Suffering
In Buddhism the Three Poisons are passion (desiring things to be present, grasping) aggression (desiring things to be absent) and ignorance (not understanding the nature of existence and reifying the illusion of permanent self-and-other).
They are called poisons because from them all other psychic afflictions arise, and since the psychical and physical are really not separate, physical sufferings (on top of the natural pains of embodied life) ensue. Hatred, jealousy, vengeance, murder, war etc. They cloud realisation of ultimate truth, but they also warp attempts to reason out relative truth. They are active on us in the practice of misattributing blame. Further, on account of suffering these afflictions, they leave us open to being manipulated into misattributing blame in line with the agendas of the ruling class.
Always the ruling class offers us scapegoats groups – any and all groups, inventing groups, dividing into groups where no division existed before or needs be- to deflect from the relative source of human social suffering which is the injustice in the material conditions of society.
When material conditions are such that humans have what they need to survive and flourish, then the greater problem of the human condition, of conditioned existence itself, can be engaged with. This is sometimes called the spiritual life or the spiritual path.
I’m not an enlightened being. But I believe I can be and so can everyone else. There are as many paths as there are sentient beings. I share here the basics of the fraction of light that has been granted so far to me, that I have been fortunate enough to receive and have been allowed to begin to think about;
‘A thing that depends for it’s existence on another thing or things may be said to have a relative existence, but no real independent substance. Everything, the entire world, has this character. Everything, including the particular and the totality, has at the base or ground of it’s existence, this dependent existence, this non-substantiality, or emptiness. For a thing to even appear, it must be empty of ‘self’, it must be only provisionally extricable, identifiable, from it’s immediate surroundings, and it's total circumstance (it’s causes and conditions). The causes and conditions themselves have also only relative existence, and thus ultimately empty’
This emptiness (SUNYATA) should not be thought of as a relative emptiness, like a hollow form, or the emptiness of an empty glass in contrast to a full one. It is an absolute emptiness that cannot be objectified in contrast to anything else, since everything has this emptiness as it’s character. It is emptiness inseparable from appearance, whether that appearance be of a form or a formless space. It is not a negative emptiness in contrast to a fullness. In fact it could be called an absolute fullness if it were qualified that fullness here did not imply something static, confined and rigid as it usually does.
What is being pointed at by the term absolute emptiness (if we are forced to talk about it as if it were a ‘some-thing’ when it is better described as ‘no-thing’) is supremely creative. Change would be impossible if this emptiness were not the ultimate character of existence. And creativity includes what we subsequently often distinguish into determinate and random change. This creativity is change before we bifurcate it or analyse it further. That movement which is prior to identification either as determined or random is what is meant here by ‘creation’.
Since emptiness is the ultimate character of everything, it is also our ultimate character. The emptiness of the world is not different from our emptiness. One could say that a dialectic process necessitates fundamental emptiness. Our true being is the ultimate emptiness of the world, this creative emptiness (a theological analogy would the creation of the world ex-nihilo by God who is creativity).
If we take it to our particularity, or individuality, we might say that we can be particular and individual only because we are ultimately empty. That is the paradox of the particular; each thing is unique because all things are empty. In fact we might say that our True Self is Emptiness. A subject cannot arise from what is purely objective. Subject and object arise together from what is prior to both. What is prior to both is immediate experience. Experience is the way existence relates to itself, and the character of existence is this ultimate emptiness. For those who know Hegelianism, when Hegel posits the absolute as the final synthesis of a movement from pure being to absolute idea, he does so in a sense by objectifying the absolute. Strictly speaking, the absolute can never be an object. Nothing can stand outside the absolute. To relate to itself as mentioned above, the absolute must contain it's own negation as the relative. The absolute identity must also be the identity of the relative’
It's a supreme mystery and yet everything, and everywhere, and every when, and at bottom who we really are.
We can only begin to intend to properly ‘see’ it when the relative problems are seen as relative. We can't even do that with so much confusion, pain and malign agendas and intents distracting us, dividing us from our natural sympathy and empathy, hurting us and inspiring us to further hurt.
With all the suffering, all the immense intricacies of the entanglements of causes and conditions of that suffering, why would anyone want to deepen their own suffering, generate more suffering? Not that I am guiltless of it. But we have to begin somewhere, sometime. If we are fortunate enough to live in relative peace we should not throw away that chance to see clearly even the relative causes of suffering.
*********
Samsara
Dependent origination, eddies of material force,
Patterns of phenomena, regularities and developments,
Taken, seized as ultra-real subject narratives and held on to.
Relative coherences given immodest emphasis
Absolute coherence, ungraspable
Pain when believed in as real.
Fear, anger, ignorance of the non-dual Real