Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 45-minute talk from a two-week retreat at Camp Cedar Glen in 1977, Joseph Goldstein opens with the classic Buddhist tale of Prince Siddhartha encountering the Three Heavenly Messengers—old age, sickness, and death—which awakened his compassion and launched his spiritual quest. Goldstein frames this story as directly relevant to modern life: like Siddhartha in his sheltered palaces, we too are insulated from confronting mortality and decline, creating what he calls “a conspiracy of silence” around death. He then pivots to the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths, focusing especially on the Second Truth: the causes of suffering, which he identifies as four forms of attachment. He walks through attachment to sense pleasures (and the trap of chasing future gratification instead of experiencing the present moment), attachment to opinions (which creates conflict and acts like “colored glasses”), attachment to rites and rituals without proper understanding (which he calls “spiritual materialism”), and most fundamentally, attachment to the self—the “little monster self” that claims ownership of experience. Throughout, Goldstein uses memorable teaching stories: the Sufi tale of Mullah Nasrudin eating burning chili peppers waiting for a sweet one, the monkey trapped in a coconut by its own greed, and a Hasidic account of a rabbi’s “don’t know mind.” He concludes by framing the path forward through the Eightfold Path and offers concrete meditation instructions on developing investigative awareness—particularly watching thoughts without judgment and paying close attention to the arising and passing of sensations. The talk balances philosophical depth with practical guidance for serious meditators.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 07 CCG.mp3
UUID: 38900720-01c2-4d94-820c-2c5d1b7f09ea
Teacher: Joseph Goldstein
Collection: Camp Cedar Glen (Joseph Goldstein)
Date: 1977 (exact day not recorded)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Words: ~5,240
This recording of Joseph Goldstein was made on April ninth nineteen seventy seven at Camp Cedar Glen in Julian, California at a two week meditation retreat. Tradition has it that when the Buddha was born, his father invited several wise men to come and see the baby and to read the signs, the portents for the future life of this baby, Siddhartha Gautama. The wise men came and they looked at the palms and the feet and met all the signs. And they foretold that Siddhartha’s life would unfold in one of two ways. Either that he would become a universal monarch, a world conquering ruler, or an omniscient, all knowing Buddha.
His father, being a king, very much wanted Siddhartha to follow in the family business and was not so anxious for him to go off and become a Buddha. So as he was growing up, his father provided three separate palaces for each of the different seasons, hot season, cold season, rainy season, filled with beautiful things, beautiful people, and whenever anyone or anything would begin to decay or grow old, they would be removed, replaced again with something or someone very beautiful to look at. Siddhartha led a very sheltered life. One day, after having lived in these palaces for quite a few years, he was curious to see what life on the outside was like. He asked his father for permission to ride through the city.
His father was apprehensive lest he should see something unpleasant, but there was no way he could ignore the request. But before he allowed Siddhartha to tour the city, he had the route or the path all cleaned up and painted and flowers and incense and all the old and sick people taken away. Siddhartha went out. And again, according to the tradition, as Siddhartha was going on this tour of the city, some of the heavenly beings, Devas in the celestial realms, knew what was happening and three of them came down to pay a visit to Siddhartha called the Three Heavenly Messengers. The first of these celestial beings appeared as a very old person, old and bent over, very frail.
The second of the celestial beings, messengers, appeared as a person who was very sick, with a very diseased body. The third of the celestial messengers appeared in the guise of a corpse, a dead person. Imagine someone who has never in their life seen either old age or sickness or death, the incredible impact that must have made. And in fact it aroused the overwhelmingly great compassion which Siddhartha had been developing for so many lifetimes. It aroused those seeds of compassion in him, the seeds of inquiry.
What is this all about? What does this mean that we get sick, we get old, we die? Seeing those things, those three heavenly messengers for the first time was the beginning of his search, beginning of his inquiry into the nature of our being which culminated finally in his enlightenment under the Bodhi tree. We’re in not so different a condition, especially in this culture, than Siddhartha in his palaces. Mostly our culture has contrived to keep unpleasant things away.
