Suffering; ITS&FYD.ch1,pt13.

SUFFERING & PAIN

[Please see the Introduction posted March 2013]

BUT BABY, IT’S COLD OUTSIDE.

Introduction.

The greatest problem with trying to discuss suffering is that the ‘causes’ can be internal or external; ie, ‘caused’ by others or self and that these causes are multi-departmental in terms of PEMS; not to mention levels of understanding. We have almost no understanding that much can be faced in life if we have the tools, the help, and the understanding that it is our Spiritual concepts that affect our lives all the way through to our individual physical circumstances. This is both for ourselves as individuals and as part of society.

We absolutely need a proper and respectful set of concepts for TISPing ourselves and Life as a reason to live and to treat ourselves and others with respect. This UUS is attempting to set up just such a set of concepts.

In general our greatest suffering comes out of our lack of real meaning in Life. This is what Jung was talking about. To quote Marie Louise von Franz;

“Jung would never treat a patient in their 2nd half of life without arriving at the question as to the meaning of this person’s life. It made no difference which everyday problem had led to the commencement of treatment; it always came down to this final question. For if one knows that one’s life has a meaning, then one is able to endure it.”

This theme is illustrated in the Tarot card of the 5 of Pentacles where 2 people in poverty and illness struggle along in the snow past the slightly open door of a church (depicted by a church window) without noticing it. What we ‘believe’ or how we find meaning for our life affects us to the core.

This is the primary reason I argue for this UUS. It gives useful meaning and a ‘reason’ for our ‘discomfort’ with Life, and thus helps us face the Split/disconnection within ourselves. This disconnection is what I am talking about when I am saying that essentially we disrespect our selves and our bodies and Life/Nature. Life is perfectly capable of (and does) giving us a great ‘whack’ when we are heading in the wrong direction for ourselves and have not taken sufficient notice of the prior gentler ‘tapping’ that we often receive. Finding this respect is essential. I don’t think we have much time left.

Life has a bad habit of pinning us up against the wall and saying ‘is this what you want?’ I suspect that many people have chosen this current lifetime as a method of pressuring themselves, as these seem to be very pressured times.

We are built to think about any pickle that we are in and to try to ascertain all the factors that got us where we are.

We are built to Explore and Look for what we want. We are also built to be able to ‘back up’ and work out how we got to where we have got; to think and to remember. Antidepressants seem to mess up our ability to do this.

Once we have done that we need to look in the Mirror and check out our own ‘beam in our eye’, and inspect and unravel our own judgement and blame of ‘the other’ to learn about our own InSelf. If we were not so caught up in our pernicious universal judging/blaming and were able to understand our ‘normal’ human-ness and bumbling, we would be far better equipped to help each other sort out our own ‘beams’, before we begin to ‘throw stones’. (A mixed metaphor or so.)

[The trouble here is that the factors in our ‘global environment’ that do greatly affect others’ suffering are now horrendously intertwined and thus appalling to attempt to unravel.]

Sometimes we seem to need to ‘get higher up’ to get out of feeling trapped.

[I once tried to trap a mouse that I found in my pantry using 4 square glass jars that I pushed together, but it popped straight up the tiny gap in the middle and escaped. It had not occurred to me as its potential way out.]

It is suffering that forces us to look for alternatives. It (suffering) is not necessarily required. Although everybody is nominally looking for the same thing (which we tend to refer to as ‘Love’) what we are really looking for is how this love feels inside us because we do not know.

Sometimes the only way to find what we don’t know what we are looking for is to learn to know what it is not.

We feel intrinsically separated from the comfort of heaven.

Being apart from God is painful, and we are deeply afraid and yearn for the safety of being a part.

We deeply fear alone, and run from it.

We are afraid we won’t get back, and we’re full of sin.

This UUS argues that you will get back, and you’ve not been ‘thrown out’ for ‘badness’.

We don’t know why we’re here and it makes no sense; it’s all arbitrary.

This UUS argues that God wants us to embrace Life and learn how to have the fun that She has. She knows it’s not easy, and I suspect She didn’t find it easy either. But, once She had worked it out… well, that was something else, and She wanted to share it. In effect, She wants partners, and we want to get to be partners. And basically, we’ll keep going until we get there, because, as I may have said before, we are parts of God.

