Remain natural while changing your aspiration

To be in Dallas, Texas in August is to encounter an obvious example of changing suffering.

Here’s how that goes. You step out of the cold airport into a furnace. As soon as your ride arrives, you gratefully slide into a seat in their air conditioned car. You arrive at your destination, and again step out of the car into an oven, where you could bake cookies or, if you prefer, fry an egg. Again, with relief and pleasure you enter the air conditioned building. A few hours later, having donned all your clothes and asked to borrow a blanket, you are pretty happy to step back into the 100 degree heat. But obviously not for long.

You could seek out these little happiness hits, this suffering of change, all day long, in and out, if you wanted to. And it is a lot better than being a giraffe or a rhino or a person experiencing homelessness, who never gets the relief of the cool air – pretty much experiencing the manifest pain of heat all day long. But is it good enough?! Is it real happiness?

To be in samsara is to experience three categories of suffering over and over and over again, in fact without cease: manifest suffering, changing suffering, and pervasive suffering.

1) Manifest suffering (or the suffering of manifest pain) is what we normally recognize as pain, ie, any unpleasant bodily or mental feeling, such as extreme heat or emotional pain from a loss.

2) Changing suffering (or the suffering of change) refers to, for example, the relief we get from entering a cold building when we’re hot or eating a donut when we’re hungry. The first few mouthfuls give rise to a pleasant feeling, so we mistake it for happiness (and later continue to seek out donuts as a result). However, this is not true pleasure because its cause, eating, is not a true cause of pleasure – as we may have noticed, eating donuts will quickly become a cause of unpleasant feelings, manifest pain, if we don’t stop. And it’s not just donuts – broccoli is not a true cause of pleasure, either. See if you can think of any food/drink/worldly pleasure that gets better the longer you keep at it.

I have noticed amongst Texan friends – whether they’re in Texas or anywhere else – that the general idea is to keep the indoor temperature at an even 70 to 72 degrees, windows closed, regardless of whether it is winter or summer, day or night. Much of the year, this temperature is entirely unrelated to the temperature outside. It means we become less resilient to changing temperatures, and, in a samsaric irony, contribute to global warming. However, trying our darnedest to make samsara work for us by changing the externals is what we all do in samsara, one way or another. It takes a lot of effort and wisdom not to try and find happiness that way.

Life is itchy

The great Indian Buddhist master Nagarjuna says our mind is like an itchy wound. Worldly enjoyments only ever work to make us happy when we need to scratch the itch, and briefly at that. Doughnuts, for example, only work if we are hungry. They don’t work at all if we have just overdosed on pizza. Cold only works if we have been in the heat, and vice versa.

If we have a big itch, we want to scratch it — it feels great, scratching itches. But we all know what happens if we keep doing it — itches turn back into manifest pain.

3) Pervasive suffering is the itchy wound itself. If we hadn’t taken rebirth in a contaminated body and mind, such as our current meaty body and deluded mind, there would be no basis for either manifest pain or changing suffering. All our experiences would be open ended comfort and bliss. As it is, we are always at risk of being in pain.

If we understand and realize the three types of suffering, we will develop renunciation and compassion, for sure, yearning to free ourselves and others permanently from suffering and its causes.

What does it mean to be spiritual?

On a related aside, I was talking earlier this evening to someone from India who recently moved to the States. We were discussing some of the more obvious differences between the two cultures, like the pervasive online life here, and the fear of commitment in relationships for people his age (Gen X). He has been interested in spirituality since he was 17, and volunteered that a difference he has noticed is that spirituality here seems to be in the pursuit of getting high (weed, music, etc) and escaping rather than the pursuit of facing up to and transforming death and suffering. I don’t know if that’s fair or not, but I find it worth thinking about, if just for myself.

What to do about all this when it comes to just staying cool/warm?

We try so hard to stay comfortable in samsara, shifting around in an endless thornbush, as Buddha explained it.  How do we reconcile our renunciation and compassion with our daily samsaric habits and habitats? It takes so much effort not to seek actual happiness by changing our environment.

And Kadampa practitioners are encouraged in any case to:

Remain natural whilst changing your aspiration. 

We need to go along with our culture and society, at least to some extent, don’t we? Do we?! What do you think? To what extent do we try to remain natural, “while in Rome do as the Romans do”?! How high do we crank that a/c?! I guess that depends on us, and Buddha didn’t make a lot of external rules.

However, to actually break out of this cycle of the three types of suffering does require changing our aspiration on a heart level, so that we really want different things.

I think we probably need to start simply by recognizing that we are doing this – shifting around to get comfortable literally day and night, and not looking much further for happiness. And that we are shifting around like this because we are in the impure bodies, minds, and worlds of samsara, not just because it is 99 degrees outside. Temporary liberations from particular sufferings are not good enough. We need to transform this situation with renunciation, compassion, and wisdom, or the vicious spiral will continue in this and future lives.

We complain a lot, but we should probably stop complaining and use that energy to get ourselves and others out of here.

The samsaric vs Dharma view

The samsaric view is to change everything around us in order to feel good or better, including about ourselves. It doesn’t really work as there is this constant dissatisfaction, “Why aren’t I happier?!”

The Dharma view is change our mind in order to feel good or better, including about ourselves. To feel content with what’s around us, perhaps seeing everything as an opportunity to practice love, wisdom, patience, and so on. Contentment is the greatest wealth. Wherever we are, we can think, “I have perfect conditions!”

This takes practice, of course. Sometimes (often, lol) I think, “If I go on retreat I will feel happier.” Which may be true insofar as I would be mixing my mind with Dharma all day long. But what is to stop me from doing that here, today, in the midst of the life I have going on already? I don’t have to postpone my Dharma practice till I do retreat, as Venerable Geshe-la once told me in no uncertain terms.

Beyond the grassy knoll

Sixty years on, we also retraced the steps of Oswald and then JFK’s motorcade, where an X marks the spot by the grassy knoll. We mused on how that one action had the power to alter human history and how different this country would probably be today without it. All our actions alter our history, sometimes quite profoundly, especially when we take karma into account, as explained here: Navigating the infinite worlds of our mind.

We did all this in the car, needless to say – you quickly notice that Texas is car country. Gas is cheap. Legs are optional. And in another samsaric irony, in which our desires are contradictory, calorie expenditure is minimal but fast food is galore.

Last but not least, I feel the urge to remind myself and you that we need to start by feeling confident and good about ourselves and our ability to gain Dharma realizations if we are to get anywhere near liberation or enlightenment. Story for another day. For now check out any of these articles on how to do this, if you still have time: Buddha nature and Rejoicing.

Thanks y’all

It was a rich weekend in Texas – I did what I went there to do, met some incredibly warm and fabulous people at KMC Texas, spent quality time with beautiful Betty (Gen Menla’s mom), and had a lot of fun being a tourist. KMC Texas is right in the heart of downtown, next to the Dallas Aquarium, in a building that is huge, modern, and cool in more ways than one! Very well worth a visit. They also have the unique distinction that Venerable Geshe Kelsang Gyatso lived and taught in Dallas 30 years ago! This year is their 30^th Anniversary.

Thank you for reading. And now, over to you, I’d love to read your comments!