I’ve been spending a lot of time contemplating the Buddhist and Hindu concepts of sukkha and dukkha, which roughly translate respectively to “satisfaction” and “dissatisfaction”.  They are key concepts in the Four Noble Truths, the first of which is often mistranslated as “life is suffering”.  A more correct translation would be “life is dissatisfying”, with the following Noble Truths stating that there is a Path towards not necessarily “happiness”, but “satisfaction”.

I think about this a lot because I find myself dissatisfied much of the time, and from an intellectual perspective, I’m not sure why.  I don’t really have anything to be dissatisfied about if I’m living in the moment and not being stuck in the past or fixated on the future.  And yet I find myself feeling precisely that way, even when I’m doing my best to “be in the moment”.  Instead of seeing the possibilities of living, I’m bored and unmotivated.

This could merely be my mental illness showing up.  After all, that is the hallmark of most mental illnesses: knowing you should be feeling one way, yet being unable to despite your best efforts.  By the same token, I believe as Carl Jung did, that there is little to no difference between the psyche and the spirit, and that healing can be achieved by seeking spiritual solutions to psychological problems.  And so I continue to focus my efforts on understanding Buddhist psychological wisdom, because it’s often so helpful.

In Buddhist psychology, dukkha is caused by clinging and grasping to what is temporary, which is everything.  So when I find myself feeling dissatisfied, I have to ask myself what it is that I’m clinging to and grasping for.  This is not an easy question to answer.  It requires a lot of looking in the proverbial mirror and digging in the proverbial dirt.  Even despite employing what I now recognize as an internal dialectic process that Socrates would be proud of, it’s still difficult for me to truly suss out the source of a problem.  I ask myself a question and get nothing in return, which is very frustrating.  It means I have more digging to do in order to leave room for the answer to bubble up from my subconscious.

Exploring why I experience dukkha rather than sukkha means I have to ask myself if I’m standing in my own way, which is another hard question.  I’d rather get out of my own way than get my ego hung up on doing something wrong, though, so I generally keep judgment out of the equation now and just address the issue at hand.  Unfortunately, I am finding that I do indeed stand in my own way sometimes, most often with the wrong attitude or perspective on things.  I still have a deeply ingrained tendency to see the world through ‘black lenses’ that essentially invert everything to look like the opposite of what it really is, and to hyperfocus on what’s negative, giving me a very distorted view of things sometimes.

If there is an overriding issue of mine that I’m working on at the moment, it’s probably this, the shifting of that inverted, distorted perspective so that it sees good things, not bad ones.  It’s a habit I come by honestly and that kept me safe for a long time, so it’s understandable that my psyche is reluctant to let go of or even change this very old habit, but it must be done.  The tendency to see what’s negative rather than what’s positive has the potential to ruin everything good about my life, and that would be so sad after everything I’ve been through.  I’ve worked hard for what I have, I want to keep it.