The Buddhist idea of suffering is somewhat different from the current idea of suffering.
For an occidental person suffering probably means physical pain or mental discomfort (as in my dad died, or my neck hurts).
For the Buddhist, suffering is a more broad concept. Thinking your life will be better if you make more money is suffering. Generally speaking the notion that your life or the world ought to be different from what it is (even if what it is feels obviously wrong), is suffering.
So the first stage of the thing is the realization (the insight) that, actually, (in a way that makes little sense right now but is completely obvious then) everything is just fine.
I’m not enlightened (and probably have no idea what it actually feels like in deeper stages), but have temporarily experienced this first insight myself. It’s bollocks, hard to understand when it’s gone but something sticks with you.
It brings the idea that what you really need to be happy is not a change outside in the world, but a change of perspective in you.
In other words, I now know that nothing needs to change so that I can be completely satisfied with my life. It’s already perfect the way it is (hint: from a normal perspective is it NOT).
All I have to do to be perfectly happy is to attain this perspective again, so I stopped thinking that my life will be better when X happen.
It releases a lot of anxiety and make life a much better experience.
All I have to do is regain that perspective, but unfortunately I have no idea how it happened in first place (inside a bus on Buenos Aires) and how to reproduce it (going back to BA didn’t worked out lol).
For the Buddhist, suffering is a more broad concept. Thinking your like will be better if you make more money is suffering. Generally speaking the notion that your life or the world ought to be different from what it is (even if what it is feels obviously wrong), is suffering.
This seems more like referring to a completely different thing, which is not suffering, but calling it “suffering” for some reason.
Are you saying that when Buddhists (et al) say that “enlightenment”/“awakening”/etc. reduces or removes “suffering”, they in fact mean that it reduces, not “suffering” as the word is used by normal people in ordinary English language, but rather this different thing (“the notion that your life or the world ought to be different from what it is”)?
If so, then saying that “enlightenment” (etc.) reduces or removes “suffering” seems like an incredibly misleading thing to say!
“Suffering” is what translators chose to use for “dukkha”, which literally means “bad axel” as in a rough axel that makes it hard for a wheel to turn. A better translation is “friction”.
“Enlightenment” is also a bad translation of “bodhi” pushed by German Romanticists for ideological reasons that have nothing to do with Buddhism. A better and more literal translation is “awakening” or “to wake up”, chosen because the metaphor is that, prior to awakening, one is asleep, as in not aware, of one’s life, confused by the delusion of belief in a separate self.
The actual claim is perhaps more precisely stated as living life with the deep understanding that the self is not separate from the world eliminates mental friction that causes psychic pain.
(My immediate caveat on this claim is that it’s about momentary consciousness, and one may not be awake in all moments of consciousness, even if an awakened person can, in theory, be awake in every moment if they put in the effort to be awake.)
The situation is such a mess. When writing about this stuff, I’m forced to pick between using the standard translations vs making up my own terminology that breaks the conventions. The meaning of “emptiness” is so counterintuitive I don’t use that term at all.
As far as I’ve understood, a big idea with dukkha is that you have an intense desire for things to not be the way you perceive them to be, even though you might not have any concrete means of changing things, and the psychic pain is your constant awareness that reality isn’t the way you want. “Regret” and “yearning” both seem like good words to describe types of this, though you probably want to imagine the more extreme versions of both, not just mild wistfulness.
If you’ve looked into predictive processing, this sounds familiar. The low-level story might be something like being stuck with persistent predictive errors where you can neither update your model or act to change your circumstances.
That’s correct, the standard model of dukkha is that we have desires that can never be fulfilled and this is painful. When we wake up to our own non-separateness from the world, though, many of those desires fall away because they were powered by a false belief that the world could be other than how it is in the present moment. To have no such desires is to attain nirvana (“blowing out” or “extinguishing” as in extinguishing a flame).
psychic pain: mental anguish, emotional distress, etc.
I mostly agree that “suffering” is confusing and it would be better if we used a different word, but also at this point it’s become jargon among English-speaking Buddhists (not that they all necessarily understand what it means, but most serious practitioners do learn about dukkha and then learn that “suffering” is just the word we use for “dukkha” in English), and like all jargon it’s misleading to a lay audience but understood by those who learn it.
I mostly agree that “suffering” is confusing and it would be better if we used a different word, but also at this point it’s become jargon among English-speaking Buddhists (not that they all necessarily understand what it means, but most serious practitioners do learn about dukkha and then learn that “suffering” is just the word we use for “dukkha” in English), and like all jargon it’s misleading to a lay audience but understood by those who learn it.
