The Four Noble Truths: The Third Truth of the Cessation of Suffering
Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo, Australia, Sydney, 15th July 2000, Tape 3.
We have been briefly through the first two of the Noble Truths, that is the Truth of the unsatisfactory nature of samsara or this wheel of birth and death. The second Noble Truth is the reason for this. The cause of our sense of dis-ease within this life is fundamentally our basic ignorance and leading from that, the grasping mind: the mind which clings and doesn’t know how to hold things lightly and be able to just allow things to flow.
The third Noble Truth is the Cessation of Suffering. That is like saying there is a cure for this disease. The Buddha has said that we are all sick and there is a reason why we are sick. There is, however, a remedy for our sickness—the third Noble Truth deals with the state of health – the cessation of sickness. The fact is that there is a cure, we can be healthy—that state of health is called Nirvana. Nirvana literally means something like blowing out, or something coming to an end. What is coming to an end are the poisons of the mind.
Our mind is poisoned; it is poisoned first of all and fundamentally by our basic ignorance which sees reality as a dualism, as being “I” and then everything else which is “non-I” or “other”’. Then, clinging to this subject-object perception as a reality. Since if there is really an I and other, then we are continually trying to attract that which pleases us and ward off that which does not please us. We are caught always between our hopes and our fears, and between pain and pleasure. Because of this whole pain/pleasure syndrome, we have ill will, aggression, frustration, anger toward anything or anyone perceived as being in any way a threat, in any way painful to us, and greed and desire and longing and clinging toward anything which is perceived as being pleasurable for ourselves. So, we are caught in this wheel the whole time.
Nirvana is a freedom from that. Nirvana is a state which is termed Unconditioned. Everything which we know in this world is usually perceived through our five senses – through our seeing, our hearing, our tasting, touching, smelling, and through the sixth sense which is the mind. So, everything that we know is within this conditioned round. It is conditioned by our perceptions, by our thoughts, by our memories, by our judgements and our biases, by the basic mental chatter which goes on the whole time and which distorts reality. Because we imbibe through our senses, we perceive through our thoughts and so there is distortion since everything comes through many different filters. So, we never see things as they really are, we only see it as we interpret them to ourselves.
Therefore reality gets very distorted because of the poisons in our mind, and because the root poison is this ignorance, this inward duality which misrepresents everything we perceive on a very fundamental level. Nirvana is the opposite of that. It is realised when all the poisons of the mind, our ignorance, our ill will, our greed, our envy and our pride, our sense of an ego, of an “I”, are totally eradicated, absolutely pulled up right from the tap roots; when they never ever can grow again. Thus, from one point of view, Nirvana is the cessation of all the poisons of the mind. It is the total eradication of all these poisons which disturb and distort our mind continually. It is the complete seeing into the falsity of our belief in a separate individual ego which most of us cling to throughout our lives. Often without our even questioning it, we are merely trying to polish up the ego and enhance it. Our idea is that if we make our ego very nice and glowing, shiny and well balanced, that is happiness. But the Buddha said that the ego can never be a source of genuine happiness because the ego is the product of our ignorant mind, and so the only way to genuine happiness is to see through the whole facade, to see through to the inherent emptiness of the ego. Since from the very beginning, this sense of “I”, “me” and “mine” has been our fundamental delusion. In fact, this sense of “me” and “mine” is the main problem. The realisation of Nirvana is not for “me”. “I” can never experience Nirvana. Nirvana only comes into the realm of our realisation when the “I” ceases. Nirvana isn’t a bigger, better more wonderful and spiritual ME!
So, what is Nirvana? Nirvana is, by its very definition, beyond words and beyond thought. It is the Unconditioned. Everything which we know with our ordinary mind is conditioned, it relies on many conditions and causes in order to come into being. Nirvana just is; it doesn’t rely on any particular conditions. The Buddha himself spoke very little about Nirvana. He did at some point say it was peaceful and I think he said it was blissful, but he didn’t talk about it much because quite frankly, words are dealing with the conditioned, they cannot describe something beyond. It’s like trying to describe colours to someone who is congenitally blind. How are you going to describe red, yellow and blue? It has no meaning to someone who does not perceive colour. Our language has no words to encompass something which transcends words. The best way that we can understand Nirvana is by meeting people who have themselves had that experience. Because sometimes when we talk about how we have to lose our ego in order to understand Nirvana, it is true that people think we have to end up like some kind of a cosmic blob. Trungpa Rinpoche said that in that case, we would need an emergency ward for people who had spiritual realisations and we would have to sit and feed them!
Of course, it doesn’t mean that, it is not that. But we have to understand that the ego is like a spider in a web. It is in the centre of the web continually weaving its idea of its own reality and external reality. That web has to be seen through because our idea of our ego involves something very real—the essence of my being, “I”, “me”. That is our fundamental illusion and that is what has to be seen through. The ego is not something solid and self-existent and eternal, but is just a construct of our ignorance. When we look for the ego, we never can find it. We strip off layer after layer of the psyche: who is this I? But we never can find it. It is transparent; it’s not something solid and real and self-existent.
