The Conditioned Existence

As we progress on our meditation sessions, we start getting more acquainted with the four noble truths that Buddha announced after his enlightment. Last session we contemplated the first noble truth in which the Buddha points out the human situation of suffering. In the gross level, we suffer when we feel pain or discomfort. This gross level of suffering is somewhat easy to recognize since whenever we feel pain, we do something to get rid of it.

The second level of suffering (more subtle) is the suffering of change. Whenever we experience a dramatic change in our lives we suffer, as an example, being laid off, ending a relationship, etc. We believe in our abilities of planning our lives beforehand, but, as things don’t always go as planned, we suffer.

The third level of suffering is the most subtle one, the one which is much more difficult to realize, the most deceiving one. It prevails anything and everything. Even the happy moments of our lives contain seeds for this suffering to sprout. This is the suffering of conditioned existence. In our daily lives we fail to realize the interconnection between everything, from the objects which we interact with, through our physical senses, to our most intimate thoughts. Everything is conditioned to something else. For me to be here writing this, I depend on having my arms, my hands, the enough dexterity in order to type, as well as my intellectual capacity for writing in English and, the most important, my intellectual understanding of the subject. If any of these conditions were not met, this text would not have been written.

Therefore, everything is dependent on something, or on a combination of other things. As Lama Samten suggests, ask yourself this question: “I am happy if…?” Then a list of factors come up in our list, factors that would cause us to be happy. If we analyze each and everyone of these factors we will also see that they are compounded of smaller parts and if any is missing, your ideal of happiness is not possible.

Because everything is interconnected, we fail to realize the impermanence of everything, from objects to events, and we strive to make the universe around us permanent and stable so we can accomplish our goals. However, when impermanence touches, we suffer. Another aspect of this suffering is our impulses of action (karma) in this impermanent, interconnected environment. We react to events in an automatic way without being aware of the consequences that will lead our lives.

Having said all that, we can see that this third level of suffering is the one underlying the previous two ones. It is the most subtle and it is the essence of our prison. It is a prison because we don’t have controls of our lives as we think we do; we live by following our karmic automatisms and getting frustration after frustration until we die. We desperately seek happiness in impermanent sources, like as if we were trying to kill our thirsts by drinking water from the ocean. We never really get anywhere.

However, not even this prison is permanent and we can break out from it. In the following sessions we will start studying and contemplating the causes that create and sustain this, so we can contemplate how we get out of it. We do have the power and the potential to get rid of this situation, the key to all this is the lucidity of our minds.

May all beings benefit from this!