"I believe that as a species, human beings define their reality through misery and suffering."- Agent Smith, The Matrix
Look, to put it another way: Friday night, I stopped at the local Kroger's supermarket on the way home from work to pick up some groceries for tomorrow's Zen hike. I parked a good deal away from the front entrance because the parking lot was full and, my attention wandering all over the place, I started walking toward the store.
In the parking lot ahead of me, right near the entrance, a man was yelling at someone in a taunting, sort of teasing voice. I didn't pay attention to his words, as I doubted they concerned me. As I got closer, I saw that he was pointing to someone sitting in a car parked in the front row.
The yelling was sounding louder, not only because I was getting closer to it, as well as more aggressive. Then, the guy in the parked car got out and started pointing back at the Shouting Man. It was then that I noticed it wasn't a finger he was pointing.
It was a gun.
We define ourselves as other than the outside world by a process of elimination - that which we perceive on the outside is not ourselves, so the remainder must be us. This perception is in the form of sensation - what we see, what we hear, what we feel, and so on. Perception itself is the process of ignoring those sensations which are indifferent to us - the vast majority to be sure - and focusing in on what is either pleasurable or offensive.
Walking toward the Kroger's, my perceptions initially considered the sensations of sound from the Shouting Man to be indifferent to me, based on my past experience of people shouting and yelling for no real purpose that I could determine. But when the sensation of seeing a handgun appeared, my perception narrowed in and focused on that one thing - the gun and the eyes of the man pointing it. In fact, my whole universe of awareness was reduced to those two elements - nothing else existed in my universe at that moment.
The yelling continued, and my perceptions now sought out the words: "Oh, you're gonna be that way about it, huh? You're gonna be a gangsta over this, a thug? Why you gotta be that way?" The Shouting Man didn't seem afraid - I got the distinct impression that this wasn't the first time he had a gun pointed at him - and he stood his ground and kept talking.
Eventually, the gunman dropped his arm, waved disgustedly at the Shouting Man, and got back in his car. Apparently, what ever the altercation was about, it wasn't worth risking a murder rap. He closed the car door and backed out of the spot, then slowly drove out the lot, passing right by me. I kept an eye on him to make sure he didn't fire off a passing round as he left, and he looked extremely angry. If this were a cartoon, he would have had black steamy lines rising above his head. He was suffering.
So the first lesson of this encounter was observing how my sensations were affected by my perceptions, and my perceptions by sanskara (mental formations, volition, or memory).
The second little lesson was how both of these men were suffering due to their cravings. Shouting Man was angry over some real or imagined transgression, and was craving an apology of some sort, and was suffering because he wasn't getting what he craved. The Gunman wanted respect, and was suffering because he wasn't getting that, even after he had produced a handgun. And the craving for apology and the craving for respect were both based on the men's perceptions of themselves as separate from each other and separate from everything else - their cravings arose from their perception of an ego-self.
I'm glad that no one had to have a cap popped in their ass as a result of all this ignorance, craving, suffering and false perception.
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