The Four Noble Truths - Revisited

 

A few months ago, my wife and I had a wonderful visit from an old college buddy and his wife. As they approached our front door, they spotted the Buddha figurine we have right outside (see above). At that point, my friend remarked, "I'm not a Buddhist because I don't believe that life is nothing but suffering..."

This is a common misunderstanding that many people have about the Buddha's teaching: that it is essentially pessimistic, because its first principle is that "life is suffering." So I felt that this was a good time to share my own understanding of the Four Noble Truths, which, according to tradition, were the first teaching the Buddha gave to his disciples after his enlightenment under the Bodhi Tree. These are usually translated as something like the following:

1. Life is characterized by suffering (Dukkha);
2. Suffering is rooted in craving;
3. Craving can be abandoned (through awakening or enlightenment);
4. The path to awakening is eightfold:
1. Right Understanding;
2. Right Intention (or aspiration);
3. Right Speech;
4. Right Action;
5. Right Livelihood
6. Right Effort;
7. Right Mindfulness;
8. Right Concentration (Samadhi)

While the commentary on this teaching is immense, and I do not pretend to grasp these teachings in any depth, I nevertheless like to review these core teachings to enhance my own understanding of them, and ideally to help others (including my friend) to gain a clearer understanding of what the Buddha was teaching us. 

Let's start with the problem of translation. Normally a single English word will not do justice to the range of connotations in the original language, so it is best to provide several possibilities for each. The key terms in the original Sanskrit/ Pali languages were as follows:

Dukkha (pain, suffering, or dissatisfaction or frustration)

Samudaya (arising)

Nirodha (ending)

Marga (path)

Dukkha has a broad range of connotations. It does not simply refer to physical pain nor extreme mental anguish, as many assume. Rather, it refers more broadly to dissatisfaction, and it arises from craving, or wanting things to be other than they are.  This is something we share with all other animate beings--at least those of sufficient complexity to have emotional lives. Quite simply, the natural state of being alive entails wanting, and seeking out, the things we don't currently have, whether it is food, water, sex, comfort, safety, or in our own case, relief from boredom through entertainment or consumerism.

More fundamentally, once we attain self-awareness through human language, we have more primordial kinds of existential anguish or frustration. We all wish we could live forever, but we all die; we all wish we could enjoy perfect health, but we all get sick, sooner or later; and we all enjoy and wish to keep the people and things we have in our lives--our spouses, families, homes, possessions, and so forth--yet sooner or later, we lose them all.  So the deepest root cause of Dukkha is simply impermanence--or in physics, the Second Law of Thermodynamics (entropy). As George Harrison sings, "All things must pass..."

So Dukkha of all kinds is directly linked to Samudaya the root cause that gives rise to it: craving or wishing things were other than they are. But is this our fate?  Most of us already share this basic pessimism, of which the Buddha is often accused; this is why many recoil from these teachings, like my friend. Who, after all, wants to be reminded, again and again, that "life's a bitch, and then you die."

But the Buddha did not stop there.  Having succinctly diagnosed our shared existential plight, he goes on to offer a promise, and then a way to get there. 

The promise, of course, is the Third Noble Truth: It is possible to abandon, or rise above, the perpetual craving that causes our grief and suffering, both trivial and profound. We don't have to remain in a state of frustration, of wanting what we can't have, or wishing things were other than they are. But how do we escape from this existential plight into which we, like all other sentient beings, were born?

The recipe or "path" he gives us for dealing with this innately dissatisfied condition of life is quite simple, but far-reaching in its implications. Let's review the Eightfold Path briefly.

Right Understanding (often translated, incorrectly in my eyes, as "right views"). This begins recursively by referring back to the first three truths: that we are born into dissatisfaction because life and all of its conditions are impermanent; that our suffering is rooted in craving what we don't have; and that we have the potential to let go of this craving, and hence of our suffering. At a deeper level Right Understanding is the insight reflected in the Three Dharma Seals--which Thich Nhat Hanh succinctly renders as Impermanence, Interbeing and Oneness (Nirvana). 

The first--Impermanence--is already the cause of the problem set forth in the first two of the Four Noble Truths: the fact that we crave things we either do not have yet, or will lose eventually--our health, our possessions, those we love, and our very lives. The second, Interbeing, refers to the deeper truth often translated as "nonself"--that is, that we are all deeply interconnected, and that without everyone and everything else in the universe, there would be no one and nothing in the universe. More specifically, in Gaian terms, without sunlight, oxygenated air, fresh water, topsoil, minerals, photosynthetic biomass, and the hard work and sexual lives of all our ancestors, and the hard work and training of all who grow our food, build our houses, and provide our possessions, none of us would be here. As Thich Nhat Hanh puts it concisely, "to be is to inter-be." And grasping this insight--and living it--is the key to the ultimate goal of Nirvana, which does not denote "nonexistence" or "heaven" as often misunderstood, but rather translates literally as "extinction"--that is, extinction of the delusion of separateness we carry around with ourselves, and the emerging awareness of our Oneness with all others, all life, and all the universe.

