It’s the nature of the human body and mind to be low, bad and sick sometimes. It happens now and again. But it is not the end. Life is a process and not a finished product (OO8 #2) and wherever you look in the universe there is only one fundamental rule: change. Even though we struggle as human beings to try to make life go smoothly for ourselves and others, nevertheless it’s impossible to ensure that happens. All ancient and most new philosophies accept the Change, as the universe itself. Study the most common form of anything in nature and you’ll see it’s a spiral form, a process.
Nowadays my experience of pain or difficulties help me remember a new meanings of the word suffering; wanting what can never be given to me. Sometimes we expect things that we obviously can’t have now, maybe never, and we create a suffering when we expect the expected to come true. We expect people to do things (OO8 #3) but they won’t, we expect happiness, money and health that we sometimes can’t have. We expect it for others too, and suffer when they don’t have it either.
I still think expectations are good. It’s using the future as a driving force. It’s the last step; first we dream it, then we have the vision and last is the expectation that it will happen. We can surely expect without suffering but it’s when we see our expectations as true that we get surprised and feel pain. We even expect an outcome from the suffering – wisdom and profound enlightenment, right here and now. But that’s not the way this universe works. If I expect something that I couldn’t have I understand that I’m asking for suffering. It wasn’t for me, at least not in the form and time as I expected it.
The first time this happened to me was when my father died in a plane crash. I was 16 and I asked for the earth to stop rotating. I expected time to stop, go back and make him come alive. At first I couldn’t understand, later I did. The death of my father wasn’t wrong, it was what I expected that I couldn’t have. Today I accept that loss of loved ones, of health and money, and other pain as the birth of something new to come. Something that might be even more beautiful than my neurons could imagine (OO8 #7 and 8). Life is a process in a spiral form, a mirror of its material form – nature.
Please accept that things will go “wrong” from time to time. And see that wrong is right, and right is wrong (OO8 #1). For me it is only possible when I observe myself and then the expected is automatically released. Now I see that my job here is to observe, try to understand, do the best of my ability to reach my goals but not expect it when the universe has shown me that it can’t be. The more we fight and try harder the more collateral damage we’ll cause and the more pain we’ll all experience in our body, our mind, and others suffer too.
When we can stand back, like watching a movie, and understand that it’s just the nature of the world to go “wrong” we see that it might be right (OO8 #1). I think that is what Buddha meant by the first noble truth of suffering. You work, struggle, and strive so hard to make yourself and others just “right” and it goes so wrong anyway. Try to stop and let things happen. Switch to frictionless. Notice how when you stop trying so hard it amazingly becomes so right and for some of us, even the suffering becomes “good” one day.
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