Into The Mystery Podcast Ep. 16: On Suffering

Why is there suffering? Why would a benevolent deity permit such a thing? In this episode, we explore the root causes of suffering (hint: it might be our old friend 'ego' again), why so much of our suffering is self-inflicted, and how we can actually use suffering to, paradoxically, end it. When Rumi said, “The cure for the pain is in the pain,” he was alluding to tapas, the Yogic practice of “sitting in the fire” of our discomfort in order to liberate ourselves from suffering.

Transcript

Suffering is a natural part of human experience,

As is pain.

But there is also unnecessary suffering that we experience in our lives,

Psychological suffering.

In this episode we're attempting to explore suffering and what its causes are,

And perhaps what the remedy to suffering is.

Have a listen.

I'm always game to talk about suffering.

It's a fun subject to talk about.

You know that you're sick when you enjoy talking about suffering.

What is sick?

Let's define sick.

I don't think it means you're sick.

I think it means you want to understand something.

Well,

There's a lot to say about suffering.

There's a default suffering in this life.

Just a basic level of suffering that's kind of assumed.

It's sort of built into our idea of what it means to be in a human body,

Dealing with other people or other souls in human bodies.

I was talking to somebody who was detailing some of her neuroses and the way that she suffered over the things that her mind would do to her.

And she was fully aware that that was what she was doing,

But she didn't know where it had come from.

She was like,

Why do I torment myself with these thoughts?

Why can't I relax?

Why can't I ever relax?

Why is my brain tormenting me?

Which I think expresses a pretty basic truth that all suffering is created by the mind,

Created by our thoughts that are rooted in things that are not real,

That are not true,

That are distortions of truth,

That are sin in a sense because they're mistaken.

Certainly.

And I think suffering,

Well for some people it becomes an identity.

People do that.

People revel in their suffering and use it to get attention and use it to define themselves and use it as a reassurance that they exist.

Definitely.

Well,

I want to come back to for a moment what you started with,

Which is that we're sort of born into this experience of suffering.

It's indicated when the Christians speak about living in the fallen state or Buddha says life is suffering.

It's some indication that the fundamental human condition is that of suffering.

It's that of struggle or strife.

I would say that to some degree all of our spiritualities,

All of our sadhanas and paths,

They arise simply out of the response to suffering.

Let's define what suffering is.

I think that would be a very useful thing.

One of the most potent things that I ever learned from Gangaji was the difference between pain and suffering and that pain is a natural part of human experience and that suffering is absolutely optional.

So for me,

I define suffering as a primarily psychological experience,

Mental,

Emotional experience versus pain,

Which is very real,

Very real.

I think this is something that we learn from culture in a lot of ways.

There is an inherent suffering to being human because most of us start out with this idea that we're separate from our divine true nature.

Well,

No idea.

We just sense it,

That we've been separated from something.

But there is a drumbeat of suffering in our culture that's kind of infectious and we pick it up from the people around us by watching the way they respond to suffering,

Their emotional responses.

We pick it up from media,

Dramas,

Movies,

Plays,

Great novels.

These things are all written around some kind of a conflict or suffering at their core.

And so it's kind of assumed,

Right?

You know,

It contributes to this baseline understanding and experience of suffering.

But I think as you begin to do your work,

You begin to question the responses that,

You know,

As an individual you might have developed in response to any particular kind of suffering.

If my car crashes into a tree,

Do I need to suffer in the aftermath that follows or do I need to treat that as simply a problem to be solved?

Yeah.

But because we have this baseline understanding of what it means like,

Oh,

There's been a loss,

You know,

Something has been destroyed,

Maybe someone's been hurt,

Therefore suffering must follow.

We just assume.

Right.

And we treat each other that suffering is the appropriate experience in this kind of a situation.

Well,

That assumption is like food.

I think back to Eckhart Tolle talking about how we have a pain body and how we even have a collective pain body,

A societal pain body,

And what does that pain body survive on?

It survives on suffering.

Oh,

That's interesting.

I haven't read that from him.

A pain body.

Yeah,

Right.

Yeah,

This idea that if we could consider our ego for a moment as a body of pain,

That in order to sustain itself has to continue to dramatize and indulge and fight and resist and complain and all the things that go along with the experience of suffering.

We can use all kinds of things to reestablish who we are,

Reify our identities,

And if suffering has become some central mechanism by which we assert ourselves or get noticed in the world or exert control over other people,

Then we're going to keep creating more of that.

And,

Yes,

As you've rightly pointed out,

If a society has a pain body as well,

Then it's going to keep propagating the same sorts of situations that maintain a certain level of discomfort and suffering in the society.

