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The Cultivation of Knowledge: Understanding and Releasing Dukkha

It's nice to be here. Let's talk a little bit about shifts in understanding, which is kind of the theme for today. It's very natural that our understanding will shift along the path. There will be changes in how we understand things. That's kind of what it means to walk the path, actually. It doesn't just mean an accumulation of knowledge over time. There are sometimes that we realize we have come into an entirely new way of seeing things, and we're actually going to have to change our behavior or our practice in order to be in line with how we've come to see things.

Today, we're going to focus particularly on our understanding of dukkha^[1] and the end of dukkha. I deliberately use the Pali^[2] word there, because we may not know quite how to say that in English. I mean, suffering, unsatisfactoriness, stress—we'll see different possibilities. But we'll also see that releasing dukkha, what it means to be free from dukkha, we would think that would be simple enough, but how we understand that also changes along the path.

These ideas, of course, lie at the very heart of Buddhist practice. It's about suffering and the end of suffering. The Buddha said sometimes that's all he teaches. So these are not static ideas to learn; they're dynamic, active knowledges that we cultivate—the knowledge of dukkha, the knowledge of the end of dukkha. When we set out to understand dukkha, our understanding begins one way, and then it changes as we mature in practice. The same is true for letting go.

Maybe just take a moment to reflect: can you think of some part of the dharma that you understand differently than when you started practice? Even if you just started practice recently, probably there's already been some kind of shift. Bearing that in mind, let's talk about this First Noble Truth, the one concerning dukkha. It says simply, in broad terms, that there is dukkha in life.

According to the first discourse of the Buddha, the very first sermon that he gave, the definition goes like this, and this one translates dukkha as suffering: "Now this, bhikkhus^[3], is the noble truth of suffering: birth is suffering, aging is suffering, illness is suffering, death is suffering; union with what is displeasing is suffering; separation from what is pleasing is suffering; not to get what one wants is suffering; in brief, the five aggregates subject to clinging are suffering." Don't worry too much about the technical term at the end about the aggregates. I think we can relate to those things.

In that same sutta^[4], there are tasks associated with each of the truths. For the first truth that says this noble truth of suffering is to be fully understood, that's the task. I came across a nice quote by the scholar Rupert Gethin, who said, "Developing an understanding of the first noble truth involves not so much the revelation that dukkha exists as the realization of what dukkha is." Does anyone really need a lot of help to understand that dukkha exists? I don't think so. I think we understand that right away. But the realization of what dukkha really is, that can pull the mind pretty deep.

We'll talk a little bit more specifically about different possibilities for how we could understand what dukkha is. Just to know that this task of fully understanding suffering is something that goes on for a long time can be helpful. We'll also talk about the Third Noble Truth; we're not only going to talk about dukkha. That's coming later today.

For completeness, let's just mention the tasks for each of the noble truths. For dukkha, it is to fully understand. For the origin or the arising of dukkha—the Second Noble Truth—the task is to abandon the causes or the conditions for it. For the Third Noble Truth, the cessation of dukkha, the task is to realize it. And for the path to the cessation of dukkha, the Fourth Noble Truth, the task is to develop it.

Let's think about developing the path. I would suggest that some of what we develop on the path is the ability to do the other tasks. We develop how we understand dukkha; we develop our ability to realize the end of dukkha. The proposition for our session today is that we're going to apply the Fourth Noble Truth to the other truths, particularly to the first and the third truth.

I think we sometimes don't realize how the process of the path can be a little bit subtle. We just do our sitting every day, we come to events, we talk with people, and then we wake up one day and realize, "Oh, wait a minute, something has really changed." That's normal. Sometimes it's helpful to really bring that to awareness. Let's do a sitting to delve a little bit more deeply into our current understanding of this quality of dukkha.

Guided Meditation: Delving into Dukkha

Find a posture that would be good for meditation. Find a comfortable place to sit, settle into a balanced posture. I like to shift back and forth a little bit or forward and back in order to really find the center point where I'm sitting. And if you're comfortable doing so, you can close your eyes.

