[DhammaSponge]

I’ve been reading a great deal of posts constantly on this website to try to get deeper and more profound understandings of the three marks of existence as a way to accelerate my progress to the Sotapanna stage (still looking forward to Lal’s upcoming post on that). 

So here we go.

Anicca: The universe unfolds according to Paticca Samuppada, or cause and effect. In every craving cycle we engage in, the javana cittas our minds produce release energy into the universe. If enough of this energy bundles, it becomes sudhatthaka, or the fundamental division of matter. And if enough energy animates this sudhatthaka (through multiple craving cycles by multiple beings over eons), it further concentrates into increasingly coarser rupa until the energy that animated this sudhatthaka wears out.

The strength of this energy and therefore the time it performs this animation is more or less predetermined. This is why the length of our natural lifetime is determined by vipaka kamma. In our case, we could somewhat influence the range of this length by providing more optimal conditions (exercise, healthy eating), but the returns on this are quite diminishing, because, at the end of the day, all kammic energy that went into fabricating this body is unstable. Once the mind has fabricated the kammic energy, its strength cannot be altered when brought to fruition. Any perceived influence on changing this is due to multiple causes working together, or simply conditions allowing auxiliary causes to bear fruit. But if the main underlying cause that brought this body into existence wears out, auxiliary causes can no longer animate a given emerging process, and this body passes away. 

All aggregates obey this principle. As I heard in a desana once, all aggregates are not to be seen as things, but as processes that obey what I have just described. Even if we had an exact knowledge of all the navi kamma that we fabricate and how it becomes vipaka kamma in future lives, developing a sophisticated plan on how we would live based on the knowledge of things rising and passing away, we still cannot fabricate future lifetimes that would go under our control, because we are not the only mind engaging in Paticca Samuppada. Other minds also crave the same things we do, and sometimes this might make things easier, but more or less this complicates things. Therefore, not a single aggregate we experience can be maintained to our satisfaction, not just because the energy behind its manifestation has already been established, but because other minds with often countering intentions have also taken part in conjuring them. Even those with abinna powers who can fabricate macroscopic objects with such powerful, purified javana cittas cannot “break even” with ideas of lasting happiness based on the five aggregates, and even if they thought they could, such powers would eventually be lost to them because of the greed that would inevitably follow with such an incorrect view (would showing a puthujjana abinna powers be even possible, or would you lose such feats before you even start?)

Dukkha: We think that there are objects in this world that contain intrinsic pleasures (sukha) that are worth pursuing, especially if we believe such pleasures can be maintained to our satisfaction and bring us lasting happiness. Yet we have never interacted with such objects, ever. More accurately, these objects have made contact with our sense bases, and based on the images that these sense bases produce, we produce a feeling that we associate with the original object. Even with this insight, however, we might be still inclined to think that we can just focus on the pleasures that we have and enjoy them, knowing that if the mind made this enjoyment, it’s just not worth using this pleasure mechanism to the detriment of others. We just enjoy this really cool trick we discovered!

But if we really sat down and thought about the entire process of craving and enjoyment, the areas where sukha are to be found diminish in location. Let’s assume we want a cookie, guilt free, to the expense of no other being, and to be even more charitable, let’s say this cookie won’t be bad at all for our health whatsoever. We don’t have the cookie right now, but we have the means to get it at a supermarket. If we engage in Paticca Sammupada, we will crave this cookie. We will create sankhara based on our remembrance on how good it was, or if we want to try something new, we will fabricate sankhara about the possible novelty of taste and what pleasures it will bring. Engaging in this process inevitably creates an amount of stress, because we don’t have this pleasure right now.

The dynamic then very quickly changes from wanting the pleasure of the cookie to freeing ourselves from the vexation of wanting that cookie by getting it. In other words, it is no longer about getting a high, but going back to baseline after artificially creating a low, which is perceived as getting a high. Furthermore, and this is quite likely, if the world prevents us from having access to this release from vexation (traffic, store closure, goods sold out), we will experience further discomfort via hate or dosa. Maybe we might not be so attached to this pleasure that this produces dosa, but patigha, which is a diluted version of hate. But every craving cycle we engage in tends to be more streamlined and amplified the next time around, so it is more likely that the patigha can get out of hand, especially if we are in a stressful situation where we perceive a cookie as a way out of that stress. 

