The Anxiety of Exsistence

This article consists of a few pages of the chapter “The Anxiety of Exsistence” from the book “Anxiety” by Samir Chopra. These pages inspired me a lot. Therefore, I extracted them in below to review and share them easily.

For the Buddhist, existential anxiety is a species of dukkha; it is not neurosis; it is not a sign of freedom, authenticity, or the limitless possibility of action and choice. Instead, it is the state of being of an ignorant creature confused about its own nature, fumbling in the dark, hurting itself and others by its delusions and ignorance, by its fearful reactions to the ever-present possibility of decay, dissolution, and death in its life. The anxiety, the dukkha, it suffers from is pointless and needless and can and should be alleviated or eliminated.

对于佛教徒来说，存在主义的焦虑是苦难的一种形式；它不是神经症；它不是自由、真实性或行动和选择的无限可能的标志。相反，它是一个对自己的本质感到困惑的无知生物的存在状态，在黑暗中摸索，由于对衰败、解体和生命中死亡的永恒可能性的恐惧反应，伤害自己和他人。它所遭受的焦虑和苦难是毫无意义和不必要的，可以且应该被缓解或消除。

For the Buddha, there are three failures of knowledge and realization that underwrite our dukkha. First, that the world is transient and dynamic, ever changing, and never stable, perpetually productive of uncertainty, resulting in our instability, the recognition that the world is always changing, that the present moment is ephemeral and fleeting, can be a source of comfort too, of course, for “this, too, shall pass.” Second, this perpetual becoming, a naturalistic expression of the world’s physical dynamism, ensures that our desires cannot be satisfied permanently because enduring, safe satisfaction can take place only in a world that affords places of repose, rest, and quiescence. I might desire and procure an ice cream cone, but even as I eat it, I am aware both that this pleasurable sensation will end, and moreover, that I will attain, if it does in fact continue, a point of fullness, for all satisfaction of desires is followed by satiation, boredom, or anxiety about loss of the desired possession—of boredom, or anxiety about loss of the desired possession—of whatever form, whether tangible or otherwise. This “suffering by way of transformation” ensures we are being caught in a species of acute psychic and emotional insecurity. (These formulations of the unstable satiation of our desires would appear later in the work of the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, who fulsomely acknowledged his debt to Eastern religions and philosophy. Schopenhauer is sometimes termed the “most pessimistic” of philosophers, for he realizes the satisfaction of a wish is merely a prompt that another take its place, that in pursuing our never-ending wants and desires, we are doomed to swing between desperate grasping, satiation, and boredom.)

对于佛陀来说，有三个知识和认识的失败是我们苦难的基础。首先，世界是短暂和动态的，永远在变化，永不稳定，持续产生不确定性，导致我们的不稳定，认识到世界在不断变化，目前的时刻是短暂和飞逝的，当然，这也可以成为安慰的来源，因为“这也将过去”。其次，这种永恒的变成，世界物理动力学的自然表达，确保我们的欲望不能永久满足，因为持久、安全的满足只能在一个提供休息、休息和宁静的世界中发生。我可能想要并得到一个冰淇淋，但即使我在吃它的时候，我也意识到这种愉悦的感觉会结束，而且，如果它确实继续下去，我会达到饱足的境界，因为所有欲望的满足之后都是饱和、厌倦或对失去所渴望的东西的焦虑——无论是有形的还是无形的。这种“通过转变而遭受的苦难”确保我们被困在一种急性心理和情感不安全中。（这些关于我们欲望不稳定饱和的表述后来出现在德国哲学家阿瑟·叔本华的作品中，他充分承认自己深受东方宗教和哲学的影响。叔本华有时被称为“最悲观”的哲学家，因为他意识到一个愿望的满足只是另一个愿望取而代之的提示，在我们追求永无止境的欲望和愿望中，我们注定在绝望的抓取、饱和和厌倦之间摆动。)

