Life just flows and flows. We try to break it up or nail is down through language but language never quite gets it. It isn't just one thing then another but one thing and another, all together as just one thing.
The Buddha articulated his views on suffering into a statement that he called the Four Noble Truths. These include the truth of suffering, its cause, its cessation and the path that leads to cessation.
The First Noble Truth- the Buddha looked at the world and saw that there is suffering in birth, aging, illness, and death. It is a simple description of the reality that bodies are born to age, get sick and die.
The Second Noble Truth is a bit surprising. It isn't unreasonable to assume that the facts of suffering are also the cause of suffering. But the Buddha took a look inside himself and found a lot of desire, desire for life to be something other than it is. Life for everyone is just this way, always too much of what we don't want and never enough of what we do. Desire causes suffering.
With The Third Noble Truth he said that suffering ends with the extinction of desire. He wasn't naive about desire. He knew as well as we all know that we can't wish away our wants. They come from deep in our animal heritage. We survive and thrive because of powerful, instinctual desire.
People understand the danger of desire and are rightfully cautious about it. Our religious traditions are rooted in efforts to manage desire, to make it less destructive. We see its power and suppress it. This often doesn't work very well and religion frequently becomes oppressive. When people see the oppression they begin to notice how many practitioners preach one thing and practice the opposite. They give up on religion as useless but religion hasn't exactly failed us. We have failed our religions.
The Buddha recommended a program based up restraint and investigation of the mind through meditation. Meditation is a really simple act of refocusing attention from desire that is expressed through thinking to the simple physical activity of breathing. The breath and the feelings in the body anchor desire and allow us to experience it without hurting ourselves.
We meditate with the hopeful expectation that it will take us from a state of suffering to a state of non-suffering. We hope it will make us feel calm. We understand that there is a distinction between suffering and non-suffering. This understanding is a false distinction. Language splits up experience into seemingly comprehensible bits. These bits are, at best, tiny snapshots of a flowing stream.
Sitting meditation allows us to suffer at a really mundane level. We get bored. Thoughts tell us how stupid it is to just sit when we cold be entertaining ourselves with television. We can stop and distract ourselves to edge off the anxiety. We can ignore suffering but when we ignore suffering, it drives our every move.
The world is a really interesting place There is a lot of scenery. We see things we want and other things we don't want. Things that seem permanent are always changing. Disasters happen. Fires burn everything and floods wash everything away. Life returns as if nothing ever happened. We notice all that happens but we ignore that it happens in space. Quiet and clear and wholly unremarkable space is necessary for life.
We believe that if we can get more of what we want and less of what we don't want everything will be fine. But life happens as it happens beyond what we like and what we don't. We can try to take refuge in our desires but it never works.
The physical world is full of things that come and go. The inner world is full of thoughts that come and go. Some thoughts make us happy and some make us feel bad. Our minds are jammed full of thoughts and we believe them. We are oblivious to their medium.
The medium is a simple, natural space of awareness. Everyone experiences it in the pause between thoughts. Most everyone dismisses it because it is as common and mundane as the air we breath or the water we drink.
The Buddha studied suffering as a scientist. He looked deeply and discovered that we don't suffer because of our circumstances but because of our desire for different circumstances. Through careful meditation he discovered that desire resolves itself in awareness.
Our trouble with this is language. Language creates the impression that there are fixed realities like a state of suffering on one side and liberation from suffering on the other side. Life isn't made up of separate bits. It flows one thing into another and back again like the breath entering the body and then leaving the body.
Suffering and liberation from suffering are one thing. When I suffer, I suffer because of wanting. I can make a decision that I am suffering because I don't have what I want. That decision creates a sense of identity, a feeling that this is who I am. Then I filter my experience though this false identity.
Or I can hold desire in awareness and feel as it moves through my body and feel as it fades as unimpeded flow of experience.
We we practice awareness over and over again until we begin to have more faith in awareness than we have in desire. Trusting in awareness is an organic religious experience available to all people.
Thai mediation teacher Ajahn Chah told his student Jack Kornfield this: "When you want somebody outside to teach you dharma, you insult yourself, because the truths discovered by the Buddha are already in your heart. There is one who knows within you who already understands and is free. If you can turn toward this natural awareness and rest in it, then everything will become simple."
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