Day 7 Dependent origination Part 1 of 2 The Craving and Clinging Mind

The long-awaited talk on Dependent Origination. What is Dependent Origination? It is the elaboration of the Four Noble Truths. What are the Four Noble Truths? Number one, there is suffering. Number two, there are causes and conditions for that suffering to arise. Number three, there is release from suffering. And number four, there is a path that leads to the release from suffering. It is an elaboration of the first two noble truths.

If you were to look at Dependent Origination in the reverse order, it is an elaboration of the third and fourth noble truths. And we'll explain how this process actually happens. The premise of the Dhamma. What is the central premise of the Buddha's message? He says, "I only teach two things: suffering and the cessation of suffering." So that is our goal: to understand suffering and to let it go. I am not interested in spiritual experiences.

I am not an experience chaser. I am interested in eradicating suffering. And so the idea here is let's not complicate what the Buddha has said. Let's just understand at the simplest level what the Buddha is teaching us. The idea is that when the Bodhisattva had reached around the age of 29, he was taken out from the palace by his trusty charioteer.

And they saw the city outside the palace. Now the palace and the inner walls of the palace were protected from any signs of suffering. There was a prediction given by an ascetic at the time of the birth of Siddhartha Gautama. And he said that this child would either be a great emperor, a wheel-turning monarch, Chakra Vartan, that's what it's known as, a wheel-turning monarch, an emperor. ascetic.

Now, Siddhartha's father was distraught with this prediction. Being a king himself, he wanted his son to follow the family business. So, he did everything in his power to protect Siddhartha, as the story goes, from any signs of suffering that includes old age, illness, and death. Up without knowing any of those things, knowing about any of those things for 29 years.

And one day he goes out and he sees, the first thing he sees is what? An ill person. And he asks Channa, his charioteer, he asks, who is that? What is that? And he says, that is an ill person. Become ill one day? Will I become sick? Then they go to another place and they see an old man.

And he says, what sort of person is this? And Channa says, this is an old man. This is an aging man. And he says, do all beings age like this? Will I age like this? And then they go to another place and they see people carrying a corpse towards the funeral pyre. And he says, what is wrong with that person?

And he says, he is dead. He is no more. He is gone. What do you mean by dead? He's not alive anymore. No existence. So then he asks him, will one day I die too? And he says, yes, all beings will die one day. Experienced any of these things, as the story goes. And then they see a fourth sight. They go somewhere else. And they see a man meditating under a tree.

And his face is serene and tranquil. And he's smiling. And he says, who is this man? What sort of person is this? And Channa says, this is an ascetic. He has gone forth from the home life to the homeless life, and he has gone out to seek the truth, and this inspires him, and that's what inspires him to start his journey.

He wants to find a way out of illness, of old age, of death, and come upon what they call the deathless, the amata, the amrita in Sanskrit. So of course he goes through a journey as someone who is a wanderer, a shramana or samana. And he goes and he meets with two different teachers. The first teacher he goes to and he learns from him how to get to nothingness.

The teacher shows him the path all the way to nothingness. And he goes through it and he intuits and says, nothing has changed. There is just this experience, but I haven't seen how to come out of suffering. So he goes to the second teacher and the second teacher says, there is something higher than nothingness. I have not experienced it myself, but my father has, but I know the instruction. I will give them to you and you can try for yourself.

So he goes and he enters into neither perception nor non-perception. But then he intuits and he says, this is also not the end of the path. There is something beyond this. He knows because he hasn't seen a change in his personality. He hasn't seen a change in his understanding of suffering. So then he renounces even being a wanderer and becomes a very strong, staunch ascetic.

He does all kinds of ascetic practices for those six years. When you go to India, if you ever have the opportunity to do so, go to places like Varanasi and Rishikesh and so on. These are places where you will see the sadhus. The sadhus are ascetics. And they live in very different ways. They are wanderers. Some of them follow very, very strict practices.

And the Bodhisattva, he followed such strict practices that he gave up eating food. He gave up eating fruits. Only fruits that were ripe enough that fell on their own, he would eat that. Then he gave up even fruits. And he gave up even water. And as the story goes, he was on the verge of death. He was skin and bones. And the devas said, we can't have this happen.

