In this podcast episode, I will share five daily life guidelines that have been beneficial for me in my personal practice. They are: consume mindfully, practice loving kindness, practice gratitude, discover wisdom, and accept constant change.

Koan Discussed: When the many are reduced to one, to what is the one reduced?

Koan Shared: Once Ma-tsu and Pai-chang were walking along and they saw some wild ducks fly by.
“What is that?” the Master asked.
“Wild ducks,” Pai-chang replied.
“Where have they gone?”
“They’ve flown away,” Pai-chang said.
The Master then twisted Pai-chang’s nose, and when Pai-chang cried out in pain, Ma-tsu said, “When have they ever flown away?”

Transcript:

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Secular Buddhism podcast. This is episode number 133. I am your host, Noah Rasheta. And today, I’m going to talk about five daily life guidelines.

Keep in mind you don’t need to use what you learn from Buddhism to be a Buddhist. You can use what you learn to just be a better whatever you already are. If you’re new to the podcast, episodes one through five give a good introduction to the basic teachings and concepts of Buddhism. You can visit secularbuddhism.com and click on the Start Here link and get started there. If you’re looking for an online community to practice with and interact with, consider becoming a supporter of the podcast by visiting secularbuddhism.com and clicking on the top link that says, “Join our online community on Patreon.”

Before jumping into the topic for today’s podcast episode, I want to talk about the Zen koan that I shared in the last podcast episode. The koan says, “When the many are reduced to one, to what is the one reduced?” I want to share some of the thoughts that come from some of the community members on Patreon regarding this koan.

The first one comes from Lauren who says, “To me, this week’s koan made me think of the interdependent nature of reality. I also thought about the often used car analogy. If you are taking a car apart piece by piece, when does it stop becoming a car? The many car parts are often reduced to the concept of a car in our minds, but the reality is that each component is unique and interdependent with all things. So I think it’s a lesson to remind ourselves that every concept we have of a physical thing or an idea is made up of subcomponents, and those are made up of subcomponents, and so on. This is so we can be mindful of what it took for this thing, this concept, this moment to arise so we may act more skillfully by having right view in the world.”

Mirella says, “I really like this koan, as it makes me think about the concepts of oneness, interconnectedness, and non-self all in one sentence. If the sense of separation between self and other disappears, then there is no one left, at least not in the same way as before the many were reduced to one. This doesn’t mean that the one is reduced to nothing, but rather that the one has become the many.”

Then, Matt says, “I am reminded of the story of the men and the elephant. In this situation, reducing the number of blind men would reduce our understanding of the elephant. I really love this koan. It also made me think of how a forest benefits from a diversity of species. A reduction of species makes the forest less able to cope with change. I think humanity is learning this from the internet. We can become trapped in thought bubbles on the internet. Reducing the views that we are exposed to makes us more vulnerable.”

I enjoyed the thoughts that were shared on the Patreon community, specifically these by Lauren, Marella, and Matt, and I wanted to share some of my own thoughts regarding this specific koan. I agree with what was shared where the invitation of the koan is to see the interdependent nature of things. What’s fascinating to me, when we start to think about this in terms of the one and the many, if you think about it in terms of a line that goes up or a line that goes down, you end up at the same place, which is the point of uncertainty and the point of not knowing.

So if I were to take the car as the analogy, car is a concept. It’s an idea. And yet, it’s a thing. It’s real. And yet, I could reduce it to all of its parts, and I end up with another concept, for example, an engine. The engine of the car. Now it’s not the car, it’s the engine. But, you do the same there. The engine, reduce that to its parts. Oh, well, now I have piston, and all these other parts of an engine. You take the piston, reduce it to its parts, and at some point you go all the way down to the lowest known particles that we know of. Then, what are those made of? And you’re still left with, well, we don’t know. We just know as far as we can go, there’s this, I think it’s quirks, right? Quarks, quirks? But, you get to that. Well, what are those? What are those made of? Is there anything smaller? And again, the answer would be we don’t know, at least for now.

But if you go up the line, it’s the same thing where many states make a country. Many countries make a continent. Many continents make the planet. Many planets make the solar system. Many solar systems make a galaxy. Many galaxies … And you go up, up, up, up, up, up until you say, “Okay, we’ve got the universe, and the universe is expanding.”

Now you can go into the theoretical explanations beyond that. What if it’s a multiverse? What if it’s string, bubbles? The various explanations of what there could be with a multiverse theory, you end up at the same place, which is we don’t know. And I think it’s kind of fun to think about that in terms of this koan, with the many and the one. What you have is, again, the many and the one, the one and the many, the many and the one. It just depends how you want to define it. Many states make up one country. But if you reduce the country to its parts, you’d have many states. Well, reduce the many states to their parts. Well, many counties. What about the many counties? Many cities. What about the many cities? And it goes on, and on, and on. But what we have are just concepts and ideas. So that’s fun to think about in terms of this specific koan, that when the many are reduced to one, to what is the one reduced? For me, this is, again, it’s an invitation to see the interdependent nature of things.

