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