Less Is More Last time we saw that craving and its close twin of aversion are the main actors on the stage of suffering called life. These are the automatic reaction patterns that we have to pleasant and unpleasant feelings caused by coming into contact with objects in the world. We also saw how craving is a root cause of so much of the suffering which we have. Today I want to discuss more strategies that we can use to cope with OCD by tackling the problem of craving.

Sometimes, when we are immersed in something for long enough, we do not realise what we are in. For example, we could walk into a musty smelling room and it hits us straight away. If we spend a few hours in the room, we gradually notice the smell less and less. After a few days, we are totally accustomed to it and we do not notice it at all. It is the same with us craving and desiring things, we do it so often that we do not even notice that we are doing it. From the moment we wake up, we think how we are going to satisfy our craving for food, warmth, love, respect and so on.

Craving is what the Buddha called a mental defilement. I would say that OCD is another type of mental defilement. The Buddhist view of the mind is that it is inherently pure but for defilements or taints like these. The goal of the Buddhist path is the removal of these taints so that we are left with the mind in its pure state, filled with peace and compassion. These defilements live below the surface of the conscious mind and have to be rooted out. They normally lie dormant until an opportunity arises for them to come out of hiding. The Buddha noticed, as can anybody who practices meditation, that the more active our minds and bodies are, the more chances these defilements have to express themselves.

A few analogies will make this clear. Imagine that your mind is a glass of water. The water is clean and pure, like your true mind. Next imagine dropping a small pellet of dye into the glass. If we keep the water as still as possible, that pellet will drop to the bottom and will remain undisturbed. However if we start to vigorously stir the water, before long, that pellet will have completely discoloured the water. That pellet is like a defilement in our minds such as craving or OCD. If we keep our minds as still as possible, then those defilements do not have the chance to develop and pollute our thoughts.

Or let's imagine that we are in a quicksand. Thrashing about will only make our predicament worse. In order to get out of this, we have to keep as still as possible so that we stop sinking. Only then will we be ready to look for ways to pull ourselves out. The best way to keep our minds still is to practice the various forms of meditation such as mindfulness of breathing. However, the novice would not be spending much of his or her time in meditative states during the day. What can we do to maintain the spirit of stillness even when off the cushion?

One answer is to live as simply as possible. Over the last few years there has been a "voluntary simplicity" movement. This is a choice of lifestyle that we can make. It encourages us to make do with fewer wants in our lives. It doesn't mean that we give away all our material possessions and go live on a mountain or anything like that. What it does do is to make us question whether the latest car model or the newest HDTV screen will really brings us lasting happiness. Or whether once we acquire these things, our craving moves onto other objects of desire and we are back on square one. Our craving is an unquenchable force that seeks ever receding horizons if we let it.

I think that if we simple our lives up a little, we give less material for our OCD to sink its hooks into. The height of simplicity is where everything in the world including our own possessions are "ownerless" to us. In Buddhism, this is called anatta, which is one of the three characteristics. Let's say that we have an OCD event such as we see some dirt on our carpet. Before we start obsessing about it, anatta tells us that we don't really own that carpet anyway, so who cares? Or we have an OCD thought that we didn't close our front door properly when we left our home this morning. Anatta tells us that our house and its contents don't really belong to us anyway, so who cares? Sorry, OCD, you're out of luck this time!

Let us finish with an extract out of one of the books of the AA organisation which states the same message. In order for us to work more effectively on our mental defects and unwanted behaviour patterns, which in our case includes OCD, we have to work at reducing the mental and physical clutter caused by our craving. Thus by choosing calm and contentment over our base cravings and desires, we create for ourselves a positive feedback loop which will spiral us onwards and upwards towards the peace of mind that we all seek.

"The chief activator of our defects has been a self-centered fear-primarily that we would lose something we already possessed or would fail to get something we demanded. Living upon a basis of unsatisfied demands, we were in a state of continual disturbance and frustrations. Therefore, no peace was to be had unless we could find a means of reducing these demands."

