A related question is “what things might be mistaken for suffering, but are not suffering?” If I find myself in turmoil over a decision, does that mean I haven’t achieved ‘stream entry’, or is that a common occurence post stream entry?
The feeling you get when you accidentally touch a hot object may be mistaken for suffering but is not suffering.
It depends what you mean by “turmoil”. Hitting stream entry doesn’t mean you always know the best course of action to take in all circumstances. As a degenerate example, no amount of meditation will teach you the optimal design for a rocket engine.
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.
If this is what you mean by “suffering”, then you are using the word in a radically different way than how it is normally used. I would suggest that choosing a different word would be more useful and more honest.
I think most common-sense uses of ‘suffering’ still match this definition. If you are in physical pain, you feel like the world ought to be one where you don’t have the pain. If you’re jealous of someone, you wish the world was one where you had whatever they have. If you are bored, you feel the world ought to be more entertaining. Etc.
For one thing, this “ought to be” business isn’t quite right. I prefer the world to be such that I am not in pain. (This itself is a needlessly fancy way of saying that I prefer not to be in pain.) I may or may not have opinions about how the world “ought to be” w.r.t. me being in pain.
More importantly, these two separate things may[1] co-occur, but they’re not the same thing. If I am in pain, I may indeed also believe that the world ought to be such that I would not be in pain. On the other hand, if I believe that the world ought to be such that everyone is equal before the law, it is absolutely not within the bounds of common usage to describe that view as being, or even being connected to, any “suffering” on my part.
The fact is that if you ask people what they mean by “suffering”, they won’t come up with anything even sort of like “the feeling that the world ought to be something other than what it is”; and if you ask people to pick a word that fits that description, they won’t come up with “suffering”.
This is one of the relatively rare cases where looking in the dictionary is helpful—we are discussing common usage, after all. Let’s look at couple of definitions.
Feeling of pain or strong stress, either physical or emotional. It can be correlative to the situation, or much higher. It can also be intentionally personally caused. To bear or tolerate something unbearable.
Other dictionaries are more of the same.
Nothing about “feeling that the world ought to be something other than what it is”, or anything similar.
May! But may not. For instance, if I am bored, I do not “feel the world ought to be more entertaining”. That is simply false as a description of my views or my mental state at those times when I am bored.
I think part of the point though is that (Buddhists believe) people are actually suffering during states of being that they would describe as “doing just fine”. And that (oversimplifying the view to a culty frame) the 99% of people who aren’t Buddhist or similar are clueless that this “doing just fine” state is actually suffering. So, the standard self report definition isn’t actually relevant (to this point, under this view.)
I think that there can be some light in this, an example that comes to mind is someone with phone addiction—as soon as they get home from work, they use their phone throughout dinner, the whole evening, and into the night.
An observing family member watches this and thinks, this person isn’t ever able to just sit and slowly eat dinner, or relax, or do anything, they are compelled to spend hours crouched over their device shining light into their eyes without moving, they are compulsively stimulating themselves to the exclusion of anything lasting.
The person in the addiction is just having a nice night watching interesting videos and chatting with friends while still getting to eat dinner and decompress from work. They genuinely feel they’re doing just fine.
But ten years later after they leave behind the phone addiction they might say, “yeah I was suffering, if I had ten minutes without entertainment or something to do my mind would start to get agitated and painful. Now I know it was because xyz that I didn’t want to stop and take things in, in that place. But I didn’t know that I was one day going to be able to actually relax. I thought that /was/ relaxing. From what I’d known since childhood that type of night felt standardly good.”
It’s like an archetypal dynamic… “YOU ARE OBVIOUSLY DISTRESSED AND PART OF YOU KNOWS IT and you can fix it by doing what I say” vs “No I’m doing just fine there’s just different ways of doing things and you’re not being kind by not respecting my internal experience”
… But… In this case maximalized to “everyone in society is subliminally distressed due to the society being misaligned”.