Maybe taking a little time to deliberately go through the body and soften the areas where we tend to hold some tension. Softening the muscles of the face, the forehead, around the eyes, the jaw. Softening the eyes and the eye sockets. Down through the throat, into the shoulders. Letting the shoulders drop off a bit without rolling forward. Maybe thinking of sliding the shoulder blades down the back.

Bringing attention into the chest area. Feeling the front, back, sides of the ribcage, allowing those to soften. Releasing the diaphragm. Softening down through the belly and the low back. Just allowing the balance and the straightness of the spine to support the body. Softening the hip joints. Releasing any bracing in the legs. Generally, just inviting ease throughout the body. If there are parts that are sore or still tense, that's totally fine. We have ease in the mind about how the body is right now.

Just allowing awareness to be soft. Mindfulness of the body. Hearing sounds, noticing any thoughts or emotions, just be there. Just maintaining a sense of simple presence.

In this meditation, I'm going to suggest several different areas of life where we tend to experience some of what the Buddha called dukkha. In each case, I'll invite you to call to mind some aspect of that area that's challenging for you. Don't choose the heaviest thing. The purpose of the reflection is to feel your relationship to dukkha in your current understanding.

One clear area where we experience dukkha is the body. Perhaps you have some pain or illness or injury, or just the usual challenges of getting older. Just touching into some aspect of the body that for you there's some dukkha, some unsatisfactoriness, some pain, some suffering. Just notice how that is in your mind. How do you relate to that? Just breathe.

And then you can release that and just go back to the open awareness. Continuing to breathe.

A second area where the Buddha points out that we often experience challenge, dukkha, is the stress of some kind of change in your life. Perhaps your work has shifted, you've lost your job, you've been reassigned. Or there's been a shift in a relationship, or some activity you used to enjoy is no longer available. On a smaller scale, there are the innumerable changes that we deal with all day: keeping our body comfortable, the changes of emotions, the challenge of thinking and responding, being "on" all day. There's really no break from change. How do you relate to those kinds of stresses? Just feeling in your mind and heart your understanding of the challenges of change. Breathing.

Once you feel you have a sense of that, softening again into the open awareness.

The third area we'll touch into, where the Buddha pointed out the difficulty of being human, is the fundamental difficulty of getting everything aligned. Your health, body, food, your work, your emotions, relationships, finances, living situation, politics, providing support to others. Can you get all of that working well at the same time and keep it that way? This is hard. Feel the dukkha of the maintenance of a human life and psyche. How do you see that? How do you feel that in your body, heart, and mind? Breathing with that.

Once you have a sense of that, just open the awareness again to the body sitting. You may wish to pass your attention again through the body, softening. In the present moment, all is fine. You're sitting here.

Take a moment to wish well for yourself. And to wish well for other people—simple mettā^[5]. That feels natural after touching into dukkha.

Shifts in Understanding Dukkha

Sometimes it's valuable to take in what we're up against, what we signed up for in this human life. I'd like to talk now a little bit more specifically about some possibilities for how we shift in our understanding of dukkha. Remember, it's not so much just about knowing that there is dukkha, but understanding what dukkha is. That has to do with how we view and relate to these challenges of human life.

Generally, our understanding of the dharma refines over the course of practice. It gets more nuanced and more subtle. In some ways, it gets complexified, and in some ways, it gets simplified. I want to talk about three different ways that we understand dukkha. They generally go from grosser to subtler, but how it's unfolding for you may not be exact.

The first is dukkha as pain. When we first arrive in practice, we tend to have a very personal sense of dukkha. Many people arrive in Buddhist practice because of some difficulty: an illness, a difficulty in a relationship, or we tend to see it as our situation—losing a job or losing a house. We might be struggling more with difficult mental states like depression or anxiety. Most people understand this type of dukkha right away, and it even has a name: dukkha-dukkha.

Sometimes people feel that Buddhism is a respectful religion because it acknowledges and affirms right up front: "Yes, the human condition is challenging." I remember feeling relieved to hear that. Usually, our first sense of dukkha as pain tends to be individual and personal. Sometimes people arrive because they're distressed by the pain of the world, but a common thread is that the problem is usually seen as external. It's that situation, that person, those people, those systems.

