Understanding the predicament

Our human predicament begins in Ignorance. Not lack of knowledge—we have plenty of that—but a deep-rooted propensity to ignore the clear truth that our vast treasury of knowledge points us to. We ignore what is happening and surrender instead to delusional ideas about what we’d like to happen or what might happen in the future.

Another term for Ignorance is Wrong Understanding: hanging on to the belief that we can evade the consequences of our actions; that what really matters—love, hope, the divine spirit, the soul—is eternal and will remain when the transient problems that we get so disturbed about are long forgotten; that nothing really has any meaning after all, except whatever meaning we arbitrarily accord it; that help is on the way and will arrive in time and save us if we just believe in it devoutly enough; that the problems confronting us are separate from one another, each with its distinctive nature, its distinctive cause, and its distinctive solution.

The diagnosis that the origin of our predicament lies in Ignorance points the way to a possible treatment of that predicament: we need to develop wisdom, and that starts with the cultivation of Right Understanding.

Easily said.

And perhaps, just perhaps, more easily done than implementing any of the “solutions” proposed by those who have not abandoned Wrong Understanding—the Climate Change Experts who tell us that we must develop a conservation mentality (but cannot tell us how to do that), or the Foreign Policy Experts who advocate an immediate pullout from Iraq (but cannot tell us how that will prevent another war in the future or what we will do with the disastrous fallout from this war), or the Education Specialists who tell us that we need smaller classrooms, or larger budgets for teacher salaries, or early intervention for problem students, or Montessori for all (but cannot tell us how those more effectively educated students will function in a society that has no jobs for them and in which racial and sexual stereotyping prevails in every enterprise and which feeds them a constant barrage of lies about products or substances or lifestyle choices that will make their lives happier and increase their self esteem).

All of that is based on Wrong Understanding and none of it will work for more than a second and a half.

In what follows, I will outline three premises which provide us, I submit, with a framework for understanding our predicament rightly, that is in a way that is in accord with the real causes and contingencies of our situation and which also leads us toward a path of action that might ameliorate the pain and suffering rooted in that situation.

Issues thinking is a trap.

Global corporate media have assumed the prerogative to define and articulate the nature of the situations that imperil our lives, our communities, and our civilization; the summarized situation is labeled an “issue”, and it becomes the matter of our political discourse. Issues lack nuance; they are polarizing, contributing to the arising of ill will and the conceit of views in those who accept them as descriptions of reality. Issues are hard-edged, distinct from one another, in a way that situations in the real world never are; for people affected by the particular situtations and events packaged as issues, the packaging works to focus their attention on the particular ways in which they are affected, exacerbating the ill will and attachment to views and contributing to the arising of greed in those with something to gain from maintaining reality in its issues-packaged state.

The Dharma is liberating.

The Buddha himself, and the most perceptive thinkers in the various Buddhist traditions, have shown us a picture of the world that gives the lie to the picture painted by corporate media. In particular, an analysis of our situation in the illuminating light of the Buddhadharma shows us clearly that issues are an illusion, that our situation is seamless and of a whole, that what we do in response to the issue labeled “Energy Crisis” has an immediate and profound effect on issues labelled “Global Hunger”, “Iraq War”, and “The Environment”. And the Buddha also showed us that pain and suffering are inherent in our situation.

The Dharma illuminates, not only the seamless nature of our situation, the absurdity of issue-mongering, and the pervasiveness of pain and suffering, but also the root cause of that suffering: “the craving that makes for further becoming” (Thanissaro Bhikkhu’s translation of a phrase from the Dhammacakkappavatthana Sutta). With regard to our situation as a society, I take this to refer to the craving for solutions to the problems inherent in the issues. (The process whereby our experience of the world proliferates into delusory distinct issues is similar to [or perhaps the same as] the process that the Buddha labelled papañca and identified as the root cause of “taking up clubs & swords, of arguments, quarrels, disputes, accusations, divisive tale-bearing, & false speech.”)

The Buddha’s Dharma also shows us that, by ceasing the craving, we eliminate that which fuels the suffering. By abandoning our search for delusory solutions to problems inherent in delusory issues, we abandon a painful waste of energy and a doomed hope, and we are free to get on with the task of living skillfully.

And finally, the Dharma shows us the way to end craving, namely a Path incorporating eight factors: Right Understanding, Right Intention, Right Speech, Right Action, Right Livelihood, Right Effort, Right Mindfulness, and Right Concentration.

The Buddha taught that each of the truths he articulated calls for a particular response from us: we must comprehend the pervasiveness of suffering; we must abandon the craving that is the cause of suffering; we must face up to the reality that our abandonment of craving must be complete, “with no residue left behind”; and, finally, we must realize in our lives and our actions the eight factors of the Path—if we can do that, and to the extent we can do that, we will experience liberation.

We are hindered on our Path to liberation by the poisons of Greed, Ill Will, and Delusion.

Just as global corporations have created the delusory issues that hinder our search for an end to our suffering, so they have industrialized the Poisons that the Buddha identified as the habits of mind that prevent us from realizing the eight-factored path. David Loy has done a masterful job, in his book “The Great Awakening” and in his other writings, of demonstrating the corporate nature of greed, ill-will, and delusion in our society and showing how those poisons prevent us from seeing the root cause of our suffering or from staying on the path that leads to an end to suffering.

Given those premises, the challenge is to craft a response to social pain and suffering that is:

1. realistic—i.e. not overly ambitious and not a response that demands either ready access to power, effective control of mass media channels, or the sudden and simultaneous change of minds on the part of large numbers of people;
2. easily communicated in terms that people generally understand in the same ways and that are not excessively freighted with emotional baggage;
3. inherently Buddhist in its origins and its ideological underpinning, but not necessarily explicitly Buddhist—in other words, the response strategy should be understandable without any reference to the Buddha or to “Buddhist teachings”, but it should also be perfectly compatible with the understanding of the world and the daily practice of those who acknowledge the Buddha and accept the teachings.

In Part Two of this three-part essay, I look at how the eight factors of the Buddha’s path provide us with a framework for crafting such a response.