Suffering for me had always been a mystery ever since I was a child. In Sunday School we would learn about people in the Bible who suffered and a God who saved them from their suffering. But, I reasoned in my childish mind, if God loves everyone why does He permit suffering?
It wasn’t until I began studying Buddhism that I learned about suffering.
What is the root of all suffering? The Buddha, upon his enlightenment said that life is pain and suffering – the first of the Four Noble Truths upon which Buddhist philosophy is based. To acknowledge that we live in a world which has the conditions for suffering is to accept the fact that the nature of this world is suffering. Suffering is not an anomaly. To embrace that is the first step to overcoming suffering.
The second of the Four Noble Truths provides unique insight to our suffering that few people – except for those who’ve studied Buddhism – have ever discovered: we only suffer when we want life to be different than it is. Wow! That’s a biggie! How often do we want our life to be different? We don’t like the weather so we wish it was warmer or cooler or drier or that it would rain more – or less.
We think a new job would be better than the one we have now. Our boss isn’t nice to us. We didn’t get a raise we believed we deserved. A new house would certainly make us happier; a bigger, more modern house would give us that feeling of finally reaching the pinnacle of success. A new car might do the same thing. A new spouse would certainly seal the deal on happiness; someone who isn’t so grumpy or someone who understands us better, makes more money and gives us expensive presents.
Contentment is a difficult point to reach in life because we humans are never really happy with the way things are right here, right now, today. So like spending the night in an uncomfortable bed we keep shifting and turning, moving this way and that way trying to find the perfect spot where we can finally be comfortable and all is right with our world. But of course even when that happens it doesn’t last long. We find ourselves back in the old restless feelings that somehow our lives need to be different than they are so that we can finally be happy and free from suffering.
Suffering is difficult to define because just like the word “happy” suffering means different things to different people. If a teenager loses their cell phone, they are definitely suffering. However, to an older or more mature person a lost cell phone wouldn’t be a tragedy. We can see through this example that suffering is not necessarily a physical experience but a mental one. Suffering, like happiness, is a state of mind. If all is created in the mind by the mind and nothing exists inherently from its own side (no Kantian “things in themselves”), then all we experience is a mere state of mind.
Suffering and the causes of suffering are often considered by us to be a kind of “evil” wrought upon us from some outside force – God or Satan – for some unknown – ad unexplainable – reason.
Sri Aurobindo, a Hindu philosopher, in his book The Life Divine tells us that the “fundamental error of the Mind is this fall from self-knowledge” by which we come to know our divine knowledge of the Oneness with the All That Is. We make ourselves “the center of our own universe instead of knowing” ourselves as one with the Universal Divine Mind. That way of thinking, Aurobindo tells us, is what causes our “limitations of being from which proceeds from a limitation of consciousness and therefore of knowledge,” and from there we are limited in all that we experience – “a limitation of self-enjoyment and therefore of delight.” We need to know our interdependence, our knowledge of the oneness or the “essence” of all life if we are to attain “right knowledge” of the individual parts.
“Hence there is an element of error in all human knowledge,” in that we mistake the world “out there” for reality and that brings on our incapacity for “possessive delight” in our life and we fall into suffering. “Self-ignorance is therefore the root of all the perversity of our existence and that perversity stands fortified in the self-limitation, the egoism which is the form taken by that self-ignorance.”
Sri Aurobindo writes that suffering and evil, as we judge them, are necessary for the evolutionary growth of the Soul in Nature. “The descent of Mind and Life into evolution need not have created any such untoward developments of the limitation of being and consciousness: for this descent is in its nature a limitation of knowledge; existence and cognition and delight of being confine themselves in a lesser truth and good and beauty and its inferior harmony, and move according to that law of narrow light, but in such a movement darkness and suffering and evil are not obligatory phenomena.”
We can see that Sri Aurobindo tells us that we are not obliged to experience suffering and evil; that suffering is a choice. We might feel physical pain as all living beings experience, but to suffer from that pain is a choice. We can choose to be miserable and allow pain to overcome us or we can choose to embrace the pain as the path for us in this moment.
Science of Mind, part of the New Thought tradition follows the path of Hinduism and Buddhism when it teaches that thoughts are things; what we think can become a reality. So what happens when some evil or negative event, an illness or accident befalls us? Some would say it is of our own doing; that our thoughts attracted that event or accident to us. But others would say that is blaming the victim and that accidents really do happen! The “victim” had no role in drawing the event to him or her – it was pure happenstance. That would mean then that pain and suffering is pointless. But remember what the Buddha said: we only suffer when we want life to be different than it is. Can we turn negatives into positives? Can we turn the slings and arrows of suffering into flowers? And that might mean seeing the beneficial aspects of suffering; the lessons learned from that which we are called to embrace even as we must endure the pain.
Even when we get the things and the life we want – that perfect life filled with all that makes us comfortable – we soon find that suffering sets in. In Buddhism this is called “changing suffering.” We get the spouse we want but that person has habits we don’t like and we soon find that person does not make us happy. So we get divorced and begin looking for another spouse, even though we know that it is not “other” who determines our happiness but only our own mind.
We are happy for only a short while – even though we got what we thought we wanted – before we find that happiness is short lived and we begin seeking something different to satisfy our ever-changing desires. It is interesting to see the many ways that people suffer as they pursue happiness through many external or material desires.
Seeking happiness through the attainment of those desires we believe will create our ultimate satisfaction many times end up resulting in misery. Often it is more beneficial to allow the Universe or God or whatever Universal Being you believe can move the energy you require to bring not just what you desire into your life, but those things that can benefit your spiritual path in optimal ways. That will grant you not what you necessarily desire – sometimes we don’t get what we desire – but it will provide you with what you need in order to realize your life’s purpose.
