The 4 Noble truths; Against The Stream: A Buddhist Manual for Spiritual Revolutionaries

Against The Stream: A Buddhist Manual for Spiritual Revolutionaries by Noah Levine.

THE FOUR NOBLE TRUTHS OF THE REVOLUTIONARY PATH TO FREEDOM

BASIC TRAINING (cont’d)

You can read Part 1, 2 & 3 of Chapter 1, AGAINST THE STREAM: BASIC TRAINING here.

The first teachings the Buddha gave after his enlightenment were the four noble truths. These were first delivered to the same ascetics he had been practicing with in the forest before his awakening. This giving of the truths is often referred to as the setting in motion of the wheel of Dharma. The term wheel is used because the Buddha’s teachings explain the cycle or circle of existence. Furthering that imagery, the wheel of Dharma consists of eight trainings, the eightfold path, which are seen as the wheel’s spokes. When a wheel is set in motion it revolves. One could say that all of Buddhism revolves around these central teachings, because every Buddhist tradition includes some form of the four noble truths and the eightfold path. So with this turning of the wheel, the Buddha started a revolution that continues to this day.

When the Buddha first returned to his old pals, the homeless homeys, they were hesitant to listen to what he had to say. They shunned him as a food-eater and sellout. But the Buddha’s newfound freedom and happiness were so apparent and attractive that they couldn’t help but listen to what he had to say.

The First Truth

The Buddha taught that life by its very nature is unsatisfactory, that some level of difficulty exists for all unenlightened beings in creation. We face sickness, old age, and death; the sense pleasures we do experience don’t last; and physical and perhaps emotional pain is a given in life.

There are two levels to this truth. The first is the pain of existence that we can’t do anything about. The second is the suffering and unhappiness that we create for ourselves due to our lack of wisdom and our vain attempts to control the uncontrollable—that is, the transient nature of all physical, emotional, and mental phenomena. We are born into a realm of constant change. Everything is decaying. We are continually losing all that we come into contact with. Our tendency to get attached to impermanent experiences causes sorrow, lamentation, and grief, because eventually we are separated from everything and everyone that we love. Our lack of acceptance and understanding of this fact makes life unsatisfactory.

Pain and suffering are two completely different experiences.

Pain is unavoidable. Suffering is self-created.

Some level of dissatisfaction exists for all unenlightened beings.

For some this is a revelation, a normalizing statement that brings about a great sense of relief. Finally we are being told the truth: life isn’t always easy and pleasant. We already know this to be true, but somehow we tend to go through life thinking that there is something wrong with us when we experience sadness, grief, and physical and emotional pain. The first truth points out that this is just the way it is. There is nothing wrong with you: you have just been born into a realm where pain is a given.

The Second Truth

There is a cause for all this dissatisfaction and suffering. It is our craving for life to be filled exclusively with pleasure. That craving for pleasure creates a natural reaction of aversion to the pains and difficulties of life. This truth can be seen as a simple lack of acceptance: unwilling to accept the pleasures and pains as they are, we go about clinging to the experiences we like and trying to get rid of the ones we don’t like.

We also create suffering for ourselves due to our craving to exist permanently—that is, our craving for eternal pleasure. When life is good, we want it to go on forever. At other times, though, we create suffering for ourselves through our craving to not exist at all—the craving for nonexistence, which results from the desire to escape from the pains and difficulties of life. All suicidal tendencies can be understood in the light of this desire to escape suffering. When life is very difficult or painful, we want to no longer exist.

As long as greed, hatred, and delusion exist within our hearts, suffering will continue in our lives, no matter how much we seek to experience pleasure and avoid pain.

Craving is the problem. Desires are natural, but craving—which is painful—is the extreme aspect of desire.

The Third Truth

Freedom from suffering is possible. There is a way to relate to all experience that is in harmony with the reality of constant change and the ultimately impersonal nature of all things. When greed, hatred, and delusion are destroyed, a state of peace and happiness is all that remains. This is the state of freedom from suffering referred to as Nirvana (which means cessation).

The Buddha experienced it, and if he could do it through his own efforts, others can too.

We all have mini-experiences of this—moments in our life, perhaps even on a daily basis, when we are free from greed, hatred, and delusion, when we are satisfied and at peace. Yet we tend to ignore or forget those experiences. The truth of craving blocks the truth of freedom. The path of rebellion, the Buddha’s path, will bring us to a more consistent state of freedom.

Freedom is available in this lifetime.

The Fourth Truth

The path to freedom consists of eight factors (often referred to as the eightfold path). These eight important areas of comprehension and practice, which make up the spiritual revolutionary’s training manual, can be broken down into three sections:

Wisdom

1. Understanding

2. Intention

Conduct

3. Speech

4. Action

5. Livelihood

Meditation

6. Effort

7. Mindfulness

8. Concentration

Studying and contemplating these eight factors, the enlightened revolutionary can experience the freedom celebrated and taught by the Buddha.

