I'll start by talking about a couple of books Rosemary and I read last time we were staying with Rosemary's mother. One of them was called: "Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley. I found it in the library and brought it home so Rosemary's mother could read it. If you haven't read it, it's a futuristic story of Earth where human beings are able to basically replicate the heaven realm but only for sixty years. Once they get to be an adult they can maintain the perfect twenty year old body until they are sixty years old by taking a certain drug (I think it was called "soma"). By taking a certain drug, they can keep their body perfectly that way until they are sixty and then they die really quickly. The body ages very quickly, which is typical of the descriptions of the heaven realms.
So a lot of human beings today are actually working in that direction, right? Thee are movie stars that have had fifteen face lifts and things, or every time a new wrinkle appears, they rush to the doctor to get rid of it forever. People are definitely trying to hide away from Dukkha, they're definitely trying to have lots of pleasantness and avoid everything that could stimulate any problem. Air conditioning, central heating, have them both and there's no mosquitoes in the house. I really feel a lot of Compassion for Westerners in a cold climate trying to practice the Dhamma: they don't get to work with mosquitoes. They don't get that wonderful opportunity to work with mosquitoes.
Once I did a long retreat in America in the middle of winter. The air was so stuffy in the rooms that I always had my bedroom window open, even though it was really cold. In the Meditation Hall there were a minority of students who wanted a window kept open, but the majority didn't want it. So that going on there. I went outside to do my walking meditation every time, no matter how cold it was. It would take me five minutes to put on all the clothes, because I didn't have the right stuff. I didn't have feather down jackets, I didn't have winter underwear, I came straight from Australia with, you know, blue jeans and a jumper, etc.
They had a clothes' donation section, and I had to raid it! I put on three pairs of pants and sweaters. I found a little kid's t-shirt, I cut two eye holes and put it over my head! But out of one hundred people doing the retreat, ninety five of them were in the basement during the walking meditation. They never went outside. I'm telling you it was cold but I went outside anyway.
They gave us big mattresses in the rooms, I came in on the first day and I couldn't figure out how to get rid of it. I had a roommate at the beginning of the retreat so I couldn't just put it on the other side of the room, there was his big mattress. Thank goodness somebody else knew what to do, I saw one out in the hall. Fine, I put mine out in the hall. Pretty soon somebody else who wanted two, took it.
There is what we call in the West, "the upper middle path". It's too comfortable. We're not working enough with Dukkha. Now that's a little bit of a sideline but this has some relevance for us, right? If it's too cold and you're going to need heating of some sort, fine. The American president in the late nineteen seventies, his name was Carter, was a little bit of an ascetic president. He said, "Let's cut down on the energy before it runs out. We had fifty five mile an hour speed limits on the road (which is less than ninety kilometers), that was it. Every freeway, that was it. He lowered the temperature in the White House and the Capitol building to around sixty eight which meant: Oh my gosh, you had to wear a sweater instead of short sleeves in the middle of winter! He lowered the temperature and he wasn't re-elected. The people didn't want it, it was considered harsh conditions (but you know it wasn't that harsh).
So you have to do certain things to make your life okay. But to the extreme of being so comfortable that you avoid all Dukkha, be careful about that. It may be that you're going the wrong way, you get what the Thais call too "sabai, sabai" and you forget. And in those heaven realms, indeed, supposedly most of the people in them forget.
In the typical heaven realms according Buddhism, people forget about Dukkha. Everything is so pleasant, anything they want they can produce instantly, they can eat whatever food they like, pleasant music whatever type they want, etc. They forget because there's no Dukkha until they die. The last five minutes or so of their life, all of a sudden everything rots. For those of you who don't know, according to what I have read, the first thing that happens is that the body smells unpleasant. Now imagine having a beautiful body for fifty thousand years and it smells beautiful, like perfume. And everything you smell smells like beautiful perfume or flowers. Everybody else smells beautiful and you've never smelt a single unpleasant smell in fifty thousand years. When you die though, all of a sudden your body starts to smell unpleasant and there's this, well you can imagine what it would be like. Ugh, ugh, but you can't get away from it can you? If you're there with friends, who are also fifty thousand year old people, they smell you, they don't want to be around you, you stink. Which means that you are left to die totally alone, absolutely nobody will be there for you and they will even run away from you. That's the heaven realm story for the beginning of the way they die. First they stink, they can't stand themselves and their friends run away. They're left totally alone, totally in fear, afraid and shocked.
That's the problem of getting carried away with being too comfortable. A lot of people today can't handle even the littlest pains, can't handle one mosquito bite. Fortunately you guys are being taught ways to work with mosquitoes! You've been given a wonderful opportunity to work with mosquitoes. You're given crummy beds - "crummy", interesting word, isn't it?. Rosemary and I were sleeping on the floor on half inch thickness mats before we were even Buddhists. For thirty years we've been on the floor, and to us it's beautiful, it's wonderful. So the word crummy is interesting isn't it?
Let's get back to if you're going to build a home, don't make it so comfortable that you forget about everything. Don't waste your money on of a lot of stuff you don't need. If you really don't need some furniture, don't get it. If you need some furniture, get simple furniture. If you don't really need any air conditioning or heating (this climate really doesn't need it), fine, then you don't have to get it. Don't make it so comfortable that you forget about working with the practice in difficult situations. Make it comfortable enough but not too comfortable. You do need some sort of bed to sleep on, you do need blankets. So you get yourself a blanket or whatever. It's up to you individually, each one of you. Make it so that you're not on a suffering trip to make more pain, but just don't go as far as making so comfortable that you are trying to not get any pain or discomfort at all.