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.

If someone is seeking official, authentic Buddhist teaching, the internet will provide much better sources than the information here. I am not a Buddhist teacher, don’t have any pedigree of lineage, nor am I licensed by any organization. I am a layman. My views represent my understanding based on reading more books than I care to count, and listening to teaching generously offered by those with much broader experience than mine. I may be wrong on some points. If certainty about accuracy is of great importance, then reading elsewhere is probably a better strategy. If the experience of a layman trying to understand and follow a Buddhist path is of interest, it’s here.

My background for decades has been Christianity. I left that path for Buddhism, but I don’t plan to discuss how or why I changed. I’ll let Christians deal with their own path, and wish them Godspeed in finding Truth within the labyrinth of doctrine usually surrounding and hiding it. At the core of the teachings of Christ is Truth, but it is a hard Truth that is often abandoned for the comfortable semi-truth of modern Christian religions. I will attempt to only make references to Christian scriptures when they seem to succinctly express Truth, and to refrain from criticism.

Depending on how this evolves, I may assemble it into an e-book sometime. For now, I’ll use the blog medium to organize and write on the topics that are of interest to me.

The first topic to be posted relates to the Four Noble Truths. The Four Noble Truths are often treated as Buddhist kindergarten material — quickly noted and passed over in favor of a rush to meditation. I’ve found it useful recently to return to them, and consider them more fully. They are the foundation of Buddhist teaching and seem worth more than a passing reflection.

The First Noble Truth is that there is suffering. It is a universal condition, not just yours, and actually includes both pain and happiness. Birth, old age, disease, dying, separation from what we want, association with what we don’t like, and not getting what we want are all forms of suffering. But it’s even more extensive than that. There is suffering because things are always uncertain and changing. And there’s suffering coming from a deep sense of incompleteness/aloneness because of spiritual ignorance – that basic inbred conclusion that we’re separate selves that is almost impossible to disagree with. Even amidst joy, there’s the niggling knowledge that it won’t last. Even in the rush of excitement, there is recognition that it’s a flash of lightning that cannot be retained..

There’s nothing personal about this condition, the Buddha said. And it cannot be permanently fixed within the constraints of life.

My own experience is in agreement with this conclusion, though it has taken a few years to see/admit the inevitably transient nature of happiness. As soon as I am happy, I generally have busied myself with the task of securing it, and have never been able to do so. It doesn’t mean I sit dourly on any happiness that manages to come my way. In a way, I relax and enjoy it more fully because I know that it will fade and that no anxious effort on my part to maintain it will work. Its fading is no longer of much serious concern or consideration, and I’ve mostly abandoned the strategy of attempting to re-create it over and over again in the same mold. My faith in achieving some secure happiness as a possible outcome of life has been seriously eroded; with that erosion, the anxious striving for it has also diminished. And when I’m not happy, I no longer feel like I’ve had my birthright cheated from me.

Accepting the inevitability of suffering has not made me aloof about relieving misery when I can. It has just made me see my efforts in a more realistic light. I can act vigorously to add to the storehouse of good in the world without needing to believe that my efforts will fix things on a grand scale or even permanently. And I see with greater clarity that the realm of suffering is much more extensive than I believed it to be. A monk friend of mine once asked me to imagine a world in which people had enough to eat, shelter, reasonable order and security, and opportunity. “Would that not bring happiness? Would we not have finally fixed things up? Most people in America live way beyond those essentials. Are we deliriously happy? Have we finally fixed up our American world?” Surely this much happiness and abundance would spill over into the rest of the world. (I doubt, though, Iraq appreciates the happiness we’ve spilled on them.) And ironically, a recent assessment of happiness showed that Americans ranked relatively low among nations when it came to happiness. Other factors, even in poor nations, play a much larger role in happiness than the fixes we chase to remedy things.

Does that mean that I don’t care about things like hunger and injustice any more? No way! But when and if those problems are remedied, I’ve concluded that happiness will not arrive with the solutions. When and if those problems are solved, the form of suffering will change, perhaps to less vicious modes, but suffering itself will not go away.