As we begin to work with this kind of dukkha, the approach is often to put more supportive and wholesome conditions in place. Externally, we might change jobs, change friends, or shift our work to be more supportive of our health. But there are also big changes that go on internally when we work with dukkha-dukkha. We practice meditation, we calm down a bit, we feel less tense physically, and we gain some mental awareness. When I first started practice, I was quite physically tense. I spent a number of years consciously relaxing my body and balancing my posture. We start to have moments of genuine mental ease, and we have experiences where we are patient instead of getting angry.

This initial, outright dukkha can begin to lessen. Just to be clear, dukkha-dukkha can happen at any time along the path, but it tends to be more prominent at the beginning. Often we see this as the very definition of dukkha: it's all the problems in my life and the terrible things happening in the world. And that is true, but we don't stop there. In some sense, just dealing with outright dukkha is a little bit like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. The Buddha asks us to keep looking at dukkha, not to be satisfied with just improving conditions.

Experiencing more of a sense of well-being is one of the conditions for starting to see other layers of dukkha. We see more subtle forms of dukkha that operate even when our life is generally good. In the story of the Buddha's life, he led a sheltered life growing up. He was protected and had sensual things, but he was dissatisfied with that. Growing up with that his whole life, he got a sense that that was not the point. We too will start to have that sense as our lives generally get better.

Then we might come to include in our idea of dukkha that it also includes unsatisfactoriness and unreliability. As we look more deeply, we see that things keep changing. We can't hold on to all of our good mind states and all of our good life situations. We have a deepening understanding that experiences are not controllable, they're not completely repeatable, and that all pleasant experiences are going to eventually change or end. This is called the suffering of change, vipariṇāma-dukkha^[6]. It doesn't just mean change; it means degradation or decline over time. You get things in place, and then over time, they drift out of alignment and decay.

We still might have a sense that a lot of this is happening due to external conditions. Nonetheless, we can start to see a more universal dimension. When we start seeing dukkha as unsatisfactoriness or unreliability, there's a realization that it's not just my situation; all humans are subjected to these changing circumstances. We start to get a sense that a lot of the challenge of the world is that people are reacting to that. They don't understand that things always change, so there's a lot of grasping and denying and pushing away in anger. A lot of that is reactivity to the fact that things change somewhat uncontrollably.

We realize that the problems of the world largely stem from what the Buddha called a dart embedded in each person's heart—our deeper inability to gain lasting happiness from worldly conditions. There's a moving sutta where he talks about this dart. You can imagine you've got a thorn that you can't quite see. All you feel is a sense of urgency right in the heart. He talks about people running around because they don't see the thorn in the heart. With practice, we start to get a sense of that in ourselves, and it's only a short leap to realize that's what's going on for everyone. We have to see clearly enough to know where it is to pull it out. That's why dukkha is to be fully understood.

We also see at this stage that our own mind is playing a major role in our happiness. The second verse of the Dhammapada^[7] says, "All experience is preceded by mind, led by mind, made by mind. Speak or act with a peaceful mind, and happiness follows like a never-departing shadow." The conditions aren't completely controllable, but there's something about the way our mind is that has an effect on our happiness. If we move to another town because things weren't so good where we were living, those conditions might be better, but we've taken our mind with us. We have habits about how we relate to things, and those come back. We start to realize that happiness and non-suffering are going to be an inside job. We get better at handling change through internal methods: equanimity, resilience, patience, mettā. Compassion naturally increases because we see that others are subject to the vagaries of life also. No matter how favorable it seems for someone else, they too have to go through changes.

If we keep practicing with all of this, the dharma deepens at each stage. The conditions that we have in place are exactly what allow us to see the next level. Another dimension is to see dukkha as stress. Perhaps we've gotten to the point in practice where we have a lot of wholesome states. We've cultivated mindfulness, maybe concentration, or the brahmavihāras^[8] (mettā, karuṇā^[9]). When we do vipassanā^[10] (insight meditation) from a wholesome mind state, we start to see more and more clearly how our own mental conditioning is functioning.