But that "Right Understanding" is only the beginning of the path to awakening. It is followed by realizing this understanding through ethical behavior, beginning with Right Aspiration--setting the intention to awaken to our true nature of interbeing, and then acting accordingly (Right Speech, Right Action, Right Livelihood, and Right Effort).

The last two steps of the path refer to the fruition of these efforts: Right Mindfulness and Right Concentration (Samadhi) which in turn cycle back in to, and reinforce, Right Understanding, Right Aspiration, and the rest, so that the Eightfold Path is less of a ladder than a spiral; with enlightenment not a "place" you reach and rest, but rather an asymptotic goal--one for which you continually strive without ever deluding yourself into thinking "I've made it." (If you think you're enlightened, you're not.)

So Right Effort is ultimately what the Buddhist path boils down to: breathing, observing, letting go, (abiding in equanimity); being well, doing good work, keeping in touch, (abiding in equanimity); learning, teaching, healing, and creating (and, as always, abiding in equanimity, no matter what happens).

May we all tread this path, in accordance with our own understanding.

After life?

Ay, but to die, and go we know not where,
To lie in cold obstruction and to rot,
This sensible warm motion to become
A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit
To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside
In thrilling region of thick-ribbèd ice,
To be imprisoned in the viewless winds
And blown with restless violence round about
The pendent world; or to be worse than worst
Of those that lawless and incertain thought
Imagine howling—’tis too horrible.
The weariest and most loathèd worldly life
That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment
Can lay on nature is a paradise
To what we fear of death.

My neighbor Bob died recently. He was 89, but hale and hearty, a good, decent man, who lived across the street. He was looking forward to flying his private plane once more on his 90th birthday, some three months hence, but...oh well...

Everyone expected that his wife Ramona would go first, since she is in poor health, confined to a wheelchair, and was recently taken to a care facility since Bob could no longer manage her care all by himself. But then--Bob died instead--of an aneurism.

All this left me pondering, yet again, the great mystery of death; something that people over 70 like myself get used to, as our friends and neighbors our age or older fall away, one by one, and simply cease to exist. 

While cultures and religious traditions throughout the world have beliefs about the afterlife, a closer inquiry into these beliefs reveals that they have little, if anything, in common with one another. To take a simple example, both ancient Egyptians and modern Christians believed in some form of Divine judgment after we die, for our conduct while alive. But while Christians hold that we must confess our sins and beg for mercy before the throne of God, in order to go to heaven instead of being consigned to eternal torment in hell,  Egyptians believed, conversely, that they should recite examples of their virtuous conduct to the divine judge(s), in order to be rewarded with a good afterlife (for which they had to preserve their bodies intact as mummies, as well as their possessions to take along with them). And of course far eastern Dharmic religions--Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, Sikh, etc.--all generally believe in some form of reincarnation--that our present lifetime is one in an endless series, from past to future, generated by our karma--the net consequences of our actions while alive--and that this will go on until we pay off our accumulated karmic debts by virtuous conduct and meditation to achieve enlightenment, also called "Nirvana" (which literally means "extinction"). 

Who is right?  Anyone? Or are these all simply wish-fulfillment fantasies, while actually, there will be nothing at all after death, other than the decay, putrification, and ultimate recycling of our bodies, while our consciousness, that inner viewpoint behind our eyes, and restless chain of thoughts, feelings, and memories we call "ourselves" will simply vanish, in the same way as a computer screen goes dark when we pull the plug or take out the battery.

That is, as Hamlet says, the question: "To die, to sleep, no more..." or "To sleep--perchance to dream..."

I have no idea, of course, any more than anyone else. I incline, however, toward the view that this unique sense of self that I nurture from behind my eyes is more like a computer screen than anything else; it depends on a continuous source of solar energy, water, and carbon transformed into biomass, to power my physical, neural, and mental processes that model the environment around me, and all these processes take a unique form, based on my genotype, that never existed before and will never exist again. I will simply wink out, that is, when I draw my last breath and my brain, starved of oxygen and water, goes dark.  From a purely physiological perspective, I do not see where there is any other possibility.

