Rant style
Freedom from suffering is a guy thing
Freedom from suffering is such a guy thing. It’s an old fogey thing too. Who came up with this idea? It feels more like a marketing ploy than any sort of decent spiritual advice. It’s like they’re saying, “Hey, I’m the big old fancy guy. Come to me and I will teach you freedom from suffering.”
Sounds like the beginning of a cult to me. And what about everybody else?
The way non-duality is taught in so many places is almost sociopathic. It sounds like they are teaching you how to be disconnected from everything. That qualifies as a full blown sociopath. The goal is to reach the point where nothing bothers you. You’re free from suffering.
Since we’re all narcissist anyway, this isn’t the best teaching to be handing out in the modern world.
Technically? Yes, technically, it’s true. Once you are awake, you know that your suffering is not you. You don’t fall into it in the same way. You don’t get sucked into the drama of it. But everybody suffers. Everybody feels bad now and then. Perhaps you had a bad night and didn’t sleep. Or you eat some bad food. Perhaps you fell down and broke your leg, or something like that. Technically, yes, you know who you are. You know that you’re not the suffering. You don’t get sucked into it. You’re not identified with the suffering. That could be called freedom from suffering.
Being free of your illusions looks very much like being free from all attachments. But then, why not teach freedom from happiness. Because it’s exactly the same thing. If you’re free from everything, from every emotion and feeling, then you’re also free from love. Love is not you any more than anger is you.
We don’t want to do that? Do we?
So I find this teaching to be unuseful. And I’m also calling it a guy thing. It literally creates a level of dominance in spiritual teachings. There are people who are, frankly, higher status. They have more money, or have a particular way of living without money and are able to look like they’re free from suffering. They actually don’t experience much suffering. It’s as much from their lifestyle is from anything else. It’s definitely an easier state to attain if you are are guy because guys are notorious about being detached from their emotions anyway.
This teaching of freedom from suffering creates a level of dominance. Someone who is able to live this totally sociopathic life, not really down in the trenches is not deeply engaged with everyone. We call them more spiritual.
What about being natural and normal? What about being a full human being?
I find that it is not useful to live through life without ever displaying a negative emotion. This is why I’m saying it’s a guy thing. As a woman you will get totally run over and turned into a doormat if you always try to be nice and never get grouchy.
Now again. Technically. If you are awake, you are free from suffering simply because you are not identified with your suffering. You know who you are and you know that anger is not you. You know that happiness is not you. At this point you’re free to be happy anytime. You are also free to be angry any time.
The actual teachings of non-duality are to not be identified with these things. It’s not about erasing suffering out of life. It’s about being unidentified with it.
So don’t slice life into the good and the bad. The freedom from suffering teachings tend to do this. There’s a whole list of things that you’re allowed to do: happiness, joy, love. And there’s a whole of a list of things you’re never allowed to have: anger, grief, despair, on and on.
Whoever came up with these teachings obviously were not raising kids! So I tell you, this whole freedom from suffering as a guy thing.
It’s better to put your attention on finding out who you are. Maybe then you’ll discover you are a much better human being than I am and be able to declare yourself free from suffering. More power to you. We need more human beings like that (as long as you aren’t a sociopath). On the other hand, you might find out that you’re just a regular person like I am. If that’s the case, let’s get together and have a cup of tea.
Freedom from suffering is a Scam’ish
If it was a social media post we’d call it a scam!
So I’m continuing along with my freedom from suffering rant, because it is a pet peeve of mine.
First of all, I want to be specific. Yes. Enlightenment is a moment where you become free of the attachment to suffering. And honestly, honestly, that’s 99.9% of suffering right there. It’s the attachment to it that’s the problem. But that needs to be spelled out exactly. As a base teaching, it’s not useful.
So this video is “Freedom from suffering is a scam-ish.”
Great Marketing
If you were a marketing executive in some big fancy firm somewhere, and you could put out a product that ensures freedom from all suffering? Well, yeah! I mean that’s something that can really really sell. You could get a whole bunch of people to buy into it.