And the thing you spoke to earlier,

Which is that it feels necessary,

It feels like we're obligated in some sense to the suffering,

Like we're loyal to it in some sense unnecessarily.

Yeah.

I kind of wonder how much,

At least in the United States,

How much that can be traced back to our Puritan roots and this idea that pleasure is a bad thing,

That the human being is here to work hard until death when heaven finally awaits.

I think we just get different societal versions.

I mean,

The Buddha spoke about it 2,

500 years ago,

So it's definitely nothing new to us,

But I think that it takes different forms,

And I think that the Puritan form is one such form.

That's where the Enneagram is very useful because you could say that the Enneagram represents nine different ways to suffer.

Nine different ways to suffer.

I hadn't thought of it that way.

That's what fixations are.

It's like fixations cause suffering.

Oh,

Interesting.

Yeah.

Why do we like suffering?

Like it?

Yeah.

I don't think we do like it.

I think we're fascinated by it.

I think we're fascinated,

At least we're fascinated by other people's suffering.

Yeah,

We can be fixated on it,

That's for sure.

Yeah.

I mean,

That's the funny thing about suffering is that the more that we become fixated on it in order to fix it,

The more we suffer.

Right.

The more we validate it.

I think a lot of our suffering comes from the fact that we believe in it.

Yeah.

That we believe it's actually a thing.

The two mechanisms that I see in suffering are the right and left hand of the ego.

They are searching and resisting,

And those two activities of the ego are absolutely necessary for the ego to continue its existence.

It must search for something,

Namely happiness or value or recognition or power or resist something,

Whatever it seems to be threatening or painful or scary.

It's constant movement to search and resist or reject is the activity of suffering.

I think we like it in the sense that we're using these two activities constantly to maintain our sense of who and what we are.

The ego just has such a hard time with the idea of simply being,

Of stopping.

Oh yeah,

Because it's death for the ego.

With no searching and no resisting,

There's no ego and no suffering.

That is a fact.

It's a spiritual fact.

Write it down.

Write it on your bingo card.

Let's connect to this basic energy of searching or this basic energy of resisting.

Let's really look at our own lives and see,

Where am I searching?

Where am I resisting?

In understanding those things,

How am I causing my own suffering?

Right.

Anytime we're searching for something,

We've already validated the idea that we're missing something.

Right.

If we're missing something,

Therefore we must be imperfect.

We're not whole.

There's a problem to be solved.

Lack to be filled.

God's made a mistake.

I'm not good enough.

You can go way down into that rabbit hole.

That's all kind of contained within this very idea that I'm searching for something.

That I'm not already just fine as I am,

As this expression of being.

Then the resistance,

The resistance of,

I'm not enough.

I don't want to feel that.

I don't want to know that.

I don't want to experience that.

Right.

All the dynamics that go into.

That's the thing is that suffering is not fun and everybody knows it,

But largely we are unwilling to encounter the actual causes.

That's what Buddha followed up with.

After he said,

Life is suffering,

He said,

There's a reason for it.

The way out of suffering is to understand how it's happening,

How it's being perpetuated.

He said it's basically through attachment.

It's through attachment and aversion.

It's through searching and resisting.

If we want to be free of suffering,

We have to understand how we're practicing suffering.

When I was younger,

I used to do a lot of suffering on behalf of the injustice in the world.

The atrocities that I read about.

None of them were happening in my front yard most of the time or in my neighborhood.

I remember when I found out what the Taliban was doing to the Afghani female population,

I was devastated.

There was a feeling of helplessness and an inability to abide a world in which something like that was possible.

I suffered mightily.

Not just that,

But that's a good example.

People seem to have their particular atrocities that animate their suffering sometimes,

If that suffering is projected.

Or introjected,

You can put it either way.

That's the word I wanted.

Yeah,

If that suffering is introjected.

Yeah,

That's a good example because what's the appropriate response to seeing someone hurt or an injustice done?

In many cases,

It's compassion.

Instead of highlighting the compassion in our experience,

The love,

We cling to the injustice and we cling to the suffering as if suffering is going to somehow help.

Yeah.

That's a real challenge to your ability to be peaceful if you're nursing an awareness that there's so much suffering on the planet.

I think that's one reason people have an argument with God.

Maybe the number one argument against God is,

Well,

A God that was actually good would not allow these things.

Well,

That's a good point.

That's the number one argument that I hear people make against their existence of God.

It's quite easy to refute,

Honestly,

When you understand that God doesn't create suffering.

In God's granting of freedom or free will,

As we usually refer to it,

Also doesn't remove or take away suffering.