Possibly the exact phrasing that lsusr used may not be the best one. And I feel hesitant to make claims of what anyone else’s experience of suffering is. I do however feel confident in saying that whenever I suffer (in the common sense meaning of the word), it involves some degree of desire (sometimes very slight, sometimes extreme and intense) that something be different, that this desire seems to be the cause of the suffering, and that the way this desire and suffering behave seem to generally line up with the way that Buddhists talk about these things.
On the other hand, if I believe that the world ought to be such that everyone is equal before the law, it is absolutely not within the bounds of common usage to describe that view as being, or even being connected to, any “suffering” on my part.
I think this is related to the desire/motivation distinction lsusr was making in a different comment. It’s possible to consider a world where everyone is equal before the law better than one that is not, and even to work toward such a world, without that involving suffering. At the same time, it’s also possible to think of the way that people in the current world are treated unfairly and feel anguish and suffer due to the thought.
So if you just believe that the world ought to have equality before the law but don’t suffer due to it, then one might say that you are motivated to have such a world. If you feel that the world ought to have equality and also experience suffering because not everyone is treated equally, then you have desire for such a world. Desire causes suffering but mere motivation does not, and the original definition we’re discussing was inexact in not making that distinction. (I tried to sketch more of the ways that this desire—or craving as I called it—behaves in this article. I’m not sure if I’d completely endorse every detail there anymore but I think it’s at least gesturing in the right direction.)
Right the delineation is associated with motive-root identity.
It’s definitely embedded in the English language… Considering the word “insufferable”, spending time with someone who is sufferable, you can accept it, bear it, spend the whole time wishing you were somewhere else, but not with such agitation as with someone who’s insufferable.
Suffering is both unbearable and urgently agitating, but usually ongoing and outside of your control.
One aspect of it is your emotional focus toward the problem… Why is it like that, why can’t I change it, … You “suffer” more the more you think about it. Commonly with respect to other people in the community not improving, or other people in the relationship or family not being considerate. Also obviously chronic pain.)
I think a fear/disgust/contempt of Buddhism commonly has the fear that we will tune out important internal motives (to change) by tuning out this frustrated despairing agitation.
With this delineation: (
One side is:
This despairing agitation (“suffering”) does point to a motive which you need to solve for, however it is a lens on the motive and is holding you back from seeing clearer the motive and your capacities. For example, when you “ignore” a toothache by tensing the whole side of your face to not jiggle the tooth, and now your whole side of your face throbs, but you’re ignoring it so stringently that the part of you identified as a worker can’t understand why you’re finding it hard to focus.
The other side is:
There is a third variable besides suffering and motive which is actually the thing which is lensing and holding you back from realizing your motive. Engaging fully with this third, is comforting, because it can make you feel you are making progress, while still blinding you to the reality that the progression staircase is built on the same foundation. (For example the dril candles.)
)
my thinking is to consider both these sides (suffering keeps you trapped/suffering is part of growth) as only two stable positions on a seesaw, easy to reason about since they’re stable.
I’m using standard translations, like how a physicist’s meaning of the word “impulse” is different from the colloquial meaning of the word “impulse”. This has tradeoffs to this approach.
It’s like Christians saying that they talk to God, and when you keep pushing for details, it turns out that “talking to” in this context actually means “imagining that you are talking to”, which of course is much less of a miracle, and much less of an evidence for the religion. And they seem annoyed when you push for the details, so I believe the confusion is not an innocent misunderstanding; it’s by design.
Physicists do not organize seminars for lay people saying that they will teach them how to control their impulses… only to admit when pushed for details that their “impulse” is actually something quite different from what most non-physicists imagine when they read the word. If for some reason the physicists felt the need to organize public seminars about impulses, they would probably start proactively adding disclaimers to avoid this kind of confusion.
Honest communication would be something like: “You know that when something bad happens to you, whether it’s serious or trivial, it is often followed by this bad feeling when you are unhappy about how things are. Luckily for you, a few hundred hours of mental training can make that bad feeling mostly disappear from your life! Trust me, it will make a greater difference than you are probably imagining after reading this description.”