Artwork by Shepard Fairey, displayed at Against the Stream Meditation Center.

THE EIGHTFOLD PATH

The factors of the eightfold path—factors regarding wisdom, conduct, and meditation—are not linear, nor are they meant to be taken one at a time. They are all developed simultaneously, and each factor has correlations with and is a support for other factors. Trainings for each of these factors, trainings in mind and body, can be taken up simultaneously. The revolutionary can and should begin meditating and being careful with his or her actions from the very beginning; however, for the sake of explaining the path, I will take the factors one at a time in the order that they are listed above, broken down into the three categories of wisdom, conduct, and meditation.

Wisdom

Like all good trainings, this path begins with theory and then moves on to practical exercises. The first two factors, understanding and intention, deal with wisdom. The would-be revolutionary should strive to understand the awakened, enlightened view of existence and the importance of having the correct aims and thoughts about what will bring about the spiritual revolution of freedom and happiness. The awakened view is the understanding that all things are impermanent, ultimately impersonal, and on some level unsatisfactory. I experience this in my relationship to my material possessions, like my car or motorcycle. I know that my vehicles are temporary, that they don’t bring lasting happiness, and that eventually I will be separated from them. Because I understand all of this, I can enjoy my toys without clinging to them or suffering when they break down. Let’s look at the two aspects of wisdom in a bit more detail.

1. Right understanding

Is knowing the truth of the way we create suffering for ourselves due to our craving for pleasure and our constant, vain attempts to escape from pain. The concepts of karma, reincarnation, and impermanence are central to the factor of understanding.

When we pay attention to life, it is easy to recognize that every action has a consequence: when we cling, we suffer; when we act selfishly or violently, we cause suffering for ourselves or others. This is the teaching of karma: positive actions have positive outcomes; negative actions have negative outcomes.

Negative actions include intentionally killing any living being, stealing, participating in sexual misconduct, lying, using harsh or abusive language, gossiping, and practicing envy, covetousness, or ill will.

Positive actions include abstaining from all of the above and practicing such things as kindness, compassion, generosity, forgiveness, and understanding.

Within the Buddhist worldview, karma is always taught within a multilife schema—that is, the outcome of one’s actions can come into fruition in this lifetime or another. Reincarnation is the truth of continued existence from life to life. It is not our personality or soul that is reborn, but our karma. It is our accumulated positive and negative actions that continue. From this perspective, we are experiencing in the present a reverberation from choices we made in the past. Likewise, our future experiences will be colored by the choices we make in the present.

Next we must understand that all things are subject to change, without a permanent self. We tend to take our selves to be our egos, or what some like to call our souls. But the truth is that there is no solid separate or permanent self. The self itself is impermanent. Even in rebirth it is not the self that is reborn, but the karmic momentum.

The teachings of karma and reincarnation may seem too mystical or daunting to easily understand and accept. But that is the beauty of Buddhism: you don’t have to accept it or understand it; rather, people are encouraged to investigate it thoroughly and find out for themselves if it is true or not. We may never be able to fully grasp the root causes and conditions of our past karmic momentum, which has brought us to where we find ourselves in this life, but if we look closely we can see the truth of cause and effect in our day-to-day life. The more we meditate, the clearer this will all become.

Karma, reincarnation, and impermanence all merge in the Buddhist concept of the dependent origination of all things, a concept that says everything is unfolding based on causes and conditions.

Our happiness or suffering is dependent on how we relate to the present moment. If we cling now, we suffer later. If we let go and respond with compassion or friendliness, we create happiness and well-being for the future.

Dependent origination begins with ignorance or confusion and ends with suffering. It is the map of how we create suffering, but it is also the path to avoiding suffering. There are twelve links in the cycle of cause and effect, and these links explain how we create and relate to karma.

We are all born into a state of ignorance. We learn how to respond to experience through internal and external conditioning and karmic momentum. At some point, we all realize that neither our instinctual nor our learned reactions are bringing about true happiness or freedom. This teaching involves both the way karma works from moment to moment and the way it works in reincarnation—that is, from life to life. For the sake of staying practical in the form of mind training and liberation, I will stick to the present-time-awareness view.

This is the technical version of dependent origination, with the components listed in order from one to twelve.

