Stories about inhibitions
2 Buddhist wisdom stories about inhibitions from Buddhist teachers, each linked to the original talk.
- Drunken karaoke on Christmas night in PenangStory · Ajahn Brahm
In brief: Teaching a retreat in Penang, Ajahn Brahm is kept awake on Christmas night by a karaoke party across the road. Fine, he says — but by midnight, drunk, the singers think they're…
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karaoke party. My god, that was suffering. And I've been teaching all day, I was tired, I wanted to rest and people were singing this karaoke. And if ever you… that’s the first time I've heard karaoke. What you do first of all – you have to be drunk first of all. And then they think they can sing like Frank Sinatra or like, you know, Barbra Streisand or something – and they can't! And it's out of tune, they forget the words, it's screaming, and it's… If you're drunk, you don't notice it, but for sober people like me, like monks, it was such suffering! And it didn't finish ‘till about one o'clock, I forgot what the time it was, and then I get up early in the morning so I didn't get much sleep that night. But I realized that if ever… the worst type of hell in the whole world will be the karaoke hell
- The actuary they called “Flash”Story · Ajahn Brahm
In brief: Visiting England, Ajahn Brahm meets a Cambridge friend he hasn't seen for 40 years — now a highly respected actuary, among the top in Europe. He reminds him of his student…
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a couple of years ago I met one of my friends when I was visiting England. He's an old friend from Cambridge days. Now that was about 40 years now. Now he's this highly respected businessman. He's an actuary. An actuary is this mathematical geniuses who work out just the odds of you know falling off a building. It works out the the the probabilities for insurance companies. And he was one of the top if not the top actuary in the whole of Europe. And so when I met him we hadn't seen each other 40 years. A highly successful very sort of good man. And I reminded him of the nickname we had for him at Cambridge which was Flash. And the reason we called him Flash was because one night at one of the parties we had he did get drunk. He went into the toilets and he came out with nothing on. That's why we called him Flash. And he said, "Better not talk too much about that Ajahn Brahm.