Pain and Suffering

Does more awareness make the pain and suffering go away?

It makes the identification go away, which releases the energy from pain and suffering. They remain, but they are less charged because your identity is less wrapped up in them. From the perspective of awareness, pain and suffering are not bad things. On the contrary: without them awareness cannot distill itself. But you cannot think seriously about transforming them until you can transcend negative emotions. Otherwise you stay stuck in the negative emotions that are resisting them. When that barrier is removed you can fully accept the suffering and use it to elevate awareness.

True suffering, as Peter Ouspensky said, is a kind of fermentation. Among other things, he was suggesting that it has chemical properties which under the right circumstances can neutralize identification and disable the ego for a shorter or longer time, or permanently. This is significant because the ego is our major block to awareness. Suffering can act as a solvent that dissolves the ego and clears a channel for awareness to flow freely as itself. Yielding to the force of suffering can be transformative because it makes the energy behind suffering available to awareness. I mentioned before that there is energy behind negative emotions. There is even more energy behind deep suffering. Identification converts this energy into negative emotions whereas non-identification transforms it into awareness.

But it is important to understand that the energy behind negative emotions and the energy of suffering are tapped in different ways. When negative emotions appear, you contain their outer expression. This creates an internal pressure that wedges open the space between awareness and the feeling of ‘I’ so awareness can realize itself. When real suffering comes it is different because you don’t have to contain it. Rather, you have to open yourself to it so its force of energy can flow through you without resistance. When you do this consciously, the force of suffering transmutes the energy behind your feeling of ‘I’ into a deeper self-realization of awareness.Both are very powerful because they mean transitioning from the dimension of ‘I am negative’ and ‘I am suffering’ to the dimension of pure awareness being conscious of itself. We normally experience negative emotions and suffering as aspects of our identity. Through conscious transformation they become catalysts for awareness.