Do you miss out on life by Suffering?

[Bobby_2021]

Recently I read a post by Leo that pursuing a life of higher development must come with high cost. You have to put up with lots of suffering.

What I thought was that suffering is a bug in reality. That something that you are doing is fundamentally wrong when you are suffering. 

Do you miss out on Life by suffering?

Does pursuing the Good life by extraordinary levels of suffering come with significant rewards?

Should you try to minimise suffering?

What is the correct way to suffer?

Should you let yourself suffer endlessly or should you call ut quit?

Thoughts? 

[Leo Gura]

Some suffering is a clue that you're living your life wrong.

But some suffering is just inescapable even if you live correctly.

Most of us don't live life perfectly and therefore create a lot of needless suffering for ourselves. In which case that suffering is a good teacher to train you to become a better human.

Of course your goal should be to try to minimize behavior which leads to great suffering. That is the process of your development. When handled properly suffering teaches you to stop doing foolish things.

But even if you do all the above, there is still suffering which you will not be able to avoid. And then your job becomes to handle it gracefully.

Edited August 5, 2023 by Leo Gura

[Bobby_2021]

https://www.actualized.org/insights/actualized-quotes-050

Oh this ties in well with all the suffering Leo has been experiencing. 

[Bobby_2021]

1 minute ago, Leo Gura said:

Of course your goal should be to try to minimize behavior which leads to great suffering. That is the process of your development.

Paradoxical beyond comprehension. 

[caspex]

I think most people get into consciousness work believing they can end their suffering. I think there's only an end to needless suffering, but you can't truly end suffering altogether. After a while though, your spirituality slowly evolves from wanting an end to suffering, to wanting bliss, to wanting understanding, to experiencing truth, to becoming/dissolving in truth. The spiritual journey goes through loads of evolutions. Your spirituality becomes about truth rather than suffering or bliss

[Buck Edwards]

There's positive value and negative value. 

Positive value helps you grow. Negative value teaches you lessons. 

However life is not about only learning lessons

Balance and moderation is the key 

 

 

[Bobby_2021]

8 hours ago, Swarnim said:

I think most people get into consciousness work believing they can end their suffering.

That's true.

8 hours ago, Swarnim said:

. I think there's only an end to needless suffering

How do you know if you are suffering needlessly? (Apart from the obvious cases like getting addicted to drugs)

8 hours ago, Swarnim said:

After a while though, your spirituality slowly evolves from wanting an end to suffering, to wanting bliss, to wanting understanding, to experiencing truth, to becoming/dissolving in truth. The spiritual journey goes through loads of evolutions. Your spirituality becomes about truth rather than suffering or bliss

I think we will become numb to the suffering. 

A big motivation for me in my childhood was to escape suffering. But that actually caused even more suffering. Counterintuitively.

So the best way to minimise suffering might be to embrace it while you suffer.

6 hours ago, Buck Edwards said:

There's positive value and negative value. 

Positive value helps you grow. Negative value teaches you lessons. 

However life is not about only learning lessons

Balance and moderation is the key 

?

[Yimpa]

21 minutes ago, Bobby_2021 said:

I think we will become numb to the suffering. 

A big motivation for me in my childhood was to escape suffering. But that actually caused even more suffering. Counterintuitively.

So the best way to minimise suffering might be to embrace it while you suffer.

Avoidance or escape is a short-term solution to fear and suffering.
(in other words, we learn that when we’re exposed to our fear it creates suffering; thus we must avoid or escape it. This works in the short-term. The suffering goes away… until the fear comes back. Then you must repeat the cycle over again, keeping you stuck.)

Fear -> Suffering -> Avoid/escape -> Short-term relief
Repeat

By staying in this cycle, you never learn to fully face your fears.

Instead: face your fear, suffer mindfully, cut out the safety behaviors (e.g. avoid/escape), and learn that you can handle it. (this is something you need to practice over and over again; doing it once ain’t gonna do it). 