But this is only a problem to the extent that we remain attached to this mental formation we call our "self." But what if that "self" is nothing more than a moire pattern, engendered by crosscurrents of air, earth (minerals), water, solar energy, and information, shaped by genetic predispositions inherited from our exponentially expanding array of ancestors? In which case, it will not just cease to exist--it never existed to begin with, as anything other than a convenient verbal construct, a way for a body, endowed with language, to maintain the membrane, both physical and social, necessary for it to function autonomously in an environment full of both things we crave (food, sex, toys, experiences, etc.) and things we fear (enemies, dangers, poisons, etc.)  So when our bodies meet their predestined end, we need not worry about losing ourselves--since we never existed to begin with as anything separate from the world we look out on through our eyes and other senses. We ARE Gaia...and when we die, we will simply melt back into Gaia, as the constituents of our bodies go on to become other beings...

Glomart, Gaia, and Garden Guilds

 Let's start with the basics, in the form of a catechism: 

Q: What is the biggest single problem in the world today?

A: The fundamental incompatibility between the production rules of Glomart and Gaia.

Q: What is "Glomart"?

A: The Global Market Economy, a self-organizing and self-propagating complex adaptive system based on the arithmetical logic (i.e. production rules) of money.

Q: What is the logic of money?

A: Basic arithmetic: (1) More is always better; (2) What's mine is not yours, and vice versa.

Q: What's wrong with that?

A: These two production rules engender an economy that has the following characteristics:

• Nothing has value until it has a price.
• Therefore, nature has no value at all until it is transformed into commodities.
• Commodities must have discrete boundaries in order to be assigned a financial value.
• The system depends on the endless growth of production and consumption of commodities.
• As resources diminish, the rich get richer while the poor get poorer--inevitably--since possession of resources increases one's ability to raise prices for those who lack them.

Q: What is Gaia?

A: The living Earth, a self-organizing and self-propagating complex adaptive system based on the logic (i.e. production rules) of living organisms and their ecosystems interacting with their mineral, hydrological, and atmospheric systems, which provides the fresh water we drink, the food we eat, and the oxygenated air we breathe, and the climate (and shelter) we need to survive and propagate.

Q: What are those production rules?

A: These consist of the following:

• Enough is  enough; all biological values are optimizing, rather than maximizing--too much or too little of any biological value is toxic to the system, whether that value is personal (e.g. body temperature or blood pressure) or collective (e.g. population density within an ecosystem). 
• There are no discrete "commodities" in Gaia; the value of any biological entity depends on its interactions with its environment and with other biological organisms.
• No matter what we may believe, we humans are a part of Gaia, and are every bit as dependent on these Gaian systems as every other organism on the planet.

Hence we have our predicament: Glomart--an inherently maximizing system that depends on endless growth of population, production, and consumption--is fundamentally incompatible with Gaia, an inherently optimizing system that is not growing any bigger, and in fact is already collapsing from overuse (via climate change, desertification, flooding, pollution, etc.)  And as the vast store of net energy (the very foundation of any material economy) available from fossil fuels is depleted, and its byproducts cause accelerated heating and chaotic fluctuations in our global climate, this basic contradiction between an "endless growth" economy and a finite biological support system is coming to a head. As we overshoot the limits of our energetic and biological support system, our global market economy is collapsing, first gradually, but then at an accelerating pace. There is no way out of this, at least collectively.

What about individually?  It's not certain, but here is one possibility.

What would happen if people with small bits of land at their disposal--front or back yards--started growing at least some of their own food. They would shortly find that there is much they don't know--much to learn--so (in addition to reading garden books or watching YouTube tutorials) they strike up a chat with their more experienced neighbors, as they are out in their gardens.

Then suppose a group of neighbors with interest in, or expertise in, growing their own food started forming neighborhood Garden Guilds, where they met once a month for potluck dinners, to share dishes, recipes, and ideas about gardening. On this basis, they started collaborating, so that people could expand their range of homegrown produce by trading it with their neighbors. As the garden guilds evolve, they could start holding reciprocal work parties as well, so that garden projects that exceed the strength or skills of one neighbor could be achieved by collaboration with others.

Multiple other benefits could arise from contiguous neighbors collaborating in this way. If, for example, a disaster struck--an earthquake, a drought, a wildfire, a flood, or a collapsing economy with hyperinflation, people would be surrounded by friends, rather than strangers, to whom they could reach out, whether to solicit or offer assistance. Ditto for external threats to the neighborhood, such as crime or violence.

Now imagine that city governments, Master Gardener chapters, churches, and civic organizations all jumped onboard, creating community-wide Garden Guild networks to promote and support the creation of Garden Guilds in adjoining neighborhoods, who all exchanged information and ideas with others. And imagine if the dominant theme of these Guilds was the study and practice of permaculture, based on the core ethics of Earth Care, People Care, and Fair Share.  The mission of the Garden Guild movement, therefore, is as follows:

Grow Gardens, Grow Community, Grow Awareness by Learning, Teaching, Healing, and Creating. 