Those are the thoughts I have about the koan. And now I want to jump into the topic for the podcast for today. I’ve been thinking a lot about different topics, and I keep a list where I have my ideas of topics. And for some reason, I thought I’d share this one today. This is a list that I first encountered when I was doing my lay ministry program with Bright Dawn. This was one of the teachings from the Bright Dawn way of oneness Buddhism, and I really enjoyed it. I wrote it down, and I’ve thought about it over the years and what it means to me. And I thought I would share it with you. But, this was taught to me in the context that there are five daily life guidelines.

I must say real quick that when I first heard about these as guidelines, it made me think of that scene in Pirates of the Caribbean where Keira Knightley, Ms. Turner, is trying to get Captain Barbossa to follow some specific rules or codes, and she invokes the pirate’s code. He retorts with, “First of all, you have to be a pirate to follow the pirate’s code.” But then, he says something that always stood out to me. He says, “And thirdly, the code is more what you’d call guidelines than actual rules.” This is something that I think about often with concepts in Buddhism. There is no compelling in Buddhism. There are no commandments. It’s not like a hard set of rules. Almost everything that we learn about is in the context of being guidelines.

So when we think about these in terms of guidelines, remember there is no compelling. There’s no rigid requirement to follow these things. But, I enjoy these guidelines. I think they are worth thinking about daily on a daily basis. So, I want to share them with you. These are the five guidelines that I learned about.

The first one is the guideline to consume mindfully. When we talk about consuming, we’re not just talking about consuming food. I do think it’s wise to eat sensibly and to not be wasteful and not take a whole bunch of food on my plate knowing that I’m probably not going to eat at all. I think there’s some sensibility with that and skillfulness with that. But, this goes into other things as well. The fact that we can pause before we buy something and see if breathing is enough. Sometimes we buy things because we feel that we need to have something that’s going to make us feel a certain way.

This is actually exactly how marketing works. The goal of marketing is to make you feel the pain point in your life that you are experiencing, because you do not have this specific thing, this house, this phone, this vacation, this whatever it is that we’re trying to market to you. I know this because I come from a marketing background. I worked at an advertising agency. Marketing has been one of my specialties for throughout most of my career. So I know that the proper technique to get somebody to buy something is to help them feel the pain point and highlight that. Your life is the way that it is because you don’t have this. We don’t say it exactly like that, but we make you feel that. Then, the solution is, well, you buy this product, or you buy this service, or whatever the thing is. And guess what? Then life’s going to be good.

So to consume mindfully is to pause before we’re going to buy into something and see why do I really want this. What’s the real motivation behind me acquiring this thing, whatever it is? And again, I’m not saying that buying anything is bad. I’m just saying it’s very skillful to know why we’re going to buy something. And in our society, sometimes we don’t entertain the thought of why we’re buying something. We just buy it because we want it.

The next form of consuming mindfully is paying attention to the effects of the media that we consume. So when we consume content, we acquire content through various sources, whether it be books, podcasts, television shows, music, social media, and there’s a way to consume more mindfully. Again, it’s not that one or another is bad, but what does it do to you to consume what you’re consuming? I know people who really struggle with the emotions and feelings that they consume by watching the news. And it seems like a really skillful thing would be to just stop watching the news, and yet they can’t. It’s like, “There’s this thing that I hate, and I got to keep watching it because I hate it if I don’t have it, and I hate it when I have it.” It’s just really strange. And there may be a much more skillful approach, which is, well, then stop consuming that thing that makes you feel that way.

Again, I’m not saying that we need to do any of these things. These are just guidelines. It’s all about you understanding yourself and then consuming mindfully based on what you know is best for you. It would be highly unskillful for someone who’s allergic to peanuts to decide, “Well, I’m still going to eat peanuts anyway because I like the flavor.” It just, it’s not that that’s good or bad, it’s just that it’s highly, highly unskillful. Why would you do that? But we do that all the time with the many things that we consume. So, consuming mindfully.

The second one is share loving kindness. So again, these are five daily life guidelines. I like to think about share loving kindness. And to me, this means consider other people’s views deeply. And I like the keyword deeply. Because oftentimes, I think about my views and how meaningful my views are to me. We all have meaningful views. Our way of interpreting reality is real to us.

Now, nobody goes around living their life saying, “I know that my way of interpreting reality is wrong, but I’m going to stick with it anyway.” Why? Nobody does that. Why? Because we all genuinely think that our way of experiencing and interpreting reality is the correct way. And you can see this in any form of ideology, right? Everybody believes that their way is the right way. So to consider other people’s views deeply for me means I’m going to go beyond the view. To view it deeply means, where did this view come from? What are some of the causes and conditions that gave rise to this view? You know, just you go down layer, layer, layer. And we don’t know the answers to all these things. You can’t know all these things, but you know that there are causes and conditions. So that helps me to not get so hung up on whatever the view itself is.

I can talk to someone who might have a very strange view that makes no sense to me, but I can see it deeply and understand that that view has causes and conditions. And I may not understand those causes and conditions, but knowing that there are causes and conditions and those causes and conditions have causes and conditions changes the relationship that I have with the specific view. I think that’s really helpful when we’re talking about political views or religious views. Those are always hot topics. It also means sharing loving kindness to me means that we work for peace at many levels. It means that I’m trying to experience more joy and less negativity with my interactions with other people.

