A purer understanding of suffering
What "dukkha" means according to the Buddha
What really does it mean to be suffering? Until today, I defined suffering as the inability to see reality clearly.
I still believe that suffering comes from this delusionment, but there is a step prior to this. What’s wrong with seeing reality more as we are instead of more objectively as it is (if that’s even possible)? Suffering is caused by this, but this in itself is not suffering.
The Pāli word for suffering is dukkha. There are many interpretations of what the Buddha meant by dukkha, but this seems to capture it well:
The Pāli word [dukkha] is often translated as suffering, but it means something deeper than pain and misery. It refers to a basic unsatisfactoriness running through our lives. Sometimes this unsatisfactoriness erupts into the open as sorrow, grief, disappointment, or despair; but usually it hovers at the edge of our awareness as a vague unlocalized sense that things are never quite perfect, never fully adequate to our expectations of what they should be.
— Bhikkhu Bodhi
So the question becomes, why are our lives unsatisfactory? I think the operative word here is “our,” believe it or not. The sense of self we possess, our ego, demands that phenomena are permanent, including the ego itself. Without permanence, a central, unchanging identify cannot exist.
Reality does not satisfy this condition because one of reality’s few laws is constant change, or impermanence.
Us as entities, going by our given names, therefore suffer. Life is not reliable, it is not consistent, and so it leaves us in this state of insecurity. That sounds very painful and threatening for anyone that needs concepts like their sense of self, their role in their relationships, and the health of their loved ones, and even their preferences and dislikes…to be reliable, meaning to be unchanging.
But what if we loosened the grip on seeking permanence? What if we flowed with the changes of reality?
As literal as embracing the change of weather and seasons as they came along, instead of clinging to the weather we got accustomed to this past month.
What if we saw our body as a vessel and our consciousness/mind/spirit as a conduit, both owned by the laws of nature? Leaving “us” with nothing in possession and exposing the illusory nature of our self?
What if all of this can be framed as freeing instead of threatening?