Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. A Tibetan folk story anchors this 74.5-minute session: a monk instructs an overwhelmed woman to add chickens, a goat, and a cow to her crowded home, until removing them makes the original chaos feel like paradise — illustrating how pleasure and pain depend entirely on shifting reference points. Ven Jampa Gendun opens by completing his analysis of the five hindrances, focusing on doubt and indecisiveness as the ego’s refusal to commit, before turning to the session’s central subject: the three types of dissatisfactoriness. These range from obvious physical and mental pain, to the subtler suffering of change (warmth at a fire that slowly becomes unbearable heat), to the pervasive burden of ego — the ceaseless, exhausting work of self-maintenance. Examining suffering, he argues, is not pessimism but the only way to uncover peace as the mind’s natural state.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 1987 11 20 3 P A P.mp3
UUID: 2e127cb9-02d0-4ffe-8f17-73b8d056888b
Teacher: Ven Jampa Gendun
Collection: Three Principle Aspects of the Path 1987-1988 (Ven Jampa Gendun)
Date: 1987-11-20
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 74.5 minutes
Words: ~8,467
Responsibility, anxiety, worry, taken as one. Sloth and torpor taken as one, that’s four. And then the fifth one, which we haven’t discussed yet, doubt and indecisiveness. It should become apparent that these are the qualities or negative states which are arising in our everyday life again and again and they inhibit, act as a hindrance to positive states, obviously to desirable states, love, wisdom, confidence. So as we work on these inner meditation, there will be a carryover into our everyday life and as I’ve tried to point out there is really no difference between the process of meditation and the process of how we deal with our everyday life and we shouldn’t think that somehow the two are divided. Meditation becomes like a laboratory really a concentrated experience of what we should be experiencing in our everyday life and it gives us a chance to be very aware and to work on our problems and we can work on these five hindrances.
So it’s the absence of these five hindrances which constitutes a meditative state which allows for the mind to be transformed. When these are present the mind is not particularly suitable, in a suitable state to really make much progress. Likewise when these five states are desire, hatred, restlessness, anxiety, are present in our everyday life, There’s no possibility for real communication for example of opening to situations. So the idea of the communication, opening to situations in meditation are just three modes of the same state. And when we’re sitting down we call it meditation but we shouldn’t confine our idea of meditation to particularly sitting postures.
It’s a way of life, it’s a lifestyle of thinking. So we’re talking about this fifth hindrance to this particular lifestyle that is doubt and indecisiveness. Doubt, these are taken as one, they’re kind of a complementary pair that always usually accompany one another to go together. Notice we don’t have any confidence in what we’re doing particularly. We haven’t defined our goals.
For example, in meditative practice we don’t have particular confidence that this method is going to really get us anywhere. We aren’t sure that there are actually higher states to be attained and we haven’t really come to, there’s no determination, there’s no commitment to the process. Of course we’re not sure, we haven’t defined for ourselves exactly what we’re doing and what is the nature of our method. We only believe half heartedly more or less in what we’re doing. There’s no real commitment to the process.
So there’s this confusion, doubt and the quality of indecisiveness. This plagues many people. And one that I think Gampopa said in the Jewel Ornament of Liberation that from his point of view that the essence of cyclic existence or we just say suffering existence is conflicting emotions. We’re never quite sure what to do. We’re drawn in two directions at the same time and this is the quality of indecisiveness, an unwillingness or inability to think things through clearly to some kind of conclusion.
We don’t want to think things through clearly to some conclusion because if we do that we’re going to have to act or we’re going to see ourselves for the hypocrites that we really are. We’d have to readjust our values that perhaps isn’t really what we want after all. This goal that we’ve decided upon, maybe there’s something else. We don’t want to commit ourselves and There’s a sense of always wanting to exist in potential. The act is quite simple.
The commitment to what’s called the objective reality. The act is quite simple but we always want to maintain some ambivalence, some potential that this isn’t quite what I want to do. I’m doing this for such and such a reason, but if I really did what I wanted to do then I wouldn’t act this way. We don’t want to take responsibility for our actions in other words. The ego wants to maintain some sense of omnipotence that it can actually do anything.
But once we actually mature and come to the realization that we do have real limits, that we have to take into consideration how we deal with situations, then we have to outgrow the sense of our own omnipotence and actually begin to work with who we really are and make decisions and be willing to follow through with those decisions even though we know we may make mistakes. If we’re afraid of making mistakes, if we’re afraid of seeing that we are not omnipotent then we’re always going to remain in potential, we’re always going to remain indecisive, never making any real commitments. So in meditation we’re not really making any commitments to our meditation because of the feeling of possible failure, a feeling of lack of self confidence that we probably don’t have quite what it takes, whatever that is, to achieve these higher states that we’ve been hearing about and possibly other people all around us are achieving, but for some reason we don’t feel that we can do it. So we don’t make the commitment in order to avoid confronting failure. So we make the determination to get on with our meditation, in other words to make the effort to really meditate, to really develop some self discipline in a healthy sense to make the effort.
