Real ize Your Suffering

[Guest guest]

Da Free John:

 

That which is called “realization”, “liberation”. “God-union”, or

whatever, gets represented to people in various symbolic forms, as

something with lots of planes and worlds, colors, lights and visions,

figures and forms, methods, universes, “inside” and “outside”, going

here, going there, distance, direction, shape. These are all conceptual

communications, symbols, pictures for the mind. Fundamentally, they

exploit your suffering, by motivating you to acquire whatever it is they

represent or hide. True spiritual life is not a motivation to these

symbols, a belief in them, nor even the acquisition of wht they

represent. True spiritual life is the process in consciousness in which

there is understanding, or re-cognition, of suffering, the present

experience.

 

Where there is no suffering, that which stands out or becomes the

obvious is called “heaven”, “nirvana”, “liberation”, the “Self”,

“Brahman”, “God”, “God-union”, “Truth”, “Reality”. When there is no

dilemma, when Consciousness Itself ceases to take on form or becomes

identical to form, that is what is called “liberation”. The process

that is involved is not one of search based on suffering.. Ordinarily,

if you suffer, you immediately seek to get free, and you attach yourself

to all kinds of hopeful signs. But true life, or spiritual life, is the

reverse of that. Ordinarily, you are seeking, pursuing forgetfulness

from your suffering, your dilemma, your contraction, this separation,

this unconsciousness. You pursue the absense of that in delight,

enjoyment, distraction, search for perfection, search for all kinds of

acquisitions, food, sex, money, good weather, lunch, until this whole

process begins to become uninteresting., You try every resort, either

by contemplation or by actual adventure. You look at every “movie” on

the subject. You seek, until that whole movement in yourself, that

whole reaction to your suffering, which is this search for the absense

of suffering, begins to wind down. Now you begin to realize its

hopelessness. The search begins to lose its ability to occupy you. It

becomes less exotic, less fascinating, less hopeful. Some quality in

consciousness begins to turn away from this whole process of seeking,

this whole reaction to your suffering, and rests in the suffering

itself. Even a vague disinterest in life’s pleasures may come over

you. You beging to realize that you are actually suffering, whereas

before you were completely occupied with your seeking, and suffering

wasn’t really the object of your contemplation. It was just some vague

“whatever”. The search was what involved you. But now you begin to

fall out of your search. You begin to live this suffering. Suffering

becomes your experience, your obsession. It completely absorbs you.

It becomes the object of your meditation. Your actual state becomes

absorbing—this rather than all the things to which you attached yourself

to forget this, to get rid of this. Then you beging to see your

suffering, to re-cognize your suffering. You begin to see, in fact,

what your suffering is. That subtle sensation that is motivating your

whole search becomes the thing that occupies you. You can no longer do

anything about it. You see what suffering itself is, at this moment.

You begin to see it precisely. It is a present activity. You begin to

re-cognize it, to know it again in consciousness. You see this

contraction of your own state, moment to moment, this separation, this

avoidance of relationship. You begin to see this more and more exactly,

specificially. It becomes an overwhelming re-cognition, until that

portion of yourself, that quality of yourself that enjoys the

recognition, that is the intelligence of this re-cognition of suffering,

becomes your intellignece, becomes the very quality of consciousness

that you live, with which you approach all experience moment to moment.

Then, instead of simply suffering, you may enquire of the nature of this

experience, moment to moment. You see beyond this contraction that is

your suffering. And you begin to enjoy that which your chronic activity

and state always prevent.

 

Your suffering is your own activity. It is something that you are doing

moment to moment. It is a completely voluntary activity.