Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Using the image of an open wound that can be aggravated, soothed, or simply left alone, Ven Jampa Gendun introduces the three types of suffering — suffering of suffering, suffering of change, and suffering of universal conditionality — as the framework for this 92-minute session. He opens by reframing going for refuge as a commitment to cultivating wisdom, love, and compassion already present in each person in seed form, illustrated with a Zen story about a student who has conceived of himself as a dog “ever since I was a puppy.” A structured mindfulness exercise then moves attention through breath, environmental sounds, body sensations, and mental objects before Gendun explores at length why acknowledging dissatisfaction is not pessimism but the necessary catalyst for inner change, and how suffering functions as intelligence rather than mere obstacle. Only the first type is covered in full; the remaining two are deferred to the following week.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 14 3PA 2007 07 23.mp3
UUID: 2664b6f2-04ff-4f0b-a7c0-d11e507b549a
Teacher: Ven Jampa Gendun
Collection: Three Principle Aspects of the Path 2006-2007 (Ven Jampa Gendun)
Date: 2007-07-23
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 92.1 minutes
Words: ~8,529
It’s nice to see all of you again. It’s been some time. So we begin by adjusting our motivation as we normally do. You know we continually talk about going for refuge, you know, what it is that we’re committing ourselves to, what is a priority in our life and we oftentimes talk about it. Can you hear me okay in the back?
Now what do we mean by a Buddha? And we usually define it in terms of its essential qualities of wisdom and love and compassion and personal power and how these are skillfully and fearlessly expressed in our daily life. And you know this may sound all well and good you know, is it just a romantic notion? You know, all of what we’re talking about are, you know, is the goal of Buddhism, is it simply a religious fiction? Is it just something that some people dreamed up to make us our lot in life a little bit less heavy?
Make us feel good about ourselves in some way? So I think it’s always useful to question, productively question, and try to see if in fact there’s any connection between ourselves and this goal of Buddhism. Is it really relevant to myself? Is it pertinent to who I actually am? You know, I think if we look and if we were to sit down and have a personal conversation, you know, we could talk about these each of these individual qualities and maybe we could each of us could find how we in fact express them in our daily life in some way, in some limited form, in one way or another.
Though we might dismiss it or overlook it or not value it, its significance, nonetheless these qualities are all there in some form, even if only in a seed form. You know, we all have some wisdom, some experience of reality, however obscure and however faint our wisdom may at times be. We all have some love and compassion, however limited and however exclusively directed our love and compassion might be at present. We all have some personal power, however weak, maybe unrefined. That power is expressed in the course of our usual daily lives.
We all have some skill and means, you know. By that, I mean transformations of this wisdom, love, and compassion and personal power in our daily life. You know, no matter how how unspontaneous, no matter how imprecisely directed these skillful means might be. We all have some fearlessness, however easily intimidated, however rare those moments of fearlessness might be. So all I’m saying is this, if we were to pay attention, I keep coming back to that notion that reality is attention, if we were to pay attention to have those singled out moments for ourselves or within ourselves, those times when we actually express in all these various limited ways and these limited forms in one way or another, all of the qualities that we’re talking about, consummated in Buddhahood, then we can begin to see that there is some relevance between who we are now, this schmoe that we conceive of ourselves, this identity, this self limiting identity that we presently hold to, and what it is that we’re trying to achieve.
You know, there’s no unbridgeable gulf between ourselves and what? Who? The Dalai Lama? Okay. You know?
Or Nelson Mandela, Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi. I’m sure you could all think of various individuals for yourself who you hold as being being what a successful life might look like, what a successful being might do with their lives. There’s only a difference in degree and not in kind. And that degree is open to change. And if we’re willing to work.
When we talk about going for refuge, what we’re saying essentially is that we make these qualities, these inward qualities and their development a priority in our life, that we’re willing to pay some attention to them and put forth some effort, create some space where we cultivate, we promote. These are important. In that trying, we will become that. And all the other words aside, this is what we mean by going for refuge. This is the only way that we can ever realistically hope to solve our problems.
This is what we’re looking at, aren’t we, in terms of the various types of suffering. If we’re ever to end our suffering, if we’re ever to be of any real use to others, this is the only legitimate goal for ourselves. So it’s simply, I guess, having some kind of confidence in ourselves. You know, beyond you know, it’s like, you know, beyond all this the constantly changing identifications, the identities identities that we assume over the course of our lives, that beneath these churning waves of this crazy mind of ours, at the depth of the ocean, unmoved by by, you know, all the changing conditions and the different conceptions and the identities that we’re continually assuming one after another, the different ups and downs of our thinking process, is the potential to be all that we could ever hope to be in terms of what we call Buddha, in terms of this wisdom, love, compassion, personal power, and how we can best lead our lives in helping ourselves and helping others. So, you know, the inner focus of our life becomes Buddha.
