The Problem of Suffering (2)

Enlightenment Made Simple

– Chapter 2 –

The Curse of the Inadequate Self

Knowing the Self to be limitless, deathless and free, delusion is vanquished, freeing the soul from bondage to the things of this world. That is enlightenment.
Bhagavad Gita

Here’s the second chapter from “Enlightenment Made Simple” by Rory B Mackay, which is now available for purchase in paperback and ebook.

Introduction
Chapter 1: When Life Doesn’t Work
Chapter 2: The Curse of the Inadequate Self

In order to be free, and that’s always our true goal, it’s necessary to understand what binds us in the first place; what causes us to feel limited, lacking and incomplete.

That’s why this chapter explores the mechanics of samsara, the seemingly endless cycle of suffering experienced by virtually all human beings. This is very much the “bad news” chapter, so buckle up! Once we’ve fully explored and understood the problem, however, we’re then ready to move onto the exciting part: the solution.

As stated in the previous chapter, whatever our goal, whether it relates to security, pleasure or virtue, it’s ultimately driven by the underlying desire to be free. Whether it’s freedom from poverty, freedom from insecurity, loneliness or discontent, you can guarantee that every desire is, at heart, a desire to be free of limitation.

We want to free of be limitation because limitation is not natural to us. If it were, if limitation were an inherent part of our nature, we’d happily accept it. But we find limitation in any form unacceptable because, as long as we are subject to limitation, we cannot be free. To be free is to be happy and happiness is the goal shared by all beings.

Unfortunately, ignorance makes us believe that happiness and freedom can only be found outside of us in the world of objects. We believe that the only way to remove our innermost sense of discontent is to rearrange the circumstances of our lives by desperately trying to get more of what we want and less of what we don’t want.

It’s an understandable mistake because it seems to be true in our own direct experience.

In the next few pages, however, we’re going to examine why this approach does not and cannot work—and why, no matter what you try to achieve, acquire or attain in life, nothing outside of you can deliver true and lasting happiness.

The Never-Ending Search For Happiness

Why do you want what you want—and why do you do what you do?

In large part, our desires, values and goals are programmed into us by societal expectations and norms. The culture we’re born into obviously sets the template and plays a dominant role in what drives us to attain and acquire.

Certain goals tend to be universal. For instance, education is naturally a priority for children. We all have to learn the ways of the world and the society into which we are born. This isn’t knowledge we are born with, but something we must acquire.

As a child, it was likely drilled into you by your parents, teachers and other authority figures that success and happiness in life come from scholastic achievement; from passing exams and graduating with as high a grade as possible.

So, you likely did your best and once you finished primary or elementary school, you moved onto high school and then possibly college or university. Upon graduation, you felt happy and satisfied with yourself: I did it! I made it! I graduated!

Was this a lasting happiness?

Probably not.

Almost immediately, the goal posts shift as you realise that education is only the beginning of the road to success. After all, what use are qualifications without doing something with them?

Your focus turns to employment and, with a little time and luck, you manage to find and secure the job of your dreams. You work hard over the subsequent months and years, again most likely to an initial sense of satisfaction and accomplishment.

What happens next is probably inevitable. Your joy and satisfaction are eclipsed by the demands and stresses of the job. Sure, you might be making good money now, and you may even have your own home, car and holidays in the sun. But it comes at a cost: the cost of time, energy, sacrifice and varying degrees of stress.

When it becomes clear that education and career aren’t enough in themselves to provide lasting satisfaction, you perhaps figure that what you really need in order to feel whole and complete is somebody to love you.

Your focus moves to finding Mr or Mrs “Right”. After trawling the dating apps, frequenting singles bars, and possibly enduring a few failed relationships, let’s say that you find your ideal partner—again, to an initial burst of euphoria. It might seem like you’ve finally found the love, joy and contentment you’ve always been seeking, first through education, then career and now through romance.

Unfortunately, the intoxicating rush of hormones you experience at the start of a relationship rarely lasts long. It’s only a matter of time before the rose-tinted spectacles come off and you come to realise that, much to your horror, your partner is a human being after all, complete with their own issues, quirks and downright flaws.

