posted February 12, 2009 10:16 PM            

How To Stop Heartache And Suffering

If we want to end a disturbing condition in our business affairs, we study the condition. If we wish to correct a mistake in directions, while traveling on vacation, we study a map. That is exactly what we must do with heartache and suffering. We must study them just as carefully as any other condition we wish to correct.

We don’t want temporary relief. We want to end it once and for all. Mere relief is like taking aspirin every day for a headache. Why not destroy the very cause of the headache once and for all so that daily relief is unnecessary? It can be done.

Start with this:
Whenever you suffer from anything whatsoever, remember that it could have been avoided. Simply remember that had you understood the Mystic Path more fully, you would not have felt that pain. This helps you to work with yourself today, so that tomorrow will be serene.

What, exactly, is suffering?

Our pains are caused by our wrong viewpoints toward things. The false self throws up an imaginary picture of how it insists things should be. And every time this should be clashes with what actually happens, we react painfully. The problem is not what actually happens, but our demands that something else should happen. Don’t take my word for this; experiment for yourself.

Of course, human beings don’t like it when advised to give up illusory demands for this or that. It saddens us. Living in illusions gives one a false sense of aliveness, so we fear to be without them. It is like feeling sad when the doctor advises us to give up tainted food!

To repeat, pain appears whenever a desire for a particular happening clashes with what actually happens. We want someone to appreciate us. When he doesn’t, we are sad. We hope for the office promotion. Someone else gets it and we fall into gloom. We hope to keep a friend. He goes away, leaving us with heartache.

The pain may be major or minor, noticeable or subconscious, but it always swells up whenever a desire smashes against the wall of reality. This fact alone should prompt the serious seeker to thoroughly investigate his desire and yearnings.

A Vital Secret For You

So how does pain ease? Not by avoiding involvement with life, for this merely sets up a hard wall of resistance, which causes fear. And not by building up lots of friendships so that if one fails we have another. This is an attempt to find security by attachment to others, which only creates more insecurity. “There is no consolation except in truth alone.” (Blaise Pascal)

So how? The entire book answers this, but we will explore several specific answers.
“May we pause here for a question? You say that suffering is an illusion, but it feels quite real to me.

Suffering is caused by an illusion. By living from the illusory false self, we encounter pain. But when awareness of the truth dissolves the false self, who is there to suffer? How can a non-existent person suffer? Try to grasp this; it is so important to you. To repeat a previous example, suppose some night you have a dreadful nightmare. It tortures you. But, when you wake up and see it as a nightmare, do you still suffer? What person is there to suffer? None.

Dr. Hubert Benoit presents the clearest explanation of this that I have ever found:

Anguish is then an illusion since its causes are illusory. Beside this theatrical demonstration we can obtain a practical demonstration of it: we can prove directly, intuitively, the illusory character of anguish. It in fact at a moment at which I suffer…I shift my attention from my thinking to my feeling, if, leaving aside all my mental images, I apply myself to perceiving in myself the famous moral suffering in order to savo[u]r it and to find out at last what it is-I do not succeed…of suffering itself I do not find a scrap. The more I pay attention to the act of feeling, withdrawing thereby my attention from my imaginative film, the less I feel. And I prove then the unreality of anguish.

Say, for example, the mind runs an imaginative film about some foolishness in our past. That stream of thought causes painful guilt and shame. So we suffer anguish. But the feeling is false, because it is based on mere thought about something that is not now happening and which has noting to do with us right now. But by permitting the imaginative film, we also permit the illusion that it is happening now, which causes pain.

How Pain Magically Disappears

Let’s see how we can call the bluff of these negative films: Suppose an anonymous voice on the telephone tells you that a tiger is prowling in the basement of your house. You scoff, hang up, go about your business. But you sense a strange uneasiness. Your imagination runs a film of a tiger prowling the basement. Realizing that what bothers you is the imagination, you turn on the basement light and look down. No tiger. You are relieved. Your anguish vanishes. You wonder why you did not look down immediately when you felt the anxiety.

This is exactly what happens in the psychological world. The mind unreels an imaginative film which frightens us. Then, we mistakenly assume that the fright is based on reality, which it is not. The tiger is not really there. We have the relief of that fact when we simply see that fact.

