(Excerpt from The World Exists to Set Us Free by Larry Rosenberg with Madeline Drexler)
The Buddha said that suffering is a noble truth, but not because suffering itself is noble. If that were so, the poor world, with so many suffering people, would be crowded with nobility. It isn’t. Suffering is suffring. It wears us down, it’s discouraging, it ages us prematurely, it cuts off creativity, it creates all kinds of problems. But in this approach, suffering is a doorway to liberation.
The great Indian yogi Shantideva once said that greatest obstacle to spiritual progress is the absence of obstacles. Can you imagine if it were all just a breeze? The point is not whether we have obstacles but finding a new way to regard what seem to be obstacles: if only this didn’t happen, if only that person didn’t treat me poorly, I could have a good life. The practice is to constantly come back to the facts. We need something to go up against to bring out the best and worst in us, and to see it so that we can genuinely free ourselves from it. From this point of view, the world exists to set us free. It sounds strange, but the attitude is that whatever happens to you can help you get free as a human being. Free of what? Suffering; living in repetitive, compulsive ways that have proven to be unfulfilling or unfruitful.
Our practice is the art of pure observation—including observation of our minds. With that idea in mind, let me suggest things that are not observation when a difficult state arises: denying it or drowning in it, getting lost in it, identifying with it, being swallowed up by it, burned by it, bitten by it. There are all kinds of subtle escapes that don’t seem to be escapes but are postponement. As things come up, we don’t look at them directly. Instead, we cope with them—sometimes for years. We human beings have an amazing capacity to delay, postpone, hesitate, cope with, until finally, when we’ve exhausted everything else, when we have nothing else to escape to, we come to wisdom—kicking and screaming as a last resort: “Okay, I’ll look at my suffering directly.”
Why do we keep doing things that don’t work? If your house is burning, you don’t enroll in a workshop and study with a teacher to get encouragement about what steps to take next: you run out to save your life. The dharma attitude is just as urgent. Why don’t we stop doing what brings us misery? Again, it requires learning how to live. But bear in mind: there is no escape from suffering. I’m not saying there isn’t an end to it—I’m saying there’s no escape from it. If you’ve seen yourself wiggle this way and that until there’s no more wiggle room left, it can give you tremendous energy to get on with it, to practice.
From the Buddhist point of view, if something is true, then it can help you get free. The reason we’re suffering unnecessarily is that we’re not living in truth. We’re living in delusion, in our imagination. Now truth:that’s an interesting word. There’s conventional reality—we all know it: red light means stop, green light means go. But our practice is beyond Buddhism, beyond any -ism. There’s a truth that has nothing to do with any ideology or culture or point of view; with Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, inner meaning, outer meaning—that’s all man-made, human. This practice, by dealing with the relative truths of our daily life as we find it, can help take us to that which is beyond constructed truth—what I would call real truth or ultimate truth.
For now, though, let’s stay close to the ground. We all know the happiness that’s a mind state. People are nice to me, I’m happy. People are not nice to me, I’m unhappy. I make a lot of money, I’m happy. I lose on stock, I’m unhappy. That’s up and down, and it’s a hard way to go through life. First of all, it’s tiring—you’re spending your life between oscillations. You’re also vulnerable because anything can be threatening. Our path is learning how to become comfortable with discomfort, how to not be afraid of fear, how to not be tyrannized by moods that drift through the mind.
As you examine the full range of human experience, you arrive at a place that’s beyond plus and minus—and that’s the whole point. Your practice takes you to something deeper. I wouldn’t even call it happiness. What the Buddha is talking about is deep peace, inner peace. It’s not the happiness of ecstasy, which comes and goes—and when it comes, enjoy it.
For me, there was a turning of a corner where, at a certain point I realized that even in looking at my suffering, this practice was the best thing I could do for myself. It’s not because the books said so or some teacher said so. I just knew that this is the best thing I could do. Maybe there was no person called “the Buddha,” maybe science will do carbon dating and find out he never existed, maybe Buddhism came out of an ancient think tank of twenty bright people. If so, I would still keep doing this—not because I’m a fanatical, ideologically committed, true-believing Buddhist but because a life of awareness and learning is the most sensible way I know how to live.