The Buddhist truth of conditionality, and cancer – why me?

Yes, there were times when I forgot not only who I was but that I was… (Beckett: Molloy)

The day I realized it can be smart to be shallow was, for me, a deep experience… (Donald Trump: Think like a Billionaire)

You have to say, for a cartoon character, Trump can sometimes come over all Nabokov. He is right. Effective public pronouncements need to be basically feeling with minimal content. (I mean what does the Gettysburg Address actually say?)

The Buddha had something of the same insight as The Donald. He saw that people don’t generally take much in. They need to dig out meaning and depth for themselves. Which is why Buddhism is a practice, not a belief system. He made this point in particular about his central teaching, called ‘conditionality’, or ‘dependent origination’. The teaching is simple: things happen, or they exist, only on the basis of certain conditions being in place. ‘This being, that becomes…’ Change those conditions, or wait for the conditions to change, and these things stop happening or existing. And er, that’s it. It’s not exactly inspirational is it? It’s not one for the fridge door.

The power of it is that it is something we lose sight of when it comes too close. We understand it but we don’t get it, we don’t live it. For example, when people talk about the Washington or Westminster ‘elite’ they are talking about people who have forgotten the truth of conditionality, that power is contingent, it is dependent, it is a relationship with a lot of ordinary people with rather unglamorous views and concerns. Ask anyone in showbiz. Like Trump. They understand.

You find the same thing when you get up close to the mind. Your thinking is the mind’s privileged elite, dedicated to optimizing the self’s google rankings, at least in your own mind. When Kim Jong Il, N Korea’s dear leader, recently persuaded the Chinese to block from the internet the expression ‘Kim Fatty the Third’, he was doing what we all do in our own way. We make it all about me. Our mental habits keep feeding us ourselves. Our thinking lives in a little world of its own, a kind of Westminster bubble of the mind.

Mindfulness and meditation is a kind of democratizing exercise. It is about listening, giving voice to the voiceless, unregarded aspects of the mind, its mysterious experience of sensation, of raw presence and feeling, of being alive to the world, and ‘the inarticulate speech of the heart’ (Van Morrison). When you meditate, the bubble of mental habits bursts open. At least for a while. Or for a moment or two. You experience a sense of yourself not as a fixed entity, but as a complex of changing conditioning factors. If I really pay attention, I will find that my experience of myself has changed from how I was even half an hour ago.

All religions answer questions. How should I behave? Where does the world come from? (actually Buddhism opts out of that one) and Why do we suffer? For example, cancer – why me? Well, how long have you got? There are any number of factors. There are probably genetic factors that have produced it; there may be lifestyle factors like diet; there may be external factors like pollution (living and cycling in central London); there may well be psychological factors like repression; there may even be spiritual factors, or karma, some sort of unskillful activity in my past, or some past life, that may be bearing this bitter fruit (not necessarily, but you never know); there is almost certainly an element of bad luck, or relatively bad luck (I am not that young - can’t complain, eh?) There is also the question of the effectiveness or otherwise of the doctors who failed to diagnose my condition. It may also be said that I am suffering from cancer now because I have survived long enough to do so.

And then, an illness is not simply an objective process that is going on separately from the person it affects. It is an experience, and how one experiences it represents another significant conditioning factor. We imagine that different people going through the same disease (or any other bit of hard cheese) are getting pretty much the same experience. This is not at all the case. This last factor is one I can change. I‘m not stuck with my experience as it is.