The horrible Trio

Guilt, Pain/Suffering, Ignorance

An individual is the sum total of his/her/their experiences. They are born and like a rolling stone gathers moss, life happens to them.

The old lives of our ancestors were simple lives. There was not much complication. Things were structured and you had a fairly predictable life as a result of all this structure.

Life in the 21st century is very different. Firstly and obviously things are very different around the world. There’s a lot of suffering in some areas, but in other areas, there’s relative peace and prosperity. Sometimes too much of a good thing can also be a bad thing. And so some of the areas that are prosperous also have their own forms of suffering.

21st Century Earth is a rough place, a crude place, a beautiful place but very rarely a place where the individual has the same chances to grow as the individual of say India or China in the year 1,500BC.

What I mean by this is not that there is a lack of knowledge now. There is plenty of knowledge — but there is also plenty of something else!

It may seem like a bit of a shocker that this is important at all — Just humour me for a moment, let that “suspension of disbelief” module kick in, for just a moment, and roll with me. Let's just say for a moment that being alive brings along with it a set of experiences that depending on your unique situation can range from a generally boring uneventful life to an exciting fun life, to a life of absolute misery and extreme suffering. Different people have a different dish waiting for them. Have you ever wondered not as to why it happens that you have the experiences you do but what the sum total of the experiences are as you progress through your life?

What marks do those experiences leave? Those moments of utter despair… do they leave any sort of long-lasting effect? For the person who has experienced this, the answer will be very obvious. Depending on how far gone there might be not very much of anyone home. But the pain has a horrible way of waking you up as well. That’s the thing with pain — it's a wake up call that things aren't exactly right. They’ve not been for a while and you’ve known it somewhere deep down. The thoughts you’ve had about yourself — may be they’ve been growing increasingly negative.

Now the complexities of the brain notwithstanding, think about it from a systems perspective…. we have pain, suffering, an individual with a simple existence — will they be more effective in their day to day life than the individual with the life of extreme suffering?

Depends right? It's not necessarily the case that adverse events always affect you negatively. You might ultimately receive something quite positive out of your adverse circumstances…(that’s if you go through the right kind of healing process) that is not the main relevant factor here though… the fact is that there is indeed an effect on the being.

The entity is left, in the worst-case severely impaired in certain cases this leads to the end of the entity. I myself have been on this graded scale — at various times in my life, I’ve visited every part of the scale.

Yet pain and suffering can be seen as opportunities. In a sense they are. Ultimately if you are able to process all that stored up pain in all its various forms within you, you are then ready to start the journey. According to who you speak to that moment when you start the journey — and the next one… it’s either relatively short or generally of unknown duration ;)

And the pain also provides the opportunity to be wide awake. Somehow it jiggles you enough for you to wake up however momentarily in order to process that pain.

Ignorance and Guilt — There is a type of guilt where wanting to search makes one feel like one must have already got there or have got there without trying. The flip side obviously being also the ones who get “there” (if there exists yadda yadda) also seem to like to promote the idea that it is possible to get there by just realizing you are already there. This is possible? Not having been exposed to a single idea, thought, talk, discussion, conversation, one can just spontaneously make the most important realisation of their lives? No problem with that whatsoever. Well except that the more the stored up existential angst( — the sum total of which is connected to the result of the sum total of the effect of the experiences as described earlier. ), the harder it is to do this.

And so we are now in this spiraling out of control kind of situation, where the individual is on auto-pilot moving through life, denying the processing of pain, suffering incredibly, and unable to fully realise themselves.

And now what do we have for these people?

Are we going to say “Hold on a second all you need to do is realise you are already there.”? “Your suffering is meaningless”, “You are already fully realised”, “You are alive”, “You are free”.

OR are we going to do the research, ask the questions and be willing to provide the answers (even if we’re wrong some of the time.) because its the right thing to do. Even if this existence is entirely a figment of your mind, my experience tells me that these are worthwhile conversations to be having.