But I guess this suggestion will be about as popular as telling Christians to advertise their faith by saying: “If you read this really big book and pretend to believe everything it says, you will get an imaginary friend you can talk to. And a big community! Trust me, the average positive impacts on well-being are large, even the scientists who are not members of our community can confirm that.”
For what it’s worth, I think the Buddhist sense of the term is close enough to what people intuitively care about that I don’t think it’s dishonest to not go into the exact nuances of technical vocabulary. At least I have personally felt totally satisfied with all the suffering reduction I’ve gotten so far (though I’m probably not awakened) and I don’t feel like “suffering” being a slightly more nuanced term than I originally thought means that any of the meditation teachers would have been ripping me off in any way.
The analogy that I’d use is that of a physicist who gives a popular-science explanation of a physical phenomenon that skips all of the math that your average listener wouldn’t understand. It makes the explanation incomplete but it doesn’t make it dishonest. In the case of the physicist, trying to include all the math would just confuse the listener, just as trying to explain the exact technical distinctions tends to just confuse people without sufficient meditative experience.
Dunno, maybe I am unfair here, but it feels like peeling the layers of an onion, and what you find below them turns out to be yet another layer of onion.
I mean, the actual Buddhism (in the sense of “Buddhism of people who grew up in a traditional Buddhist country, in a religious Buddhist family”) is a belief in heaven(s) and hell(s), not much different from e.g. Christianity. Buddhist monks are supposed to have actual magic powers, etc.
Oh wait, that’s all just a metaphor, just something those silly non-Western people believe! Actually, heaven(s) and hell(s) are just states of mind. There are no actual magical powers. No literal afterlife. When Buddha said that, he was certainly joking… uhm, using metaphors so that his teaching could make sense to the stupid followers. The actual meaning of Buddhism is psychotherapy. And skills that are extraordinary but at the same time totally scientific. You can control your mind, get rid of suffering, increase your productivity.
Actually, when I say “increase your productivity”, that’s just a metaphor! What I meant was that you will become happier in a difficult to describe way. Many people don’t get more productive at all, sometimes it’s actually the other way round, but that’s okay, because they get happier.
Actually, when I say “get rid of suffering” or “happier”, that’s just a...
...
...something else. (Or maybe just a metaphor for something else? Hard to say at this point.)
.
Try doing the same kind of mental gymnastic about Christianity, and compare the results.
EDIT:
My alternative hypothesis is: Buddhist meditation does something real, but if you described it clearly (without metaphors, without hype), it would be much less impressive than if you keep it vague. The difficulty at explaining it using plain words is partially motivated by a desire to protect the speaker’s feelings of sacred mystery (i.e. high status).
Dunno, maybe I am unfair here, but it feels like peeling the layers of an onion, and what you find below them turns out to be yet another layer of onion.
I think you’re not being unfair but you’re also responding to an amalgam of things that different people have said, and yes some of those people do have bad epistemics and do make unfounded claims that are very reasonable to criticize.
I’d like to think that I’m not engaging in those kinds of onion layers, though. My position is something like, yes lots of Buddhists do believe in weird supernatural stuff, but they still seem to have developed some meditative techniques and theories about how the mind works that seem accurate. (Though they are not the only ones, as contemplatives in many different religions seem to have converged on similar claims and techniques. This seems like suggestive evidence that the techniques do something real that can be separated from the supernatural metaphysics, if religious people with drastically clashing metaphysics can still arrive at similar techniques and conclusions [while disagreeing about the metaphysical implications].)
And in my experience, following those practices does help in reducing something that’s in my opinion reasonable to round into “suffering”, at least as measured by tests such as “if my past self got to compare his mindstate at the time to my mindstate now and asked ’would you agree that future!Kaj’s mindstate has less suffering than yours”, he’d say “yes definitely, please please tell me how I could achieve the same”.
