February 12, 2012
Why is there suffering in the world? 0
The short answer to this is that there are no suffering. But that is not very helpful and would rather piss people of since there obviously are a lot of people experiencing suffering in the world. So, it is not a question about if we should help people or not, that is suffering or is in pain. Of course should we help! I am not talking about that. I am talking about the very nature of suffering and if there is any relieve from that to be found.
First of all, enlightenment is not an escape from pain and suffering. Quite contrary, it is a deep dive into the core of suffering until you can’t separate your self from the experience of suffering. It is total intimacy. To be more precise, the resistance to pain is the very cause of suffering. We could call that separation. The no to what is, which splits up reality into a sense of a “me” that resists an experience. The other way around, without separation there is no suffering. Pain, yes, that is an inevitable ingredient of life but without separation, without rejecting what is, there is really no suffering to be found in the very moment here and now. To suffer you need to resist what is and create separation, the sense of a me, and then create a story around this me that are suffering. That is what Buddha called “dukkha” and he discovered that the remedy to suffering is the realization that there is no me, that separation is an illusion. That doesn’t mean that you move away to some higher state of consciousness, it simply means what it says.
But what about all the people that are suffering in the world? Children that are starving and being abused, wars and violence! Well, sitting under a tree and meditate will not help anyone but from “no separation”, from a total intimacy with what ever moves in life, even with sexual abuse, starvation, war and violence the chance to help is so much greater because you move as a natural response of compassion and not from resistance or rejection. Because you have realized that there is nothing separate from you and this is felt as love because essentially everything is who you are and you move as an ongoing recognition of that.
Maybe this still pisses someone of but remember that it is not some philosophy, religion or lofty spiritual discourse. It is simply a direct experience on the nature of suffering and the only way to know if its true or not is to check it out for your self … as a real life investigation!
-r-