And so the Bodhisattva said, if I am to experience awakening in this life, he took his bowl and he said, may this bowl flow upstream, this river. That was the Niranjan River. Go to Bodh Gaya, you will see remnants of the river, which is no more than just sand now. But the river flowed and the bowl went upstream and it inspired him. He says, this is not the way to awakening. And he lets go of his ascetic practices.

And he goes and sits under a tree. And a woman named Sujata offers him rice milk. And he eats that. And his five companions in the ascetic life see that. And they say, our friend has left us. He has become indulgent. And so he meditates. And when he meditates, he remembers a time when he was happy. When he was sitting under the rose apple tree, eight, nine or ten years old, during the harvest season or the harvest festival when his father was visiting the townspeople, and he remembers sitting under the rose apple tree and how happy he felt, and he said maybe this is the way to awakening, and he goes back to that experience and he meditates, and then from there he manifold past lives.

And from there he sees the arising and passing away of beings according to their karma. And then he sees the destruction of the taints. And he realizes for himself that he has attained awakening. Now part of that process was also intuiting dependent origination. and condition for suffering. And he thought about it. Or rather, didn't even think about it. He just allowed the mind to intuit it.

And what came? Birth is the cause and condition for suffering. And now we enter into understanding dependent origination. What is suffering? Suffering comes from the word dukkha. Dukkha is instability, unease, lack of balance. It comes from the idea when you look at a chariot or a horse cart, the axle is a little bit off balance and the wheel doesn't really move the way you want it to. I curse that whenever we go to Walmart, and we have experimented and seen this, every time I choose a cart, there's always one wheel that does not want to cooperate, and it is the dukkha cart.

I will tell you what, one time somebody else chose the cart, and as soon as I touched my hands on the handle, stopped functioning the way it used to. This is dukkha. This is suffering. Things don't go the way you want them to go. So now when we talk about suffering, there are three categories of suffering. There is dukkha dukkha, viparinama dukkha, and sankhara dukkha.

Dukkha dukkha is your ordinary fare of dukkha. This is the suffering of suffering. This includes pain in the body, illness, old age, death, grief, anxiety, depression, sorrow, lamentation. The things that you want, you don't get. And things happen in such a way that you didn't expect them to happen. For example, you have planned a beautiful vacation for yourself and your family. You have booked the tickets, you've booked the hotel, you've booked everything.

And as soon as you get to the airport, the flight is canceled. That is viparinama dukkha. It's a cold, wintry morning, and you step into the shower, and you turn it on, and it's wonderfully hot and steamy. And you're enjoying that shower for a few minutes, and all of a sudden, ice-cold water drips out, pumps out. You didn't expect that to happen. That is viparinama dukkha, the dukkha of change. Sankhara dukkha is a different kind of dukkha. It's a different kind of suffering. It's the suffering that arises from identification with one or more of the five aggregates affected by clinging. Yesterday you did the guided meditation on the five aggregates. You all know what the five aggregates are unless you were sleeping, but to jog your memory they are form, feeling, perception, intention and attention, or form, feeling, perception, formations and awareness. So when there is this misidentification with one or more of the five aggregates, by virtue of the truth that these five aggregates are impermanent, subject to suffering, and therefore not me, not my, not myself, when there's an identification with that.

When one of them falls apart, dukkha arises from that. And so the Buddha reflects and he realizes that birth is the cause and condition for suffering. Now when we say birth, what do we mean by that? Birth. Birth means coming into existence. We don't know what's going to happen after existence, this primary existence, this life. We don't know what has happened before that. We only know that this existence is present. And we also know that there is suffering in this existence.

So by virtue of the truth that we are born into this existence, suffer. But there is another way of understanding birth as the birth of karma, the birth of volitional action. If you were to look at dependent origination like a river that starts to flow down from the mountains all the way down and down and down, and all these different eddies and whirlpools are the different links of dependent origination.

Then there is a bend towards the waterfall. And that bend is what we call becoming. And we can still try to escape as best as possible. But as soon as we go down the waterfall, there's no way to recover. Going down that waterfall is the birth of action. As you have thought the thought, as soon as you have said the word, as soon as you have acted that act, you cannot call it back. That is the birth of action. It will now result in some kind of consequence here and now, or in the future, or a period after that, dependent upon causes and conditions.

