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Suffering can be difficult.
Being taken on a ride of existential despair may feel like vacationing in a meat grinder. (That’s how I felt anyway.)
But the pursuit of ending suffering can become its own biggest trap.
The initial discontent and subsequent effort and struggle are usually unavoidable. But after a while you can’t help but wonder what this effort and struggle is all about.
You realize that you’re struggling against a toilet’s flushing motion.
You’re trying to keep yourself afloat and escape the toilet bowl by climbing up its walls and tumbling over the seat into freedom.
The walls are slippery though. And even if you reach the top how are going to climb that overhang onto the seat? (You’re not Mr. or Mrs. Free Solo, are you?)
You try nonetheless. And oh boy, do we try, don’t we?
Then, after you’re 6543rd attempt, you’re still there in that toilet bowl, floating on the surface like a turd — feeling like one anyway.
You have no more energy to struggle.
Then another flush comes and instead of struggling against it, you relax into it. No longer do you fight against all the piss and crap. You just go with it.
You don’t need to doo-doo juggle in the hope that you’ll catapult it all over the seat.
It’s being flushed. Alongside yourself. And you notice the simplicity in it.
You simply stop fighting your experience, no matter what wanted and unwanted stuff is trying to assert itself.
What could be simpler?
And then you wonder, “Couldn’t I have gone with the flush from the beginning?”
In theory, yes. In practice, no.
There are no mistakes, mishaps, missteps.
If you have to crawl around a toilet for years before you notice the exit at the bottom, well, so be it.
Here is something to consider: has the yearning for the exit become the biggest source of avoidance and suffering in your life?
Doesn’t seem to make sense, I know. But consider it nonetheless.
Suffering and Freedom
Whatever experience is present for you is allowed.
If you use the presence of negative thoughts and emotions to mean that something is still not right with “you,” that you’re still lacking something, or that you’ve gone wrong somewhere, you’re going to have a sucky time.
It’s okay to be human, friend.
You don’t have to be aloof and detached. You don’t have to fulfill a specific cognitive and behavioral ideal. You don’t have to be, live, think, or feel in any certain way.
It’s not about that.
The one who can embrace the human mess without trying to escape it is usually better off than the one trying to get away from it.
Seeking is always a movement away from something toward something else.
What are you trying to get away from and why? Where are you trying to go and what for?
Let’s assume you’re trying to get away from suffering AND you’re trying to get to a place called freedom.
Here is the plot twist:
By trying to get away from suffering, you’re getting more suffering.
By trying to get to freedom (whatever that may be) you’re missing the freedom that is already here.
I’m sure you know this.
Trying to escape suffering reconfirms the suffering’s apparent solidity. And any freedom that can’t live alongside suffering isn’t really that free, is it?
In any case, the solution is to stop trying to get to an imagined elsewhere and look into the actual righthere.
The Glasses on Your Nose
Let’s try this again.
What if this whole thing is counterintuitive? What if the highest form of seeking is settling?
Settling where? NowHere.
What if you transmute seeking into recognizing yourself as the immediacy of your experience (not as a duality), regardless of how uncomfortable or unholy it may be?
You might be afraid of giving up seeking a better experience aka a fantasy out of fear that you might miss this magical something you’ve been seeking.
But the fear is part of the trick.
The fear is what drives the seeking. If you stop seeking, it’s fear that beckons you to go again.
What is that bugger fear hiding?
Perhaps it’s hiding the fact that there is nothing to be afraid of. Perhaps it’s hiding the fact that you’re already at the goal. Perhaps it’s hiding nothing at all.
Whatever it may be hiding, you can’t see if you’re running away from it.
Seeking and finding are relative acts happening in something we call space and time.
What is it that is aware of seeking and finding (or seeking and not finding; or not seeking and finding; or not seeking and not finding)? What is it that is aware of space and time?
And then there is the fact that on the relative level seeking and finding are contradictory. One who seeks can’t be found.
But searching for your “true self” is different than searching for a new apartment.
It’s more like looking for the glasses already suspended on your nose. Searching for them might seem useful in the beginning because you don’t know where they are. But then someone points them out to you. Do you continue looking for them?
This is what happens to spiritual seekers.
Someone tells them: “Hey, look, your glasses are on your nose, you’re wearing them.”
And then they go: “Oh, you’re right! They’re right here.”
But then in secret, the seeker goes: “But what if those aren’t actually my glasses and there are some other glasses to be found somewhere?”
And the search continues.
When you look into your non-conceptual existence it’s not only the seeking for something else that dissolves. There’s a whole bunch of doubt and suffering associated with believing yourself to be a concept that goes as well.
What if you didn’t stop searching out of frustration but out of knowing your glasses are sitting on your nose? In other words, you recognize yourself as the unavoidable knowing-being that is beyond doubt.
And as that knowing-being, you’re free to assume you’re complete, perfect, happy, content, whole, etc.
Now what?
Luka
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Loved this one, Luka! Although part of me resists all the talk of suffering because I don’t feel like I am, or if I am, I’m repressing it really well, lol! I love the analogy of the glasses. A little less so the toilet bowl 😉 Also NowHere, brilliant! As far as embracing the human mess without trying to escape it, Isn’t there something in between? Embrace it but still work on decreasing suffering for yourself and others? I know, I know, we don’t actually have a choice, things just happen, so we don’t have any other choice but to… Read more »
Thank you, Levi! Well, if you don’t feel like you’re suffering that’s great. No need to create a problem where there is none. The thing I didn’t mention here is that most points are relative. What might be useful to hear for someone at some point, may not resonate at another time. Hey, the toilet bowl analogy was divinely inspired! 😄 Good point you’re bringing up. I’d say the embracing is part of decreasing suffering. I don’t mean embrace in a helpless abdication sense. It’s a bit like traveling: it’s hard to get where you want to be if you… Read more »
Accept the flushing—that’s a great way of putting it:)
Cheers, Marcel 🙂