The Third Noble Truth

This is the third talk of the series on the Four Noble Truths. This third exploration is discovering for ourselves the way out of suffering.

Transcript

So,

We have been exploring the Four Noble Truths,

And we're halfway through.

We're beginning now with what can be considered the Good News,

The Good News in the Buddhist practice.

The third Noble Truth involves the sensation,

The cessation or the end of suffering.

So in Pali,

The word that is translated to cessation is called nirodha,

Nirodha,

Which more literally means without the obstacle.

So nirodha means without obstacle.

So the absence of obstacles,

This is the Good News.

It implies a certain freedom to move ahead.

And it's good to know that it's not necessary to suffer.

We don't have to suffer all the time.

Suffering can come to an end.

So the cessation of suffering allows for new possibilities and new expressions of ourselves.

When things come to an end in our life often,

After their initial shock that the end has happened,

There's that possibility of something new to enter,

Maybe some energy or excitement around that.

So last week,

We explored the second Noble Truth,

That suffering has a cause,

And that the cause is craving.

And we looked into the areas of our everyday life,

Asking the question,

What is the cause?

Or what is my contribution to the suffering that I'm having?

And when we look deeply,

We start to see our contribution.

Our contribution is in how we hold to our view to our ideas,

How we hold.

There's often some compulsion,

A drivenness to our clinging,

A thirst for something.

So it's not something that we can really stop,

Right?

That's what it feels like.

There's a drive in our compulsion in our,

In our craving that we can't stop.

And that's,

That's why it's represented by this word craving.

If you've ever had an addiction,

You know what that craving feels like,

But they it's all it's so deeply conditioned.

So it can be very useful to look at and to see where we have this compulsion,

A compulsive behavior.

See where we have sort of this addictive way of being where we're attached.

And then to experience the letting go,

Letting go of it,

Letting it come to an end.

It feels really wonderful.

If you've done this in your life,

That letting go the experience in the body.

The most immediate way that I know to experience letting go is the out breath.

It's like that.

On the very simplest ways,

The out breath.

It feels wonderful.

Yeah.

Try it.

So we can experience this in all kinds of areas of our life every day.

This out breath.

There's no shortage of opportunities.

So craving has a phenomenal role in how we suffer.

And if we want to learn how to be free of that craving,

That is our intent is to be free to be free of clinging and craving.

And the way that this is discussed,

And the third noble truth is the freedom from craving has a lot to do with our relationship to it.

So usually,

We have a strong reactivity to our desires to the things that we want.

We reach for them,

We want them.

We feed them,

We fuel them.

And even the negative,

We don't want something that keeps us caught in this cycle of wanting and not wanting.

You know,

We can see this playing out right now and our COVID-19 era,

People wanting to get out wanting to be free,

Wanting to experience and acting on that compulsion.

And then the conditions that come up from that wanting.

So meditation,

What we do here each week together is a process of stilling all of that,

Stilling the wanting stilling the not wanting,

Quieting all of that.

With mindfulness,

We begin seeing the relationship,

The relationship of our wanting and our not wanting.

The conditional relationship between the different ways in which we react and respond to life.

A lot of suffering can just simply disappear when all the constructiveness and the conceiving and the interpreting aspects of the mind,

All of these aspects of the mind,

Quiet down.

Have you noticed if you know the beginning of a sitting,

You might be really up here.

And then we ground down and all of that suffering all of that craving.

There may be if we just watch,

We're just seeing the show.

The experience of suffering has diminished.

It's kind of a little bit like taking a shower and becoming clean.

It feels so good after you've been working in the yard all day and you're hot and sweaty and dirty.

And you just get into the shower and then you go back into the world and you're clean.

And what meditation it's kind of been like for me is like this inner shower.

You know,

Then when I come back into the world,

I'm cleaner,

Fresher,

I'm seeing with fresh eyes,

Not carrying the burden of our preoccupations so heavily.

And often that's when we see much more.

There's more opening in life.

And then there's much more freedom and clarity.

So each day that you've said is,

Is that inner shower,

We can leave our desires alone.