So then he asks, what is the cause and condition for birth? How does birth arise? And he intuits, it is something known as bhava, which is translated usually as becoming, or habitual tendencies. When we say becoming, what do we mean? Coming into existence. There is an intention that arises, and due to those intentions and aspirations, there is a coming into being, coming into existence.

And there are three categories of existence. There is the sensory-based existence, the sensual world. This includes, if you're looking at the cosmology of the 31 planes of existence in Buddhism, this includes hell, the realm of the hungry ghosts, the lower asuras or the titans, and what is known as the realm of the animals. So these are all seen as lower rebirths. Oh, and the humans, obviously. So that's part of the sensual existence. Of the humans, there are six heavens, six angelic heavens, or six devalokas. And all of these are encompassed in the six sense-based realms. At some point or another, you experience the world through the six senses.

And you are attached to sensual experiences. That's the sensory experience, existence. There is something known as the luminous form existence, the rupa lokas, this luminous form. And these correspond to the four jhanas, which correspond to the four brahma lokas. We have the six heavens, and the seventh after that is the realm of Brahma. That's the first brahma loka, and the fourth.

In the fourth, there's something known as the pure abodes, and so on and so forth. But these four correspond to our mental states of the four jhanas. That's the second category of existence. The third category of existence is the formless realms. In this, we have four. We have infinite space, infinite consciousness, nothingness, and neither perception nor non-perception.

Here, they possess no form. In the luminous form, they possess form, but they possess no gender, no sex, nothing. They're all the same kind of form. They experience and feed on bliss, bliss or tranquility or ease or equanimity, whatever it might be. In the formless realm, there is no body, not even any luminous form. There is just consciousness and perception and feeling and formations or intention.

No body, no form, are present in those realms. So which is to say that coming into being, we cannot know whether we were any of these types of beings in a past life or whether we will become any of these types of beings in a future life. All we know for certain is this life. But our consciousness, our mindset, can be aligned to one of these realms.

How so? When somebody is hateful and violent and torturous towards others, they have a hellish kind of consciousness. When somebody is like a teenager, only interested in food and sex all the time, they are animalistic. When somebody is jealous and craving all the time, they are like hungry ghosts. And then beyond that, when somebody is generous, possesses forgiveness and loving kindness, is skillful and ethical, the devas.

They shine like the devas. Their consciousness shines like the devas. When somebody practices meditation and enters upon the jhanas, and they learn how to cultivate those jhanas frequently, their mindset is attuned to that particular brahmaloka. Likewise, when they are attuned to the form formless attainments, infinite space, infinite consciousness, nothingness or neither perception or non-perception. They are attuned to that mindset or those particular mindsets.

So our behavior, our behavioral tendencies, lead to a certain birth of action. Our habitual tendencies are a library of different choices that have been collected based on previous experience and intentions. When I am met with an experience, my mind unconsciously goes to a particular choice. That is the habitual tendency, which leads me to act a certain way. That is the birth of action, which may lead to a certain consequence that I'm not happy about. That is suffering.

So then the Buddha contemplates and he intuits, what is the cause and condition for becoming? Becoming is the cause and condition for birth. Birth is the cause and condition for suffering. So what is the cause and condition for becoming? It should be said that clinging is the cause and condition for becoming. Clinging comes from the word upadana.

It is the grasping. Now there are four types of clinging. There is sensual clinging. There is clinging to rites and rituals. There is clinging to views. And there is clinging to self-view. Clinging to sensual experiences. What does that mean? Actually, when you think about clinging, it is the rationalizing of why it is I like something or I don't like something.

I say, I hate this thing. That's my aversion. But why do I hate that thing? Because of so and so and so. There was an association with that experience. And now my mind goes back to that and associates it with that. This is how trauma arises. This is how PTSD arises. I cling to an experience. I associate with that experience.

And it creates for me this identity around it. And I misidentify with the experience, with the memory, with whatever it is. And then I act from there. And I cause myself further suffering. Clinging to sensual experiences can be pleasant or unpleasant. We talked about the unpleasant, where we create this traumatic bond or traumatic associations. But there's also clinging to sensual pleasures from a pleasant standpoint, right?

We all have certain kinds of clinging. I prefer certain things. That's preferences. But I cling to them as rationalizations of why I like something. I want this because of so-and-so. A good example of seeing this is in the world of marketing. The marketers create certain associations with their products. If I wear a certain kind of cologne, if I wear a certain kind of watch, if I drive a certain kind of car, if I eat a certain type of brand of food, I am a certain kind of person.