Everyone is doing it! Everybody out there is selling freedom from suffering, and everyone’s trying to get freedom from suffering. If we were looking at that honestly as an Internet advertisement, we’d go,”dude. It’s a scam.”
You know, to be perfectly brutal. Let’s compare it to Christianity, which says Jesus will save you. They’re not even so specific what you get saved from. I mean, perhaps, damnation, eternal hell. But these days, you’re literally just saved from everything. If you believe in Jesus, boom! You’re saved from everything. That’s great marketing.
That’s how so many of the non-dual teachings sound as well. If you get non-dual you’ll have freedom from suffering.
Bring on the pretenders
It’s going to make people pretend to be free from suffering. Even worse, it’s going to make people try hard to be free from all suffering, which means being detached from life itself. Like I’ve said before, that’s sociopathic. It ends up, causing a lot of suffering in other people.
So let’s just get rid of that. Don’t let that be a thing.
The reward?
Just think about it for a second. You’re watching this video right now and you’re probably interested in non-duality. You’ve certainly heard of freedom from suffering. What if you took that carrot-on-a-stick away. Would you still be searching for who you are? Can you honestly say that you’re searching for who you are without the promise of a giant reward at the end of it? Can you say with any honesty that you’re doing this so that you’ll actually be a better human being, whether you suffer or not?
I mean, isn’t that what we should be looking for? How to be a fully awake, participating human being, even while you are suffering. We never have this teaching about how to be a good human when you’re happy. And happiness is just an emotion. It’s something you could be attached to just as easily as you are attached to suffering.
So anyway. Rant! Rant! Rant! Freedom from suffering. It’s just not useful. Let’s find out who we are.
Freedom from suffering is not useful
Useful teachings
So let’s explore the usefulness of various teachings. Specifically here we are talking about Nonduality and teachings from eastern mysticism.
Freedom from suffering is what I’ve been ranting about in the last few videos, saying it is simply not useful. What’s the use of knowing that as a seeker? I would assume you don’t have to teach freedom from suffering to an enlightened person. They should already know. So what is the usefulness of teaching freedom from suffering to seekers?
Honestly. I have to say that when I hang out with lots of spiritual seekers, I am amazed at the level of suffering that people create themselves. I mean it’s just astonishing. And I can see how an awakened teacher, and enlightened spiritual teacher,who is teaching people, would tend to focus on freedom from suffering. It’s so obvious how everyone creates their own suffering. And you would want to help. You would want to help people get unattached from that.
Focusing on that seems to address 99.9% of the problem.
But here in our modern world, and perhaps it’s because of some miss-translations as well. It’s not really turning out to be very useful.
Confusion
It would be more useful to teach freedom from confusion, because confusion causes this particular type of suffering.
To be specific, there are different types of suffering. There’s what we might call real suffering. Someone you love dies and you’re missing them, or you’re facing your own illness and you have a lot of pain. I mean gosh, the state of the world! If you care about other people, you are going to feel pain and anxiety because so much is going on and there’s the feeling that there’s so little we can do. That I would call real suffering.
Then there is the 99.9% of suffering that people endure on a daily basis which is self created. If you stop creating it, you’ve reduced your suffering tremendously. It’s confusion that causes this suffering. So it’s really much more useful to talk about freedom from confusion, because it’s confusion that confuses us.
Believing Lies
So much of the confusion is caused by the fact that we believe lies.
Back to freedom from suffering. If you have really bought into this idea, freedom from suffering, you’re always going to be getting on your own case. Because you’re gonna always catch yourself suffering. And then you beat yourself up. “I shouldn’t be suffering.”
Worse than that, of course, we always project everything on to other people, and so you’ll get on everybody else’s case about suffering, but. You’ll particularly get on their case if you feel that they have caused suffering in you.
So let’s work on freedom from confusion instead.
How to tell if someone is enlightened
So how do you tell if someone is enlightened or not?
Since I am in my freedom from suffering rant series, let’s talk about that. Because one of the biggest criteria that is usually used to tell if someone is enlightened or not is: Do they suffer?
That’s a bad criteria.
