Time & Suffering

Those who suffered deeply in the past, or perhaps are still suffering will know this. Pain, torment, unease, trembling, they all bear a benumbing effect – you lose consciousness of time, it is as if you have been transported to a different dimension altogether, battling a thoroughly unusual dragon – a dragon which you may have never knew existed, or perhaps a dragon which you knew existed but has now assumed a distinct form, a more intimidating one, indeed one which has seemingly imposed its will on you with greater force. 

How does one lose consciousness of time, you may ask? I think that’s a very reasonable question to ask. When you ponder it, pain has an alienating aftertaste, in that it frequently generates a sense of estrangement in a person that makes him question himself, but further than that, it makes him question his basis for living – in other words, it makes him ask why he deserves such treatment and consequences. This, of course, can easily compel one to slip into victimhood; a very tricky and desperate frame of mind. 

But you see, when one senses the fragrance of life, the sweetness of faultless timing, the synchronicities of pleasure and love, that previous sense of internal strife seemingly dissipates into thin air, and as if it were never there to begin with – it’s rather curious, if you ask me. That is to say, that when one does not meet an aversion to living, when one ceases to bear a distaste for suffering and is graced with numerous scented pleasures, he loses consciousness of time in a different way – he slips into perpetuity, into an unending stream of change that is devoid of hardship and beautified by rich experience. 

Of course, when one lives through a rich and profound experience, it is not disunity, but harmony and accord that he discerns, and because of what he sees, his consciousness assumes the same colours of his experience, which often transforms murkiness – and a clouded mind – into resonance of soul and a spirit brimming with enthusiasm. Like a dance with existence, man simply stands back and mindlessly gets lost in the depths – time is hardly called to mind, apathy and boredom are nowhere to be seen, closure is held in natural indifference. However, the same couldn’t often be said of pain and suffering. It holds a firmer grip on us in an unfavourable way, reducing even our imagination to a condition of poverty, dulling our creative powers, perverting our desires, depleting our vitality, restlessly creeping on our sleep. In every possible aspect, it subverts the quality of living, and it seems to him who is subdued that there is nothing he could possibly do to influence himself otherwise or feel any other way than what he feels at that moment. 

Alienation, as one might presume, has its dangers, which differ from person to person. But one could also make the case that alienation could be immensely convenient, even transformative. Often, it is when you’re left alone isolated that your most prolific and overpowering thoughts come to mind. These thoughts must be lived through, in that they must be inquired into to their bottommost core, regardless of how menacing they may appear on the surface. Part of being brave is possessing the willingness to gaze into the darkness that haunts your soul, because that’s where illumination emerges. And as that old saying goes, many a time the answer lies in the place you least think of looking for it – or, in the place you least want to look. Fortune not only favors the bold, but the curious, too – though I don’t necessarily believe curiosity to be a virtue, I do believe a spirit of inquiry takes one far beyond the confines of everyday thinking and opens the door to the possibility of glimpsing at clearer, deeper, more insightful worlds – world which seem inconspicuous, there I say imaginary to the common person. 

But there are many thinkers in the East – well-acquainted with eastern doctrines and esoteric teaching – who will tell you that the loss of self, the shock and acute pain of trauma, the terrible extents of hopelessness and wretchedness, the disintegration of one’s ego; often act as a doorway to higher modes of being. The Hindus and Buddhists and Sikhists alike have a word –  ‘moksha’ – which is another word for salvation, discharge, release, liberation. It is often said that it takes great despair and loss for one to finally capitulate to reality, to abandon his efforts, to dispense with his desires and distastes. Much to his astonishment, though, it is at precisely this moment that his existence is renewed with a novel sense of wonder and vitality. Paradoxically, he has realized, at last, that he has nothing left to lose except his own flesh, and owing to his complete desertion away from his usual shape, a new kind of significance emerges. He naturally starts to wallow in the meaninglessness of what’s left, simultaneously realizing that there’s nothing expected of him, no ideal to live up to. 

For once, he senses a freedom unlike any other, and he didn’t even trick himself into slipping into this state – he feels like he earned it because of the incalculable suffering he endured to reach it, even though in reality, in accordance with Eastern teachings, liberation is like walking through an invisible door, looking back, and finding nothing whatsoever. Because in many Eastern doctrines, the fundamental reality of existence – which in their view is basically nothing – was depicted as meaningless, empty, void. They believed that it is out of the nothingness of space that everything comes about. A very mysterious notion, but one worth pondering on. 

Rather poetically, it is because we came from nothing and proceed into nothing that we continue to surface. We’re all doomed at the end, and none of it matters as much as you believe. But it is because of its ambiguous insignificance that it is so meaningful, profound, and beautiful. In Eastern philosophy, this is the most divine and precious nothingness, and stands completely incompatible with the ordinary nihilism of the West, typically shared among those who continue to nurture an unspoken instability and derangement, whose despondency is devoid of all significance, whose ‘why’ to live is undressed of all its nobility, intention and sanctity.

There’s no longer a burden too heavy to discompose, no emotion too pressing to distress the man who has perceived the state of Moksha – a transcendence of fear and death itself. I can’t help but close off this piece with a Chesterton saying, “Angels can fly because they can take themselves lightly.”

It is only because we are pressed down by the weight of suffering, by the apparent seriousness of life, that we have grown incapacitated; unable to fly, we lust after the hope that the burden of being grows lighter, and the fire burning in our hearts blazes with evermore intensity and illumination!