THE FOUR NOBLE TRUTHS By Ajahn Sumedho - DharmaFlower.Net

conscious awareness of things as they are. If there is knowledge of theFour Noble Truths, then there is Dhamma.With Right Understanding, everything is seen as Dhamma; forexample: we are sitting here....This is Dhamma. We don’t think of thisbody and mind as a personality with all its views and opinions and allthe conditioned thoughts and reactions that we have acquired throughignorance. We reflect upon this moment now as: ‘This is the way it is.This is Dhamma.’ We bring into the mind the understanding that thisphysical formation is simply Dhamma. It is not self; it is not personal.Also, we see the sensitivity of this physical formation as Dhammarather than taking it personally: ‘I’m sensitive,’ or ‘I’m not sensitive;’‘You’re not sensitive to me. Who’s the most sensitive?’....’Why do wefeel pain? Why did God create pain; why didn’t he just createpleasure? Why is there so much misery and suffering in the world? It’sunfair. People die and we have to separate from the people we love;the anguish is terrible.’There is no Dhamma in that, is there? It’s all self-view:‘Poor me. I don’t like this, I don’t want it to be this way. I wantsecurity, happiness, pleasure and all the best of everything. It’s notfair that my parents were not arahants when I came into the world.It’s not fair that they never elect arahants to be Prime Minister ofBritain. If everything were fair, they would elect arahants to be PrimeMinister!’I am trying to take this sense of ‘It’s not right, it’s not fair’ to anabsurdity in order to point out how we expect God to create everythingfor us and to make us happy and secure. That is often what peoplethink even if they don’t say so. But when we reflect, we see ‘This is theway it is. Pain is like this and this is what pleasure is like.Consciousness is this way.’ We feel. We breathe. We can aspire.When we reflect, we contemplate our own humanity as it is. We don’ttake it on a personal level any more or blame anyone because thingsare not exactly as we like or want. It is the way it is and we are theway we are. You might ask why we can’t all be exactly the same - withthe same anger, the same greed and the same ignorance; without allthe variations and permutations. However, even though you can tracehuman experience to basic things, each one of us has our own kammato deal with - our own obsessions and tendencies, which are alwaysdifferent in quality and quantity to those of someone else.Why can’t we all be exactly equal, have exactly the same of everythingand all look alike - one androgynous being? In a world like that,nothing would be unfair, no differences would be allowed, everythingwould be absolutely perfect and there would be no possibility ofinequality. But as we recognise Dhamma, we see that, within the