Self is Source of Suffering
In a previous entry (Do You Really Want Peace on Earth?) I mentioned the upcoming Mindfulness Day. We had a nice event, meeting new and old friends and enjoying “golden wind” on a clear autumn afternoon. In my presentation, one of three offered that day, I talked about why we have problems and how to solve them.
All problems come from selfishness due to self-preservation. The accretion of four billion years of self-preserving action and its results (karma) has created hard shells with which we shroud our individual and collective selves, like shellfish. Confined and limited, we can no longer move freely, knowing and acting well.
No one likes the selfishness of others, but everyone loves one’s own. Selfish individuals or groups are hated, hit, hypnotized in hubris, but eventually humiliated due to their own karma, like iron crumbling in its own rust. Like cancer, selfishness grows from its essence and destroys its entirety infecting all others entwined with it.
Trying to escape from our problems or protect our sense of self, we build cities and civilization (urbanization), pyramids and castles (in the air). We discriminate, exploit, and exterminate. We want beautiful heaven with drinks and dance, rather than ugly earth with shells and shots.
Francis Bacon dreamed of achieving infinite happiness through science, identifying four human idola (cave, marketplace, theater, and tribe) that could limit its pursuit. To these “idols,” which I identify as self, society, status, and species, I add a fifth: symbol. Really, these are no other than karma, conditioned responses by which we learn to define and limit ourselves.
While poignantly human, our strong sense of self is like a sharp knife that can be used both to cook and to kill. Self is the starting point of all problems and suffering. It is the origin of selfishness (sinfulness; separation from the total, integrated system), delusion, and destruction. It seems lively, but is only “living in a dark dungeon of devil.”
All religions aim at reunion from sinfulness to holiness (wholesome whole), but we fall back into selfishness due to karma. In Buddhism, we stop karma through the practice of zazen, or sitting meditation, and we practice holy reunion by taking refuge in our friends, or sangha.
The Buddha said, “Friends make all of life,” and in fact universal religions have their ideal figure in ‘friend’ (Mitra, Mithra, Mazda, Maitreya, Messiah). Our friends help us to break free from our shells and to recognize that we are part and parcel of all. By helping each other, we can savor amrita (ambrosia, immortality) beyond all mental and physical fabrications anywhere anytime.
Dear Roshi,
Thank you for your blog. It’s an important topic for us all to consider. In reading it I came up with some additional thoughts that will hopefully add to the conversation.
The stopping of karma (habit energy) would lead to friendship with all reality. Through zazen (seated meditation) we let go of habit energy by focusing our attention on our breath in the here and now - can’t do two things at once, it’s either thinking or being here with our breath. Being a friend starts with quiet listening or observing, like in zazen, which can lead to experiencing situations, people, environment, etc.. as they are, without adding anything from our past stored up attitudes and discriminative thinking. We can be a friend if we are completely here now and in acceptance. This is only fully possible when our habit energy has ceased. But the less involved we are with our mental fabrications of reality the more open we are to what is needed in each moment. If we begin now, living life observing without adding our past karmic patterns of thinking and acting we can know the reality that we are beholding this very moment, and thus have full appreciation of it and take care it with complete understanding and devotion. We are able to be supportive, loving, strong and protective.
We seldom sit still and focus our minds in the present. We are in love with our “small self”, imagined permanent self, and go around trying to preserve this “small self” at any cost. We cling to our belief in the “small self”. This “small self” lives in fear because it knows deep down that, in all it’s manifestations, it’s days are numbered. It’s voices say things like: “I’ve got to look good”, “I’ve got to be right”, “I need more, more, more” and “I don’t want to die”. Sounds schizophrenic, but what I really mean is that it is a single ultimately fictitious self with many imaginary needs and thus many voices.
If we have status, possessions, power, immovable ideas or material possessions that we hold on dearly to, we are going to be defensive when threatened with the loss of them. So we go around with our armor on, our hard shells.
I guess the opposite of this hard approach is to be soft and vulnerable.
