Solving The Problem of Suffering 1
This is one of a series of blog entries that deals with the problems of our everyday conflict and suffering. It should be read in order to avoid confusion. Start with number 1. If this blog entry is not number 1 scroll down and start with that. If something said is unclear please don’t hesitate to ask.
“You will be in harmony with Isvarra (God) if you are in harmony with what is, for all that is here is Isvarra (God)” Swami Dyananda Saraswati
There are only two disciplines in Vedanta. The first discipline is the enquiry into who and what we really are, as opposed to what we experience ourselves to be. The other discipline concerns the preparation of the mind in order for the knowledge of who and what we are to become clear and doubt free. This Vedantic preparation turns daily life into a spiritual practice that transforms the quality of our minds. Our minds go from being in friction with what is to being in harmony with what is.
Without a mind that is relatively free of friction and disturbance a clear and doubt free vision of reality is not possible. We are presented with a problem here. Friction with what is and the attempts to get rid of this friction is what our daily life is normally based on. Unless this basis from which we live our daily lives undergoes a radical change, moksa (total freedom) is not possible.
The friction with what is,is all pervasive in the daily life of us human beings. It is behind all the untold emotional suffering and disturbance that we are subject to and all the harmful acts we subject others to.However this friction is rarely seen as the problem as such. An example may make this clear.
When we are angry with someone we are not aware that we are out of harmony with what is and therefore in a state of friction with what is. We are blind to this. All we are aware of is the other person and what we think they have done to us. We are unhappy and disturbed, and we are CONVINCED that it is BECAUSE of the actions of the other person. From the Vedantic standpoint our problem (pain and suffering) is because WE have moved out of harmony with what is. We have moved out of harmony with God.
When I say what is I mean anything at all. The weather, the news reports, the economy, other peoples actions, the thoughts and emotions that arise in your mind and the subject that is aware of all these things. You. What is, is all inclusive. It must be noted that being in harmony with what is, is not some sentimental “lets love everybody”emotion. It does not mean you have are agreeing with or liking what is happening (injustice, starvation and violence) Such a notion is insane. Rather it means that your mind is not shaken by what is and is not dominated by emotional reactions that impel you to perform harmful and unhelpful acts. Being in harmony with what is, includes doing the needful with presence of mind. A clear mind that sees what is happening AND doing the needful in conformity with universal values IS being is a mind in harmony with what is. This passive “let it be” business is not part of Traditional Vedanta.
It is very important to become aware of friction as it arises in daily life. Without becoming becoming aware of friction as friction all our attention will be glued on the thing we THINK we are suffering from. When you are upset with your spouse or anybody else, it is because you are in friction with what they have done or not done and you are not aware that you are meeting “what is” with resistance. This resistance or friction is what you are suffering from. However you are thoroughly convinced that you are suffering at the hands of another.
If you push against the wall you will have the experience of the wall pushing back. There is this sense of tensing against the wall which, in terms of experience, seems to be pushing back at you. The harder you push the harder the wall seems to push back. Now think of a moment of being annoyed with someone. In that situation there is a very real sense of being rubbed up against by other person other than yourself. The experience is that another’s actions or words are rubbing up against you. Something other than yourself is doing the rubbing and you are a victim of that rubbing. The interesting thing here is that when YOU cease to push against this person or wall, YOUR experience of the wall and the person radically change. The experience of the “pusher’ and the “pushing back”(and that’s all it is, an experience) will disappear. When the attention is shifted from what you are in friction with to the fact you are in friction, a door opens to an immediate and practical transformation of the experience of friction to the experience of harmony. The importance of what I have just said will become very clear later when I go into how our daily life can become a spiritual practice.
Our problems with other people and circumstances do not lie with these very same people or circumstances, even though our daily experiences contradict this fact. At the beginning of our Vedantic study we are still having many experiences that SEEM to make this fact untrue. Personally I felt it was over the top. The idea that people and events NEVER cause us emotional pain or suffering but are ONLY instrumental in revealing pain and suffering already within us seemed a little too absolute. Yet this was the teaching and what my teacher insisted on. However once this understanding starts to become assimilated the real resolution of emotional suffering becomes a practical possibility. It is this practical possibility that I wish to unpack.
When we look at friction and how it manifests in our lives, we are struck with the fact that all forms of unhappiness manifest as friction or conflict. All suffering boils down to friction with ourselves, other people or the world. According to the Vedantic teaching, every human being suffers from a sense of incompleteness due to ignorance of their nature (which is completeness in itself) and because of this, they seek things other than themselves, in order to feel complete and full in themselves. In other words, emotional dependence on anything that gives the experience of a sense of completeness. Emotional dependence becomes evident in our lives as friction. Let’s begin to examine our daily life in the light of what has been said.
The three areas where friction becomes evident is with ourselves, others and the conditions we find ourselves within. This blog entry will only deal with friction with ourselves. In terms of ourselves we have three main problematic notions. The notion I have to be loved and approved of by other people in order to be happy and secure within myself. The notion that I can only be secure and happy if I am better than other people and lastly the notion I have to be perfect in order to be secure and happy. At present I will only be talking about the need or longing for love and approval.
