Suffering is Self-Imposed

Apr 12

Of course, you have to figure out the cause to be revealed inside of you what is hidden in you.

This is life in the horizontal versus life in the vertical. Life in the horizontal would say that your nature is a precarious, uncertain one, based upon outer events and the fulfillment of your desires, whatever they may be. Life in the vertical would say that your nature is a divine one, one within God and God within you.

Of course, there are not really any words that can describe the indescribable but it’s important to try. Life in the horizontal focuses on survival, on doing, on experience. Life in the vertical focuses on joy, on being, on existence. What we emphasize and teach is a balance of your horizontal and vertical. The reason is that the horizontal is the place where you get to manifest what you have learned in the vertical. In the vertical, the knowledge is born. In the horizontal, it grows up. Metaphysical becomes physical. But in both horizontal and vertical, consciousness is the force behind those two of you who live in different worlds.

Your soul figures out its own path in the horizontal as if it is separate from itself, from God. Of course, the two of you are never separate from one another but this is the evolutionary process. This is the enacting of the soul but it is acting. The soul can select a damaging childhood but without being damaged.

So, think about it... just imagine that you’re watching a good movie on TV but a movie you’ve seen before. You already know what the marvelous, happy ending is. At the beginning of the movie, as the lead character faces hardships and betrayal and injustice and death and suffering, you’re just enjoying your popcorn and aren’t particularly concerned because you know what all of the negativity is all about. My favorite movie to enjoy this which I have seen 100 times is Robin Williams’ role in “What Dreams May Come.” God, I always cry in the beginning because I am so moved by the suffering of the husband and wife when they lose their children in a car accident. And boy do I cry at the end when all has come to fruition and the separation is banished and the joy is unbearable as much as the loss was and the husband and wife realize that they never lost anything.

Life IS the physical body, IS the energy of God, of the Divine, and plays with the losses and the daily assault of daily life in a myriad of forms and situations in trying to figure out how to make a living and be OK. You don’t really know what it’s like to live until at least some of those assaults and shocks have been overcome. What I have noticed is that there are two types that are very similar to one another: the very poor and the very rich. The poor are trying to figure how to get it and the rich are trying to figure how to keep it.

In both cases, many, not all, are identical to one another. They do not have time to pursue a conscious life because of the pressing needs of their conditions. Of course, that’s just a JBOPPP on my part but it is also my experience in having worked with them. But back to the horizontal and vertical.

It is only when you experience the vertical and its presence in the physical, the horizontal, that you can begin to move forward not out of experience but knowledge and the certainty of the role in truth in your life, and the privilege of being in a physical body that allows you to do that.

Don’t worry about the world, about others. Focus on yourself and how you going to release the vertical part of your Self that is trapped in the horizontal. Your individuality is important because that is the horizontal in you that expresses what you consider to be the truth of who you are. It is the exclusive individuality of your expression that is important. But simultaneously, it becomes vital to begin the ending of the element of separation and begin to see yourself as a form of the vertical, of the Divine, and embrace all other forms, individuals, and processes. This does not mean that other forms should be accepted. It means they should be allowed but rejected as an expression of truth that governs all of humanity. I could be wrong but my guess is that you have suffered enough and have played the game of survival to the best of your ability and still not ending up where you wanted to.

Please understand, I am all in favor of the enjoyment of the beautiful world in which we live and the beauties of the physical world, whether that be snoozing on the beaches of Wrightsville Beach, NC, or stopping in the bars along the wharfs in San Francisco.

But as you make progress, you can learn to enjoy the unfolding and embrace everything that occurs in your life as part of that unfolding because that is all that is happening. Why do you think it is happening? Because it is an accident? Because it doesn’t know what it’s doing?

No matter what you do, whether you try to become more conscious or not, hanging onto your suffering like a merit badge, there is still this impulse in you that is part of your destiny. For the Self within to become aware of itself, in time and in space and in a physical body, not in an afterlife or as escape beyond.

This is the will of the inner light, the inner self that you can’t change. This progressive movement to this awakening is what your life is all about but enjoy! My wife gets on me all of the time because of my eating habits. When I young, I never had dessert. I had to eat food that I detested. I remember on one occasion I was made to eat part of a rotten banana so that the banana would not be wasted. When I left home at the age of 15, I swore I would never eat another thing that I did not enjoy so I didn’t.

In that process, I formed favorite foods that would become in my mind part of my celebration of the freedom of eating what I choose and one of those would become Ms. Smith’s cherry pie. When my wife fixes a pie, she does not understand my preference for Ms. Smith’s cherry pie... but I do. She laughs at me for preferring food out of cellophane. Oh, the horizontal is so delicious!

