Let Us

Life is suffering. But what does that tell us about how to live it? I mean should we spend our days, melancholy or depressed, with shoulders hunched over, bemoaning our fate to live on this earth….ALL the days of our lives? ….Because that’s a lot of days, let me tell you!

Of course not.

The beauty of life is in the freedom to fill it with  experiences to process and pursue. Belief in who we are, what we mean to the world and in the next moment and our ability to not just get through it but to enjoy it, is the catalyst for hope right?

What perplexes and sometimes amuses me is that as humans, we are so desperate to hide from the idea that life is suffering that we build layers over it, or walls around it. We hope if we obscure this obvious reality then it will no longer be true.  We dream up rules for life and create categories such as class, race, and gender. Distinctions that, I’m not sure if are meant to serve as distractions to the reality of life that escapes no one but, serve to distract nonetheless.

The distractions are numerous. There is the distraction of race – the dominant “race” judges, and based on these judgements, sets up rules for how society should behave regarding race. The race in power then embeds these judgements into the institutional fabric of society to uphold and perpetrate the importance of race. The same goes for gender, for class, for intelligence level, for beauty and appearance. Through these judgements and its rules we can fill up threads on social media, we can create scores of news articles, and television news and make the millions of decisions that we spend our entire lives making.

In reality, the purpose is twofold: One is to distract us from the mundane, static, dull and basic reality that life is suffering and two: It serves to add richness to our lives. The richness is alive in the variety of experiences we can slide into, the variety of interactions we can have with those around us. And in this way we can have things to look forward to.

Hope.

Ironically, or perhaps not, it is the very distractions we create through which our suffering plays out. It is as though, without the rich layer we add on to distract us and give us hope, we would not have a channel for experiencing our fate.

Let’s take race for instance. The dominant group constructed race to distinguish itself and set in place a method to identify itself as standout, even superior.  It is human nature to do this.  When have you not seen a winning group express the reasons they believe they are the winning group? And naturally, they attribute innate qualities, which by default, are almost always in juxtaposition to the group that is not winning. We didn’t just win by chance. We won because we can run faster, play smarter. We won because we are better, bottom line.

Here it is our ego talking. Man since the beginning of time has been at odds with admitting his vulnerability and mortality. Man struggles with the reality that he is as capable of extinguishment as a small plant or insect. Man is so terrified of his own mortality, so confused by it, that he must find ways to tell himself that he is not just a man – that he is better than just a man. He is a white man, or a smart man, or a rich man. He is anything but just a man.

In modern society race gives us the opportunity to play out our illusions of superiority and serves as a distraction to the reality that we are all equally susceptible to the suffering that is inherently life. Race gives the dominant group a means of elevating itself above the drudgery of human suffering. Of course they are not really elevating themselves above the drudgery of human suffering but in life, perception makes it so. If we can delude ourselves to the idea that we are either more than we are and so we don’t deserve what life hands out, then we are justified in seeking a way out even if it is at the expense of those deemed less than us.

In life, locked in our physical bodies, our world is our feelings, sensory and emotional, as well as our thoughts. We can experience nothing outside of it. Every moment, every experience we encounter is colored, stained if you will, with our perception by our individual feelings and thoughts. If we can delude ourselves, distract ourselves, elevate ourselves above the baseness of being just a mass of flesh and blood, then we can muster the strength to go on.

Within the illusion though, we act out the script for our own suffering. What humans, because of their own ego, don’t realize is every time we hurt, we hurt. Every time we inflict hurt on someone else, we hurt ourselves. Every time we treat another human as less than human, we must within our minds build up another layer of denial and distraction and justification from which is borne self-hate or delusion.  We cannot hurt without hurting. We can shield our awareness from the pain we cause ourselves by telling ourselves that those we hurt deserve what they got but we still hurt.

We hurt because deep down, under all the layers of denial and ego, we know we are just flesh and blood. We know we hold no super powers. We know we hold no claim to anything magical or immortal. We know we are vulnerable, and susceptible and relatively fragile. We know our life can be extinguished by anything - from something as large and formidable as a bomb or a bullet to something as seemingly innocuous as opportunistic bacteria at the wrong moment. And the instigator of our demise will not care if we are of the minority group or the majority. It will not care if we are rich or poor or anywhere in between. It will not care our race, or gender, or how beautiful we are or how ugly. And we know that.

Why then do we have these self-soothing vices? Why then do we harbor these reasons, if you will, for claim to superiority when we know the elements of life (birth, illness and death) that matter most, don’t care or discriminate based on these “reasons”? I think it is because we are uncomfortable with our mortality. We are, it seems, the only species of living things that are aware of our own existence. Not only are we aware of our existence but we are aware of every thought, every feeling, and their genesis within us. In essence, we have a conscience.

 It is our ability to delve into the meta-levels of our existence that makes our existence so difficult for us. How is it we can, through our awareness of self, plan and execute such powerful effects on our world and at once be so naturally fragile and vulnerable? We know we are alive, we can feel our existence, yet at any moment we are aware we can cease to exist. Enamored with the natural beauty of life, we are desperate to keep ourselves going. So we work our entire lives to avoid,  to stop, the inevitable cessation of existence. We stand on the backs of others to survive and we assuage our conscience by telling ourselves they are less than us or they deserve it.  We plead with God, and display in the most outrageous ways, our allegiance to him, and therein our claim to His grace and mercy above all others. We sacrifice ourselves to the god of money in the hopes that it can shield us from the tragedies of life. And it does what it can, but it cannot change our ultimate destiny.

What then should we do? Should we accept the fact life is suffering and curl into a ball and give up? Or should we get up each day and distract ourselves for a moment with the beauty of the sun, and revel for another moment in the kind word or actions of our loved ones, and pass another moment laughing at the humor of life? I propose we do just these. But let us not do it on each other’s backs.

Let us, to the extent that we can, be mindful of the pain we inflict on others and understand that we hurt ourselves in the process so that if even by that rationale, we can try to avoid behaviors that hurt each other. Let us remember that whether we are the perpetrator of pain or the victim, we cannot escape the fate of life. That no amount of intelligence or beauty or likeness to the dominant group, can save us from the reality that life is suffering and our lives are, indiscriminately, the stages through which we play out the beauty and the pain inherent in it.