The components of suffering
Our physical being is essentially an environment of physical body, senses and brain (and memory) within the field of mind, which is different because it is space. It is within this physical environment we experience the sensations of the felt sense of immediate experience which we all define as life. You're probably aware of the many different sensations of sense such as sight, touch, hearing (sound), taste and smell, and the relationship between your personal environment (which you assume is you) and the wider environment (which you assume is other).
What I'm writing about here are of course energy fields. Life is predominantly a physical experience - be it chemical, biological, organic, complex sequences of different energy cycles and vibrations, rhythms and patterns, with relationship to both consciousness and space. But this is not how we see things in terms of our existence or lives, because we see everything in terms of language and feelings, sensations, emotions and moods we can usually (but not always) verbalize through language. Some of these feelings and emotions are more pleasant, and others not so pleasant.
What I'm hoping to do here is to 'gently' introduce you to the concept of separateness in sensation, feeling, emotion and thought without throwing you in at the deep end. I once attended a four hour lecture given by some Buddhist monk on the 28 different forms of silence the end of which I was wishing I was deaf. Please also keep in mind as you read these words I'm processing my own anxiety in preparation for my upcoming mindfulness community support project in the local community. The reality is that I don't actually do that much preparation work, because I've been studying this stuff for decades and also doing such projects for years, so once I've settled on a theme for a meeting I tend to 'wing it' and make it up as I go along. But still there's the fear of public speaking, my aversion to video presentations, and the anxiety of either running out of things to say or losing track and going off on a tangent.
All suffering is an escalation of energy frequency
Let's start with the fundamental basics of energy - the rhythm, the vibration, the cycle, the wave and the frequency. Being human we only perceive energy cycles within a certain range. Outside this range of low frequency energy (life occurs at very low energy frequencies relatively speaking) so outside that range we either don't perceive energy at all or we get killed if the frequency of energy is too high (think electric shocks, impact, that sort of thing). But within the frequency range of energy we do perceive we have three very powerful things - a sensory nervous system, our memories, and of course the mind.
All energy (physicality) is impermanent, so energy is therefore change and relationship which is moving either towards space, an increase in energy frequency, or consciousness, a lowering of energy frequency. We experience this escalation of energy frequency not just as pain or discomfort, but also as fear and anxiety. Some people talk about fear energy, but see fear and pain are two different sensations and feelings, but have similar effects on how we relate to them. Fear dis-empowers, disables, it freezes us, and can create new high frequency energy cycles in our thoughts which we understand to be anxiety.
So what I'd like to focus on in this post is fear rather than pain. This is not a medical blog, the human body is complex and if you're seeking insight into pain it's probably best if you seek medical attention or a doctor who has a far better understanding of human anatomy than you or me.
Fear is largely a conditioned response to trauma and is often the gateway between trauma and suffering. It's usually fear which takes us out of our minds and back into memory. We start out in life with an undifferentiated perspective to our environment and we learn fear from coming into contact with trauma and unpleasant life experiences. This is of course when we discover that some things are too hot to touch, sharp objects need to be handled with care and we learn that the world can be a dangerous place. Dealing with fear is part of our Somebody Training and Ego development and how we learn to be differentiated in our perspectives.
The edges of your humanity
We are all born with edges to our humanity or a comfort zone. There's two edges - a soft edge which defines what love is for us individually and which is closer to our perception of consciousness, and there's the hard edge which defines trauma and suffering and which is closer to space or emptiness. Focussing our attention on these harder edges of our comfort zone there's a certain amount of trauma, pain and suffering we can deal with. This is often related to previously experienced trauma and suffering, it's stuff we know we can deal with, because we've gone through it before. It's bearable and manageable. But beyond that is the stuff we're not so sure about, moving towards what to us is unbearable, and this is where we start to experience fear and anxiety.
It's in this area around this hard edge of our humanity where our fears exist. Fears in people vary enormously from individual to individual because some fears are shared as a result of social and mental conditioning and the way our society is organized. Many people for example fear death, and almost as many fear destitution, or having their innermost thoughts and feelings revealed to others. But some fears are unique and individual, such as a fear of pain, a fear of other people's opinions, a fear of conflict, or even a fear of other people. These individual fears mainly come from our past, our experience, what we have witnessed in other people's experiences, and the felt sense of immediate experience.
The problem is that not only are these experiences involving fear and anxiety integrated with direct life experience as a part of life, but they also determine the range of the frequencies of your natural energies. They also determine and influence your perception of time - the higher the aggregate frequency of energies, the slower time passes, generally. But see this is all swings and roundabouts because the slower time passes from your perspective the more energy you are burning through in life, which shortens your life cycle if this is occurring over a sustained period of time. This is why having a healthy work-life balance is imperative in life, by way of an example.
