(Correlations with Buddhism)

As humans we understand and deal with our experiences by constructing stories and by listening to the stories of others.

Our experience is filled with meaning and stories, it is these, rather than logic that communicates our true beliefs.

Narrative or narratives are the way we organise, explain or understand our experiences and these are the central part of our learning, interactions, arts and play.

When we have a new experience for which we have yet no understanding or category, these remain unclassified until a category is presented to us or we invent one.

Until this happens, we struggle to fit them into what we know or even attempt to repress the experience occurred.

In this way we channel our psychological processes to anticipate events, basing our lives upon fictions that condition our reality, not by our personalities, though we’d like to think that we do.

When thinking about change, we need to learn to separate our lives and relationships from the knowledge and stories that may not be best for us.

This begins to challenge the stories or beliefs that control our lives and can begin the organising ourselves into alternative or more useful narratives of identity and preferred ways of being.

The four noble truths: Buddhism

1. Life is characterised by suffering (dukkha): suffering exists in the form of bereavement, rejection, injury, infirmity, embarrassment, shame and guilt.

• The cause of suffering is desire, or craving (tanha): like an unquenchable thirst, desire necessarily leads to the pain of suffering.

• Suffering can be ended by cessation of all desire, by achieving the state of nirvana.

4) The way to achieve nirvana is by the Middle Path, also called the Eightfold Path:

• Right Understanding: mastering the Buddhist doctrines
• Right Intention: earnest and honest commitment to apply their implications
• Right Speech: awareness of impact of our speech
• Right Action: awareness of impact of our actions
• Right Livelihood: engaging in jobs and tasks that support Buddhist doctrine
• Right Effort: relentlessly and diligently working
• Right Mindfulness/Awareness: meditative practice
• Right Concentration: meditative practice

The first of these, Right Understanding, encompasses a broad range of doctrines, the most important one being that of impermanence (anicca).

This Buddhist belief expresses the transitory nature of all things, the undeniable fact that all objects, concepts, indeed everything in the world, is ever-changing and impermanent.

e.g. The suffering of bereavement is caused by emotional attachment to individuals without accepting the impermanence of life.

Consequently, even what one might call the “self” has no abiding core essence, existing only as a flow of processes.

One may immediately recognize the similarity between this view of self as “flowing processes” and William James’ notion of consciousness as a “stream” which flows in a processional manner instead of being composed of discrete elements (James, 1902).

Indeed, an understanding of identity as essentially a flow of psychic processes avoids any notion of a discrete, absolute, metaphysical self.

This Buddhist doctrine of the non-existence of the self, or anatta, is important to understand; for the self, or rather the illusion of self, is the primary factor which keeps individuals in the cycle of suffering.

It is the “self”, the “I”, which experiences desire and craving, the very causes of one’s suffering. Craving for sensory gratification, craving for continued existence, craving for annihilation—these are the motivational forces for the unenlightened individual’s behaviour (de Silva, 1991).

Hence, any endeavour towards achieving the first of the Eightfold Paths, Right understanding, necessarily involves an acknowledgment and understanding of the doctrine of impermanence.

A second condition for possessing Right Understanding is mastery of the doctrine of dependent origination (Claxton, 1990).

This doctrine urges one to abandon the notion that the world is a collection of “things” with their own identities and characters.

The Buddhist philosophy of dependent origination holds that, either intellectually or existentially, there is no entity which exists in and of itself (that is, independently of other entities, or independently of representations of it); objects arise from other objects, just as concepts are irreducibly composed of, and dependent on, other concepts.

This view holds that what one might label an existent entity, is merely a convention; humans confer an ontological status onto such conventions and notations due to lack of understanding of the doctrine of dependent origination

(that is, nothing exists on its own and hence cannot be said to exist as an independent entity).

Tending to the illusion of the existence of entities urges individuals to cling to those things they believe to exist; this promotes desire of those objects, which ultimately leads to suffering.

A closely related doctrine to dependent origination is the doctrine of the nature of concepts; according to Buddhist psychology, human beings tend to make sense of their experience by imposing upon them, concepts which organize the world into a series of opposites: for example, elements of the world are conceived of as hot or cold, good or bad, up or down (Claxton, 1990).

This imposition of dichotomies upon nature is an impulse which reflects not only an inability to recognize and understand the nature of the universe as unitary

(imposing dichotomous concepts upon experience of a universe that is holistic)

but also a lack of understanding of dependent origination, for any conceptualisation in terms of opposites assumes the validity and existence of concepts; and such concepts, under Buddhist philosophy, do not exist except within the mind.

If one is to be freed from the fetters of desire in order to achieve enlightenment, one must necessarily acknowledge such dichotomous conceptualisation in order to transcend it; an understanding of impermanence and dependent origination will lead to the abandonment of the notion of existential objects and concepts.

If one seeks to follow the Eightfold Path, a firm comprehension of this doctrine is necessary for the full acquisition of Right Understanding.

A third condition, the understanding of the Buddhist notions of perception, is also critical for possessing Right Understanding.

Under Buddhist psychology, perception is based on twelve modalities: the eye and its corresponding material objects, the ear and its corresponding sounds, the nose and its smells, tongue and its tastes, body and its tangibles, and mind and its mental objects; when each sense organ is combined with its respective object, each modality pair leads to a corresponding consciousness

(i.e. visual consciousness, mental consciousness, etc.) (Kalupahana, 1987).

The Majjhima Nikaya, a text under the original Pali canon, expands on the perceptual process: “The meeting of the three (i.e. eye, material shape and visual consciousness) is contact; because of this contact arises feeling; what one feels, one perceives” (Nanamol, 1995).

However, according to Buddhist psychology, every perception is subject to distortion, either by one’s desires, by one’s cravings, by the illusions of ego, or by habitual conceptions which have become dogma (Vajiranana, 1962).

Human perception has been likened to a mirror at a crossroads, barely able to reflect light due to the dust that has been blown across its surface; such is perception: because it is clouded with illusion, it can not properly reflect the reality being perceived (Griffiths, 1986).

Buddhist psychology suggests a pessimistic view of human nature: the motivation for behavior is craving, which ultimately leads to suffering; perception and cognition are distorted, clouding one’s experience of reality; the sense of self is an illusion to which human beings desperately cling, allowing for the experience of desire and craving; consciousness is composed of false notions and concepts; physical and mental phenomena are seen by the unenlightened individual as existing intrinsically, when they in fact are not endowed with any such ontological status.

The individual on the path toward enlightenment must necessarily understand these unpleasant and unsettling mental and metaphysical circumstances before any effort can be made to transcend them.

Thus, having attained Right Understanding

(that is, having a firm understanding of the doctrines of impermanence, non-existence of self, non-existence of concepts, human susceptibility to perceptual distortion, and dependent origination), the individual seeking enlightenment may (and indeed must) then apply that knowledge through Right Intention, Right Speech, Right Action, Right Livelihood, and Right Effort.

Yet that is not enough.

It is then through the last two paths that an attempt is made not only to apply the understanding of the doctrines, but also to actually experience them.

Through the last two paths of Right Concentration and Right Awareness, which both designate the practice of meditation, one comes to experience the sense of non-existence of self, dependent origination, and a pure perception unfettered by desires and illusions.

Only through experiencing these states can one truly be freed from the desires and cravings which ultimately lead to suffering (Vajiranana, 1962).

Thus, meditation, or the exercises of Right Awareness and Right Concentration, are the final and crucial steps toward a blissful nirvana.

“Ultimately a man sets the measure of his own freedom and his own bondage by the level at which he chooses to establish his convictions.”

Neil Benbow

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