On Pain

Buddhism does a good analysis of Pain as experienced by humans. It is so very interesting to discover that this in accordance to what the science of psychology has also investigated –
Going deep into the nature of Pain – Buddha found following are 4 dimensions of it has. I name these dimensions as - 
1.    The Reference Frame –
Whatever humans experience is out of this world – this life – Our Reference frame. By design life entails a great deal of sufferings. This ranges from commonplace feelings (grouchiness, fear, anger, boredom, depression, heartaches and pains, loneliness, etc) to acute forms (produced by wars, famines, disease, natural calamities, etc).
Buddha characterizes a world in which there is a great deal of unhappiness, ranging from abject pain, loneliness, anxiety, hunger, being with hateful people, lots of those we love, to unpleasant states of feelings as described above.
Having said this I am not propagating the idea that world is a hopeless land of limitless suffering. On contrary, I am by temperament immensely optimist. The idea is just to bring to ones attention that pain is inevitable in this world – by design.
2.    Transitoriness of pain –
Pain includes an idea of change, perpetual flux, what Buddha refers to as “transitoriness”. It implies that misery is always potential – in coming. For example if a person says, “All these suffering does not apply to me. I have a well paying, interesting job, a happy marriage, and good health.” The Buddhist thesis would be : All good the person sited is subject to change. For example, the man’s wife may one day stop loving him. Or he may wake up one morning realizing that he no longer loves her. And the loss of job, health, or stability is notoriously common. The conditions of our happiness are all subject to change. The idea is that there is nothing like – “live happily ever after”.
If one is happy – she is fortunate indeed. She should obviously savor and relish it. But she should have the awareness that pain in some form is always potentiona – either in the form of commonplace feelings or acute forms as described in the point 1 above.
Again the idea is play life fully. Cherish happiness as if this is the last day of one’s life. But when pain comes, accept it as natural and normal – by design.
3.    The Causal Matrix –
This idea being adopted as-is from Hinduism, Buddha establishes another dimension of pain. The idea is that we live in a world which is highly interdependent. The events in life are related to a matrix of numerous other factors and coincidences. This has been explained in the Karma Theory of the ancient Vedantic philosophy.
This dimension has been poetically articulated by the famous Buddhist monk – Thich Nhat Hanh. He describes one of Siddhartha’s insights as he was coming to enlightenment  -
“He looked up at a pippala leaf imprinted against the blue sky, its tail blowing back and forth as if calling him. Looking deeply at the leaf, he saw clearly the presence of the sun and the stars – without the sun, without light and warmth, the leaf could not exist. He also saw in the leaf the presence of clouds – without clouds, there could be no rain, and without rain, the leaf could not be. He saw the earth, time, space and mind – all were present in the leaf. In fact, at that very moment the entire universe existed in that leaf.”
This interdependence applies, of course, to all life, including each human life.
This causal nature of suffering brings the Buddhist conception closer to the western scientific world outlook. All of science has its foundation “this is like this because that was like that”. For example, the cause of the annoying behavior of a tyrannical and abusive boss might be the ill grooming of his during his childhood by an alcoholic father. The idea is that all forms of pain might have its seed in a remote an seemingly un-related event. Life is thus a mosaic of such varied interdependences.
4.    The last link within –
The Buddha places the ultimate cause of suffering squarely within the individual. This can be explained with the following example –
We may think that a person who cheats us is the cause of our suffering. In the Buddhist view, it is our anger at being cheated, our craving to retrieve our money, our brooding over the event that is immediate cause of our suffering. The fact of being cheated is an important event in the causal sequence, but is one step removed from the final cause of suffering. This view, then, focuses not on the external, more instant causes of our suffering, but on the immediate inner link of the causal chain, on our motivational and emotional makeup.
This emotional makeup – the final link to push us into distress – is dependent solely on the human being’s inner state of heart and mind. This is ofcourse an outcome of the social conditioning of the individual.
For example the 1930s middle class American culture, in which it was made to believe that promiscuous girls were bad, homosexuals were bad, and it was important that a girl should marry being virgin – were social conditionings – which cause vulnerabilities in a lady, causing not only pain in her internal psyche but also pain in others.
So, life can offer us as many touch situations as possible – as a result of many other interdependent happenings, on which we might not have least of control. But the best part of life is that the quality of our life – our inner state of bliss or un-rest is solely dependent on that critical and last link in the causal chain – how we take it. If we re-design our inner self such that it is not affected by these un-controllable outer causal happenings, we might have a way out of the suffering.

[This article is my synthesis of the initial chapters of the book - The Positive Psychology of Buddhism and Yoga by Dr. Marvin Levine]
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The Immortal Traveler

Ageless, timeless bright and sunny,
The Traveler is in his journey through eternity!