It’s just that. You know, if that’s to have any meaning whatsoever. If it’s to be something more than simple words, it means we put some effort into cultivating these qualities. We quit dismissing our abilities. We quit overlooking them.
And we begin to say enough is enough. You know, the story I’ve been telling myself about myself hasn’t gotten me anywhere. You know, what’s it ever gotten to me in my life? And beginning not to fall into that story, not to buy into it. You know, there’s a I read I’m reading an interesting book on Zen and this this student goes to his teacher and he’s going to discuss his meditations with his teacher and he says to his teacher I’ve been having these thoughts lately that I’m a dog.
He said oh that’s interesting how long have you had these thoughts? And he said ever since I was a puppy. You know, this identity that we have about ourselves is something that we’ve had our entire lives. It’s just like, you know, now we conceive our dogs and we’ve conceived it ever since we were a puppy. We can’t imagine ourselves being the other way.
It hasn’t worked. Maybe it’s time for a change. So the inner focus of our life becomes Buddha. This possibility of wisdom, love and compassion. What is that?
So we have to do something. So we. So we practice. We practice being a Buddha as best we can. That means making use of these teachings as Dharma, the truth of things. And we do this amongst ourselves, you know, within supported by our teachers and but also those who are along on the same journey that we are.
Helping us to inspire one another, you know, offering whatever assistance we can to one another, advice, material needs, whatever. It’s a way of life. I think it’s a good life. Whatever we might achieve in the course of this life, it will have been worthwhile. We can look back without any regret.
I tried my best. It’s okay. And again and again trying to raise the level of our motivation and that it’s such that what we’re doing is not just for ourselves. You know this this extreme of individualism which is kind of a a disease of the west or self centeredness, this complete absorption and inability to connect in real and meaningful ways with others. And this is the way that we can overcome.
We can ensure that our practice won’t be of great will be of benefit. It won’t be a way of reinforcing a lot of our present dysfunctional thinking that hasn’t gotten us anywhere. And if we continually, again and again, raise the level of our motivation, even if only for one other person, and as best we can, you know, not thinking of in terms of what’s in it for me, but what’s in it for them. You know, how can I if I can be a little more understanding, a little more caring, a little more present in some significant way for them through, you know, whatever my meditation, my, you know, listening to the talk and discussing these issues, then it it would be worthwhile? You know, I can go home, in some way, maybe my relationship will be that much better.
Then we can feel assured that, you know, what we’re doing here together is going to be a benefit. Otherwise, we’re not we can’t be sure. I go for refuge until I’m awakened to the Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. Through my practice of generosity and other perfections, may I become a Buddha for the sake of all sentient beings. I go for refuge until I am awakened to the Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha.
Through my practice of generosity and other perfections may I become a Buddha for the sake of all sentient beings. I go for refuge until I am awakened to the Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha through my practice of generosity and the other perfections may I become a Buddha for the sake of all sentient beings may all sentient beings of happiness and the causes of happiness may all sentient beings be free from suffering and the causes of suffering may all sentient beings be inseparable from the joy that is without sorrow may all sentient beings abide in equanimity, free from attachment for some and aversion toward others. Reverently, I prostrate with my body, speech, and mind. I present clouds of every type of offering, those actually arranged and imagined. Disclose all my negative actions accumulated during beginless time and rejoice in all the virtues of superiors and ordinary beings.
Please remain at the end of cyclic existence and turn the wheel of Dharma from migrating beings. I dedicate all virtue, my own and that of others, to the great awakening. So I thought we would we’re gonna to meditate and I thought we would practice some exercises with our mindfulness of breath practice. You know, first we’ll, you know, do as we usually do in terms of progressively relaxing the body and then we’re going to do a breathing exercise. It’s quite simple.
It’s simply a matter of gently breathing in to whatever level is comfortable however you normally breathe in. But when we exhale, exhaling in such a way that we’re completely emptying our lungs. The exhale is but prolonged. Completely exhaling all the used air in our lungs. And then again, breathing in naturally, not in any way that causes discomfort, just any way that you would normally breathe.
But again, breathing out, prolonging in a gentle fashion, the exhale with the idea of completely emptying all the stale air, all the used air in your lungs. And we’ll do that six times. Okay? And then we’ll do the mindfulness of breath. But, again, I thought we would just do an exercise to help us in our practice.
After a point in the course of our meditation, rather than taking the breath as a primary object, we’re going to take the various sounds within our environment. So we take as our primary object the sounds, but we continue to note hearing. So whatever sounds you we attend to the sounds, whatever are in our environment. Perhaps there’s someone blowing their nose. Perhaps there’s someone wrestling about.
