Hello, thanks for listening to this Darma podcast. I hope you consider that in accordance with the Buddhist tradition all of my work as a teacher is offered without charge and supported entirely by donations only.

If you'd like to support this work you'll find a

paypal button on darmapunks NYC.com. One of the core insights of the

darma is that in reaction to the inevitable disappointments of life, what the

Buddha called the first noble truths, that we all are prone and subject to old age sickness, loss, grief, and we're even all

prone to not getting what we want quite frequently in life and I don't think anybody can really argue with that

list. The Buddha noted that while all of those things are certainly unpleasant and create a lot of stress.

The Buddha interestingly noted that suffering

is actually the product of craving to escape the pains of life,

including the painful feelings.

And it's the craving to escape that actually causes the real forms of Duka.

Specifically, the Buddha broke down the way we seek to escape in terms of first craving. We try to escape the sorrow,

lamentation, grief, despair, the negative emotion. the

sorrow lamentation grief despair, the negative emotions and the negative experiences

by the short-term pleasures, intoxicants, food, acquiring, and so forth.

Another form of craving, he said, is for numbing,

the craving to escape our conscious awareness of our experience, the craving for being

disconnected from all of our feelings. He said the third way we try to escape is an obsession with

becoming. It's actually the compulsion to self-improve. The idea that there's something about me that's lacking not good enough that I need to relentlessly

change. I need to attain a different state of being, a different higher

incarnation of myself have become different and that that craving for self-improvement becoming better versions of

ourselves and so forth that that is the way that we escape the pains of life, the

...