This would be a gift economy, rather than a zero-sum money economy where the rich get steadily richer at everyone else's expense.  In short, it would resemble the indigenous, pre-Glomart economies of our ancestors, with the added benefits of scientific inquiry, technological know-how, and global awareness and responsibility.

While such a development will not prevent the inevitable collapse of Glomart, it could nevertheless sow the seeds of a Gaian culture to replace it eventually--a culture based on creating a symbiotic, rather than parasitic, relationship between humanity and our biological support system, our unique living planet Gaia. 

The Enigma of "Nonself"

 

When you've seen beyond yourself then you will find peace of mind is waiting there./And the time will come when you see we're all One and life goes on within you and without you..."

--George Harrison

Nonself--or No-Self--is one of the most perplexing and enigmatic themes in Buddhist teachings. Most people initially see the concept of "no self" as utterly absurd: "Of course there is a self. Look in the mirror!"

And in fact, most of us are completely obsessed with ourselves, most of the time: "How do I look?" "Why am I so sad today?" "I wish I were..." "I want that..." "I remember..." "Why am I so...?" and so forth. Such thoughts seem to swarm into our mindstream nonstop--except during those rare moments when we are "in the zone," completely absorbed with a present task: a musician playing a solo, a dancer doing a pirouette,  an eye surgeon operating on a patient,  a baseball player at bat. At such moments,  self-awareness can become a hindrance, or even a danger. But at most other times, our "selves" are often our constant obsession. How could there possibly be "no self"?

This obsessive sense of self that we carry around with us behind our eyes most likely has deep biological roots.  Every living organism, after all--from single-celled all the way up to the most complex multicellular being (such as us)--depends for its survival on maintaining a permeable membrane between itself and the world, to protect its own complex and delicate cellular or organic systems from threats to its survival, while letting in essential forms of sustenance (water, oxygen, carbon, solar energy converted into edible biomass), and also processing information about the world around them: edibles, water sources, potential mates, rivals, young, nesting materials or hiding places, and threats from predators. With the evolution of language in humans, this well-developed instinct for survival and propagation that is essential for all living organisms was reified in our linguistic head space as the concept of "me." So what is wrong with that? 

Nothing is "wrong" with it, per se--especially if it is just a survival instinct reified in our minds as a sense of "self." We are, after all, animals, who like all others, must eat safe food, breathe good air, drink potable water, take shelter, find mates, raise children,  and make decisions on our own behalf in order to survive. But the Buddha (and many other sages as well), through intense and prolonged meditation and introspection, discovered that this "self" we all cherish has no objective reality at all--it is simply a mental formation, like a moire pattern in an ongoing flux of matter, energy, and information within us and without us.

"But if this were true, we'd all be the same.  But I'm unique!"  We all think so. But how unique are we, really? On one hand, we are unique in the sense that each of us has a unique genotype, derived from both our parents' chromosomes, and thereafter our personalities are shaped, uniquely, by the interaction of our genetic predispositions and our personal experiences. But despite these differences, we are made of exactly the same basic stuff, both physically and emotionally, and this commonality enables us to empathize, both with those close to us, and with complete strangers, and with other animals as well. 

At a deeper level, of course, we all share the same basic genetic machinery as all other living organisms--the self-replicating interaction of DNA, RNA, and protein molecules. In this respect, we are "the same" as bacteria, protists, fungi, plants, and all other animals. Deeper still, we are all made out of ever-changing combinations of the same 100-odd basic elements (118 at last count, though approximately 20% of these are synthetic). And deepest of all (perhaps) we may all be nothing but vibrating strings of pure information...

So this is how I have come to understand this counterintuitive notion of "nonself." Not that "you and I don't exist," but rather, that you and I (and everyone and everything else) exist (temporarily) only because of ongoing interaction and interrelation with everyone and everything else in the universe. Or, as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. put it, "we are caught in an "inescapable network of mutuality" where "whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. ".  And just as every snowflake is different but they are all hexagonal because they are fractal expressions of the H2O molecule, so we are likewise all different, yet the same, as expressions one particular genotype that makes us human, differentiating us from other animals. Yet at the same time, we and all other animals, plants, fungi, protists, and bacteria are variations on a theme of the self-replicating interaction of DNA, RNA, and Protein--another moire pattern, made possible by the far larger moire patterns of matter/energy that have manifested, since the primordial event of the "big bang," as stars, galaxies, supernovas, planets, and black holes...