Another component to this sharing loving kindness to me is recognizing that it takes bravery on my part to be kind and compassionate. Now, one quick example of this to give a little bit of context is the way that we interact with people, like homeless people. In Pema Chodron’s book, When Things Fall Apart, she has a section where she’s talking about how when we see someone on the street and they’re homeless, most of us tend to not want to look at them, especially if you don’t have anything to give them, because it’s awkward and it feels uncomfortable to not be able to help.

It’s not that we go around saying, “Oh, I don’t want to help you.” Maybe some people do. But for most of us, what we go around feeling is I wish I could do something, but I can’t. I’m not in a position to. I don’t have the money. I might not have money on me. So I’m just going to avoid looking at this person because I can’t help them anyway, which is actually sad because it kind of makes them feel invisible.

So the idea of bravery and compassion or having brave compassion is recognizing for me to look at this person in the eyes and just acknowledge them and say, “Hi, how are you?” Or, “I hope you’re having a good day,” or just a smile. It takes a little bit of bravery because there’s going to be a little bit of awkwardness, which is the awkwardness of I don’t have anything for you or I can’t do anything for you, but I’m okay with the discomfort of the awkwardness because I’m brave. So I’m just going to share that compassion and share the smile. That’s how I think about it in my head, this term of brave compassion. So that second daily life guideline is to share loving kindness, to be willing to share that kindness to other people even when it’s hard to do because it’s uncomfortable at times.

The third one is practice gratitude. This is always a good one, right? We can respect the people that we encounter because everyone and everything is a teacher. This is a helpful one for me. When you encounter someone that’s unpleasant, a coworker or the annoying person in the store, or whatever it is, we can start to see these people as teachers. What can I learn from this? What can I learn from this behavior I’m experiencing? What can I learn from … And when we have that mindset of learning, then you can have gratitude. Thank you for teaching me how not to be, or thank you for teaching me how … I don’t know, whatever the lesson is that you get. If you’re the one who can make a lesson out of anything and learn from anything, then it’s natural to feel a sense of gratitude towards whatever situation, or scenario, or person.

Then, we can be equally grateful for the opportunities and the challenges. I think it’s very easy for us to be grateful for opportunities. That’s natural. But, it’s not very common for us to feel a sense of gratitude for our challenges, but the challenges are often the more formative of the two.

I’ve had plenty of nice opportunities and experiences of things in life that I was grateful for, and I’ve also had many challenges or situations that were extremely painful and difficult, and I didn’t feel a sense of gratitude for it at the time. And yet, those events are the ones that went on to forge something much more significant and larger for me in terms of my character or in terms of life changes that I can look back on. And if I’m being very honest with myself, I would have to say I am much more grateful for all of the challenges than I am for the opportunities, because the challenges are the ones that really helped me learn more about myself or really helped me to grow. So when we practice gratitude as a daily life guideline, we’re looking at both the opportunities and the challenges and trying to practice gratitude towards both.

There’s a quote that I like to share in terms of gratitude. This is by David Steindl-Rast. He says, “In daily life, we must see that it is not happiness that makes us grateful, but gratefulness that makes us happy.” I think that’s so true. And if we can develop practicing gratitude, we’ll find that we tend to be more happy going through life not because we’re happy, but it’s because we’re grateful. It’s the gratefulness that makes us happy. And I think a lot of times we have that mixed up. We try so hard to find ways to be happy when instead we should just try to find more things to be grateful for. And really, what is there to not be grateful for? Anything that teaches me something is something I can be grateful for. So, yeah, there’s a lot to be grateful for if you just think about it.

The fourth one is to discover wisdom. And to me, this is about finding the connections between the teachings and our own life. And like I said, anything can teach us. Anything can be my teacher. So when I make the correlation between that thing that’s teaching me something and what that means for me in my life, that’s a matter of discovering wisdom. I find I discover wisdom in the little things, the wisdom of being annoyed at the red light, the wisdom of dealing with the coworker that makes annoying sounds or whatever the situation is. There’s wisdom to be had there if we’re willing to look.

Now, another concept here related to this discovering wisdom is that we should not become attached to our conclusions. When we see something that we say, “Oh, I’ve gained some insight,” that’s fine. There’s nothing inherently wrong or dangerous with gaining insight. But, how attached are we to the insight that we gain. This to me is like the blind men and the elephant. I gain wisdom when I feel the elephant then I discover, yep, these are … The elephant consists of all these little stringy things. And then later, I might discover, yeah, that’s the tail. That’s just the hair on the tail, and that’s only one part of the elephant. But to me, that might be the only real part. But, how attached am I to my conclusion? If I’m attached to my conclusion, then I don’t want to hear from the other person that’s saying, “No, it’s not. It’s one big sidewall,” the one who’s feeling the side of the elephant. So, let’s not get too attached to our conclusions.

And again, we can always keep the beginner’s mind, the empty teacup. As soon as the teacup’s full, there’s no more room for more tea so we keep it empty. That to me is not becoming attached to our conclusions.