To repeat; this UUS provides spiritual support as a reason and method (see later chapters) for facing one’s own problems in the physical, mental and emotional departments of life. It’s a useful way to support one’s self in finding meaning in life and learn how to live it in a manner that is correct for you. It is a reason for Life that also gives choice in every way.

We are supposed to suffer because it makes us ‘good’.

This comes straight out of good old P&C teachings. It’s incorrect simply because you are not considered ‘bad’ in the first place, as I hope to have made plain by now.

And, Suffering is ‘good for us’.

Suffering is not ‘good for us’ per se except to make us think. Its main message is ‘wrong way, go back’.

Thus, we are meant to think (if able to) about and remember…

·      How we got into this situation, taking all factors/forces into account and going back at least 2 years.

·      What were you judging, expecting, or blaming.

·      What is your body actually telling you?

·      Can you turn within?

·      What are the things of the most primary importance to you?

·      Can you find any advantages in this situation?

·      What brings you comfort/solace?

·      What can you learn here?

·      Can you change anything of this?

·      Are you passing this suffering along?

If God loves us, She wouldn’t make us suffer.

Not so, She treats us as powerful for ourselves as She is for Herself, because we are, but it is up to us to find that power. Life includes it all, so that we can explore it all, but our use and mis-use of energy has consequences that we may not understand for a while.

Suffering calls us to look for alternatives and hunt. It is still informative even if it’s ‘wrong way, go back’

How can we believe we are at choice?

Love must give choice, and we want to get to be partners to God. However, believing is not required here. This UUS is entirely one person’s (ie, me) ideas that give/gave me comfort, and that is why I am expressing them. Yours may be much more use to you.

What about the starving Africans? Have they chosen their situation?

I really don’t know. This UUS argues that their situation will serve them eventually, even if I don’t know the details.

Other major causes of suffering are the way power and money are used by powerful companies and countries to play ‘ducks and drakes’ with developing countries in whatever way they wish and these countries cannot do anything about them. Some of the things that rich powerful countries do to poor countries contribute to some of this abuse. Many companies are now bigger than countries and to whom do those people in charge of these companies really answer? Our P&C model of ‘how life is and should be’ (see next chapter) causes immense suffering and powerlessness to many people. Mirror Laws make it plain that if we treat others badly, then we are treating ourselves badly at very deep levels.

We need a different model, and I explore this in the next chapter.

Disrespect for Life and our selves.

Much of our suffering is through our real failure to appreciate the needs of the Soul and thus our bodies.

Our disrespect for Life and others as well, is enormous. We poison our environment (and ourselves) with chemicals, heavy metals and waste and pollution and ignore, absolutely, our bodies’ and Life’s need for clean air, clean water and clean soil, and I mean clean, not just a little bit ‘buggered up’.

This poisoning of our environment and the decreasing ability of our food to nourish us, directly affects our bodies and thus, our health (physical and mental) and gets us into trouble; deep trouble. Are we looking for ways to tackle cleaning up our environment at major comprehensive levels? Some governments are attempting to do so, but at great risk of being booted out of office as it is generally deemed a terrible thing for business which, of course, must come first. We worship money.

And disrespect for the power of God/Life/Self.

Our disrespect for our own need to allow life to inform us of what we need and want to know is directly related to our suffering.

‘Man’ puts himself first above life and attempts to dominate and control the natural world. This is mostly because we fear it and we fear life. If we can’t sort this fear, we can’t really sort anything.

What about ‘really bad’ people?

Sometimes people place themselves in situations which will give them the experience of being at a very great distance from God.

The greater the distance between a part and apart, the more uncomfortable is the process of growing up but the more you will be able to See and the more adult you may be able to become and thus a potential partner to God. That distance is what you have chosen, but it does not mean that it’s going to be a comfortable ride or even that you will succeed in your aims in this life. Remember that you have a great deal of time to do this in, and it can take a great deal of time and different lifetime experiences and perspectives to do it. My own experience is that ‘it all comes out in the wash’ you might say, but that is not to say that it was easy or that there wasn’t plenty of ‘grunge’ to look at.

PS. Judging that people are ‘really bad’ is a call to look in the Mirror, because your judging is making a fear available to your notice, that you may wish to clear.