We see that despite our very best intentions of wanting non-suffering, we have subtle, subterranean forces in the mind that keep us enacting what we know brings difficulty. Grasping of some kind: greed, hatred, delusion. Mostly what we're doing with our mental functioning is trying to get more of what's pleasant and keep out what's unpleasant. That's basically the MO of the human. We carry deep stories of what we need, who we are, and how we need to be. There's an ongoing stress in maintaining that storyline.

Some of these stories are personal, coming from our own experience. Others we got from our family or culture. We're not personally responsible for all the stories that got implanted into us. There is a form of dukkha that's built into the system. One pattern we see repeatedly is the formation of ourselves as a separate entity. Every time we separate ourselves out, there's something stressful about that. Not that we want to melt into nothingness—there is a function for the self—but there's a certain energy taken with that. The Buddha called this saṅkhāra-dukkha^[11], the difficulty of formations.

Eventually, we see that the fact that the mind is busy constructing so much of what we see comes with a little bit of stress. Every time we've intended something, separated something out, created something, or built something, that process has a little bit of tension or tightness to it. The last part of the definition of dukkha says, "In short, the five aggregates of clinging are dukkha." The five aggregates, or khandhas^[12] in Pali, are the aspects of experience that we use to construct a self and a world.

I wanted to read a quote from Ajahn Mun^[13], a wonderful Thai Forest monk. His awakening poem was called The Ballad of Liberation from the Five Khandhas. He says: "The heart, knowing the Dhamma of ultimate ease, sees for sure that the khandhas are always stressful. The Dhamma stays as the Dhamma. The khandhas stay as the khandhas. That's all."

There's no solution to saṅkhāra-dukkha in the conditioned world. We can't create better conditions such that conditions are not oppressive. Conditions themselves are oppressive. When we get to that point, that is when the mind can let go into the end of suffering. We can't do it only through wholesome karma. Something else is going to have to happen. Don't worry, it comes about naturally through the process of practice.

At the end of this grand tour of different layers of dukkha, it starts to sound like, "Wait, anything I do is stressful?" Yes, that's true. There is a point where we see that. One of the Thai Forest masters said: "You can't go back, you can't go forward, and you can't stay where you are." When you get to that point, something very interesting happens.

Questions and Reflections

Questioner: I was wondering if you could talk more about what it means to fully realize dukkha and what it means to develop the path.

Kim Allen: You're referring to the tasks. For dukkha, it is to be fully understood. Actually, the realization is for the Third Noble Truth, that cessation of dukkha should be fully realized. The quote from Rupert Gethin said, "Developing an understanding of the first noble truth involves not so much the revelation that dukkha exists as the realization of what dukkha is." Even though it uses the word realization, the task is to understand what dukkha is.

Questioner: Does that mean it's the same thing to understand and to fully realize?

Kim Allen: I think it's pointing to the same thing. The issue is that we don't completely understand what dukkha is. We think it's about my pain when we first arrive. The process of fully understanding it is to understand more and more deeply these dimensions of it. We think, "I need a new job. This job is terrible. My boss is difficult." That's true at some level. But as we work with the difficulty, we unfold these other layers. We realize, "Oh, actually, there isn't a job that's perfect." To be a human and have to make a livelihood, I'm not even in control of that completely.

At first, we think the end of dukkha will be getting all pleasant experiences, setting it all up correctly, and keeping it that way. That's a fantasy. We unfold more and more layers, and it's actually better and better news. We don't have to accomplish making our life perfect in order to find the end of suffering. But to get there, we have to really get at what the problem is that we're trying to solve.

You also asked about developing the path. The developing of the path is all the steps of the Eightfold Path. We cultivate our behavior in the world to be wholesome and helpful. The reason for that is so that our mind will be clear enough that when we meditate, we'll be able to settle down and have clarity. If we look carefully enough for long enough, we'll gain wisdom. We'll start to understand how stress comes about. Is it really caused by those things outside, or is stress somehow caused inside? This is all part of the path—this slow clarification of how to be in this human existence without struggle.

Questioner: My question is simple, but it's part of everything being aligned. I like to have the Pali words clear in my mind. I think I have vipariṇāma.

Kim Allen: Yeah, it's a "vi" in front of it. Vipariṇāma. That means change in the form of degradation.

