DO Series - Dukkha -the link of Suffering -The Delson Bot Introduced

All right, let's see. All right, John, take it away. Great, thank you. Thank you, David. Yes, it is hot here, like most of the world. Right, so thank you, welcome everybody. As I mentioned last time, in each of this series of talks I'll be highlighting some aspects of Delson's new online presence at delsonarmstrong.com. Today we have something a little special, a look at a project that's been in the works for some time and will result in a new subscription service in the coming year. It's called the Delson Bot, and it's a generative AI chat bot built on an OpenAI LLM, trained with 350-plus videos with Delson Armstrong, all of his books, and designed to act as closely as possible as an interaction with the real teacher. So that sounds pretty fancy. Why don't we take a look at it and see how it works.

Okay, so this is something you can access in your browser. The interface basically gives you a place to ask questions, and when you ask a question the AI will generate a response that's based on all the teachings of Delson. So let's see how it works. I thought I'd start with something topical for today and see what it does: what is dukkha? I don't know how much of this you can see. Yeah, we can see all of it. It's pretty comprehensive. It gives quite a comprehensive response based on everything in Delson's materials that have been fed in by Kun and his amazing team. So as you can see, it covers a rather comprehensive response. When I look at that, I think, well, could you make it a little more practical? So I'm going to ask it that question next.

And so it gives us some practical tips about how do you apply the concept of dukkha to our actual practice: recognizing, understanding the causes, practicing the 6R's, cultivating the brahmaviharas, following the Eightfold Noble Path. It outlines all of that, reflecting on impermanence and not self, being patient and kind. So, like this, you could ask just about any question you like, and you'll get a response that's based on Delson's teaching. So just to be clear, this is a work in progress and shouldn't be used for serious guidance at this point. But it is now going to be available for people to log in and try it out. And so I'm actually going to put the information into the chat.

I'll stop sharing, and I'm just going to drop this into the chat here. So if you go to this wonderful volunteer-based site called service space, but I'm afraid I misspelled service space, I'm just going to have to retype that. I'll put the link in again at the end. And then you create a little account with your email, and then you go to the second link to ask anything you like. So currently we have a more robust version in development that will be customized to be much more detailed and responsive, giving a much richer experience when it's complete and tested. We're going to launch it as a subscription model in the coming year, and this is a way to get much clearer guidance from the chat bot.

And so then, last time I spoke about the upcoming AMA, or Ask Me Anything session, set for August 17th on Zoom with Delson. This AMA format provides a more intimate setting for practitioners to delve into practice questions and more with Delson. And it's another cost-effective way to supplement his livelihood. So today we're offering everyone who signs up for this AMA on August 17th a one-year free subscription to the upcoming advanced Delson Bot model, starting the day that it's released. So we'll release it, and then everyone who's signed up for an AMA on August 17th will get a notification, and we'll be able to get a one-year subscription from that point. And so, to sign up for the AMA, here's a link to that. There are limited spots left, so please sign up soon, as soon as the stock ends, to avoid this disappointment. And now it's over to Thank you, John.

Thank you, John. Can everyone hear me okay? David, can you hear me? Yep, looks good. All right, good. So you saw John sharing some stuff on the chatbot about what is dukkha. Very good question. And as you said, it was a pretty comprehensive description of dukkha, and that's what I want to explore today with you guys. There are three types of dukkha that I want to go into. There is what is known as dukkha dukkha, viparinama dukkha, and sankhara dukkha. Dukkha dukkha means the dukkha of dukkha, right? It's the visceral dukkha that you can feel right here, right now. Viparinama dukkha is the dukkha of change. It's the dukkha, or the suffering, of what happens when you don't expect something to happen, you know, the way that you want it to be.

And then sankhara dukkha is much deeper. It's almost like an existential kind of dukkha. So these three kinds of dukkha are actually, if you think about it, and if you were to reflect on it, you would see that dukkha dukkha corresponds to the second characteristic of dukkha. Viparinama dukkha matches the impermanence, so it's you could say it's the dukkha of impermanence, the dukkha of change, of

instability and of sankhara dukkha. You can associate that with the understanding of not self, that all experiences that we have within conditioned reality are not self. So this is an easy way for you to understand the different types of dukkha. So what is dukkha? What do we mean by dukkha? Dukkha is translated usually as suffering, but I find that to be quite overly dramatic. Suffering is something beyond comprehension, something that we can't, it's way too much. But really dukkha is, well, first of all it comes from the understanding of when you have, let's say, a horse cart or any kind of vehicle with wheels, and one of the wheels is sort

of shopping, because everybody, most people now, get their stuff from Amazon, even their groceries. But in any case, for those people who might go to the grocery store, when you go and you push the cart there, sometimes you get the cart with just one wheel just a little bit off, and every time you're pushing that cart, it's just difficult to manage. That's dukkha. That's what it means. It's where one wheel is sort of slightly off axis. So this dukkha is basically instability. It's the lack of any kind of stable happiness.

