Why evade suffering?

                            pic credit:- google  

Suffering is a misunderstanding.
It exists… It’s real. I can call it a misunderstanding, but I can’t pretend that it doesn’t exist, or will ever cease to exist. Suffering is the condition on which we live. And when it comes, you know it. You know it as the truth. Of course it’s right to cure diseases, to prevent hunger and injustice, as the social organism does. But no society can change the nature of existence. We can’t prevent suffering. This pain and that pain, yes, but not Pain. A society can only relieve social suffering, unnecessary suffering. The rest remains. The root, the reality. All of us here are going to know grief; if we live fifty years, we’ll have known pain for fifty years… And yet, I wonder if it isn’t all a misunderstanding — this grasping after happiness, this fear of pain… If instead of fearing it and running from it, one could… get through it, go beyond it. There is something beyond it. It’s the self that suffers, and there’s a place where the self—ceases. I don’t know how to say it. But I believe that the reality — the truth that I recognize in suffering as I don’t in comfort and happiness — that the reality of pain is not pain. If you can get through it. If you can endure it all the way.

If you really wanted to let go of your sufferings, you could have done so a long time ago. You are holding onto them, so you must have found some way to take care of them.

Now psychologists say that there is even an investment in suffering, that you are invested in your suffering. A small child sees that when he falls sick his mother sits beside him and soothes his forehead. When he is sick his father, too, comes to visit him and pats his head. When he is sick no one scolds or nags him, everyone showers love on him. When he is sick he gets sympathy and understanding from all around. So one thing stays in the mind of the child: that when he is sick, everything is nice and good but when he is well, no one comes near him or pats him on the head – his father doesn't care about him, his mother doesn't worry about him – everyone is busy scolding him and trying to improve him. Then the whole world seems to be hard.

So the child's experience is that there is something wrong in being healthy. Perhaps there is something good in falling sick! When you are sick the whole world is friendly but when you are healthy the whole world becomes a stranger. So the idea of being sick starts to be attractive to the child's mind. From now on in his life, whenever he is in difficulty and begins to feel that the world is cold and hard, he will unconsciously want to become sick; and whenever he feels he is losing out in the world, that he has been left all alone without any friends, he will want to fall sick. And whatever one wishes happens.

It is our suffering that brings us together. It is not love. Love does not obey the mind, and turns to hate when forced. The bond that binds us is beyond choice. We are brothers. We are brothers in what we share. In pain, which each of us must suffer alone, in hunger, in poverty, in hope, we know our brotherhood. We know it, because we have had to learn it. We know that there is no help for us but from one another, that no hand will save us if we do not reach out our hand. And the hand that you reach out is empty, as mine is. You have nothing. You possess nothing. You own nothing. You are free. All you have is what you are, and what you give.

If you evade suffering you also evade the chance of joy. Pleasure you may get, or pleasures, but you will not be fulfilled. You will not know what it is to come home… Fulfillment… is a function of time. The search for pleasure is circular, repetitive, It has an end. It comes to the end and has to start over. It is not a journey and return, but a closed cycle, a locked room, a cell… The thing about working with time, instead of against it, …is that it is not wasted. Even pain counts.