compassion – Meditative Man

Third Noble Truth

We have been discussing the four noble truths for the last couple of weeks. The four noble truths are:

You should know suffering
You should abandon origins
You should attain cessation
You should practice the path

So today, let’s get into the third noble truth; we should attain cessation. What does that mean? Well, last week, during our Q&A session, a question came up about the meaning of our life. And I mentioned that the meaning of the life is to attain liberation, be free from this endless cycle of birth, life, and death. When Buddha says we should attain cessation, that is exactly what he means. We should attain cessation from the cycle of samsara.

The only way to attain permanent cessation from suffering is to attain the cessation from samsara. The cessation also refers to elimination of emotions that lead to suffering. If you think about it, elimination of craving is what we need to eliminate our day to day suffering.

We see something and we find is attractive. A person or money or something. We start thinking about it. Start paying inappropriate attention towards it’s good or bad qualities. And boom, we have to have it. That’s the craving. We will do whatever it takes to get that object. We will make a plan. Buy her flowers, woo her, steal money, whatever. Let’s take an example. We are taking a stroll on a beautiful afternoon, and we see someone eating a donut. And we go, ahhh donut!! It appears very attractive. And that’s like an object of attachment. The jelly donut. And it’s a yeah, it seems desirable. But if we don’t pay any attention. Then it’s not an object of delusion. If, on the other hand, we hone in on it. And just fantasize about it. It quickly becomes an object of attachment such that I have to have that donut right now. Or I won’t be happy. I need it. So donuts. And every other object of attachment requires honing in on what seems to be good about it and agreeable on thinking just about them. So the delusion does not occur until we really develop this wish to have it. You know, like a need or a grasping like I got to have this in order to be happy. It’s because we’ve honed in on it with an appropriate attention. So we’ve got the seed of the delusion. The object is the nice looking donut. But the inappropriate attention is when we actually develop the delusion.

Antidote to craving is contentment. It comes down to How Much Is Enough doesn’t it? Most of us are doing better than we thought we would. And yet, we want a bit more. More money, more fame, more travel, more pizza, and whatnot. We must realize, it is a moving target. I have talked about this before, about my experience in grad school. I came from India for grad school and I was paying the tuition from my pocket (well, my Dad’s pocket)! As a foreign student, the fees are very high so every foreign grad student wants to get a research assistantship so that the University will waive your tuition and give you a small stipend. After a couple of months, I got the position. They waived my tuition and gave me a $900 per month stipend. I was on top of my world! I was driving a new car, living the life if you will—all in $900. Today, I cannot live in $900 a month. What happened? As my income grew, my needs kept growing with it. This is what we need to realize: there is never enough unless you are content with yourself. The way to get to this realization is to acknowledge, “I have everything that I need at this moment.”

Let me tell you another story. There was this wall street hot shot. He went on a vacation to a small Mexican fishing village. He notices that fishermen go out every morning and return with fish by early afternoon. They cook the fish and then have beer and dance the night away. This is their daily routine. The Wall Street executive sits down with the chief fisherman and says, “You know I can make you big.”

“How so?”

“We can get you a loan to get a couple of boats. Then you can catch more fish and sell it to the town next door.”

“What next?”

“Well then we buy some more boats and sell the fish to the city.”

“Then what?”

“Then we buy a fleet of 100+ boats and make you the biggest fishing operation in Mexico.”

“Then what?”

“Then we do an IPO and you cash out and retire. You will easily be a multi-millionaire.”

“What’s next?”

“Then you can retire in a small town and wake up when you want, go to sea, catch some fish, have a beer, and party the night away.”

“I am already doing it!”

You see, sometimes what we are chasing is right in front of us. With just a little bit of contentment for what we already have, we can get what we want without chasing it.

