The 'Normalcy' of Suffering

"The outer world of circumstance shapes itself to the inner world of thought, and both pleasant and unpleasant external conditions are factors, which make for the ultimate good of the individual. As the reaper of his own harvest, man learns both by suffering and bliss."

-- James Allen, "As a Man Thinketh"

Suffering, the Buddha said, is the normal, unenlightened condition of all sentient beings. That our ordinary self-consciousness is a state of suffering, that there are specific causes of such suffering, that there is the possibility of ending suffering, and that there is a path which can lead to the end this suffering and the bliss of nirvana are the Four Noble Truths, the essence of all Buddhist teachings. Indeed, the idea that facing and overcoming one's passions - i.e., one's suffering - leads to the 'salvation' of a wider and deeper consciousness is a lesson that can be found in virtually all of the world's great religious and wisdom traditions.

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“Sometimes we must undergo hardships, breakups, and narcissistic wounds, which shatter the flattering image that we had of ourselves, in order to discover two truths: that we are not who we thought we were; and that the loss of a cherished pleasure is not necessarily the loss of true happiness and well-being.”
― Jean-Yves Leloup

“There is a light in this world, a healing spirit more powerful than any darkness we may encounter. We sometimes lose sight of this force when there is suffering, too much pain. Then suddenly, the spirit will emerge through the lives of ordinary people who hear a call and answer in extraordinary ways.”
― Mother Teresa

“No pain that we suffer, no trial that we experience is wasted. It ministers to our education, to the development of such qualities as patience, faith, fortitude and humility. All that we suffer and all that we endure, especially when we endure it patiently, builds up our characters, purifies our hearts, expands our souls, and makes us more tender and charitable, more worthy to be called the children of God . . . and it is through sorrow and suffering, toil and tribulation, that we gain the education that we come here to acquire and which will make us more like our Father and Mother in heaven.”
― Orson F. Whitney

“As long as you think that the cause of your problem is “out there”—as long as you think that anyone or anything is responsible for your suffering—the situation is hopeless. It means that you are forever in the role of victim, that you’re suffering in paradise.”
― Byron Katie

“The wound is the place where the Light enters you.”
― Rumi

Doing One's Dharma and Finding One's Path

There are innumerable paths to enlightenment - or, perhaps more accurately, the number of paths to enlightenment is precisely equal to those beings who consciously seek that goal - for each of us approaches the goal of liberation from where we are, by working out our karma, by following our own personal dharma, by walking lightly on the Earth and leaving small footprints.

Unlike traditional Indian society with its castes and classes, and with its four stages of life (the student, the householder, the spiritual aspirant, and the renunciate), modern society - East and West - no longer holds tightly to such rigid distinctions, and everyone must come to understand and work out their particular avenue through life and towards personal liberation.

"In his study of the Bhagavad Gita ("Paths to God"), iconic spiritual teacher Ram Dass notes that "(t)here are very few clear, cultural prescriptions that are deeply ingrained in our society to tell us what to do. So we're faced with having to figure out for ourselves what our dharma might be."

"We have to rely on ourselves," he points out, "we have to listen and hear how our individual differences will determine our appropriate duty moment by moment. All of our circumstances feed into that: If you have a certain type of intellect, of if you have certain economic circumstances, it defines certain paths. If you have a husband or a wife, that defines certain possibilities, and it also defines certain limiting conditions."

"Some people," he observes, "might say, "I can only do a job that is absolutely dharmic, and I would rather starve to death than earn money impurely." Others say, "Look - I'll do the best I can, given my circumstances." There's no judgment in either case; each of us has to hear what each of us has do to."

"If you are a sadhu, if you are single and a renunciate, then maybe you can afford to be more of a purist," he points out, "(as) no one is dependent on you. On the other hand," he points out, "if you are a householder and have a family, then you have certain responsibilities, and you've got to do the best you can. If you are a householder, but you are being such a purist that you don't get enough money to feed your baby, in the long run you will have done more adharma than dharma. If you're in that situation and you find that you have to take a job that doesn't feel entirely dharmic to you, do the best you can to bring as much consciousness as possible into the scene. That's all you can do. You work with what you are given."

"You do that with respect to each aspect of your life," Dass notes. "Whatever your part is," he says," you just play it, but you play it as consciously as you can. That's the most basic form of the concept of doing your dharma: to find your little square on the grid, and then to live it out perfectly."