First of all, how are you going to tell? If you meet someone and you’re trying to tell if they’re enlightened, how do you tell if they suffer or not? Very often the way to tell is to be really mean to them and find out their reaction. Well that’s not nice!
I love Zen teachings because Zen masters were real bad asses. If you were really mean to a Zen teacher, they wouldn’t be all that nice back to you. You would end up with the short stick. Zen is not a “the customer is always right” situation.
So maybe that’s another reason not to use suffering as a criteria to tell if somebody is enlightened. Because if they really are enlightened you might end up in really bad trouble with whatever it is you choose to do to them.
It’s neither useful or safe.
Torturing Yourself
Whatever you are using as your criteria to tell if someone else is enlightened is also your criteria to convince yourself that you are not enlightened. You are going to take a teaching like freedom from suffering and use that to beat yourself up.
So lighten up. Feel free to suffer or don’t suffer. Be happy or don’t be happy. It’s all part of being human.
Here’s the real secret. It doesn’t matter if you can tell if someone is enlightened. What does it matter? What matters is you. If you are enlightened, you are not going to bother with it.
We all know that everyone, in their core, in their essence, is enlightened anyway. So who cares if they know that or not. Maybe someone isn’t enlightened and is pretending they are. Maybe they’re gathering tons of disciples, and it’s really terrible. They’re making a cult. They’re doing all sorts of terrible things. You and I both know that people don’t even have to pretend to be enlightened to create cults. They can get a cult together just by being a politician. They can get a cult together in a religion that doesn’t even have enlightenment. Christianity has tons of cults, and they are not an enlightenment religion. You can have music cults, you can have game cults, all sorts of things.
It’s just not useful.
Who are they? Who are you?
Instead use your criteria to figure out if this person in front of you is a decent human being or not. Is this person teaching things that are useful?
The only way you can tell if someone else is enlightened is if you are enlightened. If you knew what enlightenment was you’d be it. If you had even a little bit of an idea what knowing who you are is like you’d know who you are. It’s so obvious you’d be it.
So then again, why bother? Why bother about everybody else? They are doing what they are doing.
It’s unlikely that you will learn enlightenment from someone who is unenlightened. But more than likely you are just gathering information anyway. You can learn just as much life information from someone who’s unenlightened as you can from somebody who is enlightened.
It kind of doesn’t matter anyway because we live in such a crazy world. My teacher, Osho was not only enlightened, but incredibly brilliant and eloquent, able to talk in a way that made so much sense. If it wasn’t for him, I would never be awake. I know that for sure. Yes he was brilliant. And yet he created such an insane mess. Or perhaps I should say the people around him came together and created an incredible mess.
And you know, when I really think about it, how could he have prevented everyone from being so insane when he was trying to teach people how to be free? Here we are today in the exact same situation. Someone who’s completely totally enlightened is going to have a really hard time making a positive difference. Just exactly the same as someone who is not enlightened is going to be having a hard time making a real difference.
So whether or not they appear to be suffering is not a decent criteria to use to judge someone else.
Better to not worry about it and just keep working on yourself.
Who are you? Ask it over and over. Who are you? How can you wake up? Listen to people who give you a good ideas and good clues and have some good energy about what it’s like. The possibility, the actual possibility for you to wake up is just right there. Know who you are.
Freedom from happiness
Freedom from happiness.
I’m having so much fun in my rant about Nonduality, and how one of the core teachings always seems to be freedom from suffering. I’m calling it a scam and great marketing ploy.
As a quick recap: Non duality is about not being attached to the things of your mind, including your emotions. So it’s just as legitimate to talk about freedom from happiness as freedom from suffering.
What are you doing?
Let’s be honest. I’m making this video about freedom from happiness just to prove that probably no one will watch this. Like why are you watching this video? Freedom from happiness? Are you nuts?
Honesty in Advertising
Just so that I accomplish what I’ve said I’m going to do… let’s look at freedom from happiness. It’s actually very easy to be free from happiness.
First don’t have any friends. Be an ass all of the time. Hide in your house. Watch a lot of TV. Watch tons of news. Always think negative thoughts all the time. Eat junk and get really fat. That will make you feel bad. Don’t go to the doctor or anything. Never exercise. Do you all these things and you’ll find yourself being not happy.
