Causes of unhappiness

It is widely thought that a core Buddhist insight is that our desires cause our unhappiness.  This is because nothing is permanent, so we are either frustrated by our inability to satisfy our desires or, if they are satisfied, by our inability to keep them satisfied.

Desires, or "clinging," is actually one one of three things Buddhism defines as causing unhappiness.  The other two are revulsion and delusion.  A revulsion is a negative desire -- something we want to avoid, like a stinky outdoor toilet or a bee sting or growing old and seeing death ahead.  Yea, they do cause unhappiness.

But it's that third one -- delusion -- that is the real hard one to deal with.  It is not something we can deal with meditating or adapting or disengaging.  It comes on us -- a mental illness is mainly it -- being unable to see any hope in the world, being convinced one is possessed by demons, being convinced we are being persecuted, hearing voices that tell us to do horrible things.

Mainly it is the diseases of depression and of schizophrenia.  They put us out of touch with reality and remove our ability to understand this -- that last part is what makes them so intractable.  Nowadays medications that can help (and generally do) are available and people should not discourage them or be afraid of them, as long as professional advice (not just an ordinary doctor, who may be as prejudiced on the subject as many people) is where the drugs come from.

Recognizing the delusion for what it is, is not usually going to happen, but it should be tried and tried again and again.  "This too will pass" applies mainly to depressives who have the condition on an intermittent basis, who have to learn to wait.  Others have it even more difficult and dangerous.

Distinguishing Reality, Illusion, and Delusion

We live our lives in a huge illusion, but we presume there is a reality "out there" which generates the illusion we experience.

For example, the sky is not blue.  The atmosphere scatters certain wavelengths of sunlight more than others, with the net result that what enters our eyes when we look skyward are wavelengths that causes our brain to generate a certain experience that our mind in English calls "blue."  In other words, colors are an illusion of the brain generated by the fact that when we look at things, whatever wavelengths of light they reflect (or in a few cases generate) are made by the brain into experiences (or color "qualia") for our mind.

I sometimes hear voices that aren't there (usually when half-asleep) that disturb me, but I long ago realized that if they are not there, then they are not there and it is something generated in the brain, no matter how "real" they sound.  Sounds are not real.  The brain generates sound qualia just as it generates color qualia, and in both cases, although they usually have some relationship to the reality of the external world, they don't always.

The difference, of course, is that the sounds of Bach in the background are illusions while voices I may hear from phantoms are delusions.  The Bach comes from sound waves from the speakers in my room from the CD I'm playing (an illusion generated by another illusion generated by another) while voices in the head no doubt have some source in my normal mental chatter that gets mistaken as incoming sound, but it has no external source and so is not illusion but delusion.

Illusions have something "real" under them, delusions do not.