Good afternoon everyone - I responded to the Cutler readings from the book The Art of Happiness on
chapters “Facing Suffering” and “Self-Created Suffering”. I want to thank my consultants Luca, Maddie,
Miranda, and Shailee — sorry if you had to face suffering in reading the chapters so closely. But I’ll try to
make amends here — this presentation is about the best ways to deal with and reduce suffering. I will present
the core argument in each chapter, explain my criticisms of what I believe are faulty assumptions involved,
and hopefully open for a more nuanced look at the nature of suffering and how to deal with it. If you disagree
with anything I say, I ask you to respond to this bit of anger or suffering by taking a note of your disagreement
and challenging me afterwards!
Slide 2: Summary
To jog your memory, the chapter on Facing Suffering began with a little anecdote about the death of a
woman’s only child and her search for the mustard seed. The main point of the chapter is that denying
suffering only makes things worse, and the best way to deal with suffering is the accept it fully — only when
the woman from the anecdote was exposed to the suffering that everyone in her village had, then could she
feel at peace again.
Why does denying suffering make things worse? The basic argument has 3 points. First, suffering is the
nature of life. There is suffering everywhere, and that is the plain fact.
So if you try to deny suffering, no matter how good you are at turning a blind eye to suffering, it will strike you
in the face at some point. If you have been in denial for so long, you will be unprepared with suffering strikes.
You will suffer so much more for having no clue how to deal with it.
Furthermore, by denying suffering, you have already made a negative evaluation of it. Only if you think
suffering sucks a lot, of if you are terrified of it, then you try to deny it. This terror of suffering is just an added
layer of suffering. So, denying suffering only creates extra suffering rather than reduces it.
So, what should we do if it’s so clear that denying suffering won’t help? We should fully accept the suffering in
our lives and around us. Face up to this bully and stop hiding away. The Dalai Lama uses a war analogy to
help us understand the importance of accepting suffering. Suffering is like our enemy at war. Only by knowing,
investigating, and understanding our enemy can we know their plans and tricks, and then maybe we can have
a better chance at outsmarting this enemy and defeating them. Likewise, we need to first accept suffering in
order to investigate and understand its nature, in order to possibly succeed at overcoming it.
Slide 3: Assumptions
Did any of you find this advice too simple or take issue with it? I certainly did. Although I believe the war
analogy is nice in theory and the Dalai Lama is wise, and I’m sure this analogy helps many people understand
the Buddhist message — I think it is deceptively simple. Let me show you how so.
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This argument that denying suffering is bad, and accepting suffering is good, depends on some key
assumptions. If we knock down these assumptions, then the argument collapses too. One assumption is that
suffering is like some objective, mind-independent thing, that sits there in your life, like this presentation I’m
giving, whether you choose to look at it or not. If suffering is objective like this, then it follows that by turning
my attention towards the suffering, the suffering should not change but simply be revealed. My attention is like
a flashlight and shows what already exists out there in the darkness. If these assumptions sounds fine so far,
in the next slide hopefully I can change your mind.
Thirdly, this argument presents a contradiction. It asks us to have genuine, non-judgement acceptance of
suffering. We should just acknowledge the suffering is there without hating it or doing anything else that would
make things worse. However, the argument also claims that our goal is to reject suffering, to liberate
ourselves from it. The need to liberate ourselves from suffering already presupposes that we don’t like
suffering. By trying to reduce suffering, we are affirming our evaluation that suffering is a terrible thing. So, the
only way to resolve this contradiction is to either get rid of the goal to reduce suffering, or to get rid of the goal
of genuine non-judgemental acceptance.
What is the right way to resolve this contradiction, and how do we correct these other faulty assumptions?
Slide 4: Corrections
I think I have some answers. First, we need to realize that suffering is not some object-like entity, but rather
suffering is constituted by our experience. The same goes for any emotional process; suffering, happiness,
and sleepiness all alike are not objective thing that we can look at or refuse to look at, but they all partially
created by our attention.
The way we pay attention to any emotional process would change it. Attention is not some flashlight that I can
point to in my mental space, but instead attention will transform any psychological object, like hands that
squeeze and sculpt a mound of clay. Paying attention to suffering would manipulate or elaborate on it, just as
how I cannot grab onto clay without changing its shape and making it into something new. I take this idea from
philosopher Merleau-Ponty, who convinced me that attention really creates things rather than discovers them.
So, it can in fact be dangerous to accept suffering. I think it is very difficult to have a totally neutral acceptance
of suffering - it is in our nature to take any object as having significance relative to our interests. In some
cases, it might be better to actually deny suffering and simply go on in life. Over time, as we are engaged in
new activities, the past suffering that we chose to deny could just fade away without unintended
consequences. There is a study by Bushman and colleagues that showed that trying to forget about one’s
anger was more effective in reducing anger than acknowledging and releasing it. Of course it all depends on
the particular type of suffering at hand, because sometimes it is essential to face up to it. All I’m saying is that
it is not a universal truth that accepting suffering is the best way to go, given that suffering is not an objective,
and attention does not simply reveal but in fact can distort and create.