I’m curious to hear more about this since I don’t find this to be the case at all. As I mentioned elsewhere in the comments of this thread, certainly the definition of “suffering” that I currently have has gotten a little different from what it was when I hadn’t yet meditated… but I do think that it overall still lines up with the common-sensical definition of suffering. Such that it’s a fair to summary to say something like “the practice leads to drastically reduced suffering” and that a past version of me who was shown various meditation-induced mindstates I’ve had would agree that those mindstates definitely involve less suffering. I find that the differences from the common-sense definition mostly only become apparent if one is pressed for details of what exactly the suffering-free states are like.
“Suffering” is confusing because it’s imprecise. It just means “to experience pain”, though with a connotation of happening for a duration because the “fer” part of suffering means to bear as in to carry. But dukkha refers to the pain we create for ourselves by expecting the world to be other than it is. So while awakening does reduce suffering, it doesn’t eliminate it because awakening addresses dukkha, not, for example, physical pain signals from injury (though dealing with physical pain gets a lot easier when you’re not also dealing with dukkha, to the point that “pain” can start to look like something categorically different from what “pain” was pre-awakening).
Thanks! That makes sense to me, though I still think that it’s close enough when talking to non-meditators, at least if one says that the path offers a “drastic reduction in suffering” rather than an elimination of all suffering.
psychic pain: mental anguish, emotional distress, etc.
Alright, makes sense, so tell me if I’m understanding the claim:
You’re saying that once one has gained this “deep understanding that the self is not separate from the world” (which is what happens when one has “awakened” a.k.a. “become enlightened”), one no longer experiences mental anguish or emotional distress (etc.).
I’m not sure that I’ve been precise enough about the kind of mental pain that’s alleviated, because there are some emotions that are painful but are not dukkha, like fear and grief. So if you read this and think “awakening means not feeling sad or afraid” then that’s wrong, but awakening does mean that feeling sad or afraid is not distressing in any way beyond the initial emotion (the experience of fear becomes like “fear is happing to me” rather than “I’m afraid”).
Second, and this is partly the fault of how we talk about things in English, but also just to reiterate that it’s also slightly wrong to say that one becomes enlightened or awakened in that the normal understanding of what that means is slightly off. This is not a switch to a different persistent state, but rather a switch to a different, stable, self-reinforcing pattern that is nevertheless not necessary total. An “awakened” person may not be awake in every moment, especially in the first months and years after they switch from identification with the self to not identify, because the new pattern of mental behavior is not completely stabilized and integrated (our minds are made up of many mental habits, and each of those habits has to get the awakening update, and new habits can potentially form that are not awake if one isn’t continuing to apply effort to stay awake).
This seems more like referring to a completely different thing, which is not suffering, but calling it “suffering” for some reason.
Well, yes. It’s a translation of a word that’s used somewhat like technical vocabulary in meditation tradition. Article about the translations, Dukkha is a bummer.
The Buddhist idea of suffering is somewhat different from the current idea of suffering.
For an occidental person suffering probably means physical pain or mental discomfort (as in my dad died, or my neck hurts).
For the Buddhist, suffering is a more broad concept. Thinking your life will be better if you make more money is suffering. Generally speaking the notion that your life or the world ought to be different from what it is (even if what it is feels obviously wrong), is suffering.
So the first stage of the thing is the realization (the insight) that, actually, (in a way that makes little sense right now but is completely obvious then) everything is just fine.
I’m not enlightened (and probably have no idea what it actually feels like in deeper stages), but have temporarily experienced this first insight myself. It’s bollocks, hard to understand when it’s gone but something sticks with you.
It brings the idea that what you really need to be happy is not a change outside in the world, but a change of perspective in you.
In other words, I now know that nothing needs to change so that I can be completely satisfied with my life. It’s already perfect the way it is (hint: from a normal perspective is it NOT).
All I have to do to be perfectly happy is to attain this perspective again, so I stopped thinking that my life will be better when X happen.
It releases a lot of anxiety and make life a much better experience.
All I have to do is regain that perspective, but unfortunately I have no idea how it happened in first place (inside a bus on Buenos Aires) and how to reproduce it (going back to BA didn’t worked out lol).
This seems more like referring to a completely different thing, which is not suffering, but calling it “suffering” for some reason.
Are you saying that when Buddhists (et al) say that “enlightenment”/“awakening”/etc. reduces or removes “suffering”, they in fact mean that it reduces, not “suffering” as the word is used by normal people in ordinary English language, but rather this different thing (“the notion that your life or the world ought to be different from what it is”)?
If so, then saying that “enlightenment” (etc.) reduces or removes “suffering” seems like an incredibly misleading thing to say!
It’s all bad transactions.
“Suffering” is what translators chose to use for “dukkha”, which literally means “bad axel” as in a rough axel that makes it hard for a wheel to turn. A better translation is “friction”.
“Enlightenment” is also a bad translation of “bodhi” pushed by German Romanticists for ideological reasons that have nothing to do with Buddhism. A better and more literal translation is “awakening” or “to wake up”, chosen because the metaphor is that, prior to awakening, one is asleep, as in not aware, of one’s life, confused by the delusion of belief in a separate self.