Another thing that is useful to understand is that when we judge and label another as ‘really bad/terrible’ we have no way of accessing or even recognizing that strong ‘negative’ energy that is apparently ‘out there’ within ourselves, and if we can’t access it, we can’t use it. It’s not available and in fact, it just frightens us, and thus, controls and limits our lives. This is the way our judgements make us afraid.

Trying to Assign Blame.

The problem with trying to understand how we are at choice is the temptation to blame the suffering person as being ‘at choice’ and leave it at that, but as I stated above, this is not a blame system. This is a ‘support the other person, as you may yourself wish to be supported’ system. [Not to mention, there’s still an awful lot of explaining left to do on my part about exactly how one could possibly get to empowering oneself. - see below]

Also, you do not know why something is happening to someone else, or what they may need to See/learn, and they may not know either until further down the track whenever that may be, and it is actually not your business.

So, if someone has ‘chosen’ to suffer in this life do we leave them to it? This is another loaded question because their and our motives are usually very mixed up. Unravelling and sorting out our own motives is an essential part of facing ourselves, and is dealt with in later chapters. A lot of the answer includes who is wanting or expecting help for themselves as well as those who wish to help or are expected to.

My ideal world includes an overall awareness that the ‘weak’ need basic protection and the chance to ‘grow up’, simply because we need to protect the ‘weak’ in our selves (Mirror Laws = ‘the rejected weak out there are the rejected weak inside us’). I address the question of group awareness and action in a later chapter because I feel strongly that a society that has people in it with nothing to lose, is a society that lacks integrity and will therefore be prone to disintegrate.

The Challenge.

We don’t know what we can find out, and we don’t know what our resources can be, so sometimes we challenge ourselves or we want the pressure. Resilience seems to need duress before we know we have it. Diamonds are forged under great pressure.

Consider some examples.

A mild example here could be someone who wanted to check if they could meditate in the noisiest environment that they could find. Another eg is the mystic, Ainslie Meares, who taught himself to really relax by using small controlled burns on his wrists. (awk!) We have internal resources that may only awaken under exigencies. Only someone who has experienced major poverty and/or degradation will galvanize themselves to try to prevent it further down the line or at least have a very strong understanding that it is deeply wrong to allow humans, or animals for that matter, to live in such a way. Someone who has been blind in one life will be far more likely to be extremely interested in finding a way to give sight to others in a later life, and so on.

Someone who has tangled bitterly with the medical world may begin to look for alternatives. Someone who has tangled bitterly with the legal world may learn to be a lawyer in next life, and so on. Someone who has starved may learn to be very careful about food. Someone who has been extremely poor and oppressed may realize that it is better to die fighting for his and others’ rights than to continue to be oppressed. Someone who has lived with secret guilt in one lifetime may decide that death and/or speaking up, maybe both, is possibly a better idea in the next one.

The challenge of suffering is how you are able to achieve the healing you desire.

If you cannot, you may continue to suffer, and many people do, and then the challenge is how you deal with that. Milton Erickson was paralyzed by polio in his late teens, with only his eyes and his mind available to him. He used them to observe people very minutely. He later learnt to walk but always with pain which he dealt with by hypnotising himself. He became simply one of the best therapists of all time. (There is a short biography of Erickson in Wikipedia.) This is inspiring because it reminds us that it can be done. Another example could be the Greek story of the centaur Chiron, who used his unending search for healing for himself to teach others about what he had and had not found. Notice that this search was unending; it did not end in his lifetime.

If you end up simply suffering you will unconsciously want others to suffer too, and will ‘spread it around’.

A primary challenge for many people is how to find ways to maximize what you can do in this situation. You are looking for ways in which to prevent and reverse such things in the first place, for yourself and others, and this is not always possible.

Sometimes we are unable to be healed and sometimes we cannot change the situation either, and may die. And still this is not the end.

Some of these factors/forces are beyond any single person to fix, and some of them are something to be angry about and to fight for. It is also true that some of them are not worth living through. Sometimes it is better to fight for our ideas or to die fighting/protesting than live/survive under vile circumstances/treatment. Some suffering is worse than death.

Sometimes we do not know what we had until we’ve lost it. “Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you’ve got ‘till it’s gone”. Our and others’ losses can be devastating and teach us to value the fragility of life, and maybe to be grateful while you have these things that are important to you.

