Stopping the Suffering Addiction and the Compulsion to Suffer
by Luis Diaz
“Let us not forget this: spiritual consciousness and human thought are quite different things. Thought can begin the search but cannot discover what is real. The human mind can unfurl the sails and start the journey, but then it must stand aside and rest, leaving it to the winds of Truth to carry us to our destination.” -Vernon Howard
Pain happens, while suffering is optional.
“That which resists, persists,” says a very old dictum borrowed from Eastern spiritual teachings. Though in some circles it has become a cliché, there is great wisdom in it. Pain can come into our lives in many ways. To resist it is, above all, to deny that it already is with us and to go on blindly fighting against what happens. But to struggle with pain is to struggle with reality, and, according to our experience, to struggle with reality is almost always a bad deal. To understand how useless it is to resist pain, let’s imagine two wheels joined by crossbars and that a hamster is trying to leap from one crossbar to the other. One crossbar is labeled “pain.” Regardless of the crossbar on which the hamster begins running, it will always have to pass the crossbar “pain”. It doesn’t matter whether the hamster leaps towards that crossbar or away from it: sooner or later it will have jump on it, and the quicker it runs, the quicker it will be on the one labeled “pain” again. Pain is part of human life as much as pleasure and joy.
And our life is like those two wheels joined by the crossbars of the numerous experiences we have to go through. The best we can do to avoid suffering is to allow things to happen and to embrace our life. But to allow things to happen doesn’t mean to like them or to agree with them. Neither does it means that we shouldn’t try to do something to change them. To honor our life and embrace it definitively, there is no need to like everything that happens to us. Embracing, loving and honoring our life only demands being present and feeling with our conscious awareness whatever we feel at any given moment. To be present does not mean to stop the mind, but to observe it and, from that place of contemplation and presence, to embrace our life such as it is and become not its enemy but its ally.
Life is being permanently created and supported by the whole universe. It couldn’t be otherwise. The ideas we have about how our life should be come from that artificial identity we call self-image, which uses our mind to generate one new fantasy after the other, are the obstacles to embracing what is really going on. To ally oneself with the universe of which we are undeniably a part, and to flow in the incessant creation of that which we call “our life”, constitutes a deep and powerfully wise act. When our energy center of gravity is aligned with the life flow, we can sense love, power and freedom. Then we are like a drop of water celebrating being part of the ocean. We can live at high speed, leaping from one experience to another. So what would happen if instead of running like the hamster within a giant self-fantasized wheel, we stopped to live thoroughly, honoring each experience and event as it occurs in the universe? What if instead of spending our energy trying to carry out our grand plans, predictions and ideas, we admitted that those plans and ideas are, in fact, part of the same universe that recreates itself through us? If we accepted this reality, we would be suddenly calm and at peace, because we would realize that what must be will be, and what must be done will be done, through us.