So these are the faults, the hindrances of doubt and indecisiveness. Doubt where we aren’t clear about our goals, we aren’t clear about our methods, we aren’t clear about whether we should be doing this or not. And indecisiveness where we aren’t willing to or have an inability to think things through, to think what are our objectives. Aren’t willing to make any commitment, come to any conclusions. We want to always remain in potential without having to actually realize our possible difficulties.
We don’t want to admit mistakes, our limitations, we don’t want to deal with reality. So these are hindrances which arise in our meditation and obviously they begin to arise in our everyday life. So next time we’ll begin to talk about how the actual methods to deal with these five hindrances, how to begin to work them within your meditation and therefore how to deal with them in your everyday life. So we’ll meditate the mindfulness of breathing. We go for refuge to the Buddha and the Dharma and the Sangha.
It’s said that two causes are going for refuge. The first is fear and the second is faith. Generally we think of fear as rather a negative, something which is undesirable, no positive qualities about it. But there are two different fears which we can talk about. One is a fear which is based on reason and a fear which is based on mistaken ideas, mistaken emotions.
Obviously the latter type of fear is to be gotten rid of. It’s a hindrance, it’s a source of suffering. But a fear based on reason, that is a rational fear, It can prove very useful in our lives. It can be a spur to us along the path. That’s a motivating force.
So this fear which is the basis, one of the two causes for going for refuge, is a fear of, as we talked about last week, were talking about cyclic existence, compulsive, reoccurring patterns, basically suffering, dissatisfaction, frustration, disappointment, possible continuation for an infinite time of such patterns without end. We talked about the nature of what we call rebirth, the mind being re associated with the subtle mind especially, being re associated with particular energy patterns which we call body. The compulsive nature of this that we have is involuntary. We have no control over it. It’s completely out of our control.
And that in the future not only will we maintain these same reoccurring compulsive patterns, but there’s an excellent probability that these patterns could be more dissatisfactory than they are at present, that there are infinitely greater types of suffering patterns which we could grasp onto in the future, that we are creating the causes for such patterns even today. You’ve created the causes for such types of patterns, such types of suffering. You know, the paranoia aroused through fear and hate, which is characteristic of a hell being, which is experienced as unremitting mental and physical pain, where the complete environment in your own body and mind seem to turn against you, and the fear and the loss and confusion and the pain which accompany that. We’ve created the cause for such a type of experience today. Possibly there’s no doubt about it.
And that there’s no reason why we can’t experience the fruit of this action that we’ve created today and sometime in the future. So thinking in this way that we are creating the causes for future suffering, future dissatisfactory state, then it’s quite reasonable to fear such possibilities actually coming about. The possibilities of future suffering is quite real and it’s quite reasonable to have such apprehension you might say or some fear, anxiety about such things. So it’s like a healthy fear which motivates us, gets us unstuck from thinking things are always going to become better, this unreasonable optimism that we might have that things are going to get better, they will get better or worse depending upon if we create the causes for things to get better or worse. And the fact is, generally, for those who are unaware and unmindful of their actions, we are creating the causes for things to get worse.
That seems to be the nature of our present situation. Through mindfulness and awareness, we can begin to create the causes for future happiness, and we generate the motivation for doing this through the fear of future suffering. This is one of the two causes for going for refuge, the fear of future suffering. And maybe I’ll talk about the second next week. The second cause going for refuge, faith in the Three Jewels that you’re able to eliminate the fear which we have generated from the first cause.
But we’re talking about the three principal aspects of the path. By Tsongkhapa, the fourteenth century yogi master of Tibet who was the founder of the Gelug sect. So he set out the path, said there were three principal aspects to it and by path we mean the method which takes us from ordinary consciousness to the goal of enlightenment. We are at where we are now and we have a destination. The way we get to that destination that is enlightenment is by traveling a path.
A path is actually a consciousness. So there are three types or three principal aspects to this consciousness or three consciousness that we should cultivate in arriving at our destination. So this was the determination to change. That’s the first path. Second was opening to others.
And the third was seeing things how they actually are, the three principal aspects of the path. Through these we cultivate all the necessary causes and conditions to take ourselves from our ordinary states of suffering to states where our own purposes are fulfilled in attaining peace, but also where we’re having the necessary skill and means in order to benefit others, the optimum state of being which we take as Buddha. That’s our paradigm, that’s our goal. So we’re talking about these three principal aspects. Cultivating the consciousnesses necessary to develop the first aspect, determination to change, to grow, this is quite often simply translated as renunciation.
I like this way of putting a little bit better determination to go. We were talking about there are four steps or four reverses. The first was appreciating who we are, the very fact of getting in touch with our Buddha nature, that is an awareness of it, realizing that we are potential, that we aren’t stuck with this negative attitude that we have, it’s merely a self image that we’re clinging to, this isn’t an actual fact who we are, that we have unlimited potential, and that we have all the necessary conditions, both external and internal, to actualize this potential. That we have healthy, sound bodies and minds, that we have all the material needs, that we live in a free country, that we have met the dharma, the necessary means to actualize the potentials. We have everything that we need.