After a time, the relationship is no longer fully satisfying in itself. Assuming you don’t decide to end it and find another partner, you might conclude that what you need in order to be truly happy is to get married.

Yes, that’ll do it! A fairytale wedding.

So, you get down on your knee, pop the question, and, assuming your partner agrees, you then set about planning the wedding to end all weddings. When the big day arrives, you experience another burst of joy—which will hopefully last at least the duration of the honeymoon before it, too, eventually wears off.

Like most things in life, you find that married life has its ups and downs. Even if you’re generally happy with your partner, it’s likely you still haven’t found that permanent sense of joy, peace and satisfaction.

At this point, you conclude that, in order to be truly complete, what you need is to start a family. So, you have a child; and then perhaps another, and maybe even more after that.

Parenthood, you find, brings both tremendous joy and its own particular stresses, anxieties and sleepless nights.

After a time, you’re still not convinced that you’ve hit the jackpot and found that elusive, everlasting happiness (which you still resolutely believe must exist somewhere!).

Perhaps your goals now centre on your kids; on getting them the best education and helping steer them toward a good career and then a marriage and family of their own. Maybe that’s where true happiness lies?

When that’s all taken care of, and your kids have families of their own, your focus likely shifts to your own impending retirement. You assume that when you retire and can do what you want all day long, you’ll finally, finally have found lasting happiness…

Chasing Rainbows

It’s a frustrating cycle. You’ve been sold dreams of lasting happiness only to discover that happiness to be limited and fleeting in nature. As you adapt to your new circumstances, your focus shifts to the next goal, and then the next, in the vain hope that this might finally solve your problems and erase your sense of lack and craving.

Seeking lasting happiness through worldly attainment is like chasing rainbows. The rainbow might be beautiful and alluring, but no matter how hard you try and what lengths you go to, you will never reach it. The moment you try to grab hold of it, you’re left holding nothing but empty air.

All things exist in a constant state of flux. Everything is constantly changing. People change, our environment changes and even our own moods, desires and values fluctuate over time.

Pleasure is, like anything phenomenal, temporary and liable to give way to pain. Many of us learn in our college days that a wild night out drinking and socialising with friends will be followed by a day spent in bed with a crippling hangover. Pleasure is by no means an unqualified blessing. You invariably must pay for it in some way.

Seeking permanency in an impermanent world is a source of great sorrow, as is the assumption that you should always get what you want.

Even if you do get what you want, the human mind is wired in such a way that we’re rarely satisfied with what we have for long. Subject to the mind’s inbuilt novelty bias, we tend to quickly take what we have for granted.

Sociologists call this hedonic adaptation. Put simply, we quickly become accustomed to our new car, new job, partner or lottery win. As the novelty wears off and we begin taking things for granted, we come to see the defects in the supposed objects of our dreams.

It’s then only a matter of time before the mind gets restless and finds a new object of desire upon which to pin all of our hopes and dreams. After all, isn’t the grass always greener on the other side?

That’s why you can achieve all of your dreams and goals, become a multimillionaire and have everything that money can buy, and yet still find yourself miserable, unfulfilled and yearning for something better.

We can only conclude there are two ways to be unhappy in life. The first is to not get what you want. The second is to get what you want—and realise that, as with all things in life, it comes with a downside and doesn’t, in fact, resolve your deep rooted dissatisfaction with yourself and life.

Quite the conundrum.

Perhaps it’s becoming clear that, as long as you have life’s basic necessities, the solution to your existential suffering is not an external one.

It doesn’t matter what you do or don’t do. As long as your attention is fixed solely outside of yourself, upon objects, attainments and achievements, whatever they might be, there’s no way to find permanent and lasting happiness.

Fulfilling your various desires and whims does not address the underlying problem of want.