If we really understand that,

Then we can stop blaming God.

That's the brilliance of the Buddha's contribution in saying there's no God because then you can't blame God for suffering.

You have to understand it's happening according to your own inner workings.

That's the brilliance of his way.

I'm reminded,

Too,

Of the story of when Yogananda went to see Ramana Maharshi and asked him that very question,

Why is there suffering in the world?

Ramana said,

What is suffering?

Who suffers?

The implication,

I believe,

Was that because all of this is God,

God doesn't suffer,

Strictly speaking,

But it's ultimately God anyway that's receiving what we would call suffering or what we would create and perceive as suffering.

This is where it's so important to understand suffering as resistance and to understand the difference between pain and suffering.

If we can understand that there's a difference between pain and suffering,

Then pain can be experienced cleanly without suffering.

Seeing that,

Ramana's words come alive with the understanding that suffering is the experience of resisting pain and that pain itself,

Unresisted,

Isn't suffering anymore.

It's pain still and it hurts,

But it's not suffering.

I read a story by one of the Swamis.

I can't remember which one it was,

But he had been riding a motorcycle somewhere and crashed the motorcycle and had a deep leg to the bone gash in his calf.

He needed to be somewhere the next day.

He kind of limped into an urgent care clinic and asked for assistance.

The doctor said,

I'd love to help you out,

But I don't have any anesthesia.

You've got this 10-inch gash in your leg and I can't operate on you.

You're going to need to get to this hospital in another town or something.

He said,

Oh,

That's okay.

I could just go ahead and do it because I need to be at this place tomorrow.

The doctor stitched it up and said,

Did it hurt?

Of course it hurt.

It hurt like hell.

It was the worst thing I've ever experienced.

He was calm on the table and the doctor was just astonished that this was even possible.

I can't personally.

I'm a yogi,

But I can't imagine going through something like that and enduring it.

I hope I never have to find out.

The body responds to pain with contraction and resistance and fighting and things.

That's suffering.

You can open.

That's the point.

You can open to pain.

When I sometimes,

Maybe you remember this from yoga training where sometimes what I tell people to practice this is the next time you stub your toe,

Really good,

Like one of those toe stubs that just really like to your core,

Right?

Instead of cringing and tightening and fighting it,

Just relax and let the pain be there without the fight,

Without the resistance.

Just a little exercise like that,

We begin to see how it's possible to open to the pain,

How it's possible to experience it without fighting it or contracting or resisting.

Then our experience of pain becomes a totally different kind of experience.

Yeah.

Well,

You know what?

Now that I've said all that,

I'm thinking back to I have three kids and I gave birth to all of them with no anesthesia,

Which is pretty painful.

Kudos to you.

Thanks.

I'm pretty proud of that.

You should be.

You should be.

Well,

It's because I'm a coward and I didn't want to have an epidural actually,

But what's the matter?

So you'll go through the pain of childbirth instead.

Well,

It was natural pain.

That's not exactly cowardly,

My lady.

Anyway,

But what I was going to say was,

You know,

But we did the Lamaze glasses and it's all about that relaxation and that being able to surrender to what was happening.

As I think back to the actual births,

It hurt like hell and at some point with my first child I turned to the nurse and I said,

I need the epidural.

And she said,

Well,

It's too late for that.

And I said,

Well,

But I can't do this anymore.

And she said,

You've been doing this for two hours.

And I didn't realize,

You know,

I didn't realize it had been that long.

And it was like,

Oh.

And suddenly just knowing that the end was close and that I had already managed the pain for that period of time made it less intense somehow.

And then,

You know,

Before I knew it,

It was over and I'd forgotten all about it.

And it certainly was a different experience,

I think,

Than I would have had had I not had techniques to cope with that pain and support,

You know,

Something to reassure me that I could handle it because I didn't kind of know if I could.

And that made a big difference in my,

Just my mental orientation to it.

Definitely.

It reminds me,

I read an article once by a CIA operative who talked about how they're taught to endure torture,

Which is basically recognize that you can handle what's happening now and to be open to what's happening now.

If you can step into the future one moment,

It's just what could happen or what will happen or how this is going to happen again,

It's too much for your psyche.

But with pain,

If we can open to it in the present,

It becomes the way to face what seems so unbearable.

And that's what you're describing is recognizing like,

Okay,

You had done this already.

And that's the interesting thing is we learn through that.

We learn that if we can open to pain,

That's part of what tapas is,

Right?

It's this willingness to encounter pain,

Willingness to encounter difficulty.

