So,
We are on our second day of exploring how the pain of this life ends,
The third noble truth.
And I was recently reminded of a teaching known as the Salt Crystal Sutta.
It's the Buddha is describing to his monks,
If you drop a salt crystal in a small amount of water,
Will the water be bitter?
And the monks respond that yes,
It would be bitter.
And then he went on to say,
If you drop the same amount of salt crystals into a lake or a river,
Would the water be bitter?
And the response was no,
Because the mass of the water is bigger.
So in life,
We can't prevent the bitterness,
But we can affect the size of the container that holds it.
And the third noble truth points to this.
Our meditation practice is about expanding the container.
And with mindfulness practice,
We begin to see the relationship,
The conditional relationship between the different ways that we react and we respond.
In the meditation this morning,
Having you experience the way that thinking has a contractive quality to it,
And then dropping into the body and just experiencing and feeling into the way when we're just with sensations of breathing,
How a lot of that suffering,
That contraction can disappear when we're no longer constructing or conceiving or interpreting our life through the aspects of the mind.
So when the mind quiet down,
When it quiets down and we're dropping into the body,
A lot of that suffering disappears.
It's kind of like when you take a shower and become clean,
If you've been working outside in the garden or doing some physical labor,
And then you take a shower and you go back into the world,
Into your life,
When you're clean,
It feels good,
Like it feels good.
And when meditation has been this sort of inner shower,
And we go back into the world,
There's this freshness,
Even if it's just for the first hour after practice.
We're not carrying the burden so heavily of our preoccupations.
We're seeing much more freedom.
And when we see the arising of pain,
The arising of stress,
With real clarity,
We can feel the experience.
We can begin to leave it alone.
And that clarity also,
We start seeing the conditionality,
As I've said.
It might be as simple as really seeing the connection between pleasant and unpleasant,
Or how we react with desire or aversion.
Pleasant is a pulling towards,
And unpleasant is a pushing away.
To see that conditionality and to leave it alone,
And then to see it fade,
It's sort of like all of a sudden you're seeing that things exist conditionally.
And that can be its very own insight,
Seeing that conditions are impermanent,
That they're coming and going.
That's an important practice in realization.
Everything arises because of something else,
Some condition.
So when we see things in our experiences that are not permanent,
Then we tend to not get stuck in them.
And you can do this with everything in your life.
What's really important is the ability to see and be present for the flow.
When we're present for the flow,
It just arises and passes,
And we're not,
There's no clinging in that moment.
If we're really present for it,
You know,
It's even written in the suttas,
You know,
To be in harmony with this truth of change,
It actually brings the greatest happiness.
And the greatest happiness is not some sort of euphoric feeling.
It's a deep ease to be in harmony with the truth of change.
There's a little story from the suttas where a bunch of monks are sitting around a campfire,
And they're just all kind of telling one yarn after the other about sort of the great mythological miracles associated with the Buddha's life.
And they're sort of outdoing each other with the stories,
You know.
So when the Buddha was born,
He came out and immediately walked seven steps.
Or he was conceived immaculately,
Or,
You know,
The gods received him and held him up so that he didn't touch the ground,
He actually was floating.
And these stories are kind of fantastical,
And they're mythological in a sense.
So they're all going around and telling these stories.
And Ananda,
The Buddha's attendant,
Is saying,
You know,
He's just so into it.
And he's like,
Oh,
These are wonderful miracles.
These are just so miraculous and extraordinary.
And he's kind of like,
Just getting really into the stories.
And then the Buddha comes into the scene of the campfire and,
You know,
He says,
I'll tell you what,
What the miracle is,
My friends,
My monks,
My disciples.
The miracle is when I have a thought,
I see the arising of the thought,
And the persistence of the thought,
And the ceasing of the thought.
And when I have a feeling,
I see the arising of the feeling,
And the persistence of the feeling,
And the passing away of the feeling.
And when there is a perception,
I see the arising of perception,
And the persistence of it and the disappearance of it.
That is a miracle.
So all these miracles about the Buddha's,
You know,
So called powers,
They're not really that important.
What's really important is the ability to see or be present for the flow,
And the change of how things come and go.
This is where the freedom is found.
This is the freedom from suffering.
To let the flow unfold,
The coming and going and the release of our hold on it,
You know,
And the pushing away and the resisting to it,
Just opening to the space where there's nothing to hold on to,
Nothing to cling to.
It's kind of like,
You know,
There's a story about falling,
Like we're just falling,
But as we fall,
We realize there's no ground.
There's no ground,
We're just going to float through space.
It's a radical,
Radical letting go.
So this interpretation of the cessation of suffering,
The end of suffering,
Has to do with seeing things arising and ceasing.
That's where freedom is found.
This is by my experience,
Where I really experience the end of suffering,
When I see that everything is arising and passing in the moment of its happening,
That there's nothing to hold on to.
This is profound liberation,
Not stopping it,
Not resisting it,
Just allowing the whole body and mind to move through life without holding on and contracting or pushing away.
And the Buddha emphasized this over and over again,
The experience of impermanence,
Inconstancy.
Suffering can come to an end,
It is possible,
And it's not permanent.
I want to express that too.
It's possible to live without the pain and the insecurity and the oppression.
And next week we'll explore how.
But for now,
I'd like to open it up,
And I thank you for your kind attention in this exploration.