Maybe it’s a truck going down Forth Street road. So we’re we’re going to search our environment for sounds, and then upon identifying, paying attention to that sound, simply noting hearing, hearing, hearing, so we maintain that observership. And then we’re going to shift after some time, the our attention to the body sensations. And we’re simply going to begin at the crown of our head and move slowly through our body, attending to the sensations which are present within the body. Maybe there’s some kind of throbbing.
Maybe there’s pressure. Maybe there’s a pulsation of your blood rushing through your body. Maybe there’s various physical feelings in your body. Maybe the pressure of your buttocks against the cushion. Just noting, sensing, sensing, or if it’s a bodily feeling, physical feeling, feeling, feeling.
Just moving gradually slowly down through the body, coming to the bottom of your toes, and working your way up through the body slowly, just simply noticing all the physical sensations within the body. Then we’ll do the same with the mind. With regard to the mind, the objects of mind are thoughts, emotions, images, mental feelings. Generally, there’ll be thoughts. So, you know, the mind is a subject.
Subjects have objects. They exist in interdependence. So being aware, what is the object of our mental consciousness? If it’s a thought, then simply note thinking, thinking, thinking. Attend to the objects of the mental consciousness.
If it’s an image, you can simply note thinking, thinking. If it’s an emotion, sadness, or boredom, boredom, boredom, sadness, sadness. Simply noting whatever the emotion, whatever the object of the mental consciousness is. Then we’ll come back to the breath. And notice how what is the difference in the quality of your of your attention when you come back to the breath?
Are you more sensitive? Are you able are you is your awareness increased? Are you able to have a more refined pay more more refined attention to the breath? Okay. So we’re going to relax the body, practice exercises.
Then we’re going to focus upon the breath as we normally do using the techniques of counting and noting. And then we’re going to perform the exercise. You know, it’s it’s as if you’re simply becoming very sensitive sensitive to the sounds and around about you, attending to the sounds and noting them, hearing, hearing. Then we’ll move to the body, working from the crown of your head through to the tip of your toes, attending to the various sensations and feelings, bodily feelings within the body, noting, sensing, or noting feeling as you move through the body. And we’ll do the same through the mind, noting the objects of the mental consciousness.
Thinking, thinking, thinking. So it’s mental feeling, feeling. If it’s emotion, you know, noting whatever the emotion is, sadness, fear, and then we’ll come back to the breath. Okay. Is that fairly clear?
So take a comfortable, firm posture. So begin with relaxation of the body, beginning to the crown, the scalp, the forehead, feeling the the wrinkles in your brow beginning to smooth out. The pressure in and around your eyes diminishing. The muscles of the face softening, relaxing. The jaws relax.
The muscles at the back of the neck, gently turn your head to each side a few times. Just very gently stretching and listening. Relaxing the muscles of the throat. Moving down to the upper back and shoulders, perhaps rotating your shoulders a few times, letting them drop comfortably to the sides. Feeling this burden, this weight that we carry around on our backs beginning to move down through your body into the ground.
Your hands are loose, soft. Relaxing your lower arms, your upper arms, Your chest is at ease. Relaxing throughout the heart area. And the lungs. The middle portion of the back, the stomach.
Releasing the tension that we hold in our stomach muscles, allowing your belly to go soft. Relaxing throughout the abdominal cavity. Keeping your trunk erect, relax your lower back muscles, your buttocks, throughout the upper legs, lower legs, and your feet. And bring your awareness to your body in general, noticing any tightnesses, any tensions within the body. Focusing upon on those areas consciously relaxing, softening, feeling the tension diminish, the tightness loosen.
Body become uncomfortable, at ease. A feeling of physical well-being pervading your body. It feels good to be in your body. Just be with your body. And we’ll practice the breathing exercise.
Gently breathing in by breathing out, prolonging, extending the breath, the exhalation, emptying the lungs, and doing that six times on your own. When that is completed, bring your mind to the breath. Just easy gentle in and out flow of the natural breath. If it’s helpful, use the techniques of counting and noting the breath. Now we’re going to take as our primary object the various sounds in the room and outside the room.
So focus your attention on sound. Continue to note hearing, hearing. Listen very carefully. Hearing, hearing. Pay Now we’re going to change the primary object to the feelings and sensations within the body.
So beginning at the crown of your head and very slowly and in a very detailed minute manner. Attend to the various sensations, feelings in the body, sensing, feeling, moving down through the body to the very tip of your toe and back upward. And again, we’ll change the primary object, the objects of the mental consciousness, the thoughts and feelings, feelings, emotions, noting, thinking, thinking, objects of the mental consciousness. Stay alert. Note the objects.
Thinking. Thinking. And then bring your mind back to the breath, just the easy gentle in and out flow of the breath. And then notice the sensations and feelings within the body. In an easy and relaxed manner Just slowly become aware of your surroundings.
