Situation
Addiction goes way beyond the vices we normally think of such as gambling and drugs. If vices were the only addictions, why are there so many miserable people who aren’t drug or gambling addicts? That’s because anything we desire is an addiction – whether under the societal norms in which you happen to live it’s legal or illegal, moral or immoral. And for all addictions, there is a Universe of things standing in our way of satisfying them.
Addiction is an attractive force that actually pulls us to a goal – versus needing to push ourselves to that goal. A goal to which we’re attracted is a desire. For example, the desire to pour a glass of Bourbon if you’re an alcoholic versus the chore of getting into your car for the morning traffic jam to work.
Those goals! So many of them! So many people telling us what to think. Some cajoling us with promises of wonderful things, some with threats. Many of them contradict each other. They enslave us. Maybe we shouldn’t have any goals! Let’s look at that here.
Background
Recapping this series on The Root of Dukkha:
- Envy is the fundamental, underlying mechanism of Dukkha (clinging, addiction). Part 1 of this series looked at envy through the lens of mimetic theory, the heuristic of learning by copying. A heuristic is a simple rule, not requiring thought, that works more often than it doesn’t: If someone you respect does something, chances are if you just copy it, it will be beneficial.
- Part 2 of this series looked to the exploration of pride as the answer to the question, “How can we be happy in a world infested with assholes?” The antics of the pridefulness in others disrupts our efforts like Earthquakes leveling our cities. Our self-Pridefulness engages us in the Dukkha of others, like a fish to a baited hook, dissipating our energy, the source of unforced errors.
This post lumps Lust, Gluttony, and Greed together because they are so tightly-knit that it’s hard to tell where one begins and the other ends. That tightly-knit band is Addiction, which is clinging – the actual Root of Dukkha.
Lust is the driving force. It fuels us to our goals through the roadblocks. Lust is closely related to Envy, since things we lust for often “belong” to someone else. Gluttony and Greed attempt to secure our lust’s satisfaction for the future. This is how they tie together:
If I never had cherry pie with cherry ice cream, I wouldn’t think of ordering it. I’d probably go with something familiar like chocolate cake. But if I saw many others eating that cherry pie with great delight, I’ll envy it, order it, love it, and thereafter lust for it. However, because I know the supply of Cherry Hut cherry pie is finite, I’ll eat as much as I can while I’m there and it’s available, and take a few home as well.
We not only lust for the obvious things such as fame, fortune, beauty, and delicious deserts, but also for things we wouldn’t phrase as “lust”, such as lusting for peace. What?! How could searching for peace be a bad thing? In fact, isn’t that point of Enlightenment? What in normal life we think of as peace is a lack of conflict. That is, conflicting with my desire to relax. And that is a destination as much as lusting for a week in Waikiki. In the world of Enlightenment, the only desire is the be in sync with what comes your way.
Assessment
Bedazzlement
It’s not really the physical things, the objects of our bedazzlement, we lust for but rather the belief that it will make us feel good1. And it usually does. The problem is that darn impermanence thing, everything good and bad passes. Impermanence is one of the facets of dukkha. Not only do we obviously suffer when things are bad, but nonsensically we suffer when things are good, while we have the thing we lust for, because we know we’re about to lose it. The biggest example is our sentient awareness of our impending death. How much time, emotional energy, and other resources do we spend staving off death?
So we find ourselves in cycles of pursuing the thing we are lusting after, enjoying it, losing it, and once again pursuing it. This sort of resembles the pattern of reincarnation. We are born, we live our lives, probably repeating the same old self-destructive patterns from our past lives, maybe learning a thing or two, dying, and being reborn to give it another shot – until we finally get it right.
But reincarnation doesn’t play a part in the The Teachings of the Eternal Fishnu since one of the principles is that for our mortal life on Earth there should be no dependency on any “supernatural” phenomenon2. But what is relevant here is the pattern of the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth as it pertains to dukkha. Life is full of suffering and the cycle ceases when we finally get it – like on Groundhog Day.
Instead of looking at that pattern from the larger level of iterations of entire lives, we can look at numerous smaller patterns that rise and fall, over and over, within lifetimes. We keep repeating patterns that end up in job-hopping, multiple marriages, no long-term friendships, yo-yo dieting. Those cycles are played out over and over during our lives – until we break the cycle.
