When we suffer . . .

When we suffer, we are experiencing the effects of frustrated desire, expectations and conditioning, but we are also on the verge of breaking out into the light. Let me explain . . .

I remember when I did my first intro course in Buddhism on the way to my PhD in Religion: I heard Buddha saying Desire causes Suffering, and to me from a very Christian background this made no sense at all. I could quote it and get 100% in the course, but there was absolutely no resonance in me to this sacred truth. More than a decade later, when due to being tired of too much suffering in my life, and yet again finding myself full of peace, love and joy after one of Sri Sri Ravi Shankar's advanced silence courses, I decided that I needed the knowledge, I needed to understand why I always ended up emeshed in suffering after the effects of the course wore off.

As I opened to the knowledge and pursued it with all my heart, with my full attention, it opened to me like a lovely flower, bit by bit revealing the sweetness and perfection of these sacred truths. Guruji's style of teaching was so simple: I got one basic principle through his example of coffee and a gulubjamon (a favourite Indian sweet): He gave us the example of sipping a sweetened coffee, then taking a bite of the gulubjamon and then taking another sip of the coffee. On the 2nd sip it tastes quite bitter, but it is the same coffee. The light came on for me. Our reality, what we experience in life is constructed: our perceptual abilities have been conditioned by cultural judgements and personal experiences. We don't see things as they are, but as we expect them to be. Any student of human perception knows that this is the case: that we don't see things that are there because we don't expect to see them, and we see things that are not there, because we expect to see them. This is a fundamental truth about the human condition, our experience of reality is illusory; we live in a world built of illusions.

So it is the illusory world we individually and collectively construct that gets us all mixed up with desire: because we are taught what is desirable and what is repulsive. In our consumerist world, where we are fed lies by advertizers all day long about what we need to be happy, this web of illusions has certain predictable if unfortunate results, such as young girls and women suffering from Anorexia Nervosa and Bulimia because of having been seduced by false or illusory visions of what it is to be an attractive female. The point is that one of the ways that desire causes suffering is by the fact that what we desire hurts or kills us like tobacco and yet theses desires seem inescapable for many.

Desire also causes suffering when what we desire is harmful for others, either directly or indirectly. Men's desire for young females is a case in point, as is our desire for personal comfort and wealth that is satisfied off of the backs of very poor, even starving people. Desire also causes suffering when our way of providing for our needs and wants leads us to damage and destroy the environment that sustains us: witness that increasing industrialization in 3rd world countries that is resulting in so much air pollution that lung and heart diseases are on their way to being the leading causes of death. Despite how obvious this pollution is they have nothing on us asa the first world's contributions to degrading the planet on which we live is so much greater than theirs. A wise friend of mine, who has witnessed the relentless onslaught against the Congo River Basin Rainforest said to me, perhaps we really do deserve to be annilahated, or at least, that's likely what we're going to do to ourselves.

Finally desire causes suffering when we can't have what we desire with responses ranging from fear and anxiety that we won't get it or we'll lose it to unhappy disappointment to bitterness and anger or despondency and despair. All of this is caused by inappropriate ways of constructing our reality, of deciding what is important and what it is that we must have or else. But I have good news: the good news is that suffering opens the possibiity of escaping these illusory constructions, these empty promises of fulfillment and happiness, because all human contructions are flawed, are imperfect, are incomplete versions of reality and human nature. As Leonard Cohen, my favourite musician and poet, famously says, "there is a crack, there is a crack in everything; that's how the light gets in!"

People "broken" by suffering, often end up being healthier, stronger and freer than those still caught in their illusions, still running the rat race, feeding the beast, trying to stay happy, when at heart they know they are as fragile as anyone else, that disaster can strike anyone, anytime, no matter how strong your illusions are. You see suffering often knocks people out of the mainstream, at least for a while, and in that time, reality can break through one's illusory defences.

All this to say, that if you're suffering, I want to encourage you by saying this is not all bad: stop to consider just how your desires, expectations, and related fears are at the root of your suffering, or are greatly amplifying the effect. I can tell you from my own personal experience that you are in fact, in the natural/spiritual centre of your being, peace and joy and love. If you can remember how infants and little children experience the world, you still have that capacity, that child-like way of being within you if only you can drop the fear, the desire for control and abandon yourself to the care of the Universe, to God, to whatever you can call that in which we live and move and have our being. I know that each of us is loved and precious and a channel of joy and peace and love for others if only we can awake. The ones who can hear me now are the ones who have already suffered, and who have already realized that there must be something more than career, possessions and family: to you I say, don't be discouraged by your suffering but surrender and find the meaning of this suffering, the liberating truth of who you are. To those of you so caught up in the pursuit of happiness, of wealth, of being somebody, I wish you the blessing of suffering when you are ready to benefit from it!

grace and peace to you all

your brother Daniel