I have a certain kind of status. I have a certain kind of public image. This is all clinging. Next time I go to Walmart or wherever, I'll have to see this. But it used to be, maybe it still is. When you go to the cereal section, when you see the cereal section, there's all the colorful cereals. Right?

Lucky Charms and Trix and Captain Crunch and whatever else there is. Why? Because you've got toddlers and children running around and they see it and they grab it. I want that. They associate. They make those associations. These colorful, entertaining mascots. I cling to that. I associate to that. That's sensual clinging. I like Lucky Charms because I like the leprechaun, but I don't like Trix because I don't like rabbits. This is what happens in the child's mind.

You try giving a three or four-year-old some food and they'll say, I don't want that. Why? Because the carrots are touching the peas. That can never happen. That's the association that they make. That's the clinging. Then we have something known as clinging to rites and rituals. What do we mean by rites and rituals? Well, on the traditional level, we mean things like doing certain rites and rituals for a certain kind of outcome.

In the time of the Buddha, in that time in India, they had, and they still do, fire sacrifices. They would throw things into the fire to appease the gods. They still do this. And they have animal sacrifices in certain temples as well. They used to have human sacrifices, but now they have animal sacrifices and fire sacrifices. The clinging to the idea that if I do this to appease the gods, then I will get what I want.

But there are other ways of looking at this. Clinging to certain kinds of beliefs about amulets and about wearing certain kinds of things on the body. Or, I have my lucky socks on today. It's going to be a good meeting, right? These kinds of associations that we make have less to do with the thing and more to do with our mindset. So that's the clinging to rites and rituals. If you attain to a certain level, if somebody becomes a stream, can I go and still pray to this deity or go to this church or light up incense or whatever it is? If it makes you uplifted, do it.

But you don't do it because you feel like, okay, I'm going to do this and this is what I'm going to get out of it. Whatever it is you do, do out of the fact that it creates tranquility for you. The reason why clinging to rites and rituals is eradicated at a certain level is because you realize that the path to true fulfillment, and the path to true awakening, is by doing the work.

Sometimes clinging to rites and rituals is clinging to a certain order and clinging to a certain schedule. If I don't have my morning coffee at 6:30 in the morning, I feel irritated. Right? But, for example, I don't drink caffeine. But something like, where if something gets off of my schedule, instead of understanding that, okay, this is what is the truth of the moment, I cling. And I say, no, it's got to be this way. That's the clinging.

Then we have clinging to views. So during the time of the Buddha, there were these six different kinds of views. So one of the views was eternalism, the belief in something that was considered a personal essence that continued on beyond this existence. to the understanding of the impersonal nature of reality as per the Buddha. Because what we consider to be the self is really just the ego structure.

Beyond that, it is just concepts. It is just experience. And so eternalism is the idea that once I leave this world, I will enter into eternity. But the reality is, everything is conditioned. Everything arises and passes away. There are, even though they are long lifespans, lifespans in heaven, in the six heavenly realms, and in the Brahmalokas. Just because you get to the Brahmalokas, or just because you get to the formless realms, mean that you're stuck there or you stay there.

Do you know how boring heaven sounds? Maybe the first year it's like really great. You get everything that you want and then how about the next hundred years? How about the next thousand years? How about the next ten thousand years? How about the next ten million years? You have every need, everything that you want. But the thing about that is you don't have suffering there.

So you're not motivated to do anything. Just enjoy the fruits of that place. Going down beyond that, below the human level, you have the hellish realms and so on. But there's only suffering there. The human existence is the one existence that has both suffering and happiness. It has moments of joy and moments of pain, moments of pleasure and moments of pain.

And so we realize that there's just enough suffering for us to motivate us out of it, to say there must be a way out. And we practice for it. So coming back to the clinging to views, so eternalism is one of them. The other is nihilism, where there is no meaning in things. It is a meaningless universe, a meaningless existence.

Then what's the point of karma and consequence? Every action has its own reaction. That is fundamentally karma. Karma is action and consequence. There is a meaning to this experience. There is a meaning to why we do things. And that's why it is contrary to the practice of the Dhamma. Then there is something known as materialism. This is the view of the Charvakas in the time of the Buddha.