But when we go beyond all that, when we go beyond all these constructs of the mind to a state which is beyond thought, but which is our primordial innate awareness, that awareness is something which has no concept of I and other. The traditional example is that it is like the sky, it is like space. Because we cannot pinpoint it, we cannot give it a middle, we cannot give it a circumference. It is not something which separates us from others, it’s that which connects us, which interconnects us with all the beings. This innate primal awareness which is beyond thought, which is beyond concepts, which cannot be thought about but which can be experienced, is non-dual by its very nature. That means it doesn’t separate into self and others. It is not that this primal awareness is “my” primal awareness, or hers or yours: it is just awareness. It has no boundaries, it is all-pervading like space. We cannot say this is my space and that is your space. Where’s the boundary? There is no boundary. We can make boundaries for the ground, but we cannot really make boundaries of space. They are very artificial boundaries. Actually, space has no boundaries. It is not that the sky is up here and then there is a break and there is no more sky. Sky is there and here, where is the sky not? Space is everywhere. It is outside us, it is inside us, it is all around us. We couldn’t exist if it were not for space; we are mostly space. I read somewhere that if you took the solid part of the human body, it could fit onto the tip of a pin. Even then, that solid matter could be further reduced into energy waves. We are all space, but we don’t see it like that. We see things as very solid, but this is not true. Likewise, inwardly we see something very solid—“me” and “mine” —but when we try to analyse it down and down, we can never find it, it’s not there. It is our fundamental illusion and we spend all our time trying to satisfy something which, since the very beginning, has never existed.
So, therefore, Nirvana is the relief from all of that. We lay down the burden, is how the Buddha put it. It is the laying down of this heavy rucksack full of all these rocks that we’ve been carrying with us, endlessly trudging along, weighted down by something which, since the beginning, has never actually existed.
Now, when we meet really enlightened beings, the first thing which strikes us is how completely vital they are. I do want you to understand that realising Nirvana is not spacing out. It’s nothing to do with “Oh, I’m not having any ego now so I can’t function”. In fact, once we have realised that the ego since the very beginning has never actually existed, we can use the ego—that’s fine. The ego isn’t the problem, it is our belief in and identification with the ego which is the problem. Once one has seen through it, one can make use of it. But then, it is our servant and not our master. Do you understand? So, when we meet with very realised beings, one knows one is in the presence of something very special – that’s where the idea of sitting at the feet of the master comes. Mary sitting at the feet of Jesus, people sitting at the feet of the Buddha or other great masters. You don’t have to say a word. People like me have to go, “Blub, blub, blub!” But a genuine master could just sit here and that would be enough—nothing has to be said. Just being in the presence of someone who is awake, someone who is genuinely awake, makes us see that we also have the potential to wake up.
So, it is this innate quality of the mind which all genuine paths are seeking, which all genuine spiritual paths are trying to find within themselves—the transcendent—however they call it. The Hindus call it Atman (Self), the Buddhists call it Anatman (Non-self). The Muslims think of it as Allah. The Christians call it the spark of God within. It’s just labels, it’s just words, it doesn’t matter what we call it, it’s the experience which counts. And everyone agrees that the experience is beyond thought, is beyond words. But for the first time, reality is known.
We have it within us. Nirvana is not over there, Nirvana is here. It is the ground of our being, but it is covered up. That s why in the Mahayana it is said that Nirvana and samsara are the same, because if we look into samsara, it dissolves into its inherent emptiness, its inherent spaciousness which is the nature of Nirvana. So actually, Nirvana and samsara, if correctly understood, are not two, they are just sides of the same coin. This quality of transcendence and the cessation of suffering is within us the whole time. It is our true nature. We just don’t see it. We have our eyes really firmly closed or we keep looking in the wrong direction. It is not something which takes forever and forever to realise. It can happen in a moment. In the time of the Buddha, there are so many stories of people coming to meet him. The Buddha says a few words and zap, they get it. Because it is there. We just have to look and see it; it doesn’t take endless aeons of time, it just takes looking in the right direction and being able to let go inwardly.
Question
Q: You talked about the clinging mind and the chatter in the mind. Where do you see dreams? Do you see that dreams are part of a clinging mind?
JTP: The consideration is that most of the dreams, especially dreams which take place around midnight and before midnight, are usually the regurgitation of whatever has been happening during the day. Sometimes we can have special dreams which are coming up from a very deep level. Usually, that happens before dawn. Those sorts of dreams are very clear. But mostly, Tibetans think that ordinary dreams, especially if we are not in a state of awareness, are just the usual chatter of the mind. There is what is called “Dream Yoga” in which we train the mind to recognise dreams while we are dreaming them and to recognise that we are dreaming and then to change the dreams into meaningful ones. Tibetans never like to waste a moment without practising and so they use up the dream period too. An ordinary dreaming state is considered to be part of the usual mental chatter.
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May All Beings Benefit
Sarva Mangalam