Most of us don’t have very close contact with many old people. We’ve created the wonderful institution of old age homes and we have other people take care of them. Or to take care of people as they’re dying, to see what death is all about. We have the wonderful custom of dressing corpses up like they’re going to a party because we don’t like to look. We don’t like to see actually what a dead body is like.
Makeup and pretty clothes. Elizabeth Kubler Ross, who has done a lot of work with death and dying people, He used the phrase with reference to how we deal with that aspect of our experience, said we’ve created a conspiracy of silence. We don’t like to confront the truth of that with the person who’s undergoing it. We don’t even like to confront the truth that we too are going to experience it. There’s a statement in the Bhagavad Gita, a Hindu classic.
Someone asked the wise man what is the most wondrous the most wondrous thing in the entire world. The wise man replied, the most wondrous thing in the world is that we see people all around us dying but we don’t believe that it will happen to us. Just for a moment, I would like you to sit or in whatever position you happen to be. Close your eyes and see if you can just feel your heart beating. If you can’t feel it, visualize your heart.
And what it is, it’s this muscle which is pumping blood. Try to feel it, try to visualize this organ, this mass of tissue and muscle. One of these days it’s going to stop. You really have no control over it whatsoever. This body, these organs which sustain and maintain our life, Just the elements, the material elements in a certain configuration doing a certain job coming into being and one day they’re going to break down like an old car.
The body is actually going to die, each one of our bodies. It’s extremely helpful in learning how to live our lives with the most richness and the most fullness the most respect for it. To really understand deeply and acknowledge deeply the fact that, as Don Juan said, we don’t have time, that the body is going to die. When the Buddha sat under the now famous tree in Bodh Gaya, He was inquiring into the nature of the mind and body, how it is that it comes into being that decays and grows old and dies, and also into the nature of the mind and why our minds create so much suffering for us. Why do we get involved in things like greed and anger and jealousy and envy and despair and depression and fear.
Why is it that these states of mind arise? And why do we get involved? The first noble truth of the Buddha’s enlightenment is the recognition that in our lives there’s some unsatisfactoriness. There’s some pain. There’s some suffering, both of the body and of the mind.
And the first truth of his enlightenment is the honesty which recognized that, which could see it in a very realistic way, not pretending that it didn’t exist, not trying to cover it up or mask it, but the honesty of mind which could take a look at what was going on, take a look at our predicament, the predicament of living, being born, and seeing what was there. And we called upon also on this path of enlightenment or the path of truth to be honest enough to take to take a clear and close look at what constitutes our experience, to recognize the fact that we’re going to die, to recognize the different kinds of mind states that arise. The Buddha didn’t stop with that recognition. Many people in the world have tuned into the fact of the mass of suffering that exists of all different kinds. He went on, With the tremendous power of his mind, both of his intellect and his concentration, he penetrated into the causes of suffering.
Why is it that we get involved in these states? He saw that the cause of suffering is attachment, clinging or grasping in the mind. Clinging or grasping to what? We cling and grasp at sense pleasures, sense objects. Pleasant sights or sounds or smells or tastes, sensations in the body, pleasant ideas.
When something pleasant arises, we have the habit of grasping, trying to possess, trying to hold on. Why does that cause suffering? It’s a nice object and why not hold on to it? It causes suffering in two ways. First, because it doesn’t last.
It’s in the nature of all our experience that everything is changing and impermanent and the more tightly we’re holding on, the more suffering there is when the object goes away. There’s another reason that grasping or clinging sense objects causes suffering, and you can see it in terms of how so many people live their lives. It involves that state of mind which gets caught up in future gratification. You know, work all year for a two week vacation in Hawaii. It’ll be nice and lie on the beach and be very pleasant.
And so the year’s work is geared towards that goal. Go around meeting people looking for the perfect relationship, the perfect partner. Know that somewhere out there there’s someone who will make me happy. Or working to get some possession or thing or situation or some status. What it does is that that movement of mind outward to gratify, to fulfill in some way that’s not there in the moment, it prevents us from settling back into the experience of what is actually there in the moment.