First Noble Truth: We Should Know Suffering

Let’s talk about something I am sure you have heard before, the four noble truths. In one of his first teachings Buddha talked about four noble truths. Essentially, he talked about how we can understand the true nature of suffering and how to abandon its causes. So here are the four truths:

You should know suffering
You should abandon origins
You should attain cessations
You should practice the path

We are suffering due to different reasons in our daily life. We have talked about this before. How many of us can say that we are free from our delusions all day long? No anger, no attachment, no jealousy, no hatred, and so forth. Not very many. And when we are under the influence of our delusions, it disturbs our inner peace. That is suffering. There is a way to eliminate our suffering. In order to eliminate our suffering, we must first understand where it comes from. Through training our mind, we can learn how to fully eliminate all of our suffering and its causes, and discover lasting inner peace and happiness.

Following Dharma is the supreme protection from suffering. It is the actual method to solve our human problems. Let’s take our own example. Every week, we meet and meditate. In our meditation, hopefully, you find some peace. A small refuge from your daily problems. Your mind does not wander about your problems. It is just peaceful. I hope you all are finding that no matter how small period of time that may be. That shows that it is possible to get rid of our delusions. Find the inner peace and happiness. It is possible to let go of our delusions. That tells us that our delusions are not intrinsic part of our mind. They are transitory. They are like the mud that dirties the water but doesn’t affect its pure nature. We have talked about this before. Our mind is like this golden nugget and our delusions are the dirt around that nugget. Our mind is not a dirty rock. Just like we can wash away the dirt and see the purity of the golden nugget, we can remove our delusions and see the pure nature of our mind. So that gives us two insights. One we can let go of our delusions. And two, our mind is naturally peaceful. That means we are naturally a peaceful person. We can handle all of our difficulties and remove all of our delusions. And it is equally important to note that everyone has a pure potential. When they get upset at us, it is not them, it is their delusions. If we keep that in mind, we will not retaliate. We will not focus on their delusions. We can wish them the peace because we know it is possible based on our own experience.

So coming back to why do we suffer. We suffer needlessly because we identify so strongly with our delusions and we don’t realize we have this extraordinary potential for joy and freedom and we don’t cultivate it. We don’t grom because we don’t even know its there. So that is a tragedy to go through life suffering based on not knowing what we are capable of.

We have talked about this before. Where do our problems come from. They are outside of our mind. Let’s say we are going to temple to find peace. Someone takes the parking spot we have our eye on. All of a sudden we are upset. The whole point of the trip is to find peace and we are upset because of a parking spot. Let’s say our car breaks down. We say I have a problem. In reality it is the car’s problem. You do what needs to be done to get it fixed but why are we letting it disturb our inner peace. It is an outside problem, that we are making it our own problem. If we develop understanding of difference between inner and outer problems, then it helps us how we can apply these Dharma to oppose the painful feelings and suffering that surface in our mind. We can overcome our suffering just by understanding that most of our problems are outer problems and have no reason to disturb our inner peace.

So coming back to the first noble truth, we should know suffering. Especially, the suffering of future lives. Those of us who believe in life after death, we should know that what life form we take in our next life depends upon karma that ripens at the time of our death. If negative karma ripens at the time of our death, we will end up taking a lower rebirth. A lower rebirth is a birth less than a human being. That meant, we can end up in the animal realm, or the hell realm, and so forth. Now, if we think about kind of suffering that will come to us in a lower realm, it is unimaginable. An animal is always in a state of anxiety for example. There are seven kinds of sufferings. Birth, aging, sickness, and death are the four main types. Then there is suffering from separating from things we like. We experience this suffering routinely in our life. We lost money, or car had an accident and so forth. Then there is suffering from getting things we don’t like. Getting sick for example, or getting a property tax bill 25% higher than the last year! The last type of suffering is suffering from not being able to satisfy our desire. Everyone of us suffers from this last one.

I would like you to do an experiment. For the next week, spend 10 minutes every day on these last three types of suffering and see what you encounter. Suffering from separation from things we like, getting what we don’t want and not getting our desire fulfilled. You will surprised how many of your mental disturbances arise due to these three sufferings.

