The Road to Suffering Is Paved with Broadband
Going on social media these days is a bit like jumping into a raging river of shit, piss, vomit, blood, and semen where everyone is yelling at each other for not swimming correctly.
There’s no proper way to navigate polluted waters. You have to get the hell out.
Let me explain.
In Buddhism the three pollutants or poisons are “infatuation, hostility, and delusion.” This unholy trinity is represented in Tibetan iconography by a rooster, a snake, and a pig grabbing each other by the tail at the hub of the wheel of becoming. This is the vicious circle of human suffering. Or, as I like to call it, the Internet. Replace the rooster, snake, and pig with Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook and you’ve got the 2020 Wheel of High-Speed Broadband Suffering.
How do you escape this vicious circle?
In the Kalama Sutta, the Buddha wanders into a village filled with some seriously confused people. Their town is at a crossroads for a great many gurus and wandering mendicant wisdom-slingers and huffy tome-toting sages skilled in the art of gas-baggery, all of whom dump their teachings on the villagers like daytrip tourists leaving mountains of trash behind. According to Glenn Wallis in Basic Teachings of the Buddha, these bewildered villagers “have been exposed to an impossibly wide and contradictory range of claims, propositions, practices, and philosophies.”
Having spent much of last week on Twitter, I can relate.
One of the villagers steps forward and @’s the Buddha: “Certain . . . religious authorities . . . explain and illuminate their own doctrines while cursing, reviling, despising, and emasculating the doctrines of others.” Emasculating? Basically the religious authorities of northeastern India, 600 BCE, were proto-trolls trying to rip the balls off of each others’ arguments. Understandably, the distraught villager tells Buddha, “We have doubts and perplexity concerning which of these teachers are speaking truthfully and which are speaking falsely.”
In other words, Tell us, oh World Honored One, which news is real and which news is fake!
Listen to the Buddha’s reply and imagine applying it to your morning ritual of eye-gulping Breitbart or HuffPo: “You should not be convinced by unconfirmed reports, by tradition, by hearsay, by scriptures, by logical reasoning, by inferential reasoning, by reflection or superficial appearances, by delighting in opinions and speculation, by the appearance of plausibility, or because you think, This person is our teacher.”
Wallis calls the Kalama Sutta “something of a Buddhist Magna Carta, granting religious seekers the liberty of free inquiry . . . The Buddha presents here a strategy for determining whether or not religious propositions are worthy of embrace. The structure that he provides can easily be extended beyond religious issues per se to include any types of dogmatic assertions — for instance, scientific, political, or aesthetic ones.”
And what is the Buddha’s strategy for figuring out who is full of shit? Look inside, buddy. Per Wallis, the Buddha calls this “knowing for yourself.”
It’s all well and good to “think for yourself,” but the Buddha is calling for something far more fundamental and radical than mere freethinking. Knowing for yourself means this: if you are doing something and it is making you and/or others suffer, red alert — you’re doing something wrong. That’s it. That’s the only metric. Suffering. So you have to pay wicked-close attention to your inner life, to the sensation of suffering — that sensation is like an anti-divining rod that points in the direction you should definitely not move.
In the Nibutta Sutta, Buddha tells a burned-out student, “An infatuated, hostile, and deluded person comes to the realization that through the overwhelming power of infatuation, hostility, and delusion, he has become mentally exhausted, and that he is hurting himself and others.” You cannot tell me that you didn’t just flinch with recognition at that phrase “mentally exhausted.” Police brutality, riots, racism, superspreaders, chokeholds, facemasks, second wave, social distancing, record unemployment, I can’t breathe. . . .
I can’t breathe.
For a meditator those words have particular resonance, for one of the only ways to get some distance from the flaming dumpster fire of suffering that is our world is to follow our breath through the practice of meditation.
Tech companies have a synonym for your suffering, by the way. They call it “user engagement.” Make no mistake: without exception the algorithms that drive profitability on the Internet feed on human suffering, on our infatuations, hostilities, and delusions. Infatuation: Yes! This Tweet is right and I’m right for hearting it!! Hostility: Oh screw you, you’re an SJW/alt right fascist. Delusion: I don’t know what to believe!
The more you engage, the more money they make.
But before we blame Zuckerfuck or Jack Douchey for all our troubles, the ancient Buddhist sutras make it clear that people have always been lost, hopeless, exhausted, broke, confused, and enraged. They’ve always looked to the outside world for affirmation, confirmation, and salvation. And this has always been the road to suffering. And the road away from suffering has always been the same — don’t do shit that makes you or others suffer.
Sounds simplistic? Try it. Catch yourself as you react to the latest installment of the Apocalypse. Feel the pain in your chest, watch your emotions spiral out of control. Then let it go. Let the emotion go. Let the suffering go. Tweet if you must. Protest if you must. Riot if you must. Do anything you want (with the understanding that you’ll have to take fully responsibility for your actions one way or another, my friend). But don’t do or feel or say anything because your suffering is forcing you to do or feel or say it.
Suffering is fucking smart. It’s inner cancer and it knows how to grow. The first thing suffering does is blind you to suffering through intense emotion. The second thing suffering does is perpetuate itself by impelling you to make bad decisions. The third thing suffering does is metastasize in your mind through beliefs, storylines, and objectives that justify its existence and ensure its continued havoc-reeking presence in your life.
The only way to stop suffering is to stop suffering.
And there’s never been a better time to start. We’re in a crucial presidential election year, the throes of a global pandemic, the possible beginning of a new great depression, a time of deep and perhaps long overdo civil unrest, and there are no more episodes of Tiger King. Whatever your feelings are on cops, quarantines, candidates, quantitative easing, and Carole Baskin, the river of shit and blood and piss that is our cultural conversation will sweep you away and then drown you in a torrent of suffering if you let it.
Don’t let it.
Please don’t put yourself into a mental state where you cannot breathe.
