Suffering

Last Sunday a gun man entered a Gay night club in Orlando, FA and killed almost 50 people and wounded many, many more.   US drones are flying over the middle East killing people, and climate change is causing the daily extinction of many species.   I have been thinking about suffering.

Clients often ask me why there is suffering.   We struggle against what we see as the unfairness and randomness of suffering.  It is unfair.  We feel if we could understand why suffering took place this would change it.  Each great religion offers explanations for suffering.  It does not change it for it is still part of our world.  We secretly hope that if we could understand suffering that we could escape it, and yet there is no escaping it.  Have you ever known anyone who did not suffer at some point in their life?  I certainly have not.  The question of why there is suffering is the wrong question.  The real question is how do we respond to suffering?   Perhaps if we could stop struggling against suffering like an animal in a trap we could learn to turn towards in and learn to respond with compassion.  Suffering is indeed with us like air, water and breath.

Christianity says that because God gave us all free will that this includes the freedom to do the wrong thing - to "sin" or to do evil.  But Christianity also says that God incarnate in the form of Jesus Christ stood looking down from a hill upon humanity and wept in response to our suffering (and way of treating each other.)  Christians are directed to identify the ways they sin or separate from God and bring themselves back to God and to pray for others to also have redemption.

Buddhism says that suffering is the nature of human experience.  But it also teaches that mindfulness is the way to reach detachment from the illusion of our experience being reality.  the Maras are the several forms of suffering that we are said to experience and believers are taught prayers of loving kindness designed to hold both people close to us and even total strangers in compassion and healing energy.

Judaism says that God contracted the divine self to make room for creation. Divine light was held in special vessels, or kelim, some of which shattered and scattered. While most of the light returned to its divine source, some light attached itself to the broken shards. These shards constitute evil and their trapped sparks of light give them power.

The first man, Adam, was intended to restore the divine sparks through mystical exercises, but his sin interfered. As a result, good and evil remained thoroughly mixed in the created world, and human souls also became imprisoned within the shards.  The “repair,” referred to in Judaism as Tikkun Olam that is needed, therefore, is two-fold: the gathering of light and of souls, to be achieved by human beings through the contemplative performance of religious acts.

It is noteworthy that all three of these great religions identify suffering - two of them describing it as separation from God, and all three see the way out of suffering as a spiritual path, that it is our intentional striving for good that is believed to be the cure.  All three call their followers to compassion in the face of suffering.  Buddhism says we cannot stop or end suffering we can only learn a way to be with us that releases us.

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.