We suffer, then, because our awareness is tainted and soiled by the knowledge that our happiness depends on an unstable, dynamic, ever-becoming world that does not lie within our control; we are aware, whether consciously or not, that happiness is fleeting, that all possessions, tangible or otherwise, are threatened by loss. Of the many variants of anxiety, this one runs deepest, for we are aware that any happiness procured at great emotional and physical labor could end at any given second, for reasons that become understood only once we have experienced them. The unknown, the formless, and the unknowable conspire to render our present contentment hollow, for we realize it will end at some point in the not-so-distant future and, indeed, could easily morph into its exact opposite. We thus live in a state of awareness at various levels of the fragility of existence, of uncertainty over whether our happiness will be taken away, of the fates of our loved ones, and all we hold dear; this knowledge is acutely painful. We know we can sense the black lining of the silver cloud; we are aware decrepitude, loss, death, and deprivation always lurk close by. Our experience of this ineliminable awareness is dukkha. Within this Buddhist understanding, anti-anxiety medication misses the mark completely, for it cannot cure our suffering from grief or anger, nor can it diminish our awareness of the inevitability of death, or diminish our grasping, our thirst, our desiring for this world’s impermanent, transient goods and joys.

因此，我们之所以受苦，是因为我们的意识被污染了，我们知道我们的幸福依赖于一个不稳定、动态、永远在变化的世界，而这个世界不在我们的控制之下；我们意识到，无论是有意识地还是无意识地，幸福是短暂的，所有的财产，无论是有形的还是无形的，都受到丢失的威胁。在许多种焦虑中，这一种最深刻，因为我们意识到，任何通过巨大的情感和身体劳动获得的幸福都可能在任何一秒钟结束，这些原因只有在我们经历过之后才能理解。未知的、无形的和不可知的共谋使我们目前的满足感变得空洞，因为我们意识到它将在不久的将来结束，而且确实可能很容易地变成其完全相反的东西。因此，我们生活在对存在的脆弱性、幸福是否会被夺走的不确定性、我们所爱的人的命运和我们所珍视的一切的不同层次的意识中；这种知识非常痛苦。我们知道我们能感觉到银云的黑色衬里；我们知道衰败、丧失、死亡和剥夺总是潜伏在近处。我们对这种不可消除的意识的体验是苦难。在这种佛教的理解中，抗焦虑药物完全无效，因为它无法治愈我们因悲伤或愤怒而产生的苦痛，也无法减少我们对死亡不可避免的意识，或减少我们对这个世界短暂、转瞬即逝的物品和欢乐的贪婪和渴望。

For the Buddha, we especially suffer from ignorance about who we are, for the selves we imagine ourselves to be do not exist in the way we imagine them to; we remain deluded and suffering so long as we are ignorant of “the thesis of non-self.” This last point, the third and final failure of knowledge that ensures our suffering, is the most esoteric and certainly the most contested of Buddhist doctrines; it is, too, the most fundamental and the most important in Buddhist teachings, as the Buddha persistently suggested. To wit, we are anxious because we are worried about the fate of a particular thing or object, our self, the precious “I” (the one to whom our body belongs, the one we say “my body”). It is this self’s losses, its misfortunes, its apprehension of the nothingness that ensues after death that cause our anxiety; it is this self’s fortunes, its gains and fame, that we seek and strive for. The Buddha, however, offered a deconstructive and deflationary analysis of personal identity to dismiss the notion of an enduring-and-identical-through-time “I,” an ego, or a soul, that functions as a locus for our anxiety, and, in the social and moral worlds we inhabit, as a locus for moral and legal blame, agency, and responsibility.

