Welcome to another episode of the Secular Buddhism Podcast. This is episode number 58. I am your host Noah Rochetta, and today I'm talking about the art of stopping and seeing.

In episode 52, The Sound of Silence, I talked about a teaching called The Three Doors of Liberation. These three doors are emptiness or non-self, signlessness or no form, and the third one is aimlessness, sometimes referred to as no goal.

Today I'd like to elaborate a bit more on this third door, the idea or concept of aimlessness. When I talked about this in episode 52, I shared the story of Angulimala. He was the murderer who was intent on causing chaos and mayhem, and when he confronts the Buddha, the Buddha goes on as if no big deal was happening here.

He confronts Angulimala, and Angulimala is wanting to chase him, but the Buddha just keeps walking like normal. He can't believe what he sees, because Angulimala is used to most people just being terrified and running from him or screaming.

I presume he's taken back by the fact that there's no fear coming from the Buddha, so he yells at him and he says, stop. This is my favorite part of the story, because the Buddha, I would imagine in a calm and serene tone, just replies, I stopped long ago, Angulimala. It's you who hasn't stopped.

That's shocking to Angulimala. He doesn't know how to take that. This is the story as it's recounted in Old Path White Clouds, the book by Tiknahan.

But this powerful phrase, I stopped long ago, has really stuck with me, and this is what has motivated me to share this podcast episode.

The art of stopping and seeing and applying this thought, as I imagine the Buddha standing there serenely saying, I stopped long ago. It's you that hasn't stopped.

I imagine him saying that to me, what is it that I haven't stopped? What was it that Angulimala hadn't stopped? That's what I want to talk about today.

Part of this is inspired by a question I received from a good friend of mine who says, I'm not sure what you mean by sit with it.

With regards to specific, like, to feelings, he said, can you expand on that for me? And he also said, I'd love to better understand the concept of suchness or oneness.

I'd love to have a podcast on that in greater depth. I hope this kind of accomplishes that. The idea of suchness, the idea of oneness, the idea of sitting with it, all in regards to this, you know, the art of stopping and seeing.

I also want to correlate what I'm going to talk about in this episode with what I talked about in episode 51 in my conversation with Stephen Bacheler.

He talked about the four noble truths and looking at these truths as four tasks. So as a quick reminder, we have the acronym Elsa to help us remember these.

So E is embrace the suffering or discomfort. In other words, we embrace the situation at hand. What is the situation at hand? Well, on the large scale, it's that in life difficulties arise.

We embrace that. On the smaller scale, it's, hey, I'm stuck at this red light. And I don't want to be stuck at the red light. I can embrace the suffering and the discomfort that I'm feeling in that moment.

So that's the first one. L is for let go, let go of your instinctive reactivity to it. This, this includes letting go of feeling that I shouldn't feel what I'm feeling. Right.

So I'm letting go. I'm just allowing another way to think of this is let it be, you know, let things be. I embrace the suffering and discomfort. I allow it to be what it is.

Then the third step, the S is C, see the stopping of the reactivity. As Stephen bachelor said, this to me is sit with it. You know, for me, to sit with something to stop and see the reactivity of it is I, it doesn't mean I'm stopping my emotions.

It doesn't mean okay, I'm not going to get mad. To me, this means when I am mad, I can stop and just see that I'm mad and stop right there. I don't have to take it a layer deeper and realize, oh, now I'm mad that I'm mad. See, that to me is not stopping.

So the stopping is being with whatever arises and if anger or sadness or a difficult emotion like that, an uncomfortable emotion like that arises, I can just be with it. I can watch it, I can sit with it.

And to me, this goes hand in hand with the concept of suchness. You know, it's it's that I can see things as they are. I can see my emotions and my feelings as they are not as I think they should be. Right, because it's in that realm of how I think things should be that I get, I become, I run into trouble.

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