Impediment to Meditation Practice

Every week we meet and meditate. Some days are better than others. Some of us are able to concentrate more than others but we all need to improve our meditative concentration. Today, I thought we discuss what gets in the way of our concentration.

There are five things that usually get in the way of perfect concentration. The first impediment is laziness. This doesn’t mean we don’t want to meditate but more like we are not fully committed. Often because we are not sure we are any good at it or we will be able to do it. Sometimes we are able to concentrate but only for a short period of time. After a while, we just give up or call it good if you will. When this happens, two things are important, faith and effort. We have to have faith in our practice and confidence that we will be able to concentrate. Without faith if we are not sure if it will work, we tend not to put all of our effort into it. So they kind of go hand in hand. And during meditation, if we lose concentration, we need to apply effort to bring our concentration back.

The second impediment is Mental Excitement. This is a fancy word for distraction. We often get distracted during our meditation. We start thinking about something benign, it starts out small in a corner of our mind. But then we give it a fuel and dwell on it and next thing we know we are in a totally different world. If a thought arises, we simply acknowledge it and don’t chase it, don’t give it any time of day, and it dies down just like waves die down in the ocean. Usually distracting thoughts arise because we are holding the object of meditation too tight so we need to ask ourselves am I holding the object of meditation too tight? What does it mean to say we are holding it too tight? It means we are focused such that our head hurts😊 I want to concentrate, I must concentrate, and pretty soon we are concentrating about a football game! The way to avoid this is by mindfulness. We need to be mindful during our meditation of any distracting thoughts and then come back to our object of meditation.

Mental sinking is the third impediment to our meditation. It is when we are not holding the object of concentration tight enough. We are meditating but not with concentration. That brings dullness to our mind. Dullness brings sleepiness or grogginess. Essentially, it is diminished mental energy. When we don’t have mental energy, we will not be able to focus on the object of meditation. Way to counter this is by alertness. If we stay alert, we will not become dull. This way, we can make sure that we have energy to stay focused on our object of meditation.

The next impediment to our meditation is too much application. What does that mean? Well, say we are trying to meditate on the clear sky nature of our mind. But if we keep applying the logic all the time that mind is clear and the thoughts are clouds in the mind. If we keep repeating this, we will never be able to concentrate on the empty sky nature of the mind. If this happens, we need to stop applying the logic and concentrate on the object of our meditation.

And the final impediment is not enough application. This is when we skip the analytical meditation and jump right into the placement meditation. For a novice meditator, this could be difficult because they have not brought themselves to the logical place where the object of placement makes sense. So when they try to concentrate it will not last more than a few seconds. In this case, we need to make sure that we complete the analytical meditation before going into the placement meditation.

Also real quick, I am not sure we covered this before or not. But an analytical meditation is when we logically get to conclusion of object of placement. For example, my very subtle mind is like the deep ocean away from waviness. My thoughts are like waves on the ocean. Just like waves die down, thoughts come and they go away. My very subtle mind is still like deep ocean. We contemplate this for a few cycles until we have a generic image of stillness of our root mind. We then hold that stillness single pointedly. That is our placement meditation.

Retreat 2026 Experience

I attended a month-long silent retreat in New York state in January 2026. This was an incredible experience, where I came back rejuvenated, and more determined than ever to enhance my spiritual practice . Now, to be sure, I have been to retreats before but this was the longest retreat I attended. I think what made me this retreat special was the fact that the environment was really conducive to serenity. Let me explain.

The Property

Kadampa Meditation Center in Glen Spey, NY (this is western part of New York State about 50 miles or so from Scranton, PA) is a vast property. I happened to be there during the winter season but I bet this place looks amazing during the summer times. It is in what is known as the upper Delaware river region. The property has walking trails (although most of those were not walkable due to snow on the ground) that go miles at a time. It is in a mountainous area (it’s funny because the closest major town Port Jervis is at a significantly lower elevation).