对于佛陀来说，我们特别因为对自己是谁的无知而受苦，因为我们想象中的自我并不像我们想象的那样存在；只要我们对“无我”的论点一无所知，我们就会继续被迷惑并受苦。这最后一点，确保我们受苦的知识的第三个也是最后一个原因，是最深奥且无疑是最有争议的佛教教义；它也是最根本的、在佛教教义中最重要的，正如佛陀一再指出的那样。即，我们焦虑是因为我们担心一个特定的东西或对象，我们的自我，珍贵的“我”（我们的身体所属的那个，我们说的“我的身体”）的命运。正是这个自我的损失、不幸，以及对死后虚无的恐惧引发了我们的焦虑；正是这个自我的财富、收益和名声，我们所追求和努力争取的东西。然而，佛陀提供了一种解构和弱化的方法，否定了一个持久且恒同的“我”，一个自我，或一个灵魂，作为我们焦虑的中心，并在我们所处的社会和道德世界中，作为道德和法律责任的中心。

For the Buddha, the anxious person was ignorant and deluded, clinging on to, grasping at, a quicksilver, ever-morphing reality, holding on for dear life to transient, ever-becoming possessions belonging to a nonexistent being. The anxiety we suffer in the Buddhist view is entirely explicable: we are always fearful of loss, of the possibility of all the insults the world can send our way, by the transience of all that we possess and hold dear. Looking ahead, we can foresee our own painful disease, decrepitude, and decay—each associated with a particular self, the “I,” the ego, me, given a particular name by my parents. Our resultant existence, thirst, arising out of ignorance of our state of self, grasps at desires, forms desperate, doomed attachments to sense pleasures, wealth, and power… ideas and ideals, views, opinions, theories, conceptions and beliefs. (Note that the Buddha does not distinguish between grasping at tangible or intangible goods; attachment to ideologies, to rigid ways of thinking and acting and being, will hurt as much as attachment to material goods and wealth.)

对于佛陀来说，焦虑的人是无知和迷惑的，紧紧抓住、贪婪地追求一个快速变化、不断变化的现实，死命地抓住属于一个不存在的存在的短暂、不断变化的财产。从佛教的观点看，我们所遭受的焦虑完全可以解释：我们总是害怕失去，害怕世界可能带给我们的所有侮辱，害怕我们所拥有和珍视的一切的短暂性。展望未来，我们可以预见我们自己的痛苦疾病、衰败和衰落——每一个都与一个特定的自我、”我”、自我、我相关联，由我的父母给我一个特定的名字。我们的结果存在，由于对我们的自我状态的无知而产生的渴望，抓住欲望，形成对感官快感、财富和权力的绝望、注定失败的依恋……观念和理想、观点、意见、理论、概念和信念。（请注意，佛陀并不区分对有形或无形商品的抓取；对意识形态、固执的思维和行为方式以及存在方式的依恋，将和对物质商品和财富的依恋一样痛苦。）

This means a relentless growth of “desire, the will to be, to exist, to re-exist, to become more and more, to grow more and more, to accumulate more and more.” But such accumulations and possessions are precisely what is threatened by this eternally becoming, uncertain world we have no control over; so, we are always anxious.

这意味着“欲望、存在的意愿、再次存在的意愿、变得越来越多、增长越来越多、积累越来越多”的无情增长。但这些积累和财产正是受到这个永恒变化、我们无法控制的不确定世界的威胁；因此，我们总是焦虑。

Anxiety, then, arises within us; it is not caused by the world outside. The world is what it is; our relationship to the world, our knowledge of it, causes our anxiety. Our minds are tormented when we attempt to remove the object—some empirical threat—that causes fear and anxiety, we fail in attempting to control something other than our mind. If the world cannot be changed, if its dynamism and uncertainty is beyond our control, and if we cannot numb our senses, then all we can do is master our cognitive responses to the world: how we react to, interpret, and judge the world’s offerings or insults.

