Many of our burdens are false. Animals do not spend years inventing and constructing burdens for themselves. You do not walk into a field and encounter a cow who is seriously self-analysing and in deep turmoil, because she is failing to connect with her inner calf! It is highly improbable that you will ever meet a cow who is seriously swamped by the fact that her project of self-improvement has unleashed this huge ancestral cow thing in her life, and now she can hardly walk because she knows she is carrying all the cow karma of her ancestry! Neither will you find a cow who is fatally depressed because she has discovered that on the night she was born the astrological structure of her destiny was negatively set, and she is just reluctantly grazing in the sweet grass knowing that soon the very fields will rise up against her! As far as we know, cows are not burdened in this manner by ultimate questions. Nevertheless, you often encounter such loneliness in animal presence; animals seem to receive it from elsewhere. It belongs somehow to the intimate pain of the world. An animal’s face can often be an icon of profound lonesomeness. It is said that Nietzsche, before one of his major breakdowns, was walking down a street in Turin. Coming up the street in the opposite direction was a horse and cart. He looked deeply into the horse’s face and went up and put his arms around its neck and embraced it. The sadness in the old horse’s face was a perfect mirror of his own torture. Every form of life participates in the light of soul and also in the darkness of suffering. A kind of voluntary kinship is made possible through suffering.
One of the great fruits of suffering is compassion. When you have felt and experienced pain, it refines the harshness that may be in you. Tolstoy said that our great duty as humans was to sow the seed of compassion in each other’s hearts. This happens in friendship. If you are in pain and your friend knows pain, you feel the kinship and understanding that can really shelter you. Understanding is one of the few shelters that are capable of standing in the suffering place.
I was in China once, and I visited many Buddhist temples. My favourite Buddha was one I discovered at the back of the altar in one of the temples. He was a Buddha with hundreds of hands, and in each hand there was an eye. I asked a young Buddhist monk who this Buddha was. The monk explained that this was a Buddha who had lived a wonderful life. He had reached such a level of soul-refinement that he was about to go into Nirvana; before crossing this threshold he took one look back and saw that there was still one person suffering in the world. He was then given the choice, either to go into Nirvana or go back to help the suffering one. He chose to come back. The very moment he made that choice, he was raised immediately into Nirvana. He was given a hand to help everyone who was suffering. And he was given an eye in each hand to see where the help and shelter were needed. This Buddha is a beautiful image of enlightened compassion which has strength, wisdom, and enlightenment within it.
When suffering comes, the darkness has arrived. The light is out. Even your faith falls away. When you are at the heart of great pain, you enter a land of sheer desolation. A strange and strong poem by the Conamara poet Caitlīn Maude captures this desolation:
Between the rosary
And the thirty acres
The pearl of your belief fell
On a land without blessing.
The land of suffering feels like a land that blessing has never touched. Illness is a form of suffering that quickly takes us into the land without blessing. Illness is a terrible visitor. We never value or even see some things in our lives until we are just about to lose them. This is particularly true of health. When we are in good health, we are so busy in the world that we never even notice how well we are. Illness comes and challenges everything about us. It unmasks all pretension. When you are really ill, you cannot mask it. Illness also tests the inner fibre and luminosity of your soul. It is very difficult to take illness well. Yet it seems that if we treat our illness as something external that has singled us out, and we battle and resist it, the illness will refuse to leave. On the other hand, we must not identify ourselves with our illness. A visit to a hospital often shows that very ill people are more alive to life’s possibilities than the medical verdict would ever allow or imagine.