1. Ignorance, which leads to

2. Mental formations (thoughts or emotions), which lead to

3. Consciousness, which requires

4. Material form, which has

5. Six senses (physical sensation, hearing, seeing, smelling, tasting, and mental thoughts) through which stimuli generate

6. Contact, which creates sense impressions that generate

7. Feelings (pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral) that generate

8. Craving (either to keep or to get rid of the feeling), which causes

9. Grasping (or aversion), which generates

10. Becoming (identifying with the experience as personal), which generates

11. Birth (incarnating around the grasping), which generates

12. Suffering or dissatisfaction

Let’s look at an example of that sequence in action:

1. I am walking down the street, not paying attention. (Ignorance)

2. I see an ice-cream shop, and the thought arises, “Ice cream is delicious and it makes me happy.” (Mental formation)

3. I decide that I will have some ice cream. (Consciousness)

4. I walk into the ice-cream shop. (Material form, my body)

5. Inside the shop, I see and smell the ice cream and I begin to think about what kind I shall order. (Senses)

6. The ice cream smells sweet and creamy. (Contact)

7. I enjoy the smells of the waffle cones and hot fudge. (Feelings, pleasant)

8. I decide that I need a triple-scoop hot-fudge sundae in an extra-large waffle cone. (Craving)

9. After a few bites I am full, but I continue to eat the whole thing because it tastes so good. (Grasping at pleasure)

10. I wish I hadn’t eaten the whole thing, or had any ice cream at all. I think I was stupid for eating it. (Becoming)

11. I blame myself for being so gluttonous. (Birth)

12. I feel physically sick and emotionally drained. (Suffering)

Dependent origination is the downstream current of life. Without intentional mind training we just float along, addicted to our habitual reaction. We float downstream from ignorance, to consciousness, to identification with the sensation. Then the desire for more or less of the experience arises. And we continue to be drawn downstream, from the indulgence of it, to the identification with it, to taking birth as the sensation and then it passes away. Because of impermanence, it dies. Then we follow the same progression over and over. This process happens many times each minute. There is contact and sensation over and over.

The mindfulness that Buddhism encourages allows us to respond in the moment of contact with pleasure or pain in a more skillful way. When we are paying attention to our inner experience at the moment of awareness of the feeling (whether the feeling is pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral), we can break the cycle of habitually reacting out of attachment or aversion. It is at this moment of awareness, at the link between contact and craving, that we have the ability to choose to let go and head in the direction of happiness or hold on and continue to suffer.

My friend and colleague Vinny Ferraro likes to refer to our practice here as “letting each moment die its own natural death.” Attachment and aversion are attempts to resuscitate or kill an experience. Mindfulness allows us to receive the experience directly and respond more like a compassionate hospice worker than an aggressive ER doctor.

What is most important, and the greatest weapon of the spiritual revolutionary, is how we meet each moment within ourselves. The mind trained in investigative awareness has the ability to break this cycle, has the free will to bring mindfulness to each moment at which desire becomes indulgence, at which feeling becomes craving.

From the perspective of Buddhist psychology, this is the only place we do have free will. If we don’t bring mindfulness to the experience of contact becoming feeling, or desire becoming indulgence, we are slaves to that sensation and to our karma, our past tendencies. We will stay in this cycle for- ever unless we train ourselves to bring attention to it and let go of the grasping and identification that cause suffering.

Most of us are unable to break this pattern without a serious amount of effort, training, and dedication to being free from it. We go through our whole lives getting pushed along by our karma, our childhood conditioning, or the momentum that we brought into this incarnation from a past one. Without training our attention to be in the present, we cannot actually control our reactions. From this perspective there is no free will without paying close attention.

Basically, this first factor in the eightfold path shows us that we can choose to purify our actions and therefore experience happiness and freedom from suffering, or we can continue to ignore the facts and endlessly wander from experience to experience and life to life covered in confusion. Only if we understand the path to freedom, karma, and truths of impermanence, not-self, and dissatisfaction can we find our way out of the maze of confusion and truly understand reality.

Guided Buddhist Meditation and Dharma Talk at Against The Stream Meditation Center. Learn about the upcoming schedule here.

2. Right intentions

Are the goals or aims of our actions. They are the reasons behind our actions.

Having learned the theoretical truths of existence, we must then align our thoughts and intentions toward the goal of free- dom. This consists of redirecting our thoughts and intentions from the negative karma–producing thoughts such as lust, ill will, and cruelty to the positive intentions of kindness, compassion, generosity, forgiveness, and understanding.

In order to find freedom we must aim our life’s energy and actions toward being free from ill will, aversion, and wishing harm on ourselves and others. We must also be free from the lust for pleasure, which is clearly the cause of much confusion in our world. Lust is desire that is out of control. Our intention doesn’t need to be free from desire itself, but only free from the extreme of craving. Wanting something is not a problem, but having to have something is—it’s a setup for disappointment.