I’m going to use as graphic an example as I can with the “family audience” to illustrate this cycle. It’s not for any gratuitous effect, but because it has to be something bad enough to overcome one’s inertia, a slap in the head, knocking you out of complacency – like when the Ghost of Future Christmases showed Scrooge his grave.
The Cycle of the Meth High and Obtaining More Meth
First, everything I know about meth and the meth lifestyle I learned from the TV show, Breaking Bad. So please forgive me if the life of a meth addict isn’t quite what is portrayed, and I bought too much into the Hollywood crap.
In particular, I’m thinking about the awful life of the character, Wendy, the meth-addicted prostitute. Her life is an endless cycle of getting high on meth then earning money – in awful ways – to buy more meth. It’s a cycle that repeats itself on at least a daily basis, sometimes a few times per day. There’s no good and easy end game.
Of course doing what Wendy has to do to obtain meth is very dukkha-filled. But even once she does obtain meth and gets high, she’s already suffering knowing that in a few short hours she’ll need to get more meth. What’s even worse is that greed mechanism in her brain kicking in, and now she need even more! It’s a senseless cycle of suffering that can only be broken when the addiction, the bedazzlement of that meth high, is broken.
Our Hopes and Dreams Too?!
No one has a problem understanding the virtue of kicking addictions to alcohol, drugs, gambling, and even eating too much. It’s hard enough for alcoholics and drug addicts to kick their vice. But those are easy compared to kicking addictions to your hopes and dreams. Our hopes and dreams are as clingy as addictions to any vices. And remember, cling equals dukkha.
Most of us won’t achieve those typical lofty, bedazzling hopes and dreams we harbor from youth that were instilled in us by media and our well-meaning parents who wanted us to have successful lives. Whether our hopes and dreams are selfish, like becoming a rock star, or socially generous like ending world hunger, the world is a huge place with hundreds of millions of others with the exact bedazzling dream.
It’s one thing if all those people only cared about ending world hunger. However, the credit will go to the one (or few) who have a passion for ending world hunger AND wants to be the celebrated one who ended world hunger, Nobel Prize and all. It’s that latter part, the celebrated one, that is lust.
What’s worse for your lofty hopes and dreams than hundreds of millions of others competing for what you’re shooting for? What’s worse are hundreds of millions of others with hopes and dreams counter to yours! For example, ending world hunger will involve drastically changing many political strongholds, which will be met with much resistance.
Your hopes and dreams narrow your world to only a few possibilities out of the mind-boggling possibilities. Whatever it is you lust for makes the rest of the world seem unfairly mundane. That’s a ludicrous as can be with all that is there in the Universe. Your addiction, vice or aspiration, are just petty chemical reactions living only in your head.
Gluttony
In some sense, Gluttony should have been the first in this series on the Root of Dukkha. That’s because most of us readily relate to the joy of shoving more hamburgers and ice cream in our faces well past what we need to live. It’s also easy to accept as plausible that behavior as having arisen in us due to how scarce food often was in the past, so we’d better fill up while be can.
For the extremely impoverished today, not knowing when your next meal will be is still a fact of life. But that’s probably not the case for most people reading this blog. When we’re able to buy any sort of meat at about $2-3 per pound, and comparing that to the effort of hunting animals much bigger and stronger than us with a stick, the availability of enough food couldn’t possibly be an issue.
But during the times before agriculture, was food really “scarce”? It was scarce, from the point of view of our poor ancestors who were usually on the verge of hunger. From the higher perspective point of view of Life on Earth, food never was and never is scarce. There was always enough to keep the cycle of life moving along in balance. Periods of lush vegetation generate lots of deer, and they support a boom of wolves, the deer and wolves are then in balance – for now.
From the point of view of modern humans constantly striving for more, “scarce” is a relative term. Meaning, as opposed to some absolute/objective definition such as “less than 2000 calories per day”. For modern humans, with our sentient ingenuity, “scarce” means “less than or equal to what we have now”. And when we have more, that becomes the new normal. That’s greed.
Greed
Greed is a human or sentient phenomenon. That’s because we creatures blessed with sentience have the intellect to design and execute processes to satisfy our greed. We are able to design processes that exacerbates our gluttony by proactively ensuring we always have “enough”. The problem is that even after we have enough for multiple lifetimes, we’re still driven for more.
