And Now, the Moment We Have Been Waiting For: Everything is Dukkha Part 1
Ok Dear Reader, here we are, the moment we have all been waiting for, the big conclusion of my everything is dukkha contemplations. In fact, as you have seen from my most recent interruptions — “The Pandemic is Over and Still there is no Shelter to Be Found” — this is hardly a conclusion; my understanding of dukkha has continued to grown and deepen. It has become a tool, a cornerstone, of my practice in a way it really couldn’t before I took the time to deeply consider dukkha’s nature, how it exists as an inevitable feature in the fabric of my life, the world.
Over the next 4 blogs, I will re-publish the write-up I shared with Mae Yo and Mae Neecha, which covered not just the conclusion that everything is dukkha, but my growing understanding of WHY everything is –must be –dukkha. I originally shared all these posts back in summer 2022, when they were fresh. Now though I want to put them back in order, share them in the context of all the work, circumstance and burgeoning understanding that got me there. So, without further ado –a rehash/renewal: Everything is Dukkha
For years, when I considered the first noble truth, I translated it as ‘life entails suffering’. This shaped my view of the world, of practice: Life has joyful parts, but it also has suffering parts. You can’t have one without the other. Case closed. But after reading LP Thoon’s biography, I was struck by how often he said “Everything is suffering”. I had heard this in Phra Arjan Dang’s sermons too. I realized how different these takes were from my own, which basically sees happiness, delight, and joy, abundant in the world, just with a “side” of suffering. I asked Mae Neecha about it and she said:
” Happiness is relief from suffering, or just less suffering. They are on different sides of the same scale… the scale of suffering. Just like how hot and cold are on opposite ends of the same temperature scale. Or how 0 and 100 are on opposite ends of a number scale.”
- Enjoyment is just the temporary relief of suffering: I was on a 5 day fast (recommended by my doctor), looking forward to getting to finally eat the next day, and I realized that pleasure was just a relief of deprivation. If I wasn’t already hungry –if suffering wasn’t a preexisting state — there wouldn’t have been extreme delight at the prospect of eating. This is true not just of physical needs/comfort, but of non-physical craving as well. I am happy to have found a husband only because of the pre-existing husband shaped hole in my heart. I was already uncomfortable, I already felt something missing.
The truth is hunger, craving, these are uncomfortable states –dukkha in and of themselves. If they weren’t we wouldn’t always be running around, exerting so much energy trying to ‘solve’ them. Relief of hunger, and the ensuing sensation of relief — which we register as happiness — is just the temporary dampening of our hunger (after all, I get hungry again soon after I eat. Thanks impermanence.) Dukkha is the foundational state. All we need to do is wait for any comforts, any sense of fullness, to pass and we return to the base state of dukkha.
- We are never actually satisfied/there is no satisfaction to be had in this world: When I sent a short Line to Mae Neecha a ways back, with a bit about my progress on this everything is suffering topic, part of her reply made me start thinking of a different angle. She said, “if while you feel happy, it could still be better somehow (if only _were here, if only there was_instead) that already indicates it is suffering not happiness.” This got me to begin considering a different definition for dukkha — ‘dissatisfaction/not satisfactory’; no matter how much I am enjoying something, in the back of my mind I am always thinking of the thing that could make it better, or the way to repeat it, or how to enjoy it for longer. Implicit in that thinking is a basic truth — the thing I am enjoying is not satisfactory. If it really were satisfactory, I wouldn’t be trying to change it. If it really were satisfactory, I wouldn’t need to find a way to prolong or repeat it. I would simply be satisfied with what it was. But every single vacation I have ever been on, no matter how magical, left me wanting more vacation time. Never have I finished a trip and said, that is it –I never need to travel again. That was perfect, I wouldn’t have changed a thing. I always want more/different. We are born into this world desiring satisfaction. We are born to satisfy desire. But this is impossible because impermanence dictates any delight we get is fleeting. So yes, we can enjoy a trip, we can momentarily fulfill our desire to travel or see a beautiful place, but there is no endurance in that delight. Instead, like the hit of a drug, the tiniest bit of enjoyment leaves us craving for more –worse, it feeds the hope that we can have more/better — and I am already calculating and planning and efforting my next trip. Why? Cause everything in this world is unsatisfactory i.e. dukkha.
- If you have to pick your poison then you get poison either way. I was dragging myself out of bed for an early workout. I didn’t feel like working out, I don’t really enjoy the process, but I do it to try and stay healthy. I hedge, trying to endure what I see as the smaller suffering of working out now to stave off the bigger suffering –heart disease — that can come later from a sedentary life. Or, another example: I was sitting at a restaurant the other night, a toddler next to me screaming. I considered my options, moving to a table closer to road noise or staying with the screaming child. I moved, trading off what I considered the greater discomfort for the lesser discomfort.
The truth is, no situation is perfect, there are always these compromises, trade-offs. The reason is that there is always dukkha, just in different shapes (toddler versus road) and in different degrees (workout versus heart attack). I like to think to myself, “yes, life entails suffering, but I got this, I can try and control my life, my fate, by picking the suffering I prefer, that I think I can live with.” Of course, there is no guarantee I can get my wish –that workouts will stave off heart disease. There is no guarantee that even if I do get the ‘lesser evil’ it really IS the lesser evil — traffic noise may annoy me less than a toddler, but road smog can irritate my asthma. The only real guarantee is that when you have to pick your poison you get poison –dukkha — either way, so of course everything must be dukkha. In fact, even the act of picking my poison –the effort, the sense of uncertainty — is in and of itself dukkha. So I guess I get a dukkha shot with a dukkha chaser.
