Buddhist Basics: The Third Noble Truth

If, as the second Noble Truth, suffering has a cause, what happens if we stop putting that cause in motion? According to Buddha’s teachings, all suffering ends, even the most subtle wish for things to be better than they are. The third Noble Truth is called the “truth of cessation,” but it’s also a description of awakening or enlightenment. The Four Noble Truths lay out the basic beliefs of Buddhism: that unenlightened life will never be fully satisfactory, but we can wake up to bliss.

Please note: This audio is ripped from a video.

Transcript

Hello fellow meditator,

And welcome to this teaching on the Four Noble Truths,

The foundational teachings of Buddhism.

If you'd like to enroll in my free email course on the Four Noble Truths,

Please visit my teacher page here on the app and click the link to my website.

It'll take you to a page where you can register for that course and other free resources.

Welcome to this video on the Third Noble Truth,

The Truth of Cessation,

And this refers to the Truth of the Cessation of all Dukkha,

All suffering or unsatisfactoriness whatsoever.

It could also be called the Truth of Awakening.

And to give you one example of the Truth of Cessation,

I will tell you about the time that I experienced the cessation of a large number of imaginary snakes.

Before I share that story though,

I want to make sure you know that I have created a mini course about the Four Noble Truths with some additional resources like guided meditations and reflection exercises to really help you take all these ideas and get them into your heart and start applying them to your life and hopefully see some transformation in your life.

So you'll find the link to that course in the description of this video.

I hope you'll go ahead and grab it.

And now back to the snakes.

So after I graduated from college,

I went to Thailand for about four and a half months to study and practice Theravadan Buddhism there in the Thai forest tradition.

And the thing about Thailand is it has a lot of snakes,

And many of them are very poisonous.

And in fact,

One time when I was doing a vipassana retreat in southern Thailand,

Everybody kind of went over to one side of our eating area to look at something that was happening there.

Turns out there was a cobra eating a frog.

So that was scary.

So anyway,

There was like snakes everywhere,

At least in my mind.

And for instance,

One time I was riding a little scooter along a road,

Kind of in the middle of nowhere and one like segment of a palm leaf was on the ground.

I was riding toward it and then it slithered away because it was a snake.

So anyway,

I just started seeing snakes everywhere.

And when I got back to Texas from Thailand,

I was still seeing snakes everywhere.

But now there were way fewer snakes.

And I just started to have these really interesting moments where I would be looking maybe at a stick.

I would see a stick from the corner of my eye and I would go,

Ah,

Snake!

And then I would realize it was a stick.

And there was just like a split second where I was actually in my mind,

I was looking at a snake,

And then the snake became a stick.

So the cessation in that experience was the cessation of my misunderstanding a stick and thinking it was a snake.

So what ceased?

There was no snake to cease.

It was me misunderstanding a stick as a snake.

That is what stopped.

And I think that's a really important point if we're going to understand the third noble truth.

We don't stop.

It's not that there is a real self that stops or that we somehow like destroy the ego or overcome it or something like that.

We just stop imagining snakes where there are no snakes.

So what this really means to come back to some of the terms that we've used in discussing the first and second noble truths,

And if you haven't caught the videos on those two and also the intro to the four noble truths,

There will be links also in the information section associated with this video.

You can go watch those.

You can also just get all of them if you sign up for the mini course.

Again,

There's a link to it in the info box.

But basically what we're talking about with the truth of cessation is that when we no longer mistake reality for being something slightly different,

When we no longer mistake this sort of like non-dual,

Non-conceptual flow of reality as it really is for like a small,

Limited,

Narrow self,

We're no longer seeing snakes where there are no snakes.

So what does that mean?

That means it's an end of ignorance because we've woken up to the way things really are.

And when there's no more ignorance,

There's no more karma like we talked about in the discussion of the second noble truth,

The cause of Dukkha.

And that means we're just,

We're not,

We're not putting into action things that are going to cause us and others to suffer either now or in the future.

The whole cycle of death and rebirth in a traditional sense,

Or if you think about it in one lifetime,

The whole cycle of all these patterns of behavior where we keep trying to get what we want in the same old ways and it never quite works.

We cut all of that.

We can just relax and be at one with the nature of reality,

Which is also our true nature.

And that really is the truth of cessation right there.

So coming back to the example of the snake and the sticks,

Or also there is a very old and widely used example in the Buddhist literature of mistaking a rope for a snake.

Again,

We're not putting an end to something that is there and that is real.

What stops is we see something clearly,

And then all of our misapprehensions or misunderstandings about that thing,

All of them just naturally just vanish.

Once you've seen that a stick is a stick and not a snake,

You are not afraid of a snake anymore.

At least that's how it went for me.

And I think a lot of people,

When they hear the truth of cessation,

They think,

It's the end of me.

If I go all the way through this Buddhist path as described in the fourth noble truth,

If I go all the way through this path,

I'm going to come out at the end and I'm going to cease to exist.

And that's so not what this is saying.

If we follow this path to the end,

What that really means is we're just no longer trying to hold all these pieces of a self together to make something real.

We're able to just let it be a flow.

We are impermanent beings.

We can allow things to arise and cease without feeling like I am about to be destroyed if this set of circumstances dissolves or at the end of this lifetime when this body dies.

