Suffering is inevitable, misery is optional
Estimated reading time: 5 minutes
I am a “glass half-full” kind of guy. Most of the time I find the good in people and in my circumstances, no matter how bad things seem. I just naturally believe that although suffering is inevitable, misery is option
When Gabriel died, through all the heart-rending tears there was magic and a great outpouring of love in the world. You can read about that here. On getting fired (euphemistically, “down-sized”) I got a better job (here’s a post). Even when I had a class in school that I hated, I managed to find something interesting to learn. Like the boy who exclaimed in joy when presented on his birthday with a room full of horseshit to clean, my natural tendency is to say “there must be a pony in here somewhere!”
Today’s post may seem like a departure. Maybe so, but the pony is still here, somewhere.
Lies my parents told me
Most religious/philosophical traditions address this fact: everyone suffers. In some, suffering in this life is rewarded in the afterlife; for others being “good” in this life leads to rewards in the next life, mediated by creator gods who judge how well we have followed the rules. For still others, there is only this life in which suffering is an optional state of mind, mitigated by our own actions and thinking. Through all these traditions runs the idea that if we are “good,” life will be fair and just, and if our life sucks then it must be because we’ve been “bad.” This is the lie our parents told us.
At best this way of thinking gives us a moral compass that encourages us to behave ethically and morally; suffering is a means to attain reward later. At worst, we blame the victim for his or her misfortune, and get an easy out so that we don’t have to address income inequities, racial or gender bias, or the way in which the culture wars marginalizes anyone who is “not like us.” I never understood this, even while my teachers and parents tried to pound it into my young mind. And that’s how I became a buddhist.
Three kinds of suffering
It’s hard to describe buddhist philosophy. The simplest and I think best explanation to be found in What Makes You NOT a Buddhist, by Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse. In it, Khyentse explains the 4 “seals” (core beliefs). One of those seals is about suffering. Khyentse says it this way: “All emotions are pain.” A more traditional way to say it is, “all contaminated phenomena are, by nature, unsatisfactory.” However we say it, along with the First Noble Truth it means that suffering is inevitable, for all sentient beings, no matter their circumstances. From the lowliest microbe to the richest human, everyone and everything suffers.
In more detail, suffering takes 3 forms.
- The suffering of suffering:
First, there is the suffering of suffering (dukkah dukkha), which is the “ordinary” pain of difficult life circumstances. By virtue of the fact that we are born, we eventually age, get sick, and die. It matters not a whit whether you are born into abject poverty or into the wealthiest of families in the wealthiest of nations. Eventually old age, sickness, and/or death will come for us. Whether we live the most ethical life, or the most vile, suffering and death will eventually come. No one escapes. - The suffering of change: Then there is the suffering of change (viparinama dukkha), which is the suffering that happens when we’re happy and life is good. Wait, what??
Give it a moment’s thought and you’ll notice that you’re never completely happy for long. Built into every positive experience is the knowledge that, sooner or later, the moment will pass. Some of this is built into our nervous system. By design, we use our brains to answer one question, and one question only: What’s next? We are constantly scanning for the next thing, the next threat, the next acquisition, the next accomplishment, the inevitable let-down that follows every high. Even in happiness we find the seeds of discontent.
Ponies make horseshit. - The suffering of existence: As we continually try to answer what’s next, we make up stories. We try to explain our way out of unpleasant periods, and we try to tell “happily ever after” stories when things seem good. But a piece of our awareness always knows it’s a story we are telling ourselves. Because of that, we experience a low-level anxiety at best (and a full-blown panic at worst), knowing that we will never really be in control of our circumstances, that life isn’t in fact fair, and that things work out, but just not usually in the way we envisioned. That background noise, the low level anxiety we feel, is what buddhists call the suffering of existence (sankhara dukkha). Ultimately it’s an underlying sense that life as we know it is unsatisfying, a sense that we do all we can to avoid.
Sometimes a good lie is better than the truth, and we tell ourselves lies all the time so as to hide ourselves from the truth.
The First Noble Truth
And there, in a nutshell, is the first noble truth of buddhism, and one of the four seals. Suffering is inevitable, and we all experience it. Next week, in part two, I’ll talk about the way through (not out). For now, I invite you to a thought experiment: sit with the idea of universal suffering a bit. Watch the way that it might make you want to push the thought away, to dismiss it, to fight it. Does it disgust you, annoy you, confuse you, bore you? Just, for a bit, notice what happens. Tell us what you learn, in the comments.
Dr Les Kertay
