True Faith can redeem humanity from immense suffering. Most of the sufferings are attributable to the human's attitude towards or against the situations. Adversity and adaptability are two sides of the same coin. One may take every situation as an opportunity to learn and adapt or may feel dejected and depressed. Good and bad events are all about interpretation. Comprehensive understanding transcends the limit of value judgment, which is essentially a human's attribute. Science and religion claim their respective shares of contribution in understanding the real world. Science often asks "how" question and feels satisfied once a coherent method is achieved. Science has got the status of Biblical authority in deciding truth even though many of its projections turn out to be fiction in due course of time. Any one who questions the structure of science and its rationality is reduced to caricature for his criticism. Criticism is the foundation of science, yet people are not addicted to listen criticism. For me, being scientific means to suspect the narratives and investigate by own reason and senses to reach upon any conclusion. That was the key message of European enlightenment. But science was kidnapped by technicians and its bizzare rationality, which produced many catastrophic technologies, including nuclear bomb. Nagasaki and Hiroshima became an experiment lab of human's insatiable cruelty. Science triumphed, rather technology robbed its soul, and reduced its status to any mythical authority. Being scientific doesn't mean one has to bear a wardrobe of scientific dogma. It means, one has to be alert in knowing what's happening around.
Religions, on the other hand, don't have any method to teach what it means to be faithful towards life and its meaning, especially, "why" question is very significant. Most of the religions are lost in ritualistic practices so much so that meaning of life doesn't get reflected from religious practices. True faith is just like water. It doesn't resist yet it finds its ways. It is the most softest existence yet it carves out the path by cutting mountains. Most softest is the most powerful, just like femininity. Feminity is the most beautiful aspect of nature. It nurtures plants, animals, organism and provides vitality to life. It doesn't resist any change. Weather moves constantly. Everything is aging perfectly. Each phenomenon is faithful to eternal law. "Nature doesn't hurry yet everything is accomplished" (Lao Tzu). Nature doesn't have any language.of suffering. It is indifferent to the human's language for emotions, passions, and desires. In fact, we have not given enough respect to our inner and outer world and reduced our existence in the mechanics of unconscious drive. We have forgotten the art of feeling, loving, and touching the beauty of harmonic nature. We don't have enough time to be poetic about chirping of birds, dance of trees, hide and seek of clouds, Sun and Moon. We all want to be efficient machine, useful for production at the cost of losing touch with "better angels of our nature" (Abraham Lincoln). Who cares in our world if someone is feeling lonely and sick, as long as he doesn't have any use or efficiency? Introspection is a lost art, whose vitality could be felt and facilitate self-improvement. It's time to reflect upon the meaning and substance of life.
Can we examine the nature of suffering, it's substance? Is my suffering a consequence of loss? Do I not suffer because I want something and can not achieve? In other words, is my suffering a symptom of deficiency? If so, one only needs to identify the missing object, and attempt to acquire the same ("make hay while the Sun shines") or find contentment in its absence ("one in hand is better than two in bush"). Every school of social science aims towards either of the two, with politics being the purest application of this deficiency theory. Given the state of political order that is manifest in 21st century, the world population is increasingly suffering from the lack of food, water, shelter on material front and security, credibility and vitality on the other. In a world slip per into the Orwellian whirlpool, "suffering" is normalized, and one's only desire is to avoid suffering (but not eradicate it). That is where almost every living human being is aspiring for, and paradoxically enough, their sufferings increase manifold.
ReplyDeleteOr, could it be that the suffering is independent of outer world? That, the suffering is a constituent of one's metaphysics instead of being it's outcome. Like the Platonic idea of geometrical shapes, does one imagine a perfect line in mind and then seeks the material equivalent in the perceived world. This claim needs to be critically examined, but the real question is, what if so?
Were suffering a result of external agents alone, it wouldn't have been difficult to remedy it, if only in theory. However, an external agent is only a starting point, if at all, to procreate a relationship between the external object and the person that ultimately suffers. The trivia of failed love affair: one loves a person and in case the emotion is not reciprocated, the person suffers. The suffering becomes an instrument of imagining the contours of desire. Suicide is a classic example: when life seems intolerable, a person commits suicide (a more tolerable condition, as imagined).
Likewise, if suffering is a "natural" instinct, there would have no institution of religion or family or society that aims, in part, to assist humans in dealing with suffering and pain. So what is suffering then?
In my experience, suffering is an admission of helpless laziness, wherein the cause of suffering is not just the lack of object but it's desire. I'm reminded of Alexander, who upon asking how he felt conquering the world, sighed in vain that he had no means to conquer the other planets as well. This audacity of desire is the keynote wherefrom the elementary economics begin. And as fate would have it, the royal desire of accomplishment created/coerced a world where
"your labor which gives form to desire takes from desire its form, and you believe you are enjoying Anastasia wholly when you are only its slave."