In terms of ourselves, we can become very dependant on the love and approval of other people. I am not talking about the enjoyment of good friends and their appreciation of you. I am talking about our dependence on love and approval of other people for our security and happiness. This dependence is the basis of much friction. This especially applies to the love-sex relationship because it is our life partners that we have the tendency to burden with our dependency under the heading of “need for love”. As it is so relevant, I suggest you think upon this relation as we go through the following example.
If someone we are close to acts in a rejecting or hostile manner, it is unpleasant and is experienced as unpleasant. The fact that it is unpleasant will help alert you to the fact that something needs addressing. It’s like when you are too cold, it is unpleasant and it motivates you to put on something warm. The fact that you experience rejecting behaviour as unpleasant does not make you non-spiritual, it just makes you human. Unpleasantness need not cause the mind to become disturbed with emotional reactions, it can just help you to avoid things that are uncomfortable. This makes unpleasant experiences a good instruction to do something needful for our comfort and the comfort of others and thereby helps us to be responsive. Uncomfortable experiences are never a problem in themselves. So we can have an unpleasant experiences that we dislike and disliking certain things is natural and very useful for our daily living. Vedanta has nothing to do with trying to get rid of likes and dislikes.
Disliking rejecting behaviour does not distort our clear perception of what is going on by producing unsteadiness of mind. Neither does it produce emotional reactions (friction with what is), which forces us into actions or inactions which cause trouble to ourselves or other people. It is only when mental reactions bind or enslave you that they are seen as a problem in Vedanta. Now back to what we were discussing.
Often when we experience rejecting behaviour, it is very easy to become filled with hurt, sorrowfulness,anger,annoyance, righteously indignation,fearfulness of losing love or affection, revengeful or retaliative and various other forms of suffering. When this occurs, our minds become unsteady to a certain degree. A good metaphor is that we can see very clearly through clear and calm water but don’t have a hope in hell of seeing clearly when the water is full of ripples. Not only can the mind become unsteady, it can also become impure. Just a note here: In Vedanta, a mind that is pushing us around by producing compulsive actions or inactions, that bypass our will, is said to be impure. Impurity in this sense has nothing to do with the thoughts that come and go in the mind. It has nothing to do with the Christian Judaic notion of purity.In Vedanta, when you are managing the mind instead of the mind managing you your mind is said to be pure.
Impurity is like the water becoming muddy. We really do not know what we are doing because we are subject to blind reaction. An important thing to note here is that emotional reactions are not actions. Actions are something we do. Emotional reactions happen to us and bypass our will and make any understanding we have unavailable to us. I think if we are honest with ourselves (which is very necessary if we are to study Vedanta properly) we can see that it is very easy for our minds to become unsteady and full of emotional reactions that push us into acting in stupid and harmful ways.
We can see that when we are suffering from the disapproval or rejection from others, we are suffering from dependence on love and approval, not from their unkind and rejecting behaviour. Our subjective standpoint, which is always blind to our dependence, will give us a convincing experience which will make it SEEM that other people are hurting us. However, the objective light of Vedanta, if it is truly active in our lives, will clearly show that every emotional upset is a revelation of our dependence, hence our ignorance of ourselves. This is good for two reasons. Firstly, awareness of painful emotional reactions become a very useful starting point in discovering what our disturbance producing unconscious notions are (we will be going into great detail on this later). And secondly, our efforts can now be directed at neutralisingour present suffering and therefore we won’t get sidetracked in the futile effort to change people or conditions in order to be happy within ourselves. An important note here: It is futile to try to neutralise suffering in the abstract. We can only deal with suffering as it occurs, moment by moment, in daily life. Don’t worry if you haven’t got any suffering going on right now for you to work on. It’s one thing you don’t have to work to produce. It is always just around the corner.
Our self ignorance we can’t see. Swaminiji often says that we are ignorant and we are ignorant about our ignorance. Our dependence is also hidden from us. However, how it’s manifested is not.
Dependence manifests as friction with a fact, which is emotional disturbance.
If I am rejected by another or given disapproval from another (these facts can and do occur) and I find myself in friction with them in any way (annoyed or wishing to pay them back in some way through words or acts or any kind of feeling of conflict large or small), I can safely assume that I am suffering from dependence, not from the actions of another person.
This goes for feelings of self depreciation as well. Self depreciation is self hatred and it is me being in conflict or in friction with myself. I feel like a loser or socially unacceptable because i am not having the experience of being loved or approved of and I hate myself for it (in conflict or friction with myself). If I don’t come to fully understand that dependence on others is my problem, then my efforts will become misdirected towards manipulating and controlling people I care about, to deal with my suffering. I will firmly believe that the way to get rid of the suffering is to successfully change others. In this case, I can’t help but look forward to experiences of victimisation for the rest of my life.
