Do You Suffer Enough

The Buddha says that it is suffering that moves us to change toward enlightenment and I must agree. I have written about pain before (Purposeful Pain, 7/14/08) but that is purely on an individual level and of the nature that prevents me from further hurting myself. What I am thinking of now is actual suffering and grief.


On a personal level the suffering in the dark night of the soul is the place where we discover real faith and hope. In truth, it cannot exist anywhere else. Seriously, what kind of faith is it if you have all the evidence in the world that god has provided for you. That is evidence. Faith is only evident when there is doubt, or as Carolyn Myss is fond of saying, "In order to have faith you need to have an experience that demands you find it." So a real purpose of our pain suffering and doubt is that it forces us to develop deep faith and the endurance of a distance runner.


But in the transformational journey, the waves of darkness keep coming. (Oh you thought it was over and that the lesson was learned - wrong!) Each time we dip into the dark night, another layer of ego is stripped away, and another door or window to the world is opened. We gradually evolve from self centered living to allocentric living - other centered. The Buddha calls these outer layers of consciousness a movement toward oneness. As the illusion of separateness is eroded by spiritual suffering (sometimes it is more like being ripped away), our consciousness opens to the global experience of what it means to be human. 'I' becomes 'we' and the limited awareness of one's "sheltered" thin slice of humanity widens to include many others. This is good and right, right?

Wrong! Not good! Because with this awareness comes the suffering of 3-4 billion of the world's population. Not spiritual suffering alone: not just hunger - but starvation; not just sickness - but plague; not just pain - but torture. Human suffering is the awareness of the transformed soul. And what can we do with that level of awareness? The answer is not in turning away, or in numbing our brains with drugs and alcohol. No, the answer is, feel it, let it course through your body and rip out the last vestiges of an ego that thinks it has the power to solve the problem, and then sit with the grief! (O, fun, sign me up for that ride!)

The price of admission to the transformation ride is awareness - disturbing, painful, awareness. The kind that wakes you up at 3AM in the question of, "What am I going to do today that works toward the side of justice and mercy?" And so I sit here with the question (I have gotten used to living in the question) wondering at what point will the suffering be so unbearable that I chuck the roles I currently have and take greater action; global action. At what point will I no longer be able to silence the voice that wants to scream out at the profitability machine, "Enough!" When will I have suffered enough for that? Do you suffer enough?