If we let down our guard and become vulnerable, adopting self effacing poverty in our habits and our nature we automatically become good friends to all.
I look forward to hearing your further comments on these issues. I appreciate the topic and hope to learn more about how to see all others as friend.
Best Wishes,
Junsho
Pride (selfishness) is not putting God first, nothing to do with self preservation; one can preserve one’s life without pride.
Dear Junsho,
Thank you for your good truthful comment.
Trees are together with all (air, earth, water, nutrition, genes, birds, insects, humans,etc.). They never discriminate with nationality, age, etc. Humans are together with air, earth, etc. (German mit is English with. Sanskrit mit-ra is friend.) We are all together and friends in nature. We make foes artificially, unnaturally. This comes from selfishness (self-interest, prejudice). This creates problems and suffering.
When we sit down (stopping karma) and see calm and clear (objectively, selflessly) as trees do, we have no foes. This creates harmony and happiness, individually, socially, ecologically. Selfishness (shell) obstructs views, values, vivid living, free and full function.
Selfishness is the source of discrimination, exploitation, extermination, extremism, violence, wars, etc. Selfishness is immaturity. The more we become selfless (without shell), the more we become truthful, peaceful, bountiful, delightful, trustful, hopeful, beautiful,…full of fine things.
Truth before and beyond prejudice and delusion is selfless, related, i.e., relative, integrated system. Ignorance of this truth is immaturity, i.e., childishness. Independent, separated “self” is truly fictitious idea and idol. Humans must mature in truth, freedom, equality, love, peace to live in harmony, confidence and joy.
Dear John R,
Selfishness is self-centeredness and self-attachment in contrast to selflessness (neither self-centered nor self-attached). So, I think it coming from self-persistence and self-preservation. Where do you think it coming from? It is related with arrogance or conceit (usually groundless, negative, harmful), rather than pride (can be grounded, positive, fruitful).
Rosan Yoshida,
I don’t really understand your comment, there is a language barrier and you use “it” too often. Pride, to me as a Christian, stems from the Fall (when man acted on the temptation from Satan and thought of himself higher/better than God). Pride is the reuslt of us thinking too highly of ourselves; we think that we are above God. I don’t think that pride is ever beneficial.
Dear John R,
You have your own special usage of pride. I hope you see general usage in ordinary dictionaries. Don’t you have pride in yourself, your knowledge, your possession, your religion, your way of life,…and even in pridelessness. Do people have no pride in themselves, their way of life, etc.?
A view of self through others is harmony. A view of self that ends at self is the source of selfishness.
Selfishness is the source of pride, an expanded view of self through self.
Preservation of self is not selfishness. Self and selfishness are distinct. Nor is self preservation the source of selfishness. Pride is the source of selfishness. It is the vicious circle.
We are nothing if we are not preserving of self. Life is not selfish. Life is.
At a higher level, selfishness is not bad. It is only selfishness.
Pride is the source of suffering, not self. A self expanded view and expectation of one’s self that is forever unmet, disappointment.
Self is distinct from pride and not its source. Pride is the abuse of self, and its source is self righteousness.
A view of self as the source of suffering is powerful. It accepts the responsibility in the matters of selfishness, righteousness, and pride.
John R.
Pride and selfishness has everything to do with self preservation.
In Christianity SIN originated from the HEART of Satan, as shown to us in Ezekiel 28:15, “You were perfect in your ways from the day you were created, Till INIQUITY was found in you. Same for human beings, iniquity (sin, injustice, wickedness, evil, crime) originate from the hearts of people because God created us with freedom of choice (free will).
God did not create sin and could never be content with forcing people do as He wished, He want and have always wanted the angels and people to choose Him over all things from out their free will and desire. Satan had the choice to remain loyal to God, or to rebel against Him. He was created with no taint of maliciousness. His rebellion was not the fault of god, but the result of his own free choice.
