Inquiry, as we saw in our inquiry into the meaning of inquiry on the previous page, involves a capacity to stay with the unknown and watch it as it unfolds. What does it mean in our day to day life? Our daily life stands on the bedrock of knowledge and experience, either gained by us through personal experiences, or passed on to us through society, books etc.
It is from this bedrock that our daily conversations with those who we love dearly and those who we don’t emerge. How do we receive their words, their actions, their gestures, and how do we respond to them? Do we receive them and respond to them through the filter of our ideas about them? What about our actions in daily life? How do we act? Don’t we act from the vast repository of experience and knowledge either we or others have acquired? And so on.
Since our daily life is submerged in the overwhelming monotony of the known, where is the space for the unknown? Where is even the need to put the known aside and let unknown unfold? Where is even the need to inquire?
While staying in, building on and expanding the known gives us a sense of comfort and security (and exponential scientific, technological and all kinds of material growth), it also leads us in constant conflict with our environment -physical, social, political or even emotional. Each one of us is caught up in our own bubbles of the known, trying hard to impose our will on the events in our life, to direct the life in the direction of our desires and away from our fears. But inevitably life goes on undirected, untamed, apparently without any specific direction. We can build as many stories as we like in order to assure ourselves that their is a specific direction and meaning to life, but time and again life proves us wrong with its absurdity.
Each one of us maybe caught in a bubble of known, but collectively we are all in the sea of unknown.
It is this friction between the known and the unknown that is suffering. It is this conflict between our desires and fears and what is actually happening that is suffering. It is this constant battle between “what should be” and “what actually is” that is suffering.
And it is in suffering, that the space for questioning all that we know opens up and sun of curiosity once again begins to glimmer through the cracks in the surface of the known.
After all, do we ask all these questions about the world and one’s relationship with it, when we are living in a bubble of self-satisfaction? Probably not. And even if we do, the force, the flavour and the immediacy (as opposed to the intellectuality) of these questions would be different when we are no longer safely ensconced in this bubble. It is when this bubble gets burst by the unexpected, unpredicted movement of life (something which is sure to happen to all of us, over and over again) , i.e. when we suffer that all these questions come flooding with their full force, isn’t it?
An example to understand this would be watching one’s house on fire. This situation presents a level of intense immediacy in which there is no (or very little) space for intellectualization. Whereas pondering over a hypothetical fire in one’s house and its prevention/eradication, is devoid of immediacy and almost entirely in the realm of intellect. Such an inquiry can be pursued sitting in one’s armchair, in a study lined with books and while sipping one’s favourite single malt.
But the inquiry that we are talking about has this sense of immediacy that is driven by a clear and present recognition (without denial or acceptance, for both are products of intellect) of suffering. A house on fire in front of one’s eyes requires no denial or acceptance, it is a fact and if facts are seen clearly then where is the question of denial or acceptance?
Does that mean that one must suffer in order to inquire? Must one go looking for ways to suffer more and more?
That would be ridiculous. A human being going out to look for suffering would be like a fish looking for water. Isn’t it always there, with us and around us? The question is are we busy explaining it, escaping it, mitigating it, or do we actually look at it and stay with it in order understand what it really is?
Inquiry into one’s own suffering is the gateway to all other inquiries about oneself.
So if one inquires when one sees that one is suffering then from this place of seeing, inquiry can go in two directions-
- How to be happy?
- Why am I suffering? What is this suffering that doesn’t let go of me?
They may seem connected but there is a difference between the trajectories created by these two inquiries:
- How to be happy? This question implies a desire to eradicate (or mitigate) suffering. It implies an intellectual/emotional movement away from the present, actual suffering and doing something to create happiness instead. It is in fact a pursuit of only an idea of happiness– idea that we have received from our world. Broadly speaking, this idea necessarily implies that one would be happy when things are as one wants them to be (‘what should be’). And this image of how things should be is nothing but a composite of all the knowledge and experience one has gained in the world. In other words the idea of happiness is nothing but the victory of ‘what should be’ over ‘what is’.
