The Third of Three Sufferings: Fundamental, All-Pervasive Suffering
This post continues the series “The Three Sufferings.” Before reading this Third Suffering, Fundamental Suffering, I recommend that you first read about the the two kinds of Ordinary Suffering: the Suffering of Pain, and the Suffering of Change.
Categorically distinct from the previous two Ordinary Sufferings of pain and of change is the Fundamental Suffering born of our conditioning. Because this Fundamental Suffering undergirds all suffering, including the two ordinary sufferings, it is traditionally referred to as All-Pervasive Suffering.
You may be surprised to learn that All-Pervasive Suffering is rooted not in our emotions, but in our attentional system’s processing of raw sensory “data.” At least provisionally, it can therefore be said that the problem of emotional reactivity is found “downstream” of the more fundamental problem of sensory misperception. For this reason, I assert that correction of sensory misconception is Tier 1 of any efficient graduated path to enlightenment.
With insight meditation practices, we work with misperception arising specifically in three sense spheres:
The felt sense of the body
The auditory sense
The visual sense
Each “sphere” consists of two reference points: a “subjective” perceiver and an “objective” percept. The early goal of insight meditation practice is to liberate the three sense spheres from their mooring in the default attentional system. By reading The Critical Path to Awakening and practicing its methods, you will gradually come to understand what liberation means and what it entails.
But here, as a necessary first step, we must focus on understanding the problem: Fundamental Suffering born of human conditioning.
Duality, Particularization, and Time
The trouble with default sensory perception is that, because it is attentional, it is dualistic. When persons knowledgeable uses the word duality in a Buddhist context, they mean that our attention preemptively separates out perceiver from percept.
In other words, the human attentional system structuralizes reality by abstracting from an otherwise direct holistic experience a stable subjective reference point. It also privileges that reference point over against the ceaseless flow of perceived objects, even when those objects are other living beings. The term duality refers only to this specific polarity: a subject reference point and an object reference point. This dyad is the highest order of what constitutes misperception.
So the first result of the attentional system’s drive to structuralize reality is to separate an object from its perceiving subject. But then this drive foregrounds that object from the rest of a whole objective “field.” In fact, a unified “field” is abstracted in the first place only because the perceiving subject presumes that the endless flow of percepts must also be backed and subsumed by some kind of stabilizing structure. This stable background “field” from which the subject remains separate—and over which the subject presumably dominates—reinforces the subject’s sense of self-entitihood, individuality, and self-importance.
Attempting to further suppress all threat of ephemerality, the subject reflexively perceives objects to be quintessentially separate not only from the subject and the background “field,” but also from other objects. In other words, attention particularizes some region of an otherwise limitless field and designates that region a unique object. At every level of consideration, the perceiver’s structuralizing drive organizes itself according to a reality ruleset whose principal axiom is separateness.
Because the structuralizing drive assumes the separateness of objects from one another, each object is necessarily narrowcasted. Because attention particularizes the field into these unique, narrowcasted objects, the perceiving subject can “pay attention” to only one of them at a time. Ironically, then, the illusion of structural stability requires that objects be perceived only serially. This serialization of individually perceived objects is what human beings call time.
In terms of Buddhist psychology, the serialization of perceived objects is also known as attention bounce. Attention bounce from object to object to object necessitates its own organizing rule—namely, that the perceiver rank-order some percepts over others. This ranking is accomplished by means of reactivity: Some percepts are attractive, whereas others are aversive. This organizing rule that directs attention bounce introduces human emotionality into our consideration of fundamental suffering.
Let us pause to recap this complex sequence: From our own sense of essential separateness from the field, we project onto all perceived objects their essential separateness from the field and from one another. Consequently, when we fix our attention on any region of the field, an “object” is foregrounded, particularized, and imbued with its own unique subsistence, while the rest of the field recedes from our otherwise broader awareness.
Conditioned by this recursive narrowing of experience, we concretize every percept into a self-subsisting, eternal form. We can focus on these separate forms only serially, however, and this introduction of time threatens our drive to concretize and eternalize everything. We compensate for this inconvenient eruption of time into our desperate need for permanence by not only solidifying, but also privileging, our subjective reference point.
Attentional Fixation as (Con)fusion
Ignorance subtends the attentional system’s serial fixation on particularized percepts, whether they be physical or mental. Specifically, our inability to “enlarge” cognition into the omnipervasive, interpervasive “context” of any particular percept encourages our attractive and aversive reactivity to run wild: We therefore grab at the particulars that we desire, and we shove away those that we hate or fear.
This “branch grabbing” phenomenon is known in contemporary sources as monkey mind, which is none other than the attention bounce that nearly every beginning meditator confronts during formal practice. The good that comes from this disruption to the ostensible goals of early practice is that the practitioner clearly recognizes it for the first time as his or her everyday “autopilot” mode of self-focus and mental time traveling, both of which are a form of “checking out” of presence.
A lack of broad metacognitive awareness—or, in Buddhist parlance, mindfulness—maintains fundamental ignorance. Without development of this broadening capacity, attentional fixation on particularized objects will translate into our unconscious, “checked out,” serial fusion with them. Ignorance is the receding of the whole “field” into nonawareness. It is what enables our fusion with particularized percepts.
This fusion can emerge with the valance of attraction, aversion, or an overt mode of “checking out”—such as dullness, indifference, sleepiness, or boredom. Regardless of valence, at bottom it is the unconscious, compulsive habit of ignoring that maintains our (con)fusion-generating attentional system. This fundamental ignorance is the All-Pervasive Suffering born of human conditioning.
Broad Metacognitive Awareness
Because of ignorance (in the sense of ignoring), the earliest milestone in insight meditation practice is skill in holding open a cultivated version of broad metacognitive awareness. With that breadth held open throughout formal practice, the aspirant metacognitively tracks moment-by-moment experience at the most fine-grained level of sensory data. This breadth of awareness hosts a gazillion of the tiniest, most fleeting sensory data as they flicker in and flicker out.
By further developing and applying this all-inclusive metacognitive capacity, or mindfulness, the practitioner increases both the spatial range and the temporal speed with which the finest sensory data can be tracked. This repeated experience in turn further broadens and speeds up the practitioner’s cognitive capacity.
With consistent insight meditation practice, our sensory “tracking” capacity expands and accelerates until it eventually exceeds the limits of spatial range and the psychological time. The practitioner thereby penetrates the illusion that we and all else exist as separate, bounded, self-subsisting entities.
At that point, the cognizer and the cognized penetrate, reflect, yet contain each other. In some irreducible sense, they are each other. Therefore, the vast expanse, the field, knows itself. Moreover, all its contingent particulars know themselves precisely where they are, without any meditating perceptual “process,” without any “going” over to an “other” reference point.
Next, to continue the theme of conditioning, we will turn to the emotionality layer in a forthcoming post titled The Three Poisons.
Welcome! I’m Jenny. Back in 1982, at the age of 19, I began studying Eastern philosophy and doctrine. In the late 1990s, I authored a 400-page doctoral dissertation comparing Zen koan aporias to the deconstructive rhetoric of silence in modern American texts—an East-West interface that still informs my teaching and writings today.
2010 marked the beginning of my formal Buddhist meditation practice. After engaging Theravadin practices in late 2013, Stream Entry quickly happened in August 2014. Mahamudra Fourth Yoga stabilized in July 2015. I then began practicing within the Bon Dzogchen tradition and began writing content now informing The Critical Path to Awakening (forthcoming). In 2017, I founded Axis Mundi Awakening to offer an intensive whole-path Buddhist awakening program to select, highly motivated students. Interested to learn more? See my teaching approach and curriculum overview.