Suffering and Human Cruelty

the solace of not needing an explanation or a cure

One night recently, after reading about some horrifically cruel things that some humans did to some other humans, I found myself feeling a familiar disturbance, a loss of equilibrium, a doubt about life itself. I felt the desire to close my eyes to life’s uncertainty and potential horror, to look away. I suspect most (if not all) of you have experienced this. Reading or hearing such stories, imagining the pain and terror the people in them must have felt as they were tortured and finally killed, we are reminded viscerally of our own vulnerability, and that of our loved ones, as bodymind organisms, and all the ways our lives could be upended and shattered in an instant. Some of the most common questions people bring to spiritual teachers are about why there is “evil” in the world and how to end or transcend suffering.

Here is an excerpt from my most recent book, Death: The End of Self-Improvement, that touches on this:

There’s an old Zen koan about two monks, washing their bowls in the creek, who see two birds fighting over a frog, tearing it apart. One monk asks the other, “Why does it have to be like this?” And the other monk replies, “It’s all for your benefit.”

What on earth does that mean? Rape, genocide, mass shootings, environmental destruction—all of this is for my benefit?

When I was young, perhaps in grade school or junior high school, I remember reading a novel called On the Beach, about the aftermath of a nuclear war, and then several years later seeing a movie called Days of Wine and Roses. Both had alcoholic characters, and I actually remember thinking back then, that’s what I want to be when I grow up—a drunk. In some way I could never have articulated at the time, that’s how I felt I could best embody a certain sense I had about life. And, of course, for a number of years, I did exactly that.

I was a wild and reckless drunken writer, like Charles Bukowski—often violent, often enraged, often abusive, often disruptive. My subconscious role, my message, was to enact despair and outrage, a death howl for humanity, to fly in the face of convention, to disrupt the façade of society that seemed so false to me.

Although I sobered up long ago, sometimes I still want to rage and howl, an urge that is perhaps not entirely negative. I’m still a fan of Charles Bukowski—and of Jesus, who gave us the Beatitudes and told us to turn the other cheek, but who also overturned tables and said, “I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.” And Nisargadatta, who lived near the red-light district in Bombay and smoked cigarettes during satsang, even while dying of throat cancer, and sometimes yelled at people and threw them out. And Kali with her necklace of skulls, devouring all things, even her own children.

There is unimaginable suffering and cruelty in this world. It can’t be denied.  We can hate it, or we can embrace it. To embrace it doesn’t mean liking it, or denying the grief or the pain or even the anger we feel. It doesn’t mean wallowing in despair and negativity, nor does it have to mean being an abusive drunk. Finding out what it does mean is perhaps the koan of a lifetime. It has something to do with transcendence, but not the kind of transcendence that dissociates or turns away. It’s more the kind of transcendence that comes from entering deeply into what is.

—from DEATH: The End of Self-Improvement

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By “entering deeply,” I didn’t mean thinking about it, or trying to explain why such cruelty exists, nor did I mean being swept away by the drama. I was pointing to the possibility of simply being fully present to bare experiencing.

Explanations of why terrible things happen can easily serve as a kind of protective shield against actually feeling the pain and vulnerability of embodied life. We human have a seemingly insatiable desire to conceptually define and pin down this living reality that is actually inconceivable and unpindownable, in the hope that by doing this, we can control it and survive. Bare experiencing or simple presence is something else altogether.

So that night, instead of going with that urge to escape, I sat down on my meditation cushion in silence, not resisting the disturbance, letting it be as it is. I watched as my mind imagined various escapes I have tried over the years: alcohol and drugs, cynicism, rage, various ways of spiritualizing or explaining away pain, distracting myself—one after another these possibilities beckoned me with their siren songs, promising solace.

But the real solace is in not needing solace, not trying to escape—it’s in the willingness to be awake to what is, including the truly horrible parts, without trying to numb out or gloss them over with some spiritual story. So I just sat there, breathing. Feeling. Being. Eventually, the disturbance dissolved into this spacious listening presence beholding (being and holding) it all.

Sometimes I distinguish between suffering, on the one hand, and pain and painful circumstances on the other. Pain is an unavoidable part of life, but suffering is what we add on to pain and painful circumstances by resisting them, by trying to escape, and by all the ways we think about and react to them—the stories we tell, the things we believe, the ways we replay painful events over and over and imagine future ones that might happen someday. It’s possible, in any moment, for suffering to end. Not by dissociating, numbing out, turning away, or glossing it over, but instead, by being fully present and entering deeply into it in a totally non-result-oriented way, expecting nothing, willing to feel the pain forever. When that happens, something shifts.

