyone, preventing merit from ever forming.

The Inner Voice Isn't Us: The Enraged Man and the Psychiatric Patient

All three natures use inner voices and feelings to control beings — we mistake those voices and thoughts for our own. The teacher tells of a man at work who gets a call to rush home; when he arrives, he finds his family's longtime rivals have stormed in and smashed everything. Furious, an inner voice screams, "Kill them!" Another voice holds him back: "You can't — you'd go to prison, and what would happen to your family?" Once he composes himself, the first voice suggests gathering allies to handle it instead. The good voice warns: if you use force and someone dies, the other side will gather their own allies for revenge — how could life ever be peaceful again?

The teacher then asked the audience: hasn't everyone heard these same two voices since childhood? Everyone agreed. This proves neither voice is truly "us" — yet both genuinely exist within us: the wholesome, the unwholesome, and the indeterminate. The indeterminate voice is the familiar one during idle stretches of life — suggesting a meal, a coffee shop, hanging out with friends, watching a show. We believe we're deciding for ourselves, but in truth, something is presenting options for us to simply go along with, feeling as though it were our own idea.

The teacher also described a patient whose inner voice grew so loud he couldn't sleep — chattering and provoking him day and night, like a creditor relentlessly demanding payment. Even in the bathroom, the shower, at meals, or trying to sleep, the pressure never let up, until he finally sought a psychiatrist. The doctor told him: don't accept those voices — they aren't yours. The patient replied that he already knew that, but the voices had grown too loud to control. The doctor had no choice but to prescribe medication. This is what has controlled all beings all along — even families, children, and parents get provoked into conflict by these same voices, and children, tragically, are caught up in this confusion without understanding it at all.

There are two kinds of illness: physical and mental. Physical illness is visible — we can see someone lying down, feel their fever. Mental illness is invisible — the person can still eat, sleep, talk, and function normally, yet inside they are churning with confusion, pressured and squeezed. No one truly knows how much they suffer inside, hidden by ignorance that convinces them all of it is simply "them" thinking, speaking, and acting. When we later act wrongly and regret it, that regret itself is evidence that an unwholesome force was steering us from behind the scenes.

The Mechanism of Dependent Origination: The Man Who Lied to His Wife to Drink With Friends

The teacher explains the mechanism of dependent origination (paticca-samuppada) through the story of a man who promised his wife and children he'd stay home and play with them over the weekend. While they were happily together, a friend pulled up outside on a motorbike, honking and gesturing an invitation to go drinking. He looked back at his wife and children. One inner voice said: don't let your friend down, he made the effort to come — you have to go. Another said: no, you promised your wife and kids you'd stay home.

He became the judge presiding over two competing lawyers. The friend's advocate brought up vivid memories — years of loyalty through thick and thin since childhood. The family's advocate had less to draw on, relying only on love and inner conviction. The more practiced, more resourceful advocate — the friend's side — won, fueled by craving stirred up through old familiar sights, tastes, smells, sounds, and the atmosphere of past gatherings, until the moment of decision arrived.

Body Within Body, Becoming, Birth, Aging, and Death — and the Sealed Sphere of Demerit

The instant he decided, clinging (upadana) arose. A tiny black speck of defilement entered his body and shattered like an atomic blast throughout it — pitch black, invisible to human eyes, but visible through the dhamma-eye of the Dhammakaya. This black dimension formed a realm of unwholesomeness (a "becoming," or bhava). Once that realm formed to house a body, a "body within the body" appeared at the center of his being — in this case, the body of a hell-being. With that body came suffering — the particular anguish of a hell-being — along with a continuous stream of demerit flowing in. Once that body appeared, clinging to it took over as the one now directing the human body.

From that point, he was controlled by this hell-being body within him, compelled to lie to his wife, compelled to go drinking no matter what. One wrongdoing led to a second, the second to a third, the third to a fourth, fifth, sixth — piling up as far as it could go. This is why, at times, we watch relatives or friends caught in situations where even a child can see what's wrong, yet they themselves seem blind to it — because they have lost their freedom entirely, controlled by this body within them, driven to repeat the same wrong again and again.

Birth (jati), in the Dhamma sense, occurs the moment this inner body appears — when the black particle shatters into a "becoming." Once born as this hell-being body, it persists continuously through that activity until, eventually, the body ages. When it becomes, in Luang Pu's words, "fully sated," it can no longer go on and withdraws — death appears. Once the activity is completed, a reward follows: the sealed pattern of demerit. All of it becomes locked into a fully "completed" sphere of demerit, made up of the stream of demerit drawn in continuously throughout the activity. At the center of this sphere sits a sphere of misfortune, whose purpose is to destroy one's assets — physical beauty, wealth, virtues, followers, status, honor, and happiness. This completed pattern is stored within the dhamma sphere, to be placed on the timeline of one's life — bearing fruit in the near future, within this very life, and in the distant future, across future lifetimes.

How Should His Wife Hold Her Mind?

