People learn about humanity without possessing any prior knowledge in the beginning. Then they put these experiences aside and return to the place where they first came. The start and end of every human life is the same, but it is the content of those lives that makes each and every person different. Different people have varying depths of pain just as they have different levels of joy.
No person may define a person based merely by listing their past experiences and personal thoughts. There is more to a person’s inner soul than just his history. More importantly, anyone who endures suffering can not compare his suffering to other people and determine that he has suffered more than the other. Every person has had his or her suffering in the past and should not compare this with that of others. Those who are negative can choose to be pessimistic and say that they are always victims. These people enjoy receiving sympathy from others by claiming persecution.
Instead of trying harder to succeed they spend their time convincing others to feel sorry for them. Their ego forces them to surrender their dignity to get sympathy. Where they should the joys of the present they see only the drudgery of the past. In fact, they utterly fail to see that the present gives them many opportunities. “A New Earth ” by Eckhart Tolle is a great example of enjoying life without any anxieties, worries, or agonies.
The trouble starts when people objectify themselves based on their objective characteristics. Characteristics like; Name, gender, age, ethnicity are part of a person but their exterior traits are not the totality of the person. Wealth can be a measure that defines people to others. Materialism makes people cling to their wealth and its outward manifestations like expensive cars and designer shoes thinking these make them better than others who don’t have them. This has been made worse by the information age.
In the time before the internet and cell phones people were less materialistic. Now people overwork themselves to obtain expensive and unnecessary luxuries. They would even go into debt charging their credit card to get the latest, and most expensive, cell phones or electronic gadgets just to flaunt their false wealth to others. Their attachment to material things weighs them down. According to “The End of Solitude” by William Deresiewicz, technology takes away privacy and concentration, and it also takes away the ability to be alone.
People become dependent on this technology because they are under the impression that these things will define them. They want to show information about themselves through the Internet using Facebook or by blogging. I for one do not have Facebook. When people ask me about Facebook I tell them that I do not have Facebook. This surprises people because they consider Facebook an essential requirement in the modern world. However, since I have Internet, e-mail and a cell phone I consider myself sufficiently connected with the world. Even if I do not own a blog site I can communicate with others and express myself well. The reason people seem to be so attached to Facebook and blogs is because they think this is their primary means of communicating and connecting to the world. This is wrong.
For my part, I have shared many things with my best friend. I have even shared a friendship ring with my best friend. Wearing a ring with a friend and calling it a friendship ring is still a popular means of showing friendship. I have always worn the ring even if my friend told me that she had lost hers. I pressed her to find the ring even if it had no negative effect on our relationship. After she gave up looking for it, I kept mine in a jewelry box. Some months later, my friend told me she found the ring in the back of a drawer. However, we did not feel any pleasure even though she finally had found the ring.
We remained unchanged in our friendship whether or not we shared a ring. I regret that for a moment I put too much importance on the ring which in truth meant very little to our intangible relationship. The ring was only a symbol. In fact, it was just a cheap trinket that will eventually rot away. Its significance is one of sentimentality, as time goes by perhaps the meaning attached to the ring will also diminish. The important thing is our mutual friendship which stays strong to this day. As time moves one it may be possible that even our friendship will cool. However, for the moment our friendship is strong and it does not need cheap trinkets to symbolize it.
Experiences of both Pain and Joy bring people to maturity, happiness and depression are both part and parcel of life. People will suffer through many agonies. Every moment brings with it the opportunity to be happy or to be depressed. For example, a mother may worry about what to serve her family for dinner while a father may agonize over how to make a living to support the family. Even children have difficulties when considering how he can make lots of money to support his family.
Children have difficulties when they study or in building relationships with their friends. Their woes are part of everyone’s life. They may think they do not need to worry and that their problems should flow away, yet this is not easy. I have kept a diary since I was in high school. My worries were nothing serious, especially when I read through the diary now. I can face my considerations with a smile now, but I remember that life was terrible at that time. I wrote all about my grades when I was a high school student. My personal suffering increased or decreased depending on my grades. As I grew up and became a woman after I came to the United States, I thought mostly about English, and my other concerns were about relationships, love, and my new home in the United States. When I became homesick, in my dairy I could describe how I had hard time staying here. I was stuck for a word when I saw the word ‘parents,’ but now I can say the word without any problems.