Just take your time. What I’m what I’m trying to do, and I’m going to try better more in the future, is to allow time for more more and more time. Not more and more. Time for discussion. I thought try to at at approximately nine o’clock, we would all go out and bring a cup of tea back.
It’s all set out, ready, the water’s boiling. And we’ll come back and we’ll form a circle and we’ll get into the routine of having more of a discussion. Think it’s quite useful. I think there’s a lot of learning that goes on, both formally but informally in the group situation. People can share their wisdom, their experience.
I think it’s quite valuable. You’ll help me make a concerted effort to to try to to do that, to make that a regular part of our of our Monday evenings together. Okay? Thinking again and again about the unvarying relation between actions and their effects and the sufferings of cyclic existence will alter the priorities you give to future lives. So, you know, we have in our life we have various priorities, those places where we’re willing to put our time and energy and create space and so forth.
I mean, eating is quite a priority for most of us, isn’t it? We always make sure we eat once. Here we’re trying to create priority in terms of our spiritual practice, our development. You know, we have to see that if we don’t change our own minds nothing more is going to change in our lives and the quality of our lives. And that’s why we’re looking at suffering in order to make our practice a greater and greater priority.
You know, I remembered, I was thinking that I have a book that was written many years ago. And this was back in, I think, seventies, you know, with the flower children and all that. There was a book called I’m Okay and You’re Okay. I don’t know if you remember that book. I don’t know if many of you know it, that that author of that book committed suicide.
He was not okay. So, you know, I’m not okay and you’re not okay, but that’s okay. The situation is work able. Saying I’m not okay, you know, you know, I’m not unique in that. We we it’s the human condition.
We all share in that in one way or another. We all have our unique expressions of the human condition, but nonetheless we all are bound up in some way with dissatisfaction or disappointment or frustration. Life isn’t quite like we might want it to be. And I think in talking this way, can, as it were, normalize suffering. It’s the given, in a way, isn’t it?
We can give ourselves and others permission to feel what they actually feel, to acknowledge the high degree of unimaginability in their lives and the difficulty of just living life in some way or another. And with that, I think we in itself is not that is not an end in itself. And to simply talk more and more about suffering in itself would just probably cause us more suffering, causes us to be all the more depressed about our lot in life. But having some kind of trust that we can do something about it, and that if we can change, the situation is workable, we can change. But the change isn’t out there, outside of ourselves.
The change necessarily has to come in terms of our own mind, in terms of our attitudes, our our ideals, opinions, our views of things. Our world view has to change. If we change that, then the quality of our life, the quality of our experience will change. So it’s good to talk about because it motivates us that all the more to bring about change. If we keep denying, if we keep up pretense that things are okay, then we will never be motivated to really do the work which is necessary to make that change a priority.
You know, we’re hungry. That’s perfectly acceptable in our society to admit that. And we do something about it. We feed ourselves. But to say, I’m suffering, that things aren’t all that they could be, that there’s a all the various dissatisfactions and so forth that we all experience every day of our lives in one way or another, is not so acceptable, and therefore we never quite are willing to admit it even to ourselves and therefore we never develop the motivation to change things to make our internal change feeding the hungers of our mind a priority in our life.
So you know it’s okay. The Buddha saw the suffering, the fundamental anxiety of all humans as a kind of plague, a disease that afflicts afflicts everyone. No matter what the circumstances of birth or upbringing, and he described it in very great detail. This was not because the Buddha liked to dwell on suffering or had a pessimistic turn of mind. On the contrary, he appears to have been a rather joyful and positive disposition.
It was out of his compassion and the sense of irony that the Buddha saw that people are constantly preoccupied with trying to avoid facing this anxiety and therefore constantly feeding it. He saw people trying to lose their awareness of the state of existence and of the inevitability of death in every form of entertainment from the luxuries of the rich to the asceticism of the forest dwellers, from the passions and aggressions of personal life to the not so different passions and aggressions of the battlefield and political conference table, from the search for certainty in a philosophy of materialism, which was as prevalent and sophisticated in his time as it is now, to the not so very different search for security and religious beliefs of all kinds. Thus, he realized, as so many modern therapists have come to do since, that the cure for our deep anxiety can begin only when we begin to recognize our urge to ignore it. In looking at our problems, the dissatisfactoriness of the quality of our lives, we can either run away from it, we can try our best to ignore it, to desensitize ourselves, to numb ourselves, distract ourselves, absorb ourselves in this and that particular, whatever it might be, activities, people, things.
There’s a long list of possibilities. We can stubbornly refuse to acknowledge our own conscience, our own awareness, our own wisdom, the truth about ourselves. Or we can confront the suffering of our lives and, to some extent, meaninglessness of our lives. And out of this confrontation, you know, the tension which it arouses, we can begin to resolve that tension by synthesizing a path. You know, some kind of journey of healing, we actually begin the process of healing.