The main attraction if you will, is the World Peace Temple at the center of the property. It is peaceful and has a calming effect on you as soon as you enter. Right next to the temple is a café that is just next to the main building. The main building has a dining hall on the ground floor with an industrial kitchen. Upper floor of the main building hosts rooms for accommodation. There is also a Top House that is about a 10-minute walk up the hill. My room was on the Top House. This worked out well because it allowed me to walk about an hour a day back and forth between the Top House and the Temple / Dining area.

Accommodation is comfortable and place is very well kept in terms of cleanliness.

Getting here is not easy for sure. You can take an Uber from NY City airport or you need to change a couple of trains to Port Jervis and then take a taxi from Port Jervis to the Temple. Because of time constraints, I ended taking and Uber coming in and used the train going back.

Volunteering

Part of attending retreat is to volunteer daily. Before I arrived, I volunteered to serve dinner. This was an easy task. They have a chef and a helper in the kitchen. They serve buffet style meals every day. My job was to bring the serving trays and set up the buffet and refill as necessary. Since there are approximately 40 or 50 people, you only needed to refill these trays twice in 45 minutes.

Daily Routine

The retreat starts on a Friday evening and the first session is from 7:30 pm to 9 pm. After that there are four sessions every day: 8 am to 9 am; 11 am to 12:30 pm, 4:30 pm to 6 pm, and 7:30 pm to 9 pm. On Thursday the last session is from 11 pm to 12:30 pm. So essentially you have a break from Thursday at noon to Friday evening. This allows people who are attending only one week at a time to come and go.

Based on the retreat schedule, I set up a daily routine where I would wake up around 7:30 am, attend the first session, go for breakfast and then come back to the room. After freshening up I would practice my regular meditation and then go for the 11 am session. Although they had prayers every afternoon between lunch time and the 4:30 pm session, I had decided to skip lunch and the prayers so I would come back to the room around 1 pm and then spend a few hours studying. We are learning from a specific book in my teacher training program in Denver and the exams were coming up so this was the perfect time to catch up on my studies. After the 4:30 pm session, I would go directly to the dining hall for dinner and volunteer duty. From there, it was back to the room before the last session of the night.

I would call it a night by 10 pm.

The Silence

The first two weeks of the retreats were what is known as partial silence. We were supposed to keep silent until 12:30 pm every day. The last two weeks were supposed to be in complete silence. I had decided to observe complete silence all four weeks. I was also off my phone (no emails, no news, no texts, no phone calls). For a news junkie like me, not knowing what was happening in the world was tough for the first couple of days. After that, your mind adjusts itself to the new normal.

The silent part was supposed to end every Thursday at noon and would start again Friday evening. Even then, I stayed away from my phone except for a call home every Thursday.

Teachings

The main objective of the retreat was the teachings. Let’s get right into that. The topic for the first week was developing renunciation. Gen Samten, who is the resident teacher at KMC Glen Spey is an amazing teacher. He has a calm demeanor and gives practical tips to develop your spiritual practice. On the introduction night, he started off with some homework for us to develop a distraction list. He asked us to come up with physical, verbal, mental, and technology distractions that are a hinderance to our meditation practice. He then asked to make sure we pick one or two from each category and either reduce or eliminate those distractions for the duration of the retreat. That was such an important start to the retreat because often we get into spiritual teachings and are still distracted by other things. A determination to remove distraction right from the start, set an excellent tone for the retreat.

Our first meditation was about developing a determination to practice Dharma of Buddha’s teachings of renunciation, universal compassion, and profound view of emptiness now while we have the opportunity. This is one of the first meditations in what is known as Lamrim meditations. This meditation focuses on our precious human life. It talks about how rare and precious this human life is and now that we have it, we must use this opportunity to attain enlightenment. Gen Samten then said enlightenment should not be a distant theoretical goal, we should try to make progress on the path every day. We should check to see if our compassion is a little better than what it was the day before and that our wisdom is a little better than what it was the day before. I thought this was very important because often we get bogged down on the result such that we forget how far we have come. It is about progress, not perfection! He also talked about being mindful throughout the day and checking to see if we are compassionate, kind, have an understanding of emptiness and so forth. On the last session of the second day, Gen Samten talked about something interesting. He said that we are observing verbal silence but we should also enjoy the beauty in silence of our mind. He said to appreciate the quietness within. Essentially, he was asking us to be in meditative state thought the day!