The only thing that’s lacking is effort. So we have to see that we have everything that we need. There’s nothing outside of ourselves that we lack. We have to develop the motivation, the determination to actualize this potential, to make use of the conditions that we know we have once we begin to appreciate them. Therefore, we begin to see the fact that this chance, this possibility of real change, really developing some sanity, some spontaneous love and compassion, some wisdom, some happiness and joy in our lives isn’t going to last forever.
It’s definite that we’re going to die, and we don’t know when. We think we’re going to die in some undistant vague for future, but that’s unreasonable. It’s a mistaken emotion. We could die tomorrow. It’s uncertain.
We don’t know. And at the time of our death, what is going to be of any benefit to us if in fact we’re going to take rebirth? And we talked a little bit about rebirth. If we are going to take rebirth then it places a tremendous burden upon us. I hear people talking about well I came to earth in this life because I had a specific lesson to learn.
We’re not on any particular mission. As I mentioned last week when I made a quote, we’re not forced to gain enlightenment. We can go through this process infinitely, an infinite number of times. There’s nothing which is controlling this process aside from cause and effect. And if we do not create the causes to finally be rid of this situation that we’re in, what we call samsaric existence, the unsatisfactory compulsive reoccurring patterns of taking rebirth again and again, there’s no reason that why we’re ever going to be rid of it.
The only way we’re going to be rid of this situation is by developing our minds. The only way we’re ever going to be happy is by developing our minds. The only way we’re going to ever really be loving, compassionate, spontaneous is by developing our minds. The only way we’re ever going to stop suffering is by developing our mind. We have an opportunity to develop our minds now, but that opportunity isn’t going to last forever.
It’s certain that we’re going to die. It’s uncertain when you’re going to die, and the only thing which is of any benefit at that moment is how much we’ve developed our mind. You know, our loved ones who we love and love us, our possessions which we have spent so much effort gathering together, and even our own body which we take such good care of, giving the best of everything. At that moment, I really have no benefit. It is only how much we’ve developed our mind which will benefit us at that particular moment, at that death moment.
So what do we take with us? We take with us our mental development and our karma and simply actions that we’ve created, the imprint, the tendencies, the dispositions that we’ve left in our mind stream, on our subtle energy, which is all that goes to the future life. You know, Jampa, this monk, he’s finished. He’s gone. Something is going through.
There’s a tendency. Some patterns will go on. Some sort of impressions made on the subtle consciousness, on the subtle energy. And these will again grasp to another types of pattern, grosser patterns, another body, grosser states of consciousness, and they will act out these tendencies. These tendencies may be loving tendencies.
They may be hateful tendencies, desirous tendencies, opening tendencies. Whatever I cultivate in this life, this is that the fruit I’m going to I’m going to be experiencing in the future. Whatever tendencies, whatever imprints I’m making now, this is what we’re carrying to the future life. So this was the fourth this was the third of the four these four reverses. First is considering our chance to change.
The second was the effect of death. The third was karma, the law of cause and effect. Now we’re discussing we began discussing last week the fourth aspect that is the suffering nature of cyclic existence. We talked about cyclic existence and we’re trying to get some feeling for what we mean when we say that. To get the feeling how we’re driven, that we have no freedom, no choice.
If there’s no awareness there’s no freedom, there’s no choice. There’s no mindfulness. We’re just very much like animals. Someone pushes our button and we react with a particular program. We have a body and mind, mentality, materiality which is programmed to react.
We meet specific conditions and we react. We plug in a program we talked about the example of a woman walking down the street and a man crosses over to the street and interplay of programs which is taking place if there’s no awareness, if there’s no mindfulness, and the suffering which ensues if there’s no awareness, if there’s no mindfulness. This compulsive pattern being driven by our tendencies, by karma, our delusions, hatred, desire, jealousy, pride, and all these we have no freedom, no choice, and the only result of being driven in such a way is suffering. So we begin to talk about suffering. This is what we’re going to talk about tonight.
A quotation by Shāntarakshita, who was the head of the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order, an English monk. Why do we have to talk about suffering? Does Buddhism place so much emphasis on suffering? Most people don’t particularly like to hear about suffering. If one is unhappy, one wants to know the reason why, but it never occurs to one to ask why one is happy.
It is therefore unhappiness rather than happiness that causes us to reflect upon our condition. It is unhappiness that makes us think. I know Buddhism, he used to say, he’s a time master, whenever we become happier our mind becomes superficial. It’s only when we’re suffering or aware of suffering that our mind becomes profound, that it begins to think deeply about the situation that we’re in, about things in general, about life. So it’s necessary to think about suffering, to think about life, to think in order to understand ourselves a little bit better, in order to go beyond suffering ultimately.