You know,

We can start to when we start to have that clarity,

We can start to leave things alone.

We don't have to pick them up.

We can leave those desires alone and not pick them up.

We can leave our cravings alone.

We can see them arising.

Oh,

This is wanting,

But we don't have to do anything about it.

We can see that the cravings and the desires have this underlying condition.

And it could be very simple,

That there's something pleasant or unpleasant that has us wanting or pushing away that we're reacting to.

It's often in the realm of pleasant,

Unpleasant or neutral.

We've talked a lot about this.

The desires that come the resistance that arises.

It's conditionally dependent on pleasant and unpleasant.

And when we start to see this clearly in the mind,

So clearly,

Because we're practicing this presence and we're practicing the arising and passing,

Watching the arising and the passing,

We can just leave it alone.

We're like,

Ah,

This is arising.

This unpleasant experience is arising.

It makes me want to go and push it away.

And it's impermanent.

I'm going to sit back.

I'm just going to leave it alone.

And it disappears on its own without any interference.

And then we don't have any problems with craving or aversion.

We don't have to make craving bad,

Or a sin or evil if we have it.

We just see it as another phenomena that's arising,

That's appearing and that we don't have to get involved with it.

It's just kind of like,

Hey,

Look at that.

It's sort of like watching a cloud go through the sky.

It's just a natural phenomena that's going through.

And for those of you that are in the Roaring Fork Valley right now,

We have those beautiful clouds.

The summer clouds are just incredible here.

They're like pearls in the sky.

I think even John Denver has talked and sung songs about it beautiful.

And there's something to that.

Like they're just these phenomenal clouds.

And if we can start to see when pleasant arises or craving arises,

Oh,

This is just a cloud.

Let me see it clearly.

So the non involvement with craving can be that strong.

If the mindfulness is clear enough,

It's phenomenal.

And the mindfulness becomes clear through the practice that we're doing here.

And what happens in practice is we begin to have a very different relationship to our inner life.

The more time that we carve out for our meditative practice,

Our relationship to our inner life changes.

We don't judge so quickly ourselves.

We're not so critical or so reactive.

So to see and know that,

That clarity of just seeing,

We got involved with the clinging or the pushing away.

We're not picking it up.

It's just there.

It's just there moving through like the clouds.

And also in that clarity,

We see the conditionality as I've said,

In the Buddhist cosmology,

It's known as dependent co arising.

Everything arises based on the conditions of something else.

Dependent co arising,

I recommend looking that term up and reading a bit about it.

It's an important concept.

It may be as simple as really seeing the connection between pleasant and unpleasant,

And how we react with desires or aversion.

Something pleasant,

We want more something unpleasant,

We push away.

And seeing the conditionality when we see it,

Oh,

This response is conditioned by pleasant,

This response is conditioned by unpleasant,

I can just leave this alone.

We can start to see that things exist conditionally.

And as conditions,

They're impermanent.

They're impermanent,

They're in constant.

They're coming and going in existence.

To see how things are conditional,

How things arise because of other conditions is one of the things that leads to freedom.

And when we see things in our experience,

As not permanent,

They're not everlasting.

We're not stuck in them.

If we can get out of the way and no longer kind of obstruct,

It's phenomenal what begins to open and unfold in this practice.

The path opens up the path.

So nirodha,

The cessation of suffering,

The non obstruction.

This is the really development of clarity of mind.

Seeing the arising and the passing of things clearly enough that we don't get involved with the pleasure or the pain or the discomfort.

We're able to see these things without obstructing them,

Without holding on to them or pushing them away without getting caught up and entangled.

This is one of the goals of practice.

This is one of the ways we can cut the clinging and the grasping that gives birth to suffering.

To see it's impermanent in constant nature,

Right in the middle of it happening.

There's a little story from the suttas,

A bunch of monks.

They were sitting around a campfire.

This was during the time of the Buddha.

They were just telling one story after another about the great mythological miracles associated with the Buddha's life.

They're kind of outdoing each other with their stories.

When the Buddha was born,

He came out and he immediately walked seven steps.

He was conceived immaculately and the gods received him and held him so that he wouldn't touch the ground.

