The First Stage: The First Noble Truth Is About Understanding the Suffering

If you don’t recognize the suffering, how do you know you are suffering? You need to become aware of the pain so you can do something about eradicating it. We often talk about birth, aging, sickness, and death as natural sufferings. We have to know the suffering nature that affects us first of all. If we think, “Oh, I am not suffering,” then we don’t see the suffering, so how can we work on getting rid of something when we aren’t even aware of it? Then we just assume our life is perfect till we fall off our track. We will feel the cut deep inside our body, heart, and mind. We would suffer horrifically from ignorance.

A while ago, when I used to chat on Facebook, I used to listen to Dan Nguyen, a Vietnamese country song singer living in California. One time I commented if he wanted to start meditation. I felt Dan Nguyen had been at the top of his career. He had the ability to sing and had achieved a lot in life by then. I wondered what he would do after ten or twenty years. Rich and famous people have everything, but the one thing that they miss and can’t be bought is spiritual attainment.

When you realize yourself spiritually, you are able to merge with the spirit flow. By then, you will look into those sufferings of life, age, sickness, and death, and you will actually enjoy their nature. It’s impermanent. You truly see it will bring new life and better future improvement through wisdom. It’s just the beauty of nature.

For other aspects of life, you can start to enjoy them all in your own spiritual world, even sexuality or relationship. You enjoy them with their cosmic nature. You can enjoy everything since it’s all different in its own beauty.

Primitive life forms, such as a maggot, it sees feces as its home, and it doesn’t know anything but the feces. You see, a maggot never knows anything else. It just enjoys living in the feces, and that is the happiness for the maggot. From this point, we have to recognize our suffering nature first and that we suffer every day.

We can’t stop breathing, but we suffer from our breath. Every time we breathe, it affects our life expectancy. Every breath that we breathe in, we get older, and we are oxidized with every breath. That is nature. Being reborn is suffering because everything repeats itself in an unknown and uncontrollable manner. In Buddhism, that is the suffering, the suffering of being born, because once you get into this world, there is no going back.

Old age is normal nature, but it’s not easy for people and all living beings, though if now you are young, you seem don’t to feel it. Even so, let's look back at your previous pictures on your Facebook posts or your album from 5 – 6 years ago. You will see you were younger than now when you are reading this. Then you will truly see that you are experiencing old age without your permission. Your body shape changes and your mind continuously changes, but you are much better in your own wisdom as you grow.

If you are reading this, you are much better in terms of spirituality than years ago when you were more ignorant and childish. You have gone through a lot of suffering and sorrow in life, and now you are also better in terms of education, experience, and wisdom than past. That’s why you are looking to learn, research, and practice spirituality, the sole truth of the spiritual cosmos.

Let’s look at the time of your past when you were a little baby. That’s your birthday, the day you were born. You wouldn’t know or be sure that you would live on after your mother gave birth to you. You were a little born baby, naked and weighing a few pounds or a few kgs. And you don’t know if you are born with a perfect body or not, with two hands and two legs and everything else perfectly. Some people are born without ears, people are born without arms or legs, and some people are born with some disability.

That’s just the very biological perfection. Then about social life, you wouldn’t know if you are born into a good or bad family or if you will be abandoned on the street soon later. You would never know by then. Then when you grew up, you went through the process of standard education training, learning until you were eighteen years old in school, but when you were in school, you were bullied, you were scared, giving up.

Back then, when you were a little baby until growing up into an adult, a lot of things happened to you, from being beaten or even bullied to fighting in school, don’t forget, a lot of children got bullied in school and dropped out of school because of it. You see, through those times, you have to go to school, you have to learn, but not everybody would be able to do so, or the same as you, nonetheless, by the time you reach 18 years old. It’s beautiful for you.

There are so many uncertainties in life. There are a lot of sufferings during the life that you live, after you go to school, a lot of stress in studying, exams, competition, and finances. Not everybody can go to school. Even if they go to school, they can’t finish school. Let's say you could go to school to study; however, it becomes too much for you to handle, then you can’t finish school. In or different scenario, you are a good student, excellent in your study, and you achieve honorary on graduation. Everybody has to go through differently. Though it’s beautiful when you reach those stages, it’s not easy.