Intention plays a central role in the spiritual life. It is that from which volitional actions come—the actions that are at the heart of karma, which literally means action. Most of us have a misunderstanding of karma: we think that it refers to the result. Something bad happens and we say, “That was my karma” or “That was her karma.” Actually, karma is action itself. The result is the karmic fruit. And that karmic fruit—the outcome of an action—comes from our intention, not the act itself. For instance, if we accidentally kill an insect by walking down the street, there is no negative karma created because it was not our intention to kill. But when we volitionally kill insects because we are afraid of them or because we hate them, we are committing an intentional act that does bear a negative consequence or fruit.

This is an important distinction: karmic results come from our positive or negative intentions, not from the actions themselves. From this perspective a person can even harm or take human life accidentally—that is, without negative intention— and not have karmic repercussions.

There are two levels of intention. The first is simply having the correct intention. This means training our mind in thoughts that are free from craving and ill will. It means thinking about the welfare of all beings, including oneself. This sort of intention may be as simple as paying attention to our motives and abstaining from actions that are motivated by greed, hatred, or delusion. For example, when we are angry and lashing out at someone, that is obviously an aversive reaction, an intentionally harmful act.

The second level of intention goes beyond just being free from negative thoughts to also intentionally cultivating positive thoughts. This is referred to as the super mundane level, or spiritual thought. Here we begin to cultivate thoughts of loving-kindness, compassion, and forgiveness. We attempt to use our mental faculties to think about, to consider, to reason, to reflect, and to apply spiritual principles. We intentionally train our minds to think thoughts that are focused on spiritual matters rather than material ones. This higher level of thought is the proper use of intentional thinking. Most of the time our minds are filled with planning how to get our next fix of pleasure or, at the least, how to avoid pain or failure. On this higher level of spiritual thought, we are intentionally thinking about generosity and compassion.

The first, mundane, level of intention involves practicing non harming. It is simply damage control. The second, super mundane, level involves intentionally using our minds to get free from suffering and dissatisfaction. In this higher aspect of intention, we use our minds—we in fact train our minds—in the practice of meditation, reflecting on impermanence and on how craving and grasping create suffering.

As we observe the way our minds and bodies react to pleasure and pain, we begin to clearly understand how ultimately impersonal this human experience is, and how through our delusions and self-centeredness we are constantly making it personal and taking it personally. We are constantly identifying with the experience that is unfolding right now. We tend to feel that all of our thoughts are me, my, mine, when the truth is that everything is just the experience of the mind. It is not “my mind”; it is “the mind”—an ultimately impersonal experience of a mind. There is consciousness experiencing thoughts, but it is not our consciousness. We don’t own that consciousness, and it’s not even permanent. It’s just consciousness, arising and passing as do all things.

Here’s another way to put it. We are not the mind or its contents, nor are we even the experiencer of the mind. The mind experiences itself.

So our practice is to overcome identification with negative thoughts through renunciation. When we let go of or renounce ill will and the satisfying of lust, we cut off suffering at its root causes. Renunciation is not about pushing something away; it is about letting go. It’s facing the fact that certain things cause us pain, and they cause other people pain. Renunciation is a commitment to let go of the things that create suffering. It is the intention to stop hurting ourselves and others.

For example, when I realized that my craving for pleasure and my hatred of pain had become addiction to drugs and alcohol, I had to renounce all forms of participation in intoxication. Through letting go of drugs and booze, I was left with the raw emotions and fears that had been fueling the addictions. But by facing the aversion to those emotions and the craving for the insensibility of intoxication, I came to understand that the craving and addition were all in my mind, and that I had the ability to choose, one moment at a time, not to run away from pain by drowning it in false pleasure. Eventually it became clear that, as the Buddha taught, pain was not the enemy, but just another given aspect of life.

It’s similar to fire. Ill will, cruelty, and craving all burn, and in their extreme forms they consume us. They are natural phenomena, however, and if we have a wise relationship to the mind, they are not a problem at all. Thus it is not about pushing these thoughts and feelings away or pretending we don’t experience them. It is about training the mind to not pick up the fire and therefore not get burned. That is renunciation. We have the choice to no longer stick our hands in the flames.

Easier said than done, but possible nonetheless.