Once upon a time he was born as the river Mississippi,
Once he was born as the seagull of the seventh mountain!

Then there was a time when he was the Road to the clouds,
Guiding and taking countless Pilgrims’ caravans!

Then there was this time when he was born,
As the poem from the heart of the lovelorn poet,
Swinging in the rhythm of the Charm
Of those Most Beautiful Eyes!

There was one age, when he was
The rapture of the ageless sage having the glimpse of his God!

And then there was he born,
As the painful throbbing of the despaired heart,
Of the sculptor in love with his stone and indifferent sculpture!

Then he was born as the profound attraction
Of the droning bee,
For the nectar of the luscious flower red!

And again as the pious and peaceful prayer,
Of the silent nun behind the walls of the convent!

Life span varied of the traveler –
From the few moments of the lover’s moan
In the moments of those ecstatic unity!
To the eternal wait of the
The longing hearts of the banks of the Ganges!
Waiting in vain, since millennia
To kiss each other, To touch each other, To hug each other!

The traveler lived though civilizations many!
From the hunter-gatherers Shoshones,
To the Greeks and Romans!
To the barbarians,
To the New World,
Through revolutions many,
Civilizations after civilizations!
Wars after wars!

Each time he evolved,
He grew and flourished,
Using minds of men women,
Boys and girls,
As vehicles in continuum –
Ages after ages!

He was in the form of the
Human ideas, insights, and innovation!
Hopes, dreams and inspirations!
The longing love and compassion!
 Manifested in the world of form,
As poems, songs, scientific insights!
As religious raptures, paintings and sculptors!
As lofty bridges, Engineering marvels, forts and damns!
Spanning through eternity!

He was born as an innocent wish,
Of the little girl gazing the stars,
He lived through as the
Enthused heart of the lover
Held in tight embrace of his beloved!
Living in vigor and youth,
All through eternity
As the never ending love
Of the Sky and the Earth!

Men were born,
Both Great and Wretched!
Civilizations started, pinnacled and
The fated with the inevitable death!
Springs came, and Winter passed!
Many came, many went.

Remained but forever
The traveler – beyond the dots of eternity!
Throbbing with life,
Was the ardor of being Human!
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The uniqueness of Gautam Buddha

Being a creative social innovator, Siddhartha had a remarkable novel idea that he created on the top of his synthesis of his “Middle Path” based on the Hindu philosophy. This idea was his rejection of the concept of Atman/God. Unlike what he had read about and had been taught by his senior Hindu counterparts, he considered human to be a conglomerate of psychological propensities – like – joy, pain, love, hatred, jealousy, hunger, craving, etc. He always propagated the idea of meditation as a way to calm down these psychological pushes and pulls and knowing one’s own real self. The idea was to create peace for oneself by reducing the entropy in consciousness, by letting these temperamental disturbances settle down. This obviously causes an increase in perceptive and cognitive abilities.
Instead of preaching his ideas strictly as a series of sermons, Siddhartha invited his followers to go through their personal journey of self realization by doing meditation. This is very close to the western outlook of the science of psychology. The beauty in the thought process of Siddhartha was that he was disruptive in the sense that he felt that the need for the Hypothesis of God was not required to present a discipline for attaining Nirvana. For him Nirvana was not the attainment of the union with a Hypothesis of God. Rather it was about going to the depth of ones own self, knowing one better and better.
By abandoning the Atman concept, Siddhartha produced a change in the Hindu outlook, making it more akin to the contemporary scientific view. Siddhartha never invokes a Deity concept to explain the causes of Dukkha, indeed, of anything in the universe.
This was I guess a very important step forward towards a scientific and evolutionary outlook of life. I am not going to the correctness or in-correctness of the philosophy of Siddhartha. It is just that it was a disruptive innovation in the discipline of thought – in an attempt to explain life. Something as disruptive as the explanation of solar system to Napoleon, by the 19th century French astronomer – LaPlace – without the need of the Hypothesis of the presence of God, for any role to be played in creation of the solar system.
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The Verdict of History

They say that Rome was not build in a day. One of the richest civilizations every formed – The Romans were astounding in many ways – Their strong military, the economic system based on markets, Their effective governance and bureaucracy. All these were comparable in many ways to the modern system of society. It is commendable for humans to have reached that high level of sophistication around 500BC!

But then this dominant civilization became stagnant and decaying after reaching their pinnacle of evolution. Barbarians came and the great Roman Empire collapsed. To be precise the Western part of the empire went on the hands of the barbarians. There is one thing very interesting in all these. Till the Roman civilization was prospering and continuing to grow things were ok. But when it became stagnant, contributing little if anything to the march of its evolution, it was taken over by the Barbarians.
Barbarians had a great affinity to the civilized way of living that they inherited from the Romans. They immediately adapted the same, and continued the evolution of Roman memes.

