Greetings,

I hope you're cultivating a relationship with dukkha. I didn't mention this much in last month's blog but the nobility of the Four Noble Truths comes from the insights connected to each of the truths. The first noble truth of "there is suffering" or "there is dukkha" doesn't mean that you simply know you're suffering because something's going wrong or you feel bad. Dukkha exists when things are going great and you feel happy. The point of the first noble truth is to recognize the presence and of dukkha and want to understand it, meaning you want to know how it came to be. You want to know why are you stressing right now? How can dukkha be present when you're happy? Is dukkha always present? These are all questions that generate interest in getting to know in English, suffering. Buddha recognized the need for a practitioner to want to understand the nature of their own suffering, rather than simply getting rid of it. And it's important to actually recognize that you are beginning to understand dukkha more. These are the three insights connected to the first noble truth. One, recognizing that your present moment is veiled by dukkha. Two, recognizing that you need to actually see how this veil separates you from reality. And three, realizing that you are not in fact connected to reality, but instead connected to your assumptions, perceptions, and distortions.

The more you come to understand the nature of dukkha, the more you see your own part in this suffering. I hate to use the word suffering. I said it last month but it so makes us think that dukkha is only related to things going wrong. Dukkha is inherent in our attachment to pleasure. Our erroneous assumption of permanency leads to a constant desire for greater and greater reliability. Our sense of reliability is connected to our sense of pleasure, our sense of things going right, or the way we want it. We look for this reliability in everything that is inherently unreliable. It's unreliable because we cannot control outer conditions no matter how much we want to. Left unchecked, this constant unreliability creates within us a constant agitation; a restlessness that external conditions will never be able to settle. This is because external conditions are constantly changing without regard to our individual situation. Genuine reliability and stability comes from within. The more we see what we are holding onto and learn to let go, the freer we become. Again, Buddha saw three insights in relation to freeing ourselves from this causal link between our desire for reliability and our willingness to accept life as it is.

The fourth insight into understanding the origins of suffering, or the causal link of our constant agitation, is learning to see our craving. We live in a closed loop system that is guarded by our ego. This ego keeps us locked in a system of understanding, assumptions, information, memory, concepts, beliefs, etc. that were established when we were very, very young. We are locked in this system the way the above picture shows locks. It's massive, this locking system of the ego. It's random, it's incoherent, and it's judgmental. It imprisons us within itself. If we try to add information to our understanding that does not fit within our current understanding, it's locked out. It's prevented from being accepted or even remembered. Oftentimes, we don't even realize that we are trapped behind this wall. There's no getting out from behind this wall of locked ideas and concepts without strong intention and persistence. In other words, we need the meditative power of beginning again and starting over.

When we establish mindfulness through the four foundations, we are, in effect, dropping out of our ideas and concepts and into an embodied awareness of the present moment. This is the fifth insight. This embodied awareness recognizes craving for what it is. It recognizes it through the felt sense of tension or constriction (maybe this is why we associate dukkha with difficulty). It can also recognize this craving insightfully by seeing the deluded nature of our grasping for what we want but don't have, or pushing away something we have but don't want. And finally, it can see how unreliable our craving is. The insightful way of seeing has to be cultivated and can only be cultivated through the four foundations. The four foundations of mindfulness (body, feeling tones, emotions/thoughts, and the dhammas) reinforce a connection to the present moment reality. This is the direct path to liberation. The more we live within the present moment, the more we can abandon craving. Living in the past or future will never allow us to abandon craving because craving doesn't arise from the past or future, it arises in our obscuration of the present moment.

Finally, as we begin to see this craving and start letting it go, we need to recognize that we are letting go of craving. Sometimes it feels like we just don't get irritated by something that used to irritate us. That's no small thing. We can't make ourselves not get irritated with something that irritates us. If we notice that we're not irritated, we need to acknowledge that we have abandoned craving in that moment. Also, if we don't get upset when something doesn't go our way. Again, we can't make ourselves not get upset when we want something to our way. To recognize that we're not upset is a recognition that craving has been abandoned. Lastly, if we're able to just let something we really enjoy come to an end, that is a moment of craving being abandoned. These are all examples of the sixth insight, or awareness that craving has been abandoned. This is what we'll be exploring this month. See if you can tell when craving is present and when it's absent.

With a deep bow,

Tuere