And it teaches us that very fine difference between the experience of pain that's clean and the experience of pain that's resisted that causes suffering.

Yoga postures,

Yoga class is an excellent place to encounter,

I'm not going to say pain.

You know,

When I teach,

I tell my students don't invite pain.

You know,

You don't want to have the sharp shooting dangerous stuff going on.

But we can certainly encounter discomfort and question it.

And I've had those moments myself in class where I've been in like standing head to knee pose or something which I don't particularly enjoy and understood the pain to be nothing more than a sensation that had no value to it,

Good or bad.

And just that little mental shift made it interesting as a phenomenon and nothing more.

There was no,

I can't take this any longer,

How much longer do I have to hold this posture?

So it's a really good way if you want to start to dive into how we create suffering is to notice your responses to these situations.

You know,

Not just in yoga class,

Although that's really sort of obvious example,

But suffering in interactions with other people in an argument.

Well,

You said something mean to me and so now I'm going to suffer over it and I'm going to resent you for,

You know,

Until you apologize or something.

We don't have to do that.

We can totally step aside from that and look at it as,

Well,

There's a thing that happened.

What does that really mean?

What am I going to do with it?

We always have that choice.

Yep.

That's our ability to be present and objective there.

It always removes the element of suffering that makes suffering personal.

It allows us to see something for what it is rather than how we're interpreting it.

You know,

You see this in little kids too.

Like if a two year old falls down and waxes his head,

His response to that will be reflective of how the parent responds to it in a lot of ways.

So if the parent freaks out and is like,

Oh my God,

Are you okay?

You know,

The child will tend to be a little bit more upset than if mom is like,

Oh,

Did you bonk your head?

And children will mimic or mirror our suffering and learn that from us.

You know,

How we respond to those sorts of physical insults or anything else.

Absolutely.

Going back to what you said early on,

It's like that's how we teach the legacy of suffering to each other.

Yeah.

That's like a microcosm of our society-wide baseline suffering assumption.

And then all the things that develop from that,

Right?

Stance in the world as a victim or the stance in the world of someone who's been injured,

Traumatized,

And not to discount injury or trauma or victimization that exists,

But to develop the identity as someone who has been traumatized or injured or suffers is to continue to live in suffering,

Which is to live in the past.

What I love about the work,

The unfolding on the spiritual path,

Is that,

At least for me,

It has allowed me to truly look at suffering that I've dragged along behind me for years.

You know,

Narratives,

Relationships,

Things that happened to me that I thought were unfair,

Economic injuries,

Whatever.

And to take those stories and finally let them go.

Finally question their validity,

Question why I was carrying all this stuff with me.

And in a lot of ways,

It was,

Well,

Reifying my identity,

For one thing.

And it also gave me this,

It allowed me to position myself as sort of the underdog in my life story.

It gave me something to fight to overcome that would make me a hero in the end,

You know,

That there was this ultimate destination I would someday get to.

And I had to question that as well.

But man,

That sustained me.

That was fuel.

That was fuel that drove my life for years and years.

And it was completely unnecessary.

And I credit steady and intense self-inquiry in kind of unearthing those things because they can be,

I mean,

This is the point I really wanted to make,

Which is that they can be cured in a sense.

I don't know if that's the right word.

Dissolved,

At least.

Yeah.

Well,

Let's also give credit to suffering itself.

Like Rumi says,

The cure for pain is in the pain.

I mean,

People have asked me what the greatest teaching or teacher that I've come across is.

It's suffering.

Without a doubt,

Hands down,

Suffering is the greatest teacher you have.

No doubt about it.

Nothing will teach you more than your suffering.

Well,

It's sort of the burr under the saddle,

You know,

Or the grain of sand in the oyster.

That's exactly what it is.

The grain of sand comes in and it irritates the hell out of the oyster.

But what does the oyster do as a response?

I don't know,

Is that a good metaphor?

Because the oyster actually kind of covers up the sand to make it more tolerable,

But you do end up with a pearl.

Well,

It covers it up,

But it produces something beautiful from it.

That's what we do with our suffering,

Is that suffering is then a fire.

It's an alchemical agent to turn something base,

Something lead into something gold,

To turn a grain of sand into a pearl.

Can we talk about tapas a little bit?

It's the food or the …?

Oh,

I would love some tapas right now,

Now that you mention it.

We don't really have that in Mexico,

But we have entojitos here that are kind of similar.

No,

I meant the fire.

I know.

Sitting in the fire of our suffering.

Sitting in the fire of our suffering,

Yes.

In Christianity,

There's this beautiful notion that God's grace is light,

But when we resist it,

It's like hellfire.

That's what tapas is.

