Hello there.
Today I'm gonna give you a rather advanced teaching.
But I'm gonna try to simplify it
because getting this concept
could completely transform your life.
The Secret of Suffering
I want you to imagine looking through a telescope.
When you're looking through a telescope,
your entire perception is absorbed
in the image that you are seeing through that telescope.
You forget all of the other stuff
that exists outside of that one perspective.
In fact, you forget that you're even a person standing right here.
If you're truly absorbed in looking through the telescope,
you believe you are over there, standing on that cliff ledge.
It basically distorts your perception.
You would essentially have to split in two
at that moment,
and step away from yourself
to not only have the perspective of looking through the telescope,
but have the perspective of seeing yourself
as a person looking through a telescope.
It's a completely different view, and therefore perception.
Life works like this.
Coming into life, you are essentially Source energy,
collective consciousness
that is coming into a singular 3D perspective.
To use a metaphor,
you are looking through the telescope.
But when you come into this life,
because you are so engaged in the image
you are looking through in your perception
from your limited 3D reality-based perception
of yourself as a separate self,
you in fact forget
that you are a person
looking through the telescope.
A better way of saying this is,
you forget that you are a nonphysical energy
that is only currently experiencing a third dimensional perspective.
You are identified with the perspective you have through the telescope.
Obviously, genuine self awareness is difficult to have
when we are this identified with the view we are seeing
through the telescope of our physical lives.
We have to disidentify with that perspective
in order to see ourselves clearly.
We have to disidentify with that perspective
to have the experience of ourselves
as a being looking through the telescope,
as opposed to the scene in the telescope itself.
To learn more about disidentification,
when this video is done,
I want you to watch two of my videos.
The first is 'Disidentification, the Practice of Non-Attachment'.
And the second is 'Mindfulness Meditation'.
When we are looking through the telescope,
we do not understand why we are suffering.
We cannot understand the HOW or the WHY of it.
In order to understand our suffering,
we have to dis-identify with this perspective
of our limited 3D life
to the degree that we can clearly, objectively see ourselves.
The first question you're gonna have to ask yourself is:
"HOW am I suffering?
What is the exact mechanics of suffering?
How does it occur?"
Pain always comes, without exception,
in response to something.
What does this mean?
It means that pain or suffering is in fact a process.
Pain happens when we resist something that we perceive.
When you feel the hit of intense emotional or physical pain,
you have to close your eyes and ask yourself
"What did this pain come in response to?"
How does suffering happen within you specifically?
In other words, if you can't quit your addiction,
how does not-able-to-quit occur exactly as a process?
If I'm having a panic attack,
how does getting a panic attack occur exactly as a process?
If I am unsatisfied with my life,
how does becoming unsatisfied with my life
occur exactly as a process?
For example, let's say that I notice
this hit of anxiety and doom.
If I close my eyes and I ask myself
"How did this occur?
What is this occurring in response to?"
but I do it by stepping back and observing the mind,
I may notice that that sensation of panic or doom
came in response to images in my mind
of something I didn't want to have happen in the future.
I may notice that these images
then give rise to an auditory thought
that looks something like this:
"I cannot survive this happening.
I literally cannot deal with it."
Essentially, the body
and the emotional aspect of my being
is reacting to an image
that has been generated in my mind.
That is a process.
Something happens,
as a result of that something happening,
my mind generates an image in the future
of what it doesn't want to have be the outcome of that experience
that it is going through right now,
as a result, my emotional body
has a reaction,
and then the auditory thought, "I cannot deal with this" comes in.
Now I am suffering.
That was the process of suffering.
I had to step back from my limited perspective
enough to see the process of suffering,
the HOW of it.
If this previous scenario is the how of my pain,
I have become so absorbed in the image
that I'm seeing through the telescope,
which is that future scenario,
that I have also lost touch with the present moment.
Now, this is what's really interesting.
If I am that absorbed in the view of the telescope,
I am so removed from the present moment.
If this pervious scenario is the HOW of my suffering,
I am in fact, two scenes removed from who I truly am.
Not only am I unaware
that I am a non-physical being coming into this life,
I am also unaware of the present moment
of the non-physical coming into this life.
I am instead, in the future scenario.
As a result, not only am I suffering,
I'm suffering alone.
Now, here I'm going to explain
the main mechanism of genuine suffering.
It's that we are in the scenario,
where nobody else is present with us.
To understand what I mean, imagine this:
You're driving a car
with somebody else in the passenger seat.
Let's pretend that you go into one of these painful future scenarios.
