THE SITUATION, PART ONE

He felt from an early age that he was being lied to, was being betrayed.  But by whom?  By what?  At the same time, he felt himself to be a lie.  When he opened his mouth he did not know who it was that was speaking.  He spent years in the university, which he argued was worth the effort.  It was intellectually stimulating, entertaining even, but of what use was it in the end?  He was left with the real question, what was worthwhile doing?  What he really wanted was salvation.

“Seek out your own salvation with diligence,” the Buddha said.  “Try it, see for yourself.  You can search throughout the entire universe for someone who is more deserving of salvation than you are yourself, and that person is not to be found anywhere.  When we are suffering, we are as much in need of our compassion as is any other being, and we are equally deserving of it.”

Only the individual can attain his own salvation. The Buddhas can merely teach that there is a Way.  It is the individual’s responsibility to follow it.  “Abide with oneself as an island, with oneself as a refuge,” the Buddha taught.  “Seek no external refuge.”

Of whatever teachings you can assure yourself that they conduce to dispassion and not to passions, to detachment and not to bondage, to decrease of worldly gains and not to their increase, to frugality and not to covetousness, to content and not to discontent, to solitude and not to company, to energy and not to sluggishness, to delight in good and not to delight in evil, of such teachings you may with certainty affirm that this is the Norm, this is the discipline, this is the Master’s message.---Digha Nikaya II.156

Salvation begins with Right View, which means the way we look at life, our perspective on it.  Without Right View, we are confused, resulting in frustration, depression, and anxiety.  The goal of Buddhism is quieting the conflicted mind.  The following is Right View, the First Door.

THERE IS NO PAST.  “Bring out the past here and show it to me,” the Buddha said.  All there is, is memory.  Memory, though, is selective, hence unreliable.  Historians balk at this, because the past is everything to them.  They don’t want to hear about the shortcomings of language, for instance, how peoples’ recollection of themselves, of others and events can be faulty, how the interpretation of facts can be suspect, and indeed how the accuracy of facts to start with can be in doubt.  Whole lives and major events are guided by this often shaky information, the blind leading the blind.

We must give no thought to our past, no remembering, no regretting, no thought to who we used to be or to what our circumstances once were, even five minutes ago.

THERE IS NO FUTURE.  “Bring out the future here and show it to me,” the Buddha also said.  All there is, is anticipation, planning, expectation, which like the past is unreliable.  This is to say, how can we know what our circumstances, much less we ourselves, will be like at a given point in the future, will be like even one hour from now.  We might be dead by then.  Only the present exists, one breath, one heart beat at a time.  

Moreover, remembering the past and planning for the future are done now, in the present.  “All we have is now,” Marcus Aurelius reminds us, as does Eckhart Tolle who speaks of now as “Isness,” what actually "is.”  Alan Watts said, “There is no place to be but here and now.  There is no way to be anywhere else.”  Watts added, “Interestingly, time is moving, yet there is only now.”

We must give no thought to our future, no anticipation, no expectation, no planning, no worrying, no thought to who we are yet to be or what our circumstances will be at some point in the future, even five minutes from now.

EXISTENCE IS IMPERMANENT.  When a prince asked his jeweler to make him something that would carry him through times of triumph as well as times of defeat, the jeweler made him a ring inscribed with the words “It will pass.”  

Impermanence, “annica,” is the First Dharma Seal.  Existence is in a state of constant flux.  Every day is different from the previous day, and the next day.  Every moment is different from the previous moment, and the next moment.  All is transient, hence unreliable, hence the cause of all our suffering.  We seek fulfillment in our lives but we never really feel fulfilled because what we seek fulfillment in is time bound, transient.  When we tries to grasp it, it just runs through our fingers.  We are not happy with what we achieve, own, and know because only too quickly we are tired of it, bored with it.  Time kills it.  We then go on to achieve, own, and know still more, which once again because of time is satisfying to us only briefly.