焦虑产生于我们内部；它不是由外部世界引起的。世界本来就是这样；我们与世界的关系，我们对它的了解，引起了我们的焦虑。当我们试图移除引起恐惧和焦虑的对象——某种经验性的威胁时，我们的心灵会受到折磨，我们在试图控制除我们的思想之外的事物时失败了。如果世界无法改变，如果它的动态性和不确定性超出了我们的控制范围，如果我们无法麻木我们的感官，那么我们唯一能做的就是掌握我们对世界的认知反应：我们如何反应、解读和评判世界的给予或侮辱。

To do so, the first step is to pay attention to how the mind works, to study how the mind reacts to objects of fear, to irritations, insults, interruptions, deprivations, and losses. This heightened awareness of the interactions of mind and body is to be gained by disciplined, regular practices of directed meditation and mindfulness, a first-person study of our consciousness achieved by withdrawing our attention from this world’s distractions to ourselves; this awareness makes us concentrate on the present moment, thus enabling us to distance ourselves from regretting or remorsefully remembering the past, or fearfully and anxiously anticipating the future. The Buddha thus asked us to pay attention to our minds, the venues and sites of anxiety, sorrow, anxiety, or pleasure; our true, exalted subject of study is ourselves; we should find out who and what we are to understand why we feel and think the way we do. Mindfulness and meditation—achieved via a variety of nontrivial techniques and practices that require steadfast commitment and discipline—enable us to study our thoughts; once we understand our relationship to our thoughts, we may understand our relationship to them; we may come to realize that these thoughts are not hostage to them; we may come to realize that these thoughts are not “us,” that “we” are not hostage to them; we are not hostage to them; we may come to realize that these thoughts are not “us,” that “we” are not hostage to them; we are not hostage to them.

为此，第一步是关注心灵如何运作，研究心灵如何对恐惧对象、刺激、侮辱、中断、剥夺和损失做出反应。这种对心灵和身体互动的高度意识，可以通过有纪律的、定期的定向冥想和正念练习获得，这是通过将我们的注意力从这个世界的干扰转移到我们自身来实现的对我们意识的第一人称研究；这种意识使我们专注于当下，从而使我们能够远离对过去的遗憾或懊悔的回忆，或对未来的恐惧和焦虑的预期。佛陀因此要求我们关注我们的心灵，焦虑、悲伤、快乐的场所和地点；我们真正的、崇高的研究对象是我们自己；我们应该发现自己是谁，了解我们为什么会有这样的感受和思考。通过一系列非平凡的技术和需要坚定承诺和纪律的练习，正念和冥想使我们能够研究我们的思想；一旦我们理解了我们与我们的思想的关系，我们可能会意识到这些思想不是我们的囚犯；我们可能会意识到这些思想不是“我们”，“我们”不是它们的囚犯；我们不是它们的囚犯。

Placing the solution for living with anxiety in our minds is simultaneously disheartening and promising: relief is so close, yet the proximity a mirage because the road to deliverance is long and tedious, for the Buddhist methods of mindfulness and meditation require an extraordinary effort for the attainment of the promised state of nirvana, placing them out of reach of most layfolk, a problem acknowledged by the Buddha himself, who offered multiple layers of analysis and practice in his sermons to his disciples, depending on their commitment to the life of enlightenment; not every poor soul who attended to the Buddha’s sermons intended to become a mendicant or a monk, begging for alms, seeking the life of solitary contemplation. This suggests that while we may never reach the terminus of deliverance and salvation, we must accept, and live with, anxiety. We do not turn back from encounters with anxiety; we face up to it.

将解决焦虑的方法置于我们的心中同时令人沮丧和充满希望：解脱似乎很近，然而近在咫尺却是幻觉，因为通向解脱的道路漫长而乏味，佛教的正念和冥想方法需要非凡的努力才能达到应许的涅槃状态，使得大多数俗人难以企及，这是佛陀本人承认的问题，他在对弟子的讲道中提供了多层次的分析和实践，取决于他们对启蒙生活的承诺；并不是每一个听佛陀讲道的可怜人都打算成为一个乞丐或和尚，乞讨施舍，寻求独自沉思的生活。这表明，虽然我们可能永远无法达到解脱和救赎的终点，但我们必须接受并与焦虑共存。我们不会从与焦虑的遭遇中退缩；我们要正视它。

Buddhist teachers therefore repeatedly emphasize living with our anxiety; they insist on mastering anxiety, not by avoiding it, but rather by accepting the inevitability of uncertainty, by having faith in our historically oft-tested ability to navigate the expected by-products of a dynamic, always-becoming world. As the Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön puts it in many elegant ways:

因此，佛教老师们反复强调要与我们的焦虑共存；他们坚持通过接受不确定性的必然性，通过对我们在历史上经常测试的应对动态、不断变化的世界的预期副产品的导航能力的信念来掌握焦虑，而不是避免它。正如佛教尼姑派玛·丘卓以许多优雅的方式所说：

We explore the reality and unpredictability of insecurity and pain, and we try not to push it away.