Marcus Aurelius comes to the point: “Erase the imagination.”

If we awaken ourselves long enough to erase the imaginative film and to search for the pain caused by it, what happens? Magic! The pain cannot be found. Why? Just as the awakening sun dissolves fog, so does our conscious awareness of pain make it disappear. Try it. Keep trying. It makes magic.

A collie and a wolf found themselves traveling together along the coast. Coming to a bay, they decided to save time by paddling across on a log. “By the way,” the wolf boastfully declared as they paddled along, “I am considered an authority on the science of the sea. Suppose we pass time discussing the tides and currents.”
“Sorry,” replied the collie, “but when it comes to the sea I know only one thing.”
“Well, then,” the wolf spoke up, “I am also famous around the forest for my sea-going philosophies. Suppose we meditate together upon the ocean’s beauty and grandeur.”
“I am afraid,” the collie told his companion, “that regarding the ocean I know only one thing.”
At that moment a sudden wave washed both travelers into the water. The wolf splashed helplessly about, calling for help. The collie skillfully towed him back to shore.
“Too bad,” the collie explained to the gasping wolf, “that we couldn’t discuss science and philosophy out there, but, when it som4es to the ocean, I know only one thing-how to swim.”

There we have the very heart of the Mystic Path. Never mind discussion, or philosophies, or fancy phrases. When it comes to heartache, or any other problem in life, we need do just one thing-learn how to swim.

Don’t Make This Mistake

See how all this connects with the basic technique of impartial Self-Observation. Witness the passage of mental and emotional grief. Watch it pass through you. Do not resist what you see. Do not identify wit it, that is, do not take the painful feeling as being part of the essential you. You are someone entirely different. Separate the pain from the person you call “I”. this is a challenging practice at first, but it produces amazing results. You have here a mystical technique that changes your life. I assure you of this.

It is as though a man had a pocketful of firecrackers that exploded one after another. If he fails to see that they are within his own system, he cannot get rid of them. But id he holds them at arm’s length for examination, the very examination tells him to toss them away.

“I don’t understand the need for bringing our pains up to the surface of conscious awareness. Why not keep them hidden away so that they won’t bother us?”

That is a serous mistake made by millions. Repressed negativities cause inner turmoil, whether you are aware of them or not. A hurricane in the darkness of the night is just as destructive as during the day.

“You are saying that whatever we refuse to face consciously, we must suffer from unconsciously?”

Right. And don’t take it as a psychological assumption; take it as the fact it is. Let me show you a small but typical pain that is experienced by many people without their slightest awareness. It has to do with the painful feeling that one has missed out on opportunities in life. A man reads in the newspaper that a certain piece of property in his neighborhood that had been worth ten-thousand dollars five years ago is now worth twenty-thousand dollars. The man feels a poke of pain. He kicks himself for not buying the property; he feels like a fool, a failure.

“You are describing me!”
You can be entirely free from such pokes of pain. It won’t make any difference to you whether you bought the property or not. But you must start by seeing that the pangs are actually within you. You cannot escape prison if you insist you are not in one.

We must see that our negative emotions are self-induced suffering, for that is exactly what they are. Can we be angry and happy at the same time? Of course not. Can we be in a mood of depression and enjoy ourselves? No. It is possible to be on fire with worry and still have a pleasant day? Obviously not. Here is a great clue: See all negative feelings as pointless pain. That will aid you to understand and to remove them.

By the way, all this is not a grim task. It is really a lot of fun.

The Hunter

So runs my dream; but what am I?
An infant crying in the night:
An infant crying for the light:
And with no language but a cry.

-Alfred Tennyson

Tears can stop trickling. That is why we are walking the Mystic Path. It shows us how.

Let me introduce you to a personal term of mine I call a Higher Hint. A Higher Hint comes to the person who has reached the end of his ego-endurance. He catches a Higher Hint, a vague and mysterious feeling that he can no longer use his human logic and reasoning to save himself. He dimly recognizes the inadequacy of his present self-structure. His mental supports are collapsing beneath him.

Such a man is awakening to the light! Having abandoned the false-with fear and trembling-he catches his first Higher Hint of the true. He is face to face with the greatest secret on earth-the New Life.