Questioner: And the stress of everything? Saṅkhāra?

Kim Allen: Yes, saṅkhāra. That's the stress of constructions, things that are put together or built.

Questioner: Can you talk a little bit more about the end of dukkha, cessation? I don't think you mean we're not going to suffer at some point. Is it just to be okay with the suffering? What is cessation of dukkha really trying to get to?

Kim Allen: The prospect of Buddhism is that yes, we could not suffer anymore. Along the way, we have many flavors of realizing what that means. In some ways, we do have to learn to tolerate some of the stress that we feel in order to look at it clearly enough. If we're in a state of reaction—angry about difficulty, denying it—we won't be able to end it. The hope is that looking at it will lead to some resolution of it. But probably not in the way you think. In Gil Fronsdal's book A Monastery Within, one of the tales says: "Your problems will not be solved; they will be dissolved."

Questioner: The bit about alignment really struck me. I realize how much of my life I want things to be in order—my kids, my work, the yard. I want all these things to be aligned, and then I'll pay attention to myself. I've come to realize over the years in practice that there's an alignment that can happen within. Even though things are not really externally aligned, they appear more aligned than they would have before. Where does the alignment originate?

Kim Allen: Maybe the first question is, where does the misalignment originate? The sense of misalignment is somehow generated within. That doesn't mean that nothing in the world needs to change. But it can be a clue as to when we're starting to bring in more suffering: when we start feeling that increasing misalignment.

Questioner: I had the misunderstanding that if we were practicing correctly, everything would just be fine. It seems to me like a balanced life might look like adjusting the conditions, holding that lightly, and working along the path. Sometimes the discomfort is so intense it just makes sense to make some adjustments.

Kim Allen: Sure. External conditions are in some ways a reflection of what's going on inside, but they also support what's going on inside. Sometimes things just need to change. I remember Gil telling a story about a lawyer who was sometimes asked to lie in his job. He asked, "How can I continue doing my job where I lie, and also follow this path?" And Gil said, "You can't." There are times when things need to be changed. The Buddha never said it's going to be exactly how it is right now but with no suffering. But it's also true that changing the external conditions is not fully in our control, so that can't be the end of the problem.

Questioner: I have these analogies: trying to start something new, a hamster on a wheel, and sailing. In all these situations, there's the flow state where you're happy, something's working well, you're enjoying that piece. And then there's the feeling of "I can't keep doing what I'm doing, I can't go back, and I can't change." There's a balance between the active and the reflective. You have to enjoy the ride while you can. Because we often forget to enjoy the ride.

Kim Allen: Well, there is a role on the path for skillful enjoyment, because the state of well-being that we're in determines how clearly we can see. But all of the analogies that you gave, I started feeling exhausted! [Laughter] Part of the understanding of dukkha is to really feel that exhaustion. To tune into how tiring it is to be thinking and doing non-stop. This is the suffering of creating conditions. And to see if there might be some alternative to that.

(The group took a short break and engaged in breakout discussions about how their understanding of dukkha has changed along their path.)

Questioner: Something I just realized: sharing dukkha, relating and connecting, transforms the experience a little bit. That was really nice to realize.

Questioner: I noticed a trend in our group. All these storms were happening outside of us, but we did what we could to rearrange the furniture to make us more comfortable.

Kim Allen: Rearranging the deck chairs! It's an enterprise we can do for a while.

Questioner: One thing that has shifted is the relationship to dukkha inside and outside, being dissolvable but not able to cease. And its connection to self. The more there's a recognition of the construction and releasing of self, the more the relationship to dukkha changes. It's changed the relationship to what I consider "knowing" as opposed to "understanding." I find tears coming up, because the release that's possible is just remarkable.

Kim Allen: Beautifully said. The more deeply we touch the dukkha, because we have the capacity, the more deeply we can touch the release of dukkha. If you want complete release, the price is the really deep touching of it. We can trust that the path will take us into dukkha at the rate that we can handle. The head says, "No, I'm worried about going into that, it's going to be too much." And it will be too much if you just plunge in. But the nature of a path is that at each moment we unfold a little bit more capacity through mindfulness practice to be with a little bit more, and then we can touch a little bit more release. When the heart starts to get how that works, it can make its own path.