The Charvakas were of the idea that eat, drink, and be merry. Even if you have to take a loan to enjoy the best foods and everything else. So in other words, late-stage capitalism. That's what materialism is. It's like, I will just enjoy the best I can from the sense experiences. But what does that do? That dulls out the senses.

And it creates the need for further, stronger dopamine hits. You think about the billionaires of this world. They have experienced all kinds of things that they can. They have bought all kinds of toys that they can buy. They have done all kinds of crazy stuff. And then they go into the realms of the weird and the immoral and the unethical and so on.

Because they are so tied to the senses. They may go on retreats, some of them, but those retreats are not really retreats, they're wellness retreats, still to satisfy the senses, to go and get wonderful massages and all of these other things, and the meditation is maybe 10 or 15 minutes through the day, right, and the rest is just relaxing on the beach. It's all tied to the material plane, to the senses. So why is it contrary to the Dhamma?

Because the Buddha says, while there are material pleasures, there is also the immaterial pleasures, the pleasures born of meditation, nothing to do with the eyes, the ears, the nose, the tongue, or the body, born from letting go, relief from letting go. What is the first jhana all about? Quite secluded from sensual pleasures, secluded from unwholesome states, his mind enters upon the first jhana. Then there is the view of what is known as fatalism.

This comes from the word niyati. And the idea is, just as you unravel a ball of yarn, that same way, you have no real control over it. So what it says in that particular view at the time of the Buddha was that everything is already predestined. All my actions are predestined, all my thoughts are predestined, all my intentions are predestined, even my awakening is predestined. And the Buddha would come and say, then what is the point of doing anything? What motivates you to move?

What motivates you to sit? What motivates you to eat? What motivates you to do anything? And this defies or is contrary to the idea of what the Dhamma is saying. Through my own self-effort do I gain awakening? About the self of the ego, I'm talking about through one's own effort, actually walking the path and doing the practice. Every moment is like a fork in the road, you can decide to go one way or the other. Now you want to get very subtle and nuanced about it and say, well, did I actually choose going down that road, or did I actually choose down that road?

I don't care. You have forks in the road and you choose something. And that is your intention. And the Buddha has said, intention is karma. Karma is intention. Then there is the view of what were known as the Nigantha, ascetics, extreme ascetics. They are what we would call modern-day Jainism. Jainism is still a religion and a tradition in India. It is followed by a large community, and you will see when you go to places like Bodh Gaya, or on the way to it, you will see some of these Jain ascetics still wandering around. And there are two types.

One is the Svetambara and the other is the Digambara. Svetambara are those who wear the white cloth. They wear the white robes. And the Digambara are the sky-clad. They wear nothing. So you will see these men around naked, stark naked, only carrying a bowl for alms. And the idea, according to that tradition, is extreme ascetic practices lead to liberation. The Jains? J-A-I-N. Jain. The Buddha was opposed to this, because their idea was that in order for us to relieve karma, we must experience the painful processes to purify ourselves.

And the Buddha said, okay, how do you know how much karma you have left in the bank balance? That you must still experience all this pain? But more importantly, this is why the Bodhisattva was known as indulgent when he ate the rice milk. Because the companions and the asceticists life of his, said he has now gone to eating solid food and he is indulging in that. And that's why he came to the middle path.

He understood the path of luxury, the path of overindulgence makes you weak and stupid. And he understood that the path of extreme asceticism only causes you pain and suffering. And so he had a middle route. That is what is known as the middle path, the eightfold path. That there is a balance in things, in how you do things. There's a harmony to them.

You don't just give up everything. People come on retreat sometimes saying, I'm going to fast. They say, no, you can't do that. I'm only going to get so much sleep. No, you can't do that. You need everything in its proper place, function in the right way, available for sitting and practicing in the right way. So, this is the view of the ascetics. The Buddha said, that's a wrong view. Remember I told you a few days ago, the Buddha talked about, there is the path that leads you from pain to pain, and pain to pleasure, and pleasure to pain, and pleasure to pleasure.

And the Buddha said, that is what I teach. One that is pleasurable in the beginning, pleasurable in the middle, and pleasurable in the end. And that is the Eightfold Path. Then there is what is known as clinging to a view that is translated as skepticism or agnosticism. And here it is what they would call at the time of the Pali Canon, eel wrigglers. Eel wrigglers. They would be people who were on the fence about things.

