Excerpts from "Essence of the Heart Sutra", pages 32-35, by the Dalai Lama

If we carefully observe our experience, we can discover exactly what role mental afflictions play in our day-to-day lives. In observing our experience, we might think to ourselves, “Today I felt very peaceful and happy,” or “Today I felt extremely restless and unhappy.” The difference between these two cases is that in the first our mental state was less influenced by the mental afflictions, whereas in the latter case the afflictions were dominant. In truth, it is always and only the mental afflictions that agitate our minds, yet we tend to blame our agitation on external conditions, imagining that encountering unpleasant people or adverse circumstances makes us unhappy.

…Encountering adversity, in itself, does not necessarily lead to a disturbed mind; even amid adversity, the principal cause of our unhappiness is our own undisciplined mind. Failing to understand this principle, we allow ourselves to be controlled by the mental afflictions; in fact, we often embrace and reinforce them, for instance by adding fuel to our anger.

…Everyone who is alive will age and die. The reality of aging and death is a simple fact of our existence and is beyond dispute. However, particularly in the West, many people are extremely reluctant to accept the reality of aging and death. This is so much the case that to even make the observation that someone is old is perceived to be unkind. Yet if we look at the attitudes of different societies, say, for example, of Tibetan society, the very same phenomena—aging and death—are seen in a radically different light. Advanced age is perceived to be a basis for greater respect. Thus, what from one cultural perspective is seen as negative is, from another, quite positive—but the phenomenon of aging itself has no intrinsic qualities in this regard.

From these examples, we can see the degree to which our own attitudes and perceptions make a difference in how we experience a given situation. Our attitudes reflect thoughts and emotions, and our thoughts and emotions reflect two principal drives: attraction and repulsion. If we perceive a thing, person, or event to be undesirable, we will react with repulsion and try to avoid it. This repulsion becomes the basis for hostility and other associated negative emotions. If, on the other hand, we find a thing, person, or event desirable, we will react with attraction and try to hold on to it. This attraction becomes the basis for craving and attachment. These basic dynamics of attraction and repulsion form the basis of our engagement with the world.

If we think along these lines, it will become clear that when we make statements such as “Today I feel happy” or “Today I feel unhappy,” it is only emotions of attachment or aversion that determine which of these is the case. This doesn’t mean that finding something desirable or undesirable is in itself an affliction. We have to examine the particular quality of that attraction or aversion.

All actions are actions of either body, speech, or mind. That is to say, every deed we commit is committed through something we do, say, or think. Buddhists refer to the actions created in this way as karma, which is simply the Sanskrit word for “action.” All actions create consequences; Buddhists call this the law of karma or the law of cause and effect. As we have seen, the Buddha taught that we should cultivate actions with positive consequences (wholesome karma), while refraining from actions with negative consequences (unwholesome karma). Certain actions, such as those on the level of reflexes or biological processes, are entirely beyond conscious control and thus morally or karmicly neutral. However, our more significant actions necessarily stem from a motive or intention and are either destructive or helpful.

Destructive acts are motivated by disturbed states of mind, that is to say, by a mind dominated by afflictions. In the entire history of human society, it is these mental afflictions, these undisciplined states of mind, that underlie all of humanity’s destructive acts—from the smallest act of killing a fly to the greatest atrocities of war. We must remember that ignorance itself is an affliction; for example, when we fail to grasp the negative long-term consequences of an action and instead act out of shortsighted thoughts of gain.

If we closely examine feelings of strong desire or strong anger, we will find that at the root of these emotions lies our grasping at the object of these emotions. And, if we take it still further, we discover that at the root of all of this lies our grasping at a sense of self or ego. Not recognizing the emptiness of self and other, we mistakenly grasp at both as autonomous, objectively real, and independently existent.

As the eighth-century Indian philosopher Chandrakirti points out in his Guide to the Middle Way, we first grasp at a sense of self, and then we extend that grasping onto others. First you have a sense of “I”, then you grasp at things as “mine.” By looking into our own minds, we can see that the stronger our grasping is, the more forcefully it generates negative and destructive emotions. There is a very intimate causal connection between our grasping at a sense of self and the arising of destructive emotions within us. As long as we remain under the dominion of this erroneous belief, we have no room for lasting joy—this is what it means to be imprisoned in the cycle of existence. Suffering is nothing but existence enslaved to ignorance.