We can call it dissatisfaction, or unsatisfactoriness. We can call it suffering. We can call it a painful experience, whatever it is, but we all recognize dukkha, and without dukkha you can't come to the Dhamma, for the most part. People are not interested in the Dhamma unless they have some level of suffering, some level of dukkha. Until then they enjoy themselves, they're happy with where they are. And when they do experience some suffering, they might look for alternate modes of dealing with that suffering, and usually those alternate modes lead to further bouts of craving, lead to further identification, and all it does is deepen the grasp of dukkha, until at some point you say you've had enough. Until you've had that experience, which is called samvega, you won't experience the Dhamma. And what is samvega? Samvega is spiritual urgency. Usually it's translated as spiritual urgency, but what it is, is where you see that you've had enough of suffering and you see that there must be a way out of the suffering. And so from that spiritual

urgency you see that there is the Dhamma. You get introduced to it. Maybe somebody recommends a book, or you go on YouTube nowadays and you search for what is the cause of suffering, why am I suffering, and you'll see all kinds of videos. But maybe you happen to come upon a video by Bhante Vimalaramsi, or by David or myself, or whoever is teaching and guiding one through the Dhamma, or you might come across a sutta, you might come across a statement by the Buddha, the voice of another, as it's known. And things start to come into motion, wheels start turning in the mind: ah, maybe this is the way out of suffering. And so instead of leading to further confusion, which is what usually happens when you look at any kind of sensual experience or anything that can suppress the dukkha, instead of doing that you find the methodology, which is the Eightfold Path, and you start to see for yourself, perhaps this might work.

And that brings about a certain level of faith, a certain level of conviction in the practice. You might join a retreat, or you might join a Dhamma talk, or a three-day program or something or another. Or you might just read one of the books like The Path to Nirvana or Mind Without Craving, or any other books by Dhamma teachers. And you start to implement those practices, or those guidelines that are there in those books.

and you start to see for yourself that you're experiencing some level of relief from that some level of relief from that suffering and because of that you start to dedicate more of your time towards it you start to dedicate more of your time towards being ethical being moral having a certain level of ethics that allows you to be more generous that allows you to be more

content that allows you to let go of unwholesome states to recognize them because your mindfulness becomes sharper and then through that mindfulness you are able to then collect the mind around an object right that's the process of what we would call meditation where the mind's attention remains fixed on a particular object for a certain duration of time before it gets distracted again which it naturally will and so you start utilizing the three aspects or the three last parts of the Eightfold Path right effort right mindfulness and right collectedness and as a result of which eventually your mind becomes so calm so collected that it starts to go through the jhanas these levels of understanding these levels of cessation which allow you to see how your mind's attention moves but also how the mind creates its own dukkah there is nobody outside of you who is responsible for your suffering you realize that the suffering is mind made it is a result of taking things personally of identifying with processes it is a result of craving what is that craving that we always speak of of the Tanha the Trishna as it's known in

Sanskrit, the craving manifests as tightness and tension in the mind and body, and it's this very subtle grasping at an object. The craving can manifest in the form of grasping at it, or pushing away an object that causes you pain, that seems unpleasant. Or the craving can manifest as identifying with an experience, saying that this experience, this person, whatever it is, is me, mine, myself. That's the process of conceit, that's the process of identity. Generally speaking, within the sutras we see that identity view comes about when the mind takes one or more of the five aggregates as self, or as belonging to self, or any variant thereof. So this process of craving is the cause, or is seen as the cause and condition for suffering. But craving can manifest in many different ways, and we'll talk about that when we talk about craving more in depth. Suffice it to say that craving is this process

of first and foremost the arising of conceit, which takes something personal and grasps onto it. From that, if it's pleasant, we'll want more of it. It becomes obsessed by it. It says, "I wish, I hope that this pleasant experience continues to be pleasant for as long as I want." Or if it's an unpleasant experience, it says, "I don't like this," and it pushes it away. That in itself is also dukkha, right? And there's craving in each of the links of dependent origination. They manifest in different ways. Clinging is a stronger form of craving, which starts to make associations with an experience. It would start to create all kinds of ideas about why it is that I like something, or want something, or don't like something, or hate something, or identify with it. And then habitual tendencies are those tendencies that create this very strong sense of self. From there, then there's the birth of action, and this birth of action is rooted from that sense of self, which leads to that whole mass of suffering.

