Sitting with the World's Suffering

"I'm sorry I just have to rant", she said.   And then she went on for some minutes about the death penalty and about our droan policy, and about ISIS and how we condemned them for killing while the US engaged in both kinds of killing.  "It is hypocrisy!", she ended.    Then she asked me how one sits with this sort of horrible thing, and what is wrong with humans that they act so ignorantly?  I have been known to have my own such rants, so I was sympathetic to her anger and turmoil.  But the question she asked me was far more important.

I have come to this belief through a variety of interlocking and reinforcing teachings and could not even recount exactly how, I can only say what I believe, but I think it is probably worth sharing.

We come with free will and not all of us are tuning into God and making choices that are aligned with the highest truth available.  But it is almost like souls also follow developmental stages - young souls learning about scarcity, violence, addiction, appropriate and inappropriate uses of power, etc. Perhaps slightly wiser souls learning about cooperation, giving, receiving, closeness, etc.  and eventually the Bodhisattva souls who have come back just to help others.  What this means to me is that within a particular life time people may be born into wars, or gang violence, or addiction, or political dramas as part of the lesson they are working on in this life time.   Some people maybe come famous actors in larger historic struggles whether they come as Rosa Parks or as George Zimmerman.  They are both working on their own personal lessons about (in this case) race or violence/non-violence - but they are also helping these themes be held up to societal awareness and learning.  They are helping our whole society learn about these themes.

Have you ever noticed how certain issues/themes show up repeatedly in your life, others not at all? How certain issues capture your attention completely and others do not engage you?  That is probably not an accident.   I for example have absolutely no interest in addictive substances.   While not wanting to hang out with addicts I also have great compassion for the suffering that they engage, and the struggle to be free of it.  It simply feels like something I have dealt with at some other time.  It is not a concern for me in this life time.

On the societal level I have even heard some argue that the likes of Adolph Hitler, took on lifetimes of suffering in order to offer us a most perfect symbol of hatred, violence and abuse of power - that in a twisted backwards way that was an offering to our collective learning. That by seeing the dark and the ugly we can better see the light and the beauty.  I do not know if I would go that far, but it certainly suggests that the project of collective learning is not straightforward.

So unlike the person above, I do not feel that people who are engaging in violence or hatred, or abuse of power are ignorant.  I simply feel they are human souls struggling with the lessons they have come to this life time to learn.  Granted I may not like their behavior, and in my turn I may rant about it. But when I am in a centered place, when I sit on the banks of the River of God, as I spoke about last month, I simply see the teeming masses of humanity struggling for resources, for love, for connection and for growth.  From that deeply centered place I see that we are all the same.  I may not be a murder, or an addict or an adulterer in this lifetime, but I know I have been in some other lifetime.  I also see that even in a current lifetime of such actions is a person who wants love, who bleeds, who hurts, who yearns.  These are other ways we are the same.

The hard part has been to sit with the pain of the world.  I have known people who have committed murder and rape and I have known people who have had family members murdered or been raped themselves.  I have known people who have lost family members in war (well even people whose last life time was to die in war) and I have known soldiers.  Their suffering has been equally real to me. It stopped looking as simple as the victims and the perpetrators.

One of the greatest gifts of the little Buddhism that I have learned is to learn how to breathe it through - breath the suffering through.   A practice I first learned from Joanna Macy, who is a Buddhist and and environmentalist.  In this practice you see the suffer you breathe it in, passing it through your heart with compassion and you imagine it leaving a whole in your heart and your chest and returning to the world.

A friend of mine recently talked about "spiritual bubble wrap".   She was talking about the ways in which we insulate ourselves against the suffering of the world.  How we turn away from stories like the next mass shooting where innocent people have been gunned down for simply being somewhere. We go numb.  We do not want to feel. Before learning breathing through I would deliberately turn my attention away from certain stories, certain kinds of suffering which felt like too much or "not my issue".   I still do this sometimes.  

But one day after a week of Joanna's workshop I had the radio on and the story came on about the sentencing of the police officers who during hurricane Katrina shot several black people on the bridge in New Orleans.   I started to turn away from the story, to put on the spiritual bubble wrap, but then I remembered to do the breathing through.  When I could do that I could notice the sadness of the racism so thick in our society that the police walk in fear of Black people, I could feel pain for the Black people who had already lost their homes and now would loose their lives or limbs because of racism, I could feel the sadness for the people of New Orleans effected by the climate change we have collectively brought.  and I could breathe it through.  Somehow it was less painful when held in compassion rather than sealed out with bubble wrap.