Obligatory caveat is that this is not only because of meditation, there have been a lot of other things like therapy, improvements in external circumstances, etc. etc. too, and that all of these also seem mutually synergestic, such that it’d be impossible for me to say which parts of my suffering reduction have been due to meditation specifically. But I have also had several occasions when I have e.g. just come off a retreat or finished a particularly good meditation session when I’ve had some experience like “oh wow I wouldn’t have been able to even imagine this kind of a state before and it’d be really hard if not impossible to adequately explain it to anyone who hasn’t experienced before, but it’s definitely accurate to say that I’m now suffering less than usual, even if some of the specifics of how that reduction is realized are not what I would have expected”.
Some of these are easier to explain than others, though. For instance, once I had a crush on a particular friend and whenever we hung out, I’d feel a mild tendency for my thoughts to slip into something like “man it’d be nice if we were dating”. This was a form of slight suffering (and a sense that the world ought to be different, as lsusr put it), though mild enough that ‘dissatisfaction’ might be a better word. On one occasion right after a particularly good meditation session, that dissatisfaction temporarily disappeared, such that I was genuinely just completely enjoying her presence as-is, with no need for anything to be different.
My alternative hypothesis is: Buddhist meditation does something real, but if you described it clearly (without metaphors, without hype), it would be much less impressive than if you keep it vague.
That seems wrong to me. “Buddhist meditation leads to vastly reduced suffering” is already a clear explanation. It’s only when people press for specific details of what it’s like that it becomes hard to explain to people who haven’t had the experience and thus have difficulty understanding the technical distinctions being drawn. Again kind of like the physicist explaining things to people who don’t know math: if your audience doesn’t have the ability to understand the equations, you have to fall back to metaphors to try to convey some kind of understanding, and probably the metaphors will break down if your audience keeps pressing for details that can’t be properly explained without the math.
If the distinction between the Buddhist meaning and the typical meaning of ‘suffering’ was explained[1], I don’t think I would have ended up confused enough to ask my question. The Buddhist conception of suffering was different enough to mislead me, at least.
I agree but I don’t think the Buddhist definition is what Lsusr said it is (do you?). Suffering is primarily caused by the feeling that the world ought to be different but I don’t think it’s identical. Although I do expect you can find some prominent voices saying so.
I should’ve been more exact. There are lots of Buddhist schools and teachers, and they disagree with each other on many things. So one shouldn’t talk about “the Buddhist sense” of any term. When I said “the Buddhist sense of the term”, I meant something like “the sense of the term that lsusr is using it in, which matches my own understanding from meditation practice as well as the (largely Theravada-influenced) teachers I’ve learned from”.
If you pressed me on an exact definition for suffering, I probably also wouldn’t spontaneously give exactly that definition (in fact, I did already mention to Said that it’s missing at least one important distinction). But at the same time, I do feel like it’s close enough to what the core of suffering in my experience is that when lsusr said it, I immediately went “yes sounds right to me”.
(Duncan Sabien would probably say that the definition that lsusr gave is a sazen—“a word or phrase which accurately summarizes a given concept, while also being insufficient to generate that concept in its full richness and detail, or to unambiguously distinguish it from nearby concepts”.)
Fair enough. I’m mostly on board with that, my one gripe is that the definition only sounds similar to people who are into the Buddhist stuff. “Suffering mostly comes from craving” seems to me to be one of the true but not obvious insights from Buddhism. So just equating them in the definition is kinda provoking a reaction like from Said.
Thank you for pointing out that the term “impulse” in physics has a very different meaning than in regular speech. A better example is the physicist’s use of the term “cold”, which intersects the layman’s intuition but is both more precise and general. To a layman, cold is just whatever causes that sensation you get when you touch ice. To a physicist, cold must ultimately be defined using ideas like entropy because (among other reasons) you can’t touch a Bose–Einstein condensate with your fingertips. The technical definition was arrived at after deep investigation into the fundamental nature of temperature.
I believe that my definition does overlap with the conventional kind in conventional circumstances, if you really pay attention to what’s going on in your brain, including disambiguating things like pain vs course suffering, desire vs motivation, etc. When you get to very low levels of mental anguish, precise definitions are necessary, because for unconventional circumstances the conventional intuition breaks.
