“Dukkha ensures you can never have enough, you've always got to have more.”
ONE of the consequences of sentient biological existence is
the experience dukkha. Dukkha is sometimes translated as suffering, but in
actual fact encompasses all senses of unsatisfactoriness, even including
pleasure (which evolution has contrived will always be a transient sensation -
lest it detract too much from the grim business of survival).
In its most manifest form dukkha includes severe suffering
such as that of the animal caught in a trap which will gnaw through its own
limb in order to attempt to gain some form of temporary survival, perhaps to
return to its young. At the other end of the scale is the subtle
dissatisfaction of the billionaire who has everything , and then discovers that
his business rival has a slightly larger yacht.
Dukkha ensures you can never have enough, you've always got
to have more.
Any sentient being living in an evolved and evolving
biosphere will inevitably experience dukkha. Dukkha is a quale(subjective
experience), an appearance to the mind of the habits of millions of years
evolution , of attempting to get the competitive edge, of never being satisfied
with second place, of perpetual restlessness.
Darwinism shows that evolution is a game that the individual
cannot win. His genes drive him to compete and propagate, but he is not
propagating himself, he is propagating his selfish genes. We spend our lives
from birth to death acquiring nutrients to grow and ensure our survival.
Nowadays many of us acquire sufficient nutrients to actually reduce our chances
of survival, but instincts driven by genes developed during millions of years
of selection by famine don't disappear in a generation or two of plenty.
We acquire every material need and even then we're not
satisfied. Our instincts drive us to acquire everything else we can lay our
hands on. Things may be no use to us, but our deep instincts tell us that by
holding them ourselves we are depriving our competitors (everybody but our
immediate kin) of them. The sociobiological roots of greed and attachment to
possessions go deep into our evolutionary past.
Evolutionary Psychology
Getting into the state of being satisfied sets the
instinctive alarm bells ringing. If you think you can drop out of the
evolutionary race then all the habituation of hundreds of millions of years of
evolution will tell you not to.
Our genes drive us along paths of action which appear to
minimise suffering, but in many cases increase it. Greed and acquisitiveness
are natural reactions designed to increase the survival of our genes, and
decrease the chances of our competitors. After a certain point, the more you've
got the more you've got to lose, (even if it is just losing face) and so the
more you've got to worry about losing.
These instinctive strivings and attachments for things which
are ultimately only going to cause us worry and unhappiness are known in
Buddhist philosophy as innate delusions (as distinct from intellectually formed
delusions such as memes). The innate delusions are considerably more difficult
to overcome than intellectually formed delusions, however it is one of the
fundamental tenets of Buddhism that they can eventually be brought into the
light of day and removed. To quote Richard Dawkins 'We are built as gene
machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against
out creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish
replicators.' [Dawkins 1989]
The Buddhist technique of rebellion against the selfish
replicators, at any rate in the form of innate delusions, is to reduce the
power of the forces which drive us by recognising them for what they are. This
is traditionally performed by a mixture of analytical thought and meditation,
and involves the recognition of four truths of biological existence:
(1) The first step is to recognise the inevitability of
dukkha - the sense of unsatisfactoriness and the certainty of ultimate loss of
everything, which haunts all sentient beings even in the absence of manifest
suffering.
(2) The second is to recognise the origins of these futile
strivings in our biologically conditioned evolutionary history. If we want to
stop being the puppets of our genes and memes we need to clearly understand why
we're attached to these particular strings.
(3) The third step is to realise that it needn't be like
this. This is perhaps the most difficult one for a reductionist materialist. It
involves realising that the mind is non-physical and that it can escape from
the eternal evolutionary treadmill.
(4) The fourth step is adopting a liberating psychological
technology that stabilises the mind and protects it against uncontrolled
attachment to further striving, suffering, biological rebirths.
Original Sin
Note that the Buddhist concept of innate delusions is
totally different to that of 'original sin' found in some other belief systems.
Innate delusions and their imprints are seen as an inevitable consequence of
where our minds have been over millions of years of evolution. There is no
actual 'blame' or 'guilt' to them, though of course the practitioner strives to
understand them in order to overcome them. The concept of Original Sin is
theological rather than scientific in origin, and derives from Eve's sin of
eating the apple being passed down through all subsequent generations.
REF
Dawkins 1989 ' The Selfish Gene' p201, Oxford University
Press ISBN 0-19-286092-5
- Sean Robsville
Source: Trans-cultural Buddhism
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