craving

The second of the noble truths is craving - taņhā - what I call dopamine variability.

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.”

Craving is aligned with phasic dopamine and is how our brains learn about reward. Dopamine variability is the aggregate value of tonic and phasic dopamine, and is highest when the tonic pool is low and the phasic waves are high.

The more volatile your dopaminergic makeup is, the more you are yanked between love and hate, confidence and fear, desire and loathing, attraction and repulsion. 

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 craving, 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 dopamine come and they pull your attention onto the latest bauble or self-image and they hold it there, making you into a different being. You feel dissatisfaction or pain until your urge is acted upon.

accompanied by delight and lust, seeking delight here and there

Craving 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 more. You get mugged in an alley and a phasic burst encodes that you should avoid that alley or people of a similar appearance. 

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 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 craving is that it is a global value. You cannot have ‘positive’ craving and ‘negative’ craving. Craving is craving 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.

The most subtle and hard-to-recognise-and-remove are the mental formations to which we become attached. We develop a certain worldview or idea 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 really bad, we crave non-existence altogether.

And we can crave all these things at the same time. When my ptsd hit 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 was, was out of control dopamine variability. 

So.

Dopamine variability = taņhā = craving = suffering.

If you want to suffer less, you need to stabilise your dopaminergic environment..

The evolutionary drive to avoid-the-negative is stronger than the evolutionary drive to seek-the-positive so the only way you can do this is by avoiding clinging to the pleasant. This in itself will lower your repulsion toward the unpleasant. Being less attached to the positive makes you less vulnerable to the negative.

Remember: variable dopamine is an essential evolutionary part of our being. Without it we could not survive. But some of us need to manage the waves more consciously than most.

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