When we look at the structure of the experience of suffering, it is always composed of two things: what the person is suffering from and the “wanting person” who wants it to go away. Without these two things, the possibility of suffering does not exist. This is important because most of our efforts to deal with suffering, before we come across Vedanta, is in trying to get rid of what we are suffering from. We do this because we firmly believe the thing that we are having trouble withis the problem, whereas the suffering is always the wanting person who is in friction with what is. This is the structure of suffering. When I am being rejected and am emotionally disturbed or upset about it, there is always the experience of rejecting behaviour and a wanting person who is unhappy about it. The different forms of suffering may be many but this basic structure is constant. Suffering can’t exist without this dualistic structure.
The notion that if people love and approve of me, it makes me a good and lovable person and the notion that I need such love and approval for my well-being and happiness, is an absurd and crazy idea. If you find yourself being upset by non approval or find yourself seeking approval (this seems to be universal with human beings), you can safely assume that you are suffering from dependence on other people for your happiness. You have a notion that your happiness depends on others. This dependence will always take the form of friction when what is wanted or longed for is not happening. This friction as has been said is always composed of a wanting person on one hand and the unwanted person or thing on the other.
As we will see later, in Vedanta there is no need to deal with the dependence as such. Neither do we have to get rid of the “wanting person” ( Vedanta does not try to get rid of the ego). We also don’t try to get rid of the unwanted person or thing that we feel we are suffering from. We will find that if we can resolve the friction, we neutralise the wanting person, the unwanted person or thing and the dependence in one hit. This is the practical result of moving from being in friction with what is, to being in harmony with what is. But I am getting ahead of myself. Let’s go over some other everyday examples of being in conflict with myself. I really want to unpack the problem before talking about the elegant solution presented to us by Vedanta.
The basis of an emotional reaction is the non acceptance of a fact. In other words, an emotional reaction is being in friction with a fact. There is nothing more to it than that. If I have a longing or a desire for love and approval active in me, as a protection against the experience of incompleteness (from a Vedanta standpoint incompleteness is only an experience, it is not a reality), it is not possible to avoid painful emotional reactions. There are not only emotional reactions in the present when people don’t love and approve of me as I desire, but emotional reactions or friction with past memories of disapproval and rejection. Some people, unwisely I think, have a very strong tendency to make a really big deal of these.
I am going to digress here for a moment and briefly deal with the topic of painful memories. It is true that we all have an accumulation of experiences of being hurt by others. These experiences don’t just remain in our minds as memories (recordings of past events), they become active again in the present and exert a force on us today. When we are emotionally upset, we are often reliving the emotional pain of the past. Past mental states are easily revivified by similar present events and we are thrown back into the emotional states and kinds of thinking that belong to the past. Freud called this phenomena regression.
When we are in a regressive state, we don’t know we are in a regressive state because the past event is being unconsciously projected onto the present and it appears to us that we are upset about what is occurring now. Regression occurs all the time. It should be noted however, that even though this is constantly happening daily, it is not at all that important in terms of neutralising emotional reactivity. What is important in resolving emotional reactivity is the understanding that any reaction, no matter where it comes from, is a state of being in friction with a fact and hence depending on people and things for our wellbeing.This is regardless of whether this fact is a projection or an actual event. If you are in harmony with a fact, no matter how unpleasant it is, you will find that it is not possible to have emotional pain concerning it.
Even though I am explaining all this in psychological terms, the solution presented by Vedanta is not a psychological one. It can help to explain the problem in psychological terms but the psychological solutions that are pitched in the marketplace by various spin doctors peddling happiness are often found to be wanting.
If the desire or longing for love is neutralised, all the memories that stand in relation to this longing will become inactive. You can only get upset about rejection in the past if you still value being loved and approved of in the present. If you neutralise the desire for love and approval in the present, you neutralise all the pain in the memories of rejection and disapproval as well.
There is no need to get rid of the memory. You can’t anyway. You remember being hurt but you don’t FEEL hurt when you remember. This is a very elegant solution. It bypasses all the endless psychological explorations of the past and all the weird and wonderful solutions that certain psychological theories have come up with to try to do something about emotional pain that are thought to be caused by past memories.
Valuing love and approval as a means to feel complete and pain-free will produce a lot of pain. Making efforts to get love and approval to be happy within yourself, will ensure you many unhappy experiences. Such a value and such efforts are not only futile, they are also crazy.
By the way, knowing all this is not going make us cease wanting love and approval. Knowing the problem clearly is very important but it is only the first part of the equation. This is because if I don’t clearly see that I am enslaved by dependence on people and things how can I value the spiritual end of Vedanta (moksha) which is freedom from ALL forms of dependence.
The second part of the equation is also needed. Because we are talking about the longing for love and approval,this second part consists of neutralising the insistent desire for love and approval. Without this neutralising we will continue to be burdened by emotional reactions which will drive us to act in stupid and harmful ways.
In the next blog entry I will discuss the longing to be better than other people. This longing is nearly universally denied (because it is embarrassing we have to hide it, not only from others but especially from ourselves) however it is universally present and takes the form of an underlying sense of inferiority that demands that we raise ourselves above others. It also results in untold misery and painful interactions between peo
