Working With Right Intention, Right Effort, Right Mindfulness

John Cunningham, guiding teacher at Insight Meditation Cleveland, offers teachings based on the Buddhist canon on supporting your meditation practice using right intention, right effort and right mindfulness. How are these to be understood? This talk is for all levels of practitioners. It is given freely. May all beings be happy, healthy, wise.

Transcript

As we mentioned earlier,

The theme of the retreat is the samadhi or the mindful training section of the Eightfold Path.

And so we'll be spending all of tomorrow looking particularly at those parts of the path.

What I'd like to do tonight is talk a little bit about the totality of the Eightfold Path and its role in the Buddha's teachings as part of the Four Noble Truths to set the stage for why is this important?

In the opening comments,

I mentioned that many of us come to a practice through the idea of concentration and mindfulness.

And particularly the word mindfulness is a pretty overworked word in our society right now.

And it applies to all kinds of ways of trying to pay attention to things.

So when we talk about it in the context of our practice,

This type of Theravada-based Buddhist practice,

Or even some of the other Buddhist practices,

Has very specific meanings of what mindfulness is,

And is very much coupled to concentration practice,

As well as to effort.

So I'd like to sort of set the stage for that this evening with this time.

The very foundation of the Buddha's teachings is the Four Noble Truths.

Some of the things that I find so amazing about it is its simplicity.

There's not a lot to believe,

Not a lot to even digest to get the gist of what the Buddha was talking about.

And yet we can spend a lifetime understanding in greater and greater detail,

Deeper levels,

What the Buddha was talking about with these Noble Truths.

The other thing,

Aside from this simplicity that we can approach it with,

Is its completeness.

Through the Four Noble Truths,

The Buddha gave us a complete description of our worldly existence here and the problem with it and how to resolve the problem.

The Buddha first presented the Four Noble Truths in his first teaching after his awakening.

Prior to his awakening experience,

He had been part of a group of six bhikkhus,

Or monks,

Who were wandering around in an ascetic kind of lifestyle.

And in his past,

The Buddha had lived a life of indulgence in the family he was born into.

And for the first 20 or so years of his life,

He lived that very extravagant life.

And then as he went out to try to seek the truth and find freedom,

He ended up in this ascetic mode of deprivation and trying to find it by pushing the world away.

So he'd spent this time with these peers and his first talk was to them saying,

Basically,

Guys,

That's not the way.

That's not going to do what you're trying to get done.

He presented the Eightfold Path as a middle way between these two,

Between a path of indulgence,

Trying to satisfy all our worldly desires and a path of asceticism,

Of trying to get rid of all the worldly stuff.

He said this Eightfold Path is a way to navigate the world as it's presented to us,

And to be able to work with what we have and use what we have to find freedom.

So he presented it by giving these four truths.

The first truth is the noble truth of Dukkha.

And again,

I think probably almost everybody on the retreat here has heard of this and probably studied it in some level of detail.

But the word Dukkha,

If you're not familiar with it,

It's a Pali word.

Pali was the sort of the high language that the Buddhist teachings were recorded in.

And I like that word Dukkha better than some of its translations.

The primary translation is suffering.

And the problem with using that word suffering for this translation is it's already full for us.

That's what our Western minds when we come to this kind of a practice,

The word suffering has a lot of meaning already.

And usually it's kind of a harsh kind of experience of pain and agony and anguish.

And while that certainly has a role in the concept of Dukkha,

It's certainly not the totality of Dukkha.

And it's not even the part that we're really trying to work with in the Eightfold Path.

So by using some other definitions,

Stress is one that I've heard,

Which I think is good.

There is an inherent stress in life.

Almost every moment has some kind of a stress to it.

Even your breathing,

If you think about it,

The reason your breath is in constant movement is because at each moment,

It's not okay.

Something needs to change.

Either your breath needs to continue or try to hold your breath.

That's not good for a little bit,

Then you got to let it go.

It's not okay.

You have to let it go.

Then you let it go,

You need more air.

So there's this constant change that's occurring.

And because of that,

There's a stress that's associated with it.

Another definition or translation that I like is unreliability.

This world cannot be relied upon.

