I know when these words reach you, you will have experienced psychological suffering in your life. A suffering that is excruciating! Unbearable! Inescapable! Indescribable!
You will have felt like reaching out to many in the pursuit of the questions: “How do I heal myself? Where do I go to find justice in a world that has turned against me? Why did it have to happen to me of all people?” Let me ask you. Do you really want to know the answers?
Try to ask yourself: “Am I feeling this pain because I consider myself separate from the world?” Try asking yourself again: “Have we not heard of people in this world who have undergone tremendous suffering, whether on account of loss, betrayal, false accusations, irreversible actions, and perhaps even their own sins?”
The feelings that we undergo from asking these questions are the feelings that make us truly and utterly human. It is this very feeling of being abandoned by the world when we most needed it that makes us who we are at our most earnest when no one is watching us. This is not the worst folly of being human but the very best experience of what it means to undergo the humanity within us, which is also all that exists outside us.
The actions whose consequences we suffer are not human. They are merely the actions of a society, or that of a manifestation of that society. But we, as a result of that consequence, we return to our humanity at its purest. Because it is in this suffering—that simply doesn’t go away, that simply cannot be explained, that simply cannot be healed, that simply does not seem to have a beginning or an end—indeed in this suffering alone are we connected back to the world from which we came.
Call it God. Call it divine justice. Call it the inherent morality of humankind. Call it simply truth. Call it by whatever name you will. But perhaps it does not have a name. It only has a place. And that place is your heart. And that heart beats in the rhythm of the universe. Your suffering connects you back to the cosmos.
The very reason that you feel the pain that you do is the supreme evidence that you are not alone. You were never alone. You are one with the earth and all that it has to offer. Your pain is the pain of this existence around you. And the moment you realize that, the moments of intense suffering that make you one with the rest of existence, are also the moments when this entire existence opens itself to you. It does not do so with the sheer benign indifference that Albert Camus spoke of. It does so with the sheer frantic delight of a parent receiving back their child, a child that had gone astray, a child that was lost, a child that was misled into taking the wrong path, but has finally found its way back home.
If you truly understand what the experience contained in that image means, you will know that it is your time now to begin healing others. They really await you. They have awaited you for a very long time. And, it is in this realization that your sufferings will cease forever.
Photograph Courtesy: Magyar, Pixabay.
Arup K. Chatterjee 