I discovered many years ago through meditation that when I resisted pain, whether physical or emotional, when I was filled with frightening thoughts about it, it got worse and seemed unbearable, but when I opened to it completely, with no separation, with thoughtless awareness, it was bearable and sometimes even interesting. It no longer seemed solid or felt like something “out there” that was invading or attacking me, threatening to overpower or kill me. Often in completely entering and being the pain, it disappeared completely.

I remember years ago reading something, maybe by Stephen Levine, someone who worked with dying people, and he was talking to a mother whose child had been murdered and maybe tortured, and he pointed out that her child only had to go through this experience once, whereas the mother was reliving it over and over. It would be hard not to do that as a mother, but it's true in my experience that we can learn to catch how we do that, how we re-play a movie over and over, torturing ourselves, as I was torturing myself the other night by going over and over in my mind the horrible scenario I had just read about. The people to whom it actually happened lived through it once, and now I was living through it second-hand in my imagination, not just once, but again and again. Seeing this, as I sat in silence, something released.

It comes down in the end to no longer trying to escape in any way. Being willing to simply feel pain and be this moment, just as it is, with no hope of a better future moment. Turning to face what we think is unbearable. Entering it fully. No separation. Not reaching for a cure. Being this awake presence.

Being awake, as I mean it, is not about perpetual bliss, nor is it about being numb. The more open and sensitive we are, the more we will feel the suffering in this world. Awakening is not a panacea. But there is this radical possibility of doing nothing, not moving away, opening fully to the very thing we think will destroy us.

Of course, the “me” who can supposedly choose to do any of this on command is a mirage. We all do what life moves us to do in each moment. Sometimes we run and hide. Sometimes we don’t. It’s all part of the dance. I drank my way out of pain until I didn’t, and the drinking had is own beauty and truth. Sometimes consciousness needs to shut down, and sometimes it wants to open. Understanding the choiceless nature and indivisible wholeness of life gives us compassion for ourselves and others when we do painful things or when we run away and hide.

Those who do horrific acts of cruelty can’t do anything else at that moment. By way of explanation, we could say that they are moved by an infinite web of causes and conditions, by forces of nature and nurture, and they lack the sensitivity and the capacity at that moment to have any other option. We may hate what they do, but hating them misses the mark in some way. In my experience, hating the perpetrators is a way of avoiding the deep heartbreak, the sorrow, the grief, and the love that is under all that. It actually hurts us to hate someone else, because in the end, we are hating ourselves, for we are all inseparable aspects of a seamless, holographic whole in which each of us contains the light and the dark—the seeds of every imaginable human behavior, the best and the worst, are in all of us. And, as the saying goes, “There but for the grace of God go I.”

Meditation will reveal this very clearly—and I’m speaking here about the kind of meditation that involves simply being present and seeing what is. In that awake aware presence, we see ourselves thinking and doing things that were previously unseen and that are not part of our self-image. At first, we may be ashamed or horrified by some of what we realize we are doing or thinking, but fortunately, meditation can also reveal that all of our thoughts and actions are a choiceless, impersonal happening. Having the insight and the sensitivity to actually see these things in ourselves and to feel the pain in this world is a great blessing, albeit not always a comfortable one. Pain is a life-saving wake-up call, and we can’t change what we don’t even know is there. The thinking mind posing as “me,”the phantom author-controller, cannot “do” any of this, because that “me” is only a mirage. Genuine transformation happens out of that aware presence in which there is no me. Awareness is the great transformer.

In simply being present, awake and aware, we also begin to directly realize the utterly impermanent, dream-like nature of the entire movie of waking life, in both its personal and global manifestations, with all its endless dramas—terrifying and heart-warming, joyous and agonizing, funny and tragic. It’s a wild ride, in which literally anything can happen. And yet, it never actually departs from right here, right now. And the ever-changing appearances dissolve as quickly as they appear. Every moment is fresh and new, and at the very core of each moment and each sensation and every apparent thing, there is nothing at all—only this vast silence, this open aware space. This silence or spaciousness is profoundly alive. It allows everything and clings to nothing. I would call it unconditional love. The benevolence of this vast wholeness often seems to reveal itself in the darkness, when least expected.

Who knows what those people I was reading about the other night were actually experiencing as their torture unfolded and their lives in this form ended—it may not have been anything like what I was imagining. But however it was for them, their pain and suffering is long since over. Forms break down, but life goes on. The space that we are is not encapsulated inside or limited to any form. And at the same time, we cannot deny the reality and preciousness of each unique and perishable bodymind. Life is at once utterly vulnerable and absolutely indestructible.