The next day, we began with meditation on death and impermanence. When you go into a meeting or have a conversation with someone, think about what if this was the last meeting or the last conversation you will ever have? Moment you think about that, I am sure you will change at least a part of your conversation to make sure that you end on a positive note.

In the afternoon session, we talked about why we are attached. And one major reason is the eight worldly concerns. If we reduce our worldly concerns, we will be able to reduce our attachment. The last session on the second day focused on mediation on the dangers of lower rebirth.

The next day, we started with meditation on going to refuge. Here, he put emphasis on effort. He asked us to investigate why we do not put effort into our spiritual practice. Often it is because of distractions. We need to identify and eliminate those distractions that are in the way of our Dharma practice. One way to eliminate these distractions is to imagine a deity at our heart and ask for help. If we feel tired during our meditation, it is good to go back to breathing meditation for a few minutes. The last session was focusing on abandoning no virtuous actions and practicing virtuous actions. If we cannot abandon non virtuous actions we should at least try and weaken those. We should also watch for non-virtuous actions throughout the day. This is essentially practicing moral discipline.

The next day, we started talking about future sufferings and how we should make a determination for attaining liberation to be free from future sufferings. If we look at the incidents in life, we should think about whether it was a separation from things we like, or encountering things we don’t like, or not being able to satisfy our desires. The last session talked about recognizing, reducing, and abandoning self-grasping. As all suffering originates from self-grasping.

We continued next day with what we should practice. Specifically, we should practice moral discipline, concentration and wisdom. During the day, we should be mindful and practice moral discipline; during meditation, we should practice concentration and wisdom. We should eliminate our distractions. We ended the day with fourth noble truth of attainment of cessation of our self-grasping ignorance.

The second week started with meditation of taking and giving. We focused on that the entire day. The following day we spent all day on equalizing self with others. An important point he made was to think of how interdependent our lives are. We do not live in Silo. We are interdependent on beings even when they do not know of our existence. We focused on meditation on how all people are equal since we all want to be happy. We can also think of how we are just one person and others are many. In this context, our happiness is insignificant and what he calls Joy of Insignificance.

Next we started talking about destroying our self-cherishing as that is the root cause of all of our problems. Digging deeper to see how self cherishing is the cause of our problems helps make a strong determination to eliminate it. Then we went on to meditate on cherishing others and exchanging self with others.

The next day focused on developing bodhicitta motivation. And the last day for the week was about bodhicitta mixed with emptiness.

The next week was entirely on tranquil abiding focusing on the clarity of mind meditation.

The last week was of superior seeing where our focus was completely on emptiness. Starting with emptiness of body, to emptiness of mind, and then emptiness of I. and at last, emptiness of all phenomena.

Virtuous States of Mind

We have been talking how our mind works and we are going to continue that discussion. As we discussed, there are eleven virtuous states of mind. The eleven virtuous states of mind are: 1) Faith; 2) Sense of Shame; 3) Consideration for Others; 4) Non-attachment; 5) Non-hatred; 6) Non-ignorance; 7) Effort; 8) Mental Suppleness; 9) Conscientiousness; 10) Equanimity; 11) Non-harmfulness.

Let’s continue with the next virtuous state of mind that is non-ignorance. It is a mental factor that is a direct opponent of ignorance. It is a type of wisdom that acts as an antidote to ignorance. For example, wisdom realizing selflessness is non-ignorance. The function of non-ignorance is to enable us to understand the profound concept of emptiness. As our non-ignorance grows, we are closer to understanding emptiness. This wisdom realizing emptiness is our true wealth. Because once we realize emptiness, there is no suffering. Non-ignorance can arise from listening or reading, contemplating, meditating and from imprints. The first three are very similar to wisdom. If we read or listen to dharma teachings, contemplate about them and then meditate on it, we will develop non-ignorance. Non-ignorance arising from imprints is based on our karma. If we had strong karmic imprints, we would naturally develop non-ignorance.

