"Life involves suffering"—that’s the Buddha’s first Noble Truth.
We’ve always liked Buddhism as a teaching, because it doesn’t dance around
suffering or pretend it’s not there. Buddhism deals with suffering as a question of
life and of philosophy—that our paradigms set us up to suffer more than we need
to—and that sounds right to us.
For the Buddha, one of the things that
causes us to suffer is a paradigm that tells us we can find security by attaching
ourselves to finite things. Since the world is always changing, we think we need more and
more attachments, mainly to people and money, to maintain our sense of security.
"Clinging" is the term for it, and it causes us pain. Why? Because everything is
in flux, everything passes away some time or another. If we cling to something that’s
on its way out of our lives, for whatever reason, we suffer, at least more than if we have
a paradigm that’s oriented to letting things come and go.
We’re not Buddhists—for that
matter, we’re not adherents of any religious tradition—yet we value spiritual
teachings for what each has to contribute to understanding who we are, why we’re
here, and what’s really going on. For many years, the Buddhist perspective gave us
our main handle on the issue of suffering. It provided an analysis of suffering that is
hopeful, in that we can shift our philosophies. That’s doable.
And yet the Buddhist way out of suffering
has involved mostly meditative practices with a focus on individual consciousness change,
with the most profound release from suffering coming after death. We’re all for
consciousness change—that’s our main work—and we do agree that it begins
with individuals, but suffering-causing philosophies influence more than individuals. They
shape social structures, and these structures perpetuate suffering and perpetrate it on
individuals starting from the moment of birth. Our ultimate release from suffering may
come after death, but there is a great deal we can do here and now in this world to reduce
paradigm-created pain.
To give Buddhism its due, its history does
include social activism, though even the Dalai Lama says that Buddhism needs to develop
more skills for social change. As for the Buddha himself, he certainly had enough savvy
that if he were alive today, he would notice that individual meditation can take us only
so far. His commitment was always to end suffering, whatever it took. From the perspective
of today’s mega-systems, which send pain around the globe, reducing suffering
requires consciousness change on many levels, involving not only individual
self-examination but also collective and whole-system questioning.
Critiquing Control Paradigm Response to Pain
In the last fifteen years, we’ve
learned a great deal about how to handle pain from the fields of addiction recovery and
restorative justice, both of which pose sharp critiques of our current cultural
paradigm—the control paradigm—and how it deals with pain. When pain arises, this
model, guided by the aim to maintain the established order of things, has various
strategies for responding:
• First, we’re to deny pain,
ignore it, pretend it’s not there, or say it’ll go away on its own. Pain is
nothing to pay attention to or worry about. We’re making it up, exaggerating. Or
we’re to believe that "those people" are always in trouble. In short, as
passengers on the Titanic, we’re to hold the line that there is no iceberg.
• Second, if pain won’t be
denied, then we’re to numb ourselves to it. We desensitize ourselves to pain, until
it doesn’t bother us. We learn to tolerate suffering in our lives, and more and more
of it. We learn not to see it, or if we do see it, we learn not to respond to it—not
to let it get to us. Television and movies are skillful in numbing our sensitivities.
• Third, if pain reaches a level that
we feel it, no matter what—it’s there in our faces—then we anesthetize
ourselves to it or patch the symptoms. Pharmaceuticals can become a multi-billion dollar
industry only in a society where there’s a lot of pain—pain a lot of people
don’t want to feel or pain that a lot of other people don’t want those in pain
to feel. Ginger Breggin, co-author with her husband Peter Breggin of The War Against
Children of Color, told us that one-year-old toddlers are now being given Ritalin and
that four to five million schoolchildren are on prescribed drugs, either Ritalin or Prozac
or some other antidepressant. Something is wrong with millions of schoolchildren, but
instead of finding out what, we drug them into conformity.
• Fourth, if pain persists in making
itself known, then we’re to blame the individual, whether it’s ourselves or
someone else. Something must be wrong with the person. People in pain that won’t go
away must have done something wrong and so deserve what they get. They must be flawed. Or
maybe they’re just bad people—bad genes, bad psyches, bad families, bad
histories. Or maybe they created it for themselves in order to learn something, which
means they’re responsible and we should not worry about their suffering. It says
nothing relevant to us. If they act from their pain in violent ways, then they must be
incarcerated—put away so their pain doesn’t interfere with a well-ordered
society.
On this model, pain is bad because it gets
in the way of business as usual, schools, families, governments, or religions as usual.
Pain management means finding a way to get people back to conforming to the social norm as
soon as possible. That way, social norms—the accepted social structures—never
have to change. The status quo is never questioned.
Shifting to a New
Model:
Pain's Role in the Dynamics of Evolution
The control-paradigm’s approach to
pain doesn’t work, though, because it fails to acknowledge pain’s critical role
in human development, both personal and collective. Pain doesn’t happen for no
reason. Until we look at what’s causing pain, pain isn’t going to go away.
In other words, pain has a message to give
us. It has a meaning—a meaning that relates to our development, personally and
collectively. Pain tells us that something isn’t working, and we’d better find
out what. Pain sends a warning signal, and we put ourselves in peril if we turn that
warning system off. Finding ways to ignore pain is like switching off our nervous system;
we won’t last long.
Pain operates on many levels. We all know
about personal pain—physical and emotional being the most obvious forms. These forms
often point to deeper levels of pain.
