240224 - The Thing to Fix

This morning I was in a hole of despair. Everything was wrong. Eventually, hunger got the best of me and I prepared to leave my hotel room to get something to eat. And yet, the despair would not allow me; I could not bear to interact with the public in this current state. So I was forced to do what I had neglected, forcefully pushed away all morning, meditate. 30 minutes later, life was restored. I felt, genuinely, okay. Everytime I am taken aback by this transformation. The worse my mind state, the more I try to avoid sitting. Not to pretend like it’s a cure-all, or that it always helps like this, but anyways, that’s not what I want to discuss today. I want to talk about the Four Noble Truths, and specifically, the mind-state that ignores them. The mind-state that relates to the world as a thing to fix.

We should perhaps be diligent in enumerating the Four Noble Truths first.

• There is Dukkha
• There is a cause for Dukkha
• There is cessation of Dukkha
• The path to cessation

Now, the usual translation of Dukkha is “Suffering”, but, it would be more accurate to say “Unsatisfactoriness”. Life is, in one way or another, never exactly as we want it. There is always something that we want. This want creates in us a desire to change things in order to satisfy it, to fix things, if you will. Thus we deny the present by the act of “fixing”. Here we should be very careful, because it’s not actions themselves that we are objecting to. Life is Process, Being is Becoming. But the action rooted in the mind-state of “fixing the present” is that which brings harm. Buddha taught us why. There is Dukkha. There is a cause for Dukkha. The first one might be easy, at least intellectually, at a fundamental level, to grasp. But the cause, he says, is not out there. The cause is the movement itself, the cause is precisely because we deny the present in our mind-state of “fixing”. The fixing itself is the problem.

So, this morning I found myself in despair. Everything was wrong, and I wanted to fix everything. Despite having reflected on Dukkha countless times, despite having chanted them every week for years, by force of habit I got trapped. Even my despair was a problem needing to be fixed. Luckily I resigned to what I know would be best and eventually I sat down to just be with it. It’s all it asks of us. Just be with it. Dukkha is not a problem to be fixed, in the ordinary sense. All we need is awareness. To, just for a while, stop running.