The things that seem so solid and substantial in our lives,

Ultimately,

They cannot be relied upon.

And why can't they be relied upon?

Because they're in constant change.

They're always changing.

So we find some situation,

Some possession,

A relationship,

A job,

A state of health,

Something that feels like this is reliable,

And it will change.

And as soon as it changes,

If we were counting on it,

As our refuge,

It will reveal itself that it is not that way.

When the Buddha talked about dukkha and what it was,

He said,

As part of his first speech on his defining what dukkha was,

He said,

Dukkha is a noble truth is this birth is dukkha,

Aging is dukkha,

Sickness is dukkha,

Death is dukkha,

Sorrow and lamentation,

Pain,

Pain,

Grief,

And despair are dukkha,

Association with the low is dukkha,

Dissociation from the loved is dukkha,

Not to get what one wants is dukkha,

In short,

Dukkha is the five categories of clinging objects.

So he talked about the five aggregates here,

This concept that we'll touch on a little bit here,

But this model that the Buddha that the Buddha offered that defines what the psychophysical organism is,

And he basically said,

It's the clinging to this,

That is the root of dukkha,

That is the that is what we would call dukkha.

So it's,

It's that kind of a definition lets us know how ubiquitous it is,

It's everywhere.

And it is not just the suffering,

When things are not going our way on a macro level.

When we when we look at dukkha,

Especially early on in our practice,

And we think of it as this sort of a,

A macroscopic level of suffering or stress or unreliability,

That there is a belief and our society supports that if we just satisfy our desires enough and push away our versions enough,

We ought to be able to lick this thing.

And if we can't do it today,

There ought to be more inventions,

More medical advances,

More psychological tools,

There should be more things that we can put together to solve this problem at this level.

So and to some degree,

It's believable.

I'm not quite sure why,

Because I've been trying it for many,

Many years,

And it has never worked.

But yet,

We all seem to believe it.

So it feels like that I don't be able to do that,

That maybe this next thing that I get this next situation,

Maybe that's the magic button.

The Buddha talked about dukkha,

He talked about these noble truths many,

Many times throughout his,

His teachings as to suitors.

He talked about dukkha at a much more granular level,

A much more fine level,

Almost as if instead of dukkha as an experience coming at us one at a time,

Like a like a mesh of dukkha,

Like this world that we're living in is happening,

Mind moment after mind moment,

Moment after moment.

And when we look at things like this idea that being stressed,

That we're leaning into things,

And they are not there,

They're not able to be held on to,

We need to look at it that way,

We can begin to see that it's there all the time when things are going away,

Are going our way,

There is the sense that they could stop going our way.

And that can gnaw at you,

Even as things are going your way.

And it's much easier to see when things are not going our way,

Very few people have to be convinced that there's dukkha when things are not going their way.

So we have these two sides here,

And yet there's there's dukkha baked into all of it.

I don't know if you've had this experience,

I've had this a number of times where there was something that was bothering me.

And I knew something was bothering me,

I couldn't quite remember it.

And I sort of go looking for where,

Oh,

Yeah,

That's what it is.

So the dukkha,

The stress of the situation,

Even though the situation was not forefronting my mind,

The dukkha still was there.

So combining these big stresses,

Big sufferings,

And the little ones,

We have this life,

Which through our aggregates is,

Is where we're caught up in this concept of dukkha,

This experience of dukkha,

Wanting things to be other than the way they are.

So because of dukkha,

The second noble truth,

The Buddha said the cause of that is,

Is a craving or thirst for things to be other than they are,

That we want things to be more to our liking.

We have this system that seems to have preferences.

And when we want to,

When we are satisfying those preferences,

We think things are better when we're not satisfying those preferences,

We think things are worse,

And we become identified with wanting things to be other than they are.

And that really is the is the core of how dukkha arises.

There is a world,

There is a set of situations out here.

And then there is a sense of an I or a me with likes and dislikes.

And there's a gap between those two.

And the extent the size of that gap,

That identification with that gap is the size of dukkha that will feel that's how much dukkha will feel.

So there's a big gap,

A lot of distance between what's out there and what we want.

There will be a lot of dukkha,

A lot of suffering.

