What causes you to suffer?
I am a strong proponent of Buddhist practice and working with the self. I believe that many of the answers surrounding suffering happiness meaning and living the good life so to speak are caught up and found in Buddhist teachings and discourse. Of course, many other faith’s practices religions philosophies all also encompass wonderful teachings that are very worthwhile to ingrained into our daily practice, however I feel that Buddhism tends to do a good job presenting these in a easy to understand and relate with format although they are not without their share of esotericism.
But, in terms of struggling there is an act more fundamental than the teachings themselves. And that act is the act of learning.ย It seems as if all of us are caught in this quest for growth although that certainly was not always the case for humanity. One of the best things about living in a developed nation is the ability to branch out and grow in so many directions – class barriers, while still existing, are significantly reduced and there is a much higher ability to change and grow based on merit and effort. Throughout human history this was much more static. It was much more likely that you would be born into the class that you were going to exit life from, perhaps pursuing your father’s or a close family members trade.ย It was codified in Europe where it became a hereditary trait.
Even the Buddha himself underwent a period of intense learning as he was working to develop the teachings. The act of learning is captured in moments of realization. The root word of Buddhism, bodh, also translates as realization. So, in a certain sense, anyone who is seeking realization could be understood as practicing a form of Buddhism. But this is not obviously to say that they would identify as Buddhists. It is very interesting to see the cultural expressions and various forms that the practice of seeking realization has taken – this extends far beyond Buddhism as a religion or political or cultural institution.
So how do we learn?
At a fundamental level, the act of learning requires a sense of openness. Being close-minded, assuming that you already know, or otherwise not being able to take in from the world the sort of mental nutriment, to borrow a phrase from Thich Nhat Hanh, that will lead to your growth prevents learning. If you are not open, receptive, on a basic level you will be dealing mostly with your own projections as you will stop bringing in input for lack of a better phrase from the external world and spend most of your time cognitively or mentally dealing with your own output which, in a funny twist, we perceive as input.
The opposite of learning
The opposite of learning, or growth, could be identified as stagnation. In the absolute sense, stagnation is a state of being devoid of positive growth-ย not positive defined by the ego but positive from an absolute point of view.
Now it’s important to understand that learning can have many forms and expressions. Most of us tend to associate learning with some form of formal education, however we will all acknowledge that life and experience are often the best teacher as they are so undeniable. Learning comes from many places – really, anything can teach you something. It is a question of how finely we can attune ourselves to the lesson. How sensitive to the subtleties and nuances we experience in our daily life we can be. How receptive and open to changing our existing views we can be. Understanding that knowledge isn’t binary, isn’t black and white, and that the true wisdom lies in being able to sort out and sift through the various shades of grey of all of the situations that we encounter. That is the real practice. Everything else, all other practices, are designed to help you to enable you to achieve success in this act.
This is why so many people feel the shortness of technical education or perhaps incompleteness is a better phrase. A lot of education’s designed at getting you better at doing something but not necessarily equipping you better to deal with the art of living.
Where Buddhism comes in as a powerful framework is in having mapped out many of the essential elements to successful living. A lot of what is being quote discovered by contemporary science – neuroplasticity, cognitive behavioral therapy, the dunning-kreuger effect; many of these cutting-edge paradigms of scientific understanding essentially are confirming the merit of age old Buddhist practice.
So bringing it back to the beginning with the question of what do you struggle with – the only answer is learning. Both in the sense that if you are struggling with something, you have not yet learned what you need to do to be able to cope with it effectively – you have not yet developed that capacity. So it becomes a question of what capacity do you need to develop in order to no longer struggle. It is not a question of altering or changing the external circumstance as much as it is a question of developing and growing your self.
One aspect that makes this approach so relatively successful, almost by definition, is that you have significantly more control over yourself and your own actions, modes of thinking, perspective and framework of understanding than you do of anyone or anything else’s. To think otherwise is a rather reductionist point of view; we tend to compress new situations external to us into digestible chunks in order to better help us relate with, cope and interact with them, whereas we allow our understanding of ourselves to be much more expansive in the degree of nuance we allow for. Furthermore, if we have a strong practice of internal auditing, questioning and development, we will know when it is time truly to seek change in the external world that represents true positive growth and not just a form of protective self indulgence.
So the real crux of the matter is when we find we are struggling in dealing with something we need to expand our view more often than narrow it, and understand how the interaction and dynamics between our self and this individual other play out within the greater context of life and our surroundings.
If the individual situation is like a rock and our understanding is like water, often our approach is to hyper-focus – almost like spraying a jet at the rock, trying to break it down; trying to either alter or change it or break it down. This is a very one directional, one-dimensional approach. Often, it will reflect more of us butting our heads up against the wall trying to achieve something that’s not working or proving very difficult by attempting the same method same approach over and over again. It is better to let our understanding as it were, surround and permeate the object of our understanding, the rock. In this sense, our capacity for understanding exceeds the dimensions of the object of understanding and it becomes just another item inside of our pond. When we tend to take the jet stream approach, the hyper-focused approach, we sometimes lose the greater context and start to relate with ourselves based on that one approach too strongly and it can cause us to either struggle or suffer, like the high school girl who is a wonderful person but feels terrible about herself because of how her boyfriend perceives and interacts with her – obviously in this example the boyfriend is not the nicest guy.
To further relate this to Buddhist teachings or understanding, in a sense it is losing our equanimity. Becoming too involved with one object will lead to the lack of ability to maintain the sense of equanimity, the sense of balance, the sense of greater context. We tend to stop interacting and relating with the situation as a whole and more start to act as just one piece interacting with just another piece in the situation, which becomes or tends to become a fairly short-sighted and limited view, driven primarily by ego.
So again, bringing this full circle, the active learning starts with getting over ourselves in a certain sense – seeing that we do not have all of the answers and operating with a certain amount of basic humility in that regard, while also maintaining a certain amount of basic confidence in the sense that of course we can learn and grow and surpass what it is that we are struggling with.