After I had sent Mae Yo and Mae Neecha my uber-long synopsis on everything is suffering, they send back a reply that had a a simple question: “The Buddha said that there are two kinds of suffering – physical suffering that we cannot avoid and mental suffering that we can avoid. In order to avoid that suffering, we need to know the cause of it. Mae Yo asked, do you know what the cause of suffering is?”
On the tail of so much in-depth investigating into the whys of suffering, its fundamental presence in this world, the answer to its cause, at least in my own life, was immediately clear to me — I am the cause of my own suffering. Here is my reply to Mae Neecha:
In short, I’m the cause of my suffering. My desire for the world to be how I want it to be ( as opposed to how it actually is) and then my continual schemes and efforts to force it to be as I want. To try and force it to confirm who I think I AM.
The cause of my desire however is ignorance; I don’t REALLY understand what the world is, so I don’t really understand the impossibility of trying to force it to follow my rules (instead of its own, the rules of cause and effect, the 3 common conditions). I am so blind, that my imagination takes the isolated moments the world is sorta-kindda-if-you-squint-real-hard close enough to my desire/view as ‘evidence’ that all I need to do is hang on to what I have, try harder/more/luckier/better and maybe this time ( or at least some time soon) I will finally pwn the world. So more “turns”, and the accompanying dukka, ensue.
This is why the heart of the 8 fold path — the way out of suffering– lies in changing my view. So I can align my understanding with the reality of the world ( since the reality of this world is sure as hell not going to be the one to align to my understanding/ imagination). Only when the cause for desire, ignorance, is removed can desire be removed. Only when the cause for suffering, desire, is removed can suffering be removed.
But seriously, thats all a little technical. Watching my 3 year old niece have a tantrum because shit isn’t the way she demands pretty much exemplifies the cause of suffering — the world doesn’t revolve around her, but she thinks it does. It doesn’t revolve around me when I think it does, when I so desperately want it to: So it’s all sorrow, lamination, pain, distress and despair till we stop expecting this world will confirm us, be as we imagine, or give us what we want. Till we stop clinging to the hope that we can keep what we love, avoid what we hate and have everything ( or even just most things, or enough things) as we want it to be.
I am the cause of my suffering, not just because I want the world to be how I want it to be, but because I want myself to be what I want to be — I want to become. Not only am I ignorant of what the world is, I am also ignorant of what I –self — is. I suspect this ignorance is actually more primary –first I need to misunderstand self before I can believe there is a world that will somehow obey and conform to self. I think this is why the rest of that passage from the morning chanting , after re-articulating the noble truth of dukka, continues on to speak specifically about the aggregates and what they are — stressful, inconstant and not self (subject to the 3 common characteristics like everything else). If ya wanna fix stressing ya gottta fix ignorance of self.
The more I considered my reply, the more I realized it may be time for me to turn my attention to the last of the 3 common characteristics, annatta, or no-self; if belief in a self is fundamental to causing my suffering — for motivating and propelling my births and becoming — then understanding the truth of no self, of the inevitable cessation of all forms and processes, of the illusion of identity I imagine in the aggregates, seems like a natural next step in my path to eliminate my suffering (aka Buddhist practice). Plus, I started this practice with impermanence, dug deep on dukka, it seems only fair to give the characteristic of no-self a little air time. That all brings me to my practice today. Right now, annatta is a slow faucet drip, I grope around, feeling mostly lost. But I have been here before, I have a plan: Each day I try and find a few examples of annatta, I gather evidence, I analyze to try and begin seeing patterns from the evidence, try to begin to consider the why everything in the world must be annatta (just as everything is impermanent and dukkha). Slowly, I suspect it will come…if and when it does, perhaps you Dear Reader will get yet another interruption in our regularly scheduled program. Till then though….I end will draw this little side-track to a close and return us to our Regularly Scheduled Program with the next blog.