“How Do I Cope With Suffering?” (Quora)
Michael Laitman, On Quora: “How do I cope with suffering?“
The suffering that we experience expands to our consciousness through the brain, and our attitude to the suffering, how we relate to it, equates to the intensity of the suffering.
Therefore, in order to cope with suffering, we have to realize, in our minds, that nature makes us suffer according to its plan, which is ultimately in order to lead us to a bright and positive future. For the first time in humanity’s history, nature takes us by the ear, so to speak, as if we are schoolchildren, and guides us to realize positive relations, where we will discover a world of light and warmth.
When we reach the final destination that nature is leading us to, we will no longer experience suffering, because suffering hinges on the fact that we see no goal ahead of us. If there is a goal, then the goal absorbs the suffering.
When we apply certain efforts, we can experience those efforts as enjoyable or as painful. There is no difference between pleasure and suffering in the sensation itself, but the difference between the two lies in the idea that we adhere to. If we feel a lack of purpose in a certain effort—that we are headed toward an abyss—then we experience suffering. On the contrary, if we imagine that a certain effort leads us to a goal where we benefit and enjoy, then we become ready not only to endure the effort, but to prolong and even enjoy it.
If we, as a society, calibrate our attitudes to think that nature leads us to a harmonious future, to stability, and to a problem-free life, and we create inputs in our social environment, such as media and art, which projects such an idea to us more and more, then we will be able to further progress in our lives with relative ease. We will then experience an end to suffering.
Whether sooner or later, we will develop to a point where we actively progress in such a direction. We have already engaged in several wars and conflicts, where we fought to the death for the sake of the future, under the guise of certain imaginary values that people invented. Today, however, we have exhausted our man-made ideologies, and all that is left for us to do is work out how we can adapt ourselves to nature’s own form of development.
By fighting for the prominence of various man-made ideologies in the past, we ended up with a lot of suffering and disappointment. Today, however, if we progress toward matching nature’s interconnectedness and interdependence, we will finally end up with a positive result, free from suffering and disappointment.
We will then find ourselves in the most comfortable and blissful state, similar to being in our mother’s womb, but which is in fact billions of times greater. It is a state where we feel completely taken care of. If we attain it in our lives, then it is much greater than the sensation in the mother’s womb because in the womb, we are unaware of the care that surrounds us. By developing such a state in society, then we will experience the sensation of total care with the additions of understanding, awareness and a feeling of achievement.
We will then experience how nature, humanity, and everything in the universe and in all the worlds, envelops us in an all-encompassing kindness. We are approaching such perfection, and if we had no experience of suffering, then we would never gain awareness of it.
Based on the video, “Why Do We Experience Pain?” with Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman and Semion Vinokur. Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman.