A hunter, stalking game in the jungle, fell into a deep well, abandoned long ago by the natives. The bottom of the well as shallowly covered with water from an underground stream that entered and exited from opposite crevices. Floundering around in the dim light, the hunter searched desperately around for a way out. To his delight he discovered several vines hanging down from the walls of the well. Grabbing one, he struggled upward, but, a moment later, the vine snapped apart, spilling him into the water. He tried one vine after another, but all failed.

He stared fearfully at the single vine remaining. Should he try it or not? He realized the wave of horror that would sweep through him if he tried it and failed. Maybe, he reflected, he should wait awhile, comforting himself with the thought that the vine could rescue him any time he really wanted.

No, that was all wrong. Better to face the fact, one way or the other. With trembling hands he reached out, tugged on the vine. It tumbled down at his feet.
Utter despair.

Then, a strange thing happened. With the loss of hope, he sensed an entirely new kind of resourcefulness. It was something different, stronger, higher than anything he had known before.

Then he became aware of the water at his feet. It sparked an idea. Taking some heavy mud, he plugged the crevice where the water exited. As the well filled with water, he rose with it to the top.

Our Higher Hint comes when we have courage to face and abandon our false hopes. Then, we know exactly what to do. Then, effortlessly, we rise to the top of life.

Lights Along The Mystic Path

People say to me, “But I am trying to liberate myself, yet nothing happens. In spite of all my efforts I remain as I am. Why?”

If you have ever asked this question, do not be concerned. It merely means that the seeker is still trying to grasp higher truths with the lower mind. It cannot be done. That is like trying to hear music by reading the printed notes. A new sense is needed, that of awareness. The everyday mind can lead to the door of the higher world but it cannot enter. That is of the utmost importance to understand; it saves so much frustration. Notice how often the New Testament states that the human mind cannot comprehend cosmic concepts.

Awareness that we are not getting anywhere-listen to this!-awareness that we are not making progress is actual progress. It means that we have at last seen through our pretensions of progress, making way for the real thing.

Do not complicate your definition of awareness. We just need to know more about ourselves. That is all. We just need to learn more. And anyone can do that.

Take distress arising from mistakes. Making mistakes is just a lack of conscious knowledge of ourselves. Consciousness is light. Imagine yourself working around your home in total darkness, wit the lights out of order. You stumble into furniture, use pepper instead of salt, perform awkward and even dangerous actions. But, as the day dawns, you see better and act better. Finally, as the sun shines bright, so do all your actions. The more light of consciousness that is in your day, the smoother your work, the quieter your rest, the sunnier your smile.

Here are some lights along the way:

1. Nothing is too difficult for you to accomplish.

2. The Truth teaches us what nothing else on earth can teach.

3. Forget everything but self-advancement.

4. The Truth will not start the walk for you, but it will match every step you take toward it with a step of its own toward you.

5. If we have not enjoyed the last hour, we have wasted it.

6. There is another Mind that thinks for you.

7. Higher awareness is a lofty state, where you see amazing sights you never saw before.

8. Suffering is not an enemy. But a guide to correction, like a temperature gauge in a hot room.

9. Don’t work so hard at living your life; just let it be lived.

10. Turning the wheel of your car in the right direction, a single wise turn of thought gives your life new direction.

The Value Of A Crisis To You

Advancement to higher understanding is always preceded by a crisis of some kind. The greater the crisis the greater the opportunity for self-uplifting. Let’s take an example: Suppose a man pretends that he really likes and enjoys other people. He acts out his pseudo-fondness by performing various acts of kindness that are commonly accepted as stemming from a kindly individual.

But this man is on the Mystic Path. This requires a strictly self-honest observation of how he really feels toward others. He shockingly finds that he really doesn’t like other people at all. He is envious, competitive, resentful. He now sees that his exterior acts of kindness were only stage performances for public display. His real motive was to impress people, to persuade himself that he was kindly.

He faces a severe crisis. Why? Because how he has his choice of honestly facing his self-deception, or of covering it up with rationalizations or excuses, or by simply refusing to look at it. If courageous, if wanting the truth above all, he will enter the crisis, that is, he will observe-as painful as it is for the time-his actual motives, which are far different from what he pretended them to be.

