When Prince Gautama, whose father shielded him from the realities of life outside the palace stepped out, he learned the first noble truth, the truth of sickness, old age, and death. The truth of suffering. It is a privilege to live as a human being, but privilege always comes with responsibility. Until we realize enlightenment in this lifetime there will always be something that will cause us to suffer. How do we deal with it?
I read this story a long time ago and could not remember the book from which to quote it.
Once a distraught widow came to the Buddha. Her young son was playing in the yard and was bitten by a snake. He died. The woman cried “It must have been a terrible mistake, please, please revive him”. The Buddha told her “First bring me a seed from a household which has not experienced any suffering.” The woman went and knocked on every door on the village and told them of her plight. She was searching for a seed. When sunset came, the woman came back to the Buddha, wearied and beaten.
“Have you brought me a seed?”, he asked the woman. “No, enlightened one. There is no household in our village which has not suffered any pain.” “You have learned the first Noble truth. Go and bury your son.”
This story illustrates that suffering comes with life. If we came into this world as a consequence of our karmas, we are bound to experience some kind of suffering, be it mental or physical suffering, for we would not have relinquished the preferences of the previous lifetimes, the memory of the forgotten past hidden from view.
Our attachments bind us. Our desires arise and as one desire is fulfilled, another one arises. We fear not getting what we desire and that causes us to suffer. We feel attached to people, our beliefs and material things. We are attached to our pets. We are attached to our identities in his lifetime.
God does not want us to suffer. He is not a punitive God. The cause of our suffering is our forgetfulness of our true nature, that we always have been and always will be part of Him. This is the only thing we have to remember. His laws are universal and impartial. When we feel that we are suffering due to an illness, a lost promotion, not having what we desire, then it is because we have forgotten this connection in pursuit of our own ego based desires. We feel mental pain in the form of being frustrated, angry or sad, and being in this body, we feel bodily pain.
There is a way out of suffering. The first is by deep and absolute surrender to the higher power, to God, and the second is by meditation which will allow us to accept the emotion fully, whether it is anger or grief or frustration or physical pain, and then releasing it, completely.
This does not mean that we are going to act out our anger. It means accepting the fact that in this moment, we are angry but we do not have to lash back at the person or event that precipitated the anger. If we grieve, we grieve fully in the best way we know how. Some grieve by bawling, some by being silent, some by keeping away from other people. There is a proviso that one must not harm oneself or others when fully experiencing grief.
To deal with frustration one must acknowledge the fact that frustration is clinging to a perceived loss, and behind that still is the feeling that there is nothing else one can do. It is a feeling of helplessness. We attribute it to an event not completely controlled by us, hence we feel frustrated. We have to bring ourselves to the realization that at the moment that we did what was done, we did the best that we could, therefore there is no need to blame ourselves or others. We can not undo what has already been done so we accept it’s consequences. Wallowing in self pity or blaming others will only plummet us into a cycle of dis-empowerment .
Physical pain comes with having a physical body and we deal with it not as an inconvenience, not as having to fight with. We simply accept that this is what we have in this lifetime and we deal with what happens, accordingly. We get born into a body, the body gets old and eventually dies. Only that which animates the body is immortal. We chose the body we are in long before we were born. We chose who our parents will be, our siblings and everyone around us to maximize learning in this lifetime. It is not easy to comprehend this at the intellectual level but it is the truth.
Where we are right now is an effect of where we were many lifetimes ago. The only way we can skip this is when we are able to choose at will when and where to be reborn, if we choose to, and that can only be a consequence of awakening in this lifetime. Until then, our rebirth is a consequence of our past.
No matter what our current circumstances in life, as long as we live there will be some kind of perceived suffering. It comes with the territory of being alive as a human being. It unites as all, just as the breath does. We need to be reminded of our true Self, then perhaps we could deal with the pain better.
Chogyam Trungpa wrote this story in one of his many books:
When the great sage Milarepa’s son died, he wept. One of his disciples asked him “Teacher, did you not teach us that everything is illusion?”. He answered “Yes, but this is super illusion.”
Even those who have already worked on themselves constantly still have vestiges of humanly suffering.
We can only deal with where we are, right now. We can choose to prolong the suffering by fighting it or we can choose to alleviate it, if not end it, by simply accepting the moment as it is and refusing to cling to the past. The present moment is always new. In the present moment there is freedom and with freedom comes power.
© 2007 by Melinda M. Sorensson
Melinda M. Sorensson, Author
My Journey to an Integrated Life
ISBN-10: 0979650704
Available at Amazon Amazon.com
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