CONSUMER PATICCA SAMUPPADA


With an understanding of the basic model of paticca samuppada, we now will apply it to the issues explored in Chapter I concerning the development of our global consumer culture. Using paticca samuppada not only offers another critical tool for looking at consumer culture, but it also entails a methodology for leading out of it. Paticca samuppada is part of an integrated system of critique and practical problem solving. By using it here we can form a bridge between our critique and our discovery of solutions and a greater mode of living beyond consumer culture.


1. IGNORANCE (avijja)
Generally, we take our sense of "self" as a given. In modern society, we can play around with it by getting a new hairstyle or quitting alcohol, but we tend to see it as this core foundation on which we experience life. Not-self challenges this idea by showing (graphically in the case of paticca samuppada) that what we consider this core foundation of "self" or soul, our conventional selves, is a very volatile system constructed by causes and conditions. By showing the infinite malleability of the construction in Not-self, Buddhism instructs us to challenge the depths of our conditioned selves and to not take anything for granted (such as our sense of "self") as being set in stone. This can be an extremely frightening idea and practice since we have spent so much time building this "self" to protect and entertain us. Without it, it seems we are without a shelter in the storm. Yet on the other hand, it is the most liberative idea and practice since it frees us from the bird cage in which we have constructed and limited ourselves.


This essential truth of Buddhism is key to our consumer culture, because our consumer culture is so rooted in the material. The fetishization of the material conditions us to more deeply objectify the "self" as a concrete form. This positing of a concrete "self" also implies an Ignorance of Impermanence (anicca). Consumerism is rooted in what the Buddha saw as the Ignorance of extreme realism (atthikavada) and eternalism (sassatavada) in which people see things and others as separate, real, fixed and enduring.1 The consumerist energy towards acquiring goods (and images) as a means towards defining and fulfilling one's "self" is just this kind of extreme realism and eternalism. The susceptibility of any consumer good to breakdown (Impermanence) reveals the inability to provide lasting satisfaction (Dukkha) and the fallacy of trying to fill up a transient "self" with transient things (Not-self) .



MENTAL STEWING
2. CONCOCTING (sankhara)
3. CONSCIOUSNESS (vinnana)
4. MIND-BODY (namarupa)
5. SENSE EXPERIENCE (salayatana)