Hello and welcome to another episode of the Secular Buddhism Podcast.

This is episode number 97. I am your host Noah Rochetta.

And today I'm talking about dependent origination.

Keep in mind you don't need to use what you learn from Buddhism to be a Buddhist.

You can use it to learn to be a better whatever you already are.

Now this topic of dependent origination, this is something I've been wanting to talk about for

a while because it is a key teaching, a key Buddhist teaching or a Buddhist principle

sometimes referred to as dependent origination. The 12 links of dependent origination,

the law of causality has a couple of names that it goes by.

But it can be a little confusing. The first time I studied it, I kind of lost interest in it right

away because it goes through these 12 links and to me at least they didn't seem to make a lot of

sense and I don't fully understand the relationship between one link and the other.

And then of course there's the, well which link is first, you know, I think our western mindset,

the moment I hear there are 12 links of dependent origination, my western mind wants to say,

well what are the 12 and what order? And I'm already thinking of it the wrong way because I'm

thinking of it in a linear fashion where there's number one, then there's number two, then there's

number three. So I think my first encounter with this teaching was a little confusing I guess because

it just didn't, it didn't make sense to me. And I thought what's the point of understanding these

12 links? If I can't make sense of the 12 links. But I've studied it from various teachers and various

approaches, talked about in different articles and different blogs and different magazines.

And I think the more I've come to understand it, the more simple it seems. On the surface it may

seem complex but when you really dig into it it's actually quite simple. So the first thing I want to

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