So the first teaching that Buddha Śākyamūni gave upon attaining enlightenment after forty nine days at Sarnath at Deer Park was the teaching of the four noble truths. The four noble truths, true sufferings, true sources of sufferings, true cessation of sufferings, and true paths to the cessation of sufferings. So among these, the very first teaching they gave was the first noble truth, that is the teachings on true suffering or the truth of suffering. So it’s our own immediate experience. It’s not theoretic.
We can’t argue about it. There’s little intellectualization that can go on about it. We experience suffering. It’s a fact. It’s our own immediate experience.
So by, you know, by becoming aware of it, by acknowledging it, we are moved to begin to investigate it. By becoming aware of it, we’ll begin to it, perhaps to do something about it. When for example we read the lives of some of the greatest teachers and practitioners of Buddhism, the mahasiddhas, time after time we see them at the end of their rope, razor at their throats, on the verge of suicide and suffering intensely with the endless quality of this question of the meaning of life in a state of cataclysmic nihilism. Then a teacher appears and says, Perhaps the Dharma can help you. This seems to be the repeated theme that constantly is going on with people who have the courage to ask the question and acknowledge their own suffering.
The life histories of all the religious leaders have pointed to this same kind of crisis, that there is a flash point of suffering and because of that there is an opening up to some quality of a path, some personal development in their lives and beyond that there develops some usefulness to other people. So it’s not that we don’t need any more suffering. We’ve had enough suffering. We’ve all experienced enough suffering and as T. S.
Eliot says, We have all had the experience, but we missed the lesson. So we have to begin to use our experience of suffering to learn and begin to draw lessons out of them. Then they become meaningful, Otherwise, we’ve suffered for nothing and we don’t want to suffer. By drawing on our past experience of suffering, by investigating our suffering, we can develop the skillful means. We can have insights into the nature of suffering and develop the skillful means whereby to begin to relate with the world in a way which ultimately will lessen our will temporarily lessen our suffering and will ultimately take us be able to transcend suffering.
There are two basic ways we can begin to relate with suffering. We can see suffering as an obstruction, as a hindrance to our life, that pain difficulties are something to be overcome, as some sort of hindrance, that you didn’t get it right, but if I can get it right, then it’s going to be okay. Something went wrong or left and therefore I’m suffering. We can sort of confront suffering that way, takes attitude to suffering that way. And the other is that another way or approach to seeing suffering is that it gives us a glimpse of what needs to be worked on.
Just as when we’re sick, we have some pain, it’s a sign that there’s some imperfection in our body, that there’s something wrong with our body. It’s a signal to us that there’s something wrong. Likewise, suffering can be seen as a signal that there’s something spiritually wrong, if you like, or psychologically wrong. And it gives us an opportunity to see what needs to be worked on, what needs to be done next. For example, a man and a woman, a couple they break up.
It’s a very painful experience and one of them is very depressed quite naturally. So how can they react to that depression, that pain? They can see the pain as something obstructing their happiness, which needs to be removed, and therefore they immediately enter into a new relationship, which removes that pain, depression. Or they can see the depression, that the pain as a symptom of some basic unskillful way of relating. Perhaps it could give them some depth into understanding into the qualities of impermanence in relationships, transitoriness, maybe attachment.
It could give them in one case, it’s simply something to be eliminated. In the other, it becomes a signal, it becomes a method for them to gain some insight into the nature of their situation, the nature of transitoriness of relationships, into the nature, the pain of attachment, and how it’s operating in their lives, and the consequences of attachment. So in one way, it simply perpetuates itself and it’s going to be repeated again and again and again. But with awareness, with the willingness to acknowledge it and become aware of it and investigate it, it becomes a source of insight. Helps to have a liberating quality.
You can begin to see what needs to be worked on. Basically when we talk about suffering, what needs to be worked on is the way we relate with what are called the three marks of existence. The three marks of ordinary existence or conditioned existence, existence conditioned by karma, by actions and afflicting emotions, afflicting emotions such as desire, hatred, jealousy, but basically we’re talking about ignorance stemming from actions and existence stemming from ignorance as this motivating force. So the three marks of such a type of existence is dissatisfactoriness, impermanence, and selflessness. So when we talk about suffering, the first noble truth, true sufferings, we’re talking about these three marks of existence.
This was the first teaching that Śākyamūni Buddha gave. So it’s very much how we relate to these three marks, how skillfully we relate to these three marks, these three marks of dissatisfactoriness, impermanence, no-self determines very much the quality of our lives, much we’re going to suffer, how we’re going to deal realistically with situations. In modern terms we can say it very much determines how neurotic we might be, what type of psychopathology we might experience. That’s what they’re talking about here. The various forms that relate into these three marks.
There are those forms that take the root as the acknowledgment and then a fear and defense against the notion of impermanence and death. This is one form of psychopathology. Psychopathology. There are those who have a poignant and even a premature understanding and acknowledgment of the extent of suffering going on in their lives. And there are those who have some frightened awareness and confusion about the notion of no real self being the center of the whole thing.
