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What is the point?
My sweetheart, Ellen, has been in the hospital after suffering a seemingly small fall in the bedroom. Since then, she has been unable to put any weight on her leg, rendering her unable to even transfer into her wheelchair. X-rays and CT scans have shown nothing to cause all this weakness and pain. The emergency room doctor is figuring it is ligament tears that are the problem since they don’t show up on X-ray. When life gets challenging to this degree, the question comes up: what is the point of fighting this battle? There is nothing like physical pain you can do nothing about to get it across to you that you usually have no actual control in your life, and no matter how angry or afraid you get, you just are not going to get your way.
I have often thought that the feeling of not being able to get our way is the root of much of what we feel as suffering in our lives. Pain is nasty and can be unbearable, but it does not turn into true suffering until you feel hopeless and unable to do anything about it. As long as there is hope that you can beat the cause of the pain and come out on top, instead of falling into just suffering, you fight. This distinction is clear and easily felt with something like physical pain, but it gets murky and harder to identify when the battle is about things like our life path, our relationships, and just about everything to do with participating with the outside world. Life simply is not interested in being “our way.” Truth be told, even if it was interested, life has no idea what “our way” even is. The outside world can not read our minds to know what we want. We feel that “out there” should somehow just know what we want… but it doesn’t – it can’t. More importantly, “out there” is far more interested in what it wants, not what we want. If it appears to be interested in our wants, it is because it has us enrolled in a social transaction that serves its purposes, not ours.
What is the upshot of this unpleasant perspective? It is the awareness that all of us are suffering to varying degrees, depending on how aware we are that we are not actually getting “our way.” We want to be the lead character in this play we call life, not just a bit-part player in a production that is vast beyond our ability to understand. As much as we try to pretend we are the central star of the show, on some feeling level we know the truth – we are tiny players with very few lines. Consequently, we suffer. We suffer with the feeling knowing that our voicing of needs, wants, and feeling expressions are lost in the roar of billions of other voices all crying out their own needs and wants. We have to ask, what is the point? Why strive? What are we hanging on for?
This all sounds pretty hopeless, and so many people get lost in this emotional trap. While what I am saying is true, it is also irrelevant. These are the feelings of the tiny child we once were. Those feelings still hide deep in our core and run our lives behind the scenes by controlling our motivations for doing what we do. Our current ego-mind makes the moment-to-moment decisions that make us feel in control, but it is the hidden child mind that controls our desires, that directs our attention, and tells us what we want. This is the level where we have to find a purpose for our life, not the conscious ego-mind. Modern psychology understands that the conscious mind is barely 5% of what is going on. The other 95% is sub and unconscious stuff. This stuff, these feelings, beliefs, attitudes, expectations, entitlements, and demands create the “box” or “comfort zone” in which we live our lives. Unfortunately, our “box” only exists between our ears. The real world has a habit of not matching up with the stuff in our box. For most of us, that makes the real world threatening and we spend our lives trying to force the world to behave the way we think it should.
It is interesting that the spiritual principle our support circle has been contemplating these last two weeks is: “ Your way is not the right way; it is only your way.” It is funny how life tries to show us our lessons. This lesson speaks directly to suffering and the point of life. We suffer because we want things to be our way and they aren’t. As much as we hate this, this truth is there to guide us to the bigger picture. We want things to be our way because we are afraid that we can’t get our needs and wants met on our own. This feeling is very real, but generally very hidden. It is the absolute truth for a newborn baby, so it is the very first “truth” we learn when we are born. It is part of the central core of our feeling reality until we replace it with better information. Very few people know how to do that. A newborn is utterly dependent on “out there” accurately guessing the newborn’s needs and then filling them. That desire becomes firmly established as a basic feeling motivator. But life becomes less and less interested in guessing our needs and wants as we grow older, and tends more to its own needs and wants instead. And so our suffering starts.
So what is the answer to all this? The simple answer should be: growing up. As we grow in our skills for participating with the world, we become more and more able to meet our own needs. We learn how to get our own glass of water, dress ourselves, make our own peanut butter and banana sandwiches, and nowadays use the cell phone better than our parents. If all there was to life was physical survival needs, we would let go of the desire to have others guess our needs and meet them because it is both easier and more satisfying to just do that for ourselves. But the world is full of all kinds of things we can’t do for ourselves. It is full of things that happen because of interaction with others – like work, play, mates, just about everything except our peanut butter and banana sandwiches. And interaction with others is frustrating since all they seem to care about is their own needs and wants, not ours. In the world of interaction with others we are still like the newborn – wanting and needing, hoping and demanding that “out there” be our way, put us first, and fill our needs and wants… but it doesn’t. This is where the “point” of this story comes into play. Just like we learned how to get our own water, dress ourselves, and so on, we have to learn the skills of getting our needs and wants met in the context of participation with others, with “out there.” We do this through our ability to create. We are creative geniuses and can figure out how to create value for ourselves with others in order to barter and exchange our created value for our needs and wants. I call these the skills of creation and connection. This gives us purpose in life. The ability to create and connect in harmony is the point of life. It is what we are here to learn. The skills are hugely diverse. There is room for almost infinite individuality.
One of our basic needs is to “be our true selves.” We each have unique and individual differences built into how our brains are wired, and consequently how we are able to think. Participating with life in harmony requires us to express our uniqueness in order for us to be happy with the participation. It is our feelings of happiness that signal us that we are being successful with our participation with life. Many people only focus on doing what is of value to others and leave themselves out of the equation. This leads to ill health eventually. You want to do what you love and find a way to make that of value to others. This gives a wider understanding of our purpose in life – doing what we love and sharing that with others in a way that generates value for them. Often times what they value most is just our ability to participate with them as a character in the play of their life. We need people to play the various roles in the play that is our life because it is through this play that we are able to discover who and what our true self is. And that is also what we are here to learn – who are we? What does our love look like and act like? What do we create through our love and how do we share it? These are all-purpose and “what is the point” answers that we are here to learn; here to fulfill.
So don’t be afraid of suffering. It is there to show us where we are still believing that “out there” needs to fill us by being our way instead of us finding our creative outflow that generates value for others. It is that exchange of our love and creation for others’ love and creation that will meet our needs and wants. This may not make your leg pain any better, but meeting the situation with the experienced skills that chase hopelessness away changes your relationship to that pain in a way that is a better feeling.