The Second Noble Truth is a statement that this suffering identified in the First Noble Truth has a cause, that it is not a necessarily inevitable condition. And that cause is NOT DESIRE, but the the attachment to desires: the desire for sensual pleasure, the desire to become – to be somebody, and the desire to get rid of things that we don’t like. The attachment makes the desire personal and is very much a part of the notion of a me, and of mine.

The Third Noble Truth is that the cause of suffering, this attachment to desire, can be overcome by rejecting, relinquishing, leaving and renouncing attachment to desire.

I’ve added a section called The Monastery to hold the writing I want to do for the next several weeks. It’s mostly oriented toward Buddhist teaching, as I understand it, with commentary on how I’ve experienced it so far. I’m not enlightened, so there are sometimes discrepancies between my experience and what I think I’ve been taught. But the views are honest layman views. Sometimes I see things clearly, and many times I can sort of see the outline of how things might work.

I’ve organized it around the Buddhist teaching, because I’ve come back to the fundamentals after of few years of thinking I understood them. These articles share my experience. For some enamored with meditation, they may seem like heavy stuff. My own personal experience is that the basics are exceptionally useful in focusing and understanding what I have experienced.

Thank you for your comments.

As you live within your awareness, so I must live within mine. Your mind has some comforts that my mine does not afford me. While you exist effortlessly within each moment, my mind reaches to a speculative future and a remembered past in its attempt to aid survival. You live mostly unencumbered by these spans of attention I cannot ordinarily avoid.

Just as you believe your senses implicitly, I’ve learned to believe in the normal reach of my mind; it has seemed so advantageous in reducing the insecurity of ordinary daily life. I cannot ignore this insecurity or return to a state of ignorance. The only avenue open for me as a human is what I would call transcendence – i.e., deliberate development of a different perspective that will free me from somewhat destructive preoccupation with these normal realms of imagination.