Ending Suffering, Part 2: Conscious Suffering

During the holidays my wife received word that a favorite cousin had been hospitalized with advanced brain cancer. He is young, handsome, charismatic, a business owner, a newly minted husband and father of a child not yet one. Family and friends are stunned, praying for a miracle.

We humans are funny about our suffering. We’ll tolerate or altogether deny the low-grade, chronic stuff that shadows us each and every day, then fall apart when it reaches an acute level. It’s a bit like mortality. We know it stalks us, yet when at last death comes calling we grow prostrate with grief, demanding to know “How could this happen?” We are surprised by something that should in no way surprise us.

Life is suffering. To those familiar this is a central tenet of Buddhism. But it’s also a downer. The truth is that while we may pay lip service to the mystical musings of a Christ Jesus or share a favorite parable from Lao-Tzu, we are are careful not to let them past the mental ramparts that keep us locked fully in the material world.  We are busy people, after all, with little time to question the ‘reality’ around us.

Which is why so many of us continue to express shock when terrible things happen to us or those we love. ‘Thoughts and prayers’ are lobbed this way and that and then we get back to the business of life. It occurs to virtually no one that perhaps this drilling deep into the me and its life are, in fact, the business of life.

Embracing Suffering

As noted in the previous post, I suspect it is only when our suffering becomes too great that we at last say, “Enough!” and we start to pay attention to the words of the mystics and true healing has a chance.

For far too many of us, however, that process doesn’t begin until death itself comes calling. Death is the one agent that will not be denied.

As a friend who provides a lot of end-of-life care once told me, “It’s in the hospice that you see a lot of last-minute negotiations with God take place, but by then it’s usually too late.” Or as Ananda Coomaraswamy once said: “I pray that death will not come and catch me unannihilate.” Meaning, please let me learn to die to this life before mortality has its turn.

This mystical directive to die before death is, to my way of thinking, critical to any real chance of genuine healing. We must embrace the suffering and, in a sense, inquire into what it wants from us. Like a physical pang demanding food, we must listen, feel, heed.

This, of course, runs counter to popular culture’s prescriptions for finding a doctor, a drug, a palliative that dulls the pain and gets us back into the action. (Ironic, isn’t it, that while we know the rehabbing drug addict or alcoholic who returns to the old haunts almost certainly will relapse, we don’t treat all forms of suffering the same way?)

Requesting a Vision

Which is why the answer for me, I hoped, was to take up a vision quest of the kind Native Americans once subjected their young males. For four days and four nights I would find an empty location far from my familiar places, and face myself head-on. No food, no distractions, just me myself and I. As much as possible I would empty myself of all beliefs, would abandon even the material needs of the body, in hopes that I was making room for something more meaningful to take its place. If I was to suffer, I at least would look right at it and see what it was trying to tell me.

The vision quest took place in a desolate Utah canyon. Having no idea what I was doing beyond the actual solitary fast, I built a stone circle and each evening plunked myself there where I could have conversations with God. Surrounded by towering sandstone walls, I alternately raged and prayed, laughed and cried. The melancholy that led me there did not abate, though boredom often took its place.

The hope? That God would at last talk back in the form of heraldic lights or sounds. But God, as I came to learn, doesn’t work that way.

On the second day, as the sun began to set beyond the Western wall and cool night air spilled heavily into the canyon stirring the desert scrub around me, “it” arrived so beautifully and simply: “Know yourself, the rest will take care of itself.” I have attempted, without success, to describe this experience but words fail. Such a message is not received in words. It is more of an impersonal, immediate “intelligence,” a kind of knowing that transcends the mind. It is Truth itself and when it comes you know it – you know it – in a way you’ve never known anything else. And I knew that the “me” who entered the canyon would not be the same one who exited it.

“Know yourself, the rest will take care of itself.” An inexpressible joy filled me because I knew I’d been given what I needed. I would remain in that canyon for the predetermined four days and nights, but something in me told me I’d received what was needed, that my marching orders were clear: it was time to find the real me.

Out of Bullets

My depression intensified after the Vision Quest. I’d used my silver bullet (the long-imagined belief that a Vision Quest would simply heal what ailed me) and while I’d been given guidance, it was akin to being given a diagnosis of disease without a recipe for overcoming it (i.e. already the ego was grabbing hold, looking for “answers” and “regimens” for healing).

Not surprisingly, then, I spent the ensuing months jetting off to this place and that – ayahuasca, meditation, energy work, sweat lodges, etc. – in the vain hope that one of these manmade contrivances would cure what ailed me. In a sense I was still trying to outrun my brain much the way I’d felt when my suffering first reach critical mass.

Through it all, however, something else was happening: I was abandoning much of the thinking and habits that characterized the old me. Bit by bit as I faced my pain and surrendered to it more nuggets of inspired Truth were recognized. Whether it was lying on a mildewed cot in the Amazon facing the enormous fear promised in the ayahuasca or turning down lucrative job offers even as my personal savings dwindled, the desire to “know myself” dwarfed everything else in my life. I was still in pain, but there was at last a sense that that pain was telling me something profound about existence itself.

To be continued….