Understanding. . .

We suffer, according to Buddhism, simply because we misunderstand the nature of reality. Once when I was speaking in San Francisco to about ten thousand fellow creatives I became in tune with something a bit different from my nervous mind and physical reactions to stepping up on that stage – we all were here for something unspoken yet shared – knowledge. That quest for wanting to know more, wanting to peek behind our own metaphorical curtain had brought us together. Our wants, our search for something had tied us together in an unspoken way. It was vey real but yet very unspoken reality. Such an understanding of interconnection comes, in Buddhist practice, from awareness of the three characteristics of experience, also known as the three marks of existence. The first is impermanence, the idea that “last year’s Super Bowl is in the same past as the Revolutionary War. The second is suffering, which can be described as the result of the mind unable to accommodate its experience. These two characteristics, or insights, are fairly easy to make sense of, and when I first began my Buddhist practice, I found I had a basic grasp of them. But the third characteristic, emptiness—the insight that there is no enduring self that separates anything from anything else—seemed more elusive to me. In years since, the understanding that everything anyone does is a result of causes and effects — has helped to keep me from labeling moments as good or bad. Circumstances and behavior can change, of course, but at any given time no one moment can be other than the sum of all of their contingent causes. Suffering happens because we have not fully awakened to our moments, our life, but no “one” decides to suffer. I wondered whether hearing about the three characteristics of experience, rather than discovering them for myself, would diminish their impact—that thinking about them wouldn’t count as much as discovering them directly. Today, I know that thinking, pondering, and reflecting on them count as well as direct moments of experience. So on that topic I started this writing with – the topic of reality – Everything spoken or unspoken, felt or ignored, known or unknown counts for the slow but steady opening of the mind and our “shared” experience of living this life.. Peace and Love, Jim