Having a positive intention is a protection against suffering. Just about every day at his home in Dharamsala in northern India, His Holiness the Dalai Lama, the exiled leader of Tibet, receives hundreds of Tibetan refugees. They tell him the most gruesome stories of how they were raped and tortured by the Communist Chinese and then walked across the Himalayas to reach him. In many cases some of their relatives died along the way, and most had to leave loved ones behind. Their stories tell of tremendous suffering. The Dalai Lama hears these stories one after another. An interviewer once asked him, “How can you listen to all of this suffering without it tearing you apart? How do you sit with all this tremendous suffering, being exiled from your own country, and the genocide of the people that you are supposed to be the leader of?” He answered, “My sincere motivation is my protection.” His sincere intention to respond with compassion and understanding to the suffering that he hears about sustains him. He sees beyond Communist China’s occupation of his country; he also sees the suffering of the oppressors. Because the Dalai Lama fully understands karma, he knows that the Communist Chinese too are creating suffering for themselves in the present and future. The intention to meet all suffering with compassion is his refuge.

It would be quite easy for the Dalai Lama to react with anger and hatred to the Communist Chinese. Instead, choosing the radical approach of the spiritual revolutionary, he responds with compassion, kindness, and understanding. He refers to the Chinese as “my friends, the enemy.”

Through letting go of ill will, we also realize that acting out our hatred only causes more hatred. Picking up the burning ember of ill will from the fire to throw at our enemy burns us before it burns them.

Perhaps most important, we must relax and realize that the stance of the spiritual revolutionary comes with time, when we have learned to cultivate the right intention. This perspective begins to unfold with practice. Simply thinking about it isn’t enough; we must practice it. This redirection of our intention comes more alive when we develop the moral and ethical practices of nonharming that follow in the next section. With the gathering of the attention in the formal practice of meditation, our mind gets concentrated and our awareness penetrates the truth of what is happening in the here and now. We directly experience the impermanent and dissatisfactory nature of our negative thoughts and we begin to see that they are not as personal as we thought.

You’ll remember that understanding and intention compose wisdom, the first level of the eightfold path. The Buddha said that trying to comprehend right understanding and right intention without ethical conduct and the training of meditation, the final two levels of the path, is like trying to row a boat across a river without untying it from the dock. He went on to say it was like trying to row upstream without any oars. Those who try will just get swept away by their confusion, ill will, and self-serving intentions based on greed and hatred.

This brings us to the second section of the training: conduct.

Conduct

Ethical conduct is based on an intention of non-harming and compassion toward all in speech, action, and livelihood. We will look at those three elements in turn.

3. Right speech

Entails the non-harmful use of communication. Having firmly established the correct view, understanding, thought, and intention about the path to freedom, spiritual revolutionaries must then align their actions with these intentions. This begins with realizing the power of communication to cause harm or to bring about positive change and happiness.

With the right intention comes the willingness to abstain from speaking harmful words. The Buddha classified speech that is harsh, malicious, vain, untrue, or gossipy as being a harmful misuse of communication. Being wise and careful about what we say, write, and otherwise communicate will bring more well-being to ourselves and to all those with whom we come into contact.

A good basic guideline for our speech is to reflect on whether what we are saying is both true and useful. There may be times when we are honest in what we say, but our words are too brutal or harsh. And there may be other times when we are deliberately being kind with the words we choose, but what we are saying is not totally true.

Most of us know the consequence of dishonesty. When we lie, we live in fear of being caught. I spent much of my early life making up stories about who I was and where I came from. Those lies built on each other until I didn’t know what I had told to whom. When I came to the path of Dharma, it took me time and much intentional practice to learn to be rigorously honest with myself and others.

Harsh speech has been my habit since an early age. I have always loved the shock value of swearing. Over the years my vocabulary hasn’t changed much, but my intentions have changed a lot. I still swear quite a bit, but now my use of fuck, shit, bitch, and balls serves more as an exclamation point to illustrate my sentiment than a sword to cause harm with. It is my feeling that swearing isn’t always harsh or malicious. Like everything else, it depends on our intention—in this case, our intention in using the language.

Likewise with gossip, there is a difference between talking about someone who isn’t present with the intention to cause harm or with the intention to share concern. Most of us have felt the effects of the “he said, she said” game. When I look at my intentions behind gossiping, I often realize that I am seeking power through sharing information. This is not a useful form of communication. Now, though I still often get caught up in it, I am aware of the negative consequences it may have. A wise friend once told me that anything people say when I am not present is none of my business. That piece of advice has saved me from a lot of suffering.

The Buddha spoke of the inevitability of praise and blame, fame and disrepute, pleasure and pain, gain and loss. For the topic of speech, it is important to accept that while some will offer praise, others will place blame.

Practicing speech that is true and useful is the intention of the rebel forces.

4. Right action

Is equally important. The real revolutionary is committed to nonviolence. The Buddha’s radical stance of nonviolence is a wise and practical path to personal and societal change. When we commit to waking up and revolting against the ignorance and oppression of classism, racism, sexism, and all forms of greed, hatred, and delusion in this world, the first step we must take in that revolt is a personal dedication to purify our actions from these things that cause harm. The minimum commitment necessary for the path toward enlightenment and freedom is renunciation of taking life, of dishonesty, and of sexual misconduct.

