Why We Suffer . . . and how to end it

Know thyself!!!

Every sage, guru, & mystic from the ancient past has proselytized this admonishment. If there is one thing they have urged us to know, it’s to KNOW THYSELF!!!

Few of us have ever paid attention to, or have explored the MOST IMPORTANT DIMENSION of who and what we are. The immaterial, intangible aspect of ourselves we all experience as “I.” We feel so deeply we’re inside these avatars we borrow, right behind these eyes. It’s almost tangible and yet completely elusive to the extent most of us don’t even pay attention to it, ask questions of it, or really ever become aware of it as something entirely separate from the body, with most believing they are their body. I assure you, the body is yours, it’s not you.

Science has been exploring, prodding, mapping, scanning, and dissecting the human body for well over a hundred years. Sorry to disappoint you, but guess what? We’ve never found consciousness in the body, nor have we found the seat of the soul. The latest theories, that are consistent with my own theory, is that consciousness is a field of energy that flows through the body, it’s not contained in, nor does it emanate from the body. How mystifying!!!

We cannot know life any other way than the way it happens within us. YOU are the ONLY DOORWAY to existence for yourself and the experiences you’re having at any given time. LIFE is only experienced through the mechanisms of our body, which is OURS, but not US.

The cumulative sum of all the impressions made upon us governing our hopes, fears, aspirations, biases, beliefs, prejudices, perspectives, and opinions – fashions the lens we see reality through and ultimately determines how we experience life. This is karma. Here in America, we have a woefully, inadequate and misguided concept of karma, thinking it is a positive endowment that benefits us if we do good or a punitive universal mechanism that punishes us if we do something selfish or unappealing to others. It’s very naive to believe there’s good karma and/or bad karma, and worse yet that, “Karma’s a bitch!”

As much as we may wish the universe worked like that, it doesn’t. And even if it did, the only thing any of us have control over is ourselves.

The reality is, we cannot have an experience we are unaware of. Reality requires your awareness of it, oh but how many us drift through life with so little self-awareness, thinking life is happening to us, not within us? We’ve all heard, “perception is reality.” Our inner reality is the only reality, the way you experience and interpret the events of your life is ALL going on within you. The degree to which we understand this is the degree to which we can choose how we feel about anything.

This is the difference between consciously responding to life, instead of unconsciously, compulsively, reacting to it, with behaviors that are so well learned, rehearsed, and automatic that there’s no thought whatsoever involved in it. This is why we call these behaviors reactions, not responses. They usually lead to regretful outcomes, and subsequent suffering.

To end suffering, we need to first understand, that All Knowledge begins with Self-Knowledge - We cannot know or experience anything outside of ourselves . . . and we cannot know anything but ourselves.

Since consciousness is always outbound from within, we are both the center (the observer) and the circumference (the events we experience) of everything, the subject (the creator) and the object (the recipient), the actor (the central figure in the plot) and the audience (again, the observer) of everything that happens to us.

To understand this is to realize pain is inevitable, but suffering is truly a choice. Pain is largely an unconscious experience – meaning it happens as an automatic reaction to life’s events. We feel it without devoting an ounce of thought to it, and are held captive by it. It’s acute and immediate. Suffering by contrast, is a conscious experience, where we and we alone are the antagonist in our story. We choose our suffering by ruminating on the appraisals we make of how all the events in our life affect us. Something can only make us suffer if we are constantly giving attention to it, and most of us do.

Life is Permanently, Impermanent

Whether we see it as good or bad, LIFE IS PERMANENTLY IMPERMANENT – all suffering comes from attachment, the idea something or someone belongs to us, and our inability to be present. We are either drifting into the past, and lamenting about something we believe we’ve lost, or projecting ourselves in the future with fear and anxiety of the unknown.

We’ve been programmed for misery because the world conditions us to externalize our pursuit of happiness, love, and self-worth and to identify ourselves and our sense of self-worth with things through acquisition. We attach value to things both tangible and abstract to define ourselves. We become “attached” to those identifications.

We often suffer because we tend to believe that our life has to have some purpose; that we are somehow missing the boat if our life is not moving in a very specified direction towards a well-defined goal.

Sadly, most of our suffering is a product of social conditioning. The degree to which we feel fulfilled is the degree to which we integrate ourselves into society and see ourselves as being relevant. This is not what life is about.