The Path Through a Pathless Land

"I maintain that Truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect. That is my point of view, and I adhere to that absolutely and unconditionally. Truth, being limitless, unconditioned, unapproachable by any path whatsoever, cannot be organized; nor should any organization be formed to lead or to coerce people along any particular path. If you first understand that, then you will see how impossible it is to organize a belief. A belief is purely an individual matter, and you cannot and must not organize it. If you do, it becomes dead, crystallized; it becomes a creed, a sect, a religion, to be imposed on others. This is what everyone throughout the world is attempting to do. Truth is narrowed down and made a plaything for those who are weak, for those who are only momentarily discontented. Truth cannot be brought down, rather the individual must make the effort to ascend to it. You cannot bring the mountain-top to the valley. If you would attain to the mountain-top you must pass through the valley, climb the steeps, unafraid of the dangerous precipices."

-- Jiddu Krishnamurti --
August 2, 1929      

In the following clip, spiritual pundit/philosopher, Ken Wilber, explains the truth of ages: that opting to walk a truly spiritual path - the path through a "pathless land" - towards higher consciousness and experiential knowledge of the Absolute is necessarily a lonely endeavour.




"If you want to find spirituality," wrote philosopher, Paul Brunton, "you must find it while living in the world, yet not being of it. In other words being inwardly detached and renounced, but outwardly living and enjoying as other people do, not held in your heart by material things, not mentally imprisoned by them, but able to renounce them at a moment's notice. If you can do this, you are free; you are no longer a slave."

[Paul Brunton, "Discover Yourself," p. 68.]

Nottingham and Krishnamurti: The Fractured Human Psyche

One of the most insightful and informed ministers active today is the Reverend Theodore (Ted) Nottingham of Indianapolis' Northwood Christian Church. In a video that directly addresses the human condition, Rev. Nottingham examines the duality and multiplicity of the human psyche in view of the world's great wisdom traditions.



"If you've had a bad dream," Nottingham explains, "if a thought goes through your head in the shower, your state changes. We are very fragile in that way. We are fractured. We are multiple. We are legion."

"The whole purpose of true teachings," he notes, "is to reunite us so that we can bring together the core of our true self, rise up out of that brokenness and enter the nobility of truly being creatures of free will, creatures in the image of their Creator. One of the blinders for us," he explains, "is that we have a strange psychological way of not seeing these contradictions."

"This is the condition of the human being," Nottingham observes. "This is everybody. It is a condition that many teachers have called 'asleep,' because we are so unaware, (because) our attention is so diverted and fragmented and there is nobody home to be present to our reality."

"There has to be a step back," he notes. "The mystics call it 'detachment,' a position of conscious presence that is not dragged around by what is going on, that does not have the rug pulled out from under it at any moment, and that is dependable both for God and for ourselves."

The ability to detach from outward phenomena is possible, Nottingham notes, but it "has to be created," through practice in mindfulness. "We don't come with that," he warns, "and life conspires to keep us from that place of centering. All the spiritual disciplines return to this. Meditation, prayer, all of these methods and habits and ways of life offered to us by the teachings lead us into a centeredness within, in a place of inner quiet, an inner sanctuary that is sealed off from the outside."

"In the world," Nottingham notes, "we are in exile. Spiritual beings lost in a world of materialism, disconnected from our source, no longer dependent as we should be on that which is greater than we are, thinking that we are independent, (we are) cut off."

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Jiddu Krishnamurti
(1895-1986)

Another great spiritual teacher, Jiddu Krishnamurti, made the same observations and voiced the same warnings regarding the many split off 'selves' that can exist within the human psyche.

"We are many and not one," Krishamurti observes. "The one does not come into being till the many cease. The clamorous many are at war with each other day and night, and this war is the pain of life. We destroy one, but another rises in its place; and this seemingly endless process is our life. We try to impose the one on the many but the one soon becomes the many."

"Our problem," he observes, " is not how to hear the one voice but to understand the composition, the make-up, of the many which we are are." Yet, this is exceedingly difficult, he notes (as so many other teachers have), because the parts - each with its myriad of desires - cannot undertand the whole. Thus, like Nottingham, he concludes that it is in understanding desire itself, and detaching from one's desires, that one comes to wholeness.

 "The voice of the many is the voice of the one," Krishnamurti writes, "and the one voice assumes authority; but it is still the chattering of a voice. We are voices of the many, and we try to catch the still voice of the one. The one is the many if the many are silent to hear the voice of the one. . . .

"To be aware of the whole, the conflict of the many, there must be an understanding of desire," he notes. "There is only one activity of desire; though there are varying and conflicting demands and pursuits, they are all the outcome of desire."

"Desire may not be sublimated or suppressed," Krishnamurti cryptically observes, "it must be understood without him who understands. If the entity who understands is there," he warns, "then it is still the entity of desire."