Happiness Doesn’t Come From Things

The Maitiri Upanishad, one of the source texts of Vedanta, dating back at least two millennia, speaks of the human predicament:

The human soul is conditioned by the threefold qualities of matter and thus falls into delusion. Because of this delusion [samsara], the soul is unable to realise the shining Self, pure Consciousness, dwelling within; the power by which one lives and breathes. The soul is whirled along the rushing stream of muddy waters, confused yet unyielding and prideful, unable to see with clarity and subject to endless frustrated desires. Fixated on the sense of “I” and “mine”, it binds itself like a bird in the net of a snare.

This basically sums up the problem of samsara, the existential suffering of humankind, introduced in the previous chapter. The word samsara literally means to “revolve”, as if mounted upon a wheel, through successive states of birth, death and rebirth.

What keeps us bound to this wheel of samsara is worldly attachment and desire. Like an old millstone, this particular wheel steadily grinds us down as we vainly seek infinite happiness in the finite world of objects and experience.

The samsari looks to the outside world to provide them with happiness, wholeness and fulfilment. They do so by hungrily pursuing, acquiring and devouring various objects, experiences and possessions.

Of course, it’s only natural that we want certain things. This is a transactional reality. We live by taking action in the world. That’s what enables us to live, function and hopefully thrive. We are hungry, so we eat. We are tired, so we sleep. We need money, so we work. We’re a goal oriented species and we naturally crave company, community and meaning.

The problem is clear, however. If your happiness is dependent upon external factors then it’s a highly precarious happiness.

Why?

Well, for a start, we have only limited control of external variables. Not only that, but as we’ve established, everything in this world is subject to duality and, as such, is highly changeable and impermanent.

Objects themselves are neither inherently good nor bad. It’s the human mind, driven by its accumulated likes and dislikes, which superimposes certain values onto an object. It then becomes either “good” or “bad” to us; desirable or undesirable.

It’s also important to understand that the happiness we experience when we get what we want is not actually coming from the object itself.

Consider this. If happiness was inherent to a particular object, that object would bring equal joy to each and every person.

That’s clearly not the case. One person’s idea of bliss might be sitting in a library reading books, while another person is illiterate, can’t stand books and instead gets their kicks from extreme sports. A child may experience joy watching Saturday morning cartoons, while an adult might find those same cartoons unwatchable, instead preferring to watch historical documentaries (which most kids would find interminably boring).

The joy we experience is, therefore, never in the actual object or experience itself. It’s superimposed onto the object as determined by our personal values and likes and dislikes.

We Seek Freedom From Desire

At best, the objects of our desires are proxies. They seem to bring us joy because the moment we get what we want, the desire that prompted us to seek it has been extinguished. For that instant, we are temporarily freed from our aching sense of lack, insufficiency and want—and we experience the bliss and peace of desirelessness.

You’ve probably never thought of it this way before but, make no mistake, desire is suffering.

We only want things when we are driven by a sense of lack; and such limitation is painful to us. To want is to suffer; to be lacking and incomplete. Freedom from want is experienced as bliss.

As we’ll explore in later chapters, this bliss is actually a taste of our own essential nature. Where else would it come from? It doesn’t come from outside of us, although that might certainly seem to be the case. It comes from within; when the mind is sufficiently calm and free of the turbulent waves of dissatisfaction and want.

Unfortunately, as long as our focus remains strictly object oriented (and Vedanta defines “object” as anything perceivable by the mind and senses), you can guarantee the pleasure will be temporary. The moment it wears off, our inner sense of lack again returns and we shift our attention to the next object of our desire.

It’s little wonder that our happiness always seems to be just over the horizon—only, try though we might (and we really do try), we can never reach it.

The Price of Samsara

Samsara, the compulsion to seek happiness outside of ourselves, comes with multiple problems.

1. Attachment

By superimposing certain desirable qualities onto an object, we easily become attached to that object. We see it as essential to our happiness; as something we cannot live without; something we must acquire, possess and keep no matter the cost. Here lies the root of psychological addiction. Something appears to bring us pleasure, so we want to keep hold of it and never let it go. If you’ve ever seen a dog with a bone, you’ll know exactly what I mean when I speak of attachment.

