Life on this level of consciousness or realm of “relative” reality is not an easy one. It is in fact, Samsara in the Buddhist teachings, and Samsara consists of the cycles of birth, death and rebirth in the material world, perpetuated by desire, attachment, and avidya (ignorance) and the resulting karma. In fact it is desire and attachment that the Buddha explained is the root of suffering. To help us alleviate our suffering, the Buddha gave we humans the Four Noble Truths, the first of which clearly states that life in the material world is one of pain and suffering.
The second Noble Truth is the reason we suffer: we create suffering for ourselves when life is not the way we want it to be. The Buddha acknowledges that there is pain, and we don’t always have control on whether or not we feel pain. All sentient beings experience pain. But we can choose whether or not to suffer in spite of the pain we may feel. Suffering, in other words, is a choice; suffering is of the Mind; suffering is an attitude, a mental and emotional reaction and response to that which we have an aversion.
There is a way out of suffering, taught the Buddha, and that is the third Noble Truth. The fourth Noble Truth is the Eightfold Noble Path: eight attitudes of the Mind that help us not to suffer.
Because we live in a realm that is of “forms” (things, phenomena) it is also a realm of desires because we are driven by our senses and emotions – we want what we want, i.e. pleasure, freedom from pain, and all the things that we believe will result in our happiness – and we reject those situations and things that we don’t want such as ill health, lack of money or an unhappy marriage, etc. We are afflicted by these “delusions” that what we feel as pleasurable will bring us happiness and contentment, and that by rejecting those things that we know we do not want we will have only happiness.
Our experience in Samsara however, teaches us differently. The things or circumstances we believe will bring us happiness often have the opposite result. Ask almost anyone who is single and they will tell you that they want a “soul mate” or a spouse to complete them and bring them the happiness of marriage. Yet in the United States, 50% of all marriages end in divorce because people become unhappy after seeing that marriage brought expectations and situations that weren’t all they had thought it to be. “Happiness,” said Aldous Huxley, “is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of other activities.” [Religion and Time]
Imperfection is a consequence of ignorance; not ignorance that is the result of not attending school or learning about phenomena, but rather the ignorance that comes from not knowing our Mind and how things – all phenomena – truly exist in the so-called “material” world. Sri Aurobindo in his book The Life Divine tells us that “whatever be our reactions or our experience on the surface, this fact of ignorance is itself an operation of knowledge and not a true ignorance.” This is a “frontal” ignorance, explains Aurobindo, that produces the delusions or “illusions” of our experience of what is reality and what is not. Behind that “frontal” ignorance – that which lies at the forefront of all we experience with the five senses and limits us through various boundaries in certain fields – is an “indivisible all-consciousness” waiting as a force behind [ignorance]. “All that is thus hidden is an occult store of light and power for the All-Consciousness to draw upon for the evolution of our being in Nature; there is a secret working which fills up all the deficiencies of the frontal Ignorance, acts through its apparent stumblings, prevents them from leading to another final result than that which the All-Knowledge has decreed, helps the soul in the Ignorance to draw from its experience, even from the natural personality’s sufferings and errors, which is necessary for its evolution and to leave behind what is no longer utilizable.
To recognize perfection in the face of imperfection is a function of the Higher Mind or the All-Knowledge, as Aurobindo calls it, noting that as creatures of the Divine Creator, we have the Divine within, to allow us to “become perfect as That is perfect, to attain liberation by likeness to it or by attaining to the law of its nature.” That perfection is recognizable by the Divinity within us.
Even Jesus said, “Be ye therefore perfect even as your Father in Heaven is perfect.” And while that has always seemed to trip up Christians studying the New Testament, we can surely know that perfection is not in the sense that we see it through the delusions of our five senses, but is perfection in that all is exactly as it should be. That takes an attitude of non-judging: no good or bad; nothing is right or wrong for my life – it all just simply is.
“If the human consciousness were bound to the sense of imperfection and the acceptance of it as the law of our life and the very character of our existence, . . . then we might say that what we are marks the limit of the divine self-expression in us; we might believe too that our imperfections and sufferings worked for the general harmony and perfection of things and console ourselves with this philosophic balm offered for our wounds, satisfied to move among the pitfalls of life with as much rational prudence or as much philosophic sagacity and resignation as our incomplete mental wisdom and our impatient vital parts permitted. Or else, taking refuge in the more consoling fervors of religion, we might submit to all as the will of God in the hope or the faith of recompense in the Paradise beyond where we shall enter into a happier existence and put on a more pure and perfect nature.”
It is this hope of heaven in an afterlife that ignores the reality of the law of imperfection in this realm of forms, desire and attachment, and the reason for imperfection. “There is not only a mental part in us which recognizes the imperfection, there is a psychic part which rejects it,” Aurobindo tells us. We reject it because we reject all that we see as unpleasant, and the result is suffering brought on by our thoughts. “Our soul’s dissatisfaction with imperfection as a law of life upon earth, its aspiration towards the elimination of all imperfections from our nature, not only a heaven beyond where it would be automatically impossible to be imperfect, but here and now in a life where perfection has to be conquered by evolution and struggle, are as much a law of our being as that against which they revolt.
“In this light [of the hidden Reality in our spiritual secrecies] we can admit that all works perfectly towards a divine end by a divine wisdom and therefore each thing is in the whole of the divine purpose. For what is is only justifiable, finds its perfect sense and satisfaction by what can and will be.” There is, says Aurobindo “a divine sense and purpose” in this law of imperfection; “the real sign is an elevation towards the spiritual knowledge and power which will transform the law and phenomena and external forms of our life nearer to a new image of that divine sense and purpose.”
With regard to accepting suffering as the Path, Aurobindo says, “It is right and reasonable to endure with equanimity [even-mindedness] suffering and subjection to defect as the immediate will of God, a present law of imperfection laid on our members, but on condition that we recognize it also as the will of God in us to transcend evil and suffering, to transform imperfection into perfection, to rise into a higher law of Divine Nature. . . . Our present nature can only be transitional, our imperfect status a starting-point and opportunity for the achievement of another higher, wider and greater that shall be divine and perfect not only by the secret spirit within it but in its manifest and most outward form of existence.”
Human suffering has nothing to do with the external world. Suffering is a state of mind that occurs when we judge situations, events and our desires to be other than that which we want them to be. If all is our chosen path, we must embrace that as it unfolds before us. Several years ago, I was invited to begin visiting with an elderly man and his wife. He was dying, and he loved discussing spiritual ideas. We had many long conversations about life and death, and suffering. During these conversations, Mal taught me something I’d never thought of before: All is perfect.
When he first said this to me, I had difficulty wrapping my head around this idea. All is perfect? How can that be? Yet, as I began looking at this from a Buddhist point of view, I began to see that just a simple change in attitude can make all the difference in our ability to be happy in the face of suffering. Things can appear to be “good” or they can be “bad.” That’s a human judgment based on our desires and wants as we see happiness. Looking at external situations and events with a mind of equanimity – even-mindedness – without attachment or aversion, we can see that truly all is perfect.
Every encounter we have with people and situations and events in our life can be the perfect event – just what we needed in our life to teach us the lessons we need to learn, to help us find greater compassion or a deeper understanding of why life happens the way it does. Because it is exactly what we need, it is absolutely perfect. Thus we can move from imperfection and suffering, to the knowledge that “all is perfect.” That brings us to a point of happiness and contentment in a world of change.