The barbarian role of cultural demolition crew is especially important when you consider how often cultural reconstruction is needed. Many of Rome’s glaring defects – slavery, exploitation, authoritarianism, corrupt self-aggrandizement – flow from deeply human tendencies. Time and again these human vulnerabilities have transformed promising civilizations into decaying, oppressive monstrosities.

It is just not that Romans were now lethargic and were not being able to maintain their cultural supremacy. Rather things are a bit more involved. Romans were just not able to adapt to the technological evolution they themselves started. With coming of standard, universally accepted coins and fully phonetic alphabet, complete with vowels, the potential existed for a more decentralized economy than ever before. So, for example, slavery – the ultimate in exploitation – now carried a higher cost of forgone productivity; the better lubricated the market, the more it can benefit from untrammeled participation. A mind, as they say, is a terrible thing to waste.

The Eastern half of the Roman Empire which survived the collapse of the west, was less guilty of some of these sins. The east seems all along to have had fewer slaves than the west. In the east the economy was less afflicted by such stultifying policies as the virtual ban on changing convocations. And, for historical reasons, the east had a more integrated economy.

The historian Chester Starr once wrote – “Every so often civilizations seems to work itself into a corner from which further progress is virtually impossible along the lines then apparent; yet if new ideas are to have a chance the old systems must be so severely shaken that they lose their dominance”.
Of course, technology isn’t some extraneous force, visited on the planet from outer space. It is selected by human minds through cultural evolution; people are the arbiters of technology. But technologies – in a broad sense, at least – are in turn arbiters of social structures.

The same evolution of memes is so much apparent in the companies and their products. There have been a definite direction apparent in the whole drama in the computing industry – starting from mainframes, to ascent of the Windows, to the rise of Apple, Google, Amazon etc. There have been a directed evolution towards more and more freedom, openness, collaboration, higher sophistication and complexity in every product and service.

Its looks so amazing that these units of culture use humans as vehicles to expand themselves. When one meme becomes stale another meme takes its place, which is more vibrant and complex. The story of the evolution of civilizations after civilizations have been an artifact to this unique dynamics of ideas, information, dreams, hope, expressions, innovations – all creations of human mind!

Certainly it is our responsibility to keep the mind nourished with Newer Ideas, Bigger Dreams, Brighter Hopes, and of course every expanding Love and Compassion!
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An Interesting Experiment by a Prince