Buddhists have a loving kindness meditation.  It starts with sending love and compassion to yourself, then to your family or loved ones, then to a friend, then to an acquaintance, and then to a stranger and then to someone you are angry or upset with, and finally to the whole world.  This for me is simply another way to sit on the banks of the River of God, another way to breath it through.  Somehow remembering that we are all just struggling to grow into our better selves, our greater soul, the collective consciousness, really helps me be with the suffering that is this world.

Sitting at The River of God

In my last post, I mentioned Michael Singer's book The Untethered Soul -- how good he is at bringing Eastern ideas of meditation or mindfulness to our Western minds.  In the first two chapters of the book, Singer patiently explains how there is a constant stream of noise going on in our mind. In fact in the second chapter he, to my amusement, refers to "the roommate" - the voice that is always talking to us.  He invites us to really observe that voice by imagining it as a roommate who sits on a coach, and to listen to what is it saying to you?  I have previously been taught by meditation instructors to watch my thoughts, to label them "thought" and return to breathing. This frankly seemed like an endless, pointless, and not very useful process of noticing that as I am still breathing and thus also still thinking. But Singer engaged my curiosity about noticing "but what am I thinking?"

As a therapist I am aware from the different avenue of Internal Family Systems Theory (a modality which I practice) that we all have "parts" within us: a very effective project manager, a wounded child part, a nurturing parent part, etc, etc, and that these parts are not always in accord. (Yes this is not the same as someone having the diagnosis of multiple personality disorder.)  In fact the most common reason why my clients can get stuck is two parts inside them are at war, literally, with each other.  Singer invites us when we are upset to notice "who is upset?"  (He would argue that none of our parts are our true self.  IFS would argue that all of our parts are our true self, but that we function best when the parts work in concert rather than randomly and independently).  IFS would suggest that when we can notice which part is upset that we need to step into an observing part and learn to speak for a part, not from it.   An example of this would be the difference between speaking from a hurt child part and saying to a spouse:  "I hate you" vs speaking for that hurt child and saying "When you ignore me I feel hurt and unloved, and it makes me angry with you."

Interestingly, Singer also suggests we go into an observing part, and that from that place we can release being in the drama of that part.  Singer says: 

"The process of seeing something requires a subject-object relationship.  The subject is called "the Witness" because it is the one who sees what's happening.  The object is what you are seeing, in this case the inner disturbance.  The act of maintaining objective awareness of the inner problem is always better than losing yourself in the outer situation.   This is the essential difference between a spiritually minded person and a worldly person."

His reference to the spiritually minded person and the worldly person is interesting to me in how often Christianity makes the distinction between God's kingdom and worldly kingdoms - or the powers and principalities.

He goes on to say:  "There's a separation between you and the anger or the jealousy (or substitute any emotion here.)  You are the one who's in there noticing these things.  Once you take the seat of consciousness, you can get rid of these personal disturbances.  You start by watching."

As my friend, Scott Gaul, has mentioned this seat of the consciousness or this witness, is not just a place in the brain, it is actually the place of our soul.   Think of that: your soul is observing your life.  Sometimes very passively without you having any real awareness of it, and sometimes like in meditation very distinctly so.

I have written elsewhere about my own experience of what I call "the river of God".   This for me is an experience of going out to a wide lens shot, of sitting on the river bank of humanity, and looking at the teeming masses, the abundance of nature, the dramas of human life: birth, coming of age, marriage, illness, striving, conflict, love, and death as God views it.  Being quite and observing it all.  Not from judgment, not from intervention, but as witness to the eternal aspects of life itself.   From this vantage point I can let go of my own knot of emotion, my own 'caughtness' in the dramas of this hour, this day or this year.  Things drop into perspective - they may still be "issues", but no longer ones that grip me by the throat.  For in fact with a wide enough lens we realize that all issues are temporary - even those which are life and death - are life and death of this one life time.  When I can remember to do it (and that is the catch to all mindfulness) it is a reliable way for me to enter into my observer part, or to my soul sitting in the lap of the divine to watch life itself unfold.

Knowing how profound and how comforting that experience of being in the witness position is, has brought me full circle from the part of me fairly disinterested in the encouragements to watch my thoughts and label them "thought" to an appreciation of the power and groundedness of stepping out of my thoughts and emotions, to observing them.