What do you mean by “suffering”, exactly? Could you describe what, specifically, it is that used to happen to you, but no longer does?
A related question is “what things might be mistaken for suffering, but are not suffering?” If I find myself in turmoil over a decision, does that mean I haven’t achieved ‘stream entry’, or is that a common occurence post stream entry?
The feeling you get when you accidentally touch a hot object may be mistaken for suffering but is not suffering.
It depends what you mean by “turmoil”. Hitting stream entry doesn’t mean you always know the best course of action to take in all circumstances. As a degenerate example, no amount of meditation will teach you the optimal design for a rocket engine.
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.
At its coursest level, suffering is the feeling that the world ought to be something other than what it is.
If this is what you mean by “suffering”, then you are using the word in a radically different way than how it is normally used. I would suggest that choosing a different word would be more useful and more honest.
I think most common-sense uses of ‘suffering’ still match this definition. If you are in physical pain, you feel like the world ought to be one where you don’t have the pain. If you’re jealous of someone, you wish the world was one where you had whatever they have. If you are bored, you feel the world ought to be more entertaining. Etc.
No, I don’t think that’s right.
For one thing, this “ought to be” business isn’t quite right. I prefer the world to be such that I am not in pain. (This itself is a needlessly fancy way of saying that I prefer not to be in pain.) I may or may not have opinions about how the world “ought to be” w.r.t. me being in pain.
More importantly, these two separate things may[1] co-occur, but they’re not the same thing. If I am in pain, I may indeed also believe that the world ought to be such that I would not be in pain. On the other hand, if I believe that the world ought to be such that everyone is equal before the law, it is absolutely not within the bounds of common usage to describe that view as being, or even being connected to, any “suffering” on my part.
The fact is that if you ask people what they mean by “suffering”, they won’t come up with anything even sort of like “the feeling that the world ought to be something other than what it is”; and if you ask people to pick a word that fits that description, they won’t come up with “suffering”.
This is one of the relatively rare cases where looking in the dictionary is helpful—we are discussing common usage, after all. Let’s look at couple of definitions.
Dictionary.com:
And clicking on “suffers” gets us:
Wiktionary:
Psychology Dictionary:
Other dictionaries are more of the same.
Nothing about “feeling that the world ought to be something other than what it is”, or anything similar.
May! But may not. For instance, if I am bored, I do not “feel the world ought to be more entertaining”. That is simply false as a description of my views or my mental state at those times when I am bored.
I think part of the point though is that (Buddhists believe) people are actually suffering during states of being that they would describe as “doing just fine”. And that (oversimplifying the view to a culty frame) the 99% of people who aren’t Buddhist or similar are clueless that this “doing just fine” state is actually suffering. So, the standard self report definition isn’t actually relevant (to this point, under this view.)
I think that there can be some light in this, an example that comes to mind is someone with phone addiction—as soon as they get home from work, they use their phone throughout dinner, the whole evening, and into the night.
An observing family member watches this and thinks, this person isn’t ever able to just sit and slowly eat dinner, or relax, or do anything, they are compelled to spend hours crouched over their device shining light into their eyes without moving, they are compulsively stimulating themselves to the exclusion of anything lasting.
The person in the addiction is just having a nice night watching interesting videos and chatting with friends while still getting to eat dinner and decompress from work. They genuinely feel they’re doing just fine.
But ten years later after they leave behind the phone addiction they might say, “yeah I was suffering, if I had ten minutes without entertainment or something to do my mind would start to get agitated and painful. Now I know it was because xyz that I didn’t want to stop and take things in, in that place. But I didn’t know that I was one day going to be able to actually relax. I thought that /was/ relaxing. From what I’d known since childhood that type of night felt standardly good.”