Suffering and Pain force 1. Alone and 2. ‘Down to the Bone.

1.Alone.

Suffering forces facing ‘alone’, (as does death, but we don’t always face this). But we fail to notice that God had to face it too! And we and Life are Her answer to this question. What is yours? Who are you when you are alone in the middle of the night? What are your resources? Who is there? This ‘alone’ means externally alone, but you have an ‘other’ within you. You can label this God/Life/Nature/U which is a great comfort if you can turn to Her, or you can label this person your InSelf. This UUS (amongst others) argues they are the same thing. Either way this pans out as ‘you are loved’ even if you may feel ‘unloved’. You don’t actually need anyone else for you to learn to Love your InSelf, and therefore feel loved. God did not, and neither do you; and you can still ask for help.

To repeat, it is possible to learn to Love You by yourself. A method is outlined in this UUS. There are others, but almost always all under the radar of social awareness. Our society prefers Blame.

2. Suffering forces us ‘down to the bone’.

We are ‘hung on the hook and rot’; we are stuck and forced to stop and back up and work out the absolute essentials for ourselves (the ‘bones of it’). The world out there goes on without us. Do then we even exist? Suffering and pain reduces the material world to ‘dust’. It is the great equalizer, (while alive) and we may not like that at all. And yet in facing our essential equality we come closer to our own humanity and our own self. Remember Merge needs equality. Suffering may be the only way we will look and come to it.

Pain can break us, and for others it has made them ‘break open’ in a way. The pain and suffering has made them kinder and wiser; sort of ‘bigger’ in fact. It does seem to be true that pain is the only thing that makes us look at ourselves. If things are OK, we seem to congratulate ourselves or take it for granted and only start to query things if they are not.

Buddha and Desire.

My understanding of Buddhist belief is that Buddha noticed that life on earth was full of suffering, and developed the idea that this was inevitable until a person became ‘enlightened’ and could ‘get off the wheel’ and no longer needed to be incarnated on earth. He also noticed that people wanted what they could not have and received what they did not want, so his answer to this was to consider that desire itself was the problem. Hence it seemed a good idea to eliminate desire altogether; (except to desire to be ‘enlightened’?).

There are 2 problems with these concepts.

1. ‘Getting off the wheel of Life’.

This is another ‘ off-earth’ version of ‘Heaven is where we’re ‘sposed to be’. This UUS posits that Earth is where we’re ‘sposed to be.

2. Getting rid of desire stops suffering.

To me, this is like telling the tiger in the cage that it’s wise not to be a tiger. This is also similar to directives that anger is ‘bad’. Anger is your energy heading in an uncomfortable direction, ie your gut. People who want to be ‘good’ have a terrible time stuffing down desire and anger, especially when other ‘ungood’ people have a great time. (It’s a judgement; what is ‘good’ and what is ‘bad’?) Desire is a primary drive, as is Explore. No desire, no Life. It is desire that can get us out of the cage and eventually to our own Expression of Self. When our desires get us stuck, the idea is to back up and think about how we got there, and what we’re thinking about it, (judging or expecting), and what can be done about it. It is not the desire that is the problem; it’s the ‘wants’, and specifically our attachment to our ‘wants’. (see also ‘wanting versus having’ in the previous section.) Then be careful about how and what you desire next.

Animals and Suffering.

Animals are not sentient beings, as in, they are unconscious and are not ‘split’, and are already fully expressing their being. The do not need to become conscious of their unconscious as we do - they are their unconscious, and are in fact here to teach us a few things about that. Buddhists have a ‘do not kill’ command as part of their belief structure, but this can and does leave a lot of animals in suffering.

Mirror Laws (ML) make it quite plain that it is wise to avoid causing suffering even inadvertently, or we will need to experience it ourselves. For our own sakes, we need to work to alleviate if not eliminate suffering in others as much as is ‘proper’ for us, starting with cleaning up our own.

Thus, all animals must be…

- Allowed to be themselves and not treated as a commodity; (ML - as we treat animals as a commodity, we treat ourselves as a commodity),

- Protected from suffering and pain as we wish to be protected from suffering and pain, and thus we work to stop it, which includes ‘putting down’ animals that can’t be healed physically, and of course working to prevent unwanted or neglected/sick animals in the first place.

