THE SITUATION, PART TWO

WHY AM I UNHAPPY?  It is because we are filled with wanting, with desire, to the point that eventually the desire becomes a thirst that cannot be satisfied, even when we achieve what we desire.  So how can we be happy?  By ceasing to desire.  Just as a fire dies down when no fuel is added to it, so our unhappiness will end when the fuel of our desire is removed. 

We must not strive, grasp, cling, clutch, wanting to do this or to be that, for even when we attain what we want, it is not enough.  The more we have the more we want.  Attaining what we want is suffering just as much as not attaining it is, with “suffering” defined as chronic frustration. 

What do we gain by striving but wealth, power, and prestige, what society has taught us are the desirable things to have in this life.  It was Krishnamurti who said, “Think it through.  Do you really want what you think you want?” 

We must beware of what we want, Buddhism warns, we might get it.  Hell is getting what we want, often.  The reality of wealth, power, and prestige is that they are transient and therefore will end soon enough in suffering.  The old adage “less is more” is correct.  The less we have the less we want, and in this way we take the greatest pleasure in the smallest things and are happy.  “He who knows he has enough is rich,” Lao Tzu said.

DO NOT COMPETE.  With competition there is a winner and a loser, with the biggest loser being the winner.  Winning is a hollow victory because when we win we must equal or better myself the next time out, feeling guilt at the same time for the suffering we have caused the loser. 

As for the person who has just lost, he feels resentful toward us, wishing us ill, looking forward vengefully to when we can compete again, when he might win, perpetuating the cycle.  Our aim must be to end suffering, not prolong it.  There is a popular picture of Buddhist monks shooting pool, a seeming contradiction to this tenet.  The monks, though, are not competing.  Like the Dalai Lama repairing his clocks, they are only killing time.

HAVE NO AMBITION.  Ambition is our attempt to fill a void in our lives, a need for love or respect, for instance.  Love and respect, however, are transient.  Wealth, power, prestige, love, and respect are hollow victories.

AVOID ALL ATTACHMENTS, FETTERS, CHAINS THAT BIND.  We must not be attached to our personal possessions, to our location, to our money, to other people we know, and least of all to ourselves.  Attaching ourselves to anything is folly because soon enough we are bored with it, wish we never had it, even as we cannot get rid of it because now we are attached to it.

We become attached to people but because we don’t like most of them very much, it undercuts our happiness in the end.  Have feelings for people, the Buddha said, but don’t make them responsible for your happiness. 

And why should we attach ourselves to ourselves, to our physical selves in particular, for our physical selves are dying, have been dying from the day we were born?  Why should we attach ourselves to our psychological selves when our psychological selves are an illusion?

VEGANISM.  Buddhists do not kill animals for any reason (ahimsa), much less to eat them.

NO DUALITY.  This is known as the principle of relativity.  There is only the appearance of opposites, when in fact everything is one, called the unity of opposites. Everything is the same energy, this is to say.  Opposites are two sides of the same coin.  Light is not possible without darkness, substance without space, life without death, self without other.  They go together.  They arise mutually, called the coincidence of opposites, and since Nature hates a vacuum, as it is said, they create each other continually.

REALITY.  The truth is that we are on a rock hurtling blindly through space, a rock containing, by a fluke, life forms.  The biggest fluke is that one of these life forms, we humans, is aware of itself.  We are aware that we will die one day, for example.  Life on this rock has no purpose beyond perpetuating itself.  We are in denial about our life on this rock, all the while.  We understand life here intellectually but cannot grasp it fully.  When we look up at the stars at night we do not know what truly it is we are looking at.  It overwhelms us.  We have a false sense of security about it, at the same time, much as we have when we climb into a jet plane, believing that we will be as safe in it as we are walking around outside it.  The same with an automobile.

DIRECT EXPERIENCE IS SUPERIOR TO SECONDARY EXPERIENCE.  Direct experience is, for example, classical music (abstract sound), physical labor (body at work), and color (sensory perception).  It is the experience of the five senses.  Secondary experience is the symbolic world, thinking and language, life once removed.  While secondary experience is useful in ways, it generates a world unto itself that is false, or, more often than not, is only partly true.

