from my old failures.
Failure is the place where destiny swings against our intentions. What you wanted and worked for never came. Your energy and effort were not enough. Failure also happens in the inner world, the times when your own smallness and limitation ruined things; you reached deep into yourself for something kind or creative and caught only smallness. Failure often gnaws most deeply in the territory of relationships. Times when you have caused damage. Failure also includes personal weakness. This is often a subject that evokes great feeling in literature. This was a theme that haunted Joseph Conrad’s characters in the novels
Below the surface in the night-side of your inner world, there is suffering happening. Given that suffering usually causes pain, it sounds strange to suggest that you might actually be suffering without knowing it. Yet there seems to be something in this idea the more one thinks about it. There is a vast area of the human soul that is totally unknown to us. Let us not equate it simply with the subconscious. This holds us too firmly within the idiom of psychoanalysis. In that unknown region, many things happen of which you are afforded no glimpse. It is probable that quite a lot of suffering happens there that never ascends to the surface of your mind. Quietly in the night of our souls, everyone suffers. This suffering can be quietly at work, refining, tempering, and balancing your presence here in the world. Patiently it turns the charred icon of your falsity into the luminous icon of real presence.
Perhaps this perspective can open a little window into the dark mystery of how children suffer. There is the awful reality of children who are suffering horribly in the world through abuse, poverty, and wars. Yet there is also the fact that in some way all children suffer. Behind the playful world of every child there is some unconscious darkness deciphering itself and working itself through. Every child carries even in its innocence some of the burden of the pain of the world. This is akin to the unknown suffering in which every adult also participates. Something in the very nature of suffering loves the darkness of the unknown and hurts us and lessens us even without our being fully conscious of it.
There are different forms of suffering. There is also much suffering in the world that humans are too unrefined to carry. This is where our more ancient sisters and brothers, the animals, come in to carry part of the world’s pain. This pain for which our minds are as yet too coarse. Sometimes when you look into an animal’s face, you see great pain. This is not pain brought about by the consciousness negatively targeting itself. Animal consciousness is more lyrical and free. An animal does not burden itself in the way a human can.
