Pain is inevitable; suffering is optional<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\nIndeed this teaching is a powerful pointer that can lead you to genuine spiritual freedom!<\/p>\n
I recognize that, to most of us, pain and suffering are often seen as being almost the same thing. However, making a distinction between pain and suffering in your mind is a critical first step towards the elimination of suffering.<\/p>\n
So what exactly is the difference between pain and suffering?<\/p>\n
Pain is a sensation that occurs in a highly biologically evolved mind-body organism with a nervous system, such as a human. That\u2019s it; pain is nothing more than a simple sensation delivered to awareness via the nervous system of a complex animal! However, when a sensation is reflexively, automatically, and instantly judged and filled with meaning by the mind, the sensation is transformed into either a \u201cpositive\u201d or a \u201cnegative\u201d experience. For example, if I punch you in the arm, you\u2019ll likely experience a physical sensation that your mind judges \u201cbad\u201d. By contrast, if I rub your shoulders, you\u2019ll probably experience a physical sensation that the mind judges \u201cgood\u201d.<\/p>\n
For both pleasure and pain, all that\u2019s really happening is that the organism experiences a sensation, and the mind instantly and automatically applies meaning to it. Truly, no sensation is good or bad, except the mind makes it so!<\/p>\n
Quite simply, suffering is what happens when the mind applies negative judgments or meaning to a sensation or experience. More precisely, suffering is a result of the mind comparing the sensations and experiences that it is present to \u2013 aka \u201cwhat is\u201d \u2013 against the mind\u2019s idea of the sensations and experiences that it thinks it should be having instead, aka \u201cwhat should be\u201d.<\/p>\n
Fortunately, if you can learn to become aware of and interrupt this process to break the pattern, it really is possible to reduce and eventually even completely eliminate suffering from your life.<\/p>\n
A useful model for understanding suffering is to see suffering as the \u201cdelta\u201d or difference between \u201cwhat is\u201d and the mind\u2019s idea of what \u201cshould be.\u201d In other words, suffering results whenever the truth of the present moment does not exactly match up with the mind\u2019s idea of how things should be.<\/p>\n
For example, let\u2019s say that money problems are causing a lot of suffering in your life; maybe you got sick and were forced to quit your job, and you\u2019re now barely surviving on disability and charity, all the while rapidly racking up credit card debt. If that\u2019s \u201cwhat is\u201d, you are likely experiencing a lot of suffering, especially if you have no idea of how to recover your health and prosperity.<\/p>\n
However, notice that the suffering here does not result directly from \u201cwhat is\u201d, but instead is generated by the delta between \u201cwhat is\u201d and your mind\u2019s idea of \u201cwhat should be.\u201d In this example, \u201cwhat is\u201d is that you are sick and in pain, you can\u2019t work, you have depleted your savings, and you\u2019re racking up debt, with no relief in sight; in that situation, it\u2019s totally understandable that those circumstances may generate a lot of suffering.<\/p>\n
Suffering really is optional, but it usually doesn\u2019t seem that way! In this example, suffering arises because your mind\u2019s idea of \u201cwhat should be\u201d likely involves you being healthy, working, and making money. Hence, the difference between \u201cwhat is\u201d and \u201cwhat should be\u201d creates friction in the mind that we call suffering.<\/p>\n
One of my teachers would often say \u201cIf you woke up tomorrow with amnesia, you\u2019d be fine!\u201d It took me a long time to understand exactly what he meant by that, but now I see it: if you didn\u2019t have any idea or concepts of how your life or the world should be different from \u201cwhat is\u201d, there would be no friction in the mind, and hence no suffering. In the extreme, someone who was constantly being punched in the nose – but yet had no basis for expecting life to be any different – would experience a lot of pain but no suffering; this is how most animals live. (Of course, to be precise I must point out that the amnesia would have to wipe out both conscious and subconscious memories to eliminate the delta and stop the mind from creating suffering.)<\/p>\n
Don\u2019t get me wrong here; the core problem is not the mind\u2019s capacity for abstract thinking that allows us to imagine how our lives or the world might be better. After all, the ability to imagine \u201cwhat should be\u201d is an important reason why humans have been able to develop technology and civilization! Instead, it is our attachments and expectations about what \u201cshould be\u201d that create the suffering. Indeed, a high spiritual vibration human still engages in thinking about how to make the world a better place, and likely takes action to create value and serve others; the difference is that the master has no attachment to those ideas or expectations, and hence they do not create suffering.<\/p>\n
In other words, if you can let go of your idea of how things should be, and simply be present to \u201cwhat is\u201d with a minimum of judgments and meaning added by the mind, suffering will begin to vanish.<\/p>\n
Of course, if this was as easy as just acknowledging that you need to surrender to \u201cwhat is\u201d while releasing your attachments to the mind\u2019s ideas of what \u201cshould be\u201d, we\u2019d all be Ascended Masters floating around and glowing as we all laughed and smiled and chanted the days away!<\/p>\n
By contrast, what I\u2019ve found is that there\u2019s a lot of spiritually oriented material that\u2019s pretty good at pointing you to the top of the mountain, but provides little or no practical step-bystep support on exactly how to get you there. Fortunately for you, the rest of this series is devoted to exactly that purpose: to show you how to embody and live in transcendent spiritual truth in your normal, day to day life, and eliminate suffering forever!<\/p>\n
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The End of Suffering? \u00a92014 Brent Phillips http:\/\/www.awakeningdynamics.com Day 1: Why Do We Suffer? One of our most powerful motivations to pursue spiritual practices is to lesser or eliminate suffering. After all, most of us experience lives filled with a never-ending parade of various flavors of suffering, including physical suffering, emotional suffering, economic\/money suffering, and…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":2983,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"sfsi_plus_gutenberg_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_show_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_type":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_alignemt":"","sfsi_plus_gutenburg_max_per_row":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[14,10],"tags":[371,611],"class_list":["post-2976","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-consciousness","category-lifepurposeandsoulpath","tag-pain","tag-suffering"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.youwealthrevolution.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2976","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.youwealthrevolution.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.youwealthrevolution.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.youwealthrevolution.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.youwealthrevolution.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2976"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.youwealthrevolution.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2976\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4506,"href":"https:\/\/www.youwealthrevolution.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2976\/revisions\/4506"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.youwealthrevolution.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2983"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.youwealthrevolution.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2976"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.youwealthrevolution.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2976"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.youwealthrevolution.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2976"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}