Start with the broad principle that life is something which can and must be developed. Some people don’t think that they are able to develop themselves, and so they think they can depend on some god to do the developing for them. This is very mistaken according to Buddhist principles. We understand that we can develop, and we must develop, by ourselves.

This life is something that is given to us by nature.

We can see this life as being similar to a basic capital which is given to us to invest. We invest this life in some kind of business, and we carry out that business in order to earn a profit. If we understand life this way, then we can understand the importance of developing this life.

Why do we talk about life as a kind of business? We use this terminology because we have the possibility of making the highest profit, receiving the highest value and benefit from this life.

If we do our investment properly and learn how to make the most profit, and receive the highest value from life, then we can call it a business.

The idea is to make one’s life as a kind of business until one gets the most out of it. We have to do something so that there is increasing value in life, so that we get the highest returns of life. So it is necessary for us to develop this life. What is the benefit or result of this business of life? First result is a life that is cool and peaceful. Second, a life that is beneficial and useful for everyone. If we realize these two results, then we can say we have received the highest possible profit from our lives.

To have a life that is happy and peaceful and beneficial for everyone concerned ought to be enough, shouldn’t it? This should be sufficient for us.

But now days people don’t seem to be satisfied with a peaceful life that is beneficial to everyone. Instead, of settling for a peaceful life, they’re interested in all kinds of luxuries, and all kinds of materialism and consumerism.

People aren’t interested a truly calm, cool, peaceful happiness, so they go and develop all kinds of materialistic pursuits and activities.

All this development – chasing after material, sensual kinds of pleasure and trying to accumulate possessions - is merely material. And then this kind of development completely misses the point of what our lives are all about. So then we can never really find a true peace and happiness.

This genuine peaceful bliss is neither “positive” or “negative” - but nobody is interested in such a thing. All people want is positive, positive, positive. So they can’t understand what real happiness and peace is about.

But here [in this monastery] we’re most interested in the kind of real happiness that is free of both “positive” and “negative”.

This is the kind of happiness that we can understand, we can discover, through the practice of mindfulness with breathing.

Please be interested in the meaning of the words “positive” and “negative.”

Positive excites, stimulates, bubbles, the mind. Negative deflates, depresses the mind. The positive leads to making us happy, while the negative leads to sadness and sorrow. Neither of these are peaceful and neither are true happiness. Both “positive” and “negative” are the opposite of being at peace.

We can take the mind itself as the basic principle, the mind which is neither positive or negative. This means the mind that neither likes the positive nor hates the negative – the mind that is not caught in either one – this “free mind” is truly at peace and is genuinely happy.

Anapanasati Bhavana - the “cultivation of mindfulness with breathing” - will help you know the mind that is neither positive nor negative.

Anapanasati Bhavana can help us have a mind that is pure. It can help us have a mind that is free of positive and negative, free of any egoistic feelings, free of any sense of “I” or “mine” .

Anapanasati, mindfulness of breathing, can help us realize the truth of “not self” – that everything in our lives is not really a self. So it helps us give up the feelings and delusions of “I” and “mine”.

But now we don’t take the mind to be the basic fact, the primary issue.
Instead we take “I”, “me”, “myself” – the ego – to be the primary reality and then act from an ego-centric position.

When this happens the mind has been deceived, the mind has been tricked and misunderstands that the mind is caught up in a delusion, in a deception of an “I”. This mind that is trapped with an ego view is a mind that cannot be developed. So instead of getting caught in this illusion, go straight for the mind itself. Don’t get sidetracked by ego. Take the mind as the basic primary issue, because this will enable us to develop correctly.

We need to be free of all egoistic concept whatsoever. That means that this “we” we talk about has to be an “we” that is not trapped into egoistic perception. This gives rise to a rather strange sentence, that “we need to have a we that is not we”. A “we that is not we” has nothing to do with egoistic concepts and delusions.

There is the “we” that is associated with egoistic concepts, and then there is the “we” that is not associated with any egoistic concepts. These two kinds of “we” are so different – they’re more different than opposites. The “we” that is free of egoistic concepts is a mind that is pure, a mind by itself. A mind that is intelligent, open, free. The “we” that is caught up in egoistic concepts is a mind that is foolish, deceived, a mind that is filled with selfishness and brings about all kinds of foolish and selfish acts. The difference between these two kinds of “we” is immense and you need to understand the difference.

This “we” that is full of egoistic concepts is the “we” that we’ve got sitting right here now. The “we” that is free of egoistic concepts is the “we” we will have sometime later. This “we” that has no egoistic concepts is what will happen when we have developed to the fullest extent, if we practice Dhamma to its fullest….

This phrase “we which is not we” is something difficult to listen to. Still, give it total attention to understand what we mean. We’re talking about this mind, pure mind, which is of great importance.

The “we which is we” is the “we” of ignorance. The “we which is not we” is the genuine “we” – the “we” of wisdom.

This “we” that we talk about doesn’t really exist. There is nothing which is “us” or “our” but this is the nature of language in our world. Because of our ignorance we don’t understand the inherent falsehood and limitations of these words “we” and “our” and “us” and so we are deceived by them and think there really is a “we” which is “we”. We believe in these words too much. We must understand how language works so we won’t be tricked by it, not to believe everything that we hear.

We ought to understand where this “we” comes from. This is a misunderstanding, a lack of knowledge, a wrong view, being deceived. This comes from upadana, grasping at things in a foolish way.

When we have sensual experience in life, which is a basic part of life, we see something, we experience something, and this is a rather crude and coarse stimulation of the mind.

When the mind misunderstands our experiences and what we see and hear, it takes these things to be “our” or “mine” and so there arises this foolish clinging to things, this stupid attachment.

We don’t see things the way they really are, and mistake them for “we”. Really there is just a kind of experience, a certain sensitivity of the mind. But then we misunderstand this and are deceived into a foolish belief into a “we” and “ours”. Through the process of experiencing sights sounds, smells and so on, these various experiences have a kind of feeling color to them – some pleasant, and unpleasant – and from these feelings there arises a desire or want, depending on a kind of feeling.

The mind wants something. Then once there is this wanting, then there develops a sense of the “we” who desires, the desirer, the wanter. This idea of “we” or “I” that desires, is just an illusion. It wasn’t there in the first place. It didn’t exit from the beginning. But because of these various developments there arose this illusion, image, picture, belief, identify of “I”.

It didn’t exist from the start.

It is concocted, a hallucination we created.