Topics Include: 1) The Buddha’s enlightenment and his decision to become a teacher; 2) His first teaching to his first five disciples: the Four Noble Truths; 3) The Buddha’s second teaching: Dependent Origination; 4) The basic teaching of Dependent Origination: the law of Karma and how it goes from lifetime to lifetime, the cycle of Samsara; 5) Review of the 12 steps of Dependent Origination; 6) Ignorance: how our conditioning prevents us from seeing the world as it actually is; 7) Volitional activities and karmic formations; 8) Consciousness: the culmination of how I respond to my experience; 9) Nama Rupa: the suceeding mind and body; 10) The six sense doors lead to our Contact with our experience: how we create our reality through how we unconsciously select how we perceive the world; 11) Craving: the consequence of our attachment to pleasant feelings and the beginning of suffering; 12) Cllinging, the natural development of craving; 13) Becoiming, or the flowering of our sankharic conditioning into our perceived sense of self; 14) Birth: the culmination of the self with the object of desire, the creation of our self, our identity. 15) Aging and death: the inevitable consequence of the birth of the self.

5 August, 2023
69 Minutes