Insomnia, Procrastination, Star Wars, Buddhism

[dr_tectonic]

It's 4 in the morning and I can't sleep because my throat hurts. Can't get at the owie spots with lidocaine; can't take more ibuprofen yet -- it hasn't been 4 hours yet, and I've got heartburn, which might be first signs of overdoing it with the advil.

Today I filed away a huge number of emails from my inbox. Go me! One thing I noticed, going through them, is that there were a whole bunch of LJ threads that I meant to comment on that I never got to. My apologies to everyone (especially drdeleto) that I never responded to; at a certain point, I just... run out of steam for debate.

We had a lovely running landspeeder battle in Jeff's Star Wars game this evening. Lots of fun, but I overdid it a little and was just wrung out by the end. The problem with not eating anything for several days is that I'm functioning just fine, but I don't have any reserves. I had a coughing fit in the car on the way home and almost burst into tears about it, because I just couldn't cope. But everything was much, much better once I came home and snuggled with Jerry for a few minutes.

Buddhism holds that desire is the root of all suffering. This is a dumb idea. It's the root of some suffering, sure, but I'm not currently awake with a sore throat because of an unfulfilled desire. It's because things aren't working the way they're supposed to. My body is using pain as a signal that something is wrong. Likewise, hunger pangs aren't the signs of an unseemly desire to feast, it's because you don't have enough goddam food. Pining for a Lexus? Suffering caused by desire. Miserable because it's too cold, even though you're sleeping on a steam grate? Suffering caused by not having adequate shelter. The former can be alleviated by letting go of the desire; the latter cannot.

And I think that I have run out of coherency now.

Comments

[dr-tectonic.livejournal.com]

No, 'cause, see, regardless of whether or not I desire to be healthy, my throat still freakin' hurts!.

I think that suffering based on a desire for health would be the mental anguish somebody with a terminal illness goes through until they hit the "acceptance" stage.

[k8cre8.livejournal.com]

Cool Icon!

And, sorry, too. Maybe we should've cancelled last night so you could get better. I think the players last night might've been in much worse shape than the characters.

[dr-tectonic.livejournal.com]

Enh, I should have paid better attention to my energy levels.

dude. . . shakes head

[ng-nighthawk.livejournal.com]

I'm thinking you don't really want an answer to this, but I feel, as a person who's. . . well, spoken and taken classes with REAL LIVE TIBETAN BUDDHISTS (tm) I should defend them a bit.

Pain != Suffering in the quote you mentioned above.

Pain is a part of life. It is unfortunate, and should be avoided, and in fact a fundamental part of the Buddha nature is compassion.

However, the suffering that is caused by desire is, in fact, the suffering caused by your desire not to feel pain. I can see you seething over this statement even now. But it is not that the Buddha would not feel pain--he would simply not suffer because of his pain.

Suffering, then, is something along the lines of:
--worrying
--self-nagging
--self-pity
--stubbornness

You can feel the same way toward a Lexus. Removing your desire to get nice things is a beginning step. Removing your desire for health, painlessness, and security is a much more advanced step.

It's really not all that different a concept than Christian mysticism, just an agnostic version of the same. In effect, the Buddha would not put his hand in the fire--that is wasteful and stupid. If the buddha burns himself or is burned by another, he feels the pain, but he is present to the pain. He understands that the pain is another experience that he should be thankful for. Ideally, he moves through life as normally as possible, without doing himself further injury, and simply accepts the pain in the same way he accepts a cool breeze or bright sunlight.

So the Buddha would say that your throat hurts, and nothing you do in your mind will prevent that. But your feelings of self-pity, annoyance, frustration, and grumpiness are psychological and THOSE are the suffering you can avoid by removing your desire to be free from pain.

I'm not saying you should do this. I'm just explaining the principle.

Re: dude. . . shakes head

[dr-tectonic.livejournal.com]

I follow that, but I'm not sure I really buy it.

Drawing a line like that between pain and suffering seems sketchy to me, but I'd be willing to allow it.

But saying that the suffering is caused by the desire to not feel pain seems tantamount to saying that the cause of suffering is not the desire, it's the fact that you let not having it bother you.

If pain is unavoidable, but we can do away with the self-pity and frustration associated with it by just accepting it, why can't you do the same with the self-pity and frustration associated with longing and unfulfilled desire, without altering the desire?

The interpretation you presented (which I'm sure is totally legitimate and what many people actually believe) sounds more to me like "the reason why things get to you is because you let them get to you", which is a fine and useful sentiment, but isn't really the same thing as "desire equals suffering".

I think it's better to express the idea as "a lot of unneccessary suffering is caused by investing mental/emotional energy in things beyond your ability to influence." Because that is, definitely, a really important point that would make lots of people much happier if they would understand it. But it also suggests that the appropriate response to suffering caused by something broken is not to just try and get over it, but to go and fix the broken thing.

Instead of trying to achieve the nirvana of nonexistence by eliminating desire (which causes suffering), we should just cut to the chase and eliminate suffering itself, and work on building paradise instead...

Re: dude. . . shakes head

[ng-nighthawk.livejournal.com]

Yes, but Buddhism is all about consciousness in the moment. A buddhist would probably (and now I'm really reaching, I didn't do the religious studies program at Naropa) say that what you are saying is exactly right. But don't be so obsessed upon the future you are working toward that you are not present to the current situation. Buddhism is against escapism in all its forms, be that habituation, drug abuse, or just about ANY activity which moves your mind away from perceiving the current moment.

However, it also says that this stuff takes time and dedication to achieve, and it wouldn't say that someone who is sick should not take pain medication unless they are really advanced and dedicated. Further, this doesn't mean that you don't read, watch TV, and other stuff--you just remain aware of what you're doing.

