Buddha's Four Noble Truths

I never studied Buddhism but as I learned to meditate I experienced the four noble truths of Buddha's teaching. Listen as I share the true meaning of suffering and how to transform your self to the point where suffering will no longer pull at you. Grab a drink sit back and enjoy.

Transcript

Hello and welcome once again.

My name is Douglas Gromins.

Thanks for joining me.

Today I'd like to talk a little bit about a little bit of Buddhism.

Yeah,

So the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism is a quintessential teaching that Buddha spread throughout his lineage.

And what are the Four Noble Truths?

The Four Noble Truths are,

First,

It's called Dukkha.

And Dukkha stands for the Truth of Suffering.

And then the second Noble Truth is the Truth of the Cause of Suffering.

The third Noble Truth is the Truth of the End of Suffering.

And the fourth is the Truth of the Path that leads to the End of Suffering.

So first we have to go into the first Noble Truth,

The Truth of Suffering.

And personally for myself it's been eons since I've really felt that suffering that I think Buddha is talking about.

Like I said,

I've got to go back quite a few years and put it back into my head.

Because these Four Noble Truths,

Even though I didn't really know them as I was a beginning meditator,

Even though I didn't know them,

They basically were part of my life.

I have to go back almost twenty years and realize what Buddha meant by suffering.

And this is what I've come up with.

So about twenty years ago,

Maybe a little bit more than twenty years ago,

I had something done.

I had a bridge put in my mouth and I got married.

And it seems like all my suffering basically began around that time.

I started not sleeping well and also I started getting indigestion from about every type of food I ate.

I didn't know what was causing it,

Or what foods was causing it,

But my stomach was going crazy and I couldn't sleep anymore.

And this kind of drove me crazy for a while.

It made my life very miserable because there would be almost,

It didn't start off all at once,

Not sleeping a full night.

It would cut out like an hour in one night and then an hour the next night.

And then this got worse and gradually got worse as it went along.

But I couldn't figure out what the hell was going on.

And slowly as this just drove me more and more crazy and got me to a point where I was just seeking anything,

Advice from any doctor who would listen to me.

And the doctors all kind of thought I was crazy.

They gave me antacids for my stomach and they gave me sleeping pills for sleep.

But those things were like Band-Aids.

They treated the symptoms but they didn't treat the cause.

And we couldn't figure out what the cause was.

But as a young surfer,

I was pretty much just a happy-go-lucky person.

And the sleep problems didn't affect me too much,

But they made it difficult and more difficult to surf really long hours.

When you're exhausted,

It's kind of hard to surf.

But I still found the energy to do that and that kind of helped alleviate some of the suffering,

Some of the stress that I was going through.

And this went on for a while and unfortunately the sleeping pills seemed to cause more sleeplessness than they cured.

So it was a real tough time in my life.

Like I said,

This went on for a couple of years,

Actually.

It gradually got worse and worse.

But through my Aikido family and my Aikido friends that I made while I was in Texas,

I met a young man named Leo and Leo turned me on to meditation.

I did everything.

I honestly have to tell you,

I tried everything.

I tried Chinese medicine.

I tried acupressure,

Acupuncture.

I tried something that was quite interesting,

Was a person who could remove negative energy from you using crystals and pranic energy.

And I think that was quite interesting.

I don't know if it worked.

But eventually Leo,

My friend,

Turned me on to meditation.

And that's kind of when things started leveling out a little bit because as a meditator you don't need as much sleep because what happens in meditation makes it so that your body doesn't need as much sleep.

So like in deep sleep,

When you go to sleep at night,

You go into REM sleep,

You go into deep sleep,

But it's for very short periods of time.

When you meditate,

That same state of mindless stillness calms you down and it lasts longer than if you were going into a deep sleep at night.

So meditation kind of helped in that way.

But I still wasn't out of the woods.

But this isn't what I think Buddha was really talking about by the end of suffering or the truth of suffering.

I think it was more about like this because what happened was I realized,

It was around 96 when I started meditating,

So about a year and a half,

Two years had passed by,

And I just felt this urge to go to California and go surfing.

