Great Truths

About 2500 years ago, the pampered, sheltered son of a minor king in a tiny satrapy [ a satrapy was a territory, a province if you will, under the rule of a satrap. This was a system of government where each satrap answered to the Persian Emperor.] This satrapy was about the size of Los Angeles. He looked around himself one day and said, "Why are things so unsatisfactory? I have everything- the most beautiful wife in the country, concubines, a beautiful son, I spend my days practicing archery and playing games with my friends. But none of that last- the game ends. We grow old. My father is grey, and my mother prefers to watch our games now instead of playing. Someday I shall grow old. Someday I shall die. Is there nothing to be done?"

This papered prince was so naive that he didn't realize he wasn't the first to ask these questions, yet was so arrogant he thought if he could ask a question, he could find an answer. So he kissed his wife and son goodbye and left his palace, resolved that he would find the answer to that burning question: why are things so unsatisfactory? Why do we suffer? 

This annoying yuppie prince was a man named Gautama (Gotama), and after years of searching, studying, pursuing his answer in every way he could find in the Himalayan foothills of the fifth century BC, one day, at the instant he saw the Morning Star rise over the horizon, he saw through to the essential nature of suffering and pain, and realized there was an answer. More succinctly, He woke up. 

The root verb in Sanskrit for "to awaken" is budh-,and so we call this yuppie prince Buddha, "the one who woke up." What he understood when he woke up became the basis for what we in the West consider a great religion, Buddhism, even though Gautama didn't believe in Gods and refused to be pinned down on all the usual questions of where the universe came from and where we go when we die.When Gautama woke up, he saw this one perfect syllogism, which is now referred to as the Four Great Truths.

The First Great Truth is that life, ordinary life, is unsatisfactory. It's painful. Bad things happen and we can't stop them, and good things end no matter how hard we try to hang on, and we suffer as we do so, because try as we might, we can't make time stop, and things change. In Psychological terms, this would be hedonic happiness which is comprised of avoiding pain, prolonging pleasure and feeling satisfied. All subjective and all experientially transitory, [non-permanent]. When we anchor our perception of happiness on these superficial surface experiences we will have moments of enthusiasm along with valleys of despair when they dim. 

The Second Great Truth is that this special sense of frustration and unsatisfactoriness arises from our very attempts to hang on to the good and push away the bad. We can ignore pain; everyone has had the experience of becoming engrossed in something and, for a while, cease to notice a nagging injury, just as most have heard of soldiers, horribly wounded, who had to be reminded that they were bleeding. Yet, once we notice, once our attention returns to the pain, then, it becomes unbearable.

Research suggest stable happiness can be traced back to a condition with roots anchored in what is known as Self Determination Theory. The premise is based upon cultivating three general areas of self assessment that can produce substantially resilient and durable happiness. These dispositions are; sense of autononmy; sense of competence; and sense of connection.

The Third Great Truth is that we can stop the suffering, the frustration, the unsatisfactory way things seem, if we can learn to see where it comes from- our attention, our thoughts- and thus learn how to turn our attention elsewhere, and stop grasping and pushing. This too has been addressed in research conducted by Dr's Goldman, Foster, and Kernis, in which authentic perception is paramount to living a genuine and happy life; where awareness, unbiased processing and generosity are directly connected to the degree of feeling self worth and feeling secure. 

Finally, The Fourth Great Truth says that there are skills we can learn, "skillful means" (Upayap) they're called, that help us stop grasping, and thus stop the suffering. Bringing me to the very reason I started this post on the Great Truths.

We are cognitive misers. Overwhelmed as we are by our external world, we create shortcuts in order to deal with the chaos of life. Those activities we do routinely, we create habits to perform without having to invest a lot of mental energy (attention), in deciding what to do. When we follow a particular process that reaps the same rewards, we imbue those habits into our everyday lives since we've learned to trust that process with the consistent results as evidence of a successful habit. We do it one way and always get the same results, this then becomes a personal principal. As we apply that principal over time we will begin to believe it is the true (and only) way to obtain our desired results. As time continues to pass we will apply those habits of belief and we will ultimately arrive at holding faith in their ability to always render the same results. This is what we have to work with, as well as work against simultaneously. 

 Due to this unquestioning belief in a process we resist any facts that contradict our assumed trust in a belief. This very panic of conditions that change (which they do) is fundamentally to our sense of adopted inadequacy and insecurity while being in the external world. We concoct a concept that is edified by previous generations where some superior authority, much like our parents when we were children, will both protect us and care for us. In that construct we seek to deserve their benevolence and so will worship and obey.

 The bad news is that along with that arrangement a particular group who advocates this relationship also deem themselves the appointed ones to translate what that power wants from us and how we can appease it in order to continue this beneficial relationship. 

 Obedience to the authority of a supernatural being whose presence is made known only to those who claim to speak for it? Yeah, that's a truth I can put on.