On the issue of the contradiction between acceptance of suffering and the goal of liberation, think it is best to
just drop the concept of judgement-free acceptance. Don’t just nod to suffering. We should try to move
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towards liberation, spit at suffering for hindering, and actively work at re-evaluating suffering, or fighting
suffering in any other way, in order to liberate ourselves.
Slide 5: Summary
Now I will discuss the chapter on “Self-Created Suffering”. In this chapter Cutler argued that suffering is not an
inevitable, inherent effect of events; instead we create it in how we respond to events. His argument goes as
follows: the effect of an event is just our responses to it and nothing more. According to this argument, it is an
illusion that events cause us to suffer. Events never cause us to feel anything, because we only encounter
events through our responses. So don’t blame an event for suffering; it is our response that creates it.
So, Cutler goes on that there are some kinds of responses that especially exacerbate suffering. One is
personalization, or when we take events as directly aimed against us. For example, if it rains, and I
personalize the event, I take that the sky decided to rain today to just get on my nerves. Another kind of
response is obsession, or when we fixate on something bad that happened, repeat it in memory, and reinforce
the horrible feelings it gives. For example, maybe I obsess over that day when it rained and ruined my hair
look limp. I get so angry every time I think about it, even though it happened so long ago.
According to Cutler, by responding to events these ways, I create suffering for myself. So I should stop
personalizing and obsessing. Instead I could recognize that I play a role in my suffering and am partially to
blame. The world isn’t out to get me, but I can hurt myself, and I should stop hurting myself. I should also
recognize the fact of impermanence, which refers to the ultimate fact that everything is in flux I can relax and
see that things change and move on. I don’t have to obsess over the past.
Slide 6: Assumptions
I’m not sure if you had any disagreements with these arguments. I was surely riled up by how Cutler seemed
to downplay the fact of that we don’t choose our responses to events. Rather, decades of habit and innate
responses build up our automatic reactions to things. I also think that obsessing or personalizing events could
be tendencies we’ve adapted through our evolutionary history, so creating suffering could be important and
good — I’ll go into this thought in the next slide. I guess neglecting these nuances is a rhetorical move on
Cutler’s part, because this book is a “handbook” on “the art of happiness” afterall - Cutler wants to be upbeat
about the possibility to become happy. But I think it’s important to dwell on the complicated nature of suffering,
or to “face it” - I’m referring to the previous chapter. We want to be well prepared.
Slide 7: Corrections
Now, I’ll try to convince you of my points. It is clear that many responses we have to events are necessary and
inevitable. If you bite into a lemon, you’re going to respond in tasting sourness. If a dog bites into your finger,
you’re going to respond in a lot of pain. Cutler doesn’t say anything that rules out these facts, but he just
doesn’t emphasize this side of the picture, of how we don’t create our suffering but it is inevitable sometimes.
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Of course Cutler is right that we can have later reactions, or form judgements, about these responses. I can
think that the sour lemon brightened my day, rather than make my mouth hurt. This judgement makes me feel
better. And it is true that we can be more deliberate in our judgements, and over time these judgements we
continuously form can shape how we immediately respond to things in the future. Maybe after repeated
practice, the sour lemon become instantly joyful and not painful at all, without my having to deliberately
rationalize it as such. My consultant Maddie posted an interesting article about the psychology of “resilience”
which refers to our ability to modify our emotional responses to events. People with greater resilience can
recover from trauma more effectively. Maddie asked whether resilience is something inborn, or whether it can
be cultivated. I’d say it can be cultivated, but only indirectly and through much labour - we must practice being
slow and deliberate in judging our automatic responses over time.
However, I want to also mention additional concerns I had. I think some innate responses are very important.
For example, it is a common saying that anger is important for motivating action. It is possible that obsessing
and replaying an event in my head is necessary to building up enough anger so that I go and report the
person who hurt me, so this person will get in trouble and hurt fewer people in the future. A study by Eric
Shuman and colleagues showed that people with more anger about political conflicts felt less fearful and more
motivated to push for reconciliation promoting policies, if they believed change is possible. If they thought
change was impossible, however, the anger was more destructive.
I wonder whether these Buddhist teachings that anger and hatred is always bad was more appropriate in the
sociocultural context 2500 years ago in India. Back then most people had no political power. So no matter
how angry they got they couldn’t do much about it. But in the modern day we have comparatively more justice
systems in place and have greater personal power. So we are able to act on anger and actually make things
better for ourselves sometimes. I compare this anachronism to religious laws that ban eating shellfish, for
example. Back then it was necessary to survival because it was poisonous. But today the world is different
and food production methods make shellfish perfectly safe to eat.
I think lessons drawn from each chapters can be used to criticize the other chapter, as I’ve shown. We need to
fully face up to the complexities of suffering, as shown in the first chapter, and this fact complicates the
arguments in the second chapter. We also need to recognize how we can create suffering, and suffering
depends on our mental processes, as shown in the second chapter. This lesson counters the arguments in
the first chapter, which treat suffering as if it is an object as we can simply accept it neutrally without changing
it.
Slide 8: Sources
Thank you all for listening. Here are my sources. I especially want to thank my consultants and the artist
Daehyun Kim, whose art I’ve used throughout this presentation.