The following talk was given at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California.

Please visit our website at adioderma.org.

Hello and welcome to this fourth talk on the Four Noble Truths.

And the general title of this series is The End of Suffering.

And that's the purpose of the formidable truth teachings,

is that the optional, emotional pain that we feel,

the emotional pain that arises because somehow there's a reactivity inside of us,

somehow there's craving,

there's a compulsion, attachment that we engage in, and the very attachment itself is painful.

And it leads to a cascade of other pains that come when we're holding on tight to something. It leads to disappointment and

fear and anger and it contributes to the creation of an edifice, of abstract ideas of who we are

and who we think we should be.

Part of our identity is the result of our stories we tell about ourselves and stories that our society tells about what it means to be a human being, or it says who we are.

So the first noble truth has a lot to do with the accumulation,

the gathering together of all the different attachments and clings we have as we construct a world,

a personal world of suffering. Buddha sometimes called it, once called it a tangled ball of thread,

that this world of suffering that's accumulated. And it's hard to sometimes understand even why we're

suffering or sometimes suffering can be so integral to our whole experience of self

that it's our identity, it's who we are, it's inconceivable,

we could be something else than someone who, you know,

than being the suffering that we have.

But in fact, the second noble truth says that the tangled ball of thread is being become tangled by the force of craving.

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