Table of Contents
If there is one thing we all have in common is that we suffer in life. Even the ones who no longer suffer have, at some point, suffered.
To be one of the no-longer-sufferers we have to get to the cause of suffering followed by a visceral understanding that there is actually no reason to suffer.
When we talk about suffering we don’t mean the stubbed-your-toe kind but the psychological-torment kind of suffering. Stubbing your toe is pain. Telling yourself that you’re an idiot and being full of regret that you didn’t pay better attention is suffering.
Although most of us are aware of the fact that we suffer, not many find a way out. Many of us try to escape suffering but usually turn towards the wrong things and work on the wrong construction sites. And most just learn how to live with it by numbing it with everything available.
Instead of simplifying we like to complicate. We assume (even if subconsciously) that progress toward the end of suffering equates with our ability to understand ever more complex teachings. That’s a problem I would say.
What is important, however, is understanding the root cause of suffering.
If you’re reading this then I assume you’ve already read stuff on the cause of suffering. You might have even heard different people talking about different causes of suffering. Some might have resonated more with you, some less. But the only real cause of suffering in your life is the one you can see by actually looking deeply at and into your life.
Although our whole organism shuns suffering, we tend to hold onto it as if our life depends on it. And we’re right our life does depend on it, at least what we assume our life to be.
Seeing why you suffer can be deeply disturbing because you’ll see that the cause of your suffering is literally everything you hold dear and deem important and necessary. So, what you need is a willingness to be disturbed, which in the context of awakening is nothing to be avoided but something to be sought.
Although there is only one cause for suffering, this cause can be looked at from many different angles and talked about in many different ways. And this is what we’re going to do here.
We’re going to state the cause of human suffering in so many ways that, hopefully, by reading this something will resonate and make sense to you. When it does you’ll be able to make this insight your own and turn it into a weapon to slash your way out of delusion.
I also want to emphasize that in most cases it’s not enough to look into the cause of suffering only once. Usually, it’s a process. In my experience, suffering intensifies and weakens before it starts dropping away.
All the emotional garbage and wrong ideas we carry around are like a planetary-sized ball of yarn that needs to be unraveled. You see this huge ball of yarn and you don’t understand what’s going on. The yarn winds and twists and there are knots, and it seems like an impossible task to unravel it. But with every sincere look, you are further taking this ball apart, until all that’s left is just a string of yarn. Then nothing is hidden, everything is clear, and the yarn is a calm unintimidating piece of string gently waving along.
Believing Your Thoughts
This is a very simple and obvious observation you can make yourself — the only reason we suffer is because we believe our thoughts. We don’t believe thoughts in general. We can easily dismiss thoughts other people share with us. We believe our own thoughts.
All suffering results from you believing what your thoughts are saying about what is apparently happening. When thoughts arise that say, “I’m not good enough,” “I’ll never amount to anything,” “I’m not lovable,” it’s not that these thoughts are the suffering.
Suffering arises when you believe what these thoughts are saying to be true. When a thought such as this arises but there is no paying attention to it — no turning it into an important thought — then the thought will simply pass through without causing suffering.
Being awake doesn’t mean that there won’t be any of your previous thoughts anymore. It means that the capacity to believe those thoughts is not present.
Mind you, I said ‘not present’ meaning that this is only ever about not suffering right now. The end of suffering isn’t making sure you’ll never suffer again in the future. It’s no suffering here and now. There is nothing to say about the future.
Now if this realization is obvious to you, there are two ways you can work with this:
1. You simply question the thought that is causing the suffering. Why do I believe this? Is this really true? Of course, nothing your thoughts say about anything is ultimately true. But your job is not to jump to this conclusion. Your job is to see this for yourself. What do I believe and why do I believe it?
2. Question what belief is. If there is a thought that causes suffering, then you are believing that thought. But what is believing? What is this mechanism that turns a mere thought into a felt reality? When you look with focus and intent, you will most likely realize two things: One, there is no such mechanism — there is literally nothing there that makes one thought more real than another. Two, the thoughts you believe are simply the thoughts that arise most frequently — thoughts that have been reinforced the most.
Resisting What Is
Another simple observation (you know what, I think it’s all simple observations) is that the cause of suffering is resistance. We perceive something we don’t agree with so we start resisting it.
