Suffering is at home in the belief of a separated self. It’s the belief that life as it appears is deeply wrong, that it should be different or better. It’s also the belief that life and all its sensations are owned personally, that there’s someone to blame, to take responsibility, to have choice, to be punished or rewarded.
Suffering is the resistance to impermanence and transience, which are inherent to any form and appearance. It’s resistance to the contraction that makes the blood and life stream move as a pulse.
And while all appearances and forms are inherently volatile, the sense of self, the sense of “I am,” is usually taken to be an individual, owned, defined, and autonomous entity, no matter if it’s perceived as asleep or awakened, victimized or empowered. This self seems to be the observer and doer in and of an ever-changing world of emergence and disappearance. It’s the artificial separation from life as it’s simply happening. The self oscillates between a variety of ideas, like karma, liberation and ascension, guilt, judgment and redemption, between an ego and a true, higher self.
It’s attached to the belief that it deserves or doesn’t deserve this. It’s the belief in success, survival, and failure for someone. The belief that it has and had choice, could have done or will do anything right or better in the past or future.
The belief that you can do it right now, in order to control an imaginary future, can turn into suffering. The belief in an autonomous doer is suffering. The belief that there’s no doer, that all is fate or karma and happening to me, can create victimhood or martyrdom, which are both essentially suffering.
Many traditions suggest that suffering may even lead to awakening, transformation, and enlightenment. And while shattering and raw life experiences can have an impact like a change in perspective, the interpretation is still a story, be it one of awakening or one of trauma. From a non-dual perspective, suffering doesn’t serve a higher purpose; it simply is what it is—an interpretation layered over raw experience. There’s no ultimate lesson to be learned, no necessary transformation to undergo. Even the belief that suffering is “for something” can be seen as another way the self tries to maintain control, to make life fit within a structured framework.
Suffering is all personal, and it fades when the person, the self, becomes recognized as a fictional character. Suffering itself then becomes recognized as fiction. There’s no one to suffer. Suffering is the interpretation of pain, of personalizing pain and attaching a story and meaning to it.
And while pain is a physical function, processed and interpreted by the central nervous system, the sense of self can create a story of suffering out of it: identification. When that attachment vanishes, decline, loss, grief, longing, and fear can be carried by a sublime peace, a deep, vibrant feeling of inherent interconnectedness with all transient and sentient appearance and form.
