One claim is that tanha (“desire” is a bad translation) is the thing that creates suffering, and that tanha comes up as resistance to pain and clinging to pleasure.
It seems reasonable to me to claim that there at least sometimes is clinging to pleasure. If I’m reading a really good book I might not want it to end, and if I’m sleepy in bed, I might want to enjoy the sleepiness for just a few more minutes after getting up.
There’s also another claim that I don’t fully understand and I’m not sure if I know how to describe correctly, but it’s something like… “At a low level of implementation if you zoom in closely enough, the relationship of pain and pleasure isn’t that of opposites in the way you’d expect if you only looked at a coarser level.”
As I said, I don’t totally get that one, but I don’t think I need to. It sounds like a technical kind of observation that will make more sense to me if I ever get that far in meditation, and until then I can just ignore it.
That said, I think it can be true that pain and pleasure are not opposites on a low level, while still feeling like opposites when experienced on a higher level. It’d be like saying that on a file system level, both a text file and a video are just collections of bits, while still behaving very differently if you try to open them on the application level.
With regard to “the only true solution to suffering is to stop tanha”, one thing that might be meant by it is “even when you are experiencing pleasure, there’s still some degree of suffering present”.
At least personally, I do often experience at least some degree of clinging to pleasure, so I think there’s some truth to this. Though of course, it doesn’t mean that there would be an equal amount of suffering present when I’m in pain vs. when I’m experiencing pleasure. The degree of subtle clinging that’s present with pleasure is much less than the suffering associated with resisting pain.
Though on occasion I’ve lucked into states where there’s much less clinging than usual to the pleasure, and it has felt pretty awesome! Can recommend. The lack of clinging lets you enjoy the pleasure much more fully.
But let’s be skeptical of this and assume that pleasure isn’t associated with any degree of suffering. Another thing that one might mean by “the only true solution to suffering is to stop tanha” is “you can’t experience only pleasure all the time, you’re going to have all kinds of periods in life when you feel terrible or at least uncomfortable, so the only way to stop suffering entirely is to stop feeling averse to pain and discomfort”. That seems straightforwardly true to me.
is clinging to pleasure isomorphic to emotional avoidance? the “resistance to pain” framing is more relatable than clinging to pleasure.
i think emotional avoidance is obviously bad. but it’s unclear that clinging to good experiences is bad? like you can obviously overdo it, but it seems much more of a problem if you’re clinging to something you’re no longer enjoying because letting go would mean having to confront unpleasant realities, vs clinging to something you’re enjoying a lot. if I’m enjoying a cookie, it’s normal and correct for me to resist if someone is trying to tear it out of my hands.
It’s often not the worst thing in the world, but the clinging introduces a low-level resistance to the pleasure that actually makes the pleasure less pleasant.
It also brings in various kinds of discomfort—e.g. someone who sees a tasty food they can’t eat, or an attractive person who isn’t into them, may experience a flash of pleasure from the sight of those and then make themselves uncomfortable by clinging to that experience and repeatedly thinking about what they can’t get.
If you are, say, at work and clinging to the thought of how nice it would feel to go home, your focus being on that future pleasure may prevent you from noticing things that you could enjoy in the current moment (it actively blocks them, as the clinging crowds out the pleasant sensory moments out of your mind). Someone may find themselves repeatedly waiting for the end of the day when at work, repeatedly waiting for the weekend when the day ends, and repeatedly waiting for the next vacation during weekends.
Often, in my experience, clinging seems to hijack attention and agency. It makes it harder to think, weigh considerations, and respond. You are more likely to flail, or stumble around, or to “find yourself” doing something rather than choosing to do it. And you’re more likely, as well, to become pre-occupied by certain decisions — especially if both options involve things you’re clinging in relation to — or events. Indeed, clinging sometimes seems like it treats certain outcomes as “infinitely bad,” or at least bad enough that avoiding them is something like a hard constraint. This can cause consequent problems with reasoning about what costs to pay to avoid what risks.
Clinging is also, centrally, unpleasant. But it’s a particular type of unpleasant, which feels more like it grabs and restricts and distorts who you are than e.g. a headache.
Conversely, a shift from clinging to non-clinging involves a feeling of relief. Something unhooks, releases, expands. Your mind feels bigger, more open, more poised, more responsive. The situation you’re in may not have changed; but you are able to orient towards it with more agency, and to consider and accept your options, however imperfect, without flinching or closing down. It is, I think, a type of freedom.
I feel the “seems to hijack attention and agency” thing is particularly prominent when in the company of people I’m attracted to or whose favor I might otherwise want to get. It’s hard to think clearly when the mind keeps clinging to “what would get them to like me”.
