buddhadharma

Welcome.  Yesterday we talked about the fact that the historical Buddha was a prince who left the palace to try to found out life’s meaning.  At first, he did a lot of complicated yogic practices, but they didn’t help him.  Finally, he sat down under a tree and just meditated on his breath.  When the Buddha got up from under the tree, he was enlightened.  In response to people’s questions, he taught the Four Noble Truths, which became his first teaching.  People sometimes refer to this teaching as “the first turning of the wheel of dharma.”

The First Noble Truth taught by the Buddha was that life is suffering.  In our present society, that is hard for us to believe, because we are always told that we are supposed to be  happy.  In our world today, people want instant gratification.  If we are bored, we don’t need to employ imagination; we just have to press a button to turn on the T.V.  If we are hungry, often we don’t bother to shop for food and bring it home and cook it; we just step out to a restaurant and have an elegant meal served to us.  The Buddha taught, though, that no matter what you do, no matter how easy you try to make your life, it’s nature is still suffering.  We get hungry, for example, so we try to  make ourselves feel better by eating.  But then we experience the uncomfortableness of thirst, so we have to have a drink.  Then we feel bloated and we have no energy, so we force ourselves to go jogging to try and work it off.  When we jog, we get all sweaty, so we rush to take a shower.  When we step out of the shower, we get chills, we so turn up the furnace.  Then it gets too hot, so we open the window, and on and on and on.  You see what I mean.  Everything we do in life is an attempt to escape from suffering, which is life’s constant.     

All of this suffering has a cause, which is the Second Noble Truth.  The cause is ego, ego meaning here the incorrect, superstitious belief in an individual, finite substantiality.  We think “I am real; my arms and legs and torso are real; my brain and emotions and memories are real; therefore, my identity as a calm and sane person, or a nervous and insane nut case, or a kindly and intelligent professor, or a wise physician, or an efficient executive secretary or an unhappy cosmetologist is also real.  We hold on for dear life to whatever identity we  claim.  We unconsciously think, as a result of this superstition, that “there is me and then there is everybody else, who is not me.”  The next step is to think “It’s me against the world.  I’ve got to protect me and mine.  I’ve got to watch out that nobody else takes away whatever I have.”  We live our lives in a state of constant low-grade warfare with the world and low-grade anxiety.  Ironically, this anxiety, which is based on trying to hold on to self, stops us from truly becoming ourselves or living up to our potentials.  We fail to grow and blossom because we become risk averse.   This makes our lives even more unhappy, besides the basic suffering that is intrinsic to being alive. 

Not to worry!  Suffering has an end, which is the Buddha’s Third Noble Truth.  Come back to tomorow, and we will discuss the Third and Fourth Noble Truths.  I will be having some minor surgery tomorrow morning, so I will be posting late.  Check out this blog in the evening.  See you then!  

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