maiyannahmaiyannah wrote the following post:

I won’t suffer very long
It feels like it’s almost time

As for the rest of us, we can only be grateful that some of the best minds and creative people have been willing to suffer for so long in order to make our world better or richer in some way. We don’t deserve it. It often comes at a terrible cost. I have to ask myself whether or how much I would be willing to suffer in order to bring some benefit.

My role model has never been the Buddha, who struggled for so many years to understand the cause of suffering, and then invested even more time in helping to provide the remedy for it, through what’s referred to as his “therapeutic paradigm”. Buddha did more than any other person past or present to present a way of understanding and alleviate suffering.

But my role model is more the deformed imperfectionists of Lao Tsu and Chuang Tsu, who evaded suffering and persecution by melting into the background scenery, avoiding contention and strife, being fiercely independent, honest through subterfuge; useless to the world, but true to the Tao. Ursula K. Le Guin thinks the Taoists were natural anarchists. The Tao te Ching is the most inspiring book I’ve read, and I first read it at the impressionable age of 16, alongside Omar Khayyam and the Hermann Hesse books.

I hope Maiyannah overcomes whatever it is that is causing her to suffer in this way. Etty Hillesum is another person I keep meaning to read more of. It seems to me that like the Buddha she understood that it’s mainly about perspective. Early in her book she speaks about a leftist professor who was so convinced that the Nazis would be around for a whole generation that he simply took his life rather than have to deal with that. She couldn’t have known he was wrong, but she herself found a way of seeing goodness and value in the world even on her train to the death camp. I keep thinking of the gap between these two perspectives. Sumud is the answer of the Palestinians. Somehow they retain their buoyancy, for the most part, even after 70 odd years of oppression.

Life is a kind of school but not one in which the syllabus is specifically tailored for the student, I think. Suffering (as well as pleasure) is there in abundance, and we can learn important lessons from suffering. We can acquire the capacity for empathy and compassion, for example. But I don’t think, as I used to, that the pain level is necessarily turned up in conformity with our capacity to learn from it. Many people suffer terribly all their lives without learning a thing from it.

Suffering is a kind of rich loam from which one can evolve spiritually, just as a lotus can only grow from mud. But the same soil can also nurture bad seeds. Life presents us with circumstances and lets us do what we want with them. It doesn’t necessarily give us the right circumstances to suit our disposition. But if we are sensitive not just to the circumstances, but to the lessons they potentially carry for us, there will be an evolution in our ability to understand life. And it will seem to us that we have been given exactly what we need; and in fact for one who is capable of such learning, this is always true.

Meaning is not inherent to reality (i.e. pain may come to us at random and does not target us specifically). And wisdom is not a matter of investing life with meaning (i.e. we do not need to adopt the superstition that we are being kindly mentored by our reality, and therefore the circumstances themselves are meaningful). The scale of meaning is a kind of human measure. Actually the universe is neither meaningful nor meaningless. If we can look back at the universe with the same dispassionate eye with which it seemingly regards us, our perception and frame of reference will begin to change. The view that we are victims or beneficiaries of an agency that is external to us begins to change too.