In other words, if you're building a house, you should be building a house, not living in the house in your mind while you're building it, or living in the house you used to have. However, there is a great story which illustrates how complicated this gets. A master's students find him eating breakfast and reading a paper, and accuse him: "You always tell us that if we're eating breakfast, eat breakfast, and if we're reading a paper, read the paper." He replies: "Of course. And if you're eating breakfast and reading the paper, eat breakfast and read the paper."

So being present in the current situation doesn't mean entertainment and thinking about stuff is bad--the important thing is take note of what it is your doing, and through that observation gradually move your mind into more efficient and enjoyable ways of interacting with the world.

If pain is unavoidable, but we can do away with the self-pity and frustration associated with it by just accepting it, why can't you do the same with the self-pity and frustration associated with longing and unfulfilled desire, without altering the desire.

In fact, (and this is a little more solid, as it relates to meditation which I did study) you DO exactly what you describe. The point is that you have desires. Ignoring, suppressing, or fighting them makes the situation much worse. You simply acknowledge the desire. "I am cranky today." "I am in pain, and really want it to stop hurting." By acknowledging that state and observing it from just a smidge of detatchment (just enough to be able to observe it, not to make yourself into a robot or disassociative sociopath) you take away some of its power to control you. "I want to snap at people because I'm sick and unhappy. That is how I feel today. That doesn't mean that this is the response I want to make to questions about how I'm feeling." Now, you may also decide that what makes the most sense in that moment is to snap at someone because that is really the best course of action. But you've decided that, not reacted based on your mood or visceral desire.

Eventually, through a long-time practice of this kind, you begin to observe your own personality in a way that allows you to understand your own foibles and strengths and you find that desires that don't make sense aren't as meaningful to you.

At that point, you can really begin to try to change things without imposing your own, more selfish outlook onto the changes you want to enact. And, in fact, working toward that paradise can help you and others to better understand yourselves as well. So you haven't removed the desire, merely the knee-jerk, undesireable reactions that go along with it.

If this doesn't seem like what the quote was actually saying, I might blame it on a poor or over-simplified translation.

shorter version

[ng-nighthawk.livejournal.com]

The point of Buddhism is to remove distractions from the fundamental duty of human existence. Desires, habits, and anything taken to the level of obsession become distractions. Buddhism teaches that these distractions can be identified and removed through the gentle discipline of contemplative practice, which is various techniques for observing how your mind works, the most important (but not only) technique being meditation in all its forms (other forms including phyisical discipline like Kung Fu and artistic disciplines like calligraphy or music).

I say gentle not because these practices are necessarily easy, but because they guide the mind to better practice by simply pointing out what it is doing and the implication being a review of whether the mind wants to be doing that. Suppression and restriction of unwanted mental habits only reinforces and amplifies the behavior--the correction is simply to take note of the behavior.

As to the fundamental duty of human existence:

"While I am here, I will do the work. What is the work? To ease the pain of human suffering. All else is drunken dumbshow."
--A. Ginsberg

Re: dude. . . shakes head

[dr-tectonic.livejournal.com]

I totally like all of what you've said here, and agree with it.

But it seems inconsistent to me with the chunk of Buddhism that says "existence is bad because existence is suffering; desire causes suffering, therefore the Ultimate Goal is to achieve nirvana/non-existence by the total elimination of desire".

Is that a split between philosophical and religious Buddhism? Serious versus popular Buddhism? Tibetan vs Indian? Well-translated versus badly-translated? The last sounds likely, but I find it surprising that such a vast error could be so prevalent. Maybe these ideas have the same kind of relationship that inquiry-based Christianity does with Bible-thumping Christianity...

Re: dude. . . shakes head

[ng-nighthawk.livejournal.com]

Good question. What works in my favor is that these explanations come from practicing Buddhists who either are Tibetan buddhists or learned from them. The downside is this might have been "Americanized" for easy absorbtion. However, the style of Buddhism you mention is what I hear about from most academic sources--but when it comes to actual practice, Tic Nat Han is one of the most famous teachers and says most of what I say here (only better, and in more detail). So I'm mostly going off of what people have told me more than what I've read from the more academic sources.

I know that formal Tibetan buddhism involved more traditional practices than what I learned--to be a Tibetan buddhist there is a lot of formalism that Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche dropped for American consumption. But in his opinion, this teaching was the core--he calls it Shambhala.

Remember there is Theravada (which is what Tibetan buddhism is) and Mahayana buddhism. Mahayana is more of a religion, Theravada more of a philosophy and monastic path. I'm not sure how that relates to this disagreement, though.

On the quote, one last thought: remember that the ultimate ideal of Buddhism is the boddhisatva. So returning to earth to help others reach enlightenment is better than just leaving earth entirely upon attaining enlightenment. So while existence is bad, etc., is a theme, it's clearly not such a strong theme that the best of us should just leave it as soon as possible.

Re: dude. . . shakes head

[psyclonic.livejournal.com]

I have heard amazing stuff about Tic Nat Han; I should go read...

I think Beemer's question and your reference to the split between the religious approaches applies in that one should consider the source when one hears a teaching. I forget where I read this (prolly Campbell) but most (inter/intra)religious differences occur among the priest-types, who are primarily concerned with religious law. The monk-types, OTOH, are primarily concerned with spiritual experience, and among all religious orders they concur on the nature of experience via mediatation/contemplation.

Re: dude. . . shakes head

[psyclonic.livejournal.com]

Wow, this is really good stuff.

I just want to clarify: "existence" would not be bad for causing suffering, in that a) it's not existence's fault that one hasn't yet overcome desire, and b) existence = the moment, which is Good.