We demand that what is should not be what it is and instead, be something else. And by doing so we suffer.
Here is a question for you. What would your life be like if you were to no longer resist anything? Try to feel yourself into this. How much more energy and peace would you have if you weren’t in a constant fight with the world in and around you?
Before anyone says it, this is not about letting other people trample over you or never changing things. This is simply the release of internal resistance in the face of life.
In fact, trying to change something from a place of resistance just causes more suffering. When you’re not resisting, things change effortlessly. We might even say they change by themselves.
Awakening is simply the release of all resistance.
To work with resistance is actually quite simple. Your mind, however, will most likely try to hijack this whole simplicity by making all kinds of commands. Ironically, these mental commands are nothing but resistance themselves. So, look out for this.
All you need to do is become aware of the resistance. See where you are resisting life.
You don’t need to try hard to change anything as trying hard to change would also be a form of resistance. What’s necessary is a minimum amount of effort to just observe and see resistance in all its forms and expressions.
Resistance usually dissolves bit by bit, sometimes even unnoticed. There might be days when you’ll be surprised that situations that previously triggered all kinds of resistance no longer cause any emotional reaction.
Where did the resistance go? Who knows? Who cares? It’s gone. That’s all that matters.
Misidentification
All suffering is a case of misidentification and all identification is misidentification.
As soon as we identify with anything, we become prone to suffering. When we believe we are this or that, then someone could attack this or that which makes us feel like we are being attacked and thus need to defend ourselves. Once again, please don’t take this literally.
It doesn’t matter what the object of our identification is, a body, a mind, a soul, a thought, an emotion, an idea, a race, a profession, a good cause, spirit, consciousness, God, etc. Identification is a setup for suffering because sooner or later something will arise that will challenge, insult, or attack this identification.
Then, we have two options.
Either we start to defend whatever we are identified with and roll around the gutter, and thus extend our suffering. Or we have the courage to see the attacker as our secret liberator who points out our misidentification.
Choosing the latter option is one hell of a thing to do. In the beginning, it will feel like you’re rolling over and choosing self-mutilation. Certainly, it will feel like your ego is taking a loss. But in the context of waking up, it’s inverse — a loss is a win and a win is a loss.
To get to the end of suffering we have to be willing to be honest about our suffering. This is a useful point to reiterate.
To end suffering we often have to suffer even more. We have to be willing to see where we have identified ourselves with something that we are not. Every time we do this it hurts because it’s like cutting off pieces of ourselves. And the stronger the identification the more it hurts.
To see that we are everything, we have to first see that we are nothing.
Avoiding Something
To be free from suffering it’s not enough to just dabble in non-duality for a while. As long as there are hidden scary corners in the attic of your consciousness, you’ll be afraid of what is lurking in the shadow.
We need the willingness to take a flashlight and illuminate all the corners where we suspect demons to hide. When we do this we usually see that the fear was unjustified and that what we suspected to be a demon was just the shadow cast by a lamp.
You can’t spiritually bypass your way out of suffering. As long as there are corners you’re unaware of, there is work left to do.
This doesn’t mean that you’ll somehow end up as a perfected human being who has no need for entertainment and only sits around with a dumb grin. It just means that you have made all the unconscious parts conscious.
Often, with time, self-destructive behavior drops away naturally. But if it doesn’t, there will no longer be self-judgment around it. If you feel like changing it, you will. If not, then that’s okay too. You are at peace with yourself.
When we think of avoidance, we usually think in terms of not confronting something in the external world. Like when you don’t have the guts to confront your heavy-metal-music-loving neighbor. But for our purposes, the confrontation is happening internally, and it’s less a confrontation but more of a facing. You simply stop running away from yourself.
Running away from ourselves leads us, you guessed it, away from ourselves. This doesn’t mean that you’ll encounter a true self when you stop running away. It’s not about encountering anything. This is about the end of suffering and the running away is the suffering. So, why not stop running away?
Suffering is like a muddy lake. The end of suffering is a clear lake. You don’t clear a muddy lake by swishing the mud around in the water. You just stop swishing so the mud can settle.
Living Conceptually
Another way to express the cause of suffering is that we live conceptually. By that I mean we live mentally instead of directly.