Then you have the other issue (or range of issues) in that fear and anxiety skew your perception of reality and distort your thinking processes. Thinking is purely physical as an activity, simply because memory is physical. You see your comfort zone exists only in the environment of memory, where you do all your thinking. Mind is perception, because it is space and perception of environment. Therefore when you experience stress, fear, anxiety, you're going more into memory and being pushed back into your comfort zone, and what happens is that you start to conceive possibilities which do not exist rather than being mindful enough to let the experiences slip into memory for later recall and remain in the present moment - the only environment for reality.
This is the very definition of mindlessness - when you are restricted through your experiences of life involving fear, anxiety, pain, suffering and pushed back into your comfort zone and memory to the degree that you cannot properly make use of your mind and conscious perception. Mindfulness is therefore working with your fears, anxieties, trauma and suffering to recover your natural state of inner equilibrium and enquanimity and reduce the frequencies of your energies.
Investigation of the roots of fear, anxiety and suffering
So having laid out the environment and context for the fear and the suffering it's important to start to move towards the practice and being able to take the practical steps towards liberation, bringing down the frequencies of energies and finding one's way back into mind. This is the first step in the whole mindfulness process. This is where I feel the need to make a confession and own up to the lie I often tell people - I do not 'teach' mindfulness. I cannot teach mindfulness to you or anyone else. Nobody can. I haven't got a clue what's going through your mind or what you're experiencing. I'm not you. I cannot be you. My role is to give you the conscious awareness, the insight, and equip you with the necessary tools through which you can create and develop your own path and practise of mindfulness.
Fear is not reality. Fear is just your emotional and psychological attachment to one possibility or variable which 'might' happen at some point in the future. Chances are it won't. How many times in your life have your fears actually become reality? Honestly? I would put good money on the fact that, throughout your life, and the millions of different times you have experienced fear, your fears have become reality on no more than three separate occasions. I'm being generous here and assuming that you're actually smart enough to outwit your own mind.
Let's take a common example - the fear of physical pain or discomfort. If you say put on a pair of shoes and you experience pain around your toes, say because you've just bought a new pair of shoes, you wouldn't continue to wear the shoes without making some kind of adjustment, would you? Once you've taken off the new pair of shoes, you also wouldn't be afraid of that pair of shoes, would you? You would investigate why the shoes are causing you pain and explore different options to make the shoes fit and feel comfortable on your feet. Now think about all the other adjustments you make in your posture, or when sitting down or lying in bed, to avoid physical pain or discomfort and make sure that you're in your comfort zone. Consider that when you're doing this you're thinking and examining possibilities through your memory and when you're out of all the things you can remember you then start using your mind and trying out new possibilities.
There's a saying in mystical circles that motion masks suffering. But does this saying have any merit? Or is it just an old wives tale?
It's worth looking into the various relationships here. First you have the actual pain and discomfort, or the trauma. The impact or the start of a creative process, because generally if you experience the sensation of pain or discomfort then there's got to be a response, right? But see on top of that trauma of pain or discomfort you have the suffering - the fear and anxiety which arises out of the sensation of pain or discomfort. All of this plays out in the mind, so you become consciously aware of the pain and the discomfort. However the suffering, the fear and anxiety associated with the pain or discomfort, is coming not from the mind, but from memory. It's a learned, conditioned reaction to the pain and the discomfort.
But quite often there is a physical reaction in contraction, such as contraction of the body, a grimace or contraction of our facial expressions. But see contraction is a physical phenomena, which increases the energy frequency and brings the energy into a closer relationship with space, so the pain initially is magnified. You might, for example, be able to recall the sharp pain of being cut or cutting yourself, or the duller, thuddy pain of impact - you bang your head, you stub your toe on the hard surface of furniture or something else. Once this initial magnified pain or discomfort subsides the pain lessens and becomes more manageable. Enduring or trying to withstand the pain is also a learned reaction or response, as is trying to fight the pain or discomfort. But it's precisely this conditioned response to pain and discomfort which builds on the fear and anxiety and therefore the suffering.
But see then there's the anticipation of further pain and discomfort, and this is coming out of the suffering, the fear and the anxiety. You start to imagine the pain lasting or getting worse, and this creates further fear and anxiety, or maybe even panic, and this is coming out of memory and into the mind. You feel that you can manage the pain in the present moment, but what if the pain gets worse? What's the pain or discomfort going to be like in half an hour? An hour? Two hours?
The ability to mentally fade out
Pain and discomfort is in itself trauma and only exists in the present moment, but is usually exacerbated by the suffering - the fear and anxiety - and this is what usually makes the pain or discomfort seem much worse.
