Suffering is Caused by Attachment

Suffering arises because everything changes, everything is impermanent. Everything is in process, all the time. Whenever we hope to find any lasting happiness by means of something that is changing, suffering results. This means that nothing in the realm of ordinary human experience can provide lasting happiness, and trying to force things to stand still and make us happy is itself the main source of misery.

“Attachment” in Buddhism extends far beyond the sense of “greed” or “clinging” to something closer to what the Christian tradition would call “pride”–a self-centered isolation, the separate selfhood, “ego” in the worst sense.

This selfhood acts upon others and the world as if they were forever separate from oneself, generating what author Charlene Spretnak described as “the continuous chain reaction of craving, jealousy, ill will, indifference, fear, and anxiety that fills the mind.” This is a deep, pervasive, but normal kind of alienation–one seemingly built into the nature of the human nervous system.

The most pervasive form of self-centered suffering takes place as we project upon everyday experience a huge burden of extraneous interpretations, associations, fantasies, emotions, painful memories, and diversions. We act then with the Buddhist big three problems: greed, aversion, and delusion. Greed sucks things in to our purposes, violating their natures as necessary. Aversion shoves things away, denies, distorts, destroys them–again violating their natures. In the state of delusion, we float, confused, not seeing, not knowing, insulated from the pain and salvation of deep experience.

Instead of seeing each moment as it is, we react to each moment from our past pain and frustration; then we react to the pain and frustration; then we react to that reaction; and so on and on. In this way a special form of mental torment is created that consists of seemingly endless layers of pain, negative emotion, self-doubt and self-justification–known in Buddhism as “samsara,” the illusory world we think of as real. It is what, in honest moments, many people might call “normality.”

I think of it this way: Instead of experiencing life directly, we create a worldview and experience it. That worldview serves to protect us through a system of explanations; but it also makes each of us into an isolated self, separated from nature, from real experience, from spirituality, and from one another–causing all experience to be distorted and “out of joint,” and ourselves to suffer from living at one remove from life. We are nearly always, in some degree, outsiders to the world and even to our own experience.

Buddhists have given deep attention to the ways human beings are at once empowered and entrapped by the categories we create for thought and language. Racial prejudice is a straightforward example of what Buddhists mean by suffering that is created by the mind; it is based on mental categories that distort perception and project our expectations onto others. The fundamental Buddhist act is to accept responsibility for one’s projections, and to learn to know, first hand, how the mind creates illusion and amplifies suffering.