In the middle of my senior year, I was grappling with some devastating relationship and personal problems with a friend. It consumed me for the larger part of three weeks, and was affecting my demeanor at school and home. After a particular emotionally abusive encounter with this friend, I turned to a teacher that I consider a confidante and mentor. I told him what had happened, and then asked why we suffer. He vowed to give me a response, and sure enough, days before I started college, this is what he sent me. I hesitate to share it, because I wanted to keep his wisdom for myself. But suffering is a worldly, human and known experience, and something that should be a subject of discussion. His letter helped me to refine my understanding of suffering, and hopefully, it will inspire an establishment of your own.
Jordan, at the beginning of the calendar year, you asked me "why we suffer." I have been thinking about that question for months and have come to a very definitive answer: I don't know. I used to think about this all the time, and it was one of my original justifications for leaving religion. And while I now have several others, this isn't the lynchpin it used to be.
(As I have thought about it I have realized something: this answer has to be rooted in religion. If it is not then the answer is simple - we randomly came out of a universal test tube in an unfair system that causes some things to suck. And while I am a firm believer in evolution I really do believe in sometype of higher power - I'm just not convinced he cares much about any of us back. Either that or he has a warped sense of humor, which is just as plausible.)
I could start with the fact that people think God is infallible. As you know, I don't think that. Why would we be so fallible? Of course, maybe a perfect being can only make imperfect images of herself, like some weird cloning experiment; but to note that would again make her inherently fallible. I also don't buy this argument that you have to have bad to know good - that's too narrow of a perspective. By that I mean that might be true for the person saying it, but that's due to conditioning. Proust argued you need suffering to learn to enjoy everything that comes with it. True, but again, that doesn't account for the original impetus.
I finally came at it from the other angle: why don't we suffer. That took some time too, but I was meditating on the Nembutsu earlier this summer (ignore how dorky that clause is) when I came to think about the different aspirations of God. In doing so I had a deep experience about love and the representation of love in the world. These are things people can say all the time, this seemed much more clear: It doesn't matter, it just is.
It's Amida, it's Yahweh, it's Allah, Visnu, it's your family, your close friends, all those make to aggregation of love and that is what makes us unique. But it doesn't matter what it is, just that it is, right? Put everything into perspective and you could love a toilet if it made you happy and caused you to do good. So maybe it's just that simple: we suffer because we love. Just a thought.