DEPENDENT ORIGINATION.  This states that what is, is dependent upon something else, the law of cause and effect.  The Majjhima Nikaya II,32 states:  If this is, that comes to be; from the arising of this, that arises; if this is not, that does not come to be; from the stopping of this, that stops.  The Majjhima Nikaya I.416 adds: The skillful man asks, “What are the consequences of my actions?  Will it lead to hurt of self, of others, or of both?  What will happen if I stop, or do nothing?”  It is like a clock where if one wheel turns, all the wheels turn.  Everything we do and do not do affects everything else that is done and not done.

JI-JI-MUGE.  Related to Dependent Origination is Ji-Ji Muge.  This refers to the interdependence, the mutual interpenetration of all things and events.  It is likened to a spider’s web where every dew drop reflects every other dew drop on it.

MINDFULNESS.  To be aware of Dependent Origination and Ji-ji Muge is called mindfulness.  A person unaware of them is described as either ignorant “avidya” or ignore-ant, that is, one who has chosen to pay no attention to them.  The cause of human misery and evil is ignorance.  We humans are, in general, so darkly ignorant about his own nature that all of our actions have the wrong orientation.  Not moral transgression then, but mental error is the root of human misery and evil.  The result of ignorance, it is said, is an endless chain of false illusions in which each succeeding illusion is due to its preceding illusion.

AHIMSA.  Non-injury to other beings.  “All things breathing, all things existing, all things living, all beings whatever, should not be slain or treated with violence, or insulted or tortured or driven away,” according to the Acaranga Sutra of Jainism, the view of Buddhism and Hinduism as well.  Jain monks while walking in a forest carry long staffs which they tap on the ground out in front of them to drive off any animals or insects lest they innocently get trampled.

NO VIOLENCE.  Physical violence goes without saying, but mental violence we must also avoid.  Anger and ill will are mental violence and are among the destructive emotions, mental afflictions, so called, which also includes hatred, jealousy, confusion, desire, and hubris.

COMPASSION.  We must be compassionate toward others as we hope others will be compassionate toward us.  We are all in the same boat, insofar as everyone suffers.  Indeed, suffering is the common denominator for every living thing on this planet.  Even for the bacteria that will kill us one day we must have compassion; they live here too.  Compassion is the cornerstone of Buddhism because it not only benefits the recipient of it but the one offering it as well.  This is to say, by shifting our attention away from ourselves and onto another, we do not feel own pain so much.  An alternative to “compassion,” a word implying superiority on the part of the one extending it, is sympathy.  We can sympathize with others because we all suffer.  If, on the other hand, we have not yet lived much life, or have not yet lived a particular aspect of it, such as the death of a loved one, we can empathize with others.

FORGIVENESS.  Forgiving a person of something that he or she has done or said is the greatest gift we can give them, and ourselves.  Forgiveness includes not trying to change someone who does not want to change, or who cannot change.

NO REHEARSAL, NO REPLAY.  Our thinking is dominated by our rehearsing what we will say to someone in the future, or our replaying what we have already said to someone in the past.  But there is no future, there is no past.  Rehearsal and replay are a waste of time.  We must live in the present.  We must treat each heartbeat, each breath, each meal, each laugh, as if it were our last, because one day it will be.

ZEN TEST.  The four Buddhist propositions are:  something is; something isn’t; something both is and isn’t; something neither is nor isn’t.  Zen asks what is beyond the four propositions?

THERE IS SUCH A THING AS BAD LUCK.  Baby birds in a nest get killed when the tree trimmers come through.  The birds were in the wrong place at the wrong time.  We will all be in the wrong place at the wrong time one day.  It is tempting to say that the killing of the birds is bad karma working itself out, but all the birds in that nest would not have bad karma.  Rather it is tathata, that which is so of itself.  Bad luck just happens of itself.