Well, I don't know if there is suffering, but I don't know if there is no suffering. I don't know if there is jhana, but I don't know if there is no jhana. I don't know if there is awakening, but I don't know if there is no awakening. So it's like, make a decision here. Come to some experience.

Come to a certain level of certitude in practice. Yes, it's good to keep an open mind. It's interesting, there is this Sutta, Majjhima Nikaya 74, the Dighanakha Sutta. Digha means long, and nakha means nails. This was an ascetic with long nails. And he was either the nephew or the cousin of Sariputta, who was one of the chief disciples of the Buddha.

And he was part of this tradition of the skeptics, the eel wrigglers. And he came to the Buddha one time, and Sariputta was fanning him, fanning the Buddha behind him. And so Dighanaka comes to the Buddha and he says, very proudly, he says, I hold no views. I don't hold on to any views that there is this or there is that.

And the Buddha asks him one question. But do you hold on to the view that you hold on to no views? And so he goes through a whole discourse with Dighanaka about this. He says, about feeling, about perception, about intention, about views in general. That, okay, fine, you let go of all views, but you even let go of your own views.

Identification with your own views. Personalizing with your own views. And Sariputta, while fanning the Buddha, realized, the Buddha doesn't even hold on to any attachment to his own Dhamma. And right there and then he attained to full awakening. So that is the clinging to views. When you let go of all views, understand the skillful means of views for the sake of liberation, clinging even to the Dhamma.

Letting go of that. Oh, I am a twin practitioner. Oh, I am a meditator. I know the truth. Everyone must know this. I cling to my ideas. That is what prevents me from going all the way. And then, of course, a part of that is also clinging to views in terms of clinging to my opinions about things.

If you really looked at it, if you really looked at all of your opinions, you will see that none of your opinions actually originate from you. You start to think this way because you grew up with a certain political idea from your parents, and you adopt that. And you say, oh, I am this and this and this. I am a Democrat or I'm a Republican or I'm a conservative or I'm a liberal or whatever it is.

Or because you grow up in a certain religious or cultural mindset, oh, I'm a Hindu, or I'm a Muslim, or I'm a Christian. Any kind of opinions about things, identification with these views, identification with cultural opinions. The Buddha has said, clinging to views causes wars. If you look at the wars that have been fought through history, it has been because of views.

Now, you can talk about the practicalities, about it was a war for resources or a war for land or whatever it is. It's a war for culture, but it's all part of opinions, all part of different kinds of views. The longer we hold on to our own views about who we think we are, the farther away we are from freedom.

Then there is clinging to self-view. What do we mean by clinging to self-view? These are the different kinds of views attached to the sense of self in relation to one or more of the five aggregates. In other words, this body is mine, or this body is me, or I am in the body, or the body is a part of me or within me.

Or experiences are mine, I am experience. Experience is within me, or I am within the experience. Or perceptions are me, or I am perceptions. Perceptions belong to me, they are my perceptions. Are they within me or apart from me? The choices that I make are mine, or I am my choices, or I live in my choices, or the choices are apart from me.

Or awareness, I am awareness, or this is my awareness within awareness, or awareness lives within me. These are the types of views that the mind either subconsciously or consciously holds on to. This is the misidentification. When you do the five aggregates practice, this is what we're trying to let go of: the misidentification, the misperception of the sense of self in relation to the five aggregates.

So these kinds of clinging, if you look at it, are the rationalizations for why we want something, why we obsess over something, or why we hate something, or why we identify with something in the first place. It's like saying in your mind, I'll give you my example, I like chocolate cake, I want chocolate cake, right? That is my craving for chocolate cake. I can't live without chocolate cake, and that's my craving. Because of so-and-so is my clinging.

Because my mother made it a certain way when I was five years old, or because I was on a school trip when I first ate chocolate cake and it was a wonderful experience. It's the rationalizing, the subconscious rationalizing that happens. Therefore, I am this kind of person who enjoys chocolate cake. I am a chocolate cake connoisseur.

That is my becoming. That is my habitual tendency. My way of chocolate cake. I will push them aside. I will argue with them. That is my birth of action. And that person slaps back, pushes back. That is my suffering, lack of chocolate cake. So now, what is clinging dependent upon? And what is the condition for clinging? It should be said, craving.

