How We Cling

You may remember that passage where the Buddha says that wisdom or discernment begins with two questions: “What when I do it will lead to my long-term harm and suffering? What when I do it will lead to my long-term welfare and happiness?” The wisdom lies in seeing that happiness and suffering come from your actions. Your actions are important because they give results in line with the principles of cause and effect. These principles apply all the way through the development of right view, all the way up through the four noble truths, and even beyond the four noble truths.

Take, for instance, the first noble truth: the truth of suffering. The Buddha starts with some ordinary examples: aging, illness, death, not getting what you want, being with what you don’t like, being separated from what you do like. All of these things are familiar. But then he goes on to say that the common denominator among these examples is the five clinging-aggregates: clinging to form, feeling, perception, thought fabrications, ad consciousness. This is where it gets unfamiliar.

You may say, “I don’t consciously cling to these things.” But you have to understand that there are four ways of clinging, and they’re all very familiar:

clinging to sensuality, your ideas of where you’re going to find sensual pleasures;

clinging to views, your ideas about what the world is and how it works;

clinging to habits and practices, your ideas about how things should be done;

and then clinging to doctrines of self, to your ideas of who you are.

These are things we cling to really fiercely, and we know that we hold on to them. Together they form your view of reality, of you in the world, understanding how the world works and how you’re going to find pleasure in the world. They’re the basic parameters of becoming: the act of taking on an identity in a world of experience.

A lot of philosophy, a lot of our everyday thought, deals with the reality of these issues: “Who am I? What is the world? How do I fit into the world? How can I get what I want out of the world?” When we have specific ideas about these issues, we hold on to them very dearly, because that’s how we’re going to find our happiness. That’s what we think.

The irony here, of course, is that the Buddha says we’re suffering because of these activities. When he talks about sensuality, it’s not just a matter of pleasant, pretty things or nice-sounding sounds. Our attachment to things comes down to our fantasies about what those things mean to us. Our attachment to our family is basically an attachment to sensuality. Our attachment to our possessions is attachment to sensuality. We think we’re holding on to things, but as the Buddha said, we’re actually holding on to activities: the activity of giving meaning to these things, of telling ourselves that this is where pleasure is to be found. That’s the clinging. It’s a mental activity.

Sometimes you hear that there’s a physical clinging response where a part of the body seizes up or gets sticky or opaque or tense, and somehow if you manage to be relaxed energetically throughout the day, there’ll be no clinging. Well, those physical sensations are just the symptoms. And often, when dealing with clinging, you do have to do some symptom management. But the real cause is the mind. It’s what the mind is doing. That’s where the real cure has to be focused.

The mind has its addictions. It’s addicted to these activities. All too often, our ideas of the world and ourselves in the world and how things should be done aren’t providing us with very much pleasure, but we can’t think of anything better. So we keep going back, going back, repeating these actions, affirming to ourselves, “Yes, this is the way the world is. This is who I am. This is how things have to be done. This is real pleasure.” There’s a constant monologue inside. It’s addictive because we feel that if we loosened our views of these things, things would start falling apart. We wouldn’t be able to find the pleasure we want.

That’s what becoming is all about. We have an idea that pleasure will be found in a certain place. It turns out that that place or that thing—or whatever it is—is located in a certain world, you have to go into that world, you have to have certain abilities to find what you want there, and you have to follow certain ways of acting to find it. You think that as long as these things are nailed down, you’re secure. But they don’t stay nailed down.

This is where the insight into the aggregates comes in. They’re actually just activities—perceptions, thought constructs, or feelings—and they’re pretty ephemeral. The purpose of meditation is to get you more directly acquainted with these activities in a hand-on way. As you’re focusing here on the breath, the breath is form. You’re trying to create a feeling of pleasure. You do that by holding certain perceptions in mind about how the breath moves through the body, together with thought constructs or fabrications: how you talk to yourself, directed thought and evaluation—directing your thoughts to the breath, evaluating how the breath is going, how the mind is staying with the breath. Even if you get to the higher levels of concentration where there’s no directed thought or evaluation, there’s still the intention to stay there, to hold on to a perception that anchors you in a particular topic. That counts as fabrication, too. And, of course, there’s the consciousness that’s aware of these things. As you meditate, you learn how to deal directly with these activities.

It’s like moving from being aware of your body in terms of how solid it feels or how warm it feels to actually seeing that it’s made up of different atoms, different chemicals. When you create your state of concentration, it’s as if you’re dealing directly with the atoms and chemicals, although in this case, the atoms and chemicals are activities. Then you begin to reflect: This state of concentration is probably the best state of becoming you can find, but it, too, has to be maintained. You have to keep working at it. It’s something you have to keep doing.

After all, the aggregates are actions. Form deforms, as the Buddha said. Feelings feel. Perceptions perceive. Thought fabrications fabricate things, and consciousness cognizes. We’re not holding on to things here. We’re holding on to actions. When you gain that insight into the aggregates through your concentration, then you can turn it on to the things you hold on to, and you realize that you’re holding on with these same activities. Yet they’re all pretty ephemeral. They’re not as solid as we’d like them to be.

Now, this would be disorienting if it weren’t for the fact that the Buddha promises that when you can let go of these activities, you’re actually more secure. In other words, you stop doing these things. In the beginning, you stop doing anything that gets in the way of the concentration or that would go against right view or the other factors of the path. Then finally, you start turning on the path itself, letting that go as well. Which means you end up not doing anything at all. No intentions in the present moment.

You realize that your intentions in the present moment are what has held everything together. And there’s an insight in the mind, a sense of dispassion for this whole process, that allows you to drop it, to stop it. When there’s no passion for the fabrications, you don’t do them anymore, so they all stop. That, the Buddha promises, is the end of action, but it’s also the beginning of true happiness.

The reason you know it was the end of action is because you’ve learned to be very, very sensitive to what you’re doing. You thought you were holding on to things, but you’re actually holding on to actions. The act of holding on, of repeating those actions again and again, is the real problem. What you’re doing is the problem.

This is why the Buddha really understood action, because he got to a point where there was no action. He was able to see that our karma in the present moment is what’s putting things together because he had stopped doing karma in the present moment. That’s when his experience opened up to the deathless.

So clinging is what you’re doing over and over and over again, like an addiction. Most of us are like addicts. We can’t imagine that if we stopped our addiction we could still be happy. But the Buddha stands as evidence: He stopped his addiction and he’s the happiest person around. Although that’s not quite right. He taught everybody how to be as happy as he is.

It takes a leap of faith to believe that you can stop your addiction and that there are people who have been able to stop their addictions and find true happiness.

But what else is there? What other hope is there? We keep coming back, coming back, coming back, repeating, repeating, repeating, holding, holding, holding, as things keep falling apart, falling apart. Which do you want?

So in teaching us the path, the Buddha teaches us a new way to cling, but a way to cling that takes us to the end of clinging. We cling to the pleasure of concentration. We cling to right view. We cling to our precepts, to our practices of meditation, and to our healthy sense of self, that we’re capable of following this path and that we’ll benefit. But this is clinging for the end of clinging. That’s what makes it special: It takes us to something really special. We’re not learning just things as they are. We’re learning things as they can be. And that makes all the difference in the world, a difference that goes beyond the world.