There’s a quote that I think goes well with this concept, discovering wisdom, which is the Tibetan proverb that says, “If I know I will die tomorrow, I can still learn something tonight.” And I love that thought. I’m always trying to learn something new. I’m always trying to read a new book, listen to a new podcast or do something that teaches me something because I’ve come to understand that there’s so much out there to be known. And so very little of it that I’ll ever get to know that it’s just exciting to learn something new, that’s exciting to gain any kind of insight about any kind of topic, and that has affected the type of things that I watch. I enjoy documentaries that teach me things because I know that that’s something that I’ll never even get close to scratching the surface of knowing all the things that there are to know. And that’s true whether I’m just thinking of one specific topic or subject or just in general all that there is to know about anything. We’ll never get there.

The fifth one is to accept constant change. To me, this means it’s an invitation to be open to whatever arises in every moment. Again, this is cultivating the beginner’s mind. But to me, I like to picture this with the Tetris analogy. I’m going through life, and the Tetris game is always changing because new pieces are always showing up, so I don’t want to get stuck for too long. We all get stuck from time to time. When that piece shows up, we’re like, “Ugh! I almost had this figured out, and then that showed up. Why did that have to show up? “And sure, I might be stuck there for a few seconds as that piece is coming down and I’m trying to figure out where to put it. But don’t get stuck there too long because then comes the next piece.

This is equally applicable to when the piece shows up that you didn’t want as the piece that shows up that you did want. You’re like, “Finally! I got the pieces that I need. Everything’s finally going to work.” And yeah, it might. Then, it shows up and they all lock into the same place, and everything’s good. That line disappears from your game. Because that’s the way the game works, right? And then it changes again. So don’t get stuck too long. Because when it’s good, it’s good while it’s good till it’s not good. But when it’s bad, it’s also bad while it’s bad till it becomes good again. And that’s just the nature, as Pema says, of things coming together and things falling apart. And that is life, right? Things come together, and then things fall apart, and then things come together, and then things fall apart. And it goes on, and on, and on until our game is over. I love to think about that when I think about Tetris.

I want to close this with a invitation to keep going. Keep going. Keep going. Always keep going. So these five daily life guidelines are consume mindfully, share loving kindness, practice gratitude, discover wisdom, and accept constant change. These have been fun for me in the past several years to try to think about often, daily, really, because they are useful guidelines. And with time, they become a little bit more habitual in the way and affecting the way that we interact with people, and with situations that we’re going through in life, and with life in general. So my invitation to you is to think about these five daily life guidelines and see if any of them seem like they would be good or relevant for you to apply into your day-to-day life.

And that is all that I have for this podcast episode. As always, I want to thank you for sharing. If you want to support the work I’m doing with the podcast, you can consider becoming a patron and joining the online community where we discuss these koans, and the podcast episodes, and more. There’s even a study group/book club. You can learn more about all this by visiting the online community at secularbuddhism.com. And if you enjoyed this podcast episode, feel free to share it with others, write a review, give it a rating tonight tunes. And that’s all I have for now, but I do look forward to recording another podcast episode soon.

And before I go, here is another Zen koan for you to think about. Once, Mat-tsu and Pai-chang were walking along and they saw some wild ducks fly by. “What is that?” the master asked. “Wild ducks,” Pai-chang replied. “Where have they gone?” “They have flown away,” Pai-chang said. The master then twisted Pai-chang’s nose. And when Pai-chang cried out in pain, Ma-tsu said, “When have they ever flown away?” Till next time.

The nature of reality is that difficulties will arise, and we’ll experience suffering. We can begin to embrace that fact by recognizing that suffering, in general, is not personal. It’s simply part of the experience of existence. And we will experience suffering, no matter how hard we try to avoid it. In this episode, I will discuss the pervasive suffering that sometimes affects how we see our relationships, jobs, and parenting.

Koan Discussed: What is the Sound of One Hand Clapping?

Koan Shared: Elder Ting asked Lin-chi,
“Master, what is the great meaning of Buddha’s teachings?”
Lin-chi came down from his seat, slapped Ting and pushed him away.
Ting was stunned and stood motionless.
A monk nearby said, “Ting, why do you not bow?”
At that moment Ting attained great enlightenment.

Subscribe to the podcast on:
iTunes – https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/secular-buddhism/id1071578260
SoundCloud – https://soundcloud.com/secularbuddhism
TuneIn – http://tunein.com/radio/Secular-Buddhism-p823114/
Stitcher – http://www.stitcher.com/s?fid=80132&refid=stpr

Transcript:

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Secular Buddhism podcast. This is episode number 131, I am your host, Noah Rasheta and today I’m going to talk about the truth of unsatisfactoriness. As always keep in mind, you don’t need to use what you learned from Buddhism to be a Buddhist. You can use what you learn to be a better whatever you already are. Furthermore, if you are new to the podcast, listening perhaps for the first time or you’ve jumped in on these podcast episodes recently, I want to remind you that episodes one through five have a summary of the basics of Buddhism, and you can find these by scrolling all the way back to the original first five, or you can visit secularbuddhism.com and click on start here.