These stories,

These mythological stories,

They're kind of fantastic and not unlike some of the Christian stories that we've heard.

These monks,

They're going around talking about these miracles.

Ananda,

The Buddha's disciple and assistant,

He was his closest assistant.

Ananda said,

He was saying all these wonderful things as well,

Talking about all these miracles.

He was like,

Oh,

This wondrous miracle,

Oh,

This wondrous miracle,

This is miraculous.

Kind of like goading and getting everybody worked up into the miracles of the Buddha's life.

Then at the end of all these miracle stories,

The Buddha kind of says,

So the Buddha is there.

He says,

It's kind of like the punch line.

You know,

Like all the earlier parts of Ananda's helping were to set up for what the Buddha was going to say.

And so the Buddha says,

I'll tell you what is a miracle.

When I have a thought,

I see the thought arising.

I see the persistence of the thought and the ceasing of the thought.

When I have a feeling,

I see the arising of feeling,

The persistence of feeling and the passing away of the feeling.

When there is a perception,

I see the arising of perception,

The persistence of it,

And the disappearance of it.

That is a miracle.

That is a miracle.

Simple.

We have this capacity.

So all these miracles about the Buddha's so called powers,

That's not really that important.

What's really important is the ability to really see,

To be present for the flow and the change of how things come and go,

Arising and passing.

Anger arises.

I see the persistence of it.

I see the cessation of it.

This is good.

This is where freedom is found.

That's an important understanding to let the flow unfold the coming and going unfold and release the holding onto it.

The pushing,

The resistance of it,

Just to open to the space,

Kind of where there's nothing to hold on to.

Nothing to cling to.

It's all just arising and passing.

That's how we get to,

On some level,

This freedom of heart,

The freedom of the mind.

It's in this radical letting go.

It is radical.

It's a practice for sure.

We start with the out breath.

Maybe that's as far as we get sometimes.

Some days that might be as far as we go.

And it's enough.

This is the interpretation of the cessation of suffering that I offer.

It's seeing really two things,

The arising and the ceasing.

The arising and the ceasing,

The inconstant nature of things.

And to really be in the flow of that.

There's profound liberation to be in the flow of life.

Not trying to stop things or change things or resist things,

Just allowing it to move through without any clinging or holding.

Clinging and holding will come.

But it's this constant putting down,

Putting down,

Putting down.

The deepest liberation that the Buddha over and over emphasized comes from this deep understanding of inconstancy.

He spoke more about impermanence,

Inconstancy,

Than he did about the Four Noble Truths.

The Four Noble Truths are in,

There's five areas in which I could find in the Middle and Discourses where he talks about the Four Noble Truths.

The central teaching that I could find over and over again was on impermanence.

The arising,

The persisting and the passing.

That seems very important to stress at this time as we look at this practice deeply.

So nirodha,

Non obstruction,

The third noble truth.

Suffering,

It can come to an end.

It's possible to be free,

Not as a state in which we arrive and never return back to our own.

This is important to remember too.

It's like,

Okay,

It's possible to be free.

When?

Now,

Now,

Now,

Now.

Not like a constant state of being.

Okay,

So I'm done.

I'm free now.

Thank you very much.

No,

It doesn't work that way.

I wish it did.

It doesn't work that way.

But it's possible to live without the pain of clinging,

The insecurity and the oppression.

It's possible to live that way.

Moment by moment.

Reviews

So helpful. Thank you 🩵💫🙏🏻

A revelation for me, thanks for this excellent talk

Insightful. Thanks for this Lisa.

Thank you. So very relevant in these times. I will try 🙏🌸

Lisa. Thank you so much for the clarity in these talks. They are very useful this morning after a week of sickness where it was hard to shake clinging, especially to self recrimination even though I had awareness of my condition

Thank you for your simple yet profound presentation of this truth. It is a miracle that the end of suffering is possible 🙏

Simply a great teaching! I love the way you are presenting the wisdom of the Four Nobel Truth. Thank you Lisa! ✨️🙏✨️

An enlightening beauty...right now. Arising, Persisting and Disappearing.