• Fake Value is Personal Desire: this brings you suffering. Why? Personal desire is rooted in greed; greed makes you a slave to that power: getting stressed because you don’t have enough possessions, trying hard to acquire them, being afraid of losing them. By contrast, wisdom and compassion do not bring you suffering because they take you away from greed, hate and stupidity: they bring nothing negative.
• Fake Value is the Three Poison consciousness. True Value is the Four Eternal Hearts.
• The True Value of life is to develop a true heart; true heart is the Buddha heart. The Buddha heart is complete care, complete kindness, complete joy, and complete freedom, all in a wise way.
• True Value is the understanding that everything is a changing illusion. You cannot hold anything. Understanding this will help you to develop wisdom and compassion. When you hold onto personal emotion, you bring suffering to yourself and others. You can’t be the Four Eternal Hearts while holding onto these emotions.
• If you understand the essence, then you will be in line with the truth of life. If you don’t understand it, then you live in the fake, personal view.
• If you develop the ability to release your suffering, that is wisdom. If you share this ability with others, that is compassion. Developing wisdom and compassion is the True Value. The Fake Value is to limit yourself to a narrow, personal view, and to make temporary things important. True Value is from many angles; it is eternal, so take it lightly.
• True Value is the opportunity to develop eternally. Fake Value is to develop only for this life. Life is the teacher of True Value. Ego is the teacher of Fake Value.
• True Value is to understand the system of life and develop the Four Eternal Hearts. Fake Value is to develop temporary things from a personal, greedy, ego, possessive life. You should develop your body to have perfect ability for pure kindness, care, joy, and freedom. If you develop your business (Fake Value) only to provide yourself with enough money and time that you can show kindness, care, joy, and freedom to yourself and others (the Four Eternal Hearts, wisdom, and compassion) then it is in a spiritual direction (True Value). Being excessively ambitious will give you stress and damage your psychology.
• True Value is a sure Will to get out of Illusion Being/reincarnation. Fake Value is to be lost in illusion. Once you find an eternal direction, reincarnation will stop.
• Buddha once went to a farmer to ask for food. Asking for food was a way for him to connect to people; in return, people could ask for help to learn Spirits.
  One farmer said rudely, “Why should I give you food? I work hard to grow food for everyone, but you do nothing.”
  Buddha replied, “I teach people to understand and develop true kindness, to avoid doing bad things, and to always do good things.”
  The farmer heard this and laughed, “Who needs your teaching? Everyone from 3-year-olds to 88-year-olds knows this! Why is this special?”
  Buddha smiled and said, “Yes you’re right, everybody knows this, but nobody does it.”
  The farmer looked at Buddha’s body language, pure gentleness, kindness, calmness, and lack of ego; then he realised how egotistical he was being, so he bowed to Buddha and said, “Please teach me. How can I follow this wisdom? Knowing is one thing, being able to follow it is another.” The farmer had clearly been egotistical, but Buddha still clearly revealed the truth to him.
• (Buddha hand pose – see image above): Refuse all the bad, accept all the good.
• Buddha is Buddha, all the time, in every way: heart, thinking, behaviour, attitude, action, being. Understanding how to be that way is not enough. To be awakened is to be this way all the time.
• Knowing is not enough; you need to be able to get rid of negative things. Chris, smoking destroys your lungs, so it has nothing to do with Spirits. You study philosophy to learn wisdom, and even though you have learned a lot of philosophy, you don’t have the strength to go against the negative things in your life. This is ridiculous.
• How do you compare fake social behaviour to the value of eternal wisdom? Think about the choices you make each day. Make all decisions clearly and understand the attitude behind it.
• You need to clear away bad things to make space for good people and situations come in.

This post is taken from a talk by Forever Wisdom Forest on 3 October 2013 at the Sydney dojo.