So not only are you not aware at that moment
that you are a non-physical being coming into your temporal perspective,
you are simply your temporal perspective,
which means you're one scene removed from who you truly are.
You are now out of that present moment of the car
living in that painful scenario.
That's what happens in the mind.
When your suffering is about
"I am living in an image right now,
engaging in an image
of what I don't want to have happen in the future",
you've literally almost time traveled with your consciousness
and that is your reality.
So, you may be physically driving in the car with somebody,
but that person is actually sitting in the passenger seat
experiencing the car
and you are living in an entirely different reality in that moment.
You are living in the worst-case scenario.
And so that creates intense amounts of pain,
because you aren't actually occupying the same reality
as the other person who is standing in the same room.
And this is also why people can't understand often
why people are having the reactions they're having
to certain scenarios.
It's because they're not in the same reality.
Now, if we're using that previous scenario of sitting in the car
and the person in the passenger seat is looking out the window
and is in the present moment is like
"This is so great! We're taking a drive to Colorado"
and you're the one driving the car
but you're projected into a future scenario that's really super terrible,
–maybe it's something with work–
you're not occupying the same reality.
When you're not having a good time,
the person in the passenger seat is looking at you going
"What the hell is wrong? Everything's going okay right now.",
and that in fact, makes your suffering worse.
Because it invalidates where you are.
It makes you feel more alone than ever.
Now, this is what I mean by
"We have to become aware of the HOW of our suffering.
How is suffering happening exactly as a process?"
Once we do this,
we have the capacity to intervene in that process.
Now, here's the most important point
that I'm going to put forward to you.
We make the mistake of rushing straight to the WHY of suffering.
"Why am I suffering?"
And you are going to interact with a million and a half people,
including myself, who will tell you
"This is why you're suffering. Here's another suggestion",
that you can take on and try on to try to alleviate your suffering.
Why does it not work?
Because we have not asked the HOW of our suffering
before we have considered the why.
If we were simply to ask someone "Why are you suffering?",
they would not be able to give the correct answer.
Because they have not disidentified
far enough to see HOW they are suffering.
Once you know the how, you can ask the why.
Why is our suffering happening in the way that it is happening?
There are many angles you could take to asking why.
For example, using the previous scenario,
we can ask "WHY seeing the image of that potential future scenario
causes you so much pain?"
We can become aware of what we really want this way.
We might find that it is painful
because the minute the mind generates this image,
we notice that we think it is real.
We believe it is in fact, what is going to happen.
It is not a potential to us.
It is an actuality, like a fate.
We can ask to see an image of the aspect of us
that is creating this image and ask him or her
WHY he or she needed us to become aware of that potential.
That answer's the WHY for us.
We can ask him or her
what would be so bad about not showing me that potential.
A while back, I was doing this suffering awareness work on myself.
I was experiencing one of those commonplace scenarios
where regardless of what was actuality going on in my reality,
my mind was currently engaged in negative images about the future.
That was the HOW of my suffering.
So when I closed my eyes and asked to see the aspect of me
that was trying to constantly generate these images,
where are they actually coming from,
what I saw was an image of myself covered in burns, like bloody.
I was mangled.
I was in one of those moods – that aspect of me I should say –
was in one of those moods where
if anybody breathed on me sideways, I was going to collapse.
That was how much pain I was in.
So when I started engaging with this image of myself,
what I came to be aware of is that
it was kicking these thoughts kind of like soccer balls
to the surface of my consciousness,
desperately trying to beg me to avoid that worst case scenario,
cause it literally couldn't handle it.
Okay, so then I understand the WHY
behind the how of my suffering.
My being was putting me into that state of suffering
in fact, because its intention
was to try to get me to avoid that painful scenario in the future
because that aspect of me is too vulnerable to freaking deal with it!
So remember how I said that once you understand
the HOW and then the WHY behind the how of suffering,
you have the capacity to intervene?
Here's what I mean by that:
Once I became aware that the aspect of me
that was creating this process of suffering
was creating it to try to keep me safe,
I could see this aspect of me then
as an aspect that needed to be taken care of.
So in visualization what did I do?
I closed my eyes,
I imagined the rest of me, the larger part of me
– let's call it the higher self or the eternal being –
coming in and picking up that burnt and bloody vulnerable aspect of me
and then caretaking her.
That's what really needed to happen,
was she needed to know that the rest of me
could take responsibility for her well-being
without trying to avoid all these disaster scenarios.
It's quite simple.
Put her in some healing water,
start speaking to her in a way
that makes her feel as if she's going to be taken care of.