我们探索不安全和痛苦的现实和不可预测性，我们试图不将其推开。

A warrior accepts that we can never know what will happen to us next. . . . The truth is that we can never avoid uncertainty. This not-knowing is part of the adventure. It’s also what makes us afraid.

一位战士接受我们永远不知道接下来会发生什么……事实是我们永远无法避免不确定性。这种不知是冒险的一部分。这也是让我们害怕的原因。

The central question . . . is not how we avoid uncertainty and fear but how we relate to discomfort.

中心问题……不是我们如何避免不确定性和恐惧，而是我们如何与不适相处。

With practice . . . we learn to stay with . . . with a nameless fear.

通过实践……我们学会与……无名的恐惧共处。

We fear losing our illusion of security—that’s what makes us anxious. We fear being confused and not knowing which way to turn.

我们害怕失去我们的安全幻觉——这就是让我们焦虑的原因。我们害怕困惑，不知道该往哪个方向走。

Egolessness is . . . our capacity to relax with not knowing, not figuring everything out, with not being at all sure about who we are, or who anyone else is, either.

无我是……我们在不知道、不解决一切、对我们是谁或其他任何人是谁都不完全确定时放松的能力。

In Buddhism’s injunction to acknowledge the presence of suffering as a condition of life, the most straightforward and transparent claim of all, I found great simplicity: there is suffering; so long as we are ignorant, we will continue to suffer. This felt chastising too, for I felt blamed for my suffering; my thinking was the root of my discomfort in this world. But Buddhism’s prognosis and diagnosis, its optimism about the possibility of cure, its provision of a path of conduct defined by explicit practices that reached into every corner of the lived life, was also deeply, powerfully empowering: I was the architect of my destiny, the creator of my fate, provided I understood who or what I was.

在佛教要求承认苦难作为生活条件的命令中，我发现了最直接、最透明的主张：存在苦难；只要我们无知，我们就会继续受苦。这也让我感到被责备，因为我为我的苦难感到责备；我的思考是我在这个世界上不适的根源。但佛教的预后和诊断，它对治愈可能性的乐观，它提供的通过明确实践定义的行为道路深入生活的每个角落，也是深刻而强大的赋能：我是我的命运的建筑师，我的命运的创造者，只要我了解我是谁或我是什么。

As a child, I had naively imagined there would be no suffering in this world, lulled into a false security by my parents’ comforting upbringing and nurturing, their apparent mastery of the cosmos. I had been disappointed, in the worst way of all, by the disappearance of those guardians, by the acute visible evidence that they were not permanent and indestructible. The failure of humanity, like mine, was a neurotic failure to face up to the constitutive features of existence; its stubborn refusal to accept existence’s stern demands was the reason for its misery.

当我还是个孩子的时候，我天真地想象这个世界上没有苦难，被我的父母安慰的养育和哺育哄骗进入了一种错误的安全感，他们显然掌握了宇宙。我以最糟糕的方式失望了，那些守护者的消失，他们不是永久和不可摧毁的明显证据让我失望。像我的人性失败一样，是一种神经质的失败，无法面对存在的构成特征；它固执地拒绝接受存在的严厉要求是其痛苦的原因。