Greed is founded upon the primal heuristic of bigger is better, or stronger. For a non-sentient creature, the simple rule of thumb is that if a creature is bigger than you, you’ll probably lose in a fight. How easy is it for the bigger is better heuristic to develop without intelligent design? Think of being halfway between the Earth and the Sun with no form of propulsion. Which way will we be pulled? Why? There’s nothing more simple than that.
So we instinctively strive for more money, more of everything. Unfortunately, although wealth is power, power doesn’t equate to dukkha-free happiness.
It’s also true that the odds are greatly stacked against those without money overtaking those with a great deal of money. Certainly, this isn’t always the case as the countless of stories of people overcoming the odds of beating a giant demonstrate. However, for every David beating Goliath, there are countless defeated Davids. As Ringo Starr says, “For every Beatles, there are millions of unplayed guitars hanging on home office walls.”
Because of our primal bigger is better heuristic, more is never enough. Our mind will always want more. We need to be cognizant of that heuristic subconsciously playing in our heads and see through that smoke at what really is there. For judo, there is only so much physical strength a human body can build. Physical strength is indeed a factor. Lions, tigers, and bears, are much stronger than us, but not very inventive. Once we know their “bad moves”, we can avoid it and counter it with something they never would imagine.
And it’s imperative to work through knowing that the primal heuristic will tell me I can’t beat a bigger opponent. As a judo practitioner, I know that the elbow of an arm sporting “22 inch biceps”, in the right position, will break as easily as that of a normally sized arm. The key phrase is “in the right position”, which will eventually happen with someone not fully in the present. With patience and some care a fruit will ripen, and with patience and presence, that arm will eventually get in the right position.
We are sentient beings, already much more powerful than other creatures that don’t dwell on the past nor are consumed by futures that probably will not come. And yet Life on Earth goes on.
Recommendation
When Siddhartha Gautama awoke from his mediation under the Bodhi Tree, his mind had coalesced4 to the Enlightenment that our selves are inseparable from everything else. It’s a realization that runs very counter to the logic of our symbolically thinking mind, and it is hard to reflect in our spirit even when we intellectually understand that.
When the human lineage became sentient, that is, having a brain capable of modeling the Universe, beings with minds of their own, we each are born into this world naively thinking we can herd the entire the Universe to our bidding. Of course, we soon realize that the rest of the Universe is comprised of countless other things with minds of its own trying to herd us. Instead of giving up on making the world in our image, we drunken ourselves with Pride, raise our swords against our opponents with a great kiai, and dive into battle for the thing we lust after.
That was all great before we became sentient and realized how terrifying all that can be to a being aware of their own immortality. As terrifying as that may be, that is still the way of Life on Earth, and it’s bigger than humanity. We depend on Life on Earth as we are at least for now completely dependent on Her.
But we don’t want to roll back to the days of our non-sentience when we were just like other creatures without a sense of self. We just automatically did what evolution happened to hand us as behaviors for that time and place. We should push through this ugly stage of our journey to Enlightenment.
We’re almost there. The simplest things we humans do are god-like to all other creatures. We can design around the physical inevitability of events and evolution ruled solely by the laws of physics and chemistry. But we suffer because we expect to control the Universe, and it usually has other things going on.
We don’t need to retreat back to non-sentience. We just need to realize that the Universe is a complex system requiring “solutions for complex systems”. All of our suffering is due to the ugly stage of the journey, like the treacherous open ocean between the two shores of our journey, in reference to Thich Nhat Hanh’s interpretation of the Heart Sutra.
It takes faith and patience. And so let’s conclude this blog looking at how we move beyond Envy, Pride, Lust, Gluttony, and Greed through the Three Zen Stories of Is that so?, The Empty Cup, and Picking Up the Bag.
No Buttons to Push – Is that so?
So why would we bother to do anything when The Rubber Ducky Buddha of Joliet advises us to throw out our bedazzlement, our addictions to vices, and addictions to hopes and dreams? What’s the point with no goals?
Do bees lust to make honey? The bees do what they do. Does the activity of bees only concern bees? Doesn’t their activity affect all plants? They pollinate and cross-pollinate, helping the plant species along their evolutionary path.
We do this because we are one with all that came before us and all that will come. For sentient beings, the genes we pass on are minor compared to our deeds.