It's not the end of me.

So the cause of Dukkha is ignorance.

It's ignorance that drives our behaviors,

That puts everything in motion and keeps us just chasing after the next thing.

We're trying to get away from what we don't want to experience.

The cause of awakening,

The cause of the third noble truth of cessation is basically the noble eightfold path,

Like the Buddhist path that we walk to get from where we are now.

Well,

I can't speak for you,

But for me,

Unenlightened experience.

And then we go down this path of practice and that's what really meditation and study and reflection and having friends who are also on the spiritual path,

That's what that's all about.

That we're committing to a path of transformation.

And at the end of it,

We understand that we're going to come out as a very different type of being,

Like understanding ourselves in a very different way.

All of this misunderstanding of the world will be gone and we'll actually just see what is there instead of what we're projecting all the time.

And a really important reason that it's even possible to wake up out of delusion,

Out of ignorance,

Is that this whole time there has been a level of ourselves or a layer of our mind,

If you want to put it that way,

That is already clear,

That is already knowing,

That is already compassionate.

The Mahayana Buddhists talk about Buddha nature.

So like our basic nature is that we are already Buddhas and we've somehow covered that up with all this gunk.

And some people are very badly behaved and you wouldn't guess there's a Buddha in there somewhere.

But the idea is that's what the path is for.

The path exists to kind of scrape away all the gunk,

All the crud that is covered over our true nature so we can once again relax back into just being who we are.

If we weren't already Buddhas or if our minds didn't have this capacity for just 100% awakened experience,

We could never stop Dukkha.

The reason that Dukkha can stop is that it was never really part of our true nature.

So if you think about the sort of,

I would say misinterpretation of the first noble truth,

Which is life is suffering,

That is not how Buddhists see it at all.

Life can be 100% awakened,

But life is suffering fits neatly on a bumper sticker and life is ultimately a non-conceptual,

Non-dual experience that goes beyond words and it's bliss that you cannot even describe that does not fit on a bumper sticker.

So I guess it never caught on.

But that is the truth that Buddhism is expressing with the truth of cessation.

And I want to take a moment to pause and reflect on the fact that really what is being described here is a form of existence,

A way of knowing or experiencing ourselves in the world that is beyond words,

It's beyond concepts,

It's beyond thoughts.

And first of all,

That means it's a pretty different objective,

It's a different goal for our path and our practice than what you might find in like a secular mindfulness tradition.

We're not just trying to have a happier life,

Although that's a great goal.

And you know,

Definitely in my case,

I can say that following the Buddhist path has made me happier,

Has enhanced my life in so many ways.

But that's not the only goal.

Like the idea of Buddhist enlightenment really is a type of being that we cannot imagine with our ordinary minds.

We get glimpses sometimes of our true nature.

And I think it's really helpful to recognize those and allow ourselves to be informed by the experience of ourselves when we're in really deep meditation.

And we just feel like there are no boundaries between us and the rest of the world.

We have an experience of profound,

Like boundless compassion for every living being.

I think those experiences point towards something that's really true.

And it's something beyond just this lifetime,

This body,

My immediate concerns.

It's really an opening out into the sacred nature of reality.

And the second thing I wanted to mention in the context of the truth of cessation and even the way it's phrased,

The cessation,

Is that the Buddhist tradition often describes the ultimate,

Whether it's emptiness or the characteristics of phenomena or Buddha nature even,

It will describe those things in negative terms.

Like the truth of cessation,

It's the end of all suffering.

You could also say it's the beginning of like indescribable,

Everlasting,

Unchanging bliss.

But instead of saying that,

They say it's the cessation of suffering.

And I think there's a really good reason for that actually.

We tend,

We're very smart creatures,

Humans,

And we have great linguistic capabilities.

So it really helps us communicate and it helps us even have the idea of a state beyond conceptuality,

Beyond language.

But if we start describing that state too much,

We are likely to get stuck onto our ideas of what it is like.

And when that happens,

We're no longer oriented towards something that we really,

That we acknowledge we don't know.

Like when I say non-conceptual,

To me,

It reminds me,

I do not know and I cannot comprehend what that state is.

I might experience little tastes of it sometimes in meditation.

But if I think I'm there and there's a me there to observe it,

That's not what the tradition is talking about.

So the reason that often the ultimate or nirvana or buddhahood or whatever is described in these negative terms is because it is beyond.

But the fourth noble truth is the pathway by which we can transform ourselves so that we can begin not to describe the ultimate with words,

But to experience it in our meditation,

In our daily life and to have not just someone else's account of it,

But really our own compass that guides us in the right direction toward a genuine state of waking up out of all suffering,

Waking up out of all ignorance,

Rather than just taking someone else's word for it.

And that,

As you might have guessed,

Is the fourth noble truth.

And I hope you will join me for that video as well.

If you haven't already enrolled in the free mini course on the four noble truths,

Please go grab that now.

I hope it'll be helpful to you.

And I'm looking forward to seeing you again in the next video or possibly videos on the fourth noble truth.

So thank you for joining me and I hope you experience a little cessation of a little suffering today.

Reviews

Thanks - I need to listen to all the related tapes in future!