Do you ever feel a sense of unease, that something is not quite right? That if you could only get that one thing, or be with that one person, or be in another place, then all would be right with the world? Or if you could only get rid of this problem, or person, or feeling, then you would be happy and at ease?
You may have everything you need: a nice home, family, a good job, good friends — and yet there is this constant longing to be somewhere else, to be doing or feeling something different. You may not recognize this, but these thoughts and emotions cause suffering and tend to obscure the positive and beautiful things in your life. This self-created suffering comes from our ignorance of the true nature of reality: We are simply not seeing things the way they truly are.
Ignorance is the root cause of the never-ending cycle of craving (grasping for things) and aversion (pushing away) that leaves us with a sense of dissatisfaction and longing, which is at the root of our suffering.
The Abhidharma — a system of Buddhist psychology based on the earliest teachings of the Buddha — provides a detailed analysis of the mind and its processes. It offers an inner roadmap for analyzing and dissecting our experience into its various components in order to see how we create our own suffering and can instead approach inner freedom. It leads us to a place of embodied wisdom: the recognition of reality truly as it is, leading to the cessation of suffering caused by ignorance. Through these experiences, we can develop the tools to liberate ourselves from ignorance and the root cause of discontent. We begin to glimpse what true reality looks like and how we may experience it in our own lives.
In his teachings, the Buddha was clear in saying, “Do not take my word for it. Put the teachings into practice, analyze them, and bring them into your own experience.” This is what the Abhidharma teachings are asking us to do. You take an experience, like waking up in the morning and stressing out about all the things you have to do that day, and you begin to break it down: You open your eyes while you’re lying there in bed, and you feel the impulse to roll over and grab your phone off the nightstand. Without thinking, you pick it up and start checking messages and seeing what’s on your calendar for the day. This sparks a chain of thoughts about a bunch of things you’ve been procrastinating about, which activates the stress response in your nervous system, and before you know it, the restful feeling of your sleep is long gone, and you’re stuck in the toxic loop of rumination.
The Abhidharma invites us to take a closer look. The progression from feeling the impulse to grab your phone to the flood of stressed-out thoughts might play out in a few short moments, but there’s so much happening in the mind. What sparked the impulse to grab the phone in the first place? And why does the mind leap from looking at a few things on a calendar to a stream of judgmental thoughts? If you look closer, you’ll see the dance of craving and aversion — the desire to hold on to some experiences and push others away. When you’re looking at your phone, your eye-consciousness is just seeing shapes and colors, but that triggers the conceptual mind, which labels, judges, and interprets what you’re seeing. These interpretations might be colored by attachment and craving in some cases — like when you think about stopping by your favorite coffee shop to grab a latte — but more often than not, they’re tainted by aversion in all its many forms, from anxiety and frustration to full-blown anger.
“The Abhidharma is a lens to view your experience, but you must transform yourself, transform your kleshas, through your own experience. This is your wisdom. This is your superpower!”
By observing these tendencies, what you are doing is like a scientific experiment within your internal laboratory. You explore your experience and break things down into their infinite parts. When you do this, the warm flame of insight begins to melt the frozen mass of ignorance, which is the basis for the cycle of craving and aversion that creates all our stress and suffering.
This is how you learn to transform your suffering. You can observe and examine the intricate web of experiences that shapes how you see the world, and especially how you see yourself. This includes your thoughts, feelings, and the raw data of sensory perception. You explore all this without judgment or expectation, but rather with a sense of care, acceptance, and openness. By bringing awareness and compassion to your experience, you can see your habitual responses more clearly and work with them in a healthy way.
So, it is not just the teachings of the Abhidharma alone that can really transform you. The Abhidharma is a lens to view your experience, but you must transform yourself, transform your kleshas, through your own experience. This is your wisdom. This is your superpower! Through inner exploration, you can free yourself from all the habitual patterns that lead to chronic stress, unhealthy emotional patterns, and other forms of suffering.
So, how do you transform these habits of being that limit our view of reality and create suffering? How can you dissolve our ignorance, craving, and aversion? You begin by developing bodhicitta, the desire to help all beings be happy and free from suffering and to awaken to their true nature. With this motivation, you can then meditate, for example, by breathing with awareness. This will help calm and stabilize the mind, allowing you to explore and examine your experience to generate insight and wisdom.
One way to do so is to investigate your direct experience: do your beliefs and assumptions match what’s really going on? What you will likely find is that, although our natural tendency is to view the world and everything in it, including ourselves, as permanent, singular, and independent, things are in reality far more fluid and complex. In Buddhist terms, we talk about gaining insight into impermanence, multiplicity, and interdependence. Seeing these qualities clearly in our own direct experience uproots the ignorance that keeps us locked in a cycle of suffering and chronic dissatisfaction.