This does not mean, don’t kill animals, especially if the reason for their existence in the first place is that we want to eat them, but it does mean that we need to honour and respect their needs for their own being, as we wish to do the same for ourselves. This means ensuring that they have a life that is correct and enjoyable for them, and that when we do kill them, we do it without any pain or suffering for them, and we do it with gratitude for their gift of their life to us, and use as much of the animal as we can, ie don’t waste it or ‘rubbish’ it.

It also means clean air, water, and soil (for all of us really) and working to avoid and eventually eliminate the use of hormones, vaccines, GMO in their food or anyone else’s, and so on.

Our health and vitality depends on their health and vitality, ditto plants.

Animals as vermin.

For example, foxes, rabbits, cane toads etc.etc. These still need to be killed ‘cleanly’, for your own sake (ML). Neither should we ignore their uses to us while living (their presence in our lives are still information about us), or dead, (it is wise for us not to ‘waste’ their bodies or treat as ‘refuse’). If we handled Nature better and had less ‘monoculture’ thinking, we might have fewer problems, but it is still a difficult area to delineate, because there are so many factors in the way we impinge on Nature and regard her as something we are here to exploit, or defend ourselves against her ‘attacks’. However, the main principal is to avoid inflicting suffering.

Life as an Illusion.

There is nothing illusory about Life on Earth in this UUS. Any perception of it in this way arises from teachings that imply that our ‘proper’ home is off-earth. Such an attitude leads to essentially disrespect of all around you, both life and others, and of course, yourself. How does one love anything in the face of such disrespect? The only place there may be illusion might be in your own decisions and attitude to life, which are being reflected back to you.

‘Ascension’ thinking.

This is another version of ‘off-earth’ ideas, and to me, another version of wishing to escape the difficulties we do not wish to face, as in, our own Shadow within InSelf. These ideas don’t fit in with this UUS.

In sum.

Our patterns and searchings and explorations have a far greater scope than we are normally aware of in this life. However that is not to say that it is not possible to find out what your own patterns and searchings are. There are now tools available to find out. It is possible and can be done. It is worth considering alternatives and hunting/exploring.

Life is God’s great Creation and Expression of Her Self in Her Exploring; and thus Delight and Love of You. It Serves You and Everyone Else All the time at the same time, as Mirror and Guide for your ultimate Delight for your Self and your Expression of this. This is what is truly mind boggling! This is the great ‘perfection’ of life. Hence, awe, gratitude and respect are useful attitudes on your part, and you must respect its power and its information for you, ie, its personal effect on you.

If it is all perfect, how is the un-love of suffering telling you about your own and others’ un-love for your InSelf? What do you want; what is important, and what are the basic basics? My version of the basic basics is this UUS of TISP InSelf. What is yours?

Ultimately the idea is to be able to support ourselves internally regardless of external circumstances and thus be able to have courage in our own lives and be kind to others in theirs. It is a great self-sufficiency in life.

Thus, always and still we are being asked

Who are you in this? And what do you want? Go inside and find out.

In this way we ‘grow up’ and embrace being apart. This means we...

·      differentiate ourselves out by sorting out and refining what we do and don’t want.

·      understand what’s important to us and others while we learn that ‘they is us’.

·      come into partnership with Life and learn how to Create Life from the heart both internally and externally ie ‘do God’.

In this we find our own Self and own that Self.

And we have a lot of time - eternity in fact - to do it.

and Life on Earth has heaps of

Contrasts and

Mirrors and

tonnes of things for us to experience.

to help us heal the split in our psyche.

The upshot of all this.

You cannot know others’ choices or their greater purpose which can span many lives, not just one. Blaming others as ‘deserving it’ is pointless. It is far better to have a society that works out how to help all of its members to have a meaningful participatory life.

As with all of us, the other is also searching and exploring.

It takes Time to understand what we have experienced and it takes Time; lots of it, to understand our own relationship with life.

Life is the gift; the journey is imperative. In the face of eternity, it does not matter one bit how long it takes to get there. Working it out is not easy, but having worked it out is great. On the way, like a worm on the hook, we scream and yell and whinge and hate it. We are afraid and angry. It is cold outside and it is painful and we hope like hell it really is just one life (oh no! it’s not! but it’s too late now!).

And now we turn to Death.