Hello everybody and welcome back to Revolutionary Left Radio. On today's episode I'm going to do something a little different.

I know you've probably heard that before but this is outside of the realm of what we usually do. It's another monologue style episode where I basically present an introduction to the core Buddhist teachings of the four noble truths in the eightfold path.

It's something I'm trying out. I've gotten a lot of interest specifically on Patreon whenever I talk about this stuff. The feedback is overwhelmingly positive and so I figure I'll continue down this path. I have a good friend and co-host on Gorilla History who is into Sufism, scholar and a practitioner of that mystical tradition with an Islam.

I'm going to have on a very soon probably by the end of this year to continue to explore these elements that don't necessarily fall directly into politics but address other aspects of our lives as human beings in the cosmos.

Because there's such good feedback, because people seem genuinely interested, I'm going to continue to do this and tell people, tell me, okay enough.

A couple of things before we get into this. At the very end, if you listen beyond the outro music, there will be a guided meditation which I mentioned in the show itself that I conducted for Patreon and that I made it public.

The feedback has been absolutely wonderful on that front so I figured I'd add it here. So if you stick around past the outro music, you can engage in that little 10 minute guided meditation.

And the second thing that I didn't mention in the show itself, but I want to point out up front, is meditation itself is like any other thing, it's not going to immediately result in amazing things.

You're not going to sit down for 10 minutes, meditate and have some blissful, amazing experience. If you want to build muscle, you go to the gym every day and you put in the work.

If you want to get healthy, you start putting in the work of eating healthy every single day and over time, the progress is made.

But you don't go to the gym, lift a few barbells and say, why am I not ripped? You know, you don't eat a kale salad and say, why am I not completely healthy and I still have all this weight?

It's a practice that you cultivate over time. And so I want you to think that as well. When you sit down, you meditate, you're not going to have some mind-blowing experience.

And so that's this thing is a subtle, protracted process. And so allow for that and hold these things lightly without dogma and without an overconfidence in your own ability to control and will things to happen.

All right, without further ado, let's go ahead and get into it. This is my little monologue style episode on the four noble truths and the A-fold path. Enjoy.

Okay. So for today's episode, I'm going to do something different, which is an introduction to the A-fold path.

Okay. So for today's episode, I'm going to do something different, which is an introduction to basically the core teachings of Buddhism.

And those are summed up incredibly nicely and simply in the four noble truths and then the A-fold path. So first and foremost, the four noble truths.

This is the teaching of the Buddha, this is the grounding and the basic foundation of Buddhist philosophy and practice. And what are the four noble truths?

Well, the first of the noble truths is that to live is to suffer. The polyward duke, which is often translated as suffering or pain, is an innate characteristic of existence.

Right. It is a, it is inherent in life that we suffer. And suffering here can mean more than just the immediate, obvious and explicit experience of pain or acute suffering.

Duke can be translated more subtly into unsatisfactoriness. Right. This, this constant sense that we have, whether we're aware of it or not, that things just aren't quite right. Right.

We're always looking to the future to be happy. We're always looking over the shoulder of the present moment, thinking that somewhere down the line will get what we want. And that will eventually make us happy.

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