I'd never been to the West Coast before to surf that I ever knew of.

Anyway,

So I told my sensei that I'd like to go to California and do a Aikido seminar and maybe do some surfing and make it like a dual-purpose trip.

Anyway,

Before I went to California,

The doctor was now thinking that I might have cancer,

The big C word,

And that scared me a little bit.

And I remember thinking back as I was eating at a restaurant,

I was eating my lunch while I was at work,

And I almost wanted to start crying.

And I teared up and I remember saying to myself,

I'm not ready to die yet.

I don't want cancer.

I mean,

Of course,

Nobody wants cancer,

Of course.

But I just came to this point,

This realization that I hadn't lived yet.

And I think that's what Buddha was talking about by the truth of suffering,

Is that there's things that control you.

There's things that dictate your life in a sense.

And of course,

It's responsibilities that we all have to deal with,

And that could be a little bit of the truth of suffering too.

But I think the bigger thing is that I felt I hadn't lived yet.

That I haven't served my purpose in this world yet,

And I wasn't ready to die.

And I think that that is the essence of what Buddha was talking about by suffering.

And the essence that I hadn't lived yet sat real deep with me.

I mean,

I'm a surfer and I never got to surf California yet.

So,

With that in mind,

I booked a trip and I had an Aikido seminar up in Oakland to go to that my sensei recommended that I would go.

A close friend of his named Rick Raul,

A brilliant Aikidoist that lived in Oakland,

Was having a seminar.

So anyway,

I decided to go to California and travel up the coast from LA all the way up to Oakland and hit every surf break that I could.

And I did.

And as I got to Oakland,

I mean,

The trip was great.

Let me backpedal a little bit.

The trip was absolutely fantastic.

I surfed my butt off all the way up the coast from LA,

Malibu,

Santa Barbara,

All these places that I've never.

.

.

I've read about magazines and I've seen pictures of the waves before,

But I never got to surf them.

So I finally got my chance to surf and it was great.

I just really enjoyed traveling up the coast by myself.

This was a soul trip.

My wife didn't want to come with me because it's not her thing for surfing or Aikidoing.

So anyway,

I traveled up the coast and I got to Oakland and I met Rick O'Owol and a few of his students and we started the Aikido seminar,

I think it was on a Thursday.

And we practiced all day Thursday in Aikido and then we practiced Friday.

But Friday night after class,

Something came over me and said,

Hey,

You got to go to Santa Cruz.

Now,

I don't believe I'd ever been to Santa Cruz before or anything.

I don't know why this calling or this urge that says,

Hey,

No,

You got to go and you got to go now.

I don't know where that came from,

But I told Rick O'Owol,

I'm sorry,

I have to leave the seminar early,

But I'm being called to go to Santa Cruz and I don't know why.

It's just something I have to do.

So I did.

I went to Santa Cruz and I got a hotel right on the beach.

It was this cliff and the cliff had these four or five very large,

Like maybe cedar trees or something,

But they were huge old trees,

Centuries old trees.

And they were hanging on the cliff by the edge of their roots.

You could see the bare roots if you went down the cliff and onto the beach.

But anyway,

It was a beautiful hotel and beautiful scenery.

And basically,

I didn't know anything about Santa Cruz or anything or surfing in Santa Cruz that I knew of.

But the waves were going off.

I mean,

It was big.

It was like four to five feet on some of the smaller breaks and much,

Much bigger out at Steamer Lane or some of the other breaks,

Cowles and all those breaks were breaking pretty big.

Of course,

Me being the adventurous soul that I was,

I went out to some of the bigger breaks and being a pretty new surfer,

I think I had been surfing on and off for about five years total,

I guess,

Maybe before I went to California.

I surfed the East Coast.

I surfed the Gulf Coast.

I surfed Florida.

Been all over,

But I just had to surf there.

And I decided to paddle out into some pretty big size surf.

I mean,

Nothing I didn't think I couldn't handle.

It didn't look like that crazy,

But I was pretty naive at the time,

Too.

These waves in California are much more powerful than the waves that I was used to.