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If a little less sucky feels like sukkha, I must be livin’ in a dukkha world. Just as I started my dukkha contemplations, Eric began pissing blood. Blood in urine is presumed cancer till proven otherwise, so I was deeply afraid (dukkha). A CT scan showed kidney stones and the doctor recommended surgery to remove them, but no sign of cancer. Suddenly I was overwhelmingly relieved –my mind registered this less bad news as sukkha even though, lets face it, needing surgery is certainly not good news. Happiness in this case was just less suffering, less of a bad outcome than I had feared.
The problem with this situation is that in order to really feel happy, we are required to know sad; any sukkha I experience is really relative to the dukkha I suffered before/after it. The pandemic isolation is another perfect example: For almost a year, Eric and I remained quite locked down. We avoided any indoor activities, even having groceries delivered. I was so lonely during that time, I longed for a return to ‘normality’, to the simplest things I had known and done before. After I got vaccinated, my first trip to Whole Foods felt like ecstasy, but I needed the extreme loss and isolation of my long lockdown to have the extreme joy of that first trip to the store.
We have already established that the world is unsatisfactory, continually stressful, that dukkha is in fact the pre-existing/foundational state. Which means that it can’t be that ‘suffering is just less happiness’ –life doesn’t bear this out: I would never say my dad’s death, or my move to NY, or my fear of Eric having cancer is ‘less happiness’. So it must be that happiness is just less suffering. Everything is just more or less dukkha.
- Comparison is the thief of joy (i.e even a little less sukkha feels like dukkha, which means I live in a super sucky world) . Throughout most of my life, a trip to Whole Foods was just a chore, but after my looooonnnnggg lockdown, my first Whole Foods adventure was a slice of heaven. With each subsequent shopping trip, as I returned to more and more pre-pandemic activities, my delight waned, until a few weeks later when the grocery store became just another chore again. The reason for this loss of enjoyment in the same exact activity is that enjoyment is not in the activity, an object, another person or a situation. Enjoyment exists in my heart. And my heart is always changing, judging what meets the threshold of enjoyment using past experiences and my own fantasies as a benchmark. So Whole Foods may have been pinnacle joy at one point, but once I had started doing more and more public stuff again, including museums and outdoor concerts –which I like way more than the store– Whole Foods felt lackluster and boring.
The problem is that if what I find to bring me joy is relative, based on standards derived from past benchmarks, I need to at least maintain the same “level” of everything, preferably “level-up” to feel a sense of sukkha. Eric often reflects on this with coffee drinking: Back when he started drinking coffee, a cup of joe from anywhere would do. But over time his tastes became more refined and he needed finer and finer roasts to drink. Before it was easy, everyplace has a gas station to grab a coffee, but once it had to be fancy we had to hunt down a rarefied coffee shop each AM. And when there really is no choice but the gas station, Eric suffers, finds it bitter and terrible on his new pallet even though back in the day gas station coffee was the norm. In other words –the very things that cause momentary happiness — like a fine cup of coffee– end up causing even more dukkha, dukkha to maintain according to that standard, dukkha to preserve/repeat and, worst of all, dukkha when you have to suffer something lesser. And the higher you go, the more there is in the world that is ‘lesser’ and the harder it becomes to find what is equal or greater than that super fine thing you are used to. Today’s joy becomes both tomorrow’s taskmaster and joykill, which makes every bit of joy I feel the seed of later dukkha.
- Entropy is the law of the cosmos and entropy makes life HARD: I was reading an article that was explaining the second law of thermodynamics, entropy. To illustrate the concept in simple terms there were 2 little pictures embedded in the text: The first was a wall of bricks and then an arrow, labeled “time”, that pointed to a disorganized pile of bricks. In a closed system, what is organized and orderly becomes less organized and orderly over time. In the second picture there was a jumbled pile of disorganized bricks and an arrow, labeled “work”, that pointed to a constructed wall of bricks. In an open system, things can move from disordered to more ordered, but only with the introduction of energy, work.
A few days later I was shaping my eyebrows, frustrated at how quickly they grow, at the time, and painful plucks, and effort it takes to keep them in a particular shape and I realized entropy rules my life, rules this world, and it makes everything so damn hard. Left alone, buildings will crumble, eyebrows will grow bushy, rooms become dirty, bodies and objects will decay. Orderly arrangements of 4es will naturally shift, eventually disaggregating altogether. To build an orderly state, to maintain that state — even just temporarily — in the face of entropy (aka anatta) requires work, it requires effort. This effortfulness, this continual need to exert energy to obtain and maintain, this is the cause of dukkha and it is literally a consequence of the law of the universe. Simply trying to live in this world, at the most basic level trying to provide requisites to a body, to acquire things and maintain them, requires herculean, regular, daily effort, not to mention overwhelming, omni-present risk (thanks Covid for making this one so obvious). For all that effort, all we buy is a little time because ultimately the law of impermanence reigns supreme. What is hard is dukkha and life in this world is hard, therefore life is dukkha.
This is already a lot to read and consider so more examples to come next week…to be continued…
