We all suffer. You are suffering. Many currents in our culture see suffering as a problem that needs solutions and fixes. I do not agree. As logical as that might seem to some people, I suggest that logic is very, very ill. And it makes us more ill – mentally, literally – and spawns more suffering. It is not at all logical to think that suffering requires any solutions. Nor that all suffering even *has* solutions.
One great thinker (and actor) suggested that to suffer willing is a supreme act of love. When we undergo suffering but want to fix it or escape it, we are not undergoing it willingly. Unwilling suffering is equal to our collective notion of what hell means.
Another supposedly great thinker called lovingly suffering the “opiate of the masses.” I don’t think he was a very great thinker at all. I rather think he was an emissary from hell. And today’s postmodern neo-Marxists are deputies of Satan who would have us believe that we suffer because it is our victimizers who are evil. Isn’t that a nifty trick? The great deceiver can never deceive greatly unless the deception can be easily mistaken as truth.
What logic *actually* shows us is that every attempt at fixing suffering causes more. Logic shows us how effortlessly easy it is to cause more suffering – infinitely easier to cause more suffering than it is to endure the suffering that is given us to endure.
“What we fail to transform, we transmit.”
Every time and way you willingly take on the suffering that has been specifically dealt to you is an act of profound and supreme love.
That is why suffering is so excruciating!
Yours is yours alone. Therefore cannot actually be shared. You yourself must “take up your cross”; no one can substitute for you. You’re an essential stitch in the fabric of reality. If you abdicate your responsibility for your own cross, you transmit that suffering onto others. Supreme and profound love is merely acting out all you can be.
If you are convinced that suffering is a condition that you should fix, or escape, go ahead and try, and tell me if it doesn’t deepen.
We are not made to fix or escape all suffering. It is not our nature.
To live in harmony with others – it is plainly logical to see – requires and demands suffering in some forms.
Is this not entirely clear to you? Think on it honestly until it is. Every act of authentic love that you have ever performed is necessarily an act of sacrifice. And what is sacrifice, except undertaking suffering willingly?
No sacrificing in the world, no suffering in the world, no love in the world.
Every act you have performed to alleviate suffering in the world amounts to sacrificing something of yourself. You may not consider such sacrifice to be the same as suffering. That’s your perspective or delusion, but it doesn’t mean that not every sacrifice involves suffering.
The greater the willing sacrifice, the greater the willing suffering, the greater the willing love.
So, I don’t wanna hear any more about God wanting us to be happy. God didn’t make us to be happy. That is not our nature. God made us to love and to be loved. That is our nature. And until you can equate happiness with suffering, love will be something you try to find, how? By fixing and escaping? You think that a path toward love? Is that really your experience of love? Does that seem logical, rational, reasonable?
To find the deepest goodness, fix and escape badness? No wonder depression and anxiety are rampant. We seek an out from the human condition because that condition involves suffering. How does that make more sense than the truth that our human nature is to love and therefore involves suffering?
To say that the truth has been revealed implies that it was so completely hidden that it could never be found lest it be magically revealed. I don’t know why those ideas are linked. It is not at all logical. We cannot come to know something that we are incapable of knowing. If we can know it, it is because we are capable of knowing it.
The revelation that profound love involves profound suffering wasn’t something we didn’t know. Deep down we knew it and know it. It was just something we didn’t *want* to know – something we didn’t want to be true, something we wished weren’t true. In that sense, what was revealed is how deeply we didn’t want to know it. How deeply we wished love could be free of suffering.
I’m not sure there is possibly a deeper revelation than awakening to our lies to ourselves. The fantasy of loving without suffering is one all of us hold. Just as all of us carry shame, self hatred, and many other delusions opposing truth. We easily buy the story that we are trash and therefore require a savior who can distract his father so his father doesn’t notice how wretched we are. What a horrible, horrible distortion of the greatest love story ever. Because we persistently wish for love without suffering, our thick skulls required divinity itself to show us they are the way. Love and suffering are bedfellows. A truth inescapable even by the divine.
Wish away. That’s not the truth.
Pick up your cross and love shall be yours. You already knew that.
Neil D. 2024-10-21
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