The actual claim is perhaps more precisely stated as living life with the deep understanding that the self is not separate from the world eliminates mental friction that causes psychic pain.
(My immediate caveat on this claim is that it’s about momentary consciousness, and one may not be awake in all moments of consciousness, even if an awakened person can, in theory, be awake in every moment if they put in the effort to be awake.)
The situation is such a mess. When writing about this stuff, I’m forced to pick between using the standard translations vs making up my own terminology that breaks the conventions. The meaning of “emptiness” is so counterintuitive I don’t use that term at all.
Makes sense. The obvious follow-up question is: what do you mean by “psychic pain”?
EDIT: Also, would you agree that using the term “suffering” for these purposes is not a good idea, on account of its misleadingness?
As far as I’ve understood, a big idea with dukkha is that you have an intense desire for things to not be the way you perceive them to be, even though you might not have any concrete means of changing things, and the psychic pain is your constant awareness that reality isn’t the way you want. “Regret” and “yearning” both seem like good words to describe types of this, though you probably want to imagine the more extreme versions of both, not just mild wistfulness.
If you’ve looked into predictive processing, this sounds familiar. The low-level story might be something like being stuck with persistent predictive errors where you can neither update your model or act to change your circumstances.
That’s correct, the standard model of dukkha is that we have desires that can never be fulfilled and this is painful. When we wake up to our own non-separateness from the world, though, many of those desires fall away because they were powered by a false belief that the world could be other than how it is in the present moment. To have no such desires is to attain nirvana (“blowing out” or “extinguishing” as in extinguishing a flame).
psychic pain: mental anguish, emotional distress, etc.
I mostly agree that “suffering” is confusing and it would be better if we used a different word, but also at this point it’s become jargon among English-speaking Buddhists (not that they all necessarily understand what it means, but most serious practitioners do learn about dukkha and then learn that “suffering” is just the word we use for “dukkha” in English), and like all jargon it’s misleading to a lay audience but understood by those who learn it.
I’m curious to hear more about this since I don’t find this to be the case at all. As I mentioned elsewhere in the comments of this thread, certainly the definition of “suffering” that I currently have has gotten a little different from what it was when I hadn’t yet meditated… but I do think that it overall still lines up with the common-sensical definition of suffering. Such that it’s a fair to summary to say something like “the practice leads to drastically reduced suffering” and that a past version of me who was shown various meditation-induced mindstates I’ve had would agree that those mindstates definitely involve less suffering. I find that the differences from the common-sense definition mostly only become apparent if one is pressed for details of what exactly the suffering-free states are like.
“Suffering” is confusing because it’s imprecise. It just means “to experience pain”, though with a connotation of happening for a duration because the “fer” part of suffering means to bear as in to carry. But dukkha refers to the pain we create for ourselves by expecting the world to be other than it is. So while awakening does reduce suffering, it doesn’t eliminate it because awakening addresses dukkha, not, for example, physical pain signals from injury (though dealing with physical pain gets a lot easier when you’re not also dealing with dukkha, to the point that “pain” can start to look like something categorically different from what “pain” was pre-awakening).
Thanks! That makes sense to me, though I still think that it’s close enough when talking to non-meditators, at least if one says that the path offers a “drastic reduction in suffering” rather than an elimination of all suffering.
Alright, makes sense, so tell me if I’m understanding the claim:
You’re saying that once one has gained this “deep understanding that the self is not separate from the world” (which is what happens when one has “awakened” a.k.a. “become enlightened”), one no longer experiences mental anguish or emotional distress (etc.).
Right? Or still wrong?
Basically, yes, although two notes.
I’m not sure that I’ve been precise enough about the kind of mental pain that’s alleviated, because there are some emotions that are painful but are not dukkha, like fear and grief. So if you read this and think “awakening means not feeling sad or afraid” then that’s wrong, but awakening does mean that feeling sad or afraid is not distressing in any way beyond the initial emotion (the experience of fear becomes like “fear is happing to me” rather than “I’m afraid”).
Second, and this is partly the fault of how we talk about things in English, but also just to reiterate that it’s also slightly wrong to say that one becomes enlightened or awakened in that the normal understanding of what that means is slightly off. This is not a switch to a different persistent state, but rather a switch to a different, stable, self-reinforcing pattern that is nevertheless not necessary total. An “awakened” person may not be awake in every moment, especially in the first months and years after they switch from identification with the self to not identify, because the new pattern of mental behavior is not completely stabilized and integrated (our minds are made up of many mental habits, and each of those habits has to get the awakening update, and new habits can potentially form that are not awake if one isn’t continuing to apply effort to stay awake).
Well, yes. It’s a translation of a word that’s used somewhat like technical vocabulary in meditation tradition. Article about the translations, Dukkha is a bummer.
It looks like you’ve had a taste of kensho.
This state of consciousness can be reliably reproduced via shikantaza + ethical living.