And what is our life? Our life doesn’t consist of future thoughts out there. The whole of our life consists of a succession of present moments. And it’s only when the mind has the ability to settle back and experience fully just what’s happening that the awesomeness and the mystery and the wonder of what our life is about can be appreciated. And you see it in the meditation practice so clearly in such subtle ways.
During the walking meditation, how often do we lift the heel off the ground in order to move forward? Right? That toppling forward into the next moment or moving forward in order to place it on the ground. Chewing the food so quickly in order to get another mouthful, or watching the in breath in order to be able to catch the out breath. To be able to lift the heel off the ground and have the understanding that that is the only thing in the world that exists for you at that moment.
Just the sensations of that movement, Just the moving forward. Just the in breath. Just the chewing. Just the seeing. Just the hearing.
In that moment, that is our entire world. The universe explodes with that kind of awareness. There’s a wonderful clarity and brightness. There’s a wonderful sense of fullness to that kind of experiencing. And as long as the mind is seeking outward, something outside of what’s happening in the moment, seeking to gratify it in some way, that quality is missing.
It’s as if we live our life in a dream. There’s a wonderful story about sense desires from the tales of Mullah Nazreddin, famous Sufi teaching figure and fool, went into the marketplace one day and he saw on sale in the marketplace big bushel of hot chili peppers. He said, Oh, they’re very cheap. They look good. I’ll take them home.
I’ll buy them. He brought this big bushel of hot chili peppers, took them home, and he started to eat them. And after a while his mouth started burning. He was on fire. And his students and friends and disciples came by and asked, Muller, what are you doing?
Why are you eating those hot chili peppers? You’re burning. He said, I keep waiting for a sweet one. That’s what we do a lot. We keep waiting for a sweet one out there instead of realizing that the sweet one is in every moment of our experience if we can settle back and see it and feel it.
Attachment to sense desire. It’s not the objects themselves that are the problem at all. Throughout our life we experience pleasant things, we experience unpleasant things, and the flow goes on. And the problem is not in the pleasure or the pain that comes, it’s in how we’re relating to it. Whether we’re trying to avoid the pain and grasp at the pleasure, whether we can settle back and experience as the flow goes by.
The first kind of attachment that we get caught up in. Second attachment, is very strong and again is the cause of a lot of suffering, is attachment to opinions. We have so many opinions about things And the stronger we cling to our particular view, our particular opinion, the more conflict we come into with other people who have got different opinions. One of the characteristics of the dharma and communicating the dharma is that it can never be argued. You can’t argue the dharma, the truth.
Things are as they are and you can communicate it in an open, easy way. Remain silent. For as long as there’s attachment to a particular mindset, particular set of concepts or opinions, you can never see it acts as a veil. It acts as a pair of colored glasses through which you view the world. All you see is the color.
There’s a line from the third Zen patriarch. It says, do not seek the truth, only cease to cherish opinions. If we could let go of our opinions about things, both of ourselves, of other people, of how the world is, let go of those biases and prejudices and really condition thoughts that we carry around, then we would be right here and able to see how things are. A lot of the problems in the world and between people come from that attachment or grasping at view, our own particular view. One of Richard’s teachers, Korean Zen master, Sonson, has a wonderful phrase describing the mind that’s free of opinions.
He calls it don’t know mind. And he says, just keep don’t know mind. He doesn’t speak English so well, but he has it. Keep don’t know mind. What’s everything about don’t know?
The don’t know mind, you can see, you can experience, you don’t have to have an opinion about it. Right? Again, there’s a Hasidic tale illustrating don’t no mind. Caesar’s rabbi lived in a small town in Russia and every morning he would get up and leave his house and cross the courtyard to go to the temple. One morning as he’s crossing the courtyard, a big Cossack comes up to him, and the Cossack is in a very angry mood, had a fight with his wife and is just looking for some trouble.
He asked the rabbi, rabbi, where are you going? The rabbi said, don’t know. And the Cossack gets infuriated. What do you mean you don’t know? Every morning for twenty years, you’ve gotten up, left your house, crossed the crossed the village square, and gone to the temple.