The old spiritual models advocated in a number of different ways going without. Desire is the root of all suffering. The second stanza of The Old Rugged Cross goes like this:

“So I'll cherish the old rugged cross
Till my trophies at last I lay down
And I will cling to the old rugged cross
And exchange it some day for a crown.”

These models do not work. In the Buddhist approach, the concept of eliminating desire is unhealthy. It is a violation and rejection of the horizontal. Now eliminating need is healthy. Because you don’t need anything from anybody for any reason to be OK, so eliminate need as quickly as possible.

Desire is associated with envy but, regardless of what you have been taught, envy is a positive emotion. When it’s repressed, that’s when it turns negative. But when it’s expressed, envy turns into positive impatience, waking up one morning and saying to yourself, “I’m sick and tired of living this way and I’m going to do something about it.” That’s desire. That’s positive, healthy desire that can force action and courage and concentration.

In terms of the old rugged cross, if you think you are going to trade in decades of suffering for freedom, you are mistaken because all you know is suffering. Freedom could be standing right in front of you but you don’t see it because all you know is suffering. In the horizontal, in daily living, life has no choice but to become more and more and more aware of itself because that is what the process is all about.

But the underlying separation and ignorance in what prevents you from becoming the master of these forces and dynamics of your life and it is knowledge and thing else that can free you from them. To clarify, it is not freedom from the horizontal or from daily life, but freedom WITH daily life.

The only way the horizontal can be mastered is by becoming conscious and that is what our work is all about. Otherwise, you remain subject to the laws of suffering and death, powerlessness, hopelessness, etc. This struggle for mastery, for consciousness, while at the same time feeding you, empowering you, is simultaneously the process that consumes you.

As Sri Aurobindo says, “You are the eater eating that is being eaten.”

It constantly seeks the experience of the vertical in the horizontal in order to give meaning to that struggle and in the process, one day is consumed and dies. Because the old form isn’t capable of organizing itself to create the experience of the vertical in the horizontal, it seeks new forms by dissolving the old forms and this is the process of death. The horizontal is finite…all your achievements, all your money, all your ego won’t mean a hill of beans on the day of your death…only the vertical will matter but at that point, it’s too late. Time to move on. But my argument is what if?

What if you achieve the experience of the infinite right in the middle of the finite, experiencing the vertical right in the middle of the vertical, what would happen to you? I’ll tell you: Heaven on earth.

And this is one of the truths of our work at Truth Spring…that heaven on earth is real, that you can learn to live, joyfully, transforming your existence into the life of a master which is what you really are. The accumulation of experience, of what one refers to as one’s past adds up lifetime after lifetime, but always obeying the laws of death until, at the point, you begin to wake up. It is, truly, the only thing going on. And in order for this process to proceed, you have to change. Now, most people do it through suffering. We are advocating doing it through joy.

And, of course, there will be days that you forget and you will be enraged because of something that happened, but it won’t last long. And, of course, there will be times when you will be deeply afraid but they won’t last long. And now change speeds up exponentially, for you have learned to discard what doesn’t work, what doesn’t bring you joy. You live a life of brutal self-implication, knowing that you are the artist, the paint, the canvas, the easel and the painting.

You are in the process of defeating the laws of death for death is the oblivion of the self, the self-selected process of ignorance, of not knowing who you are and what you’re doing here. Self-oblivion is suffering…that you chose. It’s not the opposite of life…it’s a process of life!

As I said, I love Ms. Smith’s cherry pie but I don’t want to eat it every night. Change is required. And this is the process of death that provides a change of form, a new address, a new haircut, a new pair of shoes, a new partner. It is not knowing this that makes everything else seem so horrible, so unfair, so unjust. It’s the experience of being destroyed by daily life, our experiences of feeling powerless and helpless and annihilated that exposes our underlying ignorance and incapacity to deal with those events, reinforcing our loneliness and estrangement from God. This what your ego is always trying to conjure up…some plan, some image of itself that can break up that process, that can exclude itself from any further attacks, that can separate itself from feeling separate to begin with. And this is the great flaw, the great game that the mind is always trying to play and it can’t not be the game...until you wake up.

A dentist always looks at your teeth. A dermatologist always looks at your skin. The accountant always looks at your money. The mechanic always looks at your engine. The awakened individual looks at you and doesn’t see your teeth, although they are aware you have teeth, doesn’t see your skin, although they are aware you have skin. They don't see color although they are aware you are of a certain color. They don’t see your sexual preference although they are aware you have a sexual preference.

Self-inflation, self-aggrandizement is the ego’s need to disguise and cover up the despair that lies inside. But the whole time, it is the eternal impulse that lies inside of you that seeks this experience, this knowledge. In the meantime, the ignorance plays out but with mathematical precision.

