Suffering

I was looking at a blog which chose as its purpose a reckoning of all the horrible things which are happening today; it was anti-Obama and spoke of the need for gold - the latter day idol - and the government as Gestapo. It was a diary of Dukha, or Suffering, as the Lord Buddha might have said in similar circumstances.

Suffering and Fear are the Limits of Life.
They are not events within life. Change is a source of suffering, but Change is not an event which causes suffering and fear, rather it is Life pushed up against the limits of its abilities.
In Change, we would think we are not capable of meeting the challenge of the new demands upon us: we are pushed against the Wall of Life, and the Pain is that limiting wall, that prison wall, not the push that placed us there.

Suffering is always present, because we are always forming and placing limits on ourselves; then events change and conspire to destroy those limits, causing us pain.

Blogs and Writings and Media Circuses filled with the Negative - a very prevalent phenomenon nowadays - are presenting their feelings at the Limits of Life, and they assume that those Limits are eternal: they cannot be changed nor transcended.
Therefore, they assume that Suffering, Fear and Pain are eternal unless some change in circumstances occurs, allowing us to return to our previous place: our previous beliefs and actions and expectations of the world, in effect, restoring the old limits.

The Genius of Religion expresses the change from Pain to Joy in a poem I wrote some years ago on viewing a child's grave in the Puttygut Road Cemetery:




Give him a hat,
a marble lamb;
no name thereon engrave.
Give him a robe,
a swath of lawn,
alive, we never gave.
Give him boots:
of stoney base!-
he'll no more run and play.
Give him a rose
within his cheeks
to bright this holiday.
Give him heart
and give him vein!-
O, undiscovered bourne!
May he wake
within Your love,
O God of Life eterne!

We go from the pain of lost life and lost potential to life eternal... and that is how it is supposed to be: from the grief and suffering about life and its limits to limitless life!
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