The jara marana, as we talk about it, or as it is commonly known from the links of dependent origination, but jara marana is only one aspect of dukkha. Jara and marana are essentially old age and death. That's part of dukkha dukkha. So let's get into that: what is dukkha dukkha? Dukkha dukkha can manifest as an unpleasant feeling in itself, that is unpleasant to the sense basis, unpleasant to the sense of self that identifies with the sense basis. Dukkha dukkha can manifest as illness and sickness. It's not in our control whether we can be ill, or when we can heal from illness. Old age: we are constantly changing all the time. We're constantly experiencing the subtle

decay or decline of the bodily functions of the sense faculties, and so on. Sometimes we see it. We see it manifest in our bodies, or on our bodies, or on our face. We see how aging arises: our tooth gets broken, our hairs start graying, our skin becomes more wrinkled, and so on and so forth. We can slow the aging process now through technology and through different kinds of supplementation and things like that, but still there's the identification with the body, and there's the fear of old age, because that denotes that there is a decay or decline towards the end of life. Every single person outside of the fully awakened being, let's say the fully awakened mind, has some level of fear of ending, some fear of death, right? In some circles this is known as death anxiety. What that means is when we start to contemplate that we are going to die, we do everything we can to essentially delay that death, or to become immortal in some other way, and so that death process is subverted

or there is an effort to transcend it by our relationships, by having children, by seeking wealth, by fame, all kinds of things in this world that we experience as pleasant or pleasing to the senses, because we say that if I become famous then my name shall continue to be lived on beyond the death of this body. And so that identity that is rooted in that sense of my name is something we experience some level of satisfaction in. So that's the thirst for fame, right? We try to do something long-lasting, we try to make a name for ourselves, and this is a result of the fear of death.

Likewise with the thirst for wealth: if I, if I can continue making a lot of money, then I can do this and I can do that, maybe I can prolong my life, or maybe I can even understand how to cheat that, and so on. Or if I have children, if I get married, or if I have a relationship and I have children, then my DNA passes on, and so my children live on and I live on through them, and so I am not, you know, just gone into the nothingness of the universe. So we do all kinds of things to compromise with death, to navigate and haggle and bargain with death. But if you just sit and you contemplate, very, very softly and gently, and you realize that all of that also is going to decay and decline, even the dhamma as we understand it, the name of the Buddha Gotama Buddha, will decline. There will come a time when the dhamma will no longer be understood, when the dhamma will no longer be accepted, where suddenly it just fades away into some

oblivion until there is a renewal of it when the next Buddha comes. So everything, every one, every experience, every being is subject to this death process. At a more macro level, when we talk about death, we talk about the decay of the universe itself. We have experienced death countless times. We continue to experience death countless times in every single moment, but if you start to bring that up at macro levels, you'll see that there is a renewal of birth going on. That is the form of

rebirth, where from one death there is another birth, and then from that birth there is another death, from that death there's another birth. If you set aside that as well, right, and you look at, even at the level of the universe, the experience of the universe this planet has gone through, so many different levels of destruction, what we would call extinction level

events, right? If we are to understand it through the lens of science, we see that the dinosaurs had existed so many million years ago, 65 million, 66 million years ago, whatever it is, and then they were wiped out all of a sudden, or so that's what the story is. But in any case, we see that all creatures, all beings on this planet or through any of the star systems or through any of the realms of existence, whatever we might call them, they are subject to death, they are subject to decline, and this is dukkha dukkha. Even the devas, they are around for many, many, many thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of years, whatever it might be, and they're frolicking and enjoying the fruits of their karma and the pleasure gardens and this and that and the other. And then they'll notice, and this is a very poetic way of saying it, they'll notice the plants, the flowers, they start to shrivel up, and now they're reminded of the fact that this too will