We've all encountered moments where we've been deeply disappointed or hurt or didn't get what we wanted,

And there's fire in that,

There's pain in that.

If we're willing to encounter it,

We end up seeing that what we're being given is just the right medicine for us.

It's just the right antidote.

Again,

To reiterate Rumi,

The cure for pain is in the pain.

I remember early in my journey when the ego was in a very deep panic and all sorts of pathologies and wrong thinking.

There was just drama.

There was endless drama coming up,

And I didn't know what to do with it because it seemed like it was out of my control.

At some point,

You gave me the advice to just sit in the fire.

That became a practice.

In the same way that you would be in a yoga pose and be questioning this pain to say,

Is this really pain,

I would just sit with this suffering I was experiencing.

If you sit long enough in this fire of your.

.

.

I think it's not just the fire of your awareness or your suffering,

It's also the fire of the divine energy that's driving you in this process.

It is.

.

.

Same thing.

Just using that,

As you said,

As an alchemical tool,

As a transformative tool,

It's almost as though the wildfire scours the landscape and burns all of the vegetation away.

What's left is this fertile ground and maybe a few seeds that then can burst open and reveal what was underneath the whole time.

Yes,

That's right.

That hints at the resurrection,

That there's a fire that we willingly put ourselves into.

Whatever survives the fire is what's real.

It's what's worthy.

It's what's true.

Everything else is deadwood.

Everything else is the burning away of the false.

Yeah,

All of the rot,

Whatever's been festering in us,

Everything that we've allowed to draw our attention down into the depths and away from God where it should be directed,

From simply being,

From the beauty of existence.

That's the notion of tapas,

Is it's the fire that purifies.

We have to encourage each other to enter the fire because no fire,

No purification.

Nobody in this path wakes up.

Nobody expands.

Nobody grows.

Nobody deepens by staying comfortable.

It doesn't happen.

But discomfort doesn't have to mean suffering.

Exactly.

That's the whole teaching,

Is that when you're willing,

I think it was Buddha who said this,

When you're willing to suffer,

There's no suffering because it's only the unwillingness to suffer that is suffering.

That's all it is.

It's only the resistance.

That's what tapas,

That's what these fires,

That's what resisting the passions of our ego will teach us.

Most all spiritual paths begin with some form of that because otherwise there's no real chance for advancement on the spiritual path unless you have willingly put yourself into those fires.

If you're not willing to struggle a little bit,

If you're not willing to do a little hard work and face discomfort,

You're not going to get anywhere in this journey.

Well,

There's another way that our culture assumes suffering is that we're so dedicated to finding comfort,

Like avoiding all discomfort and inconvenience.

We're looking for this easy way back into the womb,

Into this existence where everything is provided for us and everything flows to us easily or we're taking care of whatever it happens to be.

That's the basic notion within spiritual materialism.

You're absolutely right.

Yeah,

It's this idea that if I just get in tune with God,

He'll give me everything I want and it's not going to require anything of me.

Yes.

It'll just arrive on my head.

This is all leading to my comfort,

My safety,

My happiness,

That it's all about this reward.

Right,

Right,

My heaven on earth.

It is the result of having willingly encountered suffering,

But I think of even just the Wizard of Oz is a really good metaphor in the sense that the cowardly lion had to suffer his fear along the way to realize his courage.

It was in him all along,

But he couldn't have known it without going into the fire.

Every great epic has some element of that,

I think.

There's a struggle.

There's work,

There's danger,

There's fear,

There's great challenge and the reward only lies on the other side of that,

Of going through that.

There's no work around.

There's no sidestepping the fact that we need to really encounter our suffering honestly.

Not just to not resist it,

But to actively embrace it and not sort of blame it on anybody or resent the universe or some other source for what we're experiencing.

That's what Cain did.

That's what Cain did.

Cain resorted to resentment instead of taking on the challenge.

I think of Bruce Lee saying that every person has a dragon that they must encounter.

If we don't face the dragon,

We resort to nihilism,

Hopelessness,

Depression.

It says in the Bible that after God rejected Cain that his countenance fell.

He became depressed.

He refused to enter the fire.

He gave up.

It's just hinting at the notion of how tragically wrong everything goes if you're not willing to encounter suffering.

It leads us to a society full of people who feel victimized,

Nihilistic,

Oppressed,

Angry,

Afraid and unwilling to face the tragedy of human experience.

How different would it be if we taught each other,

I mean from childhood,

We would have to change the cultural paradigm entirely to have it include a certain amount of suffering.

At some point in your life,

Or maybe all of your life,

You're going to be encountering these barriers and things that you have to overcome.

