[MD] a flimsy canopy of patterns

[MarshaV]

Suffering

---
"What Is the Cause of Social Dukkha?

"According to Shakyamuni, the cause of our suffering is _tanha_, usually translated as "craving" but more literally as "thirst."  Nothing we drink can ever assuage our tanha, because that thirst is due to an emptiness at the core of our being.  It is as if that core were a bottomless pit, something like the black hole that astronomers believe lie at the center of most galaxies.  No matter how much we try to fill up our own black hole with this or that, everything is swallowed up and disappears into it.

"It is bottomless because our sense of self is an ungroundable construct.  Notice, however, the second noble truth does not identify our problem as groundlessness.  The problem is "thirst". --- not the emptiness at the core of our being but our incessant efforts to fill that hole up, because we _experience_ it as a sense of lack that must be filled up.  The problem is not that I am unreal but that I keep trying to make myself real in ways that never work.  This implies there might be another way to experience  our groundlessness."