Here’s more from that same chapter in my book Death: The End of Self-Improvement:

From the perspective of unicity, the apparent disharmony is all part of a larger harmony… Actually, there is quite a bit of violence and conflict going on even inside the human body on a regular basis, just as the two birds in the koan are engaged in a conflict, probably with some anger, fighting over a meal. The birds have no ideas about “being present” with their hunger, or “taking a time out” from their anger. They are simply doing what nature compels them to do. And so are we!

We imagine that human beings have free will and “should” do better. We find human cruelty more upsetting than the destruction caused by “natural” events such as hurricanes and earthquakes. Nature acts without intention. It simply does what it does. But what may be realized is that humans are an expression of nature as well. The Nazi, the child rapist, the factory farmer, the slave owner, the abusive drunk only have the sensitivity and capacity for empathy that they have. They don’t really have a choice, until perhaps they do—but when they don’t, they don’t…

Maybe from a larger perspective, it’s all in perfect balance, including the possible demise of the human species and even all organic life on this planet. After all, these profit-seeking, gas-guzzling, meat-eating, baby-producing, jet-traveling, tree-felling, plastic-using sapiens who seem to be mindlessly overrunning the earth are themselves an expression of the natural world, a movement of the universe… all of it empty of enduring form or substance, very much like a dream. Everything passes. No-thing remains.

One way or another… all humans will eventually die. The planet will die. The sun will eventually explode. No form survives. And that’s not bad news. That’s what makes life so alive, so dynamic. Knowing this doesn’t eliminate heartbreak and grief or the experience of loss, but it puts it all in a different light.

As I realize more and more deeply, the greatest gift we can offer to ourselves and the world is to be awake and rooted in love. That doesn’t mean ignoring the darkness or always being in a good mood, but it means seeing the light and the beauty that is here even in the darkness, and not wallowing obsessively and pointlessly in negative spin. It means being vulnerable and undefended, allowing the heart to open, again and again, relinquishing our certainty about what is right. It means giving up the control we’ve never really had, dying to the past. From love, from presence, intelligent action arises—whether it is the environmental activism of a Greta Thunberg, the silent contribution of someone like Ramana Maharshi, or those musicians making beautiful music on the deck of the Titanic as it sank.

It’s always worth noticing what we are actually devoting our time and energy to, where we are putting our attention, whether it is on scary thoughts, social media, people we dislike, or the unconditional love that permeates it all. When we open to love, when we devote ourselves to presence, when we’re awake Here-Now, we know in our hearts that all is well, no matter what seems to happen in the movie of waking life.

—from DEATH: The End of Self-Improvement

And I’ll share a few more excerpts from two of my other earlier books on this subject of suffering and the darkness in the world:

From my book Awake in the Heartland: The Ecstasy of What Is:

When you start looking into it deeply, it becomes very difficult to find the separation between light and dark… The apparent misfortunes in my own life have been the sources of my deepest wisdom, insight, compassion, humor, and strength. And yet, if I were choosing my life, I’d leave them all out. Perhaps that’s why we’re not consulted. We’d write a very flat script.

This is the fallacy of positive thinking and visualization—we never visualize ourselves with cancer, losing an arm, being a drunk, biting our fingers all night, our child ending up in a wheelchair, our bank account at zero, the world suffering yet another war. We visualize some all-one-sided, happy picture that misses the richness of life as it actually is. We visualize what can never actually exist: a one-sided coin, up triumphing permanently over down. But that’s not how it works. Up cannot exist without down. They are always in perfect balance. Neither one really exists.

Perfection never exists the way we imagine it in the mind. The only real perfection is exactly what’s here right now. That doesn’t mean I like everything that happens, and it doesn’t mean I don’t act to bring about something different. I wouldn’t hope for anyone to have a bomb dropped on them, or for any child to be born disabled, and if I could snap my fingers and have a new right hand, I’m sure I’d snap those fingers. If asked to choose between a million dollars or the loss of both legs, I’d pick the million dollars without a moment of hesitation. But I know from my own life experience that loosing both legs could be incredible grace, and that having a million dollars could involve profound suffering. Life happens. Ultimately it is beyond the scope of the mind to evaluate.

From our human perspective, it would be a terrible thing if there was a global nuclear war that wiped out all life forms on earth. But from the perspective of the totality, it might be just one more tiny event, clearing the way for something new to emerge.  From the point of view of the dinosaur, their extinction would seem like a dreadful mistake. From the point of view of the polio virus, the Salk vaccine would look like genocide. From the perspective of the universe, the disorder is all part of the larger order, in which there is space for all possibilities, for experimentation and mistakes, for play. There is room for everything in this dream, even the horror.