So how we relate with these three marks of existence is going to determine the quality of our life, ultimately whether we’re going to suffer or not. As I said, quite often Buddhism is criticized as being pessimistic, as being negative, looking at the dark side of things. Can you see back there? Would you like the light on? Is it too dark?
No? K. So, you know, why doesn’t Buddhism talk about happiness? Why does it always talk about suffering? It’s always emphasizing suffering.
If we begin to understand what Buddhism is talking about when they say nirvana or peace, The natural state of the mind is peace. The natural state of the mind is nirvana. We don’t need to gain any positive qualities in that respect. There’s nothing, no type of happiness that we need to add to our own mind. What we have to do is simply eliminate suffering from our mind.
That is, we simply have to eliminate the causes of suffering from our mind, and there is peace already there. It’s the natural state of the mind. We don’t have to construct a peace. It’s naturally there. It’s been there from the beginning of this time, but it’s being hindered, it’s being interfered with, it’s being disturbed by the causes of suffering, the afflictive emotion.
So therefore, we we emphasize the elimination of suffering because we don’t need to construct peace, we just need to eliminate suffering, and peace is there. So to understand suffering is to begin to understand our own mind, our own self, And to understand ourselves is to finally begin to realize our happiness. So he’s talking about this fact of this quality that we have a peace, the natural state of our mind is at peace, it’s an unconditioned state, that we don’t have to reach out for it, we don’t have to struggle for it, we simply have to remove the obstacles to its actualization, Simply have to remove the the the adventitious, the temporary defilement, the temporary causes which are disturbing this natural state of peace, are more or obscuring it, preventing our awareness of it. Man does not have to reach out, need not make effort towards happiness because its fundamental nature is just that, it is happiness itself. Were it otherwise and a man had to struggle for its attainment, it would not be true happiness because whatever is attained can be lost again.
Such a contrived happiness would be conditional upon circumstances and thus ever be fragile and relative thing in which the individual will not be truly free but always tied to their circumstances. There is a happiness which is not fragile and does not limit the individual because it is absolute and unconditional. It arises as soon as the conflict of the mind is resolved. Nothing else is required. The conflict in the mind merely obscures the state of bliss which is perfect silence and ever there deep within ourselves.
Unfortunately, we do not heed it and not even aware of its existence due to a noisy mind which is never entirely still. So there is only one thing to do and that is to consider with a view to its understanding suffering. Happiness is a byproduct of something else, the elimination of suffering, which comes only through self knowing. This is why it has been said that the highest path to knowledge is this via negativa and why the deepest thinkers throughout time have never admonished be happy, but instead know thyself. Never work diligently towards happiness but instead work diligently towards your own deliverance from suffering.
Ever emphasizing the negative aspect of removing obstacles defined in oneself. Happiness is not an attribute of one’s individuality, it is oneself. Therefore one does not have to go beyond oneself. One does not need anything external. It is enough to simply find oneself.
So to eliminate suffering is to find peace, to find nirvana, which was the third noble truth, the cessation of suffering. There’s said to be four seals of a Buddhist doctrine. Any doctrine which has any of these four seals is said to be in accordance with Buddhist doctrine. And the third of these four seals is that nirvana is peace, beyond suffering is peace. And this peace is a natural state within our own mind.
But first we have to recognize suffering as suffering, recognizing suffering and we go on to abandon the causes of suffering. We begin to investigate what are the causes to abandon the causes of suffering. In order to bring that about, we employ the methods of the path whereby we can begin to abandon the causes of suffering. But in the beginning we have to understand the extent and nature of suffering within our own lives to develop this motivation to go beyond it and finally be rid of it, to actually put in effect the methods for it which will finally eliminate the suffering whereby we can find peace. So the first of the three marks is dissatisfactoriness, suffering, dissatisfactoriness.
It says three times, dissatisfactoriness of pain, dissatisfactoriness of change and pervasive compositional dissatisfactoriness. Three types of dissatisfactoriness that we can investigate. So the first is dissatisfactoriness of pain. This is what we usually mean when we say suffering.
We’re simply talking about feelings. There is dissatisfactory physical and mental feelings. And then we have sicknesses, aches and pains, headaches, stomachaches, stubbed toes, angry welts, bites, scratches, itchy, whatever. These are all just occasions of the dissatisfactoriness of physical pain. Then there is mental pain, frustration, disappointment, discontentment.
Generally, can say being separated from objects that we desire, coming in contact with objects that we don’t desire to become in contact with, not gaining the happiness that we want very generally. All the types of various mental frustrations and discontentments that we go through every day of our lives. There’s almost always some type of feeling of dissatisfactor that’s occurring in some mild form or not, whether it’s just simply feeling cold or hungry or thirsty feeling uneasy about something, feeling bored. So we begin to get a sense of the extensiveness of suffering in our lives, but this in itself is not enough. We can begin to investigate the very nature of pleasure and pain.