end with, but before they can do anything about it, they dissolve, they go, they're gone. So that's how quick death can be. And so the contemplation of death should be welcomed, should be understood. Oftentimes in my retreats, what I do is I will have people do the reflections, the five reflections, and one of those reflections is "I am subject to dying, I am subject to death." Death really kind of starts to get our priorities straight, because if you've suffered enough in this life, I'm sure you would not want to repeat another life of that, right? You would want to get off of the wheel of this continuous process of birth and death, birth and death. So when you're reminded of that and you contemplate on that, and some other contemplations are there as well, which is the contemplation on the decay of the body, it allows you to disengage, to let go of the identification process with the body and the features of the body and the aspects of the body, and that starts to reduce the anxiety around death. So I urge all of you to look at this, to see it for

yourselves. One of the meditations that I introduced was the five aggregates meditation, and that goes through that process: it is to look at each of the five aggregates through the lens of the three characteristics, and then it takes you to such a level of equanimity that you're able to be okay in that moment with whatever is happening, and then it takes you a little deeper, and so on. But it really allows you to clarify this whole process and brings more of that, some vega. So in some sense, dukkha dukkha is really important. I mean, think about

the process of sickness. Right, you can't see it now, but over the last two months I had a problem with both of my eyes. I had a problem with my eyelids. I had what's called a chalazion, and it's very painful, it can be very painful. And so what it showed me was to slow down. I don't need to work so hard on completing the book and looking at the screen all the time, and all of these things. But sometimes sickness to that extent can remind you to slow things down, come back to what's needed in this moment. Maybe you need to take a break. Maybe you have overshot your nervous system and it's telling you to relax and calm down, and sit and meditate, be in the moment. Not everything has to be done right now, right

away. I'm fine now because it's gone. You can't really see it. This is like the last day of that. Before, it looked like somebody had punched me in the eye, and it's boxing or something, like a black guy. But now it's fine. But it reminded me to just slow things down, right? There's no deadline, as it were, for the book. Of course, I've already procrastinated long enough for the book on craving. But it's basically done now. So David will announce when it's going to be released later on. In any case, this is Dukkha Dukkha. It should be seen not as something painful, not as something to push away.

Because as soon as you try to push it away, you're going to have aversion to it. And all it's going to do is just create the cycle of, I don't like this. I don't want any more of this. You're going to keep pushing it, pushing it, pushing it. That's what the hindrances are in your meditation. Hindrances are dukkha. They are the manifestation of old karma, of something that you might have done some time ago as a result of breaking a precept or two or whatever it was, and now they're manifesting as these different kinds of thoughts, as these mind objects. So instead of wrestling with them, trying to push them down, trying to change them in whatever way that they are, you're only causing yourself more pain. You're only causing yourself the renewal of those hindrances. So this process of seeing the hindrances is that process of recognizing: oh, my mind is distracted, now my mind's attention is on the hindrance, and I can see my mind start to boil up and be like, I don't like this. So I can recognize it, and I release my attention to

it because where your attention goes, that's where the energy flows. Where your attention is on, that's what will make it grow. If I continue to put my attention on the hindrance, it will continue to grow. It will continue to flower and become stronger. So I release my attention, my undue attention, to that hindrance. I come back to my mind and body and I relax the tightness and tension. So when I relax the tightness, tension, I experience what I call the sky mind. I'm calling it the sky mind. That's the mundane nibbana. In that moment there is total relief. In that small moment there is this experience of the unconditioned, free of any kind of craving, free of any kind of suffering. And so you can choose to stay in that for a while and then come back to your re-smile.

Like if you're doing the meditation, you come back to the re-smile and then you come back to the object, and in doing so your mind remains more and more collected. But in everyday life, when you experience the relief from dukkha, that in itself is a mind without craving. That in itself is an experience of mundane nibbana, and you can choose to stay in that for as long as your mind's attention is in that. So that's right effort. The 6R's that we're talking about, that's right effort. That's the process of eradicating dukkha. Now, when I say eradicating or destroying dukkha, that doesn't mean dukkha is the enemy, because as soon as you make dukkha the enemy, or craving the enemy, now you're looking at it from this perspective: this is me, and this is my craving, and this is my dukkha, and now I have to deal with it. And there's all kinds of tension around that. And so, as Bhante Vimalaramsi would say, you change the perspective from all of this tension and all of this energy that's building up to, oh, it's only

