The next characteristic is Dissatisfactoriness, misery, or suffering.
I will sometimes translate it as “suffering” and other ways.
Other translators and authors also use terms such as
“misery”, “unsatisfactoriness”, “stress”, and “anxiety”.
I don’t think that we really have a perfect English word
that can capture its nuances.
There are two major aspects to the Buddha’s teaching on dukkha,
the first and most famous being
the implications of having been born,
which entails issues of having a body, and
the ordinary facts of physical pain, sickness, aging, and death,
as well as interpersonal conflicts, personal losses, fears, sorrows, grief, lamentation, and the like.
These unfortunate aspects of having been born
are clearly of great significance throughout our brief lives.
However,
the second aspect of dukkha is the key for insight practices,
and that is the inherent painful tension that comes because
we take the sensate data coming in and misinterpret those sensations in a way
that causes us to habitually create the illusion of a
permanent, separate, independently functioning (acausal), localized self.
This mode of perceiving experience is more painful than the other way that
sensate reality can be perceived, in which
sensate data imply the exact reverse:
that there is naturally occurring, causal, self-perceiving, immediate transience.
~~~
Insight practices can show us this other, less painful way of perceiving reality,
and eventually hardwire it into our systems
so that we don’t go back to the more painful way which involves
the dukkha created by this misperception.
Dukkha sounds grim or pessimistic, and perhaps deservedly so in a sense,
but it is also a powerful statement that our
moment-to-moment separate self experience
cannot, does not, and will never provide lasting satisfaction.
Why? One reason is that
Everything is momentary.
Nothing lasts,
meaning that you can experience everything that you normally think of as
a solid world arising and passing instant by instant.
So,
what is there that could last for even the blink of an eye to satisfy?
Nothing!
The point is not to be a gloomy, pessimistic, or nihilistic cynic.
This sort of attitude will not help on the insight front.
What does help is an understanding of something in our relationship to all things.
There is no thought, mind state, or thing that provides lasting satisfaction.
This is not to say that conventional day-to-day wisdom,
such as taking care of ourselves and others, is not important—it very much is.
Remember that
awakening is not a thing or a mind state or a thought,
it is an understanding of perspective
without some separate entity that perceives.
Honesty about the truth of suffering is a relief;
it’s a relief not to pretend away this shared and universal condition.
It can validate the actual experience of our lives
and give us the strength to look into the aspects of life
we typically try to ignore, deny, and avoid.
Even some deep and useful insights
can be distinctly unpleasant, contrary to popular belief!
The third characteristic of:
No-self.
We are caught up in this bizarre habit of assuming that there is
a boss controller entity called “I”.
Yet
the definition of this seemingly permanent thing
must keep constantly changing to maintain the illusion in an impermanent reality.
This takes up a lot of mental time and energy and
is continually frustrating to the mind, as it takes so much constant work and effort.
It is also mentally painful.
This process is called “ignorance”, that is, the illusion of an “I”
which assumes that everything else not conceived as such is “not I”.
This is the illusion of duality,
and the illusion of duality is inherently painful.
There is just something disconcerting about the way the mind must hold itself
and the information it must work to ignore or deny to maintain the sense that
there is a permanent and continuous self.
Maintaining it is painful, and its consequences for reactive mind states
are also painful.
It is a subtle, chronic pain, like a vague nausea, like a mild headache.
It is a distortion of perspective that we have grown so used to
or embedded within that we hardly ever notice it.
The suffering caused by
continually trying to prop up the illusion of duality
is “fundamental suffering”.
This definition of suffering or Dissatisfactoriness
is the one that is most useful for insight practices.
If we finally wake up to this painful background quality
we will effortlessly let it go,
drop it like a hot coal that we have realized we were holding.
It really works like that, and letting go in this way means being free of it.
Investigate your experience and see if you can be open to that
fundamental, story-free, drama-free aspect of your bare experience
that is unsettling, unpleasant, miserable, or dissatisfactory.
It can be found to some degree in every instant
regardless of whether that instant is pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral,
a fact that many initially find surprising, but, as practice goes on,
becomes more and more obvious.
Once you have some mental stability,
you can even examine the bare experience of the sensations
that make up the stories that spin in your mind
and see how unsatisfactory and unsettling it is
to try to pretend they are a self or the property of some imagined self.
If we continue to habituate ourselves to this understanding moment to moment
we may get it into our thick heads and finally awaken.
This misperception of reality,
called ignorance,
then leads to the mind inclining towards pleasant sensations (“attraction”),
away from negative ones (“aversion”),
and regularly tuning out in general (another meaning of the word “ignorance”).
These three basic types of reactions are generally known as
the kilesas in Pali (kleshas in Sanskrit),
or, somewhat dramatically,
the three defilements, corruptions, or mental poisons.
In terms of relative reality,
they can manifest in various emotional “flavors” of greed, hatred, and delusion.
More formally, and following the classification found in the Abhidhamma,
we find ten or fourteen kilesas emphasized as being the most dangerous for us,
with a more complete list being:
greed, wrong view, delusion, hatred, doubt, conceit, restlessness, sloth, worry, torpor, shamelessness, fearlessness (of wrongdoing), envy, and avarice.
This list bears a remarkable resemblance to
the Seven Deadly Sins listed by Pope Gregory I (and later Dante)
as:
lust, gluttony, avarice, sloth, wrath, envy, and pride.
However,
the more fundamental, non-story-based and even non-emotion-based sensations of attraction, aversion, and ignorance
can be found to some degree in every instant,
regardless of whether that instant is overtly pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral,
and regardless of the presence of or lack of the states of mind listed as
defilements.
Buddha’s step by step instructions to obtain Enlightenment
as refined by The Arahant Daneil M. Ingram.