Look at the way,

The last 20,

30 years,

There have been trends in parenting to overprovide for kids,

To protect them from suffering in so many ways.

Then the kids reach college and begin to encounter failure for the first time or difficulty because everything has been made comfortable.

They've been made too comfortable and then they utterly fail or are depressed or who knows.

But having difficulties in school or life in general because they haven't learned that pain,

Difficulty and challenge are just components of life.

There's that problem of the illusion of safety because when we teach a culture of people to seek out safety,

We don't teach them how to contend with danger and hardship.

We have to learn that.

If we don't learn that,

Well see,

Here's the thing,

We're all going to learn that at some point.

We're going to get sick,

We're going to lose people,

We're going to have terrible things happen in our life,

We're going to die.

So we're going to learn that at some point and one of the best things I think we can do for each other and our kids is not create suffering but teach each other,

Encourage each other to face it,

To meet it,

To contend with it.

Yeah,

To meet challenge,

To meet difficulty,

To contend with heartbreak,

For example,

In ways that are healthy and that don't involve wallowing in it or perpetuating the suffering with our narratives.

I mean,

Obviously we want to comfort each other.

We want to reassure each other that this too will pass.

But I think we can over validate suffering.

The Buddha talked a lot about attachment and I wonder if that's not the number one cause or the number one,

I don't want to say cause,

But the number one kind of arena in which we find our suffering.

Our dogged attachment to,

I mean,

Start with the body.

We suffer because we're attached to our bodies which change and eventually die.

We attach to people.

We connect people in our environment,

Possessions,

The hoarding of money.

I think we develop attachment to the things that we think are going to reward us or bring us pleasure in some way or whatever is going to prevent pain,

Which is really just aversion.

Buddha was clear that it is not just desire that causes suffering,

But the attachment to desire.

I think if we get into that,

It's to discover that there's a belief,

There's a hope within desiring.

There's a hope within our attachments that whatever it is that we're attached to is going to give us something or lead to something.

What attachments really do is they take us away from ourselves.

They place us in something else,

In some other direction,

Some other divergent path.

That's where suffering is.

Yeah.

If I attach to a person,

Say a lover or a friend or a family member,

A guru,

Any of those things,

That person becomes in a way kind of a part of my identity.

I sort of begin to enlarge my space to include that person in that aspect of me becomes kind of essential to the way I think about myself.

Help me understand that.

I think what I'm trying to say is I think we define ourselves by our attachments.

I know we define ourselves by our aversions.

Oh,

I don't like broccoli.

I don't like opera.

I don't like that.

I don't like people who act like this.

That becomes part of your egoic structure,

Right?

Here's all the things I don't like.

On the other side,

We have all the things that I do like.

I like people like this.

This person's my type.

I'm granola.

I'm a city person,

Et cetera.

We kind of incorporate all of these ideas that we've attached to or all these identifiers that we think are part of our makeup.

There's something brilliant that's being said here,

Which is that our attachments always have an aim that feels fruitful or good.

The result of the attachment typically ends up to be some departure,

As we've said from ourselves,

Where what it is that we think is leading to a promising end or a desired aim is actually taking us away from that.

Attachment is born from the idea that I'm going to add something to myself.

I'm going to gain something.

I'm going to become something more.

Yeah,

I'm not already complete.

I'm not already okay.

I need this thing,

Whatever it happens to be.

I need this thing to support my wholeness.

That can be anything.

Right.

It can be a feeling.

It can be a piece of knowledge.

It can be a person.

It's a way of perceiving ourselves in the world,

I think,

Ultimately.

I think that's what I was trying to get at,

Was the idea that we attach ourselves to things and then we incorporate them into our perception of ourselves as an entity that's maybe even bigger than what we are as a body,

As an individual consciousness.

Here are all my likes.

It forms this sort of milieu around you in the brain that if part of that is threatened or if it's taken away,

Then all of a sudden,

Oh my God,

Here's a loss.

Of course,

We normally equate loss with suffering.

If a person that I'm very attached to leaves me,

What will I do?

Right.

I talked about this a little bit in our episode on death,

But when my brother died,

I was really surprised by the intensity and the theatrical nature of my grieving because he and I weren't close at all.

What was happening was there was a whole story associated with him and my family.

There were just a whole bunch of implications that suddenly just turned on a dime.

Everything shifted.

I think more than grieving the person.

I love my brother,

Of course,

But like I said,

We weren't close because we were very different people.

To lose him was more losing the structure that included him,

Losing the narrative that included him and what they meant to me in terms of how I viewed myself and what they suggested to me about myself.