Now you can tell me you don’t know where you’re going. And with that, he hauls the rabbi off to the local jail. When Justice is about to push the rabbi into the jail cell, the rabbi says to him, see, you don’t know. You don’t know. To keep don’t know mind is to let go of an awful lot of mind pain, mind suffering.
Don’t get into conflict with people, it becomes so easy. Attachment to sense desire, attachment to opinions, very kinds of attachment that we get involved with, especially people in spiritual practice, is what in the traditional description is called attachment to rites and rituals. That has a very broad meaning. Most superficially it means exactly that, that the belief you light a candle and put it on an altar or light a stick of incense and say a few words and everything is going to be fine, the mind will be purified. That kind of belief in ceremony, the blind belief in that as a way of coming to understanding.
But more, more relevant to our own lives and our own practice, the kind of attachment that can form to a technique of practice. Thinking that somehow doing the technique in a very mechanical way, the rising, falling, rising, falling, or any one of a thousand different techniques, Kind of attachment to it is that if you do it in that mechanical way, it’s all gonna unfold. That understanding will come. The meditation practice is not like that. You could watch rising, falling for a long time and unless you bring to that practice a sense of alertness, a sense of inquiry, a sense of investigation, an aliveness of mind.
It does no good at all. Practice has to be done not with some blind belief in the efficacy of the practice but rather just as a tool, just as a skillful means to really see what’s going on. Watching rising falling or in out of thoughts or emotions, it has to be with a sense of what’s happening now, what am I experiencing? Having the mind very alert and very probing, really investigating the nature of your experience, not done in a dull mechanical way. Some kind of attachment, Chögyam Trungpa calls spiritual materialism.
Where you where you are doing the spiritual practice but not with proper understanding and sometimes with a gaining ambitious idea. If I do this, if I watch my abdomen rising and falling, I’ll become very pure and very holy and everybody will love me. That’s not that practice. Understanding the Dharma is to settle back into the moment without opinions, without preconceptions, with a willingness to be very honest with what you’re seeing, what you’re feeling, what you’re experiencing. The fourth attachment and one which is at the center of it all is attachment to what Lama Yeshe so aptly described last night as that little monster self.
That little monster self which sticks its head up in every moment claiming experiences of sight or sound or taste or thought to be mine, I, me. The creation of that concept and our attachment to it. Why is it a problem? You know, it’s how the vast majority of the world lives their lives, very much involved with that concept of self. Why does that create a problem?
Because if you live your life revolving about that concept of I, of self, you then have something which you have to defend and protect and gratify and aggrandize and make secure. All of those contracting actions of our lives which cut us off from other people, which make conflict between people, and it all revolves about something that is not even there except as a concept in our minds. You can live penetrate through your own understanding the nature of this mind body process and how it’s arising and passing away without reference to this self, to this I, you come into a very natural relationship with yourself, with the other people, with the world. Everything settles down in a very harmonious way. There’s no tension, there’s no conflict, because you’re not protecting anything.
You have nothing to make secure. It’s a very open, spacious way to relate to the world. These are the four big attachments which create for ourselves a lot of suffering in our lives which we don’t have to do. Attachment to sense desire, attachment to opinions, attachment to rites, rituals, different kinds of spiritual practice, not understanding correctly, attachment to self. Who causes this attachment?
Now why do we why do we get involved in this way? The story of a kind of trap that’s used in Asia to catch monkeys. What they do is they take a coconut and they hollow out the coconut and they attach it to a steak or a tree and in the coconut they put some sweet or food the monkey likes. The monkey comes along, smells the food. The bottom of the coconut, they’ve made a hole which is big enough for the monkey to slip his hand in when his hand is open, but not big enough for the monkey to withdraw his hand when he sends in a fist.
So the monkey smells the food, comes along, slips his hand in, grabs the food, can’t get out. He’s trapped. The hunters are coming. They’re going to kill the monkey. The monkey knows it.