When we see a tree, we see the concept of a tree and not its isness. This might sound like bullshit so let us clarify a little.
Have you ever seen a beautiful sunset and just sat there in pure awe and gratitude?
There were no thoughts (at least no detectable ones) to describe what you were seeing. It was pure seeing.
Then you turned to your friend and said, “Wow, this is beautiful.” Sure, saying something is beautiful is a form of appreciation but if you were sensitive you noticed that something changed. Suddenly, you experienced the words you just said, no longer the sunset in its essence.
This doesn’t mean that you have to get rid of all conceptuality. That would be a silly notion. Concepts are without a doubt useful. The problems begin when we take these concepts for actual reality.
But in reality, there are no actual trees and cats and universes and watermelons. What there is is sensory perception. There is seeing, hearing, feeling, tasting, smelling. Colors are seeing, sounds are hearing, sensations are feeling, flavors are tasting, smells are smelling. This is what is actually happening.
And this is something you can see quite quickly when you look into your direct experience. Seeing what is is not mystical or magical or spiritual. It simply is.
As an experiment direct your attention towards your sense of hearing. Pick one sound you can hear, like your neighbor’s heavy metal music.
Now, see if you can find a clear point of demarcation between the hearer (what you assume yourself to be), the hearing (the function), and the sound (loud annoying music). You should be able to realize that you can’t draw a line between each piece of this trifecta of perception because the trifecta is an illusion. There is only the function (hearing).
Try this with all other senses and then see what the common denominator is.
Attachment
This is a more common way of expressing the cause of suffering. Attachments are what make us care about one thing more than another.
What exactly is an attachment, you wonder? Attachments are emotional glue. And this emotional glue makes you project importance on some things in exclusion of others.
This doesn’t mean that you should learn to project importance on those other things as well but eliminate all importance. And this is done by ridding yourself of attachments.
Naturally, most of us would say but of course, there are some things more important than others. “The well-being of my family is more important than watermelon prices.” “Of course, there is more emotional involvement with the people I care about than with the people I don’t care about.”
This is where the mind once again tries to hijack any potential progress. Those previous examples are emotional attachment speaking. The mind will tell you that it’s normal and human to have attachments.
Sure, but this is not about normal and human. This is about natural and free.
Don’t get me wrong here. Ridding yourself of attachments doesn’t mean that you’ll no longer love your family or have preferences. It means that you can enjoy all the people and things without the additional clinging and anxiety of trying to control them and fearing losing them.
Reflect on all the suffering you experience on a day-to-day basis. Go to the root and you’ll see that there is always an emotional attachment somewhere.
Now, we might assume that ridding yourself of attachments is hard. It’s not hard. It’s simple, which doesn’t mean that it’ll always be painless. It takes some guts to acknowledge that what you have believed you need to be happy you actually don’t need.
So, all you need to free yourself from attachments is clear-seeing. All clear-seeing means is seeing how the attachment to that person or thing is causing you suffering and that you actually don’t need this attachment to enjoy that person or thing.
The painful part is that you have to be willing to let this person or thing go forever. And the final thing to let go of is yourself or rather your idea of yourself. When you are fully willing, the attachment goes.
Here is something important to consider: You can’t be free from suffering and hold on to attachments. You can’t be happy with this person or thing. You can either be happy and free from suffering or you can have attachments.
Not Knowing/Being What You Are
The cause of suffering is not knowing/being what you are.
Mind you, I didn’t say who you are but what you are because what you are is not a who. Mind you once more, I said knowing/being because many people have an intuitive grasp of their true nature (knowing) but as long as they don’t fully live from it (being), suffering will keep arising.
Figuring out what you are is the spiritual journey in a nutshell. That’s what every seeker aspires to know — themselves (disregarding the little commonly overlooked fact that there is no one to know). I would even argue that the ones among us who don’t give a single hoot about any of this have a yearning to know what they are, albeit unconscious.
If you’ve been a seeker for a while you might be aware that through seeking suffering often gets more intense. It’s as if you know there is a promised land but you don’t know how to get there. And the not-getting-there can be a tremendous source of suffering.
Here, the problem is not that you’re not getting there. The problem is not that you’re chasing there but your fantasy about there.
So, it’s useful to ask yourself what it is you expect from knowing/being what you are. The most common fantasy, one I have chased for a long time, is that there is a place where you only ever feel good.