This is where we get to the connection between fear and desire. Consider the Buddha's opening premise "You suffer because you desire" and the Four Noble Truths. But this connection through emotional or psychological attachment between fear and desire is not exclusively Buddhist but is common throughout religion, philosophies, methods such as Buddhism and Taoism and also throughout the occult. Consider that the Ten Commandments in Christianity serves pretty much the same purpose as the Eightfold Path in Buddhism. Each commandment focusses on a desire which leads to suffering.
This is because fear and anxiety magnify the trauma and leads to an escalation and rising of energy frequency. This can only happen if there is some emotional or psychological attachment or 'clinging' to the experience. But if you've ever experienced pain you will probably realize that pain is in itself impermanent and also, being a predominantly physical sensation, it manifests through the senses in waves or cycles. For example, think of a throbbing headache. If you suffer from headaches you will probably be familiar with the pulsating rhythms of the pain. Therefore fighting or resisting the pain is only going to intensify your perception of pain simply because you're cycling through the sensations in memory and this is playing out in your mind.
Now you could try meditation in such a situation and instead of fighting or resisting the pain or discomfort roll with it and meditate. This will work for maybe an hour or so but see attempting meditation from a position of trauma can often be tiring and draining because you're not completely letting go of the desire and so you're still trying to withstand the pain or discomfort, so it's not going to be effective. It's much better to relax and - in the absence of painkillers - focus instead on some kind of relaxation or even get up and focus on something or distract yourself away from the pain. The pain will subside, in its own way, but what you're actually doing here is to occupy your thinking processes and memory to alleviate the suffering. The pain will still be unpleasant, but if you can manage to shift the focus of your conscious attention onto something else then at least it will be manageable.
Therefore one such aspect of mindfulness is developing the ability to mentally 'fade out' and become one with the present moment and one's environment. This is the necessary threshold for both yoga and magic - being in the moment with one's environment and energies to the point of non-existence of self or Ego. In terms of the occult this mental state is known as being rooted, grounded, and is necessary for shielding. I will expand on this a bit more in my next blog post 'What equality really means' when I go into adwaita vedanta and the two different mystical approaches. This is the point of meditation, contemplation and other similar practices, and that is to connect to one's environment totally so as to reduce the frequencies of one's natural energies. Contrary to popular belief magic is not about wish fulfilment or casting spells, but far more to do with negating suffering and liberation from past karma.
Fear has very big eyes
Or 'strach ma duzy oczy' - this is a Polish saying. This brings us to the next very important aspect of fear and anxiety - the mental imbalance and shift away from perception towards conception, the distortion of one's thought processes which can also magnify and inflate suffering within the context of pain and discomfort. This is a very common issue in mental health and mental illness. You've probably heard of the platitude "It's all in your head" which often leads to the belief that mental illness and mental health issues are somehow imaginary. Well duh yes, but this doesn't even begin to address the nature and existence of the emotional and psychological attachment to past trauma which underlies the issue or the suffering.
Please, for the love of all things holy, if you're one of these people who are deluded by the whole self-sufficiency, haul yourself up the bootstraps nonsense, or law of attraction nonsense, or positive thinking nonsense, instead of opening your gob and showing the world how ignorant you are, you can best support people with mental health issues through silence or by offering your ears as an opportunity to listen or a talking post. Nobody needs your unqualified psychiatric opinions. While I'm digressing and dishing out some needed unsolicited advice here, you can also lay off fat people and people who have struggled with addictions as well.
Digging back into my own dark past to give you an example from my food addiction and eating disorders, there's an aspect of obesity that most people - among them doctors and health professionals - miss completely. Going back to when I was twice my size and weight, I would eat large quantities of food. Not so much sweet stuff, for my 'drug' of choice was savoury in nature, fats, oils and salt, pretty much all the shit some food producers pack into their branded processed food items to trigger the taste buds. I must have gained at least 100lbs, which is close to the weight of a typical 5ft 2ins adult woman, just from eating packaged manufactured sandwiches and wraps - bread stuffed with cheese, bacon, chicken, mayo and so on.
I was not any more hungry than I am normally or you are. I knew I was morbidly obese and dangerously so. Of course I was well aware that I desperately needed to lose weight, that I was ruining my body and my health, and that I needed to stop eating and take more exercise. But I was also socially excluded, lonely, hurting very very badly, desperate for emotional support from others but unable to find it, stigmatized and judged by others for being fat, and trans, and this led to an internal belief that I was fat, unattractive, unpleasant, useless, disgusting, and probably better off dead. This was my emotional take and perception on how people were treating me generally at the time. Of course I didn't want to be lonely, or isolated, just as I didn't want to be morbidly obese, and my only 'out' at the time was to eat large amounts of unhealthy but non-judgmental food, even though I knew at the time it was taking me even further away from the direction I needed to be moving in through life.