I called my projections of myself onto him.

So I suffered.

I suffered heavily after his death when I don't think it was as necessary as what I actually experienced.

I would agree.

I had a very similar experience when I was 20 years old.

My girlfriend at the time,

She was unfaithful and she ended our relationship.

It was quite a surprise to me.

What really caught me,

It wasn't like I couldn't handle not having a girlfriend or it was painful to lose her,

But there was something remarkable.

I remember saying this quite often at the time,

Is saying that I feel like my whole sense of reality shifted.

The whole ground of my being shifted.

At 20 years old,

I couldn't understand why that was.

Why was it that not only was I hurt and felt this loss,

But that it also shook my very sense of reality.

It ties into what you're saying,

Which is that there are these attachments to people,

Things,

Experiences,

Feelings.

They provide us with some kind of structure that we can call self.

Then when it's removed,

We feel that a part of our self has been taken away.

On a relational level,

It's true.

But it wouldn't be that destabilizing if we already felt whole.

If you're already secure in your inner nature,

In your connection to God,

You know,

In a 20,

Who is?

I mean,

There are probably not very many people.

Over time,

You develop that.

Once you've found that center,

That solid core of I am,

Then when people leave,

You can be sad,

Certainly,

And grieve a passing,

But it doesn't have to undermine your very sense of integrity.

Yeah,

That's a good word for it.

Well,

If we consider that our usual experience of integrity is this one of putting parts together to form a fragmented whole,

Then when one of those parts are removed,

The integrity is jeopardized.

Right,

Right.

It's a house of cards instead of,

You know.

I think that's probably what Jesus was talking about,

Or the Bible.

I don't know if it was Jesus specifically,

But the Bible says,

You know,

Don't build your house on sand.

Yeah,

Jesus,

Yeah.

Yeah,

Exactly.

Right?

We're schooled to do that.

We're schooled to build houses on sand.

We're schooled to,

You know,

Patanjali speaks of it as a confusion.

One of the ways he defines ignorance in the Yoga Sutras is as a confusion or an ignorance about the nature of what's permanent and impermanent.

And when that confusion is present in us,

We try to make things that are impermanent,

Permanent,

And we suffer as a result.

We suffer.

Yeah.

There's a good,

I guess you'd call it a parable.

It's not from the Bible,

It's from the East.

But it's about a man who,

His wife spent all the money and gave away the cows,

And you know,

He was just completely irresponsible.

And so one after another of his possessions were just lost,

And he kept consoling himself,

Well at least I have a roof over my head.

And then eventually she made a mistake in the kitchen and burned down the house.

And he said,

My darling,

I love you more than ever because now you've shown me that even the house I can live without.

Yeah.

It reminds me of a story that tells the opposite,

Which is about the sadhu who leaves his house,

Leaves his family,

Leaves his job,

Leaves his money,

And has nothing,

And goes to live under a tree by the river.

And one day he's down at the river bathing and comes back to find that someone has taken his tree and he's outraged.

So this person who's given up everything and has no more attachments,

Still can attach to the tree.

Oh,

It's not funny.

Yeah,

Our human capacity to attach.

I think it's like at the same time,

It makes us profoundly human and it makes us profoundly ignorant at the same time.

And if we know how to navigate attachment well,

It's really an antidote to suffering.

Once again,

I brought up yoga class earlier in this recording about that being a place where you can encounter your pain and question it,

Or your discomfort anyway.

Here's another example.

People tend to sort of have their favorite spot in the yoga studio where you usually set up your mat.

And I started attending a new class one time and there were a bunch of regulars who probably had been in that class for years.

And one day I set up in a certain woman's spot.

I wasn't even thinking about it,

It was just a spot I always kind of gravitated toward myself in other classes.

And she walked in after me and kind of headed for a spot and saw me and made this gesture like,

Oh.

And then I was about to get up and apologize because I knew that's where she usually practiced and I was going to say something.

And I stopped myself and I thought,

Oh no,

No,

No,

No.

That's her stuff to deal with.

That has nothing to do with me.

But it's funny how we become attached to those little habits or the way we traditionally think of ourselves.

And I've certainly done that.

I saw somebody in my spot in yoga class and gone,

My class won't be as awesome as it was going to be because I can't practice next to the window or the heater.

And we do this with everything.

I'm five minutes late to the show I always watch or my husband forgot the milk.

You know,

All these little things.

It's raining and I wish it was sunny.

It's sunny and I wish it was raining.

And these are all just ideas that we need to learn to sit with,

Which is what so much of yoga is about,

Is just stopping and sitting with your stuff,

Whatever it is that's coming up.