From page 76 of the 12 & 12 of Alcoholics Anonymous

Metta,
John

The message of Buddhism is that our happiness lies not in seeking to satisfy our many cravings, but that happiness lies in cultivating contentment which brings real peace to our lives.  ¶ 6:21 PM 6 comments

  Roots Of Suffering What a drama is acted out on the stage of life! If we aren't worrying about what happened yesterday, then we worry about what we are going to do tomorrow. We suffer like this, from one personal crisis to another. I can't think of a single play, film or book that doesn't involve one of the characters going through suffering of some description. In the media, suffering sells. No wonder modern society has so much suffering, we seem to crave for the stuff whether consciously or subconsciously.

There are two types of suffering in life. The first type arises because of our existence in this world and is natural suffering. This includes physical pain when we have accidents, pains in our bodies as we grow older and death when it eventually comes to us. There is only so much that we can do to try to avoid this kind of suffering. Suffering exists because we are alive. It's in the house rules of the party called life which we have gatecrashed.

However, natural suffering like this only has a limited scope of effect on us. We can only have so many accidents in our lifetime. We only grow old once and we all experience death just the once. In contrast to this, there is the second type of suffering which is self-created suffering. The relative size of this second type absolutely dwarfs the first type. The Buddha said that the origin of this second type was to be found within us and not in the outside world. What a challenging concept this is to our ego. How can our sufferings in some way be due to our own making? How does that sound fair?

The Buddha was not a moralist. He never said that you should do this or you should do that. He never created the Universe and the laws which govern it. He simply said that if you do this, then that happens according to natural law. The Buddha said that it was a thing called "desire" or "craving" (the Pali word for craving is tanha) which was the internal cause of much of our suffering. In expanding on this, he said that there were three kinds of craving which could cause suffering; the craving for sensual pleasures, the craving to become something and the craving to get rid of something.

All three kinds of desire are like young weeds in our mental garden, which the law of cause and effect will nurture into an epidemic of suffering to overrun our peace of mind. Desire in these forms is like a cancer in that it grows unabated until it blocks out the good within us. The danger lies in desire growing into attachment which means we desperately try to cling onto things, wishing them to be eternal when they are impermanent, to be ours when they are ownerless and to give us satisfaction where only suffering is to be found. To deny these three characteristics of nature is to invite suffering to come home to roost. The Buddha said not to take his word on faith alone on these matters, but to see for yourself if this is true in your own life.

What can OCD sufferers take from this. We have OCD because of a malfunction in our brains, in one of our three brains to be exact. This causes us to experience intense unpleasant feelings when certain triggers happen. Thus far, there is not a lot of difference between this and normal physical pain that we regularly experience. If we bang our knee, then we experience intense feelings for a while, then they pass. If we have a mental OCD accident, we experience intense feelings as well but they hang around for a lot longer. Up to this point, we are in the first category of suffering defined above which stops at the level of feeling.

If we are not mindful enough, then we pass over to the second larger category of suffering which is that caused by desire or craving. In our case, it is the desire to be rid of something (Pali: vibhava tanha), which are the intense unpleasant sensations which we are experiencing. What is wrong with that desire one may ask. Nothing, except that any action that is motivated by this desire, for example doing compulsions, causes us further suffering down the line. It may be wise for us to treat this desire to get rid of OCD as the true cause for our suffering and not the OCD itself. During an OCD attack, we should try to reduce this desire to get rid of it, rather than trying to make the unpleasant feelings go away which they won't do by power of will alone.

Practically speaking, this means that we should try to resist doing compulsions for as long as possible and not give in to the craving. This all sounds easy in theory but I know how hard this can be. Take heart though, you are not alone. There comes a time in life when we stand up and exclaim that enough is enough. We are no longer going to be slaves to our mental defilements such as OCD. Buddhists are grateful to the Buddha for pointing out the way to achieve the end of defilements. Let us contemplate then the second of the Noble Truths.

"Suffering has a cause (tanha)"
The Noble Truth of the Cause of Dukkha (Unskillful Cause)

But whoever in the world
routs wretched craving hard to quell,
from such a one do sorrows fall
like water drops from lotus leaf.