This disparity between my actual felt experience and what I want my life to be. You know, there there there are two basic attitudes that we can take toward our suffering. One is that suffering should things should not be like this. And there’s just something that is temporarily going wrong, and I can set it right, that things will come back to a balance. You know, the the the we can put things right again.
A little bit of this, a little less of that, a little more of this. We’ve kind of set our thermostat of pain, suffering to a certain setting, like our norm. At least it’s tolerable. And that’s that’s where we want we we we have a kind of a comfort zone worked out for ourselves. When things go wrong, when there’s some kind of imbalance, we expect there is some kind of counterbalancing feedback to begin in some way, some kind of adjustments to bring it back to that norm, to a proper setting where the way things should be.
You know, things will eventually we have the sense that things will eventually set themselves right again. Things will get back to the way they ought to be, that life should not be difficult. It ought not to be this way. It’s just that something has temporarily gone awry, and it’ll be set right again. The other attitude that we can to our suffering is that our suffering gives us a glimpse of what work we need to do next.
It’s like a statement about ourselves. Our suffering is a kind of intelligence, in a way, trying to tell us something about the way that we’re living our lives, the processes of our life, that perhaps we’re living our lives in an unskillful fashion. And that’s why we’re experiencing what it that we’re experiencing. Even physical pain is an indication that there’s something wrong with the bodily processes. And our pain is like our first line of protection against hurting ourselves so deeply that we would be irreparably damaged.
That’s a tough tough word to say. Damaged. Likewise with our mind. The pain of our mind, all these various dissatisfactions and frustrations is like intelligence telling us something about the way we’re living our life. You know, we can either listen or we can try to ignore and keep trying to live in the same way that perpetuating the same difficulties endlessly, infinitely into the future.
Our wounds are like a mouth, and we have to listen to what they’re trying to tell us. You know, the I might have I I probably have quoted this before, but I like this quote. It’s from Shakespeare’s Macbeth. You know, the the Macbeth asked the doctor, canst thou minister to a mind diseased, pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, raze out the written troubles of the brain, and with some sweet antidote cleanse the stuffed bosom of that perilous stuff which weighs upon the heart. And the doctor answers, therein the patient must minister to himself.
Himself. In reacting to, you know, if you take for example, we have a relationship difficulty. Maybe you break up with someone. So we can either view the ensuing suffering out that breakup as simply a state to be gotten rid of, that it’s a temporary obstruction to our happiness, and we can move on as quickly as possible to a new relationship, to alleviate the pain of the old relationship, the breakup of the old relationship, or we can listen to the suffering and what it’s trying to tell us. Try to understand what the message of that pain is.
Maybe our pain is symptomatic of some kind of disparity between our expectation of a relationship and the reality of a relationship. Maybe it’s telling us something about the impermanence of relationship or the unskillful ways of relating with being alone or our feelings of powerlessness or our feelings of dependency. Or maybe it’s telling us something about our underlying problems of attachment, underlying problems of fear. Maybe that’s what that pain, the message behind that pain, is trying to get through to us. So, you know, it’s at moments of suffering that we’re momentarily deflected from our usual habitual ways of viewing things.
You know, that that we view begin to view things and think about things in way in ways that we normally don’t think about them. You know, it tell it’s but the if we begin to listen to our sufferings about ourselves then it becomes we can begin to understand the human dilemma what it means to be an ordinary human being and if we can do that, then we can develop compassion. We can understand that, you know, that others are in the same exact situation that we are in, no matter what their external appearances might be, no matter how beautiful, how rich, or how powerful, how famous. They have not transcended the human condition. If we understand that for ourselves then we can develop real compassion for others.
So, you know, it’s I think, you know, psychological change. You know, there’s a resistance to change. There’s, there’s the, the inertia of, of old habits that keep going forward. I think change only arises when there is some deep awareness of discontentment if things continue as are. Otherwise, the notion of change is simply a curiosity, maybe an intellectual pastime of one sort or another.
There’s there’s no necessity for change. You you know, when when we when we’re sitting in a chair, if we’ve one the moment we become aware that our position in that chair has become uncomfortable, we will spontaneously move our position. We will naturally change our position. This is, I think, holds as well in terms of the quality of our life when we begin to understand the uncomfortableness of the way our life processes are working at present. But this awareness has to be more than intellectual.
Intellectual. It has to be more than speculative awareness. It’s simply a passing interest. It has to be if it’s going to act as a catalyst for change. For most of us, know, the, most of the time, the prospect of pleasure and pain takes priority over logic.
