After some of my initial contemplations on everything is suffering, I reached-out to Mae Neecha via Line with an update. I want to share that conversation as her response — particularly her comment about how our desire to maximize, even when we are already happy, proves dukkha — helped guide my investigation into considering increasingly  subtle forms of suffering.

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Alana:  I have been thinking a lot about this idea everything is suffering, turning it over in my mind and I now see it crystal clear:

I have been on a 5 day modified fast that I get to break tomorrow( it is a program recommended by my Rheumatologist to help modulate the immune system and try and prevent autoimmune issues, I do it every 4-6 weeks now) . Anyway,  I am so excited to eat tomorrow, thinking of how great it will feel. But it makes me see my joy is just a relief from deprivation. Of course everything is suffering if happiness is just a temporary relief from a state of longing/craving/ hunger/ suffering.

I have had more in depth and technical contemplations around this topic, but this one example just drives the point home. Just wanted to share since we talked about this recently.

MN: The other day, I was thinking about how suffering and happiness are different points on the same scale. And how if while you feel happy, it could still be better somehow (if only .. were here, if only there was … instead) that already indicates that it is suffering and not happiness.

Alana: Or how when you feel happy, in the back of your mind, you are always wondering how to preserve that happiness and afraid of losing the situation that makes you happy.

Then there is the poison that losing something that made you happy before creates longing to have it again. Hunger, craving, is dukka.  After all, what is craving but trying to satiate dissatisfaction. Dissatisfaction is the primal state. It is why we become in the first place… Dukka is there from the beginning.

MN: Dukkha is all there is. We just give it different names. But it doesn’t change the fact that it is all the same – dukkha.

Alana: Fair. Part of my efforts to understand were in fact to try out different translations: suffering, dissatisfaction, stress ( I got the most out of that one), hunger, disappointment, etc…

MN: It isn’t supposed to be easy for us to see that everything is suffering. We are born for all the different variations and names of suffering that we think are everlasting happiness. Once we can see that everything is suffering, and that there is nothing other than suffering, that is when we will be on our way out of the cycle of rebirth.

Alana: That is definitely a work in progress!