If there's,

If there's just a small gap,

There will just be small suffering.

And what the Buddha says,

It's possible to close the gap completely.

So there's no suffering.

And the third noble truth is where he,

He basically said that he said it is possible to eliminate suffering,

The cessation of suffering of dukkha altogether.

I will be using the word dukkha and suffering interchangeably just because the the word is translated that way and be used to so much,

But I would encourage you if you're not familiar with the word or you don't use it to,

To bring it added into your vocabulary,

Because it comes to empty as a empty of meaning if you're not familiar with it.

So it can be filled with your analysis,

Your meditative analysis of what it is for you.

So you can refill this word.

Whereas if you take the word suffering,

It's pretty full already.

It's hard to stuff more meaning into it.

So using dukkha this way is a good tool.

So this cessation of dukkha,

The ending of it,

The Buddha said it's,

It's possible for us to find complete freedom by dropping our identification with and our clinging to the aggregates by dropping that process by ending the reification of a self that happens moment after moment.

So it's good news after the first two noble truths,

Right,

That life is inherently suffering,

And that we're kind of doing it by our craving and identification with it.

So here the sun begins to shine,

It's possible to end it.

And then the next,

The fourth of the noble truths is the eightfold path.

The first three noble truths are descriptive.

So the Buddha,

Throughout his teachings,

He created for us these various mental models that we can,

We can work with,

Often in the form of lists.

There's actually a set of his teachings that are the number discourses where how many items are in it in a particular model.

So he built these models for us,

And offered them to us and the noble truths is one of them.

And in the models,

There's two different parts to them,

One is the idea of a description of something.

So the Buddha,

In his experiences of coming to freedom,

He actually saw stuff that he then is able to model and tell us in that model what this looked like to him.

He did not tell us this description for us to believe it.

And this is one of the things that's really special about the Buddha's teachings.

It is not for us to take,

Digest and believe.

It is for us to take,

To work with,

To explore,

To understand clearly for ourselves what it is,

And see if the model works for us.

So this descriptive model is,

Do you see Dukkha in your life?

Do you see the root of Dukkha?

Do you see why you have it?

Do you see when you don't have it?

Do you see how it can lighten up?

So these descriptive parts of the model are for us to contemplate and to work with in our practice to see the truth of them as they apply to us.

One of the things about the models that the Buddha designed and offered to us is,

He takes our experience,

Our living experience,

And he sort of breaks it into pieces that are digestible or easier to look at.

It's a lot like shining white light through a prism.

If you take a white light and shine it through a prism,

It'll break into its constituent colors.

So you can get a better feeling for what is the nature of that light by seeing.

In that light is all these colors,

Purple,

Red,

Green,

Blue,

Violet,

All these colors are part of that white light.

And the only way you see them is through this prismatic effect of shining the light through the prism.

The Buddha's models are like a prism for us.

So whether it's the aggregates that take this psychophysical organism and breaks it into these five different components,

Or whether it's the way we are in this world and the Four Noble Truths and breaks it into these pieces,

These models break it apart.

In our practice of meditation and contemplation about what we're seeing from our meditation,

Taking those two together,

We're able to do a kind of an analysis,

An experiential analysis to see what is the nature of our life here,

Of this world we're in,

And then allow it to naturally reconstruct,

Which as soon as you come out of your meditation,

For the most part it will reconstruct.

And you'll be a mom,

A dad,

A coworker,

A house cleaner,

A garbage taker out or whatever you happen to be,

You'll be that again.

But you will have more clarity about that role and who you are and what's going on behind the scenes,

Just like you do when you look at white light after you've seen it through a prism.

And so it's important that we understand this with these models,

That they are not to be believed or digested directly,

But rather to be savored and explored and investigated for ourselves.

So for us to do this,

It really requires a kind of investigation.

This is part of what we'll be talking about over the next day,

Is what's the nature of this?

This investigation,

Investigative work.

So now we come to the fourth step of the four noble truths,

Which is the eightfold path.

And this one,

Unlike the first three,

Which were descriptive,

Sort of telling us what the Buddha saw was going on.

This one was prescriptive.