And that’s how most of us, and that’s principle by which most of us live in terms of the pleasure pain principle. You know, we we you know, I know I shouldn’t, but it feels so good I can’t stop. Or I know I should, but it’s just too much trouble. Anyway, know, if things aren’t all that bad after all, you know, I can get by. Nothing changes.
You know, it’s like when I was little, I remember walking around with nails just starting to come up through the heels of my shoes. It was uncomfortable. But, you know, it was just too much of a hassle to go downtown and buy a new pair of shoes or too much of a hassle to go get them repaired. You know, I’ll get by. It’s okay.
I’ll just just for a little while longer, a couple another week. I’ll go I’ll have them fixed next week. I’ll go buy another pair of shoes next week. You know, we all we so we we develop an ability to almost, not quite, almost overlook the discomfort, you know, as if it weren’t there. You know, we as a patient have have almost got used to our our disease, our illness, but not quite.
So we have to, you know, we call you know one of the two causes of change when we talked about going for refuge but change in general I think is some kind of constructive anxiety you know without this constructive anxiety, there’s no motivation to change. There’s no energy for the discipline necessary to begin to intervene, to break up the habit of what once was and begin to introduce new ways of being, new ways of thinking. There’s no willingness to abide with the uneasy feelings which change evokes with us. It’s always frightening in some respects. Worries taking a chance, taking some kind of risk.
When we finally see the predicament that we’re in, the nature of our predicament, then we’ll find a way to get well. Buddhism places tremendous trust in our basic sanity, in our basic intelligence. If we’re willing to dispassionately look at what our actual lived experience is and see that there are alternatives, we will tend toward those alternatives. It requires some kind of discipline, but it also demands an awareness, an unflagging patient looking for ourselves and what actually is for ourselves. You know, if we don’t have to, we won’t change.
I deeply felt need in this accompanying anxiety is a necessary nurturing conditions for change, for what is. We just don’t want it to continue. It’s not okay to have nails sticking up out of your shoes. It’s not, you know, it’s not comfortable. So though we’d rather not, if we’re ever going to arouse this determination to change, then we’re going to have to develop a strong, consistent will to change.
And if if we’re going to deal with our problems at a more fundamental level, then we’re going to have to begin to systematically investigate. You know, the Buddha wasn’t trying to be heavy handed. He wasn’t pessimistic. He wasn’t cynical. He wasn’t a dirty old man trying to take our fun from us, our happiness, all the little bits of happiness that we do grab hold of along the way.
He was just trying to help us to overcome our suffering and show us an infinitely better way of life than what we have now, what we’ve gotten used to, what we take as the norm for ourselves. We don’t we can’t see any alternative. You know? I’ve been thinking this way, this telling me this story about myself since I was a puppy. So we’re going to look at suffering as a way of arousing this determination to make our practice, the practice of change, priority.
So the mark of suffering. There are three types of suffering we’re going to look at. The suffering of suffering. We’re going to become experts at suffering. The suffering I don’t think we’re going to suffer any of more for doing it.
I hope not. Maybe the less. The suffering of suffering, the suffering of change, and the suffering of universal conditionality. The suffering of suffering, the suffering of change, and the suffering of universal conditionality. So those are the three levels of suffering, the three types of suffering we’re going to look at.
So, you know, we can And you can keep this in mind. It’s an easy illustration of these three types of suffering. We’ll just illustrate them with three types of examples. And then we’re going to go back through and explain them in detail. Suppose we had an open wound.
If if if if we if that open wound were bumped into, rubbed up against, or if we if we poured some irritating substance on it, that wound would flare up. It would become sharp and intense. We would experience what we identify as unpleasant feeling. That unpleasant feeling, that painful feeling, exemplifies the suffering of suffering. So we have a wound, We it’s bumped into or it’s irritated in some way.
We experience an intense sharp pain. That exemplifies the suffering of suffering. Now, on the other hand, suppose we temporarily relieve the pain of that wound. We put some salve on it or we run some cool, clean water over it. And we experience a temporary relief of that suffering.
We experience what we ordinarily identify as a pleasurable feeling. It feels good. That pleasurable feeling exemplifies the suffering of change. Change. Now on the other hand, suppose suppose we have this open wound, but it’s neither being aggravated, irritated in any way, nor is it being soothed in any way.
With regard to the wound, we experience neither a pleasurable feeling nor a displeasurable feeling. What we ordinarily identify as a neutral feeling, That neutral feeling, with regard to that open wound, exemplifies the suffering of universal conditionality. So if we can keep coming back to these three examples in order to help us to identify what it is that we’re these three types of sufferings. So now we’re going to look at the first type of suffering, the suffering of suffering. And this is the easiest one of the types of suffering.
Even animals are pretty good at this. They can recognize the suffering of suffering. This is the existential character of ordinary feelings of suffering. This is what we actually experience. All the various manifest physical and mental sufferings, all the unpleasant feelings that we experience almost every day of our lives, that we do experience every day of our lives, either minor irritations or great pain in one way or another.