Next, virtuous state of mind is effort. Effort makes our mind happy to engage in virtuous tasks such as giving, helping others, meditation, spiritual practice, etc. The opposite of effort is laziness. Effort is supreme because all virtuous qualities arise from power of effort. We may have heard about benefits for meditation but without applying effort, those benefits never materialize. Buddha said that if you only have effort, you have all Dharma. If you only have laziness, you have nothing. There are four types of efforts. Armour-like effort, effort of non-discouragement, effort of application, and effort of non-satisfaction. Armour-like effort is a courageous mind that makes us keep up our spiritual practice no matter what kind of external hardship we face. Effort of non-discouragement prevents us from getting discouraged if we don’t see immediate results. So, if our meditation practice is not making progress, we do not give up on our practice. Effort of application is a mind that engages in spiritual practice with delight. We are happy to practice and it is not a “chore” for us. The effort of non-satisfaction is the kind of effort we put in to continually improve our practice. We are not satisfied with the little progress we have made and we want to continue making more progress.

The next virtuous mind is mental suppleness. It is flexibility of mind induced by virtuous concentration. You will notice that when we are absorbed in your meditation, you will naturally feel lighter. That is mental suppleness. When our mind is heavy and rigid, it engages in delusions. A supple mind is naturally virtuous and engages in virtuous karma.

The next virtuous state of mind is conscientiousness. It is a mental factor that cherishes what is virtuous and guards the mind against non-virtuous karma and delusions. It prevents our mind from being influenced by delusion. For example, it prevents us from being angry at someone who we disagree with by not thinking about them or avoiding them. It can also prevent delusions by exaggerating good qualities of an object. For example, if we disagree with our loved one, rather getting angry, if we think of all their good qualities, we will not get angry at them. Shantideva said that there is no practice greater than preventing our mind from being negative. Conscientiousness is generally practiced in conjunction with mindfulness and alertness. That is what we practice in our M A C meditation. We are mindful of our thoughts and stay alert for any negative thought that may pop up and are practicing conscientiousness to prevent our mind from chasing any delusions. The main function of conscientiousness is to enable us to keep our moral discipline and to improve our concentration. By practicing conscientiousness, we reduce our delusions and stop committing negative karma. This naturally improves our moral discipline. If our delusions are diminished, our life becomes disciplined and in turn we can improve our concentration.

The next virtuous state of mind is equanimity. Equanimity prevents our mind from mental sinking and mental excitement. An equanimous mind is a balanced mind. There are two types of equanimity. Equanimity towards living beings and equanimity towards phenomena. Equanimity towards living beings means we have compassion towards all living beings without favoritism. Right now, we show compassion towards those we are attached to and are indifferent towards those we do not know. Regarding equanimity of phenomena, if things go our way, we are fine; if things go against us, we are fine. It is an even-keeled state of mind.

The last virtuous state of mind is non-harmfulness. Definition of non-harmfulness is a state of mind that wished all living beings not to suffer. So it is not simply not harming others but compassion towards all sentient beings. We need to be careful and make sure we are not confusing compassion with desirous attachment. Compassion is virtuous while attachment is non-virtuous. For example, our wish for our helper to get better is out of attachment. Our wish for our friends to get better is usually a mix of attachment and compassion. Our wish for some total stranger to get better is out of pure compassion. A person whose mind is filled with compassion could never wish to harm others. Refraining from harming others is one of the most important spiritual practices. There are two types of compassion we can practice. Mere compassion and superior compassion. Wishing someone to be free from suffering is mere compassion. Thinking I myself will act to free them from suffering is superior compassion.

Hopefully, over the last two weeks you have absorbed types of virtuous mind and have developed a wish to maintain these virtuous states of mind at all times.