Mindfulness is a must if we want to be aware of and present with the emotions that provoke harmful actions. First and foremost, an awareness of our inner experience—which includes thoughts, feelings, preferences, emotions, conditioning, and sensations—requires a mind that is free from the obscuring effects of intoxicants. Mind- and mood-altering drugs such as alcohol, marijuana, narcotics, barbiturates, and hallucinogens cloud the mind and lead to an inability to be fully present for the inner experience. The Buddha was clear that the spiritual revolution requires a sober and drug-free mind. (This restriction would not apply to the prescribed psychotropic medications that some people need in order to function skillfully in the world.)

From the foundation of an unintoxicated mind, we can then train ourselves to respond to anger with compassionate investigation, respond to greed with acceptance and humility, and commit to nonharming on every level of existence. This includes letting go of all forms of dishonesty—that is, stealing, lying, and cheating. It also includes acknowledging the harm that is often caused through unwise and unskillful use of sexual energy and making a sincere commitment to a wise and careful relationship to sexuality. Traditionally this means abstaining from all sexual relations that we know will be the cause of harm to oneself or another. (More about sex in a later section.) Wise and careful action, from a foundation of sober awareness, is the way of the revolutionary.

5. Right livelihood

Means choosing a profession that is not involved in harming the world. Because we spend so much of our lives working, it is incredibly important that we find a way of making a living that does not add to the confusion and suffering in the world. Our livelihood also impacts karma: since all intentional actions have reciprocal outcomes, the time we spend on the job is a major generator of karma. It doesn’t work to practice spiritual principles at home while earning a living through something that creates harm in the world. By participating in a harm-causing career, we not only hurt other beings or our world, we create future harm for ourselves. Some of the traditional jobs to avoid are killing living beings, selling weapons, selling intoxicants, and making money in the sex industry. All of these jobs create suffering and confusion on some level. So even if the easiest way we find to make money is through selling booze or drugs, we need to choose different work. If we profit from substances that cause confusion and suffering, we are actually committing an act of self-sabotage. If our job is, say, bartending, close attention to our intention may reveal that our work is motivated by greed. A bartender witnesses the suffering of alcoholism and the confusion of drunkenness, yet profits from that suffering. Because profiting from the suffering and confusion of others has a negative karmic consequence, those who wish to be free from suffering should avoid all such jobs.

Working in the sex industry as a stripper, prostitute, or purveyor of Internet porn is perhaps a more subtle form of wrong livelihood. Sexuality is natural and sex for sale is an ancient profession, but, again, if we look deeply, it is not hard to see that the lust that motivates such an industry has negative effects on both the workers and the customers. At the very least, participation in the sex industry is dependent for profit on lust and attachment, the very causes of suffering and dissatisfaction for people.

Spiritual revolutionaries must be committed not to what is easiest but to what is most beneficial to themselves and the world. Remember: we have set our intentions to go against the stream. It is not the easiest way, to be sure, but it is perhaps the only way to achieve freedom and bring about positive change.

Meditation

Once we are committed to non-harming conduct in speech, action, and livelihood, we can benefit more easily from the meditative trainings of mindfulness and concentration. Effort underlies these other aspects of meditation, as it does all of the factors on the path.

6. Right effort

Is the intentional application of energy. Everything we have talked about so far takes effort. None of these practices or principles are easy to develop. Going against the stream is an act of intentional defiance and redirection of our life’s energy. We all have the energy necessary for this inner and outer revolution, but only with wise and intentional use of that energy—that is, with effort—can we master Buddhism’s liberating practices and avoid the habitual reactive tendencies that create more attachment and suffering in our lives.

Some of the ways we must use our energy and effort include avoiding the things that create suffering, replacing harmful thoughts and actions with thoughts and actions that create well-being and peace, developing wisdom and compassion through meditation and wise actions, and sustaining the wisdom and compassion that arise through careful attention.

When it comes to training our minds and hearts in the path of freedom, each practitioner must find the balance of applying the right amount of effort: not so much that we get strained, not so little that we get spaced out. Developing a balanced effort and energy in our spiritual life is key to the revolution.

The image of the stream works well for the implied effort that it takes to awaken and overthrow ignorance. In the beginning we are all floating downstream. At some point we become aware that the currents are dragging us down and that we are no longer satisfied with the status quo of human existence. We realize that life is passing us by and that true happiness is not going to be found by merely floating downstream. So we turn to spiritual practices as a tool to find the satisfaction that has been eluding us. Meditation and spiritual principles give us the tools to start going against the stream. In the early days and months of practice it can be a struggle simply to stop floating down the stream in the old habitual way. As we bring awareness to our habits, tendencies, and world views, we at first may see only how confused we have been. The more we pay attention, the clearer it will become how radical a path we have undertaken. And although we long for quick progress, we can achieve nothing until we stop the downward spiral.

