Sage Lewis

And here’s an idea I have about doing an addiction speaker series or DVD series.

Sage was 225 pounds, a pack-a-day smoker, drank 2 pots of coffee a day, had 12 beers on Wednesdays, 18+ beers on Fridays, and quit it all one night 3 years ago.

He didn’t find God. He didn’t check himself into a rehab clinic. He just wanted to quit and develop a plan to do it.

He can show you how.

http://www.amaravati.org/abm/english/documents/4noble2/data/04first.html#mor

With this formula of the First Noble Truth, even if we have had a pretty miserable life, what we are looking at is not that suffering which comes from out there, but what we create in our own minds around it. This is an awakening in a person — an awakening to the Truth of suffering. And it is a Noble Truth because it is no longer blaming the suffering that we are experiencing on others. Thus, the Buddhist approach is quite unique with respect to other religions because the emphasis is on the way out of suffering through wisdom, freedom from all delusion, rather than the attainment of some blissful state of union with the Ultimate.

When the sense of ‘what I want’ and ‘what I think should and should not be’ arises, and we wish to delight in all the pleasures of life, we inevitably get upset because life seems so hopeless and everything seems to go wrong. We just get whirled about by life — just running around in states of fear and desire.

That’s dukkha; if you want to hold on to something which is beautiful because you don’t want to be separated from it — that is suffering.

http://www.amaravati.org/abm/english/documents/4noble2/data/03intro.html

First Noble Truth: There is suffering.
First Insight of the First Noble Truth: The insight is simply the acknowledgment that there is this suffering without making it personal.
All life is suffering (dukkha)
That acknowledgment is an important insight; just looking at mental anguish or physical pain and seeing it as dukkha rather than as personal misery — just seeing it as dukkha and not reacting to it in a habitual way.
Second Insight of the First Noble Truth: One should understand dukkha, not just try to get rid of it.
With any form of suffering — physical or mental – we usually just react, but with understanding we can really look at suffering; really accept it, really hold it and embrace it.
The Third Insight of the First Noble Truth is: “Suffering has been understood.” When you have actually practised with suffering – looking at it, accepting it, knowing it and letting it be the way it is — then there is the third aspect.

This is the pattern for the three aspects of each Noble Truth. There is the statement, then the prescription and then the result of having practised.

http://www.amaravati.org/abm/english/documents/4noble2/data/04first.html
When we talk about our human suffering, it brings out our compassionate tendencies. But when we talk about our opinions, about what I think and what you think about politics and religion, then we can get into wars.

If anything unpleasant arises we say, ‘Run away!’ If anyone gets in our way we say, ‘Kill him!’ This tendency is often apparent in what our governments do.

(I left off at this section: MORALITY AND COMPASSION)

http://www.buddhanet.net/e-learning/intro_bud.htm
The problem is that the “world out there” is constantly changing, everything is impermanent and it is impossible to make a permanent relationship with anything, at all.

http://www.buddhanet.net/e-learning/5minbud.htm
Buddhism teaches that the solutions to our problems are within ourselves not outside.

http://www.buddhanet.net/e-learning/intro_bud.htm
It is only when we completely abandon clinging that we feel any relief from our queasiness.
We suffer because we are constantly struggling to survive. We are constantly trying to prove our existence.
The harder we struggle to establish ourselves and our relationships, the more painful our experience becomes.
Our struggle to survive, our effort to prove ourselves and solidify our relationships is unnecessary.
We could just be a simple, direct and straight-forward person. We could form a simple relationship with our world, our coffee, spouse and friend. We do this by abandoning our expectations about how we think things should be.
We practice being mindful of all the things that we use to torture ourselves with. We become mindful by abandoning our expectations about the way we think things should be and, out of our mindfulness, we begin to develop awareness about the way things really are. We begin to develop the insight that things are really quite simple, that we can handle ourselves, and our relationships, very well as soon as we stop being so manipulative and complex.

“in the beginning” things were going along quite well. At some point, however, there was a loss of confidence in the way things were going. There was a kind of primordial panic which produced confusion about what was happening. Rather than acknowledging this loss of confidence, there was an identification with the panic and confusion. Ego began to form.

The first point is called right view — the right way to view the world. Wrong view occurs when we impose our expectations onto things; expectations about how we hope things will be, or about how we are afraid things might be. Right view occurs when we see things simply, as they are. It is an open and accommodating attitude. We abandon hope and fear and take joy in a simple straight-forward approach to life.

Right livelihood is the fifth step on the path. The truth is, that we should be glad of our job, whatever it is. We should form a simple relationship with it. We need to perform it properly, with attention to detail.

Actually, nirvana simply means cessation. It is the cessation of passion, aggression and ignorance; the cessation of the struggle to prove our existence to the world, to survive. We don’t have to struggle to survive after all. We have already survived. We survive now; the struggle was just an extra complication that we added to our lives because we had lost our confidence in the way things are. We no longer need to manipulate things as they are into things as we would like them to be.