And this was actually,

I found out this was a hurricane swell that came in and filled up all the bay with tasty waves.

But anyway,

I went out in the surf and I was kind of surfing by myself.

Not at first point,

But just inside of it,

There's another break.

And anyway,

What happened was I was surfing there by myself and I took off on this pretty large wave and I botched the takeoff and I freaking got tumbled.

I mean,

Work to the max.

And I just kept getting tumbled and tumbled and tumbled and spun around and tumbled.

And I ran out of air and I almost,

At first I started to panic a little bit.

It's like,

Oh,

Crap,

It's not letting me up.

I'm still getting tumbled and I'm still getting tumbled.

And eventually a point came and I said,

You know what?

I guess this is it.

I guess this is the day I'm going to die.

And I kind of just accepted the fact that this is the situation.

And then I just went limp and I gave into it and I saw this golden light and it felt like somebody reached into the water and grabbed my collar and pulled me to the surface.

But that was probably the pinnacle moment that changed most of my life,

Especially my spiritual life,

Because the very next day I went and meditated in the chair in front of my hotel room.

And that meditation session was that everything led to that meditation session.

And as I sat there in the chair before I started meditating,

I said to myself,

OK,

It's so funny.

I mean,

A few weeks ago,

A month or two ago,

I was crying in a restaurant,

You know,

Blabbing about,

Hey,

I'm not ready to die.

And then here comes a situation where it's been forced upon me.

So with that in mind,

I went into my meditation and that was it.

That was basically the end of one point in my life and the beginning of another.

A certain part of me died,

But I had to be annihilated to get to that point.

I had to be completely exhausted and to a point where I couldn't resist anymore.

I was accepting the inevitable.

So that is what I think Buddha means by the truth of suffering.

I know that a lot of people think that the suffering could be other things.

And there's a lot of different types of suffering that go on in our lives.

But the cause of the suffering,

The second noble truth,

The cause of the suffering was this desire to live more,

This pull into the future,

This pull and this greed for wanting something more.

And coming to the point,

The truth of the end of suffering,

The third noble truth,

Was giving in.

I hear that and I've heard that Buddha basically suffered for six years doing all these altisseries and all these mental and physical things to push his body to the limit.

And none of these things worked.

He tried everything to become enlightened,

To attain basically.

I don't even know if it was called enlightenment before Buddha's time,

But it was called something.

I think some of the Hindus call it Moshka,

Which means liberation.

So the truth of the end of suffering is one thing,

Right?

But why then do you have to have the truth of the path that leads to the end of suffering as the fourth?

And I'll explain why.

The truth of the end of suffering was that point in my life where I was born and reborn,

Or I died and I was reborn.

Like a part of me did die and a part of me was born that maybe never lived before.

But as we live our lives,

As we go about our daily lives,

Then we can be pulled back into this living out of the present moment,

I could say,

Or you could say.

You get pulled back into time and that pull against you is what Buddha said that you have to create a path to escape in a way from this suffering.

So before I go on any further,

I want to come out and publicly announce that really since 1998,

I haven't felt what other people feel by suffering.

I've experienced loss,

I've lost friends,

I have cried from friends,

But that's not the kind of suffering that I think Buddha was talking about.

The suffering is this pull of pulling you out of the present moment and into anxiety and into depression and into mental disorders or physical disorders.

Oh yeah,

And then also because of meditation over the years,

I figured out what was causing all basically all my sleeplessness and my eating disorders.

And once I figured all that out,

My whole life changed.

But that was all brought about by meditation,

By living in the present moment and being aware and being conscious.

And this practicing awareness is the path that leads to the end of suffering.

Because if you're aware of time trying to pull against you,

You can imagine like a rubber band stretched around a pencil or something and you hold the pencil in a horizontal position and the rubber band pulls from side to side.

It tries to pull it down to the horizontal position but it can't do it.

When you experience a new birth,

You could say,

The Christians called it being born again,

Buddha called it enlightenment,

And like I said the Hindus call it Moshka,

Liberation.