This is the Buddha saying,

Here's the situation and for us to realize the cessation of dukkha,

For us to break ourselves free from that,

There has to be a methodology to do that.

And just with the same kind of simplicity and clarity and precision that the Buddha was able to delineate this experience of living in this conditioned world,

He also laid out this marvelous eightfold path,

Which is a guide for us to be able to find that freedom that he spoke of,

That he said was possible.

We have to start with enough understanding,

Enough capacity to say,

Yeah,

It looks like it's probably worth pursuing this.

And that's where that investigation of the first descriptive part of the past,

The first three noble truths comes into play.

Because only through investigating those does it make sense to try to move out of suffering this way.

If you don't believe that dukkha applies to you,

If you don't see it for yourself,

If you don't see that the root of dukkha is something that's going on in your system,

This identification with things being other than they are,

We want them to be other than they are,

If you don't see that for yourself,

Why would you ever try to use a set of steps to eliminate suffering if you didn't see that way.

So we have to do some of them investigation to do that.

So when we start looking at the eightfold path,

Often it's referred to as eight steps.

And that's a valid description.

But I think the problem for me with using it as steps is they imply a kind of linearity to how you would how you would go about using them.

And also a singularity that you would be using just one at a time taking step to step to step.

So,

So I like to think of them as notes like you would as musical notes.

I call them elements sometimes.

You know,

If you think of musical notes,

They each stand on their own,

Each note has its own frequency,

Its own tone,

Its own beauty,

But they can be be combined in different ways they can be played on one note and the third note and the fourth note,

You can do whatever you want.

And you can build different types of chords out of those notes.

And that's really when we get into the full path more what we're doing with with the practices is,

Is working with them as chords,

Combinations of these eight instead of trying to do them one at a time.

The eightfold path is traditionally broken into three segments.

And the first segment is,

Is wisdom,

Or panya.

And we'll talk as to what these different steps,

Different parts of it are in a minute,

But the second is sila,

Which again,

These are the Pali words,

But it means it's been translated as ethics or morality.

And the third is samadhi.

Samadhi is usually translated as concentration.

But in the context of the eightfold path,

It's better to think of it as moral,

Or mental training or mental discipline.

It's the it's the movement that helps us to head towards wisdom.

So the wisdom part of the of the path has two of the eight steps or elements.

The first is right view,

Sometimes it's translated as right understanding.

So it is,

It is the capacity of this mind to be able to see clearly,

And to understand this world in a particular kind of way.

And from the Buddhist perspective,

It's understanding this noble,

The four noble truths,

Understanding them very,

Very deeply.

And then also,

Cause and effect,

What is it that's leading to what,

How does that process work?

And cognitively,

We will understand that pretty quickly.

But it's not cognitively here that we're talking about when we talk about right view or right understanding,

It's,

It's visceral,

It's really deep,

Deep understanding.

The second wisdom element is right thought,

And that's sometimes translated as right intention.

So if you look at these two together,

Right view and right thought,

Or right understanding and right intention,

You can begin to see the nature of wisdom,

The way the Buddha talked about it.

So right view means we have this this visceral,

Deep,

Deep understanding of the way things are,

And right thought or right intention says,

Our thought then arises from that.

So the Buddha's,

The way the Buddha talked about actions,

And the way we are in the world,

It comes out of our intentionality.

So if we have right intentions,

Our actions will be right.

So one of the amazing things about the Buddha's way of talking about wisdom is it's,

It's this implicit understanding and then acting from that implicit understanding.

So it's,

It's the understanding that we have,

And then the movement to allow us to act in that way.

The closest example I can think of to that is the idea of gravity,

We have a kind of wisdom about gravity.

So you don't even need the word gravity,

Your body has learned how gravity works,

You have a deep,

Implicit right view of gravity,

You understand it,

You understand it accurately.

And from that view,

That right understanding,

You then act appropriately your intentionality,

And therefore your actions follow from your right view of how gravity works,

Without ever having to think about gravity.

That's the nature of wisdom.

It's not something we're trying to cognate that we're trying to develop our mind to always be able to think,

What should I do?

What is this?

What is that?

