Pain
Pain
Pain, suffering, anxiety, fear, discontent, hate, sadness, on and on. We have lots of names for conditions making life difficult for people. Let’s lump them together under suffering. All the world’s faith traditions offer either solace or hope. Some offer healing. The healing even works sometimes.
With the possible exception of pain, all the conditions creating suffering have the same origin-us. All we really need are food, clothing, and shelter. Everything else is desire, things created in our minds. “Make it go away.” There are more strategies for making it go away than there are people on the planet.
The strategies do offer some solace. Another beer, a horror movie, ice cream, new car, getting laid. Problem is, the craving always returns. So, do it again. And again. Try something else, maybe jumping out of an airplane will work. What about Everest? Running a corporation, getting elected. Trying a long kiss in the stairwell and an affair. We spend our lives trying to satisfy desire. All the wise ones offer a supposed cure, usually requiring some degree of sacrifice in pursuit of deliverance.
Often, the sacrifices have to be repeated because the ones asking for a sacrifice are attempting satisfy their own cravings. It don’t work, folks. All the attempts at gratification just feed the craving. Thus, we have a world of suffering. It’s the wrong approach.
Now, I am going to tell you what to do. Problem is, I am also trapped on the wheel of desire. I know the technique works because I have experienced it in my life, once for as long as a year. It’s simple, let go of desire. No desire, no suffering. Bad things still happen, but they don’t result in suffering if the desire is gone.
We all have in our core a condition of pure being, absent of all the world’s clutter. The task is getting back there. As we are in a body, to stay alive we must satisfy the body’s needs. It means going to school, working, forming associations and partnerships. All this is hard work and we build our own little mental world and fill it with needs.
Let it go, give it up, just breathe without thinking and you will begin to rediscover the place in the center of your being. Now, do what I say, not what I do. I built my own little ego world and constantly strive to keep it satisfied. Sometimes while meditating I am able to enter the peaceful state. Other times, all I do is think, often about what to write about not thinking.
When I am having a hard time letting thinking go I pray. I pray for myself, for others. For the earth. Prayer takes me away from my self. I stop praying and am sometimes able to re-enter the empty space. Often all I can do is pray. And pray.
I think choosing a prayer is a personal, private thing. It can be a mantra, a quote from the dharma, a prayer of thanks or for mercy. It can come from any faith tradition or none. It doesn’t seem to matter where the prayer is directed. It doesn’t have to be directed anywhere. What is important is the act of praying, of getting outside of the cluttered world where we spend most of out time.
The next time I meditate it can be easier to enter that space of peace. Or not. I used to say writing is the hardest thing to do. Now I think it is meditation. How to be without striving, without suffering, without escaping.
I think I will go to the store and then meditate.