Even that takes a lot of effort. There we are, flailing away in the middle of the stream, and we’re doing nothing but trying to stop going downstream with the current. Then we’re stopped, but that’s all; we haven’t begun to make progress in the other direction yet, because we’re in the center of the stream, trying to swim against the current. If we put too much effort into it, we feel tired out and overwhelmed, and it’s easy to give up and simply float downstream again. We have to find a balance of effort that is sustainable. The path of the spiritual revolutionary is a long-term endeavor. It is more like a marathon than a quarter-mile sprint.

The skillful way of practice is not to force yourself to the center of the stream with an over exuberant effort. As anyone who has ever tried to swim upstream in a river with a strong current knows, to get anywhere you have to swim from side to side. You can’t go straight up the center of the current; you have to swim diagonally toward one side, then across toward the other, to make any progress. This requires a balance between effort and relaxation. Only a steady and relaxed effort will carry you upstream, against the current. It’s that kind of steady and sustainable effort that allows us to make progress on the path of both inner and outer rebellion.

The Buddha likened spiritual effort to the tuning of a stringed instrument. If the strings are too tight, it doesn’t play correctly. If the strings are too loose, it doesn’t sound right either.

The path to freedom takes great effort and fine-tuning.

7. Mindfulness, or present-time awareness

Is essential to finding our way on the eightfold path. In fact, all of the other factors of the path depend on mindfulness of the present moment. Present-time awareness is the experience of knowing what is happening as it happens. The revolution is dependent on the rebel forces being present in mind as well as in body. That is the only way to overthrow the oppression of greed, hatred, and delusion.

This sort of awareness takes intentional training of the mind. Our attention is naturally scattered, the mind constantly swinging from present, to future, to past, to fantasy. Even for those who know that present-time awareness is the key to freedom, getting the attention to stay in the present is an extremely difficult practice. To be mindful of the present-time experiences of thoughts, feeling, sensations, and actions, we must vigilantly and continually redirect the attention to the here and now.

The formal training of mindfulness takes place on the meditation cushion, through redirecting the attention or awareness to the breath, body, feeling tone, and process of mind, as well as the state of mind that has arisen. Yet life demands more than just paying attention during formal meditation periods. We must have the intention to be mindful and aware during all aspects of life.

The body is the best place to start. Through redirecting the attention from the thinking mind to the felt sense of the body, we begin to condition the attention to be in the here and now. This is done by returning our attention to the physical experience each time it wanders into thinking about the past or future. The practice of mindfulness of the breath is especially helpful at the outset, because we are always breathing. Given that the breath is always happening in the present moment, we know that if we are aware of the sensations of the breath, we have successfully brought the attention into the present moment. This first level of mindfulness offers us an experience of relaxation and letting go of the insistent wandering of the thinking aspect of our mind.

The breath and the body are only the beginning of the mindfulness practice. Once we have established some level of present-time awareness and attention to the physical sensations of the body, we undertake training to bring attention to the feeling tone of the particular experience we are paying attention to.

Every single experience has a feeling tone to it—a quality of pleasantness, unpleasantness, or neutrality that we can perceive when we are mindful. An awareness of the experience and its pleasant or unpleasant tone is essential if we are to progress on the path to freedom. Our habitual reaction to pleasurable experiences is to cling to them, while our habitual reaction to unpleasant experiences is to resist or push them away. Clinging and aversion are the cause of most of the suffering we create for ourselves, and the subtle roots of all greed and hatred.

This second level of mindfulness, then, offers us awareness of the causes of suffering. Through being mindful of the experience and its feeling tone, we can directly examine our inner relationship of clinging to pleasure and aversion to discomfort, and we can react deliberately, choosing to let go at the root or cause of suffering. Without intentional mindfulness at this level of experience, we have no choice but to stay stuck in the habits of aversion and clinging, and as a result we float with the current on the stream of unenlightened existence. In other words, paying careful attention to the present moment and our inner relationship to the tone of experience allows us to rebel against the conditioned patterns by simply meeting the unpleasant, the neutral, and the pleasant with acceptance and understanding. A simple choice is at the heart of that rebellion: we can either stay asleep (clinging and avoiding) and continue to suffer, or we can wake up (practicing mindfulness and letting go) and find a deeper sense of well-being and happiness.