Someone asked how the man's wife should hold her own mind in this situation. The teacher answered that it depends equally on which nature is steering her in that moment. If the unwholesome side seizes the moment first, an inner voice will insist he broke his promise. If the wholesome side leads, she might think he must have had something important come up. If her own unwholesome proportion is large, she won't let it go — she'll want to make an issue of it, and since both sides are now dominated by unwholesomeness, conflict follows. If the husband's inner hell-being body is at a particularly dark level, it could even escalate to physical violence. All of this arises from the natures operating behind the scenes — meaning we cannot really intervene directly in someone else's situation. Only the wholesome dhamma already within each person can help them.

If a wife's wholesome proportion is large, that wholesomeness will guide her to hold the right frame of mind. No matter how badly her husband behaves, her own wholesome nature will resolve things on her side, comforting her, helping her let go and find the right perspective — that is the role of the wholesome force within. But if a person has never studied the Dhamma, never cultivated good conscience across past lives, it becomes far harder for them to find the right frame of mind. Someone who has habitually lived close to wholesomeness in the past will find that wholesomeness familiar and ready to act.

Alone, Yet Never Truly Alone

The Buddha said, as recorded in the scriptures, that "one who lives alone lives as if with a companion" — meaning an inner voice is always present, always guiding. Even sitting alone in a room, a voice will strike up conversation. If it is the wholesome voice, it speaks of what is right and good. If unwholesome, it criticizes this person or that, dragging one grievance after another endlessly, or lures us toward eating, entertainment, and idle pleasure that leaves us feeling hollow afterward.

The wholesome side needs a clear anchor point for the mind. In walking meditation, for instance, we're taught: "right foot stepping," "left foot stepping" — keeping the mind fixed on a clear point, because merit flows wherever the mind is anchored. Or we anchor at the rising and falling of the abdomen, or the in-and-out breath, or at the body's center while reciting "samma-araham, samma-araham." For someone who has never studied the Dhamma at all, the wholesome side will simply steer their thoughts toward whatever is right and good in ordinary life — remembering someone's kindness, or resting the mind in a pleasant, comfortable mood. By contrast, if the unwholesome side is leading, it will manufacture grievances even when alone — even picking a fight with a tree or a blade of grass. The indeterminate nature, meanwhile, steers the mind toward idle, meaningless matters that carry neither benefit nor harm.

Energy Flowing Continuously, Even While Asleep

All three natures aim to draw in the energy that drives their own system. The wholesome side draws us toward right and good thoughts to pull in pure, meritorious energy. The unwholesome side draws us toward grievance and distress to pull in demerit that powers its own decline-driving system. Our lives are never free from this flow of energy — whether asleep, awake, standing, walking, sitting, or lying down. Even while asleep, energy continues to flow: whatever state of mind we fall asleep with is the same state we wake with. If that state is unwholesome, demerit is drawn in; if wholesome, pure merit is drawn in. This energy always drives the system matching its own nature — unwholesome energy fuels the unwholesome system, meritorious energy fuels the wholesome one — purifying the mind and elevating our inner elements, increasing the proportion of wholesomeness within us while weakening the unwholesome and indeterminate forces. As unwholesomeness weakens, turmoil lessens; as indeterminate drift weakens, meaninglessness lessens. This is the truth of life we need to understand: it is happening to us at every single moment.

The Sphere of Merit: Refined Treasure That Draws In Coarse Wealth

We live under the law of karma, which operates ceaselessly. Even our being here, at this retreat, happens automatically, arranged by forces already at work, so that we can dwell in a dhamma-conducive realm where a continuous stream of merit flows through us. Merit takes the form of a round, clear, radiant sphere, containing happiness and purity within it. Happiness doesn't simply arise on its own — it must come from a source that releases a stream of happiness. Every life encounters problems and obstacles; the pure energy within the sphere of merit is exactly what releases a stream to dissolve those obstacles.

The various forms of wealth and fortune that arise in life come from the refined treasures held at the center of that sphere of merit — physical beauty, material wealth, virtues, followers, status, honor, happiness, and even the fruits of the path to Nibbana, all complete and whole at the center of the merit sphere. This refined treasure attracts the coarse wealth of the world — the kind found in people's wallets, circulating from one hand to another, present in every tree and blade of grass, in crops and grain, even in brick, stone, and sand. Whoever holds more refined treasure within acts like a magnet, drawing more of this coarse worldly wealth toward themselves. This is why people of old, upon seeing someone wealthy, would say, "Ah, there's someone with merit" — because the sphere of merit within them has grown large, and the refined treasure within it has grown accordingly. The merit within us also sustains our very state as a human being, letting us sit here at ease and in comfort. But where demerit dominates, the sphere of misfortune generates illness, preventing peace and rest, forcing a person to lie ill at home or in a hospital — because the sphere of misfortune is itself the source of affliction. The mechanism of human life, in the end, runs entirely on this automatic inner machinery.