In Buddhism, I found an injunction to move on from a childish understanding of the world, to see it shorn of wishful illusion, of narcissistic self-serving delusion. Buddhism’s more esoteric claims—ones that the Scottish philosopher David Hume would rediscover in his masterwork of modern philosophy A Treatise of Human Nature—that there was no self, just a bundle of perceptions and sensations to be found via introspection, did not resonate with my felt experiences, though its truth became apparent during my psychedelic experimentations, where I found—like the author Michael Pollan did during his ayahuasca ceremonies—that my self dissolved into the world around me. (This was what modern physics promised me too; I was stardust and I would return to that form once this mode of being in the world was done and, er, dusted.) This sheer nothingness of the self was what puzzled the Buddha’s devotees, who asked repeatedly and persistently, “What happens to me after death?” In response, the Buddha insisted that this question was malformed; it simply did not fit the case; it was a category mistake. For a nonexistent self, the question of its survival or extinction or misfortunes did not arise.

在佛教中，我发现了一个命令，从对世界幼稚的理解中走出来，看到一个没有美好幻想、自恋的自我服务的错觉的世界。佛教更深奥的主张——苏格兰哲学家大卫·休谟在他的现代哲学杰作《人类本性论》中将重新发现的那些——没有自我，只有通过内省发现的感知和感觉的捆绑，虽然与我的感受经验不一致，但它的真理在我的迷幻实验中变得明显，我发现——就像作者迈克尔·波兰在他的鸦片茶仪式中所做的那样——我的自我溶解在我周围的世界中。（这也是现代物理学向我承诺的；我是星尘，一旦这种在世界上的存在方式完成并结束后，我将返回那种形态。）这种自我的彻底虚无使佛陀的信徒们困惑，他们一再坚持地问：“我死后会发生什么？”作为回应，佛陀坚持认为这个问题是畸形的；它根本不适合案例；这是一个范畴错误。对于一个不存在的自我，其生存、灭绝或不幸的问题不会出现。

Even if we never fully attain this state of belief in the thesis of no-self, our contemplative practices that force our attention on the content of the Four Noble Truths may enable us to at least maintain an ironic—and possibly even amused—distance from the very idea of an enduring, identical self that can permanently possess any of this endlessly becoming world’s always-changing and destructible goods. Perhaps this is why the reclining or seated Buddha is always depicted with a faint smile on his face. He knows “what’s up” and “what time it is”; he can look on the world’s play and the delusions of its inhabitants with a gaze of amused detachment, one yet filled with compassion for his fellow sufferers.

即使我们永远无法完全达到无我的信念状态，我们的冥想实践，这些实践强迫我们关注四圣谛的内容，可能使我们至少能够以一种讽刺的——甚至可能是有趣的——方式，与一个可以永久拥有这个不断变化、总是变化和可破坏的世界的商品的持久、相同的自我的想法保持距离。这或许就是为什么躺卧或坐姿的佛陀总是脸上带着淡淡的微笑。他知道“怎么回事”和“现在几点”；他可以用一种被逗乐的超然目光看着世界的戏剧和其居民的错觉，这种目光充满了对他的同苦者的同情。

For the Buddha, anxiety and suffering arise from dispositions, tendencies, and habits; our salvation lies in retraining ourselves through slow, resolute, patient, and persistent effort over the course of a lifetime; our engagement in this activity is our reward and deliverance. We are never trying to seek an endpoint, a stage at which we will be miraculously delivered from anxiety. It is the act of working on ourselves that is our only deliverance; we are never to be brought anywhere, to any resting point of final repose. Our journey will be suffused with anxiety; we must accept this companion while we walk on, into life.

对于佛陀来说，焦虑和痛苦来源于性格、倾向和习惯；我们的救赎在于通过一生的缓慢、坚决、耐心和持久的努力重新训练自己；我们在这项活动中的参与是我们的回报和解脱。我们从未试图寻找一个终点，一个我们将从焦虑中奇迹般得到解脱的阶段。我们对自己的努力就是我们唯一的解脱；我们从未被带到任何地方，到任何最终休息的地点。我们的旅程将充满焦虑；我们必须接受这个伴侣，继续前行，走向生活。