Meditation 41: On Suffering

What is suffering? Everyone has an idea, in the first instance from their own case.  Individual humans suffer a multitude of afflictions.  Some come randomly and we count such suffering a matter of bad luck.  I break my arm in an earthquake, crack my tooth on a stone, stub my toe, or catch a cold.  All manners of things like this just happen to people with statistical regularity.  Other suffering is more ambiguously the result of an uncaring fate.  I smoke for forty years and get lung cancer or emphysema. Now I suffer.  The same goes for drinking too much and getting liver damage, or taking in other statistically relevant carcinogens. 

Beyond the suffering of disease and physical pain, there is the suffering of the heart and self-esteem, which can be every bit as painful and "real" as the pain of a toothache.  To love and lose is to suffer, as is the discovery of a friend's betrayal, the loss of medical coverage and one's pension, or suffering injustice at the hands of others.  The pain of conscience is never far away, a reminder of things done or left undone to one's own and others' detriment, moral or spiritual.  So, in one's own case, we find physical, emotional and moral categories of suffering.  They all involve the more or less passive experience of pain that is common to all suffering.  I experience the pain, and I cannot help feeling it, even if I do not want to suffer.  If I do want to suffer, perhaps as self-inflicted punishment for crimes committed, still the experience of suffering is passive. It happens to me.  If I flog myself, the pain I endure, though self-caused, is, nevertheless, experienced passively.                        

So by the experience of physical, emotional or moral suffering, we get the idea of what it is.  How, then, ought we to relate to the suffering of others?  The temptation, in normal cases, is to forget about suffering if one is not suffering oneself.  We want to be happy, if we can, and dwelling on the suffering of others brings us down, makes us angry, disgusted, sad, despairing, and, ultimately, perhaps, suicidal.  Everywhere in the world, there is suffering beyond belief.  Even in countries not facing social upheavals at the moment, suffering is rampant.  Some of it is a matter of bad luck in an indifferent natural universe.  Some is self-caused, but the bulk is caused by the actions of human beings themselves.  In ancient Athens, the slaves who were sent to work the silver mines suffered and died in that work, and they knew when they walked in that they would be released only when they were dead.  This is an unbearable thought, and yet there were men who forced those slaves to work and die for their masters. Obviously, the masters, not feeling the suffering of the slaves themselves, were not concerned about it.

There has to be a mean between obsessing about the suffering all around us, exploring and finding in history and current events the evils that men, for the most part, inflict on other men and women, and ignoring all suffering besides one's own and those of one's family and immediate friends.  We have to accept suffering that happens to us through living and being able to feel pain, but we do not have to accept the suffering that we cause to ourselves and even less that which is caused by one group of men to others of their own species.  The outrage that we ought to feel is what can galvanize us to act to reduce suffering where this is humanly possible.  On the other hand, it is wrong to dwell too much on suffering, and the injustice of the suffering created by our fellows against the few or against the many.  To dwell too much on these things can turn righteous anger into a blinding hate that adds to the injustice our anger was roused to eliminate.