One word of warning, though. None of this means to give away all your possessions or leave your family for a monastery! Giving away all your possessions is a cheap gesture compared to tossing out your beliefs. It’s cheap like tossing out all the candy and other carbs when you start dieting. There’s just something intuitively troubling about Hernando Cortez burning his ships so his men had no choice but to follow him.
Nor does it mean to get really lean and mean (ascetic) because all you have should be what you need right now 3. Nature has a mechanism for us to have a margin for error. The ability to store fat in our bodies is huge – no pun intended. As it is for an Inventory Manager, there is an art and science to having a buffer of supply – not too little, not too much.
You actually can have all the riches you want – as long as you know you’ll be Enlightened if you lost it. It’s easy to think you will take losing everything well while you have it … but I don’t know.
Judgement – The Empty Cup, The Beginner’s Mind
Why can’t we throw out only the “bad” addictions and “immoral” things we lust after and still cling to our hopes and dreams, which give us purpose? For one, it’s sometimes hard to tell the good guys from that bad guys. Is it immoral to kill an animal for food? Most people eat meat, but a good proportion of people are vegans or at least vegetarians for the reason that it’s immoral to kill any creature. How could so many people be on two completely different sides?
If we think back to our younger years, aren’t there many instances of things we were told to do and thought were unjust (do your homework, eat your vegetables) but turned out to be true? Are eggs good for us? The “experts” told us they were good … then bad … then good … and will probably be bad again.
But the issue isn’t what is good or bad. The issue is to transcend the framework of these primal heuristics, which work spectacularly for non-sentient beings. It’s there that the notions of good/bad, big/small, worse/better matter. Under the framework of Enlightenment, we blend into what Is.
Our brain, the pitifully inadequate model of the world, just doesn’t have enough information to pass judgement with all certainty. And haven’t we all on multiple occasions insisted we were right, and found out we missed something. What we can do is cut all clinging so we are completely sensitive to what is right now and settle in.
The Lord is my Shepherd, I Shall Not Want … – Picking Up the Bag
The thing about achieving Enlightenment is that it’s just your mind that has changed because now you see with the light on. Everything has changed, but nothing has changed. When that light switches on, you’ll still be where you left off an instant ago. There’s no need to take any drastic actions like giving away your possessions or leaving your family – which kind of means you’re still missing the point. After Enlightenment, you pick up the bag and continue down the path, but now with the light on.
If you’re breathing, there’s nothing more you need. There’s nothing you need to run away to or from.
Does this mean settling for less? No, settling for less or striving for more are notions of the normal world. In the world of Enlightenment, what seems like settling for less is a full acceptance of what Is, whole-heartedly blending into the drama instead of fighting it. That is Peace.
If you’re mindful of Now, you’ll see that it is everything, it is all that you need. Here’s Matthew 6:7-10:
7 “And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words.”
8 “Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.”
9 “This, then is how you should pray:”
10 “Our Father in Heaven, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done, on Earth as it is in Heaven.”
The Root of Dukkha – Seven Deadly Sins Series
This post on lust, greed, and gluttony is part of a series looking at Dukkha from the point of view of the seven deadly “sins”.
Notes
1 What is the feeling of “good”? Is it the shot of serotonin or dopamine we get when we land that big contract? If that’s what it is, why can’t we always be like that? Well, why can’t be always eat ice cream, all day, all night? It’s the relief of a pain.
2 Whether there is a supernatural world or not, Fishnu says that the purpose for being on Earth is to incubate our sentience. As we don’t interfere with the development of our unborn babies, except for a few times we need to intervene, we are on our own.
3 Think about the inventory concept known as “Just in Time”. The idea is to minimize your inventory, which keeps storage costs down, and keep s cash liquid. It’s a good idea, but if you’re too lean, and your demand forecast is somehow wrong, you’re in for a world of Dukkha.
4 Please note that I carefully chose to phrase The Buddha’s enlightenment as, “… his mind coalesced to the Enlightenment that our selves are inseparable from everything else”, because all Buddhas come to this same realization. Why can’t we just take this as fact from The Buddha and save us all the trouble? It’s because with 80 billion neurons and a quadrillion synapses, our brains aren’t even closely wired similarly – as would be the case for every single iPhone 6. Each of us is thus forced to find our own unique wiring to that same realization.
Fishnu 