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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 |
