(From Handbook For Humans)
It came as a great surprise to me to realize one day that pain and suffering were going to be a part of my life for as long as I lived. Up until then I had always thought that if I could just learn enough or become skillful enough, that somehow I could effectively shut pain out of my life.
But I can’t; none of us can. For as long as we live, we’re going to win some and lose some. Sometimes things will go our way and sometimes they won’t. Sometimes we’ll feel good and sometimes we won’t. And inevitably, we’re going to lose some people and situations that we love; tragedies and stupid things can and will happen. All of that is inevitable; it’s part of the very fabric of things, and has to be.
In other words, no matter how well we create our lives, no matter how fulfilled we become, no matter how well we reveal the intrinsic beauty of our lives, we’ll still face periodic pain, negativity, suffering—whatever word we’d like to use.
Thus, the future of our life is predictable. It’s going to look kind of like this: Pleasure-pain-pleasure-pain-pleasure-pain, ad infinitum. In fact, the notion that we can somehow experience only the “ups” of this great process is in itself a source of suffering.
So no matter what deep transformations or conversions we may go through, we’ll still encounter pain and suffering. To think that we’ll be the one person who will avoid suffering is already to be living in a contracted state.
Yet—how we treat that suffering, how we relate to the pain and negativities in our life, has a very great deal to do with our happiness.
One way of looking at this is that the inevitable pains of life are the dragons we encounter on our heroic journey to discover the treasure of our truest self.
Heroic? Yes, each of us can be thought of as a hero or heroine on a journey. It’s a journey towards the light, towards our natural wholeness and beauty, a journey to our natural and authentic being—a journey, strangely enough, to ourself.
In order to relate a version of the mythological story, I’ve drawn on the work of Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell and others who’ve worked in the field of archetypes. Of those, my personal favorite is Carol Pearson, whose insight and acumen are inspiring. I’ve partly drawn on the ideas in her splendid work to tell this version of our human story:
In this metaphor, we start out as innocents. Innocence is our original nature. We can see it in the eyes of a baby. Its look is unclouded by categories, beliefs, or condemnations. Its trust is total. It is pristine, pure, still relatively unwounded. It has no attitudes, no agendas to push, nothing at all. Because it does not draw distinctions, it is united with all of life.
Needless to say, this state of pristine bliss does not last long. Just in the nature of things, we leave Eden, fall from grace—that is, become wounded by life in various ways. Not the least of these woundings is that we learn how to think and thus to make judgments. We become an orphan, we feel cast out and adrift. It’s a necessary but painful step.
The metaphor of the orphan represents our encounter with suffering and disillusionment. We learn that life can have discomfort and pain. We learn that we can stumble and fall. We begin to suspect that God may be dead or uncaring.
Our caretakers, society, our young peers, etc. hurt us in countless ways. Much of it is unintended, but it happens. We learn that the government is not always good, that people can lie, have hidden motives and act in hurtful ways. We learn that “love” is often conditional on how we behave. We learn that we can be hurt and feel pain, that the universe isn’t safe.
The orphan feels powerless, fearful, resentful, grief-stricken to a large extent. Innocence and idealism have been disappointed or crushed. The negative side of life has been encountered, and it doesn’t feel good.
As orphans, we often deal with our encounter with pain by denying it, repressing it, or numbing out in some way. We want to be saved from it, to be rescued by someone or something. We may dull our pain through drugs, overwork, rituals, shopping, fanaticism—almost anything can be used.
But whether acknowledged or not, now we’re in pain. Though we can distract ourselves from it, at some level life feels disjointed, fragmented, off-center somehow. And that’s where the heroic journey begins. We begin to look for a more promising way to deal with the inevitable dragons of life.
© 1997 by James Sloman
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