this. So you change your perspective on it. It's only that. Look, don't make it so dramatic, don't make it a big deal. As he would have said, don't make dukkha a big deal, don't make craving a big deal. So that's dukkha. Dukkha viparinama: dukkha is the dukkha of change. Viparinama means to change, continues to revolve, continues to evolve. And so those are the kinds of events where it is something that you want but you don't get, or it is something that you don't want but you do get, or it's something that's unexpected but unexpectedly bad. I always give this example. If you are, let's say, doing a retreat somewhere in north Canada or somewhere where it's very cold in the dead of winter, you go to your bathroom and then you turn on the shower and it's nice and warm and steamy, and you get in and you're just there for 20 minutes and it's just like, ah, this is wonderful, this is amazing, and then bam, all of a sudden it becomes ice

cold. That's viparinama dukkha. You didn't expect it to go from hot to cold immediately, right? Or when you are on your way to a flight and you're looking forward to the vacation time that you have, and you're looking forward to the flight. You're going there, and on your way there you get an alert: your flight has been cancelled for unexplainable reasons or whatever, and now you're not going to get a refund either, because it's not stipulated in your agreement that you're going to get a refund under these circumstances. Now you have all kinds of lookup. This is part of viparinama dukkha, lookup. So this process of expecting something, that's another way of craving, gives rise to be part of it. Because we expect things to go a certain way, and so the attachment to the outcome, that's another kind of craving, that's the craving for existence, a craving for a type of existence, and if it doesn't go the way we plan or the way we expect it to

be it becomes dukkha. You can see this in meditation as well when you get on retreat. All right, I got it. Good. David has six are good. So that's what it is. You're here, I am giving a Dhamma talk, and all of a sudden something else comes up, some distraction comes up. What do you do about it? Do you say, how dare they do that, why can't they just keep quiet, why can't they just mute themselves? Or you just go with the flow? As I was saying, when you get on meditation retreats there is sometimes an expectation built when we talk about jhanas and we're referring to the different aspects of the different jhanas and so on, and it creates this image of how the meditation should go. It creates an image of how the practice should go. And so you'll see a lot of people very, very

very motivated to want to do practice, and they go into it and they're like, okay, I'm going to sit for 30 minutes, I'm going to sit for one hour, I'm going to sit for two hours, I'm going to experience loving-kindness, I'm going to send it out to all beings and all of these things. And they come to their first interview, and I ask how it's going, and they're like, I can't feel the loving-kindness. And you can see the forlorn look on their faces, and it gets even worse when I say, okay, I think it's time for you to do forgiveness practice, and they think it's like some kind of punishment. Right? Because you've set up an expectation that this is how the retreat is going to go this time around. I'm definitely going to experience cessation this time around. I'm definitely going to experience nibbana. The irony is you're having craving for nibbana. There's two kinds of desire: there's chanda, which is the wholesome desire, and

then there's craving, which is the obsession over an outcome, and when it doesn't happen the way you want it to happen, and nothing usually does, right? It never meets our expectations. Anything that we expect in life, it's either below our expectations, or actually it's sometimes above our expectations, but it's never matching exactly what we expect things to be, us, right? So viparinama dukkha is that dukkha of change. It's a result of expecting things a certain way and then not experiencing them the way that we expected them to be. Sankhara dukkha. So sankhara, sankhara of course is the formations, it's translated usually as formations. Sankhara, kara means to do, sam means like it's an extra way of doing something. So when we talk about sankharas, they are the processes, which are threefold. There's the mental, there's the verbal, and there's the bodily. The mental allows us to experience things in terms of our sense bases. It allows us to feel and perceive. The verbal allows us to take what's

experienced and then think about it, verbalize it and express it. Like, I see an oak tree and I say, hey, let's go down to see that oak tree and sit under its shade. That's a verbal formation that then generates it into the thought about the oak tree, and then let's go sit there, and then I express that. Bodily formations allow the body to function a certain way, so they are related to the breath, they're related to the processes of digestion and everything else that we do in the body. Those are bodily formations. So that's one aspect of sankhara, that's talking about formations, but sankhara is referring to a deeper layer of suffering, a deeper layer of dukkha, that is related to the process of identifying with one or more of the five aggregates.

