64 - Suffering

The first cause to answer is suffering.Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

Since time immemorial beautiful beings have dedicated their lives towards coming to the succor of those in distress in body, mind and soul. In his search for a solution to suffering, Buddha renounced his palace. While many have renounced personal well being out of a feeling of compassion, many more have caused untold suffering to others in ruthless pursuance of personal interests, out of greed or crass disregard for the ordeal that millions are enduring in our day and age. Most people find their place somewhere between these two extremes. Is there any way of allaying the psychological affliction attendant upon illness and death, starvation, penury, failure, abandonment, injustice, moreover the nagging, often unconscious fear that these arouse?

While recognizing the reality of the dire physical pain endured by many, sometimes beyond the pale of human endurance, our recourse is to call upon the influence of mind over body, first by recognizing the impact upon body functions of our attitude towards psychological trauma. Resentment, remorse, self-pity, envy, hatred, frustration, anger, addiction, co-dependence alter physiological functions mediated by the endocrine glands affecting digestion, blood pressure, the lymph glands, the immune system, neuro-transmitters, the replication of the DNA by the RNA. A large body of research is being carried out at present to determine which psychological syndrome affects which hormone secretion and which hormone affects which body function. But we can explore methods of dealing with the psychological trauma.

Reciprocally, since the bodily afflictions and the prospect of death arouse psychological attitudes, one would need to investigate how best to deal with these. No doubt these attitudes involve our sense of identity and how our sense of identity is related to our body. Buddha's solution: not identifying with the body or even the personality may well yield concrete results by dis-identifying with the seat of the pain or despair, but it does go counter to our involvement with the existential reality with all its implications with regard to accomplishment, building a better world, fostering a way of life, providing a practical underpinning for the development of culture, human relationships, etc. Besides owing to the momentous developments of science, (for example we can now see the live body cell in action), we have developed in our time a healthy respect for the privilege of involving ourselves with the fabric of the universe in our intimate relationship with our own bodiness. We are also our bodies; our bodies have accrued to us from the universe and have become part of our being, and so are our personalities.

A way of looking at ourselves taking into account the emerging paradigms of science, and indeed confirming Hindu, Buddhist and also the experience of Sufi mystics would consist of rather than envisioning ourselves as discrete entities, realizing that we are a cross between a vortex, coextensive and isomorphic with the nature of the whole universe, and being a temporarily stable but evolving sub-whole, that is a continuity in change.

Undoubtedly we are inexorably drawn into the process of becoming, which means entropy, but we also have the ability of intercepting the arrow of time vertically as it were by our incentive and inventiveness which then will enrich the flow like a tributary to a river which then will be drawn into the flow. Moreover we have the ability to escape the entropy by resurrecting.

This updated sense of identity involves then two views. The first one is: we expand - and here to find fulfillment, we need to concentrate upon radiating rather than disintegrating, The second: transmuting - that is extract the quintessence of our being from its underpinning, as in distilling in Alchemy. An application of the scientific principle according to which information is built on the expenditure of energy, and that matter is a state of energy would mean in practice that we would strive to make the best of the energy that is our body to foster realization, wisdom, enlightenment, be of service, contribute to the well being of the physical and social environment. What is more, both energy and its state as matter exist in various degrees of subtlety versus grossness, and nature takes care of the transmutation of both. The photon evidences a degree of rarification or sublimation above the electron and the electrons of our body stuff get transmuted into photons before and after death and the state of energy is defined by its frequency, hence the difference that contemplatives make between pure spirit, acting as a catalyst and the grosser states of energy for example high amperage proportionately to low voltage.

If anything is gained by the existential condition, then the relatively stable sub-wholes must be assured pre-eternity. But for there to be evolution, they must communicate to the environment the know-how gained by experience by expanding, and to the software programmed by the mind of the universe by resurrecting.

The Sufi outlook adds a whole further perspective to those availed of so far: supposing we would look at ourselves at the other end of the divine vantage point and as an expression or derivative of the divine nature. So long as we start with our personal vantage point, we will have difficulty in transcendence; but if we proceed in the opposite direction, we will glean a whole different sense of identity which will envision dissolution and reinstatement in the context of the thinking of the universe.

The Sufis call this 'uns', enjoying the intimacy of the proximity of the King, by being invited to share in the strategy at the court of the King. May I also add: and the Queen.