Understanding the Cessation of Dukkha

That transitions us nicely into teaching on the cessation, the release, the ending of dukkha. This puts us on to the Third Noble Truth: realizing the cessation of dukkha. Here is what the Buddha said about the cessation of dukkha, from that same sutta:

"Now this, bhikkhus, is the noble truth of the cessation of suffering. It is the remainderless fading away and cessation of craving, the giving up and relinquishing of it, freedom from it, non-reliance on it. This noble truth of the cessation of suffering is to be realized."

Craving is named as the thing that we're releasing, and the cessation of suffering comes when we release craving. What is craving exactly? That's something to discover through the path.

Sometimes we forget to notice the ending of suffering. One instance of dukkha ends, and we're on to the next dukkha. But did we notice the ending? When you ask people about the cessation of pain or struggle, they often feel a little bit blank. That's partly because of the profundity—it's not really describable very well. But it's also because, at a mundane level, we just don't notice it. We want to know what's here, so we're on to the next dukkha. This truth asks us to linger in the ending of pain or suffering, and to really get to know that feeling. It might go against our habit to rest in feelings like contentment, ease, and peace that are left when suffering ends.

As with the truth of dukkha, our understanding of cessation refines over the course of practice. The first understanding of cessation is fairly blatant: it's the ending of something that was painful. The ending of something that was there, and then it's not there, and we have ease or simplicity as the result. Physical and mental experiences are there, and then they do stop. Anger subsides. A long day, and then I get into bed. The fly finally stops buzzing around my head. Sometimes change isn't suffering, because what goes away is unpleasant. In the wake of that, we feel some kind of ease or simplicity. In the case of an unwholesome mind state ending, we might actually feel some love or friendliness in its wake.

But this top-level understanding is not all of what the Buddha was pointing to. He wasn't just talking about the pain going away. The Buddha had back pain. When he got older, walking around India barefoot, he would get to a town and say to one of his monks, "You give the dharma talk, I'm going to lie down, my back hurts." He wasn't free of back pain, but he was free of the suffering from it. I don't think the world the Buddha lived in was ideal either. It was a feudal society, the caste system was solidifying, his clan was overrun by an expanding monarchy. All of that didn't go away, but the Buddha found complete release from the stress of that.

We are pointing toward Nibbāna^[14], the goal of practice. Nibbāna is famously difficult to talk about conceptually. But the deeper forms of understanding the end of dukkha begin to bring in some of the qualities of Nibbāna.

The second kind of understanding of cessation is cessation as absence. Not just the ending of a thing, but the absence itself. We don't normally notice absence because we're looking at objects. In mindfulness practice, we're told to notice what's here so we're not in the future or the past. But cessation is a meaningful absence. The analogy Gil uses is making your hand into a fist. After five or ten minutes of this, when you release it, the absence of a fist has a feeling to it. It's an openness, a release. A non-fist is not a thing that you can exactly see, but it is a meaningful absence.

This is named right there in the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta^[15]. In the third foundation of mindfulness, mindfulness of the mind, we're asked to notice when the mind is caught up in anger, and when it isn't. What does non-anger feel like? Probably right now, your mind is not angry. What does that feel like? In the fourth foundation, we're asked to notice that certain hindrances are not present.

The underlying motivation for attuning to absence is that we can attune to peace, and ultimately to Nibbāna. Nibbāna is defined as the absence of greed, the absence of hatred, and the absence of delusion. If you've never looked at absence, how will you recognize Nibbāna, the ultimate absence? An absence can accompany any experience. There can always be the absence of clinging, regardless of what objects are there. If you have an absence of clinging or craving, that is a little taste of Nibbāna.

Eventually, we might come to feel some alignment with this beautiful description of freedom: "This is peaceful, this is excellent, namely, the stilling of all formations, the relinquishing of all assets, the destruction of craving, dispassion, cessation, Nibbāna."

