Another View of Suffering 

Imagine you are hungry, wet, cold and frightened. Would this be conducive to developing your creativity? If this were a chronic condition, would it be helpful to your well-being? This is basic raw suffering. There are other forms less noticeable and to some extent most of us suffer from hunger of the spirit, walled up, our real feelings hidden from us. We suffer from the threat of dislocation and displacement. If we do not control the means whereby we gain or have access to that which we need to prevent us from being wet, cold, hungry or frightened we suffer and by extension so does our humanity.

This is its meaning. And only when we allow ourselves to finally fix this view of suffering in our imagination will we all begin to wake up to our responsibility of ending it- here and now on earth, in this life. There is no waiting for the glorious, perfect eternal afterlife; eternal life is now. Its glory shines forth everywhere. But is a obscured by the opaqueness of our fears and abysmal ignorance.

We sleep walk through life, unseeing, not knowing our vast, infinite power and beauty. Not to know this is to be ignorant and abysmally so and so, we feel we have no other option but to accept a view of ourselves that infinitely degrades us to make sense of the suffering and in so doing we learn to tolerate the suffering, to renew it, even cultivate it, to suffer all that we cause, wars, poverty, various disease, and ugliness.

Imagine you are well fed, dry, warm, content and not frightened. What would it take to extend that to everyone?