It's this implicit deep understanding,

And it's through this idea of wisdom this way,

Very visceral,

Deep understanding of how things are and acting from that,

That we find freedom.

Because what we are doing when we work with the Buddhist paths,

His models,

We're slowly dismantling and taking apart the worldviews,

The fixed views that we have been holding for most of our lives that are not accurate.

We're just taking those things apart and seeing what's really there.

How does life really work?

How does Dukkha really work?

We're beginning to come close to understanding the idea of impermanence.

Our mind knows impermanence,

Doesn't it?

It understands that.

But how do we really come close to understanding at a deep level,

That things are constantly changing?

And so that kind of work.

And then the other part of it is that this is not personal,

These things that happen to the eye or the knee or feel like they are,

Are just happening.

And that I or me is grabbing out to make them personal,

But they don't have that quality of being personal as as part of their nature.

So that's the wisdom,

Or part of the the eightfold path or the Panya part.

The SELA is the ethics is a set of three different steps or elements,

Right speak,

Right action and right livelihood.

And ethics in the Buddhist sense here is a little different than it is in the typical Judeo-Christian sense that many of us were raised with.

I know for myself,

I was raised with the idea that there's right and wrong.

If I do wrong,

I can end up in hell,

Fraternity.

If I do right,

I could end up in heaven for eternity.

So there's a set of rules I had to obey,

I didn't really know why some of the rules didn't make sense to me.

But I knew there was a God in this model that,

That if he wasn't pleased,

I could be condemned forever.

But it didn't make sense to me why that was the case.

The way the Buddha talks about it,

He's not really talking about morality or ethics as a right and wrong in that sense,

But rather,

More of a pragmatic sense.

Like what is it?

What is this world situation?

What can we find ourselves in and what are the behaviors that we can align ourselves with that will make that work better?

How do we align ourselves with life that way?

So what we seek is living a life that's peaceful,

That's connected.

Those are some of our deep things,

Free of suffering.

That's what we seek.

So how can I align myself with my actions,

With my speech,

With my livelihood?

How can I align myself so that these parts of my life,

Which are major parts of my life will help to bring that about?

And so that's really what the idea of a C-level ethics is in the Buddhist sense of the word.

And then the last three steps are the samadhi or the mental discipline.

And so here we're talking about right effort,

Right mindfulness and right concentration.

So we're beginning to see now why these are broken out as they are.

We start,

Usually the wisdom part is introduced first.

And it's because you have to have a certain amount of wisdom to even be willing to start the journey on the Eightfold Path to say this is worth doing.

You have to have some sense that,

Yeah,

This is worth trying.

So as we do that,

Then the next step is through our sila part of the path,

Our ethical behavior,

To begin to make our lives align in a way that's calm,

That's peaceful,

That's connecting so that I don't have to constantly be in chaos and dealing with a lot of stresses about the way I'm interacting with the world through arguments,

Through fighting,

Through killing,

Through stealing,

Through misbehavior of my senses,

Through intoxication,

All of these ways that if we are interacting with the world that way,

There's no time to try to seek wisdom,

To try to find wisdom,

Because I'm so busy fighting off the world as it comes at me for those.

So we develop this path,

Cultivate this path of ethical behavior,

Of speech.

It's a huge part of our lives that we learn how do we cultivate a speech that's skillful?

How do we maintain that?

When you do it with your tongue,

It's amazing what will happen to your mind,

Your mind will begin to follow your tongue.

If you work with your mind first,

You can control the tongue,

But they're pretty closely related.

And then as we develop this foundation or till the soil,

So to speak,

Now we're ready to begin the mental discipline,

Which is the process of investigation,

Looking to see what is this environment in this world that we find ourselves in?

What is this psychophysical organism?

What is this?

What do I need to hear,

Not the stories that I believe about myself,

If those were good enough,

I would not need to go on retreats,

I wouldn't need the Dharma,

And I'd be fine.

But seeing that those don't work,

That there's never an end to the stress to the dukkha to the supplements never into it.

What do I need to do?

How do I look at this world to see what the situation is that,

That I find myself in?

And this is where the moral,

Sorry,

The mental discipline part of the path comes in.

And again,

The three elements here really work together.

