So tonight's talk I'm going to be focusing on one of my favorite suitas and talking about its implications.

This is the Salathaatha which in our language is the two arrows.

It's one of the most famous teachings of the Buddha in which he employs an analogy of someone who was shot with an arrow.

And well I'll read it to you rather than explain the analogy. So here's the suit itself,

the Buddha speaking. When the unstructive person feels pain, they take it personally, fixating on it, becoming

the straw, obsessed by escaping from the feelings.

So they experience two kinds of suffering.

The first is the discomfort in the body, but the second is the mental agitation

all the spinning thoughts about why me, how can I stop this, this is unfair, etc.

It's as if an individual was shot with an arrow and then subsequently shot themselves

with a second one.

And so one experiences the pain of two arrows, not one.

And then I'll go on and a little while to talk about how he addresses this. This theme is rampant throughout all of the

darma. In the perhaps the most central teaching the Patiches Samuapada, the Buddha says in life when we have what's called

dukka, really painful emotional events in life happen.

The first thing that happens is that there are fast

emotional gut feelings which some of us you know might call anything from

feelings to intuition to just the emotional body.

The stomach gets tight, the chest feels hollow,

a lump in the throat, the face.

We have a physiological response which arises and we're so uncomfortable

that that creates the craving to get rid of the feeling in the body and from that we cling to certain things that provide distraction so that we don't have to feel the emotional

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