You know, physically, and we could list these and maybe it might not be a bad idea to list them for ourselves. You know, every day there are the you know, the everyday little little occurrences, the minor irritations, all the headaches, the stomach aches, the earaches, the the back aches, the scratches, cuts, bruise, burns. You know, when you go walking, your muscles get sore. Sore muscles, sore joints. We experience various diseases, flus, colds, throat, sore throats, hunger, thirst.
So on and on and on. If you check up, there’s not one day that you probably can recall in which you do not experience some physical discomfort or pain. Most of them are are quite minor. And we we you know, it’s like the background pain, the background feeling of our body. We just dismiss it.
We it’s just there, these little irriteachings and minor hurts and so forth. But on the other hand, there are the serious pains of the body. You know, when we there’s a there is the pain of being born, of giving birth, of the pain of discomforts endured as the body grows old and deteriorates. There’s the pain surrounding our death eventually. There is the pain associated with major illnesses of cancer and all the various pains that we can experience in all the major and minor ways.
But for most of us, it is not physical pain, for most, though for some it is, but mental pain, which is the greatest source of our concern, equal or surpasses almost anything that may happen to our bodies. So each of us, without exception, can begin to list and numerate these various types of mental sufferings that we all experience in one way or another to a lesser or greater degree every day of our life. You know the daily disappointments and frustrations and not getting what we want. The great and small sorrows associated with loss and separation. The minor irriteachings or the deeply felt hurts when there’s some kind of injustice and having to deal with a world over which we have little or no control.
None of us is free for long from these self-generated afflictions of anger or impatience or jealousy. You know, we all are undergo all these irrational fears. We all are caught between the jaws of conflicting emotions when we’re torn between which way to go, what to do. You know, there is the almost desperate, you know, longing to be loved. And there’s the almost equally desperate dread of losing that love once it’s found.
There is, you know, there’s a there’s a bitter defensiveness of a of a closed heart, and there’s the open vulnerability of an open heart. If for most, you know, for most of us, there’s we there’s still the the felt remembrances of long ago ridicule and shame that we felt, you know, even as a child. It still lingers there somewhere in the background of our memory. You know, there’s there’s the feelings of knowing guilt. There’s the feelings of humiliation.
There’s the feelings of some kind of vague bewilderment that somehow we’ve we’ve somehow missed a mark in our life, but never know quite knowing what that mark really is, what we’ve really missed. You know, there’s the, you know, there’s the almost constant strain to maintain a self image, to defend our territory, to, you know, to to maintain some kind of credentials about who we are. You know, there’s this almost constant struggle to either confirm or defend ourselves in one way or another. The view that we have of ourselves as isolated egos causes us to feel terribly alone, alienated, almost like we live in a prison in some way or another. You know, constant we we then there’s, you know, there’s the everyday sense of boredom, of some degree of meaninglessness in our life, of of feeling kind of a slow, tedious eating away of the light of our life’s spirit by emptiness and apathy.
You know, there is the and then at the end of all, there awaits for all of us, you know, the pain of death, the terrors of death, and the going, you know, we have to separate from all that we want to hold on to, all that we love, all that we all have that we hold dear. And we go, we don’t know where. We simply don’t know. So, you know, each of us could could add to this list, each in our own way. You know, each of us has our own unique versions of that list, but they aren’t so much different for any of us.
We could find commonalities amongst us all in how we would form that list. There seems to be, still in all, even though we can enumerate these, there’s kind of this underlying assumption that somehow we can handle it all, that that that, you know, that things will get better, that basically that we don’t have to change, that no inner transformation is necessary. There’s abiding hope, this great hope, this groundless hope, this unrealistic expectations that we hold out that things are going to get better. Somehow the overall quality is going to change one way or another. You know, the that maybe more money or more more material things or more power or more children or more something.
Some kind of factor x is out there. A little more of this, a little less of that. And things will be the way they should be, the way they ought to be. Even though things the nails are sticking up through our shoes, still things are going to get better without ever ever having to to do anything about it. You Most of these problems we can work around.
We can work them out somehow. Well, at least some of them. And those we can’t, well, life was never meant to be easy, is it? You have to take the have to take the bad along with the good in life. And that’s what we’ve been told.
We’ve been indoctrinated into the notion that this is all you can expect out of life. This is our lot in life. So get on with it. Quit whining. That’s just the way life life is.
I was robust and eager. Then the illness happened quite suddenly. The doctors said it was rheumatoid arthritis. They said it was ultimately a crippling disease. They said there was nothing really to do about it.
I wouldn’t accept what they were telling me, what I was going to have to face. I was fighting it, fighting it all, the illness, my own reactions, self pity, anger, discouragement, doubt. But every day it seemed I was losing. Finally, I had I felt I had to quit imposing my will, my own will. That was a big step.