The first effort,

Right effort is this process of understanding what is it that we need to do?

How do we apply energy?

What's the nature of applying energy to allow us to be able to become clearer on things?

Mindfulness is the process of paying attention.

How and what do we pay attention to?

Concentration is this capacity to bring the mind into focus to,

To,

To bring our awareness that we're working with our first meditation,

Bring that awareness right to what it is we're trying to work with.

So these three work together,

They work closely together.

And it's in that working together that we begin to develop the growth of wisdom,

Because as we do these things,

As we begin to pay attention in the right way with the right kind of mindfulness and with the right kind of concentration,

Life begins to reveal itself to us.

And it does this through a series of insights in the process of these insights.

There's two different types of insights that might happen.

One is a psychological one,

We're not only talking about those so much here,

Although they will happen with this practice,

We're talking more about the existential ones,

Where you begin to see that the things that you took to be true and real and,

And to be reality are not what you took them to be.

It doesn't mean there's not something there.

It's not like these things disappear,

But that what you took them to be is not what they are.

And that process of dismantling these views that way,

Is the process of slowly developing wisdom,

Whereas we begin to see things are not as they are,

As we thought they were,

And how they really are,

Our relationship to those things begins to change.

And we begin to act skillfully around those things.

It's much like when you were a little baby,

And you started to learn gravity,

You didn't understand gravity at the beginning,

It was through trial and error that you developed the capacity to navigate this world with the gravity that it's in it.

And that's really what we're doing.

As you did as a little baby by falling,

By picking yourself up by getting scraped,

Trying it over and over again,

You developed wisdom around gravity.

That's what we're doing here with the idea of this life's inherent Dukkha,

This life's inherent nature of change,

And the impersonal nature of it,

We're beginning to slowly wear away at those fixed views that we've had about those things and see that's not what it is.

And as life reveals itself to us,

And we're open and able to accept what life is telling us,

The suffering begins to naturally subside,

It begins to stop of its own accord.

It's not we're not doing something to make it go away,

Rather,

We're opening to life as it is.

And in that process of opening to life as it is,

The suffering stops,

Why does it stop?

Because our relationship to the way things are,

Begins to be closer to the way we're okay with them being.

So this big gap where I want it to be my way,

But it's this way that big gap,

We now find that I don't have such strong opinions about the way things need to be.

They don't have to be to my liking all the time.

A question I like to ask people to just ponder for yourself is,

Why is it better to have something be pleasant and unpleasant?

Why is that?

What's the nature of something being pleasant or unpleasant,

Being any different than each other?

What I find for myself is a sense of I or me,

It seems to be the subject of everything.

And that's the one that's telling me that that's the case,

That that's why it has to be that way.

As we begin to see clearly,

That that sense of an I or me is not all there is,

It's not the subject of everything.

It's not the end all be all.

It's a part,

It's just a player in this life that's unfolding moment after moment,

And doesn't have to be satisfied in every single moment.

As we begin to see that and feel that way,

Two things happen.

First of all,

The self surprisingly takes its place as a servant instead of a master,

Without a big fight.

We think of product of a big fight,

But it really doesn't want to seize that.

And secondly,

The gap between what I want and what is begins to close.

And when that life when that gap closes,

Closes,

We're actually aligning ourselves with what life is saying is true.

If we are aligned with life,

Friends,

If we are right there,

How could there possibly be suffering?

How could there be any suffering?

When life says go this way,

We go this way.

When life says go this way,

We go this way,

There's nothing left to bump into.

So this is the gift that the Buddha offered to us through this,

Through this process of the eightfold path.

And the more we,

The more we work with these tools,

The closer we come to closing that gap.

So we talked about combining the different parts of the eightfold path into chords.

As we start working with them,

And already in your life,

You're already doing this,

They are not standalone steps or elements.

When we do anything we're doing,

We're finding these things come together,

They work that way.

The other thing about the eightfold path,

Each of the things that we're talking about as being a right something or other is already a very natural part of life.

So right action,

We've got action,

Regardless of right or wrong,

We're always going to be acting.

Speak,

There's always going to be speech,

Right or wrong,

There's always going to be speech.