What lies must be lied to, what steals must be stolen from, what betrays must be betrayed, what deceives must be deceived…but also…what loves but be loved, what gives must be given, what forgives must be forgiven, what makes others rich must be made rich, what uses others must be used, what consumes must be consumed. It is a law of reciprocity.

So, simply put, the discovery of truth in the physical matter is the journey of consciousness.

Sri Aurobindo refers to the process as mutual devouring which is so indicative of what we do to one another. This mutual ignorance has to be replaced with a mutual giving, of giving oneself to the ideals of the divine, to the ideals of consciousness and in the process, the ideals of consciousness that give itself to you. The lower part of you must subordinate itself to the higher part of you, and in doing so, the higher part of you serves the lower part of you. This is the mutual and guaranteed exchange that occurs.

The first compensation that is allotted to such an individual is a stabilized horizontal life, where chaos becomes cosmos, anxiety becomes peace, worry becomes a certainty. Your inner world is stabilizing and as a result, your outer world stabilizing. And here the implications become too vast to consider: powerlessness becomes power…not power over but power with. Separation becomes unity, allowing all forms of the divine but not accepting and rejecting lovingly those that create harm and are clearly in contrast to the goals of the divine, the endless and futile search for meaning is replaced by love, fulfillment and knowledge. Lastly, death that comes in all forms is replaced by the experience of eternity, of the immortality of your soul.

The impotence that you may feel in your efforts to acquire mastery appear to your undeveloped conscious as the reality of the world but behind this playing out of your unconscious, however destructive it may be, lies the truth of who you are and the force of life that was embedded in you at birth. If what I just said is not true, then you couldn’t even be here on this planet in a physical body in the first place.

Consciousness is the bridge between the horizontal to the vertical that once obtained, even in small doses, returns to the horizontal to rearrange the furniture and create a new life. But throughout the process, you are prey to that unconscious, the unconscious of your own choosing. You are the hunter hunting being hunted; the eater eating being eaten. And now you may be able to see at this point in the conversation that your circumstances are all self-imposed. Yes, your suffering is self-imposed as a divine mechanism whose goal is enlightenment, whose goal is the discovery of that truth that lies inside of you…and everything and everyone else.

Suffering is self-imposed.
And so is happiness and contentment and peace.

And then you’ve got an even bigger problem and that is the life consciousness, the universe may have other plans for you that are different than the plans you have for you. True heroes never choose the path. The path chooses them and, in the process, they become heroic. So, difficulty and strife and suffering are necessary to this process. If you understand this, you can then understand that failure, sin, your life are supreme acts of a supreme consciousness that knows the exact needs, the exact time and the exact longitude and latitude of its actions, as tools to achieve the already established results of the journey.

You chose to be here. You chose the difficulty, certainly at an unconscious level because who in their right mind is going to get up in the morning and say to themselves, “You know, today would be a really good day to experience difficulty.”

So here’s where all your effort and struggle come in, all of your desire to live beyond these laws. No matter what you achieve, the struggle continues. You see, on the other hand, if the individual were free of this unconsciousness, this ignorance, if the individual were conscious, difficult and struggle would have no place in the unfolding anymore. It is not that it wouldn’t occur; it’s that the individual’s energy would be focused not on the impulse of reaction and desire but on the conformation of love and affirmation of one’s true Self…no craving, no mutual devouring, no need for upheaval and disaster anymore.

The conscious individual would see the good in disaster, the joy in failure, the fulfillment in the lacking. This individual would know, even if only in general terms, the intended goal of the event…which is always good, always striving to know itself in physical form. I know this sounds strange.

So, now consider this and look for a circumstance in your life, old or recent in which you apply what I am going to say and just sit with it and observe and see that you feel. The self-imposed suffering is the mask of the divine in you.

Again, the self-imposed suffering is the mask of the divine in you.

Suffer all you want but you can’t win and you can’t prove that your suffering is real because it isn’t. It is the unreal play of unconscious thought. This struggle is the process of awakening. It’s just when you start seeing through the process, you will tire of suffering.

Yes, you will become strong.

Yes, you will endure.

Yes, you will persevere.

You will place value and pride on your scars but this is the merit badge of suffering and death and is not necessary any longer. It has done its job. Realizing that you are the victor vanquishing a foe that is you will cause anyone to stop vanquishing…why do I keep doing this? And now the self-imposed pain can come to an end and you can consider imposing something else, long-deserved, real and eternal.

Get out of your mind and see what is before you…the path of awakening…the path of joy…the path of you becoming your true and real Self. And now, the one in you who can look upon you with loving, forgiving eyes can only see a loving world forgiven of its unconsciousness.