Addictive behaviors also have clinging to pleasure as a major component—you think of how it would feel if you got to gamble/drink/whatever again, and then you can’t get the thought of that out of your head.
hmm, it’s not a priori obvious to me that these are all the same thing. the following feel distinct:
emotional avoidance. i know i should think about something, but the emotional pain of thinking about it pushes me away, and i find other things to distract myself from having to feel it, or procrastinate it, or make myself too busy to feel it, etc. i relate to the thing where indecision can arise from feeling emotionally avoidant of two different things i need to trade off between. addiction is often a way to distract myself from an unpleasant emotion.
longing. i want something i can’t have. i find myself compulsively thinking really hard about ways i can get it (often not super productively, my thinking is often very distorted in this mode). i don’t feel particularly avoidant of the feeling; if anything, it draws me in and distracts me from everything else. but it also feels inaccurate to say that everything else is causing me pain that i am trying to distract from (like with addiction), if anything, the longing is more painful, but i can’t look away.
other emotions mentioned feel like they’re maybe doing something else but it’s unclear. jealousy feels like longing plus some kind of tribal status thingy. anxiety is maybe longing for a kind of reassurance. the feeling that makes positive experiences worse because you’re scared that they will end is emotional avoidance.
i wonder if it even matters whether these are the same thing or different things. is there any difference in prediction if they are the same vs different things.
I think the underlying mechanisms for several of these is distinct, but there’s a neural mechanism that acts as a kind of shared bottleneck. Analogy: a word processor and a video player will get started up for different reasons, but they both make OS calls to read files from disk, and disrupting the file read operation will disrupt both.
In the case of clinging, I think the shared bottleneck is largely what Romeo described:
Tanha is more literally translated as ‘fused to’ or ‘welded to’. It immediately follows the mental moment that you zoom in with the attentional aperture on something. It could be that a flower or an item on the shelf at the supermarket captures your attention, or you turn your head to catch more detail as you pass by an accident on the road. Many hundreds of thousands of such events take place in the course of a single day. With most of them attention then relaxes and makes space for the next thing. But with some small proportion you find the mind doesn’t quite ‘unclench’ from the object or some aspect of the object. This tension aspect is why it is sometimes translated as ‘grasping’ which is closer. Imagine something you aren’t finished with being pulled out of your hand and you tensing your fingers to resist.
For emotional avoidance, my experience is that the thought of doing something will feel bad, and then my mind will seize upon the thought of doing something that would feel less bad. There’s an unpleasant email I should reply to and hmm, suddenly it feels hard to resist the thought of playing Slay the Spire. The thought of it clings to my mind even if I try to think about something else. Without clinging, it might be that the thought of playing StS would come up—maybe repeatedly—but it wouldn’t cling to the mind in the same way and keep pulling at my attention.
So the behavior itself is triggered by a subsystem trying to avoid discomfort by projecting the thought of something more pleasant into the workspace, but the clinging strengthens the effect and makes the discomfort persistent in a way it wouldn’t be without the clinging.
I think the mechanism might be something like, a subsystem sends the thought of playing StS to the global workspace, and then it’s emotionally charged in a way that will cause some separate subsystem to seize upon the signal and strengthen it so that it stays in the workspace. That means that on top of the avoidance-subsystem contributing signal strength to it in face of other sources of signal, the clinging gives the signal an extra boost. (Though that’s just speculation for what might explain the phenomenal experience, so this particular story turning out to be correct or wrong isn’t cruxy for me.)
For longing, there’s a similar thing—there’s some subsystem that sends up a thought of what one is longing for. That subsystem may be something entirely different than the emotional avoidance system. But once it sends its signal, clinging will amplify that signal and make it more persistent.
There’s a few different claims:
One claim is that tanha (“desire” is a bad translation) is the thing that creates suffering, and that tanha comes up as resistance to pain and clinging to pleasure.
It seems reasonable to me to claim that there at least sometimes is clinging to pleasure. If I’m reading a really good book I might not want it to end, and if I’m sleepy in bed, I might want to enjoy the sleepiness for just a few more minutes after getting up.
There’s also another claim that I don’t fully understand and I’m not sure if I know how to describe correctly, but it’s something like… “At a low level of implementation if you zoom in closely enough, the relationship of pain and pleasure isn’t that of opposites in the way you’d expect if you only looked at a coarser level.”
As I said, I don’t totally get that one, but I don’t think I need to. It sounds like a technical kind of observation that will make more sense to me if I ever get that far in meditation, and until then I can just ignore it.
That said, I think it can be true that pain and pleasure are not opposites on a low level, while still feeling like opposites when experienced on a higher level. It’d be like saying that on a file system level, both a text file and a video are just collections of bits, while still behaving very differently if you try to open them on the application level.
With regard to “the only true solution to suffering is to stop tanha”, one thing that might be meant by it is “even when you are experiencing pleasure, there’s still some degree of suffering present”.
At least personally, I do often experience at least some degree of clinging to pleasure, so I think there’s some truth to this. Though of course, it doesn’t mean that there would be an equal amount of suffering present when I’m in pain vs. when I’m experiencing pleasure. The degree of subtle clinging that’s present with pleasure is much less than the suffering associated with resisting pain.
Though on occasion I’ve lucked into states where there’s much less clinging than usual to the pleasure, and it has felt pretty awesome! Can recommend. The lack of clinging lets you enjoy the pleasure much more fully.
