As far as Buddha’s concerned, there are two main causes of my suffering and happiness, and they’re both within me. They’re both my causes: mine. We’re not discussing the external event or person or thing – they’re merely catalysts; we’re discussing the main causes.
The first cause is related to the concept of karma. This is dealt with extensively in the Buddhist literature: this is vast, this underpins the entire Buddhist worldview. The logic of karma for Buddha is that for all sentient beings, every millisecond of what we think and do and say sows seeds in our mind that in the future will produce various fruits: our rebirth, our tendencies, our experiences.
Suffering, for example. Let’s say your boyfriend harms you. This means we’ve got some intense karmic relationship from the past, who knows, forty-seven lives ago, and I did some action of harming him, something similar – it’s called “an experience similar to the cause” – which sowed a seed in my mind, and now, forty-seven lifetimes later, the conditions have all come together and boom, the punch comes back.
The first cause of my suffering – and, don’t forget, the first cause of my happiness – is my own past action.
The first cause of why I’m having a happy feeling is because I did something virtuous to my boyfriend forty-seven lives ago, and all the conditions have ripened, and now that virtuous action is coming back to me, speaking very simply.
The first cause of my suffering is a similar action I did in the past to this particular person – because karma’s very personal – that sowed a seed in my mind, and forty-seven lifetimes later, it suddenly ripens, and up comes the fruit of my past action.
The second cause of my suffering, which is really the main one, and the two subsume to this, is the delusion, anger let’s say, in my mind when I did that action that caused it to be negative.
So there are two causes of my suffering – one was the past action and one was the delusion that informed that action when I did it – that are now ripening as this present experience.
That’s not an analysis we have. Who’s ever heard of that analysis? Your therapist will not tell you that – no way in the world. This is Buddha’s analysis: it’s very precise, very detailed. And where did he get this information from? The Hindus were the ones who identified this natural law three thousand-plus years ago, and he, like them, saw the reality of it for himself.
It’s true the boyfriend was mean; it’s true that guy kicked the dog; it is true that person won a million dollars; it is true that person was kind to the little girl: they are facts. The main causes of the happy and unhappy experiences of yours, the dog, the recipient of the million dollars, and the little girl are all in their minds, created in the past. We are our own creators, Buddha says. Those actions could never have happened if the seed hadn’t been planted by those people. This is the logic of this natural law.
As far as we’re concerned, this is the craziest thing we’ve ever heard! It’s so completely different from the view we have, whether you’re a Christian, on the one hand, or on the other hand, if you’re a philosophical materialist, which is the common view that pervades the world now.
The philosophical materialist view is the one that’s in our bones. What’s that view? It’s that your mother and father made you, that you don’t have any past before this life, that you didn’t ask to get born, that nothing is your fault, it’s all just good luck and bad luck, and it’s everybody else’s fault and I’m just this innocent victim that gets happy feelings and unhappy feelings, and nobody knows why.
So the fact is, if you have that view – think about this – if that’s the philosophical view you have, and most of us do have it, it’s because it’s the view of ego and you came into this life with it embedded in your mind: no one had to teach you so don’t blame your Catholic mother or your Jewish mother for this teaching. We’ve had it for countless lifetimes, Buddha says. We’ve programmed our mind with this view of the innocent victim: “I didn’t ask to get born, it’s not my fault.”
And what are the experiential consequences of having that philosophy? When you look into the Buddhist view of the mind, the two main delusions that drive this view of the innocent victim are the view of attachment and the view of anger – these are such simple words for us, but are profound in Buddhist psychology.
Attachment is this primordially deep assumption that I must get what I want every millisecond. And, of course, what I want is only the nice things, isn’t it? Everybody’s like that: the monkeys and the ants and the dogs. It’s deeply primordially instinctive. Attachment drives all of us, and it’s this assumption – this frantic emotional hunger – that’s always wanting only the nice things. And it believes that I only deserve the nice things.
When I get the nice things, there’s just this hubris: “Well, I deserve it, so give me more!” We don’t ask, “Why is this happening? This is amazing. Someone was kind to me. Wow! I must have been kind before!” No! “Just give me more, please!”
There’s no logic to it. We simply think “Mummy made me, Daddy made me, God made me, somebody else made me, and I didn’t ask to get born.” We just assume, you know, I deserve only the good things, and someone had better give them to me!
Then what happens when the bad thing happens? The flip side: “How dare you do that to me! I don’t deserve it!”
This is why we suffer, people! This is not meant to criticize us. These assumptions are why we live in such misery: because we’re desperate for only the nice things, because we assume we only deserve that – and it’s very scary because we can never be sure when it’s going to come – and we are terrified of when we don’t get the nice things, because then we feel shock and horror because we don’t deserve it. And we believe these two assumptions with absolute certainty.
Buddha says all of this is nonsense: these are misconceptions in the mind, in the bones of our being, that we’ve been believing in for so many lifetimes, and they have no logical basis.
Where did Buddha get this view from? He didn’t make it up, it’s not from revelation, it’s not from on high, it’s not from a vision, it’s not from a dream. He’s seen the reality of it! He’s observed it with his clever mind, and he says we can too. “Here’s my methods,” he says, you know?
Buddha’s view is very different, babies, from the view that pervades the world now. And it’s up to us if we want to listen to Buddha’s view and take it on board.
And what would be the point of doing this? If I can take Buddha’s view on board, then I can do something about my suffering because I’m the main cause: I can change my mind, lessen my attachment and aversion, and purify my karma so that only the good things will happen and the bad things won’t. Wow. Who doesn’t want that!