And maybe, in the end, this is the secret for freedom from suffering. The biggest way to be free from suffering is the opposite: don’t do awful things. Be nice to people as much as possible.
Within reason…
I will end with Confucius. Confucius said, “Always start out being nice. If that doesn’t work, fight!”
I think that is a pretty good one for freedom for suffering, and not a very good one for Freedom from happiness because you will end up accidentally being happy occasionally if you follow that advice.
Sorry about that. Whacha gonna do?
What’s the Point of Nondual Teachings?
So if it’s not about freedom from suffering, what’s the point of Nonduality? What’s the point of the teachings at all?
There’s two ways you can look at this. One is that there’s no point. The point isn’t the point.
The other way you can look at it is that you can use the basic principles of non-duality to reduce suffering quite a bit. Nondual teachings help reduce confusion. These are basic good psychological practices.
Many of the ideas and concepts of Nonduality have been worked into our basic ideas of how to be a healthy human being. It’s worked into tour modern culture now to try to live in the moment. To try to not be attached to your misery. To not be attached to your thoughts. To take time to just sit and be in your grounded being.
There’s a place in all of us, no matter how bad things are, or how good things are, where nothing is happening. We have a spot in our brains, in our hearts, in our minds, and in our souls that is always peaceful and always calm. You can access that anytime. It’s very healthy to do. It reduces high blood pressure. Helps you sleep better. Turns you into a better human being.
So that’s one point. It’s good.
The thing I’m trying to say is that if we turn the idea of reducing suffering into being completely free of suffering, then we are setting ourselves up for an unrealistic goal. Anyone who does this probably projects this onto other people all the time, and it causes more suffering. It causes more confusion.
Good psychology
Forget about Nonduality. Just go look for a good therapist. Look for the teachings on how to be more effective, how to be more prosperous, how to live a better life, how to have better relationships. We are just bombarded with this sort of information these days. You can do that completely free of any non-duality teachings or non-duality goals.
It’s one of the benefits that eastern mysticism has given to our current world that we have all these great ways of looking at who we are in a very basic way.
Turn your attention to reducing your misery, your anxiety, and that will be beneficial to your life right now.
The no point
Back to our first point: that there is no point.
In non-duality no-point is the actual goal. To find that place of nothing. To discover that you are not your misery. Whether it’s a lot of misery or just a little bit of misery. This is what is usually meant by freedom from suffering. It is referring to the fact that when you find out who you are then you are not identified with suffering anymore. Suffering then is something that happens in the world.
If you are completely awakened and enlightened you will not be attached to your suffering. A very dramatic shift happens.
What’s the point?
The point is to actually reach that state where you’re not doing any techniques at all. In this state there is no striving to be free from suffering, or to be in the moment. You have found a place that is naturally relaxed. Naturally unattached.
I hesitate to say the word unattached, because then we’re back to that whole sociopathic idea of being unattached from the world. But there is a natural very real human being place. Where you are a natural normal person without all the psychosis and problems that we have today.
When you reach this point, you’re not an attached to it, but in a natural normal way. It’s not like something that you try to do. It’s not a technique. You don’t try to be unattached, because being a natural human being is relaxed and normal.
God don’t make no junk.
We were not made wrong. Everything about us, our misery, our suffering, our happiness, our love…. Everything about us is a useful part of being human. There are not parts of us that are undesirable.
We all have to live in the world right?
You can do so, using non dual teachings to help you find out who you actually are. That’s the point. You are a whole natural awake human being right there in your core.
It’s attainable.
(Perhaps that’s a good topic another day. I could do a whole other rant about the unattainability of enlightenment. That would be fun. )
But right now I’m ranting about freedom from suffering. Don’t worry about it. Don’t have that as a goal. Non dual teachings are not about learning endless techniques. They are there to bring you to a completely different state. Not a state of pretending. It’s a real awake state where there is no confusion about suffering.
That’s the not point.
Find Your Misery
It’s not that bad.