But let’s be skeptical of this and assume that pleasure isn’t associated with any degree of suffering. Another thing that one might mean by “the only true solution to suffering is to stop tanha” is “you can’t experience only pleasure all the time, you’re going to have all kinds of periods in life when you feel terrible or at least uncomfortable, so the only way to stop suffering entirely is to stop feeling averse to pain and discomfort”. That seems straightforwardly true to me.
is clinging to pleasure isomorphic to emotional avoidance? the “resistance to pain” framing is more relatable than clinging to pleasure.
i think emotional avoidance is obviously bad. but it’s unclear that clinging to good experiences is bad? like you can obviously overdo it, but it seems much more of a problem if you’re clinging to something you’re no longer enjoying because letting go would mean having to confront unpleasant realities, vs clinging to something you’re enjoying a lot. if I’m enjoying a cookie, it’s normal and correct for me to resist if someone is trying to tear it out of my hands.
It’s often not the worst thing in the world, but the clinging introduces a low-level resistance to the pleasure that actually makes the pleasure less pleasant.
It also brings in various kinds of discomfort—e.g. someone who sees a tasty food they can’t eat, or an attractive person who isn’t into them, may experience a flash of pleasure from the sight of those and then make themselves uncomfortable by clinging to that experience and repeatedly thinking about what they can’t get.
If you are, say, at work and clinging to the thought of how nice it would feel to go home, your focus being on that future pleasure may prevent you from noticing things that you could enjoy in the current moment (it actively blocks them, as the clinging crowds out the pleasant sensory moments out of your mind). Someone may find themselves repeatedly waiting for the end of the day when at work, repeatedly waiting for the weekend when the day ends, and repeatedly waiting for the next vacation during weekends.
Joe Carlsmith writes:
I feel the “seems to hijack attention and agency” thing is particularly prominent when in the company of people I’m attracted to or whose favor I might otherwise want to get. It’s hard to think clearly when the mind keeps clinging to “what would get them to like me”.
Addictive behaviors also have clinging to pleasure as a major component—you think of how it would feel if you got to gamble/drink/whatever again, and then you can’t get the thought of that out of your head.
hmm, it’s not a priori obvious to me that these are all the same thing. the following feel distinct:
emotional avoidance. i know i should think about something, but the emotional pain of thinking about it pushes me away, and i find other things to distract myself from having to feel it, or procrastinate it, or make myself too busy to feel it, etc. i relate to the thing where indecision can arise from feeling emotionally avoidant of two different things i need to trade off between. addiction is often a way to distract myself from an unpleasant emotion.
longing. i want something i can’t have. i find myself compulsively thinking really hard about ways i can get it (often not super productively, my thinking is often very distorted in this mode). i don’t feel particularly avoidant of the feeling; if anything, it draws me in and distracts me from everything else. but it also feels inaccurate to say that everything else is causing me pain that i am trying to distract from (like with addiction), if anything, the longing is more painful, but i can’t look away.
other emotions mentioned feel like they’re maybe doing something else but it’s unclear. jealousy feels like longing plus some kind of tribal status thingy. anxiety is maybe longing for a kind of reassurance. the feeling that makes positive experiences worse because you’re scared that they will end is emotional avoidance.
i wonder if it even matters whether these are the same thing or different things. is there any difference in prediction if they are the same vs different things.
I think the underlying mechanisms for several of these is distinct, but there’s a neural mechanism that acts as a kind of shared bottleneck. Analogy: a word processor and a video player will get started up for different reasons, but they both make OS calls to read files from disk, and disrupting the file read operation will disrupt both.
In the case of clinging, I think the shared bottleneck is largely what Romeo described:
For emotional avoidance, my experience is that the thought of doing something will feel bad, and then my mind will seize upon the thought of doing something that would feel less bad. There’s an unpleasant email I should reply to and hmm, suddenly it feels hard to resist the thought of playing Slay the Spire. The thought of it clings to my mind even if I try to think about something else. Without clinging, it might be that the thought of playing StS would come up—maybe repeatedly—but it wouldn’t cling to the mind in the same way and keep pulling at my attention.
So the behavior itself is triggered by a subsystem trying to avoid discomfort by projecting the thought of something more pleasant into the workspace, but the clinging strengthens the effect and makes the discomfort persistent in a way it wouldn’t be without the clinging.
I think the mechanism might be something like, a subsystem sends the thought of playing StS to the global workspace, and then it’s emotionally charged in a way that will cause some separate subsystem to seize upon the signal and strengthen it so that it stays in the workspace. That means that on top of the avoidance-subsystem contributing signal strength to it in face of other sources of signal, the clinging gives the signal an extra boost. (Though that’s just speculation for what might explain the phenomenal experience, so this particular story turning out to be correct or wrong isn’t cruxy for me.)
For longing, there’s a similar thing—there’s some subsystem that sends up a thought of what one is longing for. That subsystem may be something entirely different than the emotional avoidance system. But once it sends its signal, clinging will amplify that signal and make it more persistent.