For example, depression as an emotional
experience can point to pain in our souls—pain about the kind of life we’re
living with our jobs and families or pain about the kind of self-image and ultimately
philosophy we’re struggling under. Psychologist Charles Tart worked up a
"credo" of scientific materialism—for example, that the material universe
is all there is, that we’re nothing but the chemicals in our bodies, that we’re
here in a Darwinian struggle for survival, the usual stuff—and has people in his
seminars stand up and recite it with their hands over their hearts as if it were a pledge
of allegiance. Tart comments, "By and large, it depresses the hell out of people,
especially when they realize that they believe a lot of it, and that these beliefs are
culturally reinforced."
Personal pain, in other words, is seldom
entirely personal. Oh yes, we feel it as persons, but the roots of it are almost never
just personal. We come from a context, a web of connectedness, and that entire web is very
much present in personal pain. Indeed, we could say that we as individuals function
together as society’s nervous system, and that our personal pain is like a pain in
society’s head or chest.
Certainly the pain of millions of children
says something about what’s going on in our cultural systems: how children are viewed
and treated, how they’re trained, all informed by what kind of adult life we want to
prepare them for. In most of our current social systems, for example, thinking for oneself
is not an asset, which is why our schools do not teach it.
Pain, then, serves the vital role of
spurring us to question the status quo, to change, and hence to grow not only as
individuals but also as groups, institutions, systems, societies, and ultimately as a
species. To this end, pain isn’t to be ignored or dismissed but listened to: what is
it telling us not just on one level but on many levels? The more levels we let pain speak
to us on, the more meaning and help we get from pain. We get guidance straight from
reality about something we’re outgrowing or something that needs to change.
Pain isn’t then something to push out
of our lives before it’s served its purpose. Pain means that development and often
healing are going on. The only trouble is that development and healing have their own
schedules in our lives, and they have a tendency to upset the apple cart. But maybe the
cart was full of rotten apples. If that’s pain’s message to us about our social
systems and the philosophies behind them, we need to hear it, and it’s time for the
cart to tumble. Who wants to spend a lifetime dragging around a load of rot—and then
passing it on to our children to drag around? When pain’s message gets loud enough,
we change, rotten apples be damned.
As it happens, just the experience of
listening to pain—our own, others, as well as pain in how our social, economic, and
political systems are functioning—can have a healing effect. Why? Because it’s
the first step in pain’s message being heard. Anne Wilson Schaef says that joy and
depression both send us messages from our souls. Depression tends to last longer than joy
only because we like to hear joy’s message and listen, whereas depression we try to
avoid, and so it takes longer for us to get the message that depression is trying to give
us.
So, too, with social ills. We need to hear
what’s really going on, and we don’t mean the corporate-owned media who package
stories according to some agenda or for some emotional effect. Students have been shooting
each other in inner city schools and streets for decades. Why do we have to wait until
some upper middle class children shoot classmates and teachers to hear the message that
something is wrong? Val Valerian’s website (www.trufax.org), journal, and books are
full of pain messages we need to hear—shocking pain that’s been going on long
before the 20th century. Ignoring collective pain won’t make it go away.
Of course, those who profit from selling
rotten apples want pain silenced or dismissed: rotten apples, they’d have us believe,
don’t give us stomach aches. That’s no surprise. And the profit-makers support
those who say that listening to pain means wallowing in it or that heeding pain’s
message means getting locked in victim thinking—that acknowledging we’re in pain
means we identify ourselves as disempowered victims.
What about this? No one wants to be in
pain. If people get stuck in it, it’s because some part of the message remains to be
heard. A case of a convenience store clerk robbed at gunpoint comes to mind. She
couldn’t recover from the trauma of the experience, and her family got fed up with
her for being "stuck" in the trauma. Finally, she felt moved to meet the robber,
and a meeting in prison where he was detained was arranged. She told him her
story—all that she had experienced. Hearing what he’d put her through, the young
man was deeply touched and remorseful in a way he had not been up to that point. Hearing
her pain was a turning point for him. After that, he began working with counselors toward
doing something constructive with his life. On her side, the meeting brought to closure
the fear and trauma she had not been able to release. She felt free after that and could
finally go on with her life happily. Her pain apparently persisted so that not one but two
lives could be transformed. Pain’s message was for more than her alone. And why not?
The trauma was not a solo event.
What about identifying ourselves as
victims and disempowering ourselves accordingly? Sometimes we are victims. In a connected
universe, we are not all-powerful. Connectedness is a fact, and sometimes it makes us
vulnerable. To say categorically that we are never victims is to speak the absurd along
with the atomistic. What truly disempowers us is a strategy of ignoring the pain that
gives us feedback about how we’re connecting. We need to first acknowledge
that we’re hurting before we can take steps to change.
Which is why pain is there in the first
place. Feeling and acknowledging that we’re in pain is not a bad thing, something to
run away from. It’s not weakness. Pain is there to help us name what’s wrong and
move us in the direction of healing, and that takes courage, because it’s no small
job. Pain is there to help in this process by spurring growth and transformation. And
it’s there to wake us up to our personal connectedness to the whole ball of
wax—the whole family wax, society and culture wax, consciousness wax, and planetary
wax. We just need to listen—listen to the pain all over our psyches and
culture—and then go where it leads in claiming our powers to change.
