Suffer this! the second noble truth.

It took me a long time to realise that there didn’t have to be suffering in the world. I dont mean like in some hippy utopian vision where everything is the ‘way it should be”, I’m talking right here and right now among all the war and cruelty and death in the world. I’m not speaking in metaphor or mysterious zen-magic talk either, I mean exactly this:  despite all the pain that exists in the world that suffering is optional.

When I began looking at things in my life that statement seemed like a pile of shit, and when I began looking at things in others lives (who had it worse than me) that statement seemed like a pile of shit and a cruel joke on top of that. After all, anyone who has lost a loved one or been a victim of violence or suffered accidents and the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” will tell you that suffering happens to you and there is no choice about it! Suffering is something inflicted upon us, we believe, and beyond our ability to stop. So when the Buddha said that we suffer because of our attachments (or desires, or cravings, or thirst or however you want to describe it) it certainly sounds as though he was telling us that it is somehow our fault that we suffer! What a jerk!

Once I began to really look at life though it became clear that the universe itself wasn’t causing me suffering, it was my relationship to the universe that was. I spent most of my life feeling like I never had enough. I always wanted things, things like toys or friends or cool clothes when I was young and then things like girls or coolness or money when I was older and after 30 some years of torturing myself with those cravings I just began to want peace and happiness and love. I wanted, I thirsted, i craved and so. . . like the Buddha dude said I would. . . ,I suffered. So do we stop wanting anything? Is such a thing even possible?

Buddhism and the Second noble truth are not about cutting off your natural desires as some have claimed, Buddhism and the second noble truth are about understanding that these natural desires are not facts. Its about changing your relationship to the world so that you can feel the very natural emotion of “I want to eat all that cake” without being mad at yourself for the desire and without actually eating all the chocolate cake and without being upset that you cant have all the cake.  Its about understanding the paradox of craving.

When you want something, and it doesn’t matter what that something is, you begin suffering. It can literally be something as silly as a new pair of socks or as serious as the desire to not have cancer anymore. The majority of the time though, it isn’t as serious as cancer, the majority of the time its fame, money, power, sex or some version of them that we crave. For this example lets say what we crave is money.

We might cover that desire under the guise of wanting to be safe from homelessness or the desire to give money to a charity, but the root is that we want money. As soon as we feel like we don’t have enough money the suffering begins. How can we get it? Why does he have it and I don’t? Can I take his and get away with it? Can I get it easily? Suffering suffering suffering. The paradox is that even  if we do get the object of our desire, we still suffer! Is the money we got enough? Can we keep it? Can we get more? How do we keep him from taking our money? What if the money runs out!? Suffering suffering suffering. As if that wasn’t a big enough kick in the balls; it turns out that the things we really think we want turn out not to satisfy anyway! Haven you ever wanted a really cool jo The whole time you just knew that if you had it everything would be awesome! Then you get it and it turns out that the boss is a jerk, the coworkers shiftless boobs, and the money not nearly enough for all the work you put in. What happened!?? What happened is that the fantasy, the dream image of what you wanted could not live up to the reality that exists. it never can! Good or bad your mind can make any situation seem impossibly wonderful or horrible to a degree that reality just can not live up to! I cant tell you how many of my customers get up from their first tattoo and say “wow, that wasn’t nearly as bad as I imagined!” Because reality can never ever be ‘what you imagined’, that’s the very definition of imagination!

Just looking at the number of crazy eccentric billionaires who are miserable and kooky should tell you that. In a way it must be worse than being poor, after all you got everything that people are supposed to want and here you are still suffering! Why did Micheal Jackson buy the elephant mans bones? Probably because they were so unique and expensive that it was one of the few things left to want that he couldn’t just have with the wave of a check-book.  Id be willing to bet that as soon as he got those bones home he looked at them for a minute, closed the lid and never thought about them again. He still suffered, and so would you are me, even with a billion million dollars.

Even with everything we have ever wanted.

The problem isn’t the “everything”, its the “wanted”. The second truth is there to point out that the suffering in your life is not a requirement. Pain may be something no one can escape if they are alive, but suffering is always and completely something you opt into. From the day we are born we are creatures of want, all our lives that natural desire is fed and stoked by our families, communities, and social world. A person who isn’t motivated by desire is seen as strange, perhaps even sinister. We design our entire world around want and desire and to the day we die we that next thing, then the next thing, then the next thing. And believe me Zen folk are not immune, they may want things like sex or money less than the average frat boy (or maybe not. . .) but we crave enlightenment (even if we don’t believe in it. . .ahem), or we sit in zazen and wish our nose didn’t itch or that we could ‘do it right’ or we wish we could find that awesome cool teacher who could with a wave of his robe make everything clear and easy about Buddhism. Craving is both powerful and insidious.

So when the Buddha understood the truth of suffering he realised what a big job it was to end suffering. One story holds that he was so stunned by what he understood that he didn’t move or speak for 7 days. Id be willing to bet that most of that time he was thinking something along the lines of “those fuckers are never gonna be willing to give up desiring so much.” But he also saw that it was the one and only way out of suffering. He also saw that with a lot of hard work and compassion that it was possible.

But that’s the next truth.

