Along with the majority of human beings, you too have probably been confronted with suffering and asked yourself the following fundamental question: "Why is it me that is suffering. What have I done to deserve this?"
Suffering seems to be the lot of mankind: we come into the world crying and die often in pain, and sometimes people’s entire lives are dogged by suffering.
Our suffering is often rooted in the first years of our life: the way we are brought up and the love and attention our parents give us plays a basic role in the way we see the world, and the way we see the world determines our experiences.
It’s easy to destroy children, make them suffer, damage their self-esteem, to the point where they are no longer in a position to live their life, where they don’t even have the strength to meet their basic needs for survival.
By means of illustration of these comments, I would like to tell you a true story: "One day, a woman came to see me with her 25 year old son, because he was suffering from depression. She had consulted various doctors, without ever seeing any improvement in his condition. As I listened she said over and over again that her son was very sick and unable to work, I tried to ask her son some questions, in the hope of engaging him in a dialogue. Every time I asked him a question, it was the mother who replied, her son did not have the right to speak."
The poor man, or more correctly the poor child, did not have his own identity, he had never been allowed to become himself, he was merely the reflection of the anxiety of his mother who projected all her fears onto him. His body did not belong to him, not even his mind, which was that of his mother. He was her object. As the American psychoanalyst Joyce McDougal put it so very well, there can be « one body for two », and in this case there was one body, the mother having taken possession of the boy from his earliest years, without ever giving him the slightest chance of becoming himself.
Do you know what happened to this young man a few months after he came to see me?
One day the anguish became too great and he put an end to his days, since he could no longer live with that suffering. The psychiatrist who was treating him couldn’t do any more for him. For my part, I only saw that young man once and there was nothing that could be done, his « karmic traces » were too dense.
Another day, an alcoholic man came to see me for me to relieve him of his vice. After placing my hands on his head, some images came to me: "Child, I see you before the hanging body of a man, in a hay barn. Later, I learned that the child was him and that at the age of 7 he had found his father hanged in the barn."
For his whole life, he had never spoken of this unhappiness to anyone. That event had left traces that had branded him with a terrible anguish that only alcohol could relieve.
But why do I speak to you of these dramatic events? You will come to understand over the coming pages. But allow me for now to speak to you of the age-old wisdom of the Hindu Masters and of the reason why you are today beginning a new life, the potential of which you cannot imagine.
You should realise first of all that every man on earth hopes to avoid suffering and find happiness. The Buddha Sakyamuni, in his speech on the four noble truths, more than 2500 years ago, spoke at length of suffering. After a very severe ascetic regime and years of silent meditation, he came to understand the why and the how of human suffering, and even defined a path that made it possible to avoid it.
The sermon on the 4 noble truths that he gave in Sarnath near to Bénarès, before his former companions the 5 ascetes, constitutes a teaching on the topic of suffering:
- Dukkha, the acknowledgement that there is suffering in humanity
- Samudhaya, the appearance and the source of suffering
- Nirodha, the possibility of bringing suffering to an end
- Magga, the path or the method that leads to the cessation of suffering
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