This doesn’t mean we might just as well drop a nuclear bomb on our neighbors, or let our children get polio. But it does mean that we no longer imagine that we know what’s best for the universe. We no longer imagine that we have to (or could) “save the world,” or that it would surely be a “good thing” if we could. We simply respond to life as best we can, doing whatever life moves us to do…

Thousands of people are buried alive by earthquakes. We feel badly for them, but we feel differently when a young man blows up the Federal Building in Oklahoma City, or when people hijack airplanes and fly them into buildings. We think that the people who die at the hands of other people are victims of something more personal than those who die through an “act of nature.”  The actions of Timothy McVey, Adolph Hitler, Ariel Sharon, Yasar Arafat, George Bush, or Osama bin Laden are not usually seen as acts of nature, because we think of these people (and ourselves) as having some kind of independent will, independent of nature or God. Is that actually true? The atrocities committed by our fellow humans seem to us to be the result of some kind of misunderstanding or malfunctioning that we think might be avoidable, or might be in our power to change, unlike the earthquake, which is clearly beyond human control.

Thousands of people dying, perhaps slowly and painfully. In a sense, nothing is happening except that forms are breaking down and new forms are emerging. We make up a story around it, and call it a tragedy. And yet, as sensitive beings, when we see such suffering, how can there not be sorrow? And, in the case of the human-generated suffering, a natural curiosity to find out if there is any other way for human beings to function. What makes us do these kinds of things and can it be otherwise?  Is there another possibility?  And if there is, what is the source of it?   

—from Awake in the Heartland

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From Nothing to Grasp:

Although we often think of ourselves as something outside of nature or beyond nature, or perhaps as some kind of unnatural aberration; in fact, our complex brains and our human activity are as much an expression of nature as anything else. Our skyscrapers, highways and weapons of mass destruction are every bit as natural as beaver dams, ant hills and bee stings. And likewise, modern medicine, political movements fighting for social justice, spiritual practices such as meditation and books like this one are also an expression of nature, just as the white blood cells battling an infection in the body are an expression of nature. Everything is included in what is…

Everything is as it is. And as Thich Nhat Hanh points out, roses and garbage are inseparable – the rose depends on the compost, and the compost depends on the rose – they contain each other as one undivided process that he calls interbeing. And in the final analysis, our whole life and this whole universe is like a snowflake hitting the warm ground. Poof! It’s gone! How real was it?

A friend recently wrote to me that he was seeing the image of Jesus on the cross in a wholly new way, as a pointer to the sacredness of everything. “It is God hanging on the cross,” he wrote, “spikes through hands and feet, showing that even this suffering is sacred, is God, is Emptiness, is Just This.”

—from Nothing to Grasp

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Words from a few other people:

I am not trying to not suffer…I just accept everything as it is to the best of my ability… Living involves suffering… When you’re sensitive, you suffer. That’s what suffering is, the sensitivity of your mind and your body… The only "enlightenment" I know is here and now—to be as you are right now, suffering or not… Things are as they are and in this moment (right now) can be no different… If you are suffering, don't run from it. Embrace it and live it. That really would be "enlightened."
--Robert Saltzman from his recent Substack

What makes it unbearable is your mistaken belief that it can be cured.
--Zen teacher Charlotte Joko Beck

We live in a world that is not perfectible, a world that always presents you with a sense of something undone, something missing, something hurting, something irritating. From that minor sense of discomfort to torture and poverty and murder, we live in that kind of universe. The wound that does not heal—this human predicament is a predicament that does not perfect itself. But there is the consolation of no exit, the consolation that this is what you're stuck with. Rather than the consolation of healing the wound, of finding the right kind of medical attention or the right kind of religion, there is a certain wisdom of no exit: this is our human predicament and the only consolation is embracing it. It is our situation, and the only consolation is the full embrace of that reality.
--Leonard Cohen, from a 1994 Shambhala Sun interview

We want to be only good, and we want to remove all evil. But that is because we forget that good is made of non-good elements... You cannot be good alone. You cannot hope to remove evil, because thanks to evil, good exists, and vice versa… No mud, no lotus.
--Thich Nhat Hanh

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Wishing you all blessings (whatever that may mean—I’d say it means wishing you what is), and thank you all for being here, just exactly as you are. (And you can always find more about my books, the individual meetings I offer, a donate button to my PayPal, podcasts, articles, and much more on my website.)