Suffering Doesn't Stop
I read many magazine articles, online articles, blogs, books, etc. Most of it just flows right through because it's already part of my internal environment or a subtle riff thereof. And then sometimes a passage is read that simply stops time, eliciting a deep resonance, followed by bouncing waves of introspection. This is one such passage, from the spring 2008 issue of Buddhadharma, p 37 (an excerpt from Ending the Pursuit of Happiness: A Zen Guide by Barry Magid (2008):
The core of our practice and our life is how we face, understand and meet the fact of suffering. Suffering is not an optional or controllable or removable part of life; it is intrinsic to what life is all about. But that definitely is not the message any of us have come to hear. The Buddha didn't just stop with the first truth; he continued and even promised that through understanding the root causes of suffering, suffering could be ended. The promise of the end of suffering is the hook we grab on to, and for a long time after we've begun to practice, we try to maintain our personal fantasy of what exactly that end of suffering is going to look like. But it doesn't end up looking like what we expect - or what we want.
My old teacher Joko Beck used to say that it took many, many years for students to finally discover what practice really meant, and when they did, most of them quit. That's because the end of suffering that we realize we can achieve through practice turns out to be an end to separation from suffering. Suffering ceases to exist when it is no longer something that we experience as impinging on our lives, as an unnecessary, avoidable intrusion that we finally learn to exclude from our lives once and for all. Instead, what we realize deeply is that suffering is inseparable from life. I like to describe what happens by saying that suffering doesn't disappear from our life, but into our life. When we live our life as a whole, there is no longer an aspect that gets singled out as "suffering."
The part that stopped time was the first sentence of the second paragraph about how students who finally realize that suffering is inevitable and inescapable quit practicing (or at least move away from monastic or serious lay practice, I'm assuming). I've temporarily fallen into this realm, even though I do not claim to have practiced for many years, nor to have had any profound enduring realizations about the nature of some sort of reality. (Well, that's not entirely true, but qualified.) I have fundamentally realized, though, through the *gift* of constant pain and herniated cervical discs, that suffering - physical, emotional, spiritual, mental - is something that is never completely driven out of our lives as human beings. And, when one has spent some time with the belief that somehow being realized means having less suffering, this is quite a(nother) shock to the human psyche, which is doing its best to adapt and survive. Or perhaps even carve some meaning and creativity and love out of life.
But sometimes you just wanna say: FUCK!
And then you laugh out loud at the absurdity of it all.
The core of our practice and our life is how we face, understand and meet the fact of suffering. Suffering is not an optional or controllable or removable part of life; it is intrinsic to what life is all about. But that definitely is not the message any of us have come to hear. The Buddha didn't just stop with the first truth; he continued and even promised that through understanding the root causes of suffering, suffering could be ended. The promise of the end of suffering is the hook we grab on to, and for a long time after we've begun to practice, we try to maintain our personal fantasy of what exactly that end of suffering is going to look like. But it doesn't end up looking like what we expect - or what we want.
My old teacher Joko Beck used to say that it took many, many years for students to finally discover what practice really meant, and when they did, most of them quit. That's because the end of suffering that we realize we can achieve through practice turns out to be an end to separation from suffering. Suffering ceases to exist when it is no longer something that we experience as impinging on our lives, as an unnecessary, avoidable intrusion that we finally learn to exclude from our lives once and for all. Instead, what we realize deeply is that suffering is inseparable from life. I like to describe what happens by saying that suffering doesn't disappear from our life, but into our life. When we live our life as a whole, there is no longer an aspect that gets singled out as "suffering."
The part that stopped time was the first sentence of the second paragraph about how students who finally realize that suffering is inevitable and inescapable quit practicing (or at least move away from monastic or serious lay practice, I'm assuming). I've temporarily fallen into this realm, even though I do not claim to have practiced for many years, nor to have had any profound enduring realizations about the nature of some sort of reality. (Well, that's not entirely true, but qualified.) I have fundamentally realized, though, through the *gift* of constant pain and herniated cervical discs, that suffering - physical, emotional, spiritual, mental - is something that is never completely driven out of our lives as human beings. And, when one has spent some time with the belief that somehow being realized means having less suffering, this is quite a(nother) shock to the human psyche, which is doing its best to adapt and survive. Or perhaps even carve some meaning and creativity and love out of life.
But sometimes you just wanna say: FUCK!
And then you laugh out loud at the absurdity of it all.
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