Mind Chatter #165 (October, 2006) (PDF) - Centerpoint Research ...

How to End Suffering continued...
motivate you to act, but to do so in a way that doesn’t
involve suffering (in other words, that doesn’t involve
making internal representations of what you don’t want).
I’ll make this distinction more clear in a moment. The
second Noble Truth, then, is that the cause of suffering is
attachment, clinging, resistance.
The third Noble Truth states that suffering can be
ended by giving up attachment. In a way, the principle of
Letting Whatever Happens Be Okay is a statement of the
third Noble Truth: if you let whatever happens be okay,
if you are not attached to the outcome (or averse to the
outcome), you don’t suffer.
Let’s look at this third Noble Truth a little more closely.
The third Noble Truth very clearly implies that suffering
does not come from your circumstances; it comes from
your clinging to circumstances being a certain way.
This is a very weird idea to most people, because it
really does look as if circumstances cause your feelings and
reactions. Recall, however, my discussion of your Internal
Map of Reality, where information comes in through
your senses (i.e., you have an experience), you filter it in
various ways (deleting, distorting, and generalizing what
comes in), and then make an internal representation with
whatever is left over.
These internal representations directly lead to your
internal states and your behaviors, and these lead to
your results in life. Most people are aware of the original
sensory experience, and then the resulting internal state or
behavior. Everything in between (the filtering, the making
of internal representations, and the resulting generation of
internal states and external behaviors) happens out of most
people’s awareness.
Since this entire creative process is invisible to most
people, it looks as if the outside event causes the state or
behavior. In reality, how the brain processes the outside event
creates your internal states and your behaviors. If your
processing involves clinging or resistance (making internal
representations of what you don’t want), you create
suffering.
IT’S NOT THE CIRCUMSTANCES,
IT’S THE PROCESS
Let’s say we have a factory. The raw materials—wood
for instance—go in one door, and later, the completed
products—let’s say, picnic tables—come out the other end.
You’re watching from a hill overlooking the factory, and you
see the wood going in one end, and the picnic tables coming
out the other. The actual factory, however, is hidden by
trees and what happens inside is invisible to you. You might
think, then, that the wood somehow caused the picnic
tables, even though it’s what went on inside the factory that
caused the wood to become picnic tables. If the process
inside the factory had been different the wood might have
become doors, or porch swings, or baseball bats.
So it’s how circumstances are processed in your mind that
creates how you feel and behave in each moment. If you
process experiences by clinging or resisting, you create
suffering. If, like most people, the processing going on
in your Internal Map of Reality is unconscious, if your
internal processes are invisible to you, you’ll create the
impression that circumstances caused your suffering (called
“being a victim”).
When Buddha says that suffering is caused by
attachment, clinging (or resistance), he’s saying that when
you process outside events in a certain way, you suffer.
When you process outside events by resisting the fact that
what is will eventually pass away, or by not wanting things
to be the way they are, you suffer.
Furthermore, if you give up clinging, attachment, and
resistance, if you process what comes in through your
senses in a different way, you end suffering.
Be very clear, though, that suffering does not come from
what is being resisted or by what you are attached to or
resist—even though it might look that way—but rather
from the resistance or the attachment itself.
This is a key point. It means that no matter what the
situation, you can process what is going on in a way that
avoids suffering.
“BUT I HAVE NO CHOICE!”
Most people, though, make the assumption that certain
situations are inherently suffering-inducing, and that there’s
nothing you can do about it. If you have physical pain,
they say, you have no choice but to resist it, and no choice
but to suffer. If your child dies, you have no choice but to
be attached to your child remaining alive, and no choice
but to suffer. When you come to the end of your own
life, you have no choice but to be attached to life, to resist
death, and to suffer over the fact that death is coming.
Please do not misunderstand. I’m not saying that it
isn’t normal to grieve when a loved one dies, or that it
isn’t “okay” to do so. Of course it is. What I am saying,
however, is that whatever suffering you experience in such
a situation is a choice, and that choice is created by what
you do inside, not by the situation itself.
You certainly might choose (assuming you are choosing,
rather than just responding automatically) to grieve and
feel bad. If one of my children died, I suspect I would
12 MINDCHATTER October 2006