Recall the four noble truths:
1) Life is suffering
2) The cause of suffering is attachment
3) This can be overcome
$) The way to achieve this is to follow the 8 fold path
We haven't really talked much about attachment, so let's do that now. First, a question: what exactly is attachment? Is it wanting something? Not really - Buddhists are not trying to overcome all desires. Hmmm...so is it obsession? Well, it's certainly going to cause a lot of suffering if you are obsessed with something, but most of the time people are not obsessed with things, so if this were the only problem most of our lives would be happy. The idea of attachment is something more like this: it's wanting something in an unrealistic way. If you want something in an unrealistic way, then you are bound to be disappointed because your desire can not really be met.
What do I mean? Well, one way to cash this out is to talk about impermanence. All Earthly things are impermanent. Living things die, physical objects decay, entropy happens. We all understand this intellectually, but very few of us really accept it fully. We say, "Sure, I will die some day," but then freak out if it looks like that day will be today. Why is this? It's because, while we "know" we will die, we really haven't come to grips with that fact, so we seek to hide from it, avoid thinking about it. But you can't avoid death, so all this means is that I will suffer in trying to avoid what can not be avoided. I will worry about illness and injury that haven't even happened yet. Then when I get sick, I will worry about whether this might be what kills me. If it looks like I will actually die, I find myself scared to death, sleepless and depressed. While it seems at first that refusing to think about death will make me happier, it actually just insures my further suffering.
Buddhists really work on accepting the fundamental impermanence of things. One good example of this is the construction of mandalas, which are very complex geometric designs. Every few years monks come to Clemson and construct a mandala in the library - you should check them out the next time they come. How could this help with impermanence? Well, traditionally mandalas are made out of colored sand. A team of monks might spend three entire days making a complex mandala out of sand, then when they are finished, they get a broom and sweep it up. The idea is that the mandala is a thing of beauty and should be enjoyed, but it is also a transitory thing and we should not seek to preserve it. As with the mandala, as with all things on this Earth...
There is a very interesting type of meditation in Buddhism called "cemetery meditations". As the name suggests, they basically amount to meditating on different aspects of death. For example, you might spend an entire meditation session meditating on your own dead body and what will happen to it after your death. This strikes us as morbid and weird, but that's the whole point. You KNOW you will die and that your body will decay. Why is it weird to accept this and spend a bit of time thinking about it? Because you are trying not to accept what you know to be true. You instinctively feel that, if you can just avoid thinking about what will happen, you will somehow be happier. But actually all it does it leave you completely unprepared, emotionally at least, to deal with death. This just increases your eventual suffering.
What we have to do is come to grips with the fact that nothing last forever. This allows us to interact with the world the way it really is, not the way we wish it to be. Far from causing suffering, a realistic attitude increases our enjoyment of things. How? Well, if we realize the something is here only for a short time, then we will appreciate i all the more. If a parent realizes that their children will one day grow up and leave the house, they will enjoy the childhood years they have all the more. On the other hand, if they refuse to accept this fact, then they will cling to their children, preventing them from maturing properly and causing everyone involved to suffer unnecessarily. If you think about it, you can come up with many such example where a person's refusal to accept impermanence causes suffering. On the other hand, accepting that nothing last increases our enjoyment of what he have when we have it -there's even a song about this idea: Tim McGraw's Live Like Your Were Dying.
Meditation, of whatever type, is very good at getting us to truly accept truths we already know intellectually. This may seem trivial, but the fact is that, if we do not accept a truth, then it tends not to influence our actions very much. If you look for them, you will find yourself coming to accept things like this as you continue to meditate. I will give just one trivial example that often happens early on in meditation. You experience a pain - perhaps a knee issue or lower back pain. You "know" that this pain does not really signal an injury, it's just a transitory moment of discomfort that will pass as soon as you stand up. Nevertheless, you tend to act as if it really did signal injury. You want to deal with it NOW. You have a hard time ignoring it. Pain is BAD. After you have been meditation a while however, you will come to realize that it's not bad at all, at least not in this situation. You will find it easier and easier to ignore the pain because you really KNOW that it's not important. Now that you truly accept what you knew only intellectually before, you can easily modify your behavior. Similarly, you "know" that it's better to love other people than to hate them, but you still hate. Wouldn't it be nice if you could integrate this basic truth into yourself so fully that you actually acted on this belief?
Ok, so today we will do our fourth and final loving kindness meditation. Next week, we move on to compassion...