Suffering

It is the birth right of every being to be peacefull. To be happy. And we understand the nature of the suffering, the nature of the seeking, it's very clear. I don't want certain things in my life and I want other things. But the problem is we can't have one without the other. We can't have pleasure without pain. That is the basic duality of our life. We can't have creation without destruction. So anything that we can imagine has an opposite. We can't have female without male. Sometimes men and women wish they didn't have the other. That is the reality of this existence. This life experience. Three/four dimensional existence. And because of the way our body-mind organisms have been designed and the way we live, this duality is going to always be present.

If we would have been taught that in a young age, we would have a different view of anger, we would have a different view of sadness, different view of frustration and anxiety. All the things we call negative we would deeply understand and accept. They also have their place in life. The spiritual seeker falls into the trap, the false belief of thinking there can be a life without pain.

And if we look at the lives of Jesus, the Buddha, Ramana Maharishi, even my guru's guru Nisargadatta Maharaj, they had physical pain. We can't expect the end of physical pain. That's logical. Because we can see the lives of the great sages, a lot of them had physical pain. Some of them had very painful death.

Then if we look at the next kind of suffering - what I call financial or material suffering. We need a house or some shelter, clothes, food and water, to keep the body alive. If we don't have some of that basic financial or material resources, we will have that pain.

Then we can look at emotional and psychological pain. Is it possible to not have any emotional or psychological pain? We can look at the lives of the great sages. Nearly all of them got angry or sad. they had strong extreme emotions. Some even got violent, they got frustrated, irritable. we can't expect the end of strong emotions. What can we expect? The Buddha said: "here is the end of suffering available to all beings in this life". What was he pointing towards? If we understand our psychological suffering, it is usually based on inter human relationships, including the relationship with ourselves.

In other words we don't suffer so much in the relationship with a plant. Or rock. Or animal. But that can also happen. Some of us are more sensitive to it. We are not worrying so much about what if the tree is liking us, accepting us, loving us, understanding us. Or the rock. Maybe the mouse or the dog or the cat.

My teacher summarized it, said that psychological and the part of emotional suffering was five key things: Blame, Guilt, Shame, Hatred and Pride. And if we look at our own life, we might see that the baggage of suffering that we are carrying is based on inter human relationships including the relationship with ourselves and is based on these five things.

When we do something that hurts the other, we blame ourselves, or we blame the other if they have done something to provoke the action, or have hurt us. And we feel guilty about it, we might experience shame, or we hate ourselves or we hate the other. Or if it's a good action, like "we've done a fantastic talk tonight", we feel pride.

If we can understand that, that is the root of our psychological, emotional suffering. In all our inter-human relations, the basis of our suffering is blame, guilt, shame, hatred and pride. I add worries and expectations.

So if we look at the stories in our head for example. The commentary in our head. It's usually around these five plus two. Interhuman relationships. The interhuman relationship might include our relationship with God, our relationship with Consciousness, our relationship with the source. Because the mind turns God into a person, a Being. So it becomes the relationship. Me and God.

And we come to spirituality, or what we call spirituality, to basically find the end of our suffering. To find the end of our pain. And we are right to do this because some beings like the Buddha or Ramana Maharishi - many beings, have said, it is the birth right of every being to have an end of suffering.