Also, another request I’ve received quite regularly is a request for suggestions for reading material and books. If you’re interested in learning more about these concepts and ideas, feel free to visit secularbuddhism.com/books and there you will see my recommended books that I’ve read and that I wholeheartedly recommend for anyone interested in exploring more about Buddhism or about any of these general topics and concepts that I discuss in the podcast.

So quick update on my own life, I recently, as you may have noticed, I didn’t record the podcast episode last week because I’ve been on the road. Many of you know that I moved to Mexico for a year with my family to help my kids learn to speak Spanish and to identify with the culture since that’s where I’m from. But in light of the recent worldwide events and the potential social unrest and economic changes that are happening all over the world, including for me, much of my work related to online advertising, which I can do remotely, has dried up. So I had to make a decision and rather than waiting till June to move home, we decided last week that we should go ahead and make the move.

Now flying home was not the tricky part, we knew that would be easy. The tricky part or the scary part was how to get all of our possessions home, because we knew that that would require me packing them all up into the car and driving all of the possessions back home and that’s exactly what I did. So I’ve been off the radar a little bit for the last seven days. It took me seven days from last Wednesday. I left early in the morning, made my way through driving from essentially the Southern part of Mexico all the way to the North, crossed into Texas, made my way up to Dallas, visited my parents and then made the journey westward from there and recently made my way back to Utah. So that’s what I’ve been up to in the last seven days. And that’s why I was not able to record a podcast episode last week. So here I am catching up.

Okay, jumping right in I want to talk a little bit about the koan that says, “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” Now this is a koan that I wanted to bring up because it’s one of the classics. It’s one of the main ones that you’re going to hear when you start studying or reading about zen koans. I want to share some of the thoughts that come from the Patreon community and I’ll start with David Spots who says, “For me, the answer to this week’s koan is, whatever is perceived by the listener.” Nina from the community says, “This koan brings up the emptiness of things, as well as intervene. A clap is made up of non-clap elements, which dismantling it would be the fingers, the hand, the skin, the bones, the brain, the cells, et cetera. So ultimately the sound of one hand clapping is empty of sound because a clap is relative to what is perceived to be a clap.” I like those thoughts by Nina.

And then Matthew says, “Whenever I hear this koan, I remember when they had it on the Simpsons and it opened Lisa’s mind. I agree with a lot of what others said, which is interesting because before I used to try to solve the puzzle, but it is much like if no one is around and the tree falls in the woods, does it make a noise? It is about perception. I think it is also about things not having an intrinsic meaning. What is a clap? Is it two hands hitting each other? If so, how hard? What if I touch them ever so softly? Can one hand clap? Maybe. You can hit your palm with the fingers of the same hand. And what if you slap your thigh with your palm, like you often do at a sports event, or if you have a drink in one hand, that is one hand clapping and I know the noise that it makes.” And that’s the end of Matthew’s thoughts.

And I agree with all the sentiments that were shared in the group, it was as always it’s a fun experience to hear other people’s perspectives and their thoughts regarding one single topic, in this case, what is the sound of one hand clapping? Now for me, I feel like trying to answer is the problem, because I could equally ask other questions, like, what is the sound of anger? And if I were to ask, what is the sound of anger? You can give me an answer, you can say it’s yelling or it’s grinding your teeth, or it’s punching the wall with your hand. All of which could be correct, but all of which are also incomplete because perhaps there isn’t an actual sound to anger, there’s events that can arise with anger as its cause or its condition. And I think with the sound of one hand clapping, you can run into similar issues because you’d have to define what is clapping.

I remember in school sometimes when you had to be quiet in class but they wanted you to clap, you could lift your hands in the air and kind of rotate them back and forth like air clapping, but there’s no sound taking place and that counts as a clap. So then it forces you to have to define is clapping an act of celebration, where I want you to know that I’m celebrating with you and that counts as a clap? Is it specifically the two hands that come together? If so, what about at a sporting event where I take those two long sticks, the clapping sticks and I hit those together to make my clap louder, does that not count because my hands aren’t touching?

And it can become problematic because I have to define what is a clap, so then I’m left with this idea with one, what is the sound of one hand clapping? Well, the sound of one hand clapping is the sound of one hand clapping. However, I define it I may be missing the point, but I will always be correct by saying that the sound of one hand clapping is the sound of one hand clapping. And now I leave it up to you to imagine what that means to interpret the meaning of that. That’s how I like to think about this specific koan. It’s an invitation as always to go inward and ask myself, “Well, what does clapping mean to me? What does the sound of one hand clapping mean to me?”

So jumping into the topic that I have for this podcast episode, The Truth of Unsatisfactoriness, I’m going to echo some of the sentiments I shared in episode 122, We Don’t Eliminate Suffering and episode 57, Discovering All Pervasive Suffering. The truth of unsatisfactoriness is a title that we could use to talk about the first of the noble truths. So in Buddhism, if you were to ask almost any Buddhist, what the core basic Buddhist teachings are, they would probably summarize the four noble truths. And the first of the truths is the truth of suffering or the truth of unsatisfactoriness. And I like the word unsatisfactoriness more than suffering, but it’s the same general idea.