This is an illusion. It’s the yearning for something permanent and preferably a nice permanent. If you’re sincere and honest with yourself, you can quickly see that there is no proof for this always-feeling-good place you’ve been chasing.
Knowing/being what you are is actually more like not knowing what you are in each moment. You don’t put a label on what you are. Thus what you are is not permanent.
Knowing/being what you are doesn’t mean that you’ll never feel bad again. It means that there is no longer resistance to feeling bad. In other words, you stop fighting with what is.
Believing in Separation
Basically, the crux of the whole suffering issue is that we believe we are separate individual selves walking around in a world that is separate from us. This is the belief most of us operate from.
If you’re reading this you might be familiar with spiritual catchphrases like ‘we are one’ and ‘all is one’ and some such. Usually, this is nothing but nice talk and few know what they’re really talking about. Nonetheless, non-separation is not something we have to achieve.
Instead, we have to clearly see that separation is an unquestioned assumption. And this assumption can’t withstand serious scrutiny.
Of course we suffer as long as we believe we are small insignificant people who have to wrestle with other people and the world for a place under the sun.
For most people, it’s obvious that they are humans in a world and what I’m saying here is crazy talk. But where do we derive our proof that we are separate human beings separate from everything else?
All the proof for the separate point of view can only come from emotionally-charged thinking, which isn’t providing proof at all. The moment you allow your mind to do some thinking without the distorting influence of your heart, your thoughts will sing a different song.
Actually, we can quickly and easily disproof separation. Not only can we disproof separation, but we can also disproof multitude as well. This means that there is no we and everything. There is only I and one, which is the same.
Think about how you experience the world. As we have said earlier, we don’t experience objects, we experience sensations — sight, sound, touch, smell, and taste. The world is not made up of atoms, quarks, and whatever smaller units we can find. The world is made up of sensations.
Now, as we have also said earlier, perceiving is perceived. In other words, there is no seen without seeing. Nor is there a seer. There is only the function — seeing.
Evidently, the same is true for the other senses. Ok but now all the senses are separate, you might say. Well, what is the common denominator in the senses? Awareness. Without awareness no seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, tasting. Awareness is all and all is awareness.
This, by the way, is not something you need to learn. Nor do I want you to believe this. You can confirm this in your own experience and for that, all you have to do is have a look into your direct experience.
Living in Time
Time is not just a psychological concept but also a measurement unit of space. Without the 4th dimension of time, we couldn’t perceive the other three spatial dimensions. For appearance to appear as form, we need extension and duration, which are represented by space and time.
This shows that time and space are not two different appearances, but a single concept — space-time — which utilizes four dimensions, three spatial dimensions and one temporal one.
The problems, however, begin when we grant time an existence outside of ourselves. But without thought, there is no time. Without us observing the three dimensions, nothing moves.
We assume we are part of the 3rd dimension but to observe any dimension clearly, we have to look in from a higher dimension.
The 1st dimension can only be seen as such from the 2nd, the 2nd from the 3rd, and thus the 3rd from the 4th. Therefore, we can say we are in the 4th dimension perceiving the 3rd. In other words, we are time. Without us, there is no time.
In any case, time, like any concept, cannot have a conceptual existence without its interdependent counterpart, which is ‘no-time’ or ‘eternity’. Eternity does not mean everlasting but absence of time.
We all know that interdependent counterparts have no separate existence. Therefore ‘time’ and ‘eternity’ are like any other pair of opposites. In the final equation, however, they are mutually negated and reintegrated as wholeness.
Enough digression. Time as a spatial dimension is not the problem.
Psychological time is the problem, which is a concept created by the identification with a pseudo-entity thinking in a temporal context.
The belief that there is a past that influences a present that influences a future is the problem. And because we believe we are entities inside the influencing forces of past, present, future, we are at the mercy of this uncontrollable force called time. Not only is this viewpoint not true, but it’s also unnecessary.
For a moment, imagine you wouldn’t worry about the past nor about the future, and not even about the present. All you would do is live intimately with what is right here and now. This doesn’t mean you’d no longer think. Even thinking about events would be an expression of this here and now.
How would your experience of life change? Try to feel your way into this for a moment. Sure, here and now would occasionally have some pain, but no suffering.