But let’s keep looking for sukha, because we still aren’t there yet. We still have to wait in line to buy the cookie, and for all we know, there might be an elderly woman holding up the line, slowly getting out her exact change for what she’s bought (I live in Germany, so cash is preferred over card in many cases compared to other countries). We still have to go to an acceptable place to open the package and eat the cookie, and the packaging might be quite resistant to being opened, as I am sure we all experienced. Maybe it’s a hot day, and as we touch it, some of the chocolate or glaze gets across our hands and they get sticky. But finally, as we shove that precious food into our mouth, there we have it, release! And the pleasant sensation, but who cares about that, the stress is gone! We have finally found the sukha we wanted. But as soon as we experience it, it goes away. How long can you hold a cookie in your mouth until you need to swallow? The sugars and salts in your mouth cannot stay there forever. And once you swallow, are we then satisfied? Nope, you still have a veneer of liquid cookie on your tongue, and unless you had the foresight to wash it with water, you’ll be still quite uncomfortable.

Against a stream of dukkha, we have gotten for ourselves one brief moment of sukha. And this was something that took us maybe thirty minutes to a few hours to obtain. What about “loftier” pleasures, like getting a bigger house, a better job, a prettier girlfriend or a prestigious accolade? It would be more like a deluge of dukkha against one sukha moment. Or maybe not even that at that point, maybe the feeling registered is so faint that it’s more about the release from vexation than the actual pleasure itself since we slaved for so long just to get it. 

Stress will always coincide with craving. But if we change our gati regarding our objects of craving, the craving diminishes. So does the stress. No craving, no stress. If we don’t crave sukha, we’ll have less dukkha to worry about. But unless we reach Nibbana, dukkha will never be non-zero. 

Anatta: We can then infer from the cookie example and all of its extrapolations that going after pleasures for lasting happiness is fruitless. But also, if we persist in our ideas of nicca and sukkha being worthwile, unfathomable oceans of dukkha await us. If we don’t try to disillusion ourselves with this trick of nature that we claimed to intellectually understand, when we die, if we haven’t gotten a phala, we have no idea how our gati will change. And we definitely won’t carry over this intellectual understanding of sanna and mental images with us. We will have to encounter this again, and that is quite unlikely. It can be the case that, over the trajectory of lifetimes, the craving process will be pursued, greed cultivated. And then we start accumulating heavier kamma when we decide it’s worth it to harm other beings to further entrance ourselves with vinnana’s little magic show. Then it only becomes inevitable for us to cultivate apaya gati again and crave an apaya birth. Then the real suffering comes along. Imagine that, if we were reborn as a peta, and saw that all the akusala kamma we accumulated was because, in this lifetime, we didn’t think the Sotapanna phala was worth attaining. It’s like we finally, after many tries, were at the precipice of climbing out of a slippery pit, only for us to slip and fall back to the bottom once our hands made contact with the top. 

Comprehending these three marks of existence deeply leads to us not craving existence. Not craving existence allows us to not crave another birth at cuti patisandhi. We finally, for the first time, no longer send out an energy signal to animate a sudhatthaka as a new hadaya vatthu, and the particle that has constantly been excited across multiple energy levels is finally allowed to enter the ground state after infinite eons without seeking to excite anything else. This ground state, beyond cause and beyond dependent origination, is what we may call Nibbana. 

If there are any extra corrections, nuances or insights anybody has to offer with what I just said, I eagerly await to see them so that I may hasten my way to the first noble attainment. The above has been my understanding after less than two months of interacting with this website. I can only imagine what I could get to know after a year. 

• This topic was modified 22 hours ago by DhammaSponge.

2 users thanked author for this post.

jennydo, Jittananto

[Lal]

Quite insightful comments. Please keep up with your efforts.

• Yes. The next post will focus on the Sotapanna stage, and I will attempt to make connections to the concepts we have discussed so far in the new series, “Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta – New Series.”

2 users thanked author for this post.

jennydo, Jittananto

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