And it's so simple.

And yet we have all these complicated strategies to avoid it.

Yeah,

Right.

Well even the typical yogi is looking for strategies to,

Something to attach to,

To alleviate suffering.

Oh,

That's true,

Isn't it?

Yeah.

The third Zen patriarch said,

Exercise one single preference and you set heaven and hell infinitely apart.

You know,

It's like this capacity we have to,

As you said,

Define ourselves based on what we want or what we think is right.

Yeah.

I mean that hits even deeper.

So I can almost hear the objection of a listener saying,

Well then,

Right,

So I'm not allowed to like things anymore or dislike things?

How does one navigate one's life if suddenly we just view everything as a neutral experience?

How do we do that?

What does that mean?

You go live in a box.

You go live in a box.

You go live in a box with a loincloth and you eat rice and beans every day and that's it.

It doesn't sound very satisfying,

Does it?

No,

But I mean it's an integral question.

We talk about this all the time,

Of course,

Being in the world but not of it.

But you see the mindset that you just presented,

Which I think is a fair one.

I think it's likely that a lot of people who hear what we're saying would come to that conclusion.

But you can see that what's hidden just underneath attachment is a nihilistic attitude.

If I don't have the thing I can attach myself to,

If I don't have my desires,

If I don't have my hopes,

If I don't have the thing I can aim at,

Then life is meaningless.

But the real experience of being without attachment is actually one of joyous freedom.

And that's the confusion in our mind,

Is that the confusion in our mind tells us that we have to seek a way out of suffering rather than this experience of knowing what it's like to be present within no attachment and to actually know that as freedom rather than deadness.

I mean look even at an experience where we're happy or feel peaceful.

There's no attachment in it.

Until you realize that it's a limited period of time and you go,

Oh I'm happy right now.

And then you want to hold on to it.

Right.

But yeah,

An hour from now this happiness will have passed and that'll be kind of a bummer.

And there arises the attachment again and that's the very moment we begin to suffer again.

Because in that happiness or peace where you want nothing,

There's no attachment and there's no suffering.

In fact,

That's what happiness is.

It is where our attachment and our suffering have ceased.

But what we do,

The mistake in our mind is that we try to fulfill that desire for happiness by attaching it to conditions.

And as long as we attach our happiness to conditions,

We suffer.

Right.

And the conditions are always ever receding into the future.

Right.

So it's like,

Okay,

I'm pretty happy right now because I've got so much money or I'm having this experience.

But boy,

There's even something better coming maybe five years from now.

If I save up enough money,

Then I can have an even better experience or I can be even happier than I already am.

We're always shifting the goalposts on ourselves.

Or the opposite which you've mentioned,

Which is what if this leaves me?

What if this happiness leaves me?

So a desire to hold on to it.

And that's what our attachment is.

The attachment are those two things,

Those two movements.

It reminds me,

Have you heard the story of Krishnamurti?

Maybe I've told it already,

I don't know.

But one day he came to his students and he was older and his age,

Had been teaching a while and he said,

Do you want to know my secret?

And they were chomping at the bit to hear and he said,

I don't mind what happens.

And that's like the ultimate expression of non-attachment is,

I don't mind what happens.

Yeah.

Because as long as I mind what happens,

I have some sense of what the conditions should be for me to be at peace.

Adyashanti said something similar.

He said,

If you want to be happy,

Simply release your demand on the present moment.

Yeah.

This poem is from St.

Catherine of Siena and it's called,

No One Will Begrudge Me.

I talk about it sometimes with him,

All the suffering in the world.

Dear God,

I have prayed,

How is it possible all the horrors I have seen,

All the atrocities you allow man to commit when you,

God,

Are ever standing so near and could help us?

Could we not hear your voice say no with such love and power that never again would we harm?

And my Lord replied,

Who would understand if I said that I cannot bear to confine a pain,

Nor let it learn from the course it chooses?

But what of a man walking lost in a forest,

Weeping and calling your name for help?

And unknown to him,

He is heading for a covered pit with sharp spears in it that will maim his flesh when he crashes through the trap.

Yes,

Why don't I remove every object from this world that could cause someone to weep?

Yes,

Why don't I speak in a way that could save a life?

I opened up my hand and the infinite ran to the edges of space,

And all possibilities are contained therein,

All possibilities,

Even sorrow.

In the end,

Nothing that ever caused one pain will exist.

No one will begrudge me.

The absolute innocence of all within my creation takes a while to understand.

It's good.

Reviews

What a beautiful talk. Suffering truly has been my greatest teacher 🙏🏻