When you live moment to moment you don’t suffer.
Fear of Non-Existence
The fear of non-existence otherwise known as the fear of death is the base of all fears. And fear itself is the root emotion from which all other so-called negative emotions branch off.
Even if you’ve never experienced this fear consciously it is nonetheless there. The desire for approval, security, control, etc. all stems from there.
There are quite a few people I have met who have boldly claimed that they are not afraid of death/non-existence. While this may be true for some to some degree, the reality is that a genuine fear of death/non-existence is not easily triggered.
You might assume you’re not afraid of death because you’ve never experienced an intense fear of death. Or you might not be afraid of death because you believe in a (better) life after death, which is a way to avoid the fear of non-existence. Whether there is another form of experiencing after the death of the body is beside the point here.
The reason why I’m saying that the fear of non-existence is the cause of suffering is that our fear of being no one/nothing causes us to constantly identify with something. Here we have the misidentification bit again.
Most people who have told me they are not afraid of death/non-existence were still quick to defend the image they hold about themselves. From experience, I can tell you that at many points I have been convinced I was no longer afraid. Until something convinced me otherwise.
The more you release identification the more subtle identification gets. You have to be willing to truly be no one.
Just observe for one day how much identification happens. See all the striving in you and in the people around you to be someone special, to find something that gives them a solid sense of identity.
Of course, nothing like that is ultimately available and sooner or later this identification will be taken from you.
An effective way to get in touch with this root fear is to introduce some death awareness into your life, aka memento mori. What it leads to is not morbidity but life awareness. And life never settles, it never identifies as something to the exclusion of something else.
When you truly see the beauty of being no one, then you’ll no longer try to grasp all the identifications that have caused you so much suffering.
In the end, however, this is not about dying but about realizing that what you are was never born nor will ever die. Only matter could suffer that kind of thing and you are not matter. So it doesn’t matter, does it?
Holding on to Suffering
The final way we’ll express the cause of suffering is that we hold on to suffering. This sounds quite paradoxical, I know.
First of all, why would anyone hold on to suffering? Well, the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t know. This includes not knowing whether the devil you don’t know even is a devil.
All of this is to say that we cling to the known even if the known is suffering. We might all agree that suffering can be scary but you know what’s scarier? Not knowing what else there might be.
If a life of suffering is all you’ve known your whole life and all the people around you have ever known in their lives, then letting go of suffering is effectively jumping into a black hole.
You and no one else know what’s on the other side. Some people do know and they tell you that it’s safe. You can jump. Suffering is optional. But then, what if it doesn’t work for you?
We like to be right, and defend our opinions, and blame the world, and all the other more or less pitiful little expressions of suffering. We like to say things like “It’s not that easy,” or “It will take time.” But in the end, these are all just excuses to not fully stop. If you’re honest with yourself, you can see where you’re deriving little payoffs from suffering.
You have to be willing to give up on all these little payoffs. Dropping suffering is not a deal you can make. You can’t sort through it and decide what you’re going to keep and what you’re letting go.
If you just want to suffer a little less, the world can accommodate you. But if you want to get to the end of suffering, everything needs to go.
The Cause of Suffering is Uncaused
In the end, even the idea of a cause of suffering needs to be let go. Our conviction that everything is happening on a cause-and-effect basis is just another idea based on unquestioned assumptions.
In the final equation, there is no malicious cause causing our suffering.
It’s all a mental game you’ve been playing with yourself. Maybe the goal of the game is to see that it’s just been a game all along or maybe the goal is to just keep you entertained and engaged by all means necessary. If that includes some suffering, so be it.
But perhaps you have come to a point where you have suffered enough. Maybe you’re finally willing to do what it takes to have peace of mind, even jumping into a black hole.
But know that coming to the end of suffering is not a way to avoid life. Many, if not most, of us, come to this whole awakening business with the agenda to disengage from life, to no longer be affected by life. We would prefer to just avoid the burden of life, instead of seeing that the burden lies in our wrong ideas and beliefs.
In many ways, however, getting to the end of suffering means being more intimate with life than you’ve ever been. So intimate, in fact, that there no longer is a difference between you and life.
The end of suffering is not an escaping from life but a finding of life.
Luka
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