Suffering can not by bypassed, instead it should be overcome with acceptance and understanding of the situation. Suffering requires one to be unconscious, it can not tolerate the light of presence. Suffering is a product of the unconscious mind, when one is unaware of life, suffering appears and shows up. Accepting that all suffering will pass is the first step to acceptance (Tolle, 224). If people think that agony will eventually end they gain an internal awakening. They are awakened in the sense that neither their egos nor their thoughts control their lives.
Several months ago, I decided to go back to Korea after this semester because my main suffering, which is homesickness, was active again. This cycle repeats every time I think it has disappeared. Pain-body never misses a moment when I am unconscious. For a year, I kept this cycle, so I finally felt sick of experiencing this again. I wanted to end this malignancy of my suffering. However, I experienced homesickness when I went to Korea for my summer vacation. Homesickness is loneliness, so it also is activated even though I was at home. I could not stay alone anymore because I became the kind of person who cannot stand solitude. I was swayed by loneliness and could not take it away. The primary reason that I suffer is that I am much too attached to home yet I know in my heart that I can no longer turn back.
Idle thoughts feed a person’s ego and the ego disturbs the balance of life and the desire to improve and achieve more favorable circumstances. The form of suffering which is made by thoughts is the same as those which are controlled by the ego. “When you are no longer totally identified with forms, consciousness—who you are—becomes freed from its imprisonment in form. This freedom is the arising of inner space” (Tolle, 226). In order to find inner space, people should stop and think. They must stop and reflect on what it is that controls them. It is in knowing what it is that weight them down that these people gain freedom from depression.
People must learn to understand that their feelings of sadness are mostly in the mind. Their false beliefs create a hold on them which makes their condition worse. The beliefs take hold of them because of their attitude. If they believe that their notions of inferiority and sadness are true then eventually these will become self-fulfilling prophecies. So even if the reasons are not true a person who feels inferior will eventually be inferior indeed. In “The Field,” Rumi says, “When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about. / Ideas, words, even the phrase ‘each other’ doesn’t make any sense.” When I heard a rumor that my friend started, I thought the rumor was not true.
Even though other people believed the rumor, I thought they would realize it wasn’t true when they thought about it. The fabricated rumor, even if it is untrue when spoken begins to take a level of reality because they affect the people. People cannot see the truth with a closed mind, so they should open their thoughts and attitudes to find inner enlightenment. This is an inner space that will appear when they get free from constricting thought and form. If they find an inner space, they can make life happier because they are not controlled by thought and ego. They will not longer be bound by the unnecessary considerations and worries of an ego driven life. Only the presence in their lives is the truth. People should not consider the past or the future. The present time is the past and the future, so concentrating on the present time is more important. Moreover, what a person is doing now is his or her purpose in life. The purpose is to translate an idea, a dream into action. Thus, the purpose is to live now. After all the present is a gift, which why it is called a present.
People can meet their purpose in life by means of creating an inner space in which they feel free from any anxieties. The purpose for an inner space is to create an accord with a person’s primary purpose which is born when he or she is born. In her poem “When Death Comes,” Mary Oliver describes life towards death as follows: “When death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse to buy me, and snaps the purse shut/ I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering: what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?”
People know they will leave this life someday, but they do not accept it because they are afraid to go into the full darkness. However, it is warmth and peace as Oliver mentions when she uses the word ‘cottage.’ People have thousands of worries while living their lives, so they should accept the terror of death since they cannot avoid it. Everyone knows death, but no one wants to face it. Death is a return to the place from where they came, and that is the final and best end.
References
“A New Earth” by Eckhart Tolle.
“Ten Poems to Last A Lifetime” by Roger Housden.