Arguing With Billy

It is not my goal to enforce any kind of viewpoint to anyone. My passion and interest in relieving your suffering, but this doesn’t mean I’m asking you to believe in the same thing as me. This means, it’s up to you to suffer or not and I have no interest in convincing you to not suffer, unless you want to relieve suffering and want to learn how from me.

Even then, just because I work with you it doesn’t mean I’m asking you to adopt my viewpoint. Even after you completely understand the mechanism of suffering, you can still opt to make the choice to suffer.

And I won’t take it personally or think I did a bad job, because what’s there to convince you of? To me, your decision (should you choose to) to suffer is no different from your decision to have a certain kind of pasta for dinner.

Moreover, my ancestor, the great Buddhist monk Wonhyo, famously renounced his monkhood to return to society. He got married and had a child, which is pretty much the reason I exist. So in the Buddhist world, the choice to suffer is not unheard of. But it is definitely a conscious choice, instead of an unconscious one.

I’ve been accused of being abusive or unsafe to be around, and not just once. This is a thing that happens somewhat regularly to me because the dharma tends to be pretty extreme about its viewpoint on suffering. Moreover it is hard for the conditioned mind to grasp the concepts; I even see my Buddhist teachers accused of the same thing.

I’m saying all this to ultimately say this: if you don’t agree with me or the dharma, that’s fine. That’s a personal choice you can have. But you cannot mistake that for the truth, just like how your belief around the earth being flat won’t make it flat.

The dharma is not centered around this external celestial knowledge that you don’t have access to. For example, I know nothing about astrology or or human design. In order for my life to make sense in that system, I need to study it. The dharma doesn’t work like that; the dharma is all based on verifiable truths that you can verify yourself.

(Verifying is vital in Buddhism because so much of the suffering that the Buddha experienced was due to him taking in all the things he was taught without verifying for himself, awakening was the ultimate realization of the dharma by a constant series of verifications)

For example, impermanence. It doesn’t take a Stephen Hawking level genius to realize that nothing is permanent. Although it certainly helps! If you think some things like the earth or the universe is permanent, the book A Brief History of Time is an excellent guide to understanding how science has verified all the truthful reality we get to observe today.

Another mark of existence: non-atomic self. There doesn’t exist this concrete, atomic thing to call anything so transitively there is nothing to definitely label as “me”. Everything about me is the result of a temporary contextualization. Again, this is so simply verifiable and doesn’t require any crazy knowledge about anything.

There does exist things that are not verifiable. For example, is there a god? This does not concern Buddhists because the existence of a god is not only unverifiable, but it has no effect on the ability to be happy today in this life. Since you can be happy with or without the belief that there is a god, it is up to your individual choice and none of my business.

Your belief in a god, however, does not require me to participate in the faith. That’s what causes religious wars and that’s super far from what Buddhists seek, peace. You can have ten pies of meat lover pizza for all I care, but you can’t force me to eat it. I mean you can, but that is forcing me to do something against my will.

This means, when one argues with me that it is impossible for them to not suffer given their life experience, they are free to believe it but that cannot be forced upon me as it is not based on reality. I’m not denying their personal reality of suffering. But it has to be differentiated from the truth if we are having a conversation about the dharma.

As a friend, I can empathize and take your side. But as someone teaching the dharma I would be lying to you that certain situations warrant suffering. This is, again, different from the perspective that everything is daisies and roses. Not everything in life will feel pleasant. But that doesn’t mean the unpleasant experiences need to incorporate suffering.

As much as I won’t take in your perceived truth, you don’t have to take my perceived truth. But Buddhists have over generations verified the truth that so far, as of right now, we have yet to discover at least one fundamental reason to suffer. Because of this great statistical odd that there will be no reason to suffer, we can generalize to say that there is no reason to suffer until we verify.

So what is that verification process? When it is offered to you that your lived experience is different from reality, one reaction is to just declare the offering as wrong and erroneous and never consider it again. Another option is to verify for yourself, if there is no true reason to suffer then why am I suffering?

You will come up with a reason, and it will be asked: is this a true reason to suffer? If it is a true reason to suffer, it will apply globally across all humans over time. Anyone subject to this reason will 100% suffer. Is this the case? Can I find at least one instance of a person who has the same situation as me, but is not suffering?

The constant verification of this simple premise, “there is no reason to suffer”, will grant a lot of insights about how much we are suffering because of ourselves. There is no reason to suffer outside of your own mind. There will be obstacles to this process, but it’s nothing you can’t overcome with a determination to end your own suffering.

And perhaps that great determination may be the only thing keeping you from total, complete happiness (i.e. lack of suffering).