(Photo by Creative Vix, courtesy of Pexels.)
The majority of the suffering that you experience is caused not by something outside of yourself but by your internal reaction to things. And those reactions that bring pain are usually based on attachments and expectations that are unfulfilled. You make an appointment with someone and they don’t fulfill your expectations so you get disappointed. That is why my motto is, “No appointments, no disappointments.”
One of the main Buddhist precepts is that life is suffering. The father of Yoga, sage Patanjali, made a similar statement: “Dukham evam sarvam vivekinaha.” This means that for a person with discriminative knowledge everything is painful. It is easy to misunderstand what they were teaching and see it as some kind of negative or pessimistic view of the world.
In actuality, Buddha, Patanjali, and many of the great sages realized that everything is painful when we cling to anything through our attachments or wrong relationship with life. What is right relationship? It is the understanding that we are to be in the world, but not of the world; to be active and involved in life, to enjoy life without being selfishly attached to the results of our actions.
God, working through the nature, through people and things, teaches us this lesson on a daily basis. Any time we have the wrong approach in life, we experience pain. And when we feel that pain, we either learn the lesson and drop the attachment or we get stuck in more and more pain. That is why when we realize that everything holds the potential for giving us pain and causing suffering, we will—if we are intelligent people—be careful to have the proper relationship.
In effect, pain is our friend and teacher. Pain is trying to tell us: “Hey, if you don’t want to be in pain or to suffer, drop your attachment and selfish expectations. Then you will certainly be happy and joyful.” But we seem to not understand the message that pain wants to give us. Instead, we misinterpret it and feel that people or situations are needlessly torturing us. Things are painful to us in order to help relieve us from the unhealthy attachments we have formed.
We can misunderstand this sutra of Patanjali or what Buddha taught and see everything as painful. If everything is painful why did God create everything then? Did God purposely create everything to be painful and to hurt us? Is God playing some cruel joke on human beings? No, not at all. Things are in reality, neutral, but they become painful because of our wrong association. Our relationship to the person or thing is incorrect, and then that causes us pain.
The tenfold path of Buddhism leads to liberation from this suffering. In Yoga, there is an eightfold path that is very similar. These paths teach us how to be in right relationship with everything in this world. They show us that everything in nature and in life is essentially neutral. What makes it a positive or negative experience for us is our reaction to it. Haven’t we heard the simple proverb, “One man’s poison is another man’s nectar?” But how could that be? Poison is poison, isn’t it? If it is poison to one person how can it be nectar to another? What is it really: poison or nectar?
Everything is neutral—neither painful nor pleasurable. We make things painful by our wrong connection. If you plug your finger into the electrical outlet it is painful. If you plug your lamp into the outlet it is enlightening. If you plug nothing into the outlet, it is nothing. The outlet is just there, it is neutral. The entire nature is neutral, neither good nor bad, pleasurable nor painful. It becomes painful if you into it with a wrong relationship.
And the entire function of prakriti (nature) is to give us this experience; to help us to have the correct relationship with everything. We should know the proper relationship. For example, let’s take the element of fire. Fire is very good, right? It gives you warmth in winter. Because it gives warmth, you might say, “Oh, fire, you are giving me warmth. You are just wonderful! I just want to hug you.” But let’s say you go and begin to hug the fire, what will happen? The fire will burn and may even kill you. What would you say if the fire burns you? “Oh, fire I hate you. You are burning me. I don’t want to even go near you.” So, you step far away, and what happens? Soon, you will find yourself freezing cold.
So, Yoga and Buddhism teach us that we suffer because of our improper attitude, because of our wrong relationship, because of our negative attachment. And that should make us want to detach. Once you detach yourself completely that which seemed to be causing pain is no longer experienced as painful. That means that it is our mind, our thoughts, our understanding that causes us to experience something as painful. We have caused our own pain and we ourselves have the ability to remedy the pain.
