The Source of Suffering and the Choice of Responsibility
La fuente del sufrimiento y la elección de la responsabilidad
A student reflects on how unpleasant experience led to associations with war, prompting a discussion about the deep roots of suffering, total responsibility, and the difference between struggling with reality and dancing with it.
The Source of Suffering and the Choice of Responsibility
A student reflects on how unpleasant experience led to associations with war, prompting a discussion about the deep roots of suffering, total responsibility, and the difference between struggling with reality and dancing with it.
It sounded like an example of how there really is no time. The suffering is there, but you don't notice it, so it seems like it happens in time. But it's really about where we put our attention. That was what seemed to be said between the lines.
Yes. What often happens is that we distract ourselves, constantly avoiding a very subtle sense of unease, a sense of something not being okay. It's really difficult to stay with it. It wouldn't be uncommon to fall asleep if you go there. And yet it's one of the most important things to be able to stay with.
As you get closer to that, time stops in a sense. So it is outside of time, because the mind is always constructing the experience of time, too, in a sense to avoid or distract us from that underlying unease.
I also noticed that the mind was already active. Something unpleasant had happened just before, when I was talking with someone, and that unpleasantness was still in my awareness. So it was easy to do this practice. I was already doing it before we started; I couldn't let go of it. And then what was interesting was that during the meditation, there was this sudden flash, an association with war. It was so obviously experiential in that moment. What's the difference? It all comes from the same thing. Maybe it comes out more or less intense, but the mind just took it there. All of a sudden I was thinking about war. This situation wasn't war, but it felt like it.
The roots of war in unexamined suffering
I would strongly lean toward the hypothesis that all wars come from that. Collectively and individually, it is the unbearable inability to sit with that deep unease. It leads to war. Suffering is the inner war: the war with ourselves, with our gods, with our reality.
Maybe that's where total responsibility comes in.
One hundred percent.
Instead of "you made me feel this way."
Exactly. I remember a couple of years ago, I was writing, and an expression came in words that I noticed as really important. It was something like: total responsibility leads to waking up. It leads to the end of suffering. All that is needed is full responsibility.
Because it forces awareness. You go inside. You don't let it get projected outward.
Yes, because the source of suffering is ourselves. Not taking responsibility means placing the source of our suffering anywhere other than in ourselves. That's how we then turn to the mind as a tool and ask it to help us deal with a problem "outside." And "outside" might even be in my body. I might be suffering because my legs don't work the way I want them to. That's still "outside" in a sense. My body, my mind, my world, my surroundings, my country, my government, my partner, my past, my future.
And maybe just that movement of going to the mind and creating stories is already suffering in and of itself. It's like I've left myself, so how can anyone be there for me if I've left myself?
The mechanism of resistance and seeking
Exactly. It is to place the source and the condition of okayness somewhere else: how the world needs to be, how the constellation of my life in this moment needs to be. It's wanting experience to be a certain way in order to be okay. I want something in my mind to change, something in my body to change, something in my surroundings to change. Something needs to not be how it is now, and then I will be okay.
That's a decision. That's a posture. It's a choice. It's an identification with the position that says, "When my experience changes from what it is now to what I want it to be, I will be okay, but only then."
That is the cause of suffering. That is what is meant when people talk about resistance or seeking. That's the mechanism. And that position is what we are attached to, identified with, addicted to.
It's very subtle, because it doesn't mean that I don't want things to be different. It means I don't need things to change in order to be okay with how they are. And "okay" here doesn't mean I don't want them to be different. It's a much deeper "I am not okay." There is a very deep sense of unrest and dis-ease with how things are, and I need that to be different. But this is an arrogant stance, not a victim's stance. It's not just "I'm not okay, I need this to be different." It's "I'm not okay, I want this to be different," and it carries a kind of defiance toward God, toward life, toward reality.
Layers of avoidance
That's where responsibility will take you: to see that you are the one taking that position. When we let go of responsibility, we experience that same stance through a veil that feels more like victimhood. "I'm not okay with this. The world is not how I need it to be. This is not okay for me. Life needs to change." There's more of a sense of being a victim of the situation. And then a further veil covering that is, "Oh yes, I am okay, because I'm going to change the world, I'm going to change this, and once I get there, I'm going to be okay."
Exactly.
Dancing versus struggling
That creates struggle, as opposed to a position that is completely at ease and at peace with what things are, while simultaneously engaging and dancing with life. I use the word "dancing" versus "struggling." If how reality is right now, and I am not in a position of "what is should not be" fundamentally, then something very different is possible.
This is so subtle, because it's really hard to describe. I could experience "what is should not be" in the sense that if I see a child being abused, that should not be, and I can take that position. But that is different from a deeper sense in which what is happening should not be, where something in my deep experience of reality itself is essentially unacceptable, something I can't handle. It's a very subtle difference.
For me, the difference is this: I can see that I'm not in a good space because I get reactive. What comes up for me is that I lose my love, I lose my compassion, I lose my acceptance. That's the difference. There could still be a sense of acceptance. What I'm seeing may not be a loving thing, but I don't lose my loving source.
Exactly. That openness, that non-resistance: from there, we can engage with whatever situation arises. That's what I call dancing with it. We relate to it fully, openly, and move it toward what we discern should be better. That is wisdom. Whereas if what is happening is not okay, and I'm not okay because that shouldn't be, then what I create from that position is friction, struggle, war with myself or with reality.
When I'm in that reactive place, my heart is closed. I know I'm going in the wrong direction, and I can't stop it. I just need to be there for myself in that moment.
Yes.