The Four Noble Truths
The 4 Noble Truths can be distilled into 2 meanings:
- We are deeply lost and confused and because of that we are suffering
- We can de-confuse / liberate ourself from suffering and can find true happiness and real freedom.
If the things / experiences we consider to be enjoyable were true sources of happiness, then the more we have, the happier we should become. Is our happiness multiplied every time we get more of what we think makes us happy?
1. You should know suffering
True suffering. You’re suffering a lot more than you think. Even the things we find enjoyable are suffering. They aren’t real happiness. In fact, the more we have, the more we suffer. It gets boring and eventually painful. Therefore they are true causes of suffering. We may think that doing things in moderation is the recipe to happiness.But Buddha says ultimately we all have to experience the suffering of sickness, ageing, death, birth. Things break, relationships end, we lose the things we like. It’s a one way street to a (literal) dead end.
What’s the meaning of it all? Understanding the truth of suffering means learning not to deny our reality and experience. All our experiences of happiness are disguised suffering. We need to take the mask off and see what’s underneath. See we are fragile and vulnerable and accept that. Even in just this life, let alone future lives. It’s liberating to know just this 1 truth. It’s normal and natural to suffer. Stop pretending or hiding from that truth. Accept this human situation.
2nd truth is the real cause of suffering.
3rd truth is the path that will liberate us from those causes.
4th truth is the experience of being free.
When we accept suffering we cease to suffer. We may still experience pain, but don’t suffer. Suffering is a disturbed state of mind; if our mind is disturbed we don’t experience peace. That acceptance is fearless and free. Hold that acceptance with a determined and focused mind. The true causes of suffering is ignorance, one of the aspects of this is the denial of reality.
The hallucination that sex, drugs, rock n roll etc are true causes of happiness is another aspect of our ignorance. It exaggerates the qualities of these things and their ability to fill up our absence of happiness. It’s like drinking seawater. It looks like it’s going to quench our thirst, but it just makes us thirstier. We fantasise that’s it’s going to go right, but it can’t go right.
We bounce from anger and frustration to hallucinating an elusive enjoyment. This is samsara.
We need to cut the root of all our suffering.
2. You should abandon origins
Origins are delusions such as anger and attachment, but principally the delusion of self-grasping. Self-grasping is the part our mind that believes what we see to be released and try and out there. E.g. The belief of the “reality” presented to us in a nightmare/dream. It is just a hallucination of our mind that’s asleep. We the dreamer are also not real. The experiences we have in the dream aren’t real. We can die in a dream but we don’t really die. So who died? Just a hallucination. Our ignorance creates a self, other people, occurrences, and we suffer. Why? For no reason at all. Friends are also empty reflections of my attachment.
Who’s the real enemy? My ignorance, that believes what it sees.
We need to meditate on how fragile our circumstances are to prevent complacency
3. Follow true paths
We have to overcome self grasping ignorance. Realise emptiness of ourself and all the things we normally perceive as being pleasant, unpleasant and neutral. Everything is an empty reflection, like a dream. It exists, but it doesn’t exist in the way it’s appearing or the way we believe. The only antidote is to see through the mask, to see the emptiness of the mask.
Everything that appears does so out of empty space. They appear to be solid and material but their nature is empty-like space.
Who are we really? We’re not the waking person, we’re not the dreaming person.
If you don’t wake up from the suffering of this life, you’ll just take it all into the next life. Just another soap opera, another karmic catastrophe.
The only way to cease the suffering of this and future lives is to taste emptiness. Feel this deeply until the mind that believes everything out there is real dissolves. Mix our mind with this emptiness like water mixing with water. Dissolve duality - there is no objective, there is no subjective. There is no me here and world there. Then we will experience the cessation of ignorance. Everything doesn’t disappear, we just experience the union of non-duality and bliss.
Without self-discipline there is no way we can absorb our mind in deep concentration. Moral discipline, concentration and wisdom are the 3 higher trainings which are the essence of the path to liberation. Any path that doesn’t have these is not the true path to liberation.
4. Attain true cessations
Every reduction in delusion or suffering we should regard as a temporary cessation. This is a similitude of a true cessation. We should savour these. They are the seeds of our liberation. Real true cessation is permanent. We can never suffer again. There is no grasping, no ignorance, only the experience of peace.