2. Mental Disturbance

Such attachment inevitably leads to mental disturbance. Our mind gets clouded and we fail to see things as they actually are, free of the qualities we’re superimposing onto them. This compromises our ability to see and deal with life objectively.

When we’re under the delusion that X, Y or Z will bring us unending happiness and satisfaction, we’re out of touch with reality. We’re seeing what we want to see rather than what’s actually there.

We expect certain objects to continually fulfil us, to bring us pleasure and joy, and we’re quite unprepared when we have to deal with the inevitable downside to those objects, not least the fact that we cannot hold onto anything indefinitely.

3. Anxiety and Grief

Attachment inevitably leads to suffering. When we become attached to an object, the fear of losing it can generate tremendous anxiety and that’s to say nothing of the grief we experience if and when we do.

Human psychology isn’t actually as complex as you might think. When it comes to our attachments and aversions, like children, we basically want what we want, when we want it. When we don’t get it, we experience upset, whether in the form of tears and tantrums, bitterness or rage, depression or anxiety. Much of our sorrow basically boils down to life not giving us what we want.

4. Delusion

The resultant anger, sorrow and grief leads to delusion. This delusion, in time, can incapacitate our mind altogether.

An incapacitated, grief stricken mind is unable to think and process reality objectively. At worst, we lose the capacity to discriminate between right and wrong, between what’s truly important in life and what only seems important in the context of our desires and attachments.

Like the snake devouring its own tail, the samsari self-destructively expects the world to deliver more than it’s capable of delivering—and then suffers like hell when it doesn’t. This relentless cycle of seeking, acquiring and losing objects is most certainly not the solution to the problem of self-lack.

Samsara is the false expectation that, if you can just bring the world into alignment with your desires and aversions—if you can get what you want and avoid what you don’t want—you’ll get your “happy ever after” ending.

Let’s look at this from another angle.

How can you be happy if your happiness is dependent upon external variables?

For a start, you’re never truly in control of anything outside of yourself. All objects in duality are, by nature, finite and fleeting. Try though you might, you can never hold onto anything for any length of time. There’s simply no permanence to be found in an impermanent world.

The stronger your attachment, the more your mind will be a bubbling cauldron of desire and anxiety. You become an addict; hopelessly dependent upon objects and experiences for temporary bursts of happiness. You seek experience after experience, always desperate for the next hit.

You may even become so addicted to your desired objects that the very thought of losing them is akin to death. You may have heard the stories of Wall Street brokers jumping out of their windows when the stock market collapsed in 1929. Those poor souls were so identified with their jobs and with money that they simply couldn’t conceive living without it.

5. Violating Dharma

Another danger when you become addicted to objects is that your desire for those objects may supersede your commitment to dharma.

Dharma manifests our inherent sense of right and wrong. It means doing the right thing and responding appropriately to life in any given situation or circumstance.

People whose desires have spiralled into uncontrolled attachment may be liable to do all kinds of questionable things in order to get their way. At best, they might simply cut corners and bend the rules here and there. At worst, they may be willing to break the law and actively harm others. Basically, their desire becomes so strong that they end up causing untold suffering to both themselves and others.

This can be seen at both an individual and collective level. The human race is so deeply enmeshed in samsara that we’ve been living in an insanely self-destructive manner; willing to sacrifice the planet upon which we depend, and all our children’s futures, for whatever short term monetary gains we can acquire.

The Problem is You

Let’s forget about the world for now, though. The fundamental problem, the very root of your suffering, is not the world even with all its strife and turmoil. It lies much closer to home.

The source of your sorrows is—you.

Samsara is born of a deep sense of personal lack; the feeling that what you are is somehow deficient and inadequate; that you don’t have enough and that you aren’t good enough.

That’s what you’re ultimately seeking in life: the basic sense of being sufficient, adequate, whole, worthy and complete.

As subsequent chapters will explore in some depth, your dissatisfaction with yourself is based upon ignorance; delusion.