At this point, a miracle occurs. Having brought his pretense up from the subconscious to the conscious level-as shocking as it is-he crashes through. Awareness of his pretense destroys it-and away fall all the weariness and guilt that goes with pretense. Because the man no longer identifies with the stage performer, because he sees that the actor is not his True Self, he separates from it, then, he is forever free, just as an actor playing the dreadful Mr. Hyde separates from the role to become the real and compassionate Dr. Jekyll.

Don’t think all this is complicated. It is really very simple. A crisis of pain or suffering should be valued. Not that such things should be self-induced, but, then they come, they must be seen as opportunities. Suffering, when properly used, is the very ending of suffering. Use anguish to eliminate its own cause!

“I don’t understand. You say that awareness of anxiety dissolves it. I know how anxious I am and still it persists.”

Feeling anxiety is not the same as awareness of it. When you merely feel anxious , you are identified with it; you are so close you can’t see it. It you close your eyes and feel a round objects with your fingers, you may worry that it is a bomb. Open your eyes and you see it is a harmless ball. Likewise, as we awaken to see things as they really are, our pains disappear.

Krishnamurti (The First and Last Freedom) explains correct awareness:

Awareness is observation without condemnation. Awareness brings understanding, because there is no condemnation or identification but silent observation. It I want to understand something, I \must observe, I must not criticize, I must not condemn, I must not pursue it as pleasure or avoid it as a non-pleasure. There must merely be the silent observation of fact. There is no end in view but awareness of everything as it arise.

Suffering Has No Power Over You

Let’s clarify our discoveries:
We can either suffer from our suffering, or we can use it to end suffering. To abolish anguish we must understand its nature. What is suffering? It is a face to face encounter with something that the false self doesn’t want to face. It is resistance against the Truth, against Reality. We resist the very Truth that could liberate us because we don’t recognize it, because we are still under the delusion that falsehood is all there is.

Suffering is nothing more than an attempt by Nature to help us face illusions we don’t even suspect we harbor. Scientist Louis Agassiz points out, “Nature brings us back to absolute truth whenever we wander.” If we learn the lesson, we lose both the illusion and the pain that it causes. If we resist, misery remains.

“If our plans are caused by wrong ideas, why do we fight so fiercely whenever a mystic tries to separate us from them?”

Because there is a temporary and frightening gap between the old and the new. You resist leaving prison because you fear that the other world may be even worse. People fight inner liberty because their prison-conditioned minds project anxious imaginations of what the new world is like. But it is not at all the prison. You must have courage to leave the pseudo-security of your prison-thinking. Then you experience the happy new.

Suffering of itself teaches us nothing, anymore than boarding a ship takes us anywhere. We must use it correctly. We must endure it long enough to call its bluff. We must not runaway to refuge in self-pity or to high-sounding rationalizations. Such retreats only increase the illusion that suffering has us on the run. In spiritual battle we defeat the enemy, not through flight but through standing still ling enough to see that we have mistakenly attributed power to the enemy. Suffering has no power over anyone. Just perceive this. Perceive it and you win every time, whether the assault comes as loneliness, frustration, despair, whatever.

Do not think of suffering as something hateful or something to escape. To do this is to miss the meaning entirely.
Learn to use suffering wisely.
For what purpose?
To dissolve the very suffering.

As a practical illustration, suppose our distress is caused by a cruel remark from someone. Now, the distress arises because the remark fell on the false self, whose very nature is touchy, sensitive, indignant. But as this artificial self fades away through psychological insight, what entity is left to suffer? If a thousand people throw black paint against the air, it remains clear and undisturbed.

What A Mystic Knows

“You say we must react rightly to suffering. What is a wrong reaction?”

When you resist it, hate it, fight it, try to escape it with some frantic exterior activity.

“Why are those reactions wrong?”

Because they prevent you from understanding the whole process. And that is why you suffer over and over again. If your car breaks down, do you walk away and pretend there’s nothing wrong, or do you work at understanding the mechanical failure in order to repair it? Why not face the inner breakdown and correct it? Unsolved pain gradually increases.

“In what way?”