Just to give you an insight into the hellish, darker side of addiction and obesity, that vast unexplored area of trauma and suffering that few if any seem willing to open up about, talk about or discuss. Any addiction, be it to drugs, food, cigarettes, porn, sex, video games or whatever creates a kind of psychological and emotional vicious circle where the solution and the problem become one and the same. You're aware of the problems you're creating for yourself by feeding the addiction, but see the internalized fear, stigma and anxiety from deep within your memory and your mind restrict you to seeking the solution through creating even more of the problems. You become trapped and a victim of your own ignorance, lacking the mindfulness and inner fortitude to dig yourself out of the hole you've dug yourself into. But just like everyone else you don't want to suffer or experience any more trauma or suffering, so you end up kicking the can down the road, lying to yourself and others, denying the fact that you're creating even more karma and hurting yourself even more and you can no longer get yourself out of the mess you got yourself into.
You know people will judge, because that is in your experience, because it's not so much 'human nature' but the same social and mental conditioning we all go through. But see you don't want to be judged or to be hurt or stigmatized any more. You know you cannot escape human ignorance, either in other people or yourself, and it's this knowledge that pushes you even further into the addiction and deeper and deeper into the hole you're digging for yourself. So back we come to that same relationship of 'dukkha' (Sanskrit for suffering) and the relationship between suffering and desire through physical attachments. But see here 'attachment' is an imprecise translation of 'klesha' (the Sanskrit word), which is better translated as 'defilement', 'hang up' or even 'corruption'. Addiction is the best example I can offer of the attachments referred to in the Buddhist Four Noble Truths. Perhaps now you can see how 'klesha' can also be translated as 'sin' in terms of the Western Abrahamic religions of Christianity, Islam and Judaism.
Just to be clear also here obesity isn't always a consequence of addiction, because it can be a symptom of many different things. One thing is however clear that much of the judgment, stigma, assumptions and wonky premises when it comes to obesity are neither helpful nor beneficial, either to the individual or to society in general.
But here again you can see how fear, anxiety can magnify the suffering and take you far away from your path, through nothing more than the distortion of your thought processes, depriving you of the ability to emotionally and psychologically address past karma, trauma, to the degree that it robs you of your natural equanimity and places you firmly into 'hungry ghost' territory.
Your natural ability to resolve past karma
To expand on this further we can see how fear, anxiety, and suffering can create further trauma through depriving us of our natural ability to address and resolve past karma. As I've stated previously, and often, karma is physical action or activity - any physical action or activity - which means that karma isn't just about what you do and what happens to you, it's also very much to do with the choices and decisions we make, our ability to reason, to internalize and rationalize, to think, and to be able to relate to our environment and others.
Rather than going into the various human conceptual methods of addressing and resolving karma, whether it be through Buddhism, Taoism, Qultura methodology, or religion, I tend generally to advocate to people to learn about the relationship between trauma and karma through examining the relationship of the two in relationship by observing how inanimate objects interact with one another. Go find a body of water such as a lake, a pond or a river, and practise throwing stones or skimming pebbles into the water. Explore for yourself the relationship between trauma (impact) and karma (response). You probably don't have access to a gong and a hammer, but by creating trauma and observing the karma which arises from the trauma you can get a good sense of the relationship between the two.
You can then expand on this further by going into nature and simply observing other animals and species to get a better perspective on how different species handle trauma and suffering, and how they deal with threats and manage fear. Some of you reading this will have a pet, a dog, a cat, or you will be able to observe insects, birds, squirrels, and then you will be able to go for a walk among trees. Please don't underestimate the capacity for learning about mindfulness and karma from Mother Nature. Spiders are experts in mindfulness, they're most definitely Zen, alternating between minimal effort and maximum effort.
But when it comes to your natural ability to resolve past karma even before you start to figure out 'how' you first need to take stock of 'what'. How will you know what method best serves you as a tool for resolving past karma and moving towards mindfulness if you don't consider the two major variables of your life experience and also - just as importantly - your environmental influences, the social and mental conditioning you have gone through in life?
This is why in my work and in my practice I'm unwilling to advocate one method or even promote one method over another. In my one to one work as a shaman I generally try at the first attempt the method the other person is most familiar with, be it a religion such as Christianity or Islam, and start from there. However in group work and community I tend to be much more general and holistic trying to get to the actual mystical principles in the simplest and most direct means accessible to me, and leave the choices for which methods to try out down to the individual participants.
This is where I will leave it for now. I will revisit this subject in later blog posts once I've got past my next post on equality, equilibrium and equanimity.