It’s like an archetypal dynamic… “YOU ARE OBVIOUSLY DISTRESSED AND PART OF YOU KNOWS IT and you can fix it by doing what I say” vs “No I’m doing just fine there’s just different ways of doing things and you’re not being kind by not respecting my internal experience”
… But… In this case maximalized to “everyone in society is subliminally distressed due to the society being misaligned”.
Possibly the exact phrasing that lsusr used may not be the best one. And I feel hesitant to make claims of what anyone else’s experience of suffering is. I do however feel confident in saying that whenever I suffer (in the common sense meaning of the word), it involves some degree of desire (sometimes very slight, sometimes extreme and intense) that something be different, that this desire seems to be the cause of the suffering, and that the way this desire and suffering behave seem to generally line up with the way that Buddhists talk about these things.
I think this is related to the desire/motivation distinction lsusr was making in a different comment. It’s possible to consider a world where everyone is equal before the law better than one that is not, and even to work toward such a world, without that involving suffering. At the same time, it’s also possible to think of the way that people in the current world are treated unfairly and feel anguish and suffer due to the thought.
So if you just believe that the world ought to have equality before the law but don’t suffer due to it, then one might say that you are motivated to have such a world. If you feel that the world ought to have equality and also experience suffering because not everyone is treated equally, then you have desire for such a world. Desire causes suffering but mere motivation does not, and the original definition we’re discussing was inexact in not making that distinction. (I tried to sketch more of the ways that this desire—or craving as I called it—behaves in this article. I’m not sure if I’d completely endorse every detail there anymore but I think it’s at least gesturing in the right direction.)
Right the delineation is associated with motive-root identity.
It’s definitely embedded in the English language… Considering the word “insufferable”, spending time with someone who is sufferable, you can accept it, bear it, spend the whole time wishing you were somewhere else, but not with such agitation as with someone who’s insufferable.
Suffering is both unbearable and urgently agitating, but usually ongoing and outside of your control.
One aspect of it is your emotional focus toward the problem… Why is it like that, why can’t I change it, … You “suffer” more the more you think about it. Commonly with respect to other people in the community not improving, or other people in the relationship or family not being considerate. Also obviously chronic pain.)
I think a fear/disgust/contempt of Buddhism commonly has the fear that we will tune out important internal motives (to change) by tuning out this frustrated despairing agitation.
With this delineation: (
One side is:
This despairing agitation (“suffering”) does point to a motive which you need to solve for, however it is a lens on the motive and is holding you back from seeing clearer the motive and your capacities. For example, when you “ignore” a toothache by tensing the whole side of your face to not jiggle the tooth, and now your whole side of your face throbs, but you’re ignoring it so stringently that the part of you identified as a worker can’t understand why you’re finding it hard to focus.
The other side is:
There is a third variable besides suffering and motive which is actually the thing which is lensing and holding you back from realizing your motive. Engaging fully with this third, is comforting, because it can make you feel you are making progress, while still blinding you to the reality that the progression staircase is built on the same foundation. (For example the dril candles.)
)
my thinking is to consider both these sides (suffering keeps you trapped/suffering is part of growth) as only two stable positions on a seesaw, easy to reason about since they’re stable.
I’m using standard translations, like how a physicist’s meaning of the word “impulse” is different from the colloquial meaning of the word “impulse”. This has tradeoffs to this approach.
Standard? Yes. Honest? No.
It’s like Christians saying that they talk to God, and when you keep pushing for details, it turns out that “talking to” in this context actually means “imagining that you are talking to”, which of course is much less of a miracle, and much less of an evidence for the religion. And they seem annoyed when you push for the details, so I believe the confusion is not an innocent misunderstanding; it’s by design.
Physicists do not organize seminars for lay people saying that they will teach them how to control their impulses… only to admit when pushed for details that their “impulse” is actually something quite different from what most non-physicists imagine when they read the word. If for some reason the physicists felt the need to organize public seminars about impulses, they would probably start proactively adding disclaimers to avoid this kind of confusion.