Take a person who gets angry frequently. He justifies his painful anger by saying that people are rude or inconsiderate to him; therefore, he has a right to his anger. He fails to see that anger is a self-punishing feature of the ego-self, which can, if he chooses, be dissolved. So, by not handling his anger correctly, he creates other negativities that go with it, like guilt and tiredness.

“That is true. I see that much.”

When a man reaches a certain level of insight, he takes an entirely different view of his unhappiness. He no longer resists it. He understands its value. He sees that a shock or crisis is a message telling him that in some way he is living out of harmony with his original nature. Therefore, although shocked, he studies what happened. As his enlightenment grows, he is less and less shocked and more and more at peace.

“I will try to understand.”

Good. You will be happy. But don’t expect your friends to grasp this. They are still resisting everything that happens to them!

Here we can add another definition of the true mystic:
He is one who has suffered just as much as anyone, maybe a lot more, but he faced it squarely; he entered deeply into the dark tunnel and came out on the other side.

The mystic understands the sufferer and has great compassion for him. The mystic knows how much this man or that woman agonizes-and he knows the cure. But he also understands the tremendous resistance within the sufferer. This is why the enlightened teacher never argues about spiritual matters; he sees the uselessness of trying to persuade the understandable.

What is the mystic’s attitude toward those who refuse to receive the very truth that could set them free? It is very simple. He says to them silently, “When the pain becomes unbearable, when you are willing to give up the false self, come back and we’ll talk it over.”

The Authentic Answer To Worry

What about that type of pain we call worry?
It is totally unnecessary.

This is not a beautiful dream. It is a fact. When you reach a certain height of wakefulness you don’t worry about anything-and I mean anything.

One of the deepest despairs of man is that he can do nothing about the thousand and one worries that his day dishes out. He sighs, “Well, that’s life,” never realizing that all can be different.

To find the answer, we must return to the basic fact of man’s real self and his invented self. The false self, with all its wrong viewpoints, can do nothing to dismiss worry; it can only cause it. The conditioned mind can only substitute a new worry for an old one, like a motorist slipping in a muddy field from one mess to another.

Let us not be fooled by thoughtless thinking on this point. No man, who still lives from his false self, is free from worry. The only way you, or I, or anyone else finds freedom is by extinguishing the false sense of “I” and living from our authentic nature.

Let’s state the problem as simply as possible: All worry-and there are no exceptions-all worry springs from false notions about ourselves. We mistakenly think we must be popular-and, when the telephone fails to ring, we worry. We assume that we must be wise-and, when we do some foolish thing, we fret over our intelligence. We insist that exciting things should happen to us-and, when they don’t, we feel empty.

It is utter nonsense that we must be popular, or wise, or excited. We need be only one thing-mature, and decent, and happy human beings. Then, by one of the magical features of mysticism, we are genuinely wise and excited in a new way.

You no longer take anxious thought for tomorrow. You are carefree and cheery. You won’t know nor care where your good comes from. And for advanced students of the Mystic Path I add this: Not only will you neither know nor care where your good comes from but you won’t care whether it comes or not. You already have it.

Two farmers own wells the sell of the first farmer is dry. He gets water only when rainfall fills it accidentally and irregularly. That farmer is insecure and apprehensive; he is at the mercy of chance. The well of the second farmer is fed naturally and constantly by an underground stream. That farmer is relaxed and unworried.

When living from our True Source, we are relaxed and unworried.

To end heartache and suffering

1. Study suffering scientifically.

2. All heartache is caused by wrong viewpoints.

3. We must stop running imaginative, negative films.

4. By bringing anguish up to full awareness, we destroy it once and for all.

5. Like the hunter in the story, you can rise to the top of life.

6. Awareness means simply understanding ourselves. We must work sincerely at self-awareness.

7. Review the supplied Lights Along the Mystic Path.

8. Every crisis of pain can be used to make future pain impossible.

9. Do not resist any kind of anguish or heartache. If we resist, we miss the very lesson it teaches.

10. Worry is non-existent to the advanced traveler along the Mystic Path.

posted September 09, 2011 06:20 AM            

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Remember, love can conquer the influences of the planets....It can even eliminate karma.

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