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.

I was introduced to Buddhism in 1972, as a young kid, my dad had converted after he got sober.

He was looking for a spiritual path that was atheistic in nature and so as a part of his recovery so he got heavily into

Buddhism and started buying up all these books which wound up on the family's books shelves and along with my mother's books on Freud and Jung and Adler and Fromm and so forth and so forth.

And so I was very curious at the beginning,

what allowed the Buddha to become so peaceful and wise. How was it that he could be so content in his life and yet be so insightful?

And I heard the words at very young age,

Enlightenment and awakening.

And my dad practices in so they have the word can show and stuff like that.

I was interested just in how the Buddha became enlightened and I thought it must be something that was very hidden, very hard to find out. But actually, the answer to the process of Enlightenment or awakening was actually laid out very clearly by the

Buddha in the poly cannon. So it's not easy to simply jump in at first and grasp you have to practice at it for a while but I did finally after years and years of study starting in the 1990s. I had done my academic work on Buddhism and psychology and I took some time off and then in the 90s I started studying the Polycannon and I became more and more familiar with how to unpack the language.

And I found a fascinating story of perseverance, a breath of undertaking that was quite astonishing.

It's not easy to unpack enlightenment in a single talk, especially to sing roughly a half an hour talk, but I'll do my best to give you an understanding of both what the Buddha said it was and how he achieved it.

To understand what Enlightenment is, we have to start out by just reviewing some of the most basic

insights of truths of the darma, the teachings of the Buddha, the first great truth is that with life we experience

inevitable pain and trauma. There is sickness, old age, death, grieving the loss of loved ones,

grieving separation from the loved, and also many of us endure deprivation

of what we year for. We don't get to have the children or relationship or a career in the arts or the ability to travel as much as we long for.

So in all life the first great truth is there's going to be emotional pain.

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