I saw that I had to enter into my own experience of pain and face up to it and to allow myself to be changed by it. Without that, nothing could be done. I saw that healing comes with owning our wounds as the first step in moving beyond them. You know, it’s in through confronting and owning our own wounds, you acknowledging what it is we’re actually experiencing, the truth of suffering in our lives, that we actually begin to initiate the process of healing, getting better, moving beyond. Know, beginning to you know, we take the possibility of liberating ourselves from these problems a little more seriously than we have up to now.
You know, We have a sense that all our problems are somehow, what we might say, a big word, idiosyncratic to ourselves. Somehow they’re unique to ourselves, that they have been visited on me alone. They’re peculiar to me in some way or another. You know, this is my this is my my unique sit situation. This is my all of this arises out of my individual history, my unique upbringing in some way or another.
You know? That’s why I have this problem. You know? I was I was I was an only child, and my parents smothered me with too much attention. That’s why I had this problem.
I had three brothers and two sisters. I never got any attention. That’s why I had this present problem. You know, I was I was really poor when I was little, and I felt inferior to everybody. And that’s why I have this problem today.
I was really rich, and I felt superior to everybody else, you know, better than everybody everybody else. And and and that’s why I have this problem today. You know, I lived out in the country. You know? I didn’t have any playmates when I was little.
And that’s why I have this problem today. I lived with you know, in a in a one room house with three kid with, you know, three brothers and four sisters. I had no space to myself. You know? And that’s why I have this problem today.
You know? There there there is always the underlying assumption that if only we had had the right number of siblings, had the right economic circumstance, had the right social circumstances, then in the course of our growing up, then we wouldn’t have these problems today. You know, we would our life would be the way it should be. It was supposed to have been, that something went wrong when I was a kid. You know, there there’s this persistent underlying assumption that there exists some ‘right’ within conditioned existence, but there doesn’t exist such a right.
You know? We lack that rightness, and that’s therefore, we don’t we don’t see that the lack of rightness is endemic to the human condition. It doesn’t exist. So we can’t we we can’t keep blaming what it is that went wrong either in the past or what is present now. I believe that sometime you have to decide, decide to stop feeling badly about yourself, decide to stop wanting what you do not and apparently cannot have.
You must decide to stop believing that your real life, the life you were supposed to have, as opposed to the one you do have, this one in which you have been feeling unfulfilled, unappreciated, and unloved is elsewhere. Having come to this realization, I like to think I have accepted gracefully. Neither searching nor waiting brought me the romantic happy ending I had in mind. I see that I see now that neither regret nor anticipation served me well. Now I tell myself what I am living is my life, and I’d best get on to it.
Yeah. So, you know, the point is the point is there is no right in conditioned existence in a life lived in in our in our present approach to the way that we live our life, a life which is lived under the control of karma and afflictive emotions, in such a way of life, there is no right. We can’t blame it on something outside of ourselves. It doesn’t exist there. We we’re holding out for it, but we’re we but it’s futile.
We shouldn’t be caught off guard by suffering. We shouldn’t be surprised when life is difficult, when it keeps continually, almost every day, throwing up challenges, problems to ourselves. You know, we shouldn’t expect it to be otherwise. That’s the thing. And that should be our understanding of what is normal within the human condition.
So, you know, this is the truth truth of life. You know, life is difficult. It is a succession of problems. And if we and and unless and until we penetrate to that truth, we will continue to hold that life should be other than the way it is. And this groundless hope that your life that you’re struggling to achieve is somehow waiting somewhere out there in one form or another.
You know, that it is only ourselves who are going to be able to bring about that life, ourselves who are going to have to change if things are ever going to change. Just another minute and then we’ll stop. Know, Buddhism is trying to help us not only to deal with, you know, the temporal ongoing difficulties of our life, the daily problems of our life, but what are called the ahistorical problems as well. Whoever you were, whatever your position, whatever has happened, it’s dealing with that problem of being an ordinary human being. As long as an individual lives under the control of karma and afflictive emotions, regardless of their background, where they may live, what they may do, their power, their wealth, their beauty, whatever, in one way or another, in in each in their own unique forms.
And the forms aren’t the same. There are commonalities, the various expressions can be unique. But nonetheless, dissatisfactory. It is suffering in one form or another. So the suffering of suffering describes the existential character of the of the feelings of suffering within conditioned existence.
And then we’ll go next week, we’ll take a look at the suffering of change. So what I’d like to invite you to do, if you would, please, if you’d like to have a cup of tea, there are some cups out on the table in the kitchen, and we have a cup of tea. And then I’d like to form an actual circle so we have kind of a mutual exchange. Okay? So please.