I even got her a little bucket,
where she could start putting these images,
so that I didn't have to be ignorant.
I could still sort through them and see them,
but she didn't have to be in charge of the job
of kicking them to my conscious mind
which was exhausting for her in the first place.
It is only when we see the HOW process of suffering
and the subsequent WHY that process is occurring within us
that we have any potential of actually solving the reality of our suffering,
as opposed to just taking shots in the dark
or taking other people's opinions
and trying them on like clothes that don't quite fit.
Once you understand the How process of suffering
and the WHY that process is occurring within you,
you have the capacity to intervene in that process.
I want you to become aware that your being is always,
constantly and continually, trying to help you.
Even the ego – which us in the spiritual field,
we've made a hell of an enemy out of,
exists to try to help you.
Nothing that the ego does, is ultimately a self-destructive process.
It may be self-destructive, but the ego doesn't think it is.
So it's trying to serve you.
There's not an aspect of you, that is your enemy.
So, quite often what we find
is that the how and why of suffering
involves some kind of positive intention.
For this reason, I want you to watch my video on YouTube titled:
'The Hidden Positive Intention'.
When we ask how, we begin to see things as a process.
When we ask how relative to our suffering,
we begin to see our suffering as a process.
When we ask the WHY after the HOW,
we get to see the purpose behind that process.
We then have the awareness necessary to intervene in that process,
so that process itself does not control us.
Now I also want to tip you off to the fact
that people usually have a primary process for their suffering.
Let's call this our primary habit.
It's the one that we do over and over and over again
and becoming aware of this particular pattern or habit
or how we're suffering in our life,
and intervening in it,
is the way to really dramatically
alter the quality of lifestyle that you're living.
For example, my pattern of suffering,
the how of it may be
what I just told you before and all these previous scenarios.
It may be that the process of suffering is
"I experienced something that causes my mind to generate images
of a future something I don't want to have happen.",
and that process continually occurs.
Once I'm aware of that and I start feeling that pain,
I can awaken myself.
I can essentially use that pain of doom
that is the response emotionally
to those generated images in my mind,
as a meditation bell in and of themselves,
to go ~ beep ~
"Teal, you're doing it again."
so I can use it to disidentify.
That's what a meditation bell does.
It pulls you immediately back to the present moment
or to wherever you want your consciousness to go.
It can pull you into the disidentification with those painful images
or the process of suffering you're engaged in
to the degree that instead of being in that process of suffering,
you are seeing yourself engaging in that process of suffering.
Another way of putting this is,
you can use the pain of your suffering
to pop you out of the perspective
of being engaged in that image in the telescope
to seeing yourself as a person who is engaged in that image
that they are looking at through the telescope.
So, you can use the pain of your suffering
to snap you out of suffering,
use it like a meditation bell and when you feel it go,
"Ah, Alright. What was I just doing?
What was I just thinking?
What is the process that was just taking place within me?
When you do that,
you literally pull the momentum of your consciousness
out of that suffering process.
I want you to think of your consciousness as if it is fuel
where your consciousness is engaged in a process,
it is like momentum, it creates that process.
So when you pull your consciousness out of it
and you are instead observing the process
from an objective point of view,
you withdraw the momentum from that process,
it ceases to occur.
So, if I was lost in the future scenario,
not only am I aware that I was, I can stop and ask myself
"Are there concrete steps that I can take right now
that would enable me to avoid this worst case scenario in the future?"
If yes, I take them.
If no, that's my indication
that it is not the steps that need to be taken to avoid it,
it is the fact, that there is an aspect of me
that is desperate to avoid it,
that in fact, feels incapable of dealing with that scenario,
that needs me to turn around and give it care.
When you feel yourself suffering,
I invite you to start switching your focus from "What is wrong with me?"
to "How does the process of this suffering work?".
Many of us think we are in a process of finding happiness
when our suffering occurs
because we are in fact in a process of "not finding happiness".
We are absorbed in the telescope view of our unhappiness.
Be open to stepping back and seeing the processes
that are actually taking place within you
and the purpose behind those processes.
Suffering is a process.
This is your invitation to become aware
of HOW the suffering process happens within you specifically
so that you can understand
WHY the suffering process is happening in you
the way that it is happening.
Once you develop this level of awareness,
your answer about what to do about your suffering
will quite literally fall straight into your lap.
You won't have to work at it.
It will be as if it was right under your nose all along.
Have a good week.
Subtitled by: Isa & Reviewed by Tanya Duarte