The Fourth Noble Truth: The One With All The Gory Details

When we last left our heroes, they were contemplating the first three Noble Truths:

1. Shit Happens, causing Life to Suck
2. These are linked because we crave Shit not to Happen (or to happen differently)
3. We can learn to stop this craving . . . somehow.

As Grumpy as I am, I confess, this all actually makes a world of sense. Well, #1 and #2 do . . . #3, well, I'm a scientist and would like to see some empirical evidence. But for now, let's go with the flow. We can always convert to Scientology later if it doesen't work out.

With the Fourth Noble Truth, we get to that "somehow", and enter "buy my DVD" territory. The Fourth Noble Truth is that we merely have to follow the Eightfold Path in order to achieve enlightenment. To whit: 

1. Right Understanding
2. Right Attitude
3. Right Speech
4. Right Action
5. Right Livelihood
6. Right Effort
7. Right Mindfulness
8. Right Concentration

In the future, I will experiment with focusing In Actual Real Life on a given one on a given day of the week . . . god, is that going to be a train wreck. But it should be entertaining, and his Grumpiness needs work on all of them.

It is important to note that, as Ms. Boorstein points out, that this isn't a path in the sense that you need to work on one before the other. You can pretty much start anywhere, and they're all interconnected -- you don't notice whether you're speaking rightly without being mindful, for instance. So it's more along the lines of being an Eightfold Circle or Eightfold Dot.

The Cliff Notes: Keep all this shit in mind as often as you can, and you'll get a handle on craving, leading to greatly decreased suffering (even if we don't all end up in Nirvana.) It sounds like a lot of work, and I think it is, but you have to admit, the payoff sounds pretty sweet. Also, the Eightfold Path is also known as "The Middle Way"

because there are no cocaine binges allowed, but also no self-mutilation. So that's good, right? Plus, there's a small chance that Bryan Cranston may get involved, which would be awesome.

Of course, we really don't know how much work we're in for until we define what "Right blah blah" is for each of the blah blahs.

Something tells me we'll get to them though, and funny .jpgs will be involved.