The third level of mindfulness brings attention to the process and contents of our mind. Having established present- time awareness of the body and feeling tone of experience, we then turn our mindfulness to the mind itself. This is done through paying close attention to our states of mind as they arise, including all of the emotional experiences that are felt both mentally and physically. By paying close attention when the experiences of greed or anger are present, we begin to investigate what that state of mind feels like, where it arises from, where it goes, and how we relate to it. This takes a level of intentional non reactivity: we receive with awareness the state of mind and know it through direct experience, yet we allow it to arise and pass without trying to get rid of it or hold on to it. Rather than reacting with our usual attachment or aversion, taking everything personally and feeling the need to do something about it, we relax into the experience, seeing it clearly and letting it be as it is.

This is important on two levels. First, we become intimate with our mind states and with how they affect our mood and actions. Second, we begin to see more and more clearly that states of mind and emotions, like everything else, are impermanent. With mindfulness we have the choice of responding with compassion to the pain of craving, anger, fear, and confusion. Without mindfulness we are stuck in the reactive pattern and identification that will inevitably create more suffering and confusion.

This is certainly a radical practice, turning the mind on the mind. It feels like a form of internal dissonance. In rebelling against our mind’s long-held habits, we are practicing cognitive disobedience, the highest form of the inner revolution. No longer slaves to the dictates of the mind, we gain the ability to choose for ourselves how we respond to the thoughts, feelings, and sensations of being alive. When we break free from a conditioned identification with the mind, we open a door to relating to our minds rather than from them.

The fourth level of mindfulness is paying attention to the truth of the present-time experience—that is, paying attention to and knowing when suffering is present, when craving has arisen, and when contentment and peace are being experienced. This level of mindfulness extends to all of the experiences we have, including the awareness of the arising and passing of the hindrances, the senses, the noble truths, the factors of enlightenment, and the attachments and cravings that keep us in ignorance of the truths of existence. ( I will say more about these experiences in a later section.)

All of the sitting meditation instructions are applicable to any posture or movement of the body. Whether done walking, standing, sitting, or lying down, mindfulness and contemplative inquiry can and should be practiced.

Eventually all of these meditations become one. The mindfulness of breath and body leads to the awareness of the feeling tone, then expands to the awareness of the content and process of the mind, and finally expands to include all of the phenomena of the mind/body process. This is what the Buddha taught as the meditative training called the Path of Insight.

8. Concentration, or focused attention

Is another necessary tool on the path to freedom. In the time of the Buddha, concentration meditation techniques were commonly taught. There are whole spiritual philosophies built on the pleasant experiences that occur when the mind is extremely concentrated. And it is true: when the mind is fully concentrated on one object—for example, on a mantra or a single experience— you will often have a very pleasant, blissed-out experience. This is due to the fact that when your mind is fully concentrated, you are no longer aware of the hindrances of sleepiness, restlessness, craving, doubt, and aversion.

However, when the concentration wears off, the mind is still subject to those same difficult experiences. Thus the so- called spiritual experience of concentration meditations is really just a temporary phenomenon of bliss or nothingness. The Buddha had the experience of the highest levels of concentration again and again, and he saw that it was ultimately unsatisfying and impermanent. A temporary state of concentration can’t change your relationship to the mind. It can’t set you free from the confusion and difficulty in life; it only allows you to avoid or ignore it temporarily.

Although the Buddha ultimately rejected concentration as the sole path to freedom, he realized that concentration was a useful tool, when integrated with mindfulness, to bring about insight and wisdom. Concentration is developed through giving preference to a single object, such as the breath, a phrase or mantra, or any of the previous foundations of mindfulness. As we continually bring our attention back to the chosen object, the mind becomes more focused and able to see more clearly the nature of the chosen experience.

Concentration is best used to see the impermanent, impersonal, and unsatisfactory nature of all phenomena. These three insights—impermanence, impersonality, and unsatisfactoriness—are the weapons of the liberating forces of the inner revolutionary. Those who understand the way it is, rather than the way we wish it were, are on the path to freedom.

After hearing these four noble truths and the eight factors of wisdom—the elements of the eightfold path—the Buddha’s buddies all understood that he had indeed found the true path to freedom. They joined him in the spiritual revolution and set off to help spread the message of wisdom and compassion to all who were interested in listening.

This was the beginning of the unbroken lineage of spiritual revolutionaries, known as Buddhists, that continues to this day. The Buddha and his homeys then spent the rest of their lives spreading the good news and opening the door to freedom for generations to come.

Noah Levine Dharma Talk: Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path

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Against The Stream: A Buddhist Manual for Spiritual Revolutionaries

$16.99

Against the Stream is more than a just another book about Buddhist meditation. It is a manifesto and field guide for the front lines of the revolution. It is the culmination of almost two decades of meditative dissonance from the next generation of Buddhists in the West. This is a call to awakening for the sleeping masses.

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