The only way to find true happiness is to risk being completely cut open.

CHUCK PALAHNIUK

23

ON SUFFERING

(And How to Fit the Entire Human Race into a Single Sugar Cube)

As I was writing the preceding chapter and glanced over at my old Tony Hawk skateboard, it brought back some memories that reminded me of how, for the greater part of my teenage and early adult years, I felt like I deserved to suffer. Since then, I’ve become enthralled with trying to better understand suffering and its root causes. My exploration and studies led me to a quote from spiritual teacher Ram Dass, who wrote, “Suffering is the sandpaper of our incarnation. It does its work of shaping us.”1

While at first glance this statement may sound rather simple, as I took it deeper into my heart and spent time truly contemplating what it meant, I found myself becoming profoundly affected by it. That simple statement helped me realize that, even though I had yet to understand much of the rationale behind both my mental and emotional turmoil—and the subsequent unskillful ways in which I lived to avoid feeling and working through said turmoil—at the very least, all my past suffering wasn’t for nothing.

I also realized that I could use the mental and physical discomfort I residually experience as a transformational tool. Instead of becoming comfortably numb by ingesting various substances, I face my past and all its fucked-up wreckage. I completely open my heart to the pain of those dark times while I explore my uncomfortable thoughts, emotions, and memories when they arise; and through these modest acts of bravery, I am able to begin transmuting the pain, the heartache, and the misery into compassion for both others and myself. What’s done is done. We can’t change the past, but we can make amends by doing our best to be better people each day, offering our lives and those in it our best possible selves.

Another thing I began to recognize while sitting with Ram Dass’s words was that, on a broader scale, much of the suffering that is rampant in people’s lives today goes unnoticed by them. This might sound weird to some of you, because it would seem that if we’re in pain or we’re suffering, then we’d know it and do something about it, right? Well, this is partially correct. Larger-scale pain and suffering, like the loss of a loved one or pain surrounding any other kind of traumatic event, is virtually impossible to ignore, so we each consciously deal with it in our own ways (healthy or not). It’s the lower levels of pain and suffering that usually go unnoticed—that’s because we’re used to them. For example, feelings of discontentment with our job, our love life, our home, or our physical appearance are just a few things that cause many of us to experience an underlying shitty feeling throughout our days . . . and usually without our even knowing it.

One of the Buddha’s primary teachings is the Four Noble Truths. These are:

       1.  Human existence is characterized by suffering. (Some Buddhist teachers note that “suffering” was taken out of context, or mistranslated from the Buddha’s original teachings, and instead should be replaced with the word “unsatisfactory.” Either way, you get the point.)

       2.  There are causes for our suffering and unsatisfactory experiences in life, which include craving, aversion, desire, attachment, and ignorance.

       3.  Freedom from this suffering is possible.

       4.  There is a path to freedom, known as the Eightfold Path, which consists of right understanding, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration.

If we really think about the Buddha’s first two Noble Truths in the context of our lives, we can see that, yes, in birth there is suffering (or unsatisfactory-ness), in aging there is suffering, in sickness there is suffering, in not getting what we want there is suffering. Hell, even in getting what we want there can be suffering if we attach or cling to it for a sense of peace and happiness.

The good news is that there’s grace to be found in this suffering if we can open our heart to it and work with the pain—whether using the Eightfold Path or other means that feel right for us (like the Unconditional Love and Acceptance practice or the Shadow Self practice). If we work with the pain from a place of Witnessing Awareness rather than the ego, which will want to turn away from it in fear, we begin to see that our pain and its various forms of discomfort are simply byproducts of our human experience. This is not to diminish them or say that we won’t still feel them, but the experience will become significantly less personal.

When we no longer identify ourselves as the unpleasant emotions, spaciousness opens up around our uncomfortable experiences; it’s a liberating, subtle shift and it happens when we’re rooted in the Witnessing Awareness. Over time, from this place of Witnessing Awareness, it becomes increasingly clear that we are so much more than just our thoughts, emotions, and physical bodies—which, when we’re attached to them as our ultimate reality, are the root of our suffering.

Now, here’s a random fun fact: we are made of atoms, which are 99.99999 percent empty space. So basically, if you were to squeeze the space out of all the atoms of all the people in the world, the entire human race would fit into a sugar cube.2 You may be thinking, “Interesting, but what am I supposed to do with that information?” Well, my point isn’t so much about the information itself but rather its implications: that many of us have been living with our head in the sand, from believing that our ingrained perception of reality is the only reality to believing that living with all the aforementioned suffering is actually necessary.

I’m trying to offer a gentle wake-up call here to those of us who have become indifferent in life, accepting this underlying stress, pain, and suffering simply because it’s what we’ve come to know as familiar, and believing familiarity is safe. Sometimes familiarity is safe, but not when it leads to an unnecessary lack of well-being. For me, suffering has now become a reminder, an invitation to remember that I am much more than this physical body, the 99.99999 percent empty space I’ve strictly identified with for so many years. With that remembering comes a lot of peace.

Of course, on the relative level, we are our physical selves, but the awareness of our physical selves (which is beyond the limits of our rational, thinking mind) offers us the possibility to experience life without taking things so personally. The dumb shit we did in our younger years, or hell, that we may have done last week, no longer needs to be a source of our suffering. We learn from our mistakes and make amends both with ourselves and—wherever and whenever possible—with those we may have harmed. Then we let it go; we move on. The greatest gift we can offer others and ourselves as we’re cultivating a deeper experience of Everything Mind is our own being, so why not make that the best possible being we can?