Impermanence – Accepting Change
As humans, we often hold tight to the way things are. We like consistency, stability, and sameness. We don’t like surprises, we don’t like change. When there is a sudden change in your schedule, for example, you may feel unsettled. But such resistance to change creates problems because change is the very nature of our lives, and indeed of reality itself. Even on a molecular level, everything is changing. Every moment we are aging. You may reflect on these changes and feel anxious, sadness or depression, or you might focus on all your aches and pains with aversion.
If you can recognize this natural tendency as you are feeling it, this is the first step toward transforming this belief. If you can see and feel your craving or aversion to change and how this is playing out in your body or in your life, you can decide how to respond. Embodying the recognition that all things are impermanent allows us to loosen our emotional grip and let go of trying to hold on to things that will inevitably change. Nothing is permanent. Everything is in a continuous process of arising and dissolving. When you see change as inevitable, you can let go of resistance.
Letting go is not a passive act; it is intentional. When a happy time in our lives comes to an end, or a relationship changes, or a loved one passes away, we recognize and accept this as part of the flow of impermanence. This does not mean we do not feel sadness or other emotions; rather, the recognition of impermanence helps us to get rid of the stickiness of those thoughts and emotions, as they are impermanent too, and this helps us build resilience.
Multiplicity – Opening to Complexity
We often view the world through the lens of our beliefs and interpretations. This can be helpful for navigating the overwhelming complexity of our lives, but it comes at a cost. Our beliefs tend to oversimplify and distort things. They keep us from seeing the richness and complexity of experience.
In reality, nothing is as unitary and simple as our concepts would have us believe. The real world is infinitely complex. In Buddhist terms, we would say that things are not singular — there are so many pieces. No matter where we look, things change all the time. They are not permanent. They are impermanent.
On their own, change and impermanence are not a problem. The problem is that we expect things to be otherwise. What we are expecting and what ends up happening hardly ever match. Then we feel disappointment, anger, anxiety, worry, loneliness, and sadness.
From this perspective, the sense of a separate, permanent self is an illusion. Our bodies, minds, and experiences are constantly changing, shaped by innumerable external and internal causes and conditions. By recognizing that you are not the discrete, independent “self” that you believe yourself to be, you start to let go of a rigid self-image and fixed notions of who you are.
When you sit down to meditate and explore your direct experience, you will see a multiplicity of parts: In your body, you can see all the pieces right down to the cells and molecules; with your feelings, you can break them down into their component parts; when you try to find your mind, you can see that it is everywhere and nowhere. This realization that there is no solid, fixed self is called “no-self,” or “anatman.” This is a profound insight that shatters the usual way of relating to the world. When we let go of the illusion of a fixed, singular self, we discover a more fluid, flexible, and compassionate way of being. We shift how we experience the things around us. This radical change of perspective helps us meet each moment with awareness and compassion, rather than getting caught up in reactivity and judgment.
Interdependence – Exploring the Web of Connections
Closely connected to the understanding of impermanence and multiplicity is the principle of interdependence. The Buddha taught that nothing exists in isolation; everything arises in dependence of countless other factors. You are not a separate, autonomous individual, but rather an interconnected node in a vast web of relationships.
For example: when you see an island off in the distance, it looks like a separate, independent piece of land, but if you look below the surface of the water, you will see all the tendrils of connection that hold the island to the earth and feed its existence. Similarly, you could not exist without your family who brought you into this world and nurtured you, and the web of connections that brought you to the present moment. You could not exist without the land you live on, and those who help provide the food that feeds you. When you start to see your profound interconnection and interdependence with all of life, your actions become infused with a sense of care and responsibility toward all living beings and our planet.
The Buddha offers a radical alternative to how we usually see the world. Ignorance, aversion, and craving are transformed. Aversion becomes loving-kindness and compassion. Craving becomes awareness or presentness. Ignorance becomes wisdom.
Through the practice of meditation, you can learn to be present with your experience without getting caught up in reactivity. You can observe the arising and passing of all phenomena, including your thoughts, feelings, and sensations, with a quality of acceptance and openness. This doesn’t mean you become numb or indifferent. Rather, you develop the capacity to respond to life with greater awareness, loving-kindness, compassion, and wisdom. This clarity allows your mind to become more open, flexible, happy, and creative in a way. You’re able to enjoy pleasure without clinging to it, and to meet difficulty with patience and understanding.
This freedom from your own afflictive thoughts and emotions is the essence of inner liberation and this then ripples out into the world to help countless beings.
See the previous pieces from this series on the Abhidharma:
How Buddhist Abhidharma Practice Mitigates Aversion, Craving, and Suffering, by Mingyur Rinpoche
Watch: Mingyur Rinpoche teaches on Mindfulness of the Body
Understanding Abhidharma, a.k.a. Buddhist Psychology — a Q&A with Edwin Kelley