Why you know, when we talk when we talk about contaminated pleasure, contaminated pleasure, why is it why do we call it contaminated? Why is the pleasure that we generally experience, why is it dissatisfactory? It’s okay, doesn’t it? It seems pleasurable enough. But if we look into the question, the nature of pain and pleasure, we see that all our pleasure and pain are inextricably bound together in relationship to one another.
Our concept dependent upon memories, tendencies, our attention, the focus of our attention. The question of pleasure and pain is very much bound up with memory, you know, particularly dispositions or patterns. You know, we talk about, for example, someone comes up to an idiot, is sitting in a corner and he’s hitting himself over the head with a hammer over and over again. And the man walks up and he looks and he’s he’s very he’s very startled. He he stares at him and he said, know, why are you hitting yourself?
It’s determined upon what we remember as being dissatisfactory. The relationship with the same situation, the same object, the same person, pleasure and pain. You know, there’s a story about this story that took place in Tibet, and woman in Tibetans and most eastern countries have extended families where within the small home there might be the grandparents on both the mother and the father’s side and the cousins and uncles and the children and grandchildren all living in the same dwelling. And one day this peasant woman, she couldn’t handle it anymore. She just was freaking out on her home situation, and she was just running down the street, just running away, this lama, let’s say a monk, a very, you know, wise monk, He saw her and he saw that she was in difficulty, that she was unhappy.
He said, wait, wait, come here, and so the woman stopped and she, of course, had great respect for this wise man, this this Lama, and she came over and said, well, you know, what’s the problem? What’s wrong? She says, oh, Lama, I can’t I can’t stand it any longer at my house. It’s it’s just too much. I’ve got here’s my husband and his parents and and his cousin and their parents and my uncle and then my grandfather and his and their children and my cousin and then inside, and and I can’t stand it.
It’s too noisy. I don’t have any privacy. I can’t the children running around. Everything smells, and it’s I can’t stand it in on them. He said, I’m I’m I’m leaving home, she said.
I can’t I I have to get away. I’m freaking out. He said, no. No. No.
It’s okay. It’s okay. Don’t worry. Everything’s gonna be alright. He said the lama said to the woman, do you have any chicken?
And she said, yeah. Well, we have chicken. Yes. Yes. And, Lama, I want you to take those chickens and put them in the house.
And so she, you know, she had some faith in this in this person’s judgment that she’s going to try. I’ll try that. So she went home and she put, you know, all the chickens inside the house, you know, there’s chickens running around crowing and and the droppings are all over the floor, and then they’re up on the rafters flying around, and then she came and then things are getting worse and worse, And she’s running out, and she’s and Lama, she’s running away. Stop. Stop.
She says, come. Come. Come. She said, what’s the matter? She said, I can’t stand it.
Things are worse now than they were, you know, with the chickens and and the feathers flying around and the noise and the smell. Things are worse. They said, don’t worry about it. Gonna be okay. He says, do you have a goat?
Yeah. Yeah. I have a goat. Put the goat in there. Okay.
She had it on her face. So she went back, and she put the goat in the house. Now now the goat is eating the mattress, and then the goat droppings all over the floor, there’s baah baah baah all day long, and and things are getting worse. The smell is getting worse. It’s getting noisier and more confusing.
And she again, she starts running away, and, again, the Lama calls her over to him. He said he said, I can’t stand anymore, Lama. He said, no. No. It’s gonna be okay.
It’s gonna be okay. Do you have a cow? Yeah. I have a cow. He said, okay.
Put the cow in the house. Just trust me. Trust me. So she said, okay. So she went home and she put the cow in the house.
And now there’s, you know, like, the middle of the night, was coming and waking everybody in the house and then the big, what do you call them, cow patties all over the floor, and it’s fleas and the flies and the smell and the stench and the and the urine flowing on the ground on the on the floor, and it’s getting she just freaks out. She can’t stand. She goes running, screaming down the street crying, and the Lama says, come, come, no, and she keeps on running. No. Stop.
Stop. Come. Come. Come. So finally, she drags through her great face that she has in this wise man.
She she stops, and she comes over to him and says, she says, I can’t stand anymore. Don’t don’t ask me to do anything I if I’m finished, I have to leave home. It’s just too much. I can’t stand it one more moment. And he said, okay.
Now relax. Alright. I want you to go home and take the cow out of the house. Okay. I’ll try that.
So she goes back home, and she takes the cow out of the house. And then the next day, he sees the woman walking along. And he says, how is it now? He says, oh, it’s a little better than it was. She says, okay.
That’s good. That’s good. Now take the goat out of the house. I said, okay. So he goes in that night and takes the goat out.
And, again, the next day, the lama sees her, and and he asked her, how is it now? Oh, it’s getting much better now. You know, it’s it’s not as noisy or it’s not as smelly as it used to be. And it’s okay. You know, things are getting better.