DYING.  As soon as we realize that we are alive, we know that we will be dead before long, Alan Watts said.  Every last person in the world will die eventually, just as every speck of living anything will die.  If we are nothing, however, we have nothing to lose.  Buddhists seek to be nothing.  “When Death came, there was no one there,” their saying goes.  Some say that Buddhists have a death wish.  It is not that they don’t want to live any longer, they say, but that they don’t need to. 

OBJECTS.  Buddhists conceive of an object, a rock for instance, as an event, not as a thing or substance.

THE WORLD.  Buddhists accept the world as they find it, as it is.  Above all, they do not place blame.  They believe that the individual determines what happens to him, that the individual, not something “out there,” is responsible for his fate.  The external world only reacts to what the individual does.

SUCHNESS.  Also termed thusness or, again, tathata, it means reality as it is, without superimposing any ideas upon it.

GOD.  The issue of God is avoided in Buddhism because it is not the point.  The point is liberation, in real terms, today.

ICONOGRAPHY.  Even Zen Buddhists have elaborate temples where they bow to statues of the Buddha, but, as Alan Watts put it, this is merely what Buddhism comes in, the packaging.

THE MIDDLE WAY.  The Middle Way is so the cure is not worse than the ailment. The Middle Way is what is common between opposites.

CONTAGION.  Our behavior is that of the people around us.  We do what other people are doing usually, called “contagion” in psychology.  The result is conformity, even when conformity is bad for me, like war.

ON THE BRIGHT SIDE.  Rather than dwell on how our lives would have been better had we done this or done that, we should think, instead, of the ways in which it might have been much worse.

BURDENS.  Talent, celebrity, intelligence, duty are burdens, baggage, chains that bind. 

LONE RHINO ON THE PLAIN.  Pratyeka-buddha.  This is a monk who choses to not live in a monastery, wandering the countryside instead.  “Seek out your own salvation with diligence,” the Buddha said, relevantly.  “Be a lamp unto yourself.”

SAMADHI.  A remarkable place in the brain.  Samadhi is not self-hypnosis.  It is absorption to the point of ecstasy.  It can occur spontaneously during deep meditation or be the result of such “technical means” as repeating a mantra at length.  Frustration over not attaining it at will, though, can make it a fetter. 

TAO.  The Tao that can be named is not the Tao.  He who says he knows the Tao does not.  It cannot be said what the Tao is, only what it is like.  The Tao is like gravity.  Wu wei in Taoism means non-interference.  We should flow with our lives, not get in the way of them.  Alan Watts explained, “You are going along with the Tao whether you want to or not.  You can swim against it but you’ll still be moved along by it.  If you swim against it, all you’ll do is wear yourself out.  But if you swim with it, the whole strength of it is yours. Yet the difficulty for us is determining which way it is going.”

WHAT WE ARE, FINALLY.  Our will has nothing to do with it.  We are happening of ourselves.  There is nothing for us to figure out.

OUT OF NOTHING COMES SOMETHING.  What we are, finally, is where mysticism begins.  The Buddha called this wisdom.  It comes when we empty or purge from ourselves our ego-identities.  We become like newborn children then.  We are, afterwards, on the surface, no longer buried under layers of self, thinking, memory.  What remains is feeling, feeling not of the emotional kind, but of the intuitive kind.  We need only feel it, not interpret it.  We must not expect anything from it.  There is nothing we are to do about it.  It is there that we see that we are all of existence.  Tat tvam asi, that art thou, as Vedanta puts it, or as Alan Watts states it, “You’re it.  You’re the whole works.”  What follows is mystical union, but not of self with other, but of self with self, in the way that the Atman is Brahman, in Vedanta.  And with this comes a fundamental shift in consciousness.

RIGHT DIRECTION.  We are facing in the right direction.  All we need do is keep walking.

FLOWER.  A plant at the end of its life suddenly sprouts a flower.  The plant is surprised by it more than anyone.  It is now what it was meant to be, it sees, the only thing it could ever be.  So it is with us in the liberated state.

LIBERATION.  Consciousness sees that it is a broader consciousness, not that it is a part of a broader consciousness but that it is that broader consciousness.  It is like sitting with your hands resting on your thighs, where your hands feel your thighs at the same time that your thighs feel your hands.