Complete detachment from desire through the experiential realization of one's wholeness, or centeredness, without any fractures, seems to be what is required. To see one's desire with one's very being, devoid of the raucous narrations of the many smaller 'selves' we each possess, is the way that leads us out of the mind trap we have created. For, "(t)o understand without the experiencer is to be free of the one and the many," Krishnamurti notes.

"In the awareness of this whole process," he writes, "there is a silence which is not of the experiencer. In this silence only does understanding come into being."

[Krishnamurti: Commentaries on Living: First Series," pp. 37-38.]

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"The mystics," Nottingham notes, "tell us that you must be emptied, so that you may be filled . Meaning that it is possible, by eliminating the many false 'selves' of the psyche, for us to become "transparent to the divine," as the great 20th-century Christian mystic Karlfried Graf von Durckneim put it.

Krishnamurti on Wealth and Enlightenment

All of the world's great religious or wisdom traditions address the impossibility of reaching higher states of consciousness and spiritual realization while attachments to the people and things that seem so important to our egoic self-consciousness remain.

Perhaps the most famous of these teachings are Jesus' encounter with "the rich young man" ( Matt. 19:16-22), and his saying that it is easier for camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God (Matt 19:23-24; Luke 18:24) - the kingdom of God which he specifically and plainly said was within us all (Luke 17:21).

Buddhist and Vedanta yoga traditions each stress the importance of non-attachment, while Judaism, Christianity and Islam each teach the importance of charity, a specific form of non-attachment. But it is perhaps the modern spiritual teacher, Jiddu Krishnamurti, who best explains why attachment to the things and people of the world are a hindrance to those who are on the path to spiritual enlightenment.

"For the rich as for the poor it is extremely difficult to find reality," Krishnamurti observed, further noting:

"The poor crave to be rich and powerful, and the rich are already caught in the net of their own action; and yet they believe and venture near. They speculate, not only upon the market, but upon the ultimate. They play with both, but are successful only with what is in their hearts. The beliefs and ceremonies, their hopes and fears have nothing to do with reality, for their hearts are empty. The greater the outward show, the greater the inward poverty."

"To renounce the world of wealth, comfort and position is a comparatively simple matter; but to put aside the craving to be, to become, demands great intelligence and understanding. The power that wealth gives is a hindrance to the understanding of reality, as is also the power of gift and capacity. This particular form of confidence is obviously an activity of the self; and though it is difficult to do so, this kind of assurance and power can be put aside. But what is much more subtle and more hidden is the power and the drive that lie in the craving to become."

"Self-expansion in any form, whether through wealth or through virtue, is a process of conflict, causing antagonism and confusion. A mind burdened with becoming can never be tranquil, for tranquility is not a result either of practice or of time. Tranquility is a state of understanding, and becoming denies this understanding. Becoming creates the sense of time, which is really the postpone of understanding. The "I shall be" is an illusion of self-importance."

Perhaps this is why it is "the poor in spirit" who are "blessed" for "theirs is the kingdom of heaven," according to Jesus in the 'Be-attitudes' which served as the introduction to his famous "Sermon on the Mount." For it is "the poor in spirit" who are non-attached to the things or people of the world, and are not interested in "becoming" anything; rather they are the ones who are simply 'beings,' and spiritual beings at that. Spiritual beings who truly dwell within their "be-ing"

Projecting the World We Wish to See . . . and Then Belieiving It!

Foundation for Inner Peace

One of my first spiritual "guides" was an old-timer who was physically handicapped and relatively poor. Every day he would truck down to the local bookstore to read a daily excerpt from "A Course in Miracles" ("ACIM"). At one point, he asked me if I had ever read it. I hadn't at that point. Yet, soon after reading Eckhardt Tolle's "The Power of Now," I bought a copy of ACIM. (A reference to ACIM is one of only four footnotes in Tolle's spiritual masterwork.) Moreover, for a while I belonged to a wonderful group that met every Tuesday to read from, and discuss, ACIM.

ACIM is a profoundly insightful instructional book, consisting largely of a long and detailed basic text, a manual for teachers of ACIM, and a student workbook of (not surprisingly) 365 lessons. A year working with ACIM and contemplating its lessons and teachings, as so many have found, is a year well spent.

The aim of ACIM (like so many other inspired works and wisdom traditions, both ancient and modern) is to expose and slay the "ego" and its misperceptions, and thereby reunite the student in consciousness with the G_d which pervades and sustains our physical universe.

At some 1,400-odd pages, ACIM has both astonishing depth and breadth, and it provides the "forgiveness lessons" we all need to heal the separation which the ego and its false perceptions have created between humankind and the Godhead "in which we live and move, and have our being." This need for a fundamental correction of our egoic perceptions is clearly set out in this extract from the Preface to "A Course in Miracles."