I want you to take all the chickens out of the house. Okay. I’ll try that. She goes home, and she takes all all the chickens out of the house. And the next day, she the Lama sees her smiling smiling and walking down the street, you know, seems to quite happy.
So how are things going? And she says, oh, Lama thinks it’s so wonderful now. You know, it’s so clean and quiet in the house, and it’s no smell. I don’t know why I ever wanted to leave home in the first place. So the moral of that story is the same situation, right, as when she started, as when she was freaking out.
She couldn’t stand at home because of the confusion, but now her point of reference has changed of what she considers cleanliness, what she considers confusion, what she considers impossible situation that she can’t endure. Her her her reference, her memory, what what is she using? This so we we can see how pleasure and pain are bound up with one another. Whatever we use as our reference can determine what we consider pleasure. What we use as a reference of pain determines our pleasure.
So any type of experience within cyclic existence demands that we have experienced pain. We cannot have pleasure without pain. This is why pleasure within cyclic existence is dissatisfactory because it always must be accompanied by pain. Otherwise, we have no way to conceive of it as pleasure. Therefore, it is dissatisfactory.
It has always been conditioned by conception of pain. This is the nature of the pleasure of cyclic existence. It’s inextricably bound up with pain, with the experience of suffering. Its very existence depends upon our experience in pain. So that’s the dissatisfactoriness of pain, then there’s the dissatisfactoriness of change.
Dissatisfactoriness of change is not actual suffering, it’s potential suffering, psychological suffering. See suffering is actually a feeling, isn’t it? It is a feeling of pleasure or displeasure or a neutral feeling. So this is not obvious because it’s not actual suffering, but it’s thought of as dissatisfactoriness. You know, so we can exemplify what we mean by this dissatisfactory quality.
You know, you’re very cold. You’re experiencing the dissatisfaction you’re experiencing the suffering of cold. Your hands are cold. And you go inside and you get an extra nice warm fire. And, yeah, it’s just nice And you feel warm, you feel very pleasurable.
So the first instant of that feeling of pleasure is the cessation of the feeling of pain, displeasure, of coldness. Right? The very first moment of that feeling of pleasure, of warmth, was first off dependent upon the prior deprivation, prior suffering, But not only that, we just look at that very first moment. You stand there next to the fire feeling warm, very pleasant, feeling all rosy, you know, and you’re feeling warm and warm standing there. Oh, it’s getting hot.
You know? And you start to step back from the fire and look okay. Because what? It’s becoming painful. You’re starting the pleasure of pleasure of warmth is beginning to diminish and being beginning to be replaced by the displeasure of heat, of hot.
When did that what is the cause of that displeasure of heat? The fire, isn’t it? It’s the heat of the fire. When was that cause present? The cause of that of the displeasure, the suffering of heat, the suffering of hot was there at the very first moment when you were experiencing the pleasure of warmth.
The very moment that you’re experiencing the pleasure of warmth, the causes for the experience of the pain of heat were there at the same time. It was just a matter of becoming the sensitivity of oneself changing, the situation changing. As the prior memory of the cold, pain of cold faded, we’ve become more sensitized to the heat. In the first moment, we experience this pleasure of warmth, but as we become more sensitized, we lose our memory of the the painfulness of the cold, and we begin to experience the the heat, the hotness as a cause of suffering and the painfulness of suffering. It’s beginning to be transformed.
We reach a point when we can no longer conceive of that cause that is the heat of the fire as being a source of pleasure and now becomes a source of pain. Same source, same cause. It’s now the mind that’s being transformed in the way it conceives of it because it has lost the remembrance of the feeling of the pain of cold. Any of our pleasures always has the potential to be transformed into a pain. This is the nature of all pleasure within cyclic existence.
They are not inherently pleasurable, they can always turn into pain. In that way we say that they’re dissatisfactory, They have a dissatisfactory quality of changing. If they’re prolonged, if our point of reference changes, if we conceive of them differently, the same cause will become which was a source of pleasure becomes a source of pain. They’re not lasting. You know, we can’t hold they cannot be continued for any length of time.
If we continue to eat, we you know, initially, it’s a source of pleasure. As we continue continue to eat, obviously it becomes a source of pain. So there’s nothing inherent in that pleasure. It’s only our mind conceiving of pleasure, conceiving of pain. This is the dissatisfactory quality of these pleasures.
Again, we’re not trying to become pessimistic. You know, what we can see as a pleasure in pain will determine the direction of the flow of our mind. You know, the the Our behavior is determined by behavior and pain as a priority over our logical understanding. We may think to ourselves, I know I shouldn’t do this, but it feels good. Right?
We may know intellectually that this is not a good thing to do, that this is going to hurt you, whatever. But down at the nitty gritty level where we experience pleasure and pain, that our behavior is being determined. So this is the level we have begin to understand where our pleasure actually lies, where our pain lies. If we continually conceive of putting your hand in a fire as pleasurable, we shouldn’t be surprised that you’re burnt over and over again. So if we can begin to understand what is actually pleasurable, what is happiness, instead of conceiving what is actually painful as pleasure, as misconceiving, and continually making the same mistakes over and over again, suffering over and over again.