But when you experience this birth,

This new birth,

Then you're born into basically a new existence where suffering basically doesn't really exist in your world.

It goes on around you,

But it's on the periphery because you found a center.

Before you were living in the mind center,

But you found a center that's higher than the mind center.

It's a rising energy into this new existence that you experience when you move up into the spiritual dimension.

I have heard that desire is basically the seed of the truth of suffering.

So you desiring,

Like I desired more out of life and I wasn't ready to die yet,

Caused my suffering to be there in the first place.

So the key element then is to learn to drop desire.

And to drop desire you have to drop fear for one and greed on the other hand.

So both things must be dropped.

These are the two things that pull you into suffering and keep you suffering until you can learn to drop them and overcome your fear of death,

Overcome fear of anything you're facing in life that's causing you to suffer more and more.

Because then the end of suffering can actually occur,

But not until you conquer your fears and basically drop greed.

And when I say greed,

Desire for heaven is a subtle greed.

And I know everybody thinks about when they want to die that they want to go to heaven.

I think everybody would say that,

I mean that sounds like something wonderful to happen.

But through my experience,

I've experienced that heaven and earth are right here.

That this being born again into a budding Buddha or a Christ or whatever you want to call it,

This is realizing that heaven is right here.

Hell is right here too.

And hell is this suffering that,

So if you're not born again or if you're not twice born,

Dawiji,

I think they call it in Hinduism,

But if you're not twice born,

Then you're surrounded by hell and you're surrounded by suffering.

And it pulls from you and it pulls you and it keeps you on this horizontal plane.

But the shift to the vertical happens when you delete these things,

When you drop these things and dive into meditation and then all that's left after that,

Once you become a budding Buddha,

Is that you have to practice awareness to keep yourself on the path that leads to the end of suffering forever.

Because suffering,

Like I said,

It happens on the periphery.

It's around you,

But it doesn't touch your center.

So in a way,

It's there and you feel it,

But it can't move you off your center.

Once the shift to the vertical is made,

Then your life is different.

You coast through time.

You coast through this life,

Basically not feeling the essence or the pull of time.

I mean,

It's been 20 something years since that trip to California and the whole thing seems like it happened yesterday.

The enlightenment,

The experience that I went through seems like it just happened to me and it's so fresh and it's so pure of an experience and that stays with you.

That pureness will stay with you for the rest of your life.

It's basically a miracle that happens,

The miracle that happened to Buddha,

The miracle that happened to Jesus and it's happened to many others.

There recently the Mystic Osho had over 10,

000 people under him become enlightened while he was alive and many,

Many more afterwards.

Even Alan Watts,

A famous orator,

Has helped many people to become enlightened.

There was a period that Alan was teaching before he was enlightened,

But he was so spot on about it that it's hard to tell when he became enlightened.

When was the pinnacle point that brought him to this experience that we call enlightenment?

Anyhow,

Folks,

That was my take on the Four Noble Truths as it came about in my life and helped me to change these things.

I never studied Buddhism.

I didn't even know anything about the Four Noble Truths.

This stuff just happened to me and I'm a changed person because of it and because I'm such a changed person and I feel that this life is so beautiful.

I mean I spend most of my time either surfing or working or skydiving or doing things that I love to do.

I don't feel this suffering anymore and when it does happen around me,

It touches my outer being but it never touches my center.

And even when people pass away,

When you've seen enlightenment,

This ultimate death they call it,

When you've seen this enlightenment,

When you've seen the beauty of it,

You know it's not the end anymore.

You know that there's nothing to fear.

You know that whenever someone passes away,

They basically dissolve back into the oneness of existence and that is a beautiful thing to have happen to you.

Anyway,

I guess I'll end it here,

Folks.

Thanks again for listening to me and I hope you enjoyed this talk on the Four Noble Truths and like I said how it changed my life and I hope that my lesson that I'm sharing with you could help change your lives and help you live a peaceful life without suffering.

Anyway,

Take care of yourselves.

Namaste to all my beautiful spiritual friends and aloha to all my surfing friends.

Take care of yourselves.

Blue skies.

Bye bye.