Serge. Thank you for asking me this question as I think it is a very important one, as certainly suffering, in one form or another, visits all of us from time to time. Indeed, it spares none of us, and, as Jack Kornfeld pointed out in his book 'After the Ecstasy, the Laundry', it even hits those among us who are enlightened! And often it comes and whacks us right out of the blue. We develop a serious illness; we suffer a severe loss. Something very painful happens to us. And the thing about suffering, especially if it is very acute, is that it takes us very deep. It concentrates our attention like nothing else. We get to see things about ourselves or about the world that perhaps ordinarily we would never be able to see .
Perhaps, we recognise that we need to care more about the Not-Have's of this world; perhaps, we are challenged to be kinder or braver or less self-indulgent! Perhaps we need to look at death in the face or understand more about the spiritual significance of loss. I also think that suffering is in our lives to 'test' us, to see if we are up to dealing with it ! Indeed, if our suffering is very acute, we simply have to learn to deal with it , if we are to survive. I think our big challenge is to see if we can use our grief to help us evolve and move forward as opposed to feeling resentful that the world isn't dealing us the cards that we would like!
The one thing which all of us have in common, of course, is that we don't like to suffer! Indeed, as the Buddha pointed out, most of us try to devote our lives to having pleasure and avoiding pain! However, we need to realise that suffering really is a fact of life and that were it not for its existence, we couldn't really know joy. Also, the more we try to avoid it, the more it will come after us! Jung understood suffering and told us that whenever he felt deeply touched either by great joy or by great pain, that he knew that both had come from God. It helps us if we can realise this as well, as it can get us out of the thinking that we need to put our lives on hold until we 'get through' our suffering, to realising that it is an integral part of our life and therefore needs comprehending and living with.
I always think that one of the main things that my suffering (when it chooses to visit me) asks of me is that I have more heart, that I be more conscious, more human, that I open my eyes much more, that I learn to see many things that I have always seen, only in a new and deeper way. Indeed, often we will find when we suffer, that we cannot any more 'get away' with our old fuzzy and unconscious habits that we could get away with when our lives were going the way we wanted!
What suffering asks of us, then, is that we rise to it, that we choose to show conscious strength, that we make sure that we find a clear centre inside ourselves which can help us be more objective and thus realise that our suffering is not who we are. If we get too identified with it and go too far down the road of 'poor-me-ism' or feeling a Victim, then we risk , quite literally, getting ' taken over' by this archetype
( for suffering is an archetype). And if this happens, then we lose the capacity to deal with it. Our suffering has us instead of us having our suffering and when this occurs, it ceases being transformational.
I think that at this particular time in our evolutionary history, that a great many of us are going through quite a lot of suffering. Indeed, I think that Species Man or 'us as a human collective' is being powerfully tested and that what is currently happening on our planet is that we are going through what I will call a Species Dark Night of the Soul crisis.
Essentially what this means is
a) that many of us are having to face very, very painful aspects of ourselves that perhaps, up until now, we have avoided looking at, and
b) that many of our old supports and conforts are currently being removed from us.
Here I am reminded of that lovely little remark by Thomas a Kempis. 'Grace is given to us to train us and is removed to test us'. For essentially what suffering is, is an absense of grace. Our old comforts and supports are removed. We are left naked, having to confront our own darkness. OK, so how do we deal with this?
Firstly, I suggest that we accept our suffering and we don't try to deny or fight it but instead recognise that it really is one of the ways that God uses to try to help us grow, and so, hard as this may seem, we need to give thanks for this opportunity. Thus, we must try to open our hearts as wide as possible to our suffering , mindful that they really are our own little 'inner alchemical furnices' and, if we allow them, are capable of transmuting all our 'base metal' into gold!
Just as logs fed into a fire will make it burn more brightly, so, if we feel up to it, if we feed our suffering into our hearts, it will also help open them more. It is also useful to recognise that what we are confronting is a karma of some kind or other - either one that is particularly connected to us, or conversely, it might be that our souls will have chosen to work through some aspect of species karma - and so we are 'taking on' some extra heavy suffering!
We need to remember this. The joy and the light are near. They are approaching us. Basically, if we can endure our suffering and not cave in to it, we will emerge purified and strengthened and the new spiritual light that will soon be with us, will allow us to move forward in our lives in a whole new and powerful way.
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