And here what we’re trying to understand is that the nature of reality is that difficulties will arise and we will experience suffering or unsatisfactoriness. We can begin to embrace that fact by recognizing that suffering in general is not personal, it’s simply part of the experience of existence. And we will experience suffering no matter how hard we try to avoid it, whether we search for a magic formula to remove it, or we chase after money to buy it off or seek fame to drown it out or whatever. If we pray, meditate, perform rituals, to try to shield ourselves from it suffering in some form will find us. It is the central problem of human existence. The diagnosis is universal. It’s not just you, it’s all of us, the rich, the famous, the powerful, the pious, everyone. If you think you’re alone with your difficulties, just spend some time talking to others and ask them about their problems. And if they’re open and they’re honest, you’ll soon discover that everyone has struggles and pain and unsatisfactoriness to contend with.

What we learned from the Buddha about embracing suffering is that life is going to be easier for us when we truly accept the suffering is a part of life for everyone, there’s simply no way around it. Now I wanted to bring this topic up because in recent weeks, I had a discussion with a friend of mine, Matt, who brought up this concept, this idea of acute suffering versus chronic suffering. And what he wanted to elaborate on was that sometimes when we approach Buddhism and we approached these big concepts or topics around suffering, it seems easy to apply these to some form of acute suffering, like some big change. Like you lose your job or you lose a loved one, or you realize that you’re sick, things of that nature.

But what happens when we experience this level of unsatisfactoriness in a chronic sense? It’s a lower magnitude of unsatisfactoriness yet it’s there and we just kind of deal with it day in and day out and often for months or years or even our whole lives. And in that discussion, it made me think about this Buddhist concept of all pervasive suffering. So if you’ve read some of my books that talk about the topic of suffering, I mentioned the various types of suffering, and I think it’s important to recognize and highlight that there are indeed various forms or ways to suffer. One of them is what we call all pervasive suffering. Keep in mind for a second, this notion of all pervasive suffering, which is essentially that there’s always at any given moment, some underlying unsatisfactoriness that’s there. And what we want to identify is where does that come from?

So just as an example, on my drive here, I spent seven days sitting in the car driving. My shortest days were 10 hour drives, and my longest days were 14 hour drives. So doing this day in and day out, I had a lot of thoughts about discomfort and unsatisfactoriness, and it stemmed from things like, my foot is going numb, to my legs are really uncomfortable, my lower back is hurting, all of the discomforts that come with sitting in a car for that long. But it got me thinking, “What if I went back in time?” At some point I would say, “Transporting my possessions is really hard on this sled.” So I invent wheels. Oh, well, that made it a lot easier. And for a split moment, I’d be grateful that it’s so much easier to pull this wagon with my possessions, rather than pushing it or dragging it on a sled. And then I might realize, “Oh, it was way easier when I tethered this wagon with wheels to an animal and I let it pull me. Oh, I’m so grateful for that now.”

And then there would be discomforts that arise from that. “Oh, I wish my animal didn’t need to rest so I could keep going. I wish it could go faster because this is taking forever.” Or, “I’m going numb sitting on the back of this horse.” Or something like that. And then motors are invented and they come along and, “Oh, well now this is easy. I get in this vehicle and I just go.” And again, “Well, but it’s slow.” And what I’m trying to get at is that over time this process has become better, and better, and better, and better, why? Because we generally don’t like discomfort so we’re constantly looking at ways to ease or minimize the discomfort.

And thanks to that, we’ve evolved to the point where here I am taking a seven day drive that traverses from one whole country to another, it’s pretty incredible that I can do that in a car. And sure there are difficulties that arise because that’s the nature of life is that there are always going to be difficulties and that’s what I wanted to highlight. Sure, I could make this better. What if I cut it from seven days down to three days, there would still be discomfort for sitting for three days or one hour. We do this when we’re on the airplane, right? We can be on an airplane, taking a flight that’s going to be an hour or two hours long that covers thousands of miles or something and we’re unsatisfied that the internet right now isn’t working and I can’t watch the movies, the screen in front of me is broken or something like that. And this is what I want to get at with the idea of all pervasive suffering or what Matt was talking about a more chronic form of suffering.

This is evident in things, not just because I was taking a drive, but let’s use another example, Matt and I talked about this and the example would be, let’s say you’re in a job and you’re not completely satisfied with your job. There’s an underlying level of unsatisfactoriness with your job. The problem that arises isn’t the unsatisfactoriness, I think the problem that arises is that we feel the unsatisfactoriness and we think that we shouldn’t feel it. t’s like we’ve believed for, I don’t know, from societal views or wherever these views came from that if we’re suffering, even a little bit, then we’re doing it wrong.

And I see this all the time when I receive emails that ask about tips or advice about parenting, for example in Buddhism, and the general vibe I get from these types of emails is that, “Hey, parenting is pretty hard, therefore, I must be doing it wrong. How can Buddhism help me to do it right, so that parenting isn’t hard anymore?” It’s almost like nobody told us that parenting is hard. Somehow we all bought into this lie, which is that if you do it right, parenting is easy. And that’s the problem. The problem isn’t that parenting is hard. The problem is that parenting is hard and we don’t want it to be hard. So here we are comparing, because of social media or whatever, what we think other people’s parenting experience is like, and we’re thinking, they must be doing something right and I must be doing something wrong because if it’s hard, I’m not doing it right.

