Seeing clearer and suffering less
One day, as a small boy, the Buddha sat under a rose-apple tree and watched as the fields were plowed for the coming crop. As he looked on, he saw insects and their eggs destroyed during the plowing. This saddened him. As Karen Armstrong writes in Buddha, he “gazed at the carnage and felt a strange sorrow, as though it were his own relatives that had been killed.”
But then he felt something else: pure joy. The kind of joy that blooms in your chest when you’re absorbed in a moment, when you’ve forgotten yourself. The kind of joy that fades the second you become aware of it, when you attach an “I” to it.
“The child had been taken out of himself by a moment of spontaneous compassion, when he allowed the pain of creatures that had nothing to do with him personally to pierce him to the heart,” Armstrong writes. “This surge of selfless empathy had brought him a moment of spiritual release.”
His compassion for all living beings gave him his first taste of enlightenment. And this compassion came, in part, because he forgot about himself.
The Buddha said that the main reason we suffer is that we don’t see things clearly. And we don’t see things clearly because of our tendency to over-identify with our “self”, thoughts, and feelings.
But this doesn’t have to be the case. We too can decide to not take ownership of our thoughts and feelings.
The Buddha said our being (mind, body, soul) is in constant flux; we have no permanent “self”. Nowhere on your body can you point to and say “this is me”. We’re constantly changing from moment to moment.
Our thoughts, fears, cravings, and desires are always changing too. They’re so fleeting, so impermanent, so empty that the Buddha regarded them as “remote phenomena that had little to do with him”.
But how can we view thoughts—which are about as local as they come—as remote?
It may be best explained by the theory popular among Vipassana meditation teachers and evolutionary psychologists, called the modular model of the mind theory.
Basically, this theory says that our unconscious mind is a collection of interconnected and fluid, yet specialized, modules. As Robert Wright says in Why Buddhism Is True, these modules are activated by feelings and are responsible for sending thoughts to our conscious mind.
According to this theory, our conscious mind doesn’t create thoughts—it receives them. We choose whether to take ownership of them, or let them float by.
For instance, let’s say we’re watching Halloween. This might activate our “fear” module. This fear module might then send the thought—make sure the front door is locked—to our conscious mind. Or, let’s say you’re on the lookout for a romantic partner and you see an attractive man or woman. Your “find a suitable partner” module might activate, telling you to show off.
If we choose to take ownership of the thoughts we receive, it’s likely that we will also take ownership of the feelings—putting ourselves at their mercy.
Similar to the Stoics, the Buddha taught that if something is outside of your control, and it’s causing you to suffer, stop identifying with it.
Easier said than done, I know. (Buddhist monks spend their entire lives practicing this type of detachment.) But it’s powerful enough that whether you practice it one time or millions of times, you can benefit from it.
Once a skeptic, Robert Wright now uses mindfulness to help relieve his pain. If he’s experiencing anxiety, he might ask himself, Where, exactly, is the source of this feeling? Maybe he discovers the feeling is in his chest. He will then direct his attention to his chest, studying this newfound feeling as an outside observer, mindful of its separateness. It may be anxiety, but it’s not his anxiety. By not identifying with it, it loses its power.
Thoughts bubble up. Feelings demand our attention. But the less we identify with them, the clearer we see. And the clearer we see, the more compassionate we are, and the less we suffer.