He’s getting frantic. He wants to run away. He can’t. The trap is holding him. Who’s holding that monkey in the trap?
Nothing except the force of his own attachment, his own greed. All he has to do is open his hand, slip it out, and be off. But it’s a very rare monkey who can do that. There’s no one binding that monkey. Likewise, there’s no one binding us to opinions or sense objects or to the idea of self, nothing except the force of attachment in our own mind.
To realize that is a very important step in understanding because then we can begin to take responsibility for ourselves. We don’t have to look for other people to liberate us because that can’t happen anyway. Begin to see that there’s nothing binding us outside of our own minds and all we have to do is to see it, open our hands, slip out, and be free. Second noble truth of the Buddha’s enlightenment is the cause of suffering in our lives, especially the kind of suffering of mind that we get involved in. Now the cause of it is attachment.
Again, he didn’t stop there. The third noble truth of the Buddha’s enlightenment is the experience of the end of suffering. The experience of that state which puts out the fires of greed and hatred and delusion, we call that experience nirvana or peace or coolness, can be understood in two ways. First, it can be understood as freedom from defilement, which means freedom from greed, hatred, delusion in every moment. In every moment of mindfulness, you are experiencing momentary nirvana because the mind is not grasping, it’s not condemning, it’s not identifying with the object, it’s just the pure experience of what’s arising in the moment and it’s a moment of peace.
The other meaning of nirvana is the experience of that state which is beyond this mind body process altogether. The state of rest, putting down the burden. There’s wonderful phrase in the oldest part of the Buddhist scriptures which says that there is no higher happiness than peace. And maybe even within these few days, perhaps you’ve had glimpses, even for a moment, of a mind that’s in balance, A mind that’s just there experiencing what’s happening without movement, without reaction. There’s a wonderful sense of peace that comes in that experience.
The third noble truth of the Buddha’s enlightenment, the end of suffering, the fact that it’s possible. Again, his enlightenment did not stop with that either. Because if it had, it would have been very nice to read about but it wouldn’t have helped very much. You know, Munindra used to say very often, The Buddha’s enlightenment solved his problem. It didn’t solve ours except to point out the way.
And that’s the last, the fourth truth of his enlightenment. The path, the way to the experience of this peace, to the end of suffering, the end of pain that we cause for ourselves. And the path has been described many different ways in terms of the eightfold path, meaning actually just to go over in in a sketchy way, because there’s something very important to understand in the Eightfold Path. The first three parts of the path have to do with how we live our lives in the world. Often people ignore that and think that somehow spiritual practice means sitting or walking, right?
And everything else out there doesn’t count. That’s a very fragmented view of the Dharma of practice of our lives. In fact, the first three steps of this path, speech, right action, right livelihood, all have to do with getting our act together in the world to live in as simple, harmonious, truthful a way as possible, to really be conscious in what we’re doing. Next three steps of the path have to do with our our meditation practice. It’s right effort and right concentration and right mindfulness, putting out the energy to arouse those factors of mind, to make them strong.
And the last two have to do with the development of mind, that is right thought and right understanding, the fruit or the culmination of our meditation. As an expression of the path, a beautiful statement by Ajahn Chah, Jack’s teacher in the Forest Monastery. The statement was in response to a question of practice about still having very many thoughts and what to do about it. Probably Jack who asked. This is what he said.
Don’t worry about this. Try to keep your mind in the present. Whatever there is that arises in the mind, just watch it, let go of it. Don’t even wish to be rid of thoughts. Then the mind will reach its natural state.
No discriminating between good and bad, hot and cold, fast and slow. No me and no you. No self at all. Just what there is. When you walk, there is no need to do anything special.
Simply walk and see what there is. No need to cling to isolation or seclusion. Wherever you are, know yourself by being natural and watching. If doubts arise, watch them come and go. It’s very simple.
Hold on to nothing. It is as though you are walking down a road. Periodically, you will run into obstacles. When you meet defilements, just see them and overcome them by letting go of them. Don’t think about the obstacles you have passed already.