If our conception of what is pleasurable, what is painful, what is happiness actually accords with reality, then in this sense the basic sanity of the mind, it will naturally flow in the direction of pleasure, of what it conceives of as pleasure. We don’t have to force ourselves to seek pleasurable experiences, the natural quality of the mind, the aversion approach, right? If we can begin to, even within the conditioned experiences to what we have, begin to conceive of what are more skillful higher types of pleasure, more subtle types of pleasure as pleasure, begin to see that what are grosser types of pain, not as pleasure but as pain, our mind will begin to tend toward those naturally. For example, meditation. If you begin to experience happiness, pleasure in meditation, you will naturally begin to develop a liking for meditation, for refined states of consciousness.
You will naturally begin to engage in less and less types of gross pleasure. You won’t have to make an effort in this way. It’s like putting grass in front of a tiger. He doesn’t have to renounce that grass. He doesn’t have any interest in it whatsoever or putting meat in front of an elephant.
He just doesn’t have any interest in it. Likewise, as we begin to as our as our, you know, our range of what we conceive of as pleasure and pain begins to shift toward more actual types of pleasure, more subtle types of pleasure, the conception of grosser types of pleasure will slowly begin to be conceived as dissatisfactory quite naturally, and we will find ourselves more enthusiastic about in in meditation, where we find states of consciousness, until we actually get to the place where we see that our real happiness lies in the unconditioned nature of the mind itself, lies within the peace within nirvana within ourselves. And There would be no question of having to renounce anything, it’s because the only thing that we can see of as being happiness is the peace within our own mind. Anything less than this, it can be thought as dissatisfactory. This natural quality, the natural valence of the mind begins to tend towards nirvana, towards peace.
It becomes a natural direction of our lives on a very basic level of pain and pleasure, not intellectually. So that was the the second type of dissatisfaction of dissatisfaction of change. And there’s a third, very complicated word, pervasive compositional dissatisfaction of pervasive compositional suffering. This is the most subtle type of suffering. Is maybe you say metaphysical suffering.
It is also not an actual suffering. So it’s usually illustrated by what are called the contaminated aggregates or what they can simply say ordinary body and mind. And we went into this last week. This this fact that we have a materiality and a mentality which is programmed. It’s programmed to reenact patterns.
Upon meeting a specific object, certain situation, the condition, the tendency, the disposition, the latencies are activated and we activate in a certain way. We experience certain sensations, certain experiences. This is dissatisfactory. It’s a source of suffering. So this grasping at specific patterns, grasping at patterns or compulsive reoccurring patterns, this is pervasive to all beings within cyclic existence.
I’m explaining this word pervasive composition, satisfactory. Pervasive means it simply extends to all ordinary beings, pervades all ordinary beings. Compositional, we talked about this a little earlier. The fact that these patterns that we enact are positive feedback system. What does that mean?
They reinforce their future repetition that the more you hate, the more you hate. By hating, the more you hate in the future. By desiring, the more you’re going to desire in the future. All these programs by their enactment become more deeply ingrained, more deeply entrenched tendencies, dispositions within our own mind and therefore they not only act as a basis of present suffering but they act as a basis for the same suffering repeated in the future. Therefore they are composite of present suffering and future suffering.
This is so they’re composite. They act as a basis. These patterns, these contaminated aggregates, program mind and body act as a source of present suffering and as a source of future suffering. They’re a composite of present and future suffering. Therefore and these are pervasive to all beings, ordinary beings.
Therefore, pervasive composition of dissatisfactoriness. We can just simply say ego, can’t we? This is basically what we’re talking about, the burden the burden of ego. You know, it’s like carrying a bundle of thorns on your back around with you all the time wherever you go, whatever you do, this bundle of thorns is there on your back. We may become insensitive to it at a time, but it’s always there.
It’s always a slight irritation. This constantly having to maintain, the constant maintenance of ego is tiring. Continually having to reestablish our self image, reestablish who we are, our identity, secure our credentials, secure our existence, reaffirm our territory, and having to guard ourselves, watch ourselves constantly so we don’t goof up. Know, we’re always afraid of something we’re going to goof up. Constantly having to reconfirm our existence, judging ourselves, judging others, constant ongoing action of ego is tiring, it’s a burden, it’s very subtle but it’s always there isn’t it?
It never stops, it’s always you never have a chance to stop, chance to rest, a chance to experience some silence and peace, this constant burden of ego, action of ego maintaining itself. So this is the dissatisfactoriness or the pervasive composition of dissatisfactoriness, Simply the problem of having to bear the burden of ego. So this is the first mark of conditioned existence, of ordinary existence, dissatisfactoriness. We’ll have to continue with the other two marks next week. So now we’ll meditate.
K?