A third way to see the cessation of dukkha is as an aspect of nature. There's something that seeks freedom, the way water seeks the lowest point. What is the gravitational pull of the heart? This idea is captured in the Cetanākaraṇīya Sutta (AN 10.2). It states explicitly that the path to Nibbāna is a natural flow:

"For a virtuous person, one whose behavior is virtuous, no volition need be exerted, 'Let non-regret arise in me.' It is natural that non-regret arises in a virtuous person."

When we are acting well in the world—not lying, cheating, stealing, or killing—that's the recipe for non-regret. It goes on:

"For one without regret, no volition need be exerted, 'Let gladness arise in me.' It's natural that gladness arises in one without regret."

We move from external action in the world (virtue) to an internal feeling. It continues:

"For one who is glad, no volition need be exerted, 'Let joy arise in me.' It is natural that joy arises in one who is glad... For one with a joyful mind, no volition need be exerted, 'Let my body be tranquil.' It is natural that the body of one who is joyful will be tranquil."

From that follows happiness, concentration, knowing and seeing things as they really are. From there to disenchantment, dispassion (no longer being fooled by the deceptions of the world), and finally, knowledge and vision of liberation. This sutta says we get on the wagon with virtuous behavior, and we follow it down like water seeking the lowest point, arriving at the peace of liberation. It says: "Thus, one stage flows into the next stage, one stage fills up the next stage, for going from the near shore to the far shore."

We come to see that the end of suffering is something that gets initiated. If we bring forth what's needed at the beginning of the path, a cascade gets started. Another way to say this is that the mind has an intrinsic or natural freedom that needs to be uncovered through the effort of practice. Ajahn Chah^[16] said:

"This mind, in truth, there is nothing really wrong with it. Within itself, it is already peaceful. That the mind is not peaceful these days is because it follows moods. The real mind doesn't have anything to it. It is simply an aspect of nature. It is already unmoving and peaceful, just like a leaf which is still as long as no wind blows. If a wind comes up, the leaf flutters. The fluttering is due to those sense impressions. If it doesn't follow them, it doesn't flutter. We must train the mind to know those sense impressions and not get lost in them."

There are two different views of the path. One is a developmental path: we build up strength, build mindfulness, cultivate concentration, and create a mind able to let go. Another view is that we're revealing or eliminating obscurations. There's something natural that the Buddha discovered, but there's the work of clearing away what's in the way of it. I think they are, in essence, the same.

We work wherever we're at. Whatever dukkha you're experiencing now is the First Noble Truth. We just sit with that, see what can happen, and something will shift. Maybe it'll just end because the situation changes. Or maybe we'll realize, "Oh, I had a story about that, a view that isn't accurate," and suddenly it doesn't look the same.

Questions on Cessation

Questioner: There are kind of two approaches: one is a general meditation practice where you're strengthening, and the other is this virtuous life where the water flows downhill. Are there specific meditations around craving and loss? My son died two months ago. So it's grief.

Kim Allen: That is part of the very fundamental dukkha of being human. The understanding that the world deals with aging, illness, and death is what spurred the Buddha to find awakening. It's a very profound Heavenly Messenger. The place to start is to really connect with your own heart, and know, to the degree possible, the sense of loss and connection, loss and love. How those somehow intertwine.

Questioner: It's complicated, because I think grief is the flip side of love. The deeper the love, the deeper the grief. How do you stop that yearning? How do you keep the closeness in memory but accept that they're gone? That's a struggle.

Kim Allen: You've said it very beautifully. I almost feel like the path is somehow to increase the space in the mind and heart so that it can hold all of what you're feeling. That in itself is going to open a path toward the release of this very deep challenge that we have as humans: to have the love, the connection, the need to be with others, and the reality that every single connection eventually breaks. Holding all of that, increasing the size of the heart so that it encompasses all of that, is a good description of the path. So meditations that open spaciousness for you. When we get narrowed in on one aspect of it, there's struggle there. Big and vast. Thank you for sharing that.

Questioner: I had a clarifying question. The first understanding of cessation was the ending of something, the second was absence. What was the third one?

Kim Allen: Cessation as nature. A natural process, built-in, in the way that suffering is built-in.

Questioner: One example of releasing and ending suffering in a pointed way is alcohol or drug dependency. The relief that comes from being able to let that craving go, and have your life start anew. They say, "You can't imagine how good life can be when you let go of this craving that is obviously causing us harm." That's a very clear and direct example of letting go so you can start a new life.

