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How many of us, for example, are still convinced, mature as we may be, that if our mate would only change, or if we could only meet the perfect person, everything would be fine? These are the dysfunctional myths and illusions that drive our lives in very dissatisfying directions. How many of you remember the song from the musical Fiddler on the Roof-—“If I were a rich man …” What’s your big “if”? The big “if” that leads you away from wisdom and reality?

The development of wisdom is greatly facilitated by seeing our little hypocrisies and large illusions and learning to be more forthright and honest with ourselves and others. Wisdom is seeing the true nature of things—exactly as described in the Four Noble Truths, or the Four Facts of Life according to enlightened vision. Wisdom is higher consciousness, wakefulness, and awareness. Wisdom is self-knowledge: Wisdom is truth manifested as clarity of vision. Wisdom sees that light and dark are inseparable and that shadows are also light.

SAMSARA: THE CYCLE OF

CONDITIONED EXISTENCE

Conditioned existence—that’s a technical way of describing this flawed world. When we talk about people trying to fully embody a spiritual practice, we tend to speak in very lofty terms, but on a day-to-day level, many of us are trying to resolve gritty, here-and-now issues. As much as we may like to think of our concerns as primarily spiritual and having higher meaning and value, in fact we are also coping with the physical and psychological issues of this life, this world, and the times in which we live. Consider the following examples:

Robert, who wants to connect with others in a more meaningful and satisfying way, feels that his lonely neediness has contributed to the several intense attachments he has formed to rejective women. He wants to be done with such unsatisfying patterns.

Jennifer needs to do something about her anxiety. The smallest upset and she feels overwhelmed; her heart starts racing as she begins preparing for disaster. She wants to calm down.

Debra is overly attached to her family and dependent on their approval; even as an adult, she is terrified of being alone. In search of herself, Debra has consulted sages and savants as well as crystals, psychic channels, and Tarot.

Steven doesn’t know to handle his fatigue and generalized sense of anger. Like many others Steven has taken a good look at the ladder of his own success and found that it is leaning against the wrong wall.

Conditioned existence, as these people experience it, often means living a life of superficial habits and compulsions. To some extent, that’s how most of us live. Controlled by our psychological patterns (our internal conditioning), we are hostages to unconscious drives, needs, and impulses. We stay in jobs we hate; we repetitively choose relationships that are hurtful. We don’t know how to break habits that are self-defeating; we don’t know how to change patterns that are misguided; we don’t know how to find better, more creatively satisfying ways of being. That’s unconscious behavior and that’s conditioned existence.

Whether your unconscious behavior finds its source in something that occurred in your childhood, as Freud thought, or in something that happened lifetimes ago, as a Buddhist belief in rebirth suggests, the end result is the same. What you are doing isn’t working. Dissatisfied is dissatisfied. Unconscious is unconscious. Is there really a distinction between psychological or spiritual distress? Psychology and Buddhism are two different traditions with a shared truth: As long as you stay unconscious, asleep at the switch of your own life, true happiness will prove elusive.

The Buddha gave conditioned existence a name: samsara. Samsara is the Sanskrit word that describes the wheel of suffering that we perpetuate by doing the same thing time and time again. The literal definition of samsara is “perpetual wandering.” In Western terms, samsara describes deeply entrenched conditioning and beings (all of us) who are looking for fulfillment and satisfaction in all the wrong places. More often