The delusion in question?

Because you experience a body, sense organs and a mind, you’ve assumed that this must be what you are: a crude merging of mind and matter, subject to birth, death and all kinds of limitations in between.

By superimposing your sense of self onto the body and mind, you’ve contracted the vastness of your being into a limited, time-bound entity called a “person”.

Regardless of personal circumstances, human beings universally make the same misidentification and are united by the same sense of limitation and incompleteness.

This sense of limitation gives rise to desire; which then spurs us to seek completeness wherever we can.

Because the senses are automatically hooked to world of objects, that’s precisely where we channel our search for wholeness. It’s also hardly surprising when, from a young age, we are bombarded by advertisements and media messages convincing us that we need certain objects and experiences in order to be happy.

The greater our sense of lack and self-limitation, the stronger our desires and the more desperate our search to find love, wholeness, validation and happiness outside of ourselves.

Driven by misplaced desire, we become obsessed with getting what we want and avoiding what we don’t want. Our lives become an exercise in manipulating the world to our fancy.

Human beings are naturally goal-seeking creatures. So, it’s absolutely fine to want to improve your life situation and there’s no problem at all with pursuing material objects and experiences.

However, if you’re attempting to overcome your basic sense of self-dissatisfaction by simply rearranging the circumstances of your life, it’s very much a wasted endeavour. It doesn’t ultimately matter how much money you make, how many luxury holidays you go on a year or how successful you become in business or love. It won’t fix the underlying problem.

The issue is not that “your life” isn’t the way you want it to be.

There are people out there who lack any form of material wealth and who still live happy and fulfilled lives, irrespective of their situation. Conversely, some of the richest and most successful people on the face of the planet suffer crippling despair, anxiety and unrelenting misery.

The problem, therefore, is not your life. The root of the problem is the idea you have about yourself; this notion that what you are isn’t enough.

Whatever object you happen to want, it’s never the object itself you’re really after. What you want is to feel better, to be different, to be whole, complete and free of lack.

That’s the fundamental human want; the need to feel whole and complete. You cannot be happy in the absence of this.

Your attempts to find wholeness outside of you are doomed to constant failure. While you certainly have it in your power to achieve and accumulate certain things, there’s no way you can get what you want all the time. Life simply isn’t set up that way.

That’s both bad news and good news.

It’s bad news for the wanting, needing little person ravaged by desire and fear. It’s good news when you realise that, although life isn’t here to fulfil your every wish, it is here to wake you up; to break your heart open and reveal that deep within, you already have and are everything you could ever possibly want.

The Solution is You

The crucial takeaway here is the acknowledgement that your suffering is not caused by the fact you’re not getting what you want from life.

The real problem is self-ignorance.

You have assumed yourself to be something limited and lacking; a person subject to all kinds of limitation, want and sorrow. You have taken yourself to be what you are not. That’s the fundamental message of Vedanta. You’ve imagined yourself to be a beggar when you are, in fact, a king or queen.

In time, you may actually be glad that you didn’t manage to hold God to ransom and force Him to deliver your long list of worldly desires and demands. Instead, you’ll be grateful that you finally came to realise that the true treasure is within; that the freedom you long sought was always and only within you as the very essence of your own Consciousness.

There’s no way to “win” at samsara within samsara. The only solution is to break free of it altogether, and, as we’ll see in the next chapter, that’s what the fourth and final life goal, enlightenment, is all about.

Summary

We all seek freedom because limitation is not natural to us. To be free is to be happy and happiness is the goal of all beings.
Ignorance makes us seek lasting happiness outside of us when, in actuality, happiness can only be found within.
Desire is suffering. Freedom from desire is experienced as bliss.
The cost of samsara is great. It causes attachment, mental disturbance, anxiety and grief, delusion and the tendency to violate dharma, hurting both ourselves and others.
The real problem is our innermost sense of lack and insufficiency; the sense that who and what we are is not enough.
This is caused by a misidentification; by identifying ourselves with the body and mind rather than with the Consciousness we are.