I was reading this book – The Positive Psychology of Buddhism and Yoga : Path to a Mature Happiness by Marvin Levine. Some of the illustrations in the following article are taken from this book. The theme of this article is to give an overview of cognitive approach Siddhartha took to formulate what was later called Buddhism. It was a unique experimentation by a creative man – trying to synthesize the esoteric philosophy of the then prevalent Hinduism – into a simple, practical and scientific approach towards living a peaceful and happy life. Interestingly the same thing has been the pursuit of the western approach of developing the science of Psychology.
Around 500BC northern India had certain religious and philosophical parallels to ancient Greece. This is probably no coincidence. Some 4000 years ago, the same people in the northern part of the globe drifted south, some towards Europe and Greece, and some towards India. Knowledge of the classical Greek language, is of great benefit in studying Sanskrit.
In Greece, religion functioned on two levels. There was the pantheon of Gods that was part of the popular religion, but there was also the abstract characterization of the world and of man’s place in it, which the philosophers were developing. The disparity between the two Greek views of the divine was made painfully clear by the death of Socrates. He, who taught the importance of contemplating the sublime essences, was executed for leading the young away from their (the popular) religion. The same duality of religious beliefs existed at the same time in India. There was a pantheon of Gods, with accompanying stories, symbols, rituals, and rules of worship. There was also, however, the more philosophical approach that saw deity in a more abstract form. It is this latter philosophical approach that gave rise to the movement we call Yoga and that influenced the Buddha. By first reviewing certain basic ideas in this philosophical context, we gain a better understanding of the Buddha’s teachings.
In the Hindu-philosophical view, the personalized gods are replaced by a universal spirit, referred to as Atman. Atman pervades everything – sun, planets, stones, trees, insects, monkeys, you and me. Our spiritual goal is to discover this Atman within ourselves and thus to connect with the all pervasive Atman. The Atman within is to be discovered in a deeper place than our cravings, fears, and agitations, deeper than such ordinary mind activity as brooding, daydreaming, and planning. The Atman could only be glimpsed when all this restless craving and mind activity is stilled. The mind is likened to a lake. When turbulent, it is opaque but, when calm, it is transparent. Yoga was founded on this conception of an all-pervasive, inner and outer Atman. The term Yoga means “linking”, and is usually interpreted to mean linking the inner Atman with the outer.
Drawing parallels from likes of Socrates from Greece, and proponents of Vedas and Upanishads from India, it appears that both these magnanimous civilizations of the world had their framework of civil psychology pretty robust. For people who were into day to day work, and had nothing much to do into the domain of contemplation, there was this easy story created of personalized Gods. There were thousands of Gods for both Greek, Romans and in Indian societies. And for the more contemplative class – people who had time to think and contemplate – there was this philosophical framework of an “Atman”.
The concept of Yoga – (literal meaning is addition or linking in Sanskrit)- was an interesting discipline created with all its ramifications – with the sole motive of establishing the connection with the Omnipresent, Omniscient – The Absolute. This abstract form of the Absolute was given various names – “Param-Atma”, “Param-Brahm”, etc. The sole objective of a spiritual journey was about establishing this connection. This was achieved through calming the mind, and detaching it from various stimuli of the external world. Having done that, there was a significant reduction of entropy in the human consciousness. No matter which path was followed – the general mass easy way of personal gods, or the selective high class philosophy of abstract power – the end goal of these civilizations was commendable – achieving peace of mind – reducing of entropy in the consciousness.
This pursuit of mankind was a threshold in the evolution of human thinking. Among many other factors [other memetic influences from other competing civilizations] this discipline of thought kept the human mind away from slipping down to the innate human tendencies of exploitation, authoritarianism, and self-aggrandizement.
Pain of the real world (Dukkha), Atman, re-incarnation, Karma – these formed the conceptual framework in the Buddha’s cognition of the world – as he was strongly influenced by this unique philosophy prevalent in India – around 500 BC. Synthesizing the abstract philosophical aspect of Hinduism, Siddhartha formulated a unique way of living based on Four Noble Truths. He called his way as the Middle Path – A path between being a selfish materialists and an ascetic. He laid out a unique framework which was mostly atheist – solely aimed at liberating humans from pains inherent in being a human.
The Four Noble Truth are outlined below –
1.    The Truth of Dukkha (Suffering) – We are vulnerable to a multitude of suffering such as hunger, pain, fear, loneliness, hatred and so on.
2.    The Truth of Tanha (Craving) – We are vulnerable because of the way human nature is constituted. Specifically, we are a bundle of urges that push and pull from within. Urges for example, to obtain food, drink, sexuality, companionship; to escape boredom, pain, irritation.
3.    The Truth of Nirvana (Liberation from Dukkha) – Our vulnerability can be ended. We can attain freedom from Dukkha. We do this by changing ourselves, by transforming our cravings. We can subdue those overpowering urges that push us now one way, and then another.
4.    The Truth of Magga (Eight fold path) – Liberation from Dukkha is attained by practice of eight disciplines. These disciplines entail the cultivation of
a.    Right Understanding
b.    Right Thought
c.    Right Speech
d.    Right Action
e.    Right Livelihood
f.    Right Mindfulness
g.    Right Effort
h.    Right Meditation
It looks amazing that how scientifically Siddhartha laid out a framework for humans to achieve a state free from suffering – he called Nirvana. It was about re-designing one’s understanding of the world, to make the forces of circumstances irrelevant in deciding the state of mind for a person.
Now, inherent in this 8 fold path is the ambiguity of what is “Right” in all these points. I see it this way. As Buddha followed the Hindu way of the goal of spiritual journey is to establish ones connection to that “Param-Atma”, which resides deep inside one’s self. Having this as the primary goal of life, everything else looks of secondary importance. This stance creates lots of freedom. This is because now, for the seeker, all the humane vulnerabilities are secondary to her existence. This stoicism creates a launch pad for the seeker to create something big, difficult, huge and unique – in defiance of the real limitations and inherent failure modes. There is a gradual elevation of human psyche – from the feeble self oriented fearful existence, to a robust, creative and fearless expression of humanity. When the primary goal is something non-cognitive (knowing the Param-Atma), any cognitive dilemma of life does not shake the seeker.
This formula helps in reducing entropy of human consciousness thereby bringing to ones disposal and extra psychic energy, which otherwise would have been wasted in dealing with human sufferings. This increases the probability of the seeker to enter to FLOW, getting into a domain of her choice, and thereby creating artifacts of creativity – which leaves a legacy for humanity.
To be able to continue the evolution of mankind towards an optimal direction, such a homework looks like a smart option. It is certainly a reasonable way to orient the mind and transcend the weaknesses inherent in being human. At the same time, it transmutes these weaknesses to absolute unique human faculties which play a vital role in beautifying further the evolution of human civilizations. 
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