Suffering is Real, March 14, 2009

Moderator: A Washington viewer says, “I appreciate the answer about pain. I’m experiencing some dissolution of the long held misunderstanding about the subject. It feels to be deeper than mental.”

David: Pain is real. If you are in a human form there’s going to be pain. Things are going to not always turn out the way, the way it feels good. Sometimes things don’t turn out the way if feels good. It doesn’t mean you are too attached and you know, somehow you are resisting life. There’s real pain. There’s real sorrow in life. It would be just absolutely ridiculous to try to argue the point that there’s no sorrow in life. When things like that are said by spiritual teachers and traditions, just think of it as marketing. “That everything is joy. There’s nothing but joy. Joy is all around or nothing has ever been created. I have never been born therefore how can I ever suffer?” That’s advertisement. That belongs in a magazine with a picture. Life is real. Life is absolutely real. Living and dying have tremendous impact on a sensitive and authentic consciousness. It’s only a fake who doesn’t feel things or who doesn’t want to feel things; wants to run away from experiencing things. And at the same time I don’t want to go into a romantic loving of pain and sorrow. That also is not the point. That’s also grossly inaccurate, that somehow life has to be lived Van Gogh-style.

You just have to understand that life is made up of tremendous Light in which nothing has ever been born and tremendous darkness where matter comes into being. Now by Light and darkness I don’t mean good and evil. I just mean un-manifestation and manifestation. Things can only come together in a gross form on a plane where things are coagulated, where everything comes into hardness: water, air, fire, ether, earth; where you need those elements to produce forms.