Verse 337: Dhammapada

Explanation: Craving is a lowly urge. It is difficult to escape craving. But, in this world, if someone were to conquer craving, sorrow will slip off from him like water off a lotus leaf.  ¶ 8:35 PM 1 comments

  What A Feeling! Humans are such complicated creatures! We are walking, talking bundles of feeling and emotion. How many times do our feelings and emotions win over our reasoning at the end of the day? Last time, we discussed what Buddhists call the five aggregates. One of these, the feelings aggregate, is given special attention. To recall from last time, feelings are categorised by the Buddha into three types; pleasant, unpleasant or neutral. Here, we do not use the word "feeling" in the sense of higher order emotions such as love, but just the tonal quality of those thoughts and emotions. I will use the word feeling in the Buddhist context from now on.

We saw that neuroscientists have discovered that there is a part of the brain called the R complex at the core which governs raw emotions like pleasure, pain and fear. When we have a gut feeling of fear or an intense pleasurable sensation, these do not come from the cerebral cortex, but deep down in the subconscious from the core structures. This is why we find it hard to directly control feelings because another part of the brain, independent of consciousness, is in command of them. Buddhists say that the key to unlocking ourselves from the prison of Dukkha is to let go of these learned reactions to feelings, which are produced by the core of the brain.

It is interesting to note that one of the current theories for why we have OCD is that structures in the R complex such as the caudate nucleus are in chemical imbalance. When OCD rears its head, our feelings become intensely unpleasant. Our learned reaction patterns are to perform compulsions or ruminations until we get a neutral or pleasant feeling instead. It is not just when OCD comes calling, our whole lives are governed by our reactions to our feelings. Our brains seem to be programmed to move towards those things which give us pleasure and to move away from those things which cause us displeasure. We do it automatically and without thinking. Where did this programming originally come from?

These reaction patterns are part of our inherent survival instincts from when we were babies. When we were newborn or even when we were in our mother's womb, the overriding concern in our lives was the principle of pain and pleasure. Our higher brain structures were still very undeveloped, while our R complex had the important task of keeping us alive. When we felt hungry, the unpleasant feeling in our stomachs was immediately acted upon and we start wailing for our parents to feed us. When we were given warmth or attention, the pleasant feeling caused us to display our pleasure by giving the baby noises which our parents sought. The neural circuits responsible for our reactions to pleasant and unpleasant feelings were etched into our brains before we could even walk.

For sufferers of OCD like us, these automatic reaction patterns have their work cut out for them. When OCD hits us, the unpleasant feelings are so strong that our brain circuits deep down work overtime to move us away from the situation causing the OCD. The compulsions which we perform to alleviate the unpleasant feelings often have very weak or no connections to the obsession. We might have an obsession about something which happened years ago and by washing our hands now, the pain of the obsession goes away as if by magic. In the same way, a baby moving its arms and legs and crying out produces the result of a full stomach and the feeling of hunger goes away as if by magic. The baby doesn't have to think about the whys and wherefores of how this happens, it just knows that it works. What is common in both cases is the automatic reaction pattern to move away from unpleasant feelings by doing whatever is necessary.

What I have found useful is that during an OCD attack, try to focus on the feelings and sensations in your body. Move your conscious attention from inside your head to outside onto your body. How does OCD feel to your body? Where are the unpleasant feelings located? I sometimes feel it as a tightness in the chest area. Once you have identified which area of the body the feeling of unpleasantness is coming from, try to relax that part of the body as well as you can. Keep focusing on that part of the body and stay out of your head! After a little while, the feeling will start to pass away from your body and when you come back to inside your head, you will hopefully find that your obsession is much reduced.

Most people do not realise why they sometimes act the way they do. They do not know that they are compelled from behaviours deep inside their minds, conditioned a long time ago. The Buddha said that our conditions can be overcome by following his advice. He said that we could strive to gain deliverance from suffering in this very life, which is tantamount to us rewiring our brain at the deepest level. This seems like an impossible task, but the Buddha and his followers, both past and present, all over the world achieved this goal. The way they did it has been documented in the Buddhist teachings which we have been making our way through on our journey. Next time, we will see how all this relates to the second of the Four Noble Truths.

Metta,
John

Our automatic reaction patterns to pleasant and unpleasant feelings were conditioned into our young minds in our infancy. As adults, if we have not developed enough mindfulness, these reaction patterns still hold sway over our daily lives uncontested. A Buddhist Master may gently tease us by asking how many of us in adulthood still operate as if from a cradle.  ¶ 5:39 PM 3 comments