Honest communication would be something like: “You know that when something bad happens to you, whether it’s serious or trivial, it is often followed by this bad feeling when you are unhappy about how things are. Luckily for you, a few hundred hours of mental training can make that bad feeling mostly disappear from your life! Trust me, it will make a greater difference than you are probably imagining after reading this description.”
But I guess this suggestion will be about as popular as telling Christians to advertise their faith by saying: “If you read this really big book and pretend to believe everything it says, you will get an imaginary friend you can talk to. And a big community! Trust me, the average positive impacts on well-being are large, even the scientists who are not members of our community can confirm that.”
For what it’s worth, I think the Buddhist sense of the term is close enough to what people intuitively care about that I don’t think it’s dishonest to not go into the exact nuances of technical vocabulary. At least I have personally felt totally satisfied with all the suffering reduction I’ve gotten so far (though I’m probably not awakened) and I don’t feel like “suffering” being a slightly more nuanced term than I originally thought means that any of the meditation teachers would have been ripping me off in any way.
The analogy that I’d use is that of a physicist who gives a popular-science explanation of a physical phenomenon that skips all of the math that your average listener wouldn’t understand. It makes the explanation incomplete but it doesn’t make it dishonest. In the case of the physicist, trying to include all the math would just confuse the listener, just as trying to explain the exact technical distinctions tends to just confuse people without sufficient meditative experience.
Dunno, maybe I am unfair here, but it feels like peeling the layers of an onion, and what you find below them turns out to be yet another layer of onion.
I mean, the actual Buddhism (in the sense of “Buddhism of people who grew up in a traditional Buddhist country, in a religious Buddhist family”) is a belief in heaven(s) and hell(s), not much different from e.g. Christianity. Buddhist monks are supposed to have actual magic powers, etc.
Oh wait, that’s all just a metaphor, just something those silly non-Western people believe! Actually, heaven(s) and hell(s) are just states of mind. There are no actual magical powers. No literal afterlife. When Buddha said that, he was certainly joking… uhm, using metaphors so that his teaching could make sense to the stupid followers. The actual meaning of Buddhism is psychotherapy. And skills that are extraordinary but at the same time totally scientific. You can control your mind, get rid of suffering, increase your productivity.
Actually, when I say “increase your productivity”, that’s just a metaphor! What I meant was that you will become happier in a difficult to describe way. Many people don’t get more productive at all, sometimes it’s actually the other way round, but that’s okay, because they get happier.
Actually, when I say “get rid of suffering” or “happier”, that’s just a...
...
...something else. (Or maybe just a metaphor for something else? Hard to say at this point.)
.
Try doing the same kind of mental gymnastic about Christianity, and compare the results.
EDIT:
My alternative hypothesis is: Buddhist meditation does something real, but if you described it clearly (without metaphors, without hype), it would be much less impressive than if you keep it vague. The difficulty at explaining it using plain words is partially motivated by a desire to protect the speaker’s feelings of sacred mystery (i.e. high status).
I think you’re not being unfair but you’re also responding to an amalgam of things that different people have said, and yes some of those people do have bad epistemics and do make unfounded claims that are very reasonable to criticize.
I’d like to think that I’m not engaging in those kinds of onion layers, though. My position is something like, yes lots of Buddhists do believe in weird supernatural stuff, but they still seem to have developed some meditative techniques and theories about how the mind works that seem accurate. (Though they are not the only ones, as contemplatives in many different religions seem to have converged on similar claims and techniques. This seems like suggestive evidence that the techniques do something real that can be separated from the supernatural metaphysics, if religious people with drastically clashing metaphysics can still arrive at similar techniques and conclusions [while disagreeing about the metaphysical implications].)
And in my experience, following those practices does help in reducing something that’s in my opinion reasonable to round into “suffering”, at least as measured by tests such as “if my past self got to compare his mindstate at the time to my mindstate now and asked ’would you agree that future!Kaj’s mindstate has less suffering than yours”, he’d say “yes definitely, please please tell me how I could achieve the same”.