Wisdom,

We know things,

We know things about,

It's just what are we going to know things about and how are we going to know them.

So this set of eight properties,

Whether they're skillful or unskillful,

Right or wrong,

They're always going to be there.

So what we're doing here as we train ourselves on these things is to align ourselves in these eight properties in a way that brings us closer to understanding how this world works,

Understanding its nature,

Understanding what it's not,

And then acting in accordance with that.

So it's really combining these different steps throughout our lives to do that.

And you will find as you begin to cultivate any one of these steps,

If you spend some time working on it,

It naturally bleeds over into the others.

For example,

Right effort is foundational to pretty much everything we do,

Even this Naseela part of the path to have right actions to have right speech.

Certainly at the beginning,

There's a lot of work to keep the tongue still.

I know I spent a long time when I was first starting to work with right speak,

Just not feeding my mind's desire to be thinking about what to say when somebody else was talking,

Just to give them the space to say what they're going to say,

And me not be so busy trying to figure out,

And when do I get to get in my words here?

When do I get to say something that took a lot of effort to do that,

And master it by any means,

But just I know I was surprised as I watched my mind how much it wanted to do that.

Another one for me is exaggeration.

If three of something was good,

Four had to be better.

So I found as I paid attention to my speech,

This idea of exaggerating would just creep in.

And I would often find myself saying something,

Knowing if I looked closely that it was an exaggeration of what the real situation was.

And it just happened without paying attention without that effort to say,

I don't want to be doing that.

Without doing that,

I would not.

I'd still be exaggerating.

I still do.

But I mean,

I'm doing as much as I had been.

So right effort and right speech,

The same is true with right action,

And right.

Right speak.

I'm sorry,

Right action and right effort.

As you look at all the different of the eightfold path,

The elements,

You see how they go together.

So tomorrow,

We're going to be spending time digging into the this Samadhi section of the eightfold path.

With the other parts of the path,

Again,

You're familiar with them.

I think as you develop this part of the path,

You will find you will be drawn to looking more closely at the seal part of the path and also the Tanya,

The wisdom part of the path.

Because again,

They propel us into that space.

This part of the path is the workhorse.

This is the this is I call it the heart of the eightfold path because it's you set the stage with the seal apart,

You set everything you prepare everything.

And this is the engine that really moves us into seeing things more clearly,

Developing the capacity to identify what's going on here,

That makes something seem the way it is out there.

And through the process of insights begins to dismantle what we had as fixed views,

And turn that into wisdom.

So we moved from the sealer into the Samadhi into Panya is was we make this and then as we come back to the the path again,

After having more insight,

And more wisdom,

We now just keep repeating this process,

Because each time we do it,

We see more deeply how things are,

We begin to understand more completely,

The nature of this conditioned life.

And and each time we do that,

It feels like,

I think I got it.

And then something in life will tell you,

You don't got it.

And so it's this process of repeating this over and over again,

That deepens our understanding of the four noble truths,

Deepens our understanding of wisdom,

What wisdom is,

And how it manifests in our life,

Deeper understanding of how to practice how to do concentration,

How to do mindfulness practice,

How to develop the positive practice,

How to bring those things into our,

Our daily meditation,

And more powerful and connected,

Or curious way of doing it.

And then sealer so that we are we're at peace,

Both with ourselves and with those around us and fostering peace in the world around us.

Reviews

Excellent explanation of suffering and Buddhism.
Thank you 🙏

So helpful! Excellent. Thank you 🙏🏼

A great overview. - I like your term of « elements of the path » , with the implied option to begin « where we are », explore that, integrate it and discover where/what it leads us to next…and go from there… Trust that as this « opened system » will lead us, in due time, to meet all the elements and work with them to transform « dukka » into peace. - Will return to this. 🙏🏻

wonderful

This was interesting and you explained in a way that was easy to understand. Our inner environment has to change before the external will follow. It’s something I know but it’s easy to lose sight of in the world at times. Thank you.
🙏🏻🦋🌸🌿

This was the best explanation of the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path I have ever had presented to me. I will listen to it many more times to truly absorb the concepts. John Cunningham is outstanding in the way he clearly connects all aspects of the dharma. Thank you John!