How Suffering Leads to Bliss

How Suffering Leads to the Cessation of Suffering 

By Sara Dechen Lhamo

 

So I thought I would write a little bit more on my article from the other day, on The Essence of Buddhism, and expand a bit on the part where suffering leads to negative emotions, and explain how this eventually leads to training, which of course leads to the cessation of suffering itself.

The actions that create harm for ourselves and others, set up the klesha avarana (emotional obscurations) and jneya avarana (thought obscurations) that block us from seeing our True Natures (our tathagatagarbha). This experience of not seeing our True Natures is painful, because the intuitive flow of our True Natures is Pure Love, and the illusion of being cut off from that love scares us, and leads to fear. This fear that we are “cut off”, or somehow separated from that love, is the primary confusion. And because we are afraid, we go into “fight” or “flight” mode, and immediately start trying to cling to it, or fight things in a desperate attempt to get back to that love. But what we’re not seeing, is that we never left the love. What is happening is an illusion is arising, that *fools* us into thinking we are cut off from that love, but we are actually not. And it is for this reason that meditation helps us: because when we meditate, what we are doing is sitting STILL, and allowing those tendencies of confusion, and fight or flight to flow past us.

Instead of acting on them, we exhaust them by letting them burn out, like a fire running out of fuel. As long as we don’t put more fuel into it, we are fine. And what happens is it burns down and starts to go out, our confusions (of a lack of love) and fight or flight response starts to calm down. As this occurs, we feel more and more peace, and of course, in the process of this, we become less emotional, and erratic in our thoughts, and less stressful. If we keep this up, as a regular practice, we eventually start to get through all of it; all the karmic tendencies we’ve carried with us over all the lifetimes. While it might be painful at first to sit there with that, what we start to see over time, is that the painfulness becomes less and less, and we truly start to get some lasting peace as we finally calm down and start to feel that connection with our Tathagatagarbha again, our True Natures.

"[The] experience of not seeing our True Natures is painful, because the intuitive flow of our True Natures is Pure Love, and the illusion of being cut off from that love scares us, and leads to fear."

As we start to relax into our True Natures more and more, we still get bouts of unpeace coming as emotions and disturbing thoughts do still come up regularly. But we also start to connect to our True Natures more and more, and this starts to build up faith for us, as we start to have faith in the process and realize that this is in fact working to get us to our True Natures once more. As we see that the process works, we start to have ever-stronger faith in it, and this in turn leads to our doubling-down on the process and putting more and more energy into our training, which in turn leads to more and more result, compounding the healing process. And thus, eventually we hit the cessation of suffering itself, and complete it. And be at peace. And this is how the process works, and it’s important to know that the suffering does end.

"Finally, it builds to the point where they just can’t stand it anymore, and are willing to do anything, and so sit down and give Buddhism, or meditation a try."

But what about the start of this process? The start of the end of the cessation of suffering so to speak? How does that come about? Well it comes about when a being truly has enough. They have suffered enough over many lifetimes and realized, truly (often the hard way) that running and fighting really does not work. They have fought their battles, and fled for ages, and it just made them more and more miserable. Finally, it builds to the point where they just can’t stand it anymore, and are willing to do anything, and so sit down and give Buddhism, or meditation a try. Initially, they may have a few tastes of peace and then leave again to go back to their regular habits. But those memories of peace stick with them and as they try their old ways again, eventually they remember that the one thing that actually gave them peace was Buddhist training, or sitting down and meditating, and so they try it again. And so on, and eventually it just becomes enough of a positive force, over many lifetimes that they don’t leave the path and truly dedicate themselves to their alleviation of suffering through their training. And this eventually leads them to true and lasting peace.

Incidentally, the name of this process, when someone has a first taste, is called a Stream Enterer. When someone decides to train for a while for a more extended period, it’s called an Enterer and Abider. When that person eventually returns to the world again to go back to their regular habits, they are called an Enterer and Abider with the Result of Once Returner. When they finally realize that training is the only thing that will bring them peace, they are called an Enterer and Abider with the Result of Non-Returner. And when they finally, truly hit Nirvana, they are called An Enterer and Abider with the Result of Foe Destroyer: having destroyed the True Foe, the negative thoughts and emotions. So this is how the cycle and process of training works.


© 2019, Sara Dechen Lhamo