Attachment and Buddhists

In the comments of my previous blog PD wrote this:

when I was reading about you getting married (congrats man!). Many buddhists deny themself relationships. I have gathered it is because the fact, that by doing so you dont create yourself an attachment. I once asked a person who was into Buddhism the following (when he told me the 4 noble truths) “You have kids. Do you let go of them because they create an attachment and possibly make you hold onto things when you should let go?” Didnt get a answer.

Have you thought about all this Jason?

Its a good question and on the surface it makes sense. After all, we Buddhists are always going on and on about not being attached to this or that. If you are new to Buddhism it is easy to read this as an admonition not to “get stuff”, material stuff AND emotional stuff (like relationships). I used to believe this myself, I would see a book or jacket I wanted and then I would get mad at myself for wanting that object! How, I reasoned, was I ever going to “get enlightened” if i still craved material things!? As usual, it turned out that I had the entire question upside down. Fortunately, the longer one ‘does’ Buddhism the more these kind of logical fallacies work themselves out. In this case the actual story of the Buddha provides the first part of the answer.

Briefly, when Gautama left his life as a prince he began his journey to awakening using various methods that were already common  in India, these included various focused/guided meditations, visualizations, philosophical pondering, and rituals, but  finding that none of these satisfied his quest to end suffering he next tried Asceticism. He mortified his body with pain and starvation, he gave away all his clothes, didn’t bathe and ate less and less until ( in the legends) he existed on a single grain of rice per day. Statues of him from this period show a frightful picture of a man dying, his ribs protrude, his eyes are sunken and his veins in stark relief against his emaciated skin.

Gautama the Ascetic

In an effort to transcend the suffering of the world he was killing himself. Gautama was denying himself  everything, even the very basic sustenance that humans need to survive. He had achieved the “highest” level of asceticism short of death and yet he realized that he was no closer to ending suffering, that in denying himself he had, in fact, made it impossible to think or function at all. After this part of the story he decides to eat again and when a little healthier begins to meditate, a meditation that eventually lead to his awakening as the Buddha (Buddha meaning “the awakened one”).

The story of the ascetic Buddha isn’t just to show us how bad ass Gautama was or to add drama, whether it really occurred or not, the point is to show that the Buddhas path is the Middle Way. Neither clinging to things or rejecting everything will end suffering the tale tells us. When he was a well fed prince, Gautama suffered, when he was a starving holy-man he still suffered, it was only when he let go of both craving and renouncement that he could see the reality of the universe.

So to believe that being a Buddhist means to “avoid attachments” is really missing the real point, which is;

the objects (whether a new car or a wife and children) are not ‘attachments’, they simply are things that exist, the ‘attachment’ happens in YOU! (or me) Without you and me to desire that new car, it is simply a pile of metal, glass, and plastic, it has no inherent ‘attachment-ness’ until one of us came along and decided that we needed it so badly that we suffered.

Buddhism is not about changing the world outside of us to fit our ideals, its about living in the world as it really and truly is without getting so hung up on those ideals that we suffer. To deny ourselves things that we need to exist (and I believe that love is one of those things) is to become the Ascetic. Attachment also doesn’t have to be for an object, the Buddha suffered because he was attached to the idea of transcending his body even to the point that he nearly died of starvation, he was ‘attached’ to his ideal. It was not until he acknowledged that his body was not the source of his suffering that he could work on the real problem of suffering and its causes.

Buddhism is also not about denying reality. In fact, to the Chinese Chan Buddhists to be ‘enlightened’ was often described as “seeing with your original face”, that is, the mind that you had before we added all sorts of conditioning, ideals, and cravings to it. Your Natural Mind. Buddhists understand that part of a natural mind is the desire to mate and pass on your genetic line as children, that we naturally desire enough food, shelter, and company to feel safe. Once again the Middle way is the ideal. To crave too much food causes suffering, to deny enough food is suffering. We need to desire enough food to keep us sustained and healthy and that’s it. Food (or any other object of desire) is not the problem, our attitude toward it is the problem.

So what do we mean by ‘attachment’? Well,  what it literally means, to hold onto something beyond a level that is natural and healthy. To cling to an object, person, or idea to the point where it becomes unnatural is “attachment” (and suffering). In practical terms this means that we can desire a new car so long as that desire doesn’t cause us to feel bad if dont get it, or as long as it doesn’t cause us to desire it so much that we steal in order to have it. In personal terms this means that I can and do love Cara, but not to the point where I become agitated if she is gone for an hour or want to fight every male she talks to besides me. On the other side of the coin if I were to decide that my natural desire for her was ‘bad’ and  then If I began to  try to crush that part of my mind would be the other suffering extreme (like some Catholic monks who whip themselves if they feel any sexual desire)  It means to be aware that desires are natural without clinging to them or avoiding other things, it means The Middle way!

So some Buddhists (mainly monks) swear off romantic love because it is easier to focus on the moment without wanting to run off to the woods with your girlfriend all the time. But in many traditions (like Japanese Zen) monks and priests are free to marry. Being celibate is not mandated except in many monastic traditions. Buddhism is imminently practical, and to deny one of the basic human needs would not only be silly, but would lead to the kind of craziness we see in the more sexually conservative religions.

What Buddhism finally teaches us is that it isn’t the kids or the mate that are the attachment, its our very own grasping minds.