Talking about the disease, you don’t want to get sick, but it still comes to you. Years ago, I watched on YouTube about a boy in Vietnam who was born physically and mentally normal, but until the age of eight, he got some serious sickness. When he recovered physically, his mind changed, and he became a different person, a mental person of four years old. He can’t grow his mentality. He lives into adulthood with a 4-year-old boy mentality, he is suffering, and he is only a 19-year-old boy by that time. He refuses to wear clothes, not able to recognize anything as a boy of his age. His mom is getting older too. She is over 50 years, and how many years can she take care of him? He is also getting older with his mom. They will both age, get sick, and die, but he isn’t able to take care of himself. That is the suffering of him and his family.

Let’s look at the pandemic we have been through, covid nineteen. Many people are living into their old age, and during the pandemic, they never go out or leave home for their safety, but their younger children and grandchildren, who are ignorant, defying medical advice to protect their own health in public places, refusing vaccination, not wearing masks. They go out to crowded parties, they get infected, they go back and give the virus to their elders, their parents, their grandparents who are more susceptible to infection, and they get sick together, some die from it, that is a kind of collective suffer from ignorance.

There are different suffers that are not by choice or ignorant. It’s the collective karma of a community or a country. For instance, many children who are born in many poor communities in Africa continent, they don’t even have food to eat, and they grow up malnutrition and they die young age…it’s sad, but that is suffering in life. We have to understand life and karma.

Back to your own lifetime, during your beautiful youth time growing up to young adulthood, you are full of energy. You look so handsome and beautiful, and you are so full of energy. You feel like a superhuman. You party days and nights without tiredness, but you are no longer a teenager. Your body is a collagen factory producing to its full capacity but reducing each year you get older. When you are going to be twenty-five, twenty-six, or twenty-seven, you are reaching middle age. It’s a fact of the human body that your body has already lost a huge quantity of collagen required to maintain your youthfulness, your face is changing fast, your eyes have their bags under, your skin has become less smooth, and your eyes have wrinkles, especially when you laugh or even smile, your hair is falling off slowly, and you reach the age twenty-nine, and thirty the collagen factory in your body is rebelling you, it is shutting down and produces only 10-30% capacity of your 18 years old age, the collagen is at maximum 99% or even 100%. Now at the age of a thirty-year-old man or woman, when your body needs collagen as much as before, but the body only produces 10-15%, so your body takes collagen from external food supplements instead, but it’s never enough to replace your own body's demand.

Your wrinkles are now strongly visible not only by the tails of your eyes but the two sides of your nose, your forehead wrinkling out, so many deep lines appearing. At thirty-two, the body produces only 5-10% of the age of nineteen. So, when you hit the age of thirty-three, you notice clearly your whole-body shape is changing fast. Your super six packs are pulled together into one big one pack. Your chest and your breasts are withering. You can no longer party all night long like before. You get tired easily, you can’t work out for hours nonstop, and you are slowing down, slowly, slowly. Your doctor will advise you to reduce your sugar intake.

Now when you get to forty, you truly experience aging. As you get older, your body starts to slow down clearly, and you start to experience sickness, high blood pressure, diabetes, high cholesterol, and a lot of other illnesses or even HIV or lung cancer. Some even already die of this age over 40s. And if you get to age fifty, it’s getting worse, and when you get to sixty-year-old that you are truly living in old age, and when you get to seventy, you are not expecting anything anymore.

You can never dream of living as Queen Elizabeth. At ninety-six-year-old, she was still riding a horse. To be able to take care of yourself when you get up to those old ages, you have to cultivate wisdom when you are young. Just like when you drive a car, if you keep good maintenance, the car will last longer, so as you’re the body, it is just the same. You get to keep maintain your health thoughtfully.

If you don’t keep your health in good shape, you don’t eat good and healthy food, but you eat all junk food, bad food, you will contaminate your body, and that is when you get sickness and cancer later on in your old age. I read an article about the former Apple chairman. He died when he was over 50 years old in his luxury life. He said, “Eat your food as medicine when you are young. When you get old, you won’t have to eat medicine as your food” That’s the true wisdom of people who live in the sickness of old age. Nowadays, a lot of people get cancer from food, so you need to eat good, healthy food. You get to take it seriously in your cultivation. Your health is everything you need in your cultivation journey.