Suffering and happiness
There is suffering in this life. This was the first noble truth that Buddha spoke about after enlightenment. We chase happiness throughout our lives. So much so that the pursuit of happiness is considered an inalienable right of humans in the American constitution. Both happiness and suffering are events happening in the conscious mind. They are not things that manifest in the external world that we can grab. Do you feel happy or sad in a dreamless deep sleep state? But can happiness exist without suffering? How would we know what happiness is if there was no suffering, just like we wouldn’t know what light is if we have never seen darkness. We can even argue that happiness and suffering are not two separate things. As suffering decreases, happiness increases and vice versa. Like the play between light and darkness during the course of day and night. The balance between suffering and happiness is like a knob that you can learn to tune.
If happiness and suffering are just mental events, why are we so fixated on experiencing one and avoiding the other. The primary reason is at a physical level all living beings are genetically programmed to seek sensations of physical pleasure (that humans so often miscontrue for happiness) and avoid sensations of pain. And secondly we have been deeply conditioned by society to seek happiness and avoid suffering. It’s true that we are born in a physical body and are governed by the same laws of nature that govern the animals. That is our default state. In Fact the animals have an advantage in the sense that they are not conditioned by their society.
So where does it leave us, the humans? Can we really do anything to change the state of our existence or resign ourselves to being governed by nature and external forces swinging wildly between experiencing pleasure and pain. Can we learn to tune the balance between suffering and happiness? The answer is “We can”. In fact only we can. Given we humans have the highest level of sentience and consciousness amongst all living beings. We have the potential to raise the level of our consciousness, understanding and realization.
The journey starts with the acknowledgement of the presence of suffering in our lives. We don’t try to cover it with all kinds of consumption at our disposal that numbs us temporarily to cover up the suffering inside. Imagine you have a wound and you just keep on taking pain killers to not feel the pain and pay no attention to treating and healing the wound. That is how we currently deal with the suffering in our lives. We just don’t know how to handle it. We have not been taught in the family, in our schools, in our communities about how to deal with suffering. The suffering of each of us affects others. The more we learn the art of suffering well, the less suffering there will be in the world.
There is the suffering of the body, including the sensations of pain, illness, hunger, and physical injury. Some of this suffering is simply unavoidable. Then there is the suffering of the mind, including anxiety, jealousy, despair, fear, and anger. We have the seeds, the potential in us for understanding, love, compassion, and insight, as well as the seeds of anger, hate, and greed. While we can’t avoid all the suffering in life, we can suffer much less by not watering the seeds of suffering inside us.
When you cut your finger, you just wash it and your body knows how to heal. When an animal living in the forest is injured, it knows what to do. She stops searching for something to eat or looking for a mate. She knows, through generations of ancestral knowledge, that it’s not good for it to do so. It finds a quiet place and just lies down, doing nothing. Nonhuman animals instinctively know that stopping is the best way to get healed. We human beings used to have this kind of wisdom. But we have lost touch with it.
Mindfulness is the best way to deal with suffering without being overwhelmed by it. Mindfulness is bringing your mind to the present moment, to know what’s happening in the here and now. Mindfulness is always mindfulness of something. It’s the energy that helps us be aware of what is happening right now and right here, in our body, in our feelings, in our perceptions, and around us. With mindfulness, you can recognize the presence of the suffering in you and in the world. And it’s with that same energy that you tenderly embrace the suffering. Recognizing the tension, the pain, the stress in our lives, we can bathe it in our mindful awareness, and that is the beginning of healing.