Craving is the cause and condition for clinging. Craving comes from the word tanha. Tanha, or trishna in Sanskrit, means thirst. I don't urge any of you to do this, but if somebody were to spend an entire day without any water, how would that feel? How would that feel? There is this obsession to get relief from that thirst. That is the craving.

The fight, flight, right? The fight, flight, freeze, and fawn. That is a mechanism of craving. It's the nervous system looking at the experience and saying, this is who I am, or this is what I want, and I will fight for it, or this is something I don't want, and I will flee from it, or I freeze up.

Or I fawn, I try to appease and do whatever I do. This craving, this like it or not like it, or identify with it, this is the tanha, this is the mind that's like, if I don't get it, I will feel unfulfilled. So what are we actually experiencing here? In the body, we're experiencing tension in the nervous system, because we see something that we want, or we see something that we don't want. So now we see something that we want, and as soon as we fulfill getting that thing, how do we feel?

Relief. When we see danger, danger, I don't like this, I hate this, and we push it away, or we run from it. Once that thing is away, how do we feel? Relief. But is there a way to experience relief without having to satisfy that fight or flight experience? The 6R's. To recognize the experience for what it is. To release the hindrance.

or my undue attention, or my identification. To relax the body, the tightness and tension there. To bring something wholesome and skillful in its place and steady my mind in there. This is the path of the Dharma. To recondition from that fight or flight process towards a place where I am free from that. I am in a space of relief all the time.

I feel content and satisfied all the time. So for the purpose of dealing with the hunger of the body or thirst in the body or whatever it is, I do what it is that needs to be done, or if I don't get that chocolate cake, or if somebody who I don't like gets in my face. You see, the thing is, the human brain has evolved in such a way that during the times when we were hunter-gatherers, we faced all kinds of dangers, we faced all kinds of predators. was a survival mechanism that was useful for us. But the Buddha came at an interesting time.

He came at a time when civilization was flourishing, when we had agriculture. We didn't have to worry about predators. We didn't have to worry about these things. Imagine at the time of hunter-gatherers, the Buddha coming to them and saying, let go of your craving. What are you talking about? We need to eat. We need to survive. But he came at a time when we were in a civilized age, so to speak.

A time when we were used to the way things are now, even now, with the comforts of our home and security and everything else. And now when we go to the office and we read that email that we've been not wanting to read from that person that we don't want to talk to. That is our saber-tooth tiger. We go into fight-or-flight mode.

We identify with the experience. And that leads to craving. And that craving leads to clinging. That's the association of why it is I like this or why it is I don't like this. That leads to becoming. I am this kind of person because of these choices. And that leads to taking a certain choice without mindfulness, without conscious reflection.

And I act upon that choice, which eventually will ricochet into further suffering. Which part? Well, to me it sounds like justification. What leads to justification and then continues? Yes, that's what I'm talking about. Could you repeat that, please? So first, I identify with an experience. My mind says, this is me, mine, or myself. And I hold on to that experience as pleasant or unpleasant. And that's clinging. No, that's the first process of identification with an experience.

That results in me saying, I like this pleasant experience and I want more of it. I can't live without it. Or this aversive experience is something I hate. That's the craving. Now, I cling to it by associating with it and saying and rationalizing why it is that I like it or why I don't like it or why I consider it to be me.

That's the rationalizing. So in my mind, I'll say, I like this. That's the craving. Because of so-and-so, that's the rationalizing. That's the clinging. Therefore, I am this sort of a person. That's the ego structure coming up as becoming. That's the bhava. Therefore, I act from there in an unconscious way. Lack of mindfulness. That's the birth of action. That ricochets off at some point as a consequence of that action. So this is all how suffering arises. This is part one of dependent origination.

There's a lot more that we'll talk about before craving tomorrow. So we'll stop here and I'll open it up for questions. Let's share some merit. May suffering ones be suffering free, and if you're struck, fearless be. May they shed all grief, and may all beings find relief. May all beings share this merit that we have thus acquired for the acquisition of all kinds of happiness. May beings inhabiting space and earth, devas and nagas of mighty power, share this merit of ours. May they long protect the Buddha's dispensation.