This pursuit of this idea of happiness that is much lauded and encouraged in the popular culture is then not just an escape from the actual fact of suffering, but a continuation of our resistance to ‘what is’. If our house is on fire there is no way we can stand in front of the burning house and imagine building a new house in its place (what should be). The fact that our house is on fire is inescapable (what is). Since the inquiry that we are talking about is based on the clear and present recognition of suffering, so an escape in the form of the question “How to be happy” is clearly not an inquiry.
From this escape emanate the realms of pop psychology, new age beliefs, self-help, religion etc. In other words, first we suffer because the bubble of our self satisfaction was somehow burst, then we recognize our suffering but only to escape the fact that we are suffering by seeking to form a new bubble of new beliefs or ideas, until this bubble gets burst too, and on and on we go. This is not inquiry. - Why am I suffering? What is this suffering that doesn’t let go of me? This other direction in which one may proceed upon recognizing one’s own suffering is to seek to understand it. But then how does one seek to understand it? By reading books about suffering, by seeking to understand theoretically its nature, its causes, its process theoretically? All these are ways to expand the knowledge about suffering, which once again does nothing except creating a momentary escape from it.
An attempt to seek to understand suffering in theory therefore would again be a mental escape from the fact of suffering, and hence not an inquiry and not really different from the previous direction.
On the other hand, learning about suffering by staying with it and watching it carefully as it arises and unfolds is a different matter altogether. Just as learning about fire, its nature and its process by watching it burn is quite different from learning about fire by reading or theorizing about it, so it is with suffering.
So, suffering (esp. when its sudden and intense) can and often does induce an urgent inquiry into one’s state and the reasons thereof, at least momentarily. But then, that moment of unfiltered curiosity triggered by a sudden onset of calamity fades and disappears, overpowered by the onrush of the comforting familiarity of the known. One uses the known either to explain or mitigate the calamity (both of which are ways of escaping the fact of suffering).
One suffers, but the known is far too comfortable and hence taken to be the antidote to suffering. One doesn’t see how it is the attachment to the known that is causing all the suffering in the first place. And how suffering in turn creates the desire for the expansion of the known. One doesn’t see the truth of their relationship with each other. This inability/refusal to see is the inability/refusal to inquire.
Caught between the attachment to the known and an aversion to suffering, not understanding how this attachment and this aversion create and sustain each other, one remains trapped in this endless cycle of self-deception that expands both the known and the suffering.
Inquiry, then, has no room to flower.
The question then is how is this cycle to be broken? What will make one inquire into what is, not by escaping it but by staying with it?
Next: The Difficulty of Inquiring
3 responses to “Suffering and Inquiring”
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I don’t know, life is just a series of events to become attached to but ultimately to be let go of. The less attachment, the less pain, in my experience. Its difficult to let go of attachment entirely. Especially since we live in a society that requires one to make a livelihood. So not only do we have be told what to do but we must be responsible to do it. Life is too short to allow suffering to dictate one’s life. But its also too long to be foolish enough to be taken by attachment. I guess everyone is on their path trying to strike a balance between the two.
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Pressures of society and livelihood condition our response to the world in more ways than one. Hopefully we will be able to inquire into them in more details in future.
“Life is too short to allow suffering to dictate one’s life. But its also too long to be foolish enough to be taken by attachment.”
Yes indeed. But doesn’t suffering dictate one’s life as it is, no matter who or what? Consider all the striving, all the desire to improve all the time. Would this striving, this craving be there if one was not suffering all the time?
So the point is not whether one lets suffering dictate one’s life or not. The point is that it is happening already no matter what one does. Do we recognize this fact without any distortion? If we see this is as a fact, then we would also see that trying to escape this fact only increases the suffering.What does one do then? One would then have to stay with suffering in order to understand its nature firsthand. Only if one understands it can there be a possibility of ending of suffering. So staying with suffering is the only way to bring about a radical transformation in the fact of suffering dictating one’s life.
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Thanks.
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