"The world we see merely reflects our own internal frame of reference - the dominant ideas, wishes and emotions in our minds. "Projection makes perception" (Text, p. 455). We look inside first, decide the kind of world we want to see and then project that world outside, making it the truth as we see it. We make it true by our interpretations of what it is we are seeing. If we are using perception to justify our own mistakes - our anger, our impulses to attack, our lack of love in whatever form it may take - we will see a world of evil, destruction, malice, envy and despair. All this we must learn to forgive, not because we are being "good" and "charitable," but because what we are seeing is not true. We have distorted the world by our twisted defenses, and are therefore seeing what is not there. As we learn to recognize our perceptual errors, we also learn to look past them or "forgive." At the same time we are forgiving ourselves, looking past our distorted self-concepts to the Self That God created in us and as us."

I am reminded in Shakespeare's immortal words from Act II, Scene II of Hamlet: "Nothing is good nor bad, but our thinking makes it so."

The Only Thing 'Unchangeable' Is the Inevitability of 'Change'

If there is one thing that Einstein showed decisively, it is that there is nothing permanent in this universe. Even time and space, he demonstrated, are relative. Even the order of events may change for two observers, one moving slowly and the other moving at close to the speed of light.

If there is anything permanent at all, in fact, it may be the fundamental axiom that "nothing is permanent." Everything is always dynamic and in the process of change. The only thing that is unchangeable, it seems, is the inevitability of change itself.

The "permanence" of "impermanency" - we all age, sicken and, eventually die - was one of the telling factors that prompted the Buddha to teach, in the first of his "Four Noble Truths," that to the unenlightened mind this (our human experience) is dukkha, a certain "unsatisfactoriness" or "insufficiency" that is conventionally translated as "suffering."

Even our most pleasurable moments are actually instances of suffering, the Buddha taught, as we know inherently that these momentary pleasures will end, and always all too soon. Even relaxing on the beach in a tropical 'paradse' one is liable to think, with a sinking feeling in one's stomach, "Oh, but I have to fly home on Saturday!" At best, therefore, even these most paradisiacal moments are impermanent and insufficient to imbue us with any sense of true and lasting happiness. They are, thus, dukkha.

Recently, author Judith Johnson discussed "Embracing the Permanence of Impermanency" on the Huffington Post. "Emotionally," Ms. Johnson writes, "many of us yearn for permanency by seeking to alter the terms and conditions of our lives."

"We dream of utopias where only good and happy things come our way. We want financial security and happy families, good health, and access to the fountain of youth. When we find a deep and abiding friendship or love, we want it to retain its intensity and deliciousness. Often, we resort to manipulating our loved ones and ourselves to perpetuate the exhilaration. Yet the tighter our grip, the faster its fleet."

"What becomes permanent," Johnson observes, "is often only that which has solidified in our minds -- our prejudices, habits, beliefs and inclinations." And there is the rub. It is how we think, and at what level of consciousness we interact with our "reality," that determines whether or not we we suffer in our lives. But, fortunately, "like rock," Johnson notes, our prejudices, habits, beliefs and inclinations "can be altered if we use wisdom."

To end suffering, the Buddha concluded, one must end this vain, yet continual clinging and craving; both of which center in the mind and its attitudes (or conditioned ways of thinking). To do this, Buddha taught, it is first necessary to have a right understanding of impermanency and the ultimate insufficiency of "things" to provide lasting happiness. Next, one should refrain from engaging in speech, actions and ways of making money that perpetuate craving and clinging, either in oneself or in other beings. ("After all," as one wag recently put it, "it is exceedingly hard to reach enlightenment with a suffering creature on the end of one's fork.")

Finally, one must energetically engage in discriminating between what causes, promotes or prolongs craving and clinging, and what does not. Then with a rigorous meditative and contemplative practice one works to eradicate the thinking and thought structures that cause clinging and craving.

As Ms. Johnson notes on Huffington Post:

"As long as our myopic vision persists, we tend to live in a fixed, uncompromising relationship with the world around us. Those who disagree with us are likely to be perceived as wrong, their viewpoints discredited as inferior and therefore not meriting consideration. Such a dynamic all too often rules our politics and our most intimate relationships. When we live this way it is as though we dance a rigid box step rather than fluidly and expansively expressing our being."

Realizing that our "things," our "experiences" - even our very "thoughts" and long held "ideas" - are impermanent, it is then possible to overcome "our myopic vision." To do so, however, we need to cultivate a proper understanding and view of our life experience, to refrain from engaging in improper speech, actions and livelihood, and to expend the energy we thus preserve in engaging in at least a minimal meditative and contemplative practice, rather than wasting all that energy cursing the perfidy of the gods and the fickleness of fate and our fellow beings.