Sin so warped Satan’s character that he is beyond the point of no return as far as repentance is concerned. Covetousness (greed, materialism), pride, envy, selfishness, bitterness and hatred are the only plants that grow in his heart. Human beings are in danger always of becoming this same warped way from these deadly sins because all evil that we know are birthed from these. When you notice any of these character flaws in people you are in contact with, you are always in danger from them if the right circumstances ever arise and is why some of us realize that so many among us are capable of the most unbelievable evils. People possessing these character flaws are also in danger of bringing upon themselves a harden state of no return.
In such a state people just as Satan foolishly attempt to self preserve being blind to the fact that they are not preserving themselves but only bringing harm/death upon themselves.
In Satan’s rebellion he influence many other angels to rebel against God and follow him, where war pursued in heaven and Satan was kicked out down to the earth. Satan’s rebellion in heaven failed. In the earth Satan still had access to some of God’s unfallen creatures. God allows the loyalty of ALL of His free-will beings to be tested. Although Adam and Eve had been warned of the consequences of disobedience, Satan was still able to entice them to disregard the warning. Satan, symbolized by the serpent implied that they could be like God and that struck the cords of pride, envy (jealousy) and covetousness (greed, materialism) within Eve and Adam. We see people everyday who have taken on the character of Satan and the worst thing one can do to them self is to fall in step, following after such people and participate in their evils.
After Satan was kicked out of heaven down to earth, the serpent (representative of Satan) said to Eve, Gen.3:5, “For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” Adam and Eve were drawn to the tree of good and evil: and in that moment of vain-glory, and high notions, they made the wrong decision.
We learn from Scripture that jealousy and pride was Satan’s original sin. It shows us just as just how dangerous these two sins really are because from them are born selfishness which is the cause of ALL problems within our world just as Rosan Yoshida has written here.
The best Christian example of selfishness is when Satan caused the death of Christ on the cross, look at how he influenced people to bring Christ to His death in order to preserve things as they wanted and desired things to be and Jesus was a threat to them in keeping things as they desired. Satan not only lost his power over those he held captive in death, but he also demonstrated the extent to which sin had corrupted him. He was willing to murder the source of health and strength for all mankind to accomplish his selfish purposes.
People behave in this same evil way on the earth today, we see it in our world just as Rosan Yoshida has written, “in trying to escape from our problems or protect our sense of self, we build cities and civilization (urbanization), pyramids and castles (in the air). We discriminate, exploit, and exterminate.”
It is a Christian truth also that, “Self is the starting point of all problems and suffering. It is the origin of selfishness (sinfulness; separation from the total, integrated system), delusion, and destruction. It seems lively, but is only “living in a dark dungeon of devil.”
Scripture agrees with what Rosan Yoshida has written here, “All problems come from selfishness due to self-preservation”.
It is very deceiving harmful and detructive, in fact, regarding self-preservation, the context of Mark 8:35-37 is most revealing, “For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me and for the GOSPEL will save it. For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul ? Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?”
It tells us that it is the soul of man that can be lost from allowing these sins to enter one’s hear , which is the cause and effect, reaping what you sow (karma).
Jesus, (our Messiah) warning in Mark 8:35-37 was spoken to a mixed crowd of people, both saved and unsaved because He wanted those saved to know they could still become lost just like he wanted those still on the road to hell to know the price God demands for final salvation (an actual entrance into God’s kingdom).
Dear Another,
Selfishness comes from self-preservation instinct and instinctive action, isn’t it? Self-preservation comes from “self” idea and action, isn’t it? “Self” idea is delusion, isn’t it? “Self” unchanging among others and independent from others is unrealistic, isn’t it?
Is your self static and self-controlling? Life is neither static nor self-controlling. Don’t you get old and get cold? Life is dependent on limitless factors and functions in time and space.
If there is the true “self,” it must be self-same and self-sovereign. If “the self” changes constantly and have no control on its self, what kind of “self” is it?
The “self” idea is like grasping an elephant’s tail and a pointing finger. It is cutting out from the entire dynamic function and catching on an idea, not reality (constantly changing total system in interdependence: in the law of Dependent Origination).