And Buddhism kind of steps in and it’s saying, “No, all pervasive suffering is that parenting is hard.” There’s just no way around that, there’s no escaping it. Imagine that you have a restaurant that you really enjoy. And at that restaurant you have a specific dish, a meal that you really enjoy, so you always pick that. Now you may have this underlying unsatisfactoriness if you start to think, “I really like this, but man, what if there’s another meal at another restaurant that I might enjoy more?” If I think that, which absolutely could be true, then yes, it’s difficult to fully enjoy this meal because what if there’s another meal that I would enjoy more? So I want to go taste all of them. Now there’s no way around this because you cannot taste every dish at every restaurant in the world, it cannot happen. It’s physically impossible.

So when I recognize that, then I can learn to accept that there is going to be a level of all pervasive suffering every time I eat a meal, no matter how good it is, because somewhere in the back of my mind might be the thought, “What if there’s another meal somewhere else that I would have liked more?” Now take that same line of thinking and correlate that to other bigger things like relationships, I think this is a big deal in relationships. And we think, “Well, I’m in a relationship…” And some days I’m thinking, “Hmm, what if I had married this other person instead?” I don’t know someone you dated in college or high school and you start having those similar thoughts. What if there was a relationship out there that would be better than this one more compatible or whatever?

And the truth is, well, yeah, it very well could be, but here’s the catch you could be in that relationship and you’d be having the exact same thoughts, “What if I had married the other person?” And there’s no way around that because you can’t have the experience of being in a relationship with every single person in the world, it cannot happen. It’s physically impossible. So there’s always going to be that underlying all pervasive unsatisfactoriness in every relationship that is telling you, “What if, what if it would have been different?” Well, yeah, that’s fine. So what I want to get at with this, the idea here is that when these thoughts arise or when this general underlying form of all pervasive suffering arises, there’s nothing wrong with it.

The only time this becomes problematic is when that arises. And then we started thinking, “Oh, what does that mean? Oh no, maybe…” And don’t misunderstand me here, I’m not saying if you’re in a relationship, just stick with it, there’s no better relationship out there. That’s not true either, I know plenty of people who were in a miserable relationship and ended up getting divorced and ended up in a much happier and healthier relationship later. So I’m not saying stick with things, I’m not saying that. What I’m saying is, you’re never going to find the one that is perfect in the sense that I will no longer have any form of unsatisfactoriness, whether it’s the meal at your restaurant or the person that you’re married to, or the way that you’re parenting your children or the job that you have. And there’s always going to be that, what if. And I think it takes a lot of skillfulness to decide if, and when it reaches the point that you actually should do something about it.

I’ve done something about it in terms of my job. I wasn’t happy with a job once and I finally did something about it and I was much more happy in another job. And I’ve made career changes that even now I feel like I am really enjoying my job, I cannot imagine, the line of work that I do teaching people to paraglide, I cannot imagine something more fun. And yet there is the all-pervasive thought of, “Well, what if I had become a helicopter pilot? That was my dream as a youth.” Or, “What if I had become an air force pilot and I flew jets?” Or, “Ooh, what if I would have had the chance to become an astronaut?” And I can go down that path and sure, it’s true, what if one of those things would have been way more enjoyable that than what I do? And I don’t know, because I wouldn’t know unless I was in those shoes and I might be in those shoes thinking, “This is kind of stressful, I wonder what it would be like to just be a paraglider pilot or a paraglider instructor?”

So the point I want to make is that when we identify this all-pervasive suffering, this underlying unsatisfactoriness that permeates everything we can learn to recognize that it’s perfectly okay to experience all pervasive suffering or all pervasive unsatisfactoriness. That it only becomes problematic when we experience it and we think we’re not supposed to be experiencing this because then we start buying into strange conceptualizations that have in our mind, which is, “Well, if I don’t like this job, I shouldn’t be here.” And again, I’m not saying stick with a job you don’t like, that’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying that there’s a difference between identifying the all-pervasive suffering, that’s there versus this is an acute form of suffering and I definitely need to do something about it. Like my boss is mean to me and I can’t stand my boss then yeah, do something about it. So please don’t misunderstand what I’m trying to get at here, I’m not saying stick with a bad relationship or with a bad job.

Another way to think about this, a way that came up in our conversation this morning in our live Zoom call, the community call, we were talking about the concept of judgment and how one of the listeners, or one of the participants mentioned that he’s trying hard to not judge people. And I brought up the fact that judging people is a natural thing, we all do it and it’s because we’re hardwired to do it. We have to make quick assessments to decide, are we safe? Right? This is an evolutionary thing where we can almost instantly say, “Is this person on team us or on team them?” And we’re hardwired to do that. So what I wanted to make clear was there’s nothing wrong with judging, it’s the attachment we have to the assessment we made in our judgment, that can be what’s problematic.