Obligatory caveat is that this is not only because of meditation, there have been a lot of other things like therapy, improvements in external circumstances, etc. etc. too, and that all of these also seem mutually synergestic, such that it’d be impossible for me to say which parts of my suffering reduction have been due to meditation specifically. But I have also had several occasions when I have e.g. just come off a retreat or finished a particularly good meditation session when I’ve had some experience like “oh wow I wouldn’t have been able to even imagine this kind of a state before and it’d be really hard if not impossible to adequately explain it to anyone who hasn’t experienced before, but it’s definitely accurate to say that I’m now suffering less than usual, even if some of the specifics of how that reduction is realized are not what I would have expected”.
Some of these are easier to explain than others, though. For instance, once I had a crush on a particular friend and whenever we hung out, I’d feel a mild tendency for my thoughts to slip into something like “man it’d be nice if we were dating”. This was a form of slight suffering (and a sense that the world ought to be different, as lsusr put it), though mild enough that ‘dissatisfaction’ might be a better word. On one occasion right after a particularly good meditation session, that dissatisfaction temporarily disappeared, such that I was genuinely just completely enjoying her presence as-is, with no need for anything to be different.
That seems wrong to me. “Buddhist meditation leads to vastly reduced suffering” is already a clear explanation. It’s only when people press for specific details of what it’s like that it becomes hard to explain to people who haven’t had the experience and thus have difficulty understanding the technical distinctions being drawn. Again kind of like the physicist explaining things to people who don’t know math: if your audience doesn’t have the ability to understand the equations, you have to fall back to metaphors to try to convey some kind of understanding, and probably the metaphors will break down if your audience keeps pressing for details that can’t be properly explained without the math.
If the distinction between the Buddhist meaning and the typical meaning of ‘suffering’ was explained[1], I don’t think I would have ended up confused enough to ask my question. The Buddhist conception of suffering was different enough to mislead me, at least.
In a footnote, for example.
I agree but I don’t think the Buddhist definition is what Lsusr said it is (do you?). Suffering is primarily caused by the feeling that the world ought to be different but I don’t think it’s identical. Although I do expect you can find some prominent voices saying so.
I should’ve been more exact. There are lots of Buddhist schools and teachers, and they disagree with each other on many things. So one shouldn’t talk about “the Buddhist sense” of any term. When I said “the Buddhist sense of the term”, I meant something like “the sense of the term that lsusr is using it in, which matches my own understanding from meditation practice as well as the (largely Theravada-influenced) teachers I’ve learned from”.
If you pressed me on an exact definition for suffering, I probably also wouldn’t spontaneously give exactly that definition (in fact, I did already mention to Said that it’s missing at least one important distinction). But at the same time, I do feel like it’s close enough to what the core of suffering in my experience is that when lsusr said it, I immediately went “yes sounds right to me”.
(Duncan Sabien would probably say that the definition that lsusr gave is a sazen—“a word or phrase which accurately summarizes a given concept, while also being insufficient to generate that concept in its full richness and detail, or to unambiguously distinguish it from nearby concepts”.)
Fair enough. I’m mostly on board with that, my one gripe is that the definition only sounds similar to people who are into the Buddhist stuff. “Suffering mostly comes from craving” seems to me to be one of the true but not obvious insights from Buddhism. So just equating them in the definition is kinda provoking a reaction like from Said.
Thank you for pointing out that the term “impulse” in physics has a very different meaning than in regular speech. A better example is the physicist’s use of the term “cold”, which intersects the layman’s intuition but is both more precise and general. To a layman, cold is just whatever causes that sensation you get when you touch ice. To a physicist, cold must ultimately be defined using ideas like entropy because (among other reasons) you can’t touch a Bose–Einstein condensate with your fingertips. The technical definition was arrived at after deep investigation into the fundamental nature of temperature.
I believe that my definition does overlap with the conventional kind in conventional circumstances, if you really pay attention to what’s going on in your brain, including disambiguating things like pain vs course suffering, desire vs motivation, etc. When you get to very low levels of mental anguish, precise definitions are necessary, because for unconventional circumstances the conventional intuition breaks.