The Cause of Distress

 

 

Di’stress (Buddhist: dukkha), i.e. negatively experienced stress, is felt when a living being under-performs (Buddhist: under achieves).

Happiness (i.e. con’stress (my word invention), i.e. positive stress, Buddhist: sukkha) is felt when a living being performs, i.e. achieves, ecstatic joy when it outperforms, i.e. becomes ecstatic.

In short, di’stress (e.g. the stick) and con’stress (e.g. the carrot) function as a living being’s Guide & Control mechanism.

 

 

 

Since, according to the Buddha Keynes, ‘in the long run we are all dead’, we all eventually underachieve. And that results in much di’stress, felt as sorrow or suffering. In this sense the Sakya (i.e. Old) Buddha was right. However, di’stress as such does not result, as he claimed, from transience and dependence (i.e. non self-ownership) as such but from the inability to overcome both transience (specifically decay) and dependence. This is achieved, albeit temporarily) by attaining quantum status, i.e. an order of 1, and which is experienced as a true self (or atta).

 

In the course of time, the Old Buddha changed his mind (i.e. when he must have remembered how he himself had attained samma-sambodhi, i.e. perfect awakening ≈ realization) and took a more anticipatory and pro-active view. Di’stress is ended and con’stress (i.e. happiness) is achieved through attainment, for instance, via the perfection (i.e. samma-sam (bodhi)) of a personal function or task, such as ‘awakening to the functions domain of distress)’ or one of the means included in the Noble 8-fold Path. His Mahayana followers made much of the attainment (read: perfection, actually meaning whole satisfaction) mode of di’stress avoidance.

 

Again, dukkha and sukkha are a Guide & Control system. The world (i.e. Samsara) is not a mass of distress. Distress is caused by failure to respond @ best (and better) to the world.

 

Old Buddhism's list of the causes of distress

 

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