Kim Allen: Let's do a short meditation to connect in with our understanding of the cessation of dukkha.

Guided Meditation: The Ending of Dukkha

Getting yourself into a comfortable meditation posture and bringing your attention inward. Letting some of the words and thoughts settle from what we've been thinking and talking about. Maybe taking a couple of long, slow, deep breaths, and on the exhale, just allowing the body to soften into an upright and relaxed posture.

Call to mind a time when something that was painful or agitating went away. You felt relief or ease or peace from that. An injury healed, an illness healed, or some troubling situation actually resolved. How did that feel in your system? Sensing that positive sensation in the mind.

And then also tune in now more generally to the state of your mind right now, or your heart. Most likely there is an absence of strong greed at this time. Sense the non-greed in the mind.

Most likely the mind is not completely overcome by hatred at this moment. Sense what it's like to have a relative absence of aversion at this moment.

Probably your mind is not completely overcome by delusion at this moment. You're not totally out of touch with what's happening in the present moment. How does it feel to have a relative absence of delusion?

A place that is relatively free of greed, hatred, and delusion is a place that's close to Nibbāna in some sense. Attune yourself to this meaningful absence. See if it's in some way nourishing to the mind and heart. Just breathing with that.

As a short reflection, consider: Do you practice with the inspiration that dukkha could completely end? What is your relationship to this goal of the Buddhist path? Whatever comes up is fine.

(The group took a few minutes to share in pairs their reflections on noticing a heart free of greed, hatred, and delusion.)

Final Reflections and Dedication of Merit

Questioner: When I contemplate Nibbāna or the end of suffering, what comes up for me a lot is not feeling so preoccupied with that, and more preoccupied with how I show up for the world and for other people. I get the sense that it's possible to end suffering and still not be awesome with other people. Emotional maturity and an understanding and tolerance for people is important to me. No matter where I get on the path, I just want to be there for people in some way.

Kim Allen: That sounds beautiful.

Questioner: Even after years of learning the dharma, I still have a concept of Nirvana as being something very deep, profound, and almost otherworldly. With this guided meditation, you were pointing out something very simple and accessible: right now I'm not super angry at anyone, I'm not super craving anything. It's not a particularly agitated state of mind. There are thoughts coming and going, but this is a taste of what Nirvana might feel like. It seems very ordinary at the same time.

Kim Allen: It's an ordinary, extraordinary thing! We can partake of certain qualities of freedom all the time, and it's often a matter of recognizing them. Remember the view that it's already there, but we're not seeing it. At any moment, we could have a glimpse of it if the waters were to part. It's not always a lofty, transcendent, otherworldly thing. Sometimes it's like, "I'm sitting here, and I don't feel a lot of greed, hatred, and delusion." And that is a little taste.

We've seen today how our understanding of dukkha and the cessation of dukkha can shift over the course of walking our path. We can bear in mind that our understanding of other dharma qualities could also shift. What about mindfulness? Our understanding of compassion that we walk in the door with on the first day is one thing, and after 20 years of practice, it's different. Even ethics—what is wholesome, what is unwholesome—changes. So we don't want to let ourselves be trapped in fixed concepts about the dharma. Allow things to flow and change, and be willing to act differently if your understanding changes. This is a dynamic path. Part of the courage of the path is to act in line with what we understand.

The qualities of the dharma are: well expounded by the Buddha, visible here and now, timeless, inviting exploration, onward-leading, and to be realized individually by the wise. "Come and see"—that's the invitation of the dharma. I am very much inspired to see so many here interested in that, and I have a lot of faith and delight in your ongoing path.

Let's just consider that it's a blessing that we get to come together to share the dharma. There's a collective good that's generated from that. We can direct our minds toward the benefits of this practice being shared more broadly. As we go out into the world, we'll encounter people, and this ripples out farther than we can really know. Just wishing that the benefits and the beauty of this practice be shared with all beings, so that all beings may be happy, all beings may be peaceful, and all beings may find freedom from dukkha. May all know the release of suffering. Thank you.