The Source of Suffering and Total Responsibility
La fuente del sufrimiento y la responsabilidad total
A student reflects on how unpleasant experience led to associations with war during meditation, opening a discussion about how avoiding a deep sense of unease leads to suffering, projection, and struggle, and how total responsibility can dissolve that pattern.
The Source of Suffering and Total Responsibility
A student reflects on how unpleasant experience led to associations with war during meditation, opening a discussion about how avoiding a deep sense of unease leads to suffering, projection, and struggle, and how total responsibility can dissolve that pattern.
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 is one of the most important things to be able to stay with.
As you get closer to that, time in a sense stops. So it is outside of time, because the mind is always constructing the experience of time, partly to avoid or distract us from that sense.
I also noticed that 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 prepared for the meditation; I couldn't let go of it. And then what was interesting was that during the meditation there was this sudden flash, this 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 wasn't war, but it felt like it.
The roots of war in unmet 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 feeling that 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 struck me 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. To not take responsibility is to place the source of our suffering anywhere other than ourselves. That is how we then turn to the mind as a tool and, in a sense, ask it to help us deal with a problem "outside." And "outside" might even be in my body: "I'm suffering because my legs don't work as I want them to." That is 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?
Needing experience to change in order to be okay
Exactly. It is to place somewhere else the source and the condition of what needs to be. It is to demand that the constellation of my life, my experience in this moment, be a certain way in order to be okay.
What I mean by that is: 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 is a decision. That is a posture. It is a choice. It is 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 is the mechanism. And that position is what we are attached to, identified with, addicted to.
It is very subtle, because it doesn't mean 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 points to something much deeper: a very deep sense of unrest and dis-ease with how things are, and a demand that it be different. But it is an arrogant stance, not a victim's stance. It is not "I'm not okay, I need this to be different." It is "I'm not okay, I want this to be different," and there is a kind of defiance in it, a refusal directed at life, at reality itself.
Three layers: defiance, victimhood, false optimism
That is where responsibility takes 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. Life needs to change." There is more of a sense of being a victim of the situation. And then a further veil covers even that: "Oh yes, I am okay, because I'm going to change the world, and once I get there I'm going to be okay."
That creates struggle, as opposed to a position that is completely at ease and at peace with what is while simultaneously engaging and dancing with life. I use the word "dancing" versus "struggling" deliberately.
If I am not in a fundamental position of "what is should not be," then I can still respond to what is. It is very subtle and hard to describe. I could see a child being abused and take the position that it should not be. But that is different from a deeper sense that what is happening is essentially unacceptable, that something in my deep experience of reality is intolerable.
For me, the difference is this: the emotions that come up show me I'm not in a good space, because I get reactive. I lose my love. I lose my compassion. I lose my acceptance. That's the difference. There could be a sense of acceptance. What I'm seeing is not a loving thing, but I don't lose my loving source.
Dancing versus struggling
Exactly. That openness, that non-resistance: from there, we can engage with whatever situation arises. That is what I call dancing with it. We relate to it fully, openly, and move it toward what we feel and discern should be better. That is wisdom. But if what is happening is "not okay" and I am "not okay" because it shouldn't be, then what I create from that position is friction, struggle, war with myself or with reality.
When I'm in that other position, 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. You notice the effect in yourself: the feelings and emotions that arise tell you exactly where you are.