THERE IS NO SELF.  Memory, present consciousness, and anticipation of what is coming next create the illusion of a self.  Krishnamurti said, “Could it be that you identify with a merely abstract ego, based on nothing but memories?” There is this physical body, this happening, sure enough, Alan Watts said, but it is all there is.  As well, there is no self separate from the rest of existence as our egos would have us believe.  This is the Second Dharma Seal, called “anatta” or “anatman.”  We have a body versus we are a body.  

Hormones contribute to the illusion of a self.  This is the lie of hormones.  A case in point, it is not until testosterone recedes in us males, usually in our fifties, that we see the extent to which testosterone has us seeing the world through a veil.  

There is as well the lie of mental states.  We have been conditioned to view the world and ourselves in a certain light, which may be false.  This includes the lie of symbolic thinking e.g. thinking about thinking and the problems that thinking creates in us, and the lie of language e.g. words about words and problems that words create in us.  We don’t know what we are looking at half the time and then go on to communicate about it using symbols which are merely approximations of what we mean.  Alfred Korzybski noted, “Whatever you say something is, it isn’t,” with Alan Watts adding, “nothing is really describable.”  Compounding this, we identify ourselves with our thoughts.  We think we are our thoughts.

Also there is the lie of feeling states.  We have been conditioned to react to the world and ourselves in certain emotional ways, which may be false.  When we are lonely, we miss our families, friends, and God.  Loneliness, though, like all other feelings we have, comes, as Krishnamurti explained, from thoughts, which again are impermanent, transient, and unreliable.  Feelings, likewise then, are impermanent, transient, and unreliable.  Yet we identify ourselves with our feelings.  We feel we are our feelings.  We feel we are our moods.  Our entire lives are just these smoke and mirrors, called “maya” in Buddhism, meaning to be enchanted, spellbound.  All we actually are is just consciousness.  We are conscious bodies.  As Buddhism sums up, we are only a temporary collection of momentary events that are constantly in flux in their causal relationship to each other, with a consciousness that expires when we expire.

WHAT IS WORTHWHILE DOING?  “Survival is not the issue,” Alan Watts said, “because you are not going to survive.”  Rather, liberation is it.  Everything other than the Path to liberation is irrelevant.  “It is not what others do, or do not do, that is my concern.  It is what I do, and do not do.  That is my concern.”---The Dhammapada p54.  

KILLING TIME.  Kill time before it kills us.  The Dalai Lama kills time by fixing clocks, a reminder to him that he is “on the clock,” memento mori.  Much like chanting, it to keep his mind from itself.  My elderly mother looked at her watch incessantly, seemingly to see whether her time was up yet.  On her deathbed she must have been greatly relieved to realize she could put her watch away.

OCCUPATION OF LIBERATION.  Everything other than the Path is irrelevant.  We must make liberation our occupation, so that there is but one thing.  Our day is for this one thing only.  All we want in this life, after all, is to be happy.  We are naturally happy.  The reason we are not happy is because we are too bound up in the irrelevant.

SUFFERING.  Termed “dukkha” in Buddhism, this is the Third Dharma Seal. “Greater than the waters in the four oceans is the flood of tears each being has shed, or the amount of blood he has lost when, as an animal or wrong-doer, he has had his head cut off,” the saying goes.

Life is not all suffering, of course, but largely it is.   According to Buddhist psychology, every moment of life when happiness and inner peace are absent is a moment of suffering.  When you are rushing, impatient, irritated, frustrated, anxious, angry, fearful, bored, sad, or jealous, when you are filled with desire for something you want that you don’t have, or feel aversion toward something you do have but that you don’t want, you are suffering.  When you are reliving a painful experience from your past or imagining a future one, you are suffering.  Nothing on this planet is free of suffering.  Even long-time Buddhists who endeavor to not suffer still do so, because all our sources of suffering cannot be eliminated. 

PLEASURE TRAIL.  To ease our pain we seek out what pleasures we can find here and there, food, sex, adventure, like a chicken on a trail of corn.  The trouble is, we adapt to them to where we need more and more of them to get the same effect.  The same effect, however, is not what we get.  It’s always something less.