Twenty-five hundred years ago Master Lao Tzu, lived by a philosophy he called Tao (pronounced dow) which simply means, “the way.” He taught, “There is no goal, only the way. Life is the way.”

Life has no purpose other than the transformation of ourselves (a process the entire universe is undergoing constantly) here and now. In other words, “the way” is the purpose, enjoying the journey is the goal. We never arrive, because there is no destination, not even in death. Life on the physical plane is only about transformation, growth, expansion, the ascension of our consciousness, and the evolution of our soul. No other purpose.

The physical plane, in our path along the “Wisdom Chain,” as I like to call it, is a unique destination for us because it creates countless opportunities for our soul’s evolution that are not available to us in the immaterial realm that lies beyond this physical dimension.

In observing the morphology and structure of every living thing, its physical attributes are nature’s resolution to the forces acting upon it. For example, in order for us to stand upright in response to gravity and air pressure pushing down on us, our body had to develop very specialized muscles that could innervate our bones in a way that would allow us to become bipedal. If there were no gravity acting upon us our bodies would have an entirely different set of anatomical features that would not resemble anything that we identify with as being human today.

Consciousness is no exception. If consciousness became isolated and had nothing to interact with, nothing acting upon it, it, like anything else, would simply atrophy. In order for consciousness to grow, it requires a force acting upon it. In other words; challenges.

This is why we incarnate and cross the abyss from the nonphysical into the physical dimension. Our reality is one of contrast, duality, and experiences that are constantly pulling different emotions within us to the surface. Our emotions serve as a compass pointing to the much deeper truth about our reality, and that is, we are woven into and out of all that surrounds us. We are each the center of the universe because the universe that we each observe does not exist without our conscious observation of it and we don’t exist without the universe that we emerged from.

Again, consciousness is an outbound phenomenon. Since consciousness only flows from within us outwardly, everything within the observable universe is only an extension of ourselves, quite literally the theatre of one’s mind. So, with I myself being the center of the universe, the most fundamental tenet of this thing we call “LIFE” is all knowledge begins with self-knowledge. We cannot know anything outside of our self . . .

This is why I stated, we are both the center and the circumference of everything; the subject (the individual navigating life) and the object (the one affected by every internal narrative we create in our heads in response to what’s external) of everything that happens to us, everything we interface with, and every scenario we find ourselves in. We are the central figure to the plot in every story we tell ourselves and those stories we create are always commensurate with our confirmation bias . . . in other words, what validates our beliefs. The reason we are the subject and the object is because we are the one creating the internal narrative within ourselves and the one affected by that narrative.

All these experiences we are provided, allow us to consciously expand and evolve as we interact with creation itself. What relevance would life have if there were no struggles, no problems to solve, no challenges, and no opportunity to learn from these temporal experiences? There’d be no need to look at ourselves and try to understand, no need to explore, discover, be curious, nothing to inquire about, there’d be nothing ventured and nothing gained, and no need to know much of anything because there’d be no need for the application of knowledge or what we’ve learned along the way, to apply to anything. So, celebrate EVERY experience in life. The good, the bad, and the ugly because experience is how we know ourselves, and every experience is our teacher.

Our Human intelligence, recently acquired as a product of natural evolution, is such that if we do not organize it properly, it only causes confusion and misery. Instead of being robust with tremendous potential and possibility, it is a very sophisticated tool that has become a big problem for most of humanity.

We give suffering all kinds of different names, calling it stress, anxiety, depression, madness, or misery, but essentially it simply means our intelligence has moved beyond our control. This mind of ours seems to do an awful lot of thinking on its own and often turns against us if we do not know how to use it. If we are suffering all by ourselves, without anyone antagonizing us, it simply means that our intelligence is now working against us. Our minds have gone off the rails and we cannot seem to control it. As a result, we become victims of its seemingly intentional and incessant provocation.

So what’s the way out???

Realizing, our thoughts create our beliefs, our beliefs create our story or internal narrative, and that narrative or internal dialogue we are having creates all our feelings. Change your thoughts and EVERYTHING CHANGES…

Let me know your thoughts on how you deal with loss and grieving. Do you find yourself in a place of suffering? How are you coping with it? I would love to hear from you.

Love & Light to You in your continued Journey of Self-Discovery

David