craving

The second of the noble truths is craving - taņhā - dvar.

The essential pattern is that contact with sense pleasures gives rise to craving, which gives rise to clinging and dissatisfaction, which gives rise to suffering. The traditional formulation is here: 

“Now this, bhikkhus, is the noble truth of the origin of suffering: it is this craving which leads to renewed existence, accompanied by delight and lust, seeking delight here and there; that is, craving for sensual pleasures, craving for existence, craving for extermination.”

This is what I call dvar. Dvar is closely aligned with phasic dopamine and is a global agitation factor, a generalised feeling of unsettlement and disease, a crawling out of your skin with wanting to do something, something else, nothing.

Dvar is how spiky your dopamine is. The spikier it is, the more you are yanked about between love and hate, confidence and fear, desire and loathing, attraction and repulsion. Phasic dopamine is what encodes salience and desire for and against things, and large bursts result in large cravings: positive, negative, or positive-and-negative at the same time.

In the adhd literature this is often called rsd. Rsd, in my experience, is not limited only to human relationships but is a general feeling of insecurity because of the instability you feel with regards to people, objects, money, your view of yourself, memories and imagination.

This is pre-cognition and usually beyond our awareness. This is why you flip from loving someone to hating them; utter confidence to utter pessimism; complete security to overwhelming insecurity. The higher your dvar, the more you will suffer.

To break it down further:

it is this craving which leads to renewed existence

This is talking about rebirth. The craving causes us to be reborn as a new person, in that moment, then and there. The spikes of dvar come and they pull your attention onto the latest bauble or self-image and they hold it there, making you into a different being. The phasic burst physically changes the coding of your neurons. You feel dissatisfaction or pain until the urge is acted upon.

accompanied by delight and lust, seeking delight here and there

Dvar is unavoidable and is triggered by encountering a sense-pleasure or displeasure. It is how we learn and is an essential part of our evolution. You eat ice cream and it makes you feel good. A phasic burst of dopamine encodes the pleasurable experience and makes you crave it once more. You get mugged in an alley and a phasic burst encodes that you should avoid that alley or people of a similar appearance. Much of our encoding is passed to us by the people we encounter and our general environment - you doomscroll and you see doom. It is all driven by phasic dopamine.

It is important to remember that mind is just another sense in this model. The eye delights in visual pleasures and revolts against visual disgust. The mind does exactly the same. This is why we get attached to dreams, memories, self-image and more. We find delight in some and repulsion in others and our phasic dopamine jumps in to reinforce our thinking. This is deep reinforcement learning in a closed environment; training an agent on a limited data sample.

that is, craving for sensual pleasures, craving for existence, craving for extermination.

The key thing to realise about dvar is that it is a global value. You cannot have ‘positive’ dvar and ‘negative’ dvar. Dvar is dvar and it will encode for both extremes. It is like a magnet with a north and a south pole. All you control is the power, not the polarity.

The five external senses are easy to understand: you like or dislike a sensation so you want more or less of it. You do not feel at ease until your craving is satisfied, but satisfying that craving results in yet more phasic dopamine which encodes it harder. This is the foundation of addiction and why ironman athletes are the heaviest drinkers and hardest workers around. They have high dvar, and they don’t realise that the zone-2 workouts are how they are managing it, at least not consciously. But if you remove their Z2 work it’s like stopping a monk from meditating.

Anyway the most subtle and hard-to-recognise-and-remove are the mental formations to which we become attached. We develop a certain worldview or a certain view of who we are or who we will be, and we become attached to that the same way we would become attached to career success, respect, or ice cream.

We crave existence. We crave physical survival, of course, but we also crave ‘existence as’ something or other. We crave self-love. We crave self-dignity. We crave power and respect. We crave viewing ourselves as righteous and good and venerable so we harm other people in the process by trying to belittle them when they differ. We tell ourselves all kinds of stories to maintain these self-views and when they do not match the reality we suffer.

We crave non-existence in multiple ways too. We wish we could stop drinking so much, stop eating so much, stop snapping at our children, stop being the way we are. If things get bad like they did for me before my saga, we crave non-existence altogether.

And we can crave all these things at the same time. I reached dvar1.0 the winter after I found a suicide body, when the ptsd hit. I had been driving hard at the ironman, hard at the art, and just generally turning the volume up on all things I liked in order to drown out all things I didn’t like for 5 years or more.

When the ptsd and mental formation of suicide surfaced from my unconscious, I was driven to both act and not act, all at once. This will be what they call a mixed episode in bipolar terminology, but all it really is, is out-of-control dvar. Phasic dopamine tends to hit in the 100ms (calm) to 3s (painfully driven) range, and every 3 seconds I was getting physical waves of agony rolling up my spine and trying to make me act on my drive for non-existence. You need to keep those waves under control.

So.

Dvar = taņhā = craving = suffering.

If you want to suffer less, you need to lower your dvar.

The evolutionary drive to avoid-the-negative is stronger than the evolutionary drive to seek-the-positive so the only way you can lower dvar is by avoiding clinging to the things you crave. This in itself will lower your repulsion toward the things that revolt you. Being less attached to the positive makes you less vulnerable to the negative.

Remember: dvar is an essential evolutionary part of our being. Without it we could not survive. But some of us have dysregulated dopamine systems which means that our dvar requires more conscious management than most.

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