ON SUFFERING
 

You know, I look around and I’m struck on a daily basis, I’m in awe, I’m dumbfounded by all these people arguing and fighting over petty disagreements... about how we should live, or behave, or act. Crazier still, are all those folks crusading around killing each other over this big disagreement about what happens after we die. The misinterpretation of one or two holy lines in the same book can lead to complete genocide. It’s madness. And it’s been going on and on since we fell out of the trees… and really what it’s about is this gargantuan crisis of meaning. Because at the heart of it, the bare bones of the matter, the truth for want of a better word, is that nobody has the faintest idea what’s going on.

       To parse the German philosophy of Geworfenheit, we’ve been thrown into existence, and now we’re forced to deal with it and we don’t quite know what to do. On a lot of levels, we feel ill-equipped, inadequate, useless, we’re getting the whole thing wrong, we’re told that we’re sinners or conversely that it’s all some big fluke and there’s no God at the heart of it and our consciousness has emerged like a marvellous accident out debris and rock, all of which is floating through space on its way to nowhere regardless.  

         And despite, or perhaps in-spite, of whatever we choose to believe, bad things continue to happen – and as we get older, they happen with increasing regularity, call it entropy if you want. I call it the Law of Loss. The Buddhists call it duhkha – unsatisfactoriness of being, or more simply put: pain and suffering — and this very common feeling begins to arise that there’s been this great injustice. We get very, very angry – some of us go out into the world, and say: “enough, this is how things are dammit, or at least this is how they should be and this is what I’m going to do about it!” And in due course we fight our battles, and we start our wars… but of course, that doesn’t work for very long, nobody really listens. Things are still impermanent. And when the anger subsides, if we haven’t destroyed ourselves completely in the process, we might find that we’ve become terribly depressed. “Oh, to hell with it”, we say, we just want this great injustice to end. Better to have never been. Or we become completely apathetic, impervious to it all, which in a way is even worse; we become the bored housewives of our own lives, so to speak. And then to add insult to injury about the whole charade, right at the end, just as some of us have started to get a handle on the whole thing, we die. Isn’t that a trip? And for many of us, despite our Geworfenheit, our suffering and our thrownness, death is still the very worst thing that can happen.

        Perhaps you’ve made your peace with it. As the saying goes: “I don’t mind dying, I just don’t want to be there when it happens.” But it does, and for most of us when it happens, we drown. Our lungs give up. But what you don’t realise is that you’ve done it before, you drowned on air when you came out of your mother’s womb. The sensation is very much the same. So, this Great Injustice happens twice, once when we’re born, against our will, and thrown into this life, and once when we’re sucked right back out of it.

        And in between we create chaos. Absolute chaos on earth. Because we don’t understand why. 

        Well, this simply won’t do. It’s in our nature to want answers, to want to get to the bottom of this existential soup; to find Meaning. It’s all any of us are doing, day in day out anyway, searching for meaning in all the wrong places. In a career, a spouse, a family, a car, a community, you name it. But we never quite find it, do we? Not for long. We’re never quite satisfied. We have moments, sure: a meditation, a morning run, an orgasm, a sunrise, a sunset. But then it’s gone. And we’re right back where we started, messing around in the dark.

        Well, what if I told you that there are answers. That there is an answer, a light that never goes out… it’s there to be had, if you want it.

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        It’s here right now. You’re wallowing in it. –– Silence. It rests deep within yourself. It is the sound of the stillness from which it all emerges.

        You won’t find it out there, in a textbook or a holy book, it’s not in the vacuity of the night sky or the hidden code that lies beneath the ground. It’s not at the end of the telescope or at the bottom of a microscope. It’s to be found deep within. But you see, your whole life, you’ve been looking the wrong way. You’ve been searching without for the answers that are within.

        Believe me I do not say this trivially. 

        There’s a complete and awfully simple sense in which all the great sages are saying the exact same thing. It begins and ends in silence.

So be still, pay attention. Train your mind to see what is. Explore the true nature of your consciousness — that’s it.

        As the old Buddhist saying goes: ‘the finger which points to the moon, is not the moon.’

        Only you can do it.

        The best thing is that you don’t need to go anywhere. You don’t need to do anything. It’s an undoing. The stillness is here already, surrounding us like an infinite ocean of natural great peace.

In the words of the great Tibetan master, Nyoshul Khen Rinpoche:

"Rest in natural great peace

This exhausted mind,

Beaten helplessly

by karma and neurotic thoughts,

Like the relentless fury

of the pounding waves

In the infinite ocean of samsara

Rest in the natural great peace."

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[repeats 3 times]