Suffering for Suffering's Sake

There's a spiritual line I like that says you can be in pain but not suffer. And it makes sense: observing the pain, having some kind of detachment from it, you can acknowledge it but not be wed to it. Your sore throat or strained muscle or virus or cancer can kick up a helluva shitstorm, but that doesn't mean you have to be *owned* by the pain.

But there's another maxim that came to mind today in witnessing a friend's suffering and reading about Vicki Woodyard's path through this life, and that is:

Sometimes suffering *is*, just for suffering's sake.

When you are toppled of the pure precipice of idealized non-dual space (which is about as pure as washing up with a bar of soap made of of dog shit), it's easy to pontificate that everything is perfect just the way it is.

But when somebody's filthy hands pull you off that precipice and sit you in front of a tv to watch the horror unfolding 24-7; when rape and death and even the simple untimely death of a family pet parade in their maudlin glory through your life, the precipice is seen, perhaps for the first time, as what it actually is: a constructed place of artificial glory. Second cousin to Peter Popoff's glittery spiritual chattel being advertised to the lonely up late watching TV because sleep won't come and the bottle's empty and there's terror at the door waiting to be let in when they go get the morning paper.

Sometimes suffering is suffering for suffering's sake. This is where the shit lives. The unexplainable, the unreedmable, the awful things in life that simply cannot be touched.

And yet thissuffering creates the same gordian knot that can pull one out of the morass.

For with surrender - against everyone's advice, in the face of horror; against all common sense - to truly let go and be - there is the light before the light; touch before touch; unity before unity: the nameless, faceless, lightless Mary and Buddha and Christ excoriating the emotional entrails and leaving nothing but light.

And it is that light which dissolves the precipice where you hung out to begin with;

And shines on the new ones being built as quickly as the pain subsides.

Namaste