Don’t worry about those you have not yet seen. Stick to the present. Don’t be concerned about the length of the road or about a destination. Everything is changing. Whatever you pass, do not cling to it.
Eventually the mind will reach its natural balance where practice is automatic. All things will come and go of themselves. Sitting for hours on end is not necessary. Some people think that the longer you can sit, the wiser you must be. I have seen chickens sitting on their nests for days on end.
Wisdom comes from being mindful in all postures. Your practice should begin as soon as you awaken in the morning. It should continue until you fall asleep. Don’t be concerned about how long you can sit. What is important is only that you keep watchful, whether you are working or walking or going to the bathroom.
Each person has their own natural peace. Some of you will die at age fifty, some at sixty five, and some at ninety. So too your practice will not all be identical. Don’t think or worry about this. Try to be mindful and let things take their natural course.
Then your mind will become quieter and quieter in any surroundings. It will become still like a clear forest pool. Then all kinds of wonderful and rare animals will come to drink at the pool. You will see clearly the nature of all things in the world. You will see many wonderful and strange things come and go, but you will be still.
This is the happiness of the Buddha. Any questions? That’s a very important quality of mind to work with. Investigative mind does not mean, in this particular sense, thinking about things. Although even that at times some kind of wise reflection could be useful also, but for the most part it means the quality of mind which is looking carefully or listening carefully.
You know, it’s the care with which you’re experiencing things. In other words, not to be half hearted in your attention because then you don’t really see very much or very clearly. Even with something as simple as the lifting of the heel off the ground, There are ten thousand sensations which are happening. You know, when you really investigate what’s happening, which means pay such close attention, that movement becomes so exquisite. It’s like you don’t want anything else at that moment.
You’re totally there just for that. And then the forward movement, really to be looking carefully. What is it? I feel kind of a miracle. That feeling the same thing with the breath.
A kind of exercise you can do to cultivate this investigation with regard to the mind and thoughts. I mentioned it briefly before but call it the thought game. And that is just sitting and determining that for a certain period of time you are just going to watch your thoughts and nothing else. Not getting involved in them, not judging them. It’s almost as if you’re sitting back in a movie theater and there’s a screen in front of you.
Right? And you’re sitting back very relaxed, meaning the mind is very relaxed, but watching very carefully just as a cat would wait for a mouse at a mouse hole. Just there. Right? You’re sitting back watching the screen just waiting for thoughts to come.
And because you’re putting a lot of energy into waiting for the thoughts to come, you’ll begin to pick them up very quickly. And in that kind of quick perception you can begin to investigate what is a thought, you know, and to see how it comes out of nothing and goes back into nothing and to really experience it’s an interesting question, what is a thought? What is it? Don’t know. But you can work with that kind of careful looking, right?
That’s what I mean by investigation, Really taking care with what you’re experiencing. From a quarter to six to six, you can mull over your thoughts. Actually, you find that as you begin to As you begin to see and work with your thoughts more in the meditative way, you then have more it’s a kind of power of mind to then when it’s appropriate, when you have something to think about, to actually sit down and think something out to the end. Instead of some problem just continually recurring through the mind and never quite getting a handle on it or what to do about it, It’s as if your powers of concentration can be directed and applied when it’s useful and appropriate, something comes up you have to decide or plan or confused about. You can sit down in a very conscious way, follow the whole sequence of thought to the end of it, and then be done.
And that’s a useful way to use the mind also. For the most part in terms of the meditation practice and the development of insight, what you want to be concentrating on is not so much that particular way of using the mind but of seeing how everything is arising in passing. But again, it’s appropriate to do so, it’s a very effective way of working. One more word about investigation. A way to deepen that quality of mind and working in your practice is to pay especially careful attention to the moment of an object arising and the moment of it passing.
To see just when something comes and just the moment when it disappears. And that can be a sound, a thought, a sensation, the sensation of the breath, or the movement of the abdomen. Any object which is coming into your field of awareness, see if you can work with that degree of alertness that will be right there in the moment of its coming and just there for its disappearing. You get a lot of insight then into how things are going.