So for me, I catch myself judging people all the time. And when I do, I just remind myself, “Well, that doesn’t mean that I’m right and it certainly doesn’t mean that it’s true.” And I have reasons for why my judgment goes one way or the other and that’s based on my societal views, my upbringing, my all kinds of things, things that I cannot help. But when I realized that I’m doing it, I can remind myself that just because I thought that doesn’t mean that it’s true. And if I were to spend time getting to know this person, I may be pleasantly surprised at how wrong I was. And that has happened to me various times. It’s also happened where the more I get to know them, the more confident I am in my assessment that I had already made the judgment. I’m sure we’ve all experienced both of those things.

But the point here is that judgment isn’t the problem, the problem is attaching to the assessment we made in the judgment and saying, “I know that I’m right, and I am definitely not wrong.” That attachment can produce a lot of difficulties. Now it’s another thing to say, “I’ve judged this person, but now I’m open to see how they really are. And I’m going to spend time trying to get to know this person.” And it’s just a whole different thing. So the correlation here is that suffering a similar, we experienced suffering because the nature of life is that unsatisfactoriness arises, right, the moment we want things to be other than how they are.

So the problem isn’t that we suffer, the problem is that we attach ourselves to this idea that we can somehow through a magic formula, eliminate it. And I know it sounds tricky cause Buddhism proposes this as a formula, right? The four noble truths, the truth of suffering, the truth of the causes of suffering, the truth of cessation of suffering and the truth of the path that leads to the cessation of suffering. So there it would seem very clear that what we’re implying here is if you practice Buddhism hard enough and in the right way you eliminate suffering.

And although that’s what it sounds like, there’s a huge caveat there, which is first, we’ve got to define what is suffering and distinguish between what is natural and what is self-inflicted and then realize what we’re talking about in terms of eliminating any kind of unsatisfactoriness is the self-inflicted unnecessary unsatisfactoriness. Because the all pervasive, there’s always going to be that underlying form of unsatisfactoriness because of the nature of reality, because of the nature of the fact that I cannot taste all the meals at all the restaurants of the world, I will always be left with the prospect that this meal that I enjoy, no matter how much I like it, there could be another one out there that I would enjoy much more and I’ll never know because I will never taste it. And that to me is powerful to know that is the truth of unsatisfactoriness.

So going back to parenting really quick, being a parent is hard, there’s no way around that. And the problem isn’t that being a parent is hard, the problem is that we don’t want to fully accept that it’s hard because we somehow still believe that if it’s done right, it should be easy. And that is the problem, that is the lie, that is the mental conditioning. Parenting is hard. Being alive is hard. Having to go to work every day is hard. There’s no way around that. And that is the truth of unsatisfactoriness. So I hope that these concepts and ideas help a little bit with the understanding that in life difficulties arise and that’s not a problem. What we want to do is we want to start understanding the causes and conditions of our unsatisfactoriness and getting to know ourselves and getting to the point where we understand ourselves better.

And that’s all I have for this podcast episode, as always, thank you for listening. If you want to support the work I’m doing with the podcast, consider becoming a Patreon and join our online community where we discuss these koans and we discuss the podcast episodes, and we have a weekly study group and live interactions with a Q&A, and the Zoom calls, every Sunday. You can learn more about the online community by visiting secularbuddhism.com. If you enjoyed this podcast episode please share it with others, write a review, give it a rating in iTunes. And that’s all I have for now, but I look forward to another podcast episode soon.

Before I go here is your Zen koan to work with between now and the next podcast episode. Elder Ting asked Lin-chi, “Master, what is the great meaning of Buddha’s teachings?” Lin-chi came down from his seat, slapped Ting and pushed him away. Ting was stunned and stood motionless. A monk nearby said, “Ting, why do you not bow?” At that moment Ting attained great enlightenment. That’s all I have for now until next time.

In Buddhism, doubt is beneficial because it is the first step in weakening our wrong views. The wonderful thing about doubt is that it can propel us in the direction of more skillful views. There is a strong emphasis in Buddhism to avoid “believing in” Buddhist teachings, instead, we are encouraged to evaluate them and to understand them and ultimately, to test them against our own experience.

Koan Discussed: One day Chao-chou fell down in the snow, and called out, “Help me up! Help me up!” A monk came and lay down beside him. Chao-chou got up and went away.

Koan Shared: What is the sound of one hand clapping?

Book Mentioned: “Mind in Tibetan Buddhism” by Lati Rinbochay. Available at: amzn.to/3ezRfZa Read More

In this podcast episode, I will discuss the HALT Method and share my thoughts on the koan shared in the last episode: “What is your original face before you were born?”. I will also leave you with this new koan to explore: “One day Chao-chou fell down in the snow, and called out, “Help me up! Help me up!” A monk came and lay down beside him. Chao-chou got up and went away.”

Read More

A key Buddhist principle is a recognition that things are always changing. Life is transient. When we have the feeling of wanting things to return back to normal, we need to remember that normal was always relative, there is no going back. Read More

“Good concepts are like a gold chain, bad concepts are like an iron chain, they all equally bind you in the end.” The concept we have about who we are is binding. What if instead of trying to become somebody, we practiced becoming nobody. In this podcast episode, I will discuss the idea of becoming nobody. Read More