Right Action... Wrong Place


Bart: "They ruined my childhood!:
Lisa: "Your childhood is currently happening

That humorous title sums up our current clumsy means of dealing with human suffering.

No one can deny the fact of human misery. But wouldn't you think, that after all this time, we might have a clue as to how to alleviate it?

For literally thousands of years we have been scratching our collectives nose when it is our universal butt that is itching. There can be no relief to the annoying itch until we scratch in the right place. I mean when you're cold you don't put a sweater on the coffee pot. You put it on you.

Needless to say, this isn't the result of a lack of sincerity or persistence. It is simply our ignorance as to the source of our discomfort. We have completely mistaken the cause and, as an inevitable result, have come up with consistently failed solutions.

In every field of human activity we have learned to assess our results and alter course appropriately. Yet, in this endeavor to be free of suffering we don't scrutinize our most fundamental assumptions about its cause and cure. We seem to be stuck in the idea that somehow human suffering arises from conditions and therefore we engage relentlessly in the activity of trying to change conditions.

We change partners
We change jobs
We change locations
We change clothes
We change leaders
We change political systems
We change economic systems
We change religions
We change attitudes
We even rearrange the furniture

Yet the suffering remains. And it will continue to. Why? Let me ask this. What do all of those changes have in common? They all are an attempt to change external conditions in the hopes of alleviating the experience of suffering, discontent, discomfort. We keep scratching in the same place, despite the failure to achieve relief.

2500 years ago Buddha suggested a path to the end of suffering. The first step in that path was simply "Right views." In other words, seeing things as they actually are. We can infer from that, that the first cause of suffering would be wrong views. Needless to say, trying to alleviate suffering while being steeped in wrong views of how suffering actually comes to be, would definitely be scratching your nose when your butt itches.

The incredible profundity of non-dual self-inquiry is that its whole thrust is to question those assumptions that have led to human suffering.

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