From a talk given by Kenn Duncan, April 2026 

Words & Thoughts from Carol Cook, Barbara O’Brien, Leight Brasington

This weekend weeding wackin the backyard, I broke a window (one I’ve broken before doing the same thing).  I started thinking, damn it… if I had waited just a little longer to do the weeds, if there were no rocks in our backyard… if, if, if!   But I did do it at this time, because the weeds had grown tall, and there were rocks, and I hit one and it flew up and hit the window, and I hadn’t covered the window this time.  

There I was sitting in my anger towards myself, after my initial outburst (hard to believe I know, but it happens every now and then) I started thinking about this teaching, and a teaching from Carol Cook.  She has shared with me some of her teachings and pointed this series in particular.  Conditionality, the Principle of dependent arising.  I had to sit with all that and I recalled a part of this teaching:

The dukkha arises because you want the world to be different than it is. I don’t want there to be a broken window.

It’s said that not long before the buddha reached enlightenment, still sitting under the Bodhi tree, he spent several weeks meditating on dukkha, suffering.  How can we deal with suffering. In his wisdom he didn’t try to figure out WHY there is dukkha: he looked for what was the necessary conditions for the arising of dukkha. 

From a talk given by Kenn Duncan, June 2026 

Words & Thoughts from Carol Cook, Arinna Weisman and Jean Smith

“The Buddha walked through India after his awakening for 40 years. What he said of his own teaching is that he never taught anything that wasn’t about the nature of suffering-dissatisfaction, it’s cause and its ultimate end” 

As we know these teachings were summarized in the 4 noble truths, there is suffering, there is a cause to suffering, there is a cessation to suffering and there is a path to the end of suffering.

We started looking at a specific teaching the Paticca Samapadda (in pali), translated many ways > dependent origination, dependent arising, conditioned genesis, there’s others but these are the main ones you’ll come across. He realized he had gained insight to an essential truth here about conditions that are present as suffering arises, but, he also realized how difficult it can be to understand this law or process of dependent arising. 

This teaching goes into detail about the 2nd noble truth the cause of suffering and shows us how we cultivate suffering due to conditions that have arisen like ignorance, ignorance about our interconnections with all of life, about the impermanence of all phenomena, about the sources of happiness.