So dukkha dukkha is, of course, the more prominent dukkha that we can experience in everyday life. To that extent, so is viparinama dukkha. Things don't go according to the way we plan them to go, and there's the sankhara dukkha, which is this sort of existential suffering. Now, it doesn't mean that life is suffering. This is very important to understand. We're not saying that all of life is suffering. What we're saying is that there is suffering in life, and that suffering in life arises due to whenever we take things personally. And we project an idea of self around the experience, around the five aggregates. And those projections can be laced with all kinds of memories of how we expect things to be.

Rooted in trauma, rooted in associations, rooted in behavioral tendencies or whatever it might be. But at the very, very root of all of that is conceit. What is conceit? There are two things. There is sakkaya ditthi, and there is mana. Sakkaya ditthi is the belief in a personal self. It's the self-view. That is understood to be eradicated when one becomes a stream-enterer. So what does it mean, the belief in a personal self? It means that there is a worldview which takes, that there is an experiencer to all experience, and that that is who I am. But it's an intellectual understanding. It's at an intellectual, philosophical level, let's say. When you experience the cessation, perception, feeling and consciousness, you touch the nibbana element and you come out of it, then you realize that what you thought was a self is actually a series of selves that are rooted in conceit, that are rooted in the misunderstanding or misperception of reality, of taking things personally.

So what goes away is that intellectual understanding or misunderstanding. The mana is conceit. This is at a very deep level. So it means that even though you understand that things are impersonal, there's still this ingrained sense of this is me, this is mine, this is myself. There's this sense of like, why did he say that to me? Why did she respond in this way to me? There's still the sense of I am greater than them as a meditator, or I'm less than them as a person, or I deserve to be equal to everybody.

That too is a kind of conceit. There's so many different layers of conceit, but at the very basic level, what conceit is essentially is the mind seeking stability in that which is unstable. This is why in the suttas it is mentioned that the perception of impermanence, that is the understanding and experience and insight into the impermanent nature of all reality, is the destruction of conceit. It is the way to the destruction of conceit. Why? Because anicca is usually translated as impermanence, but anicca actually also means that which is unstable. So conceit is looking for something that is stable. It's the mind wanting to land on something that's stable. The mind saying that what is stable for me is to identify as a man, as a human, as an American, as an Indian, as a Buddhist, as a meditator, as an expert in jhana, as a teacher. It's identifying with something, a political affiliation, a religious belief, any kind of views, anything that the mind can hold on to and say, this I can hold on to, this is me, this is mine, this is

myself, and then when you have the destruction of conceit, it's from the realization that nothing is permanent, nothing in this conditioned reality is permanent, and nothing is stable, and I am okay with that. It's fine. It's at a very deep intrinsic level that you understand that it's okay. And when the mind is okay with that, what happens? It experiences Nibbana all the time, because Nibbana is the only so-called element that is indestructible.

It is the only that is unshakable, irreversible. That is why at the final fruition for somebody who's fully awakened, they have no conceit, because they know and realize that nothing in this reality is stable, so why even question if there is? And the mind is okay with that instability. The mind no longer seeks for something to land upon and is okay with not having landed on anything, and such a mind is said to be signless. Such a mind is said to be undirected. Such a mind is said to be empty. That mind being signless because it doesn't hold on to any object, but mind being undirected because it understands that no object is worth holding on to which is stable, and such a mind is empty because it sees everything as an impersonal process. Not only sees it, it actually experiences it in its day-to-day

reality. And this is why it is said in the sutras that not even the devas can scan the mind of a fully awakened being, because there's nothing to grasp onto. There's nothing that the mind can hold on to that can detect that there is a being there, so to speak. So this is all about sankhara dukkha. The sankhara dukkha is that intrinsic existential dukkha that arises from the desire, from the craving, to want to belong to something, to want to hold on to something, to want to identify with something. Traditionally speaking, we say that, or we call that, the identification with the five aggregates. So the destruction of conceit allows you to let go of that kind of dukkha, and in essence that's why we have the four noble truths, because there's the dukkha for the first noble truth. There's the craving, which is the abbreviation of the links of dependent origination and their co-factors like conceit, expectation, identification, and all of these things. The destruction of all of that leads to the third noble truth of nirodha. So nirodha is the relief that you experience, the final total

relief of having let go completely of any process that causes suffering. And we do that through the utilization of what is known as the eightfold path, and I've always said right effort is the heart of the eightfold path. So six hours, right effort is the heart. Every time you do that, you are utilizing the eightfold path to let go of craving and experience the relief from suffering.