Edited August 6, 2023 by Yimpa

[hyruga]

You can fight your thoughts vigorously by questioning past beliefs.

And you can also choose to be joyful because you are God. Didn't this forum always like to preach the latter?

[Bobby_2021]

Posting all my thoughts from contemplating suffering:

 

Suffering is a an important feature in the imagination of reality by God to make it real.

Which is why it's so hard to get anything done, things always go sideways, and life is just pain no matter whatever you do. You can never escape from the costs even if go obsess every single fibre of your to living correctly.

There is just endless suffering.

Suffering is simply imagined by God for no real reason, actually. It simply is imagined as a feature of reality to make it more real. There need not be any cause and effect between suffering and the things that causes suffering. Even that relationship is imaginary and wouldn't exist unless imagined.

I think a worthwhile life is when you have a lot of ups and downs.

Suffer a lot as well as enjoy a lot.

Suffering is like a cost. And you can reduce the net cost by restricting yourself from engaging in transactions at all. And you can maximize the value from those few transactions you actually engage in. 

I think a conservative worldview is the best if you want to completely mitigate suffering. Amd you can have a bit of joy as well occasionally. The entire conservative setup is so nice if you think about it. 

And most of these liberal are also conservative who happened to be slightly more privileged, so don't get lost in the conservative vs liberal fallacy. 

Edited August 9, 2023 by Bobby_2021

[WoodDragon]

I have suffered greatly in this life. I have been lucky enough to have learned from that suffering.

 I have also learned, from Leo and others, that I no longer need to suffer that way to learn.

Still, I am grateful for those challenges. What I have come to know, because of them. So many levels of love.

More than the colors of the rainbow.

 

p.s.

there will always be suffering. What you do or don’t do with it is what will make or brake you.

Edited August 9, 2023 by WoodDragon
Added thought.

[DefinitelyNotARobot]

That already puts suffering on a pedestal, at least the way I read into it. Is life all about suffering? Well suffering is a big part of life, and we shouldn't deny it, but there is a level to which you can give power to this suffering, out of your limited will. By making it seem like one can "miss out" on life you're missing that this feeling of missing out IS a form of suffering. So you suffer and then you suffer the suffering by thinking that it will lead to less happiness and more suffering, thus the wheel keeps spinning. The circle continues.

I'm not certain whether one can break out of that circle or not, but you can definitely throw more coal into the fire than necessary and you can definitely put a break to this wheel, at least momentarily, thanks to all the spiritual tools (and even non-spiritual tools) that are available to us.

So are you missing out? Maybe, but maybe suffering is life in it's most intense form. Maybe being happy isn't as great as it seems? Maybe there is truth in both sides of the coin? Maybe worrying about missing out will be your "coal into fire" situation.

I honestly don't know, I'm just throwing some food for thought into this mix.

Edited August 9, 2023 by DefinitelyNotARobot

[WoodDragon]

Never give up your power. Don’t go looking for suffering. It’s always there. Love is also there. And that is the true teacher.

Don’t take suffering personally. Don’t take anything personally. Nothing is forever. We will experience many things, many times in our lives. Watch from a distance. Don’t get muddled up in the forest.

[Bobby_2021]

It's important to see that you are addicted to this drama, non sense and bullshit. Not at the God level, but at the human personal level.

You kind of like suffering like a masochist. The kind of experience and little treats that you get from suffering. That makes yourself too attached to suffering, even while suffering is totally imaginary in this game of life that God imagine.

It's like deducting points from the game or something silly like that. Suffering exists as a part of the game, which serves as a crucial compenent to make it real. 

If you were totally liberated from suffering, you wouldn't want to do that, you would want tot go back to imagining Suffering.

----

These are just my musings.

@DefinitelyNotARobot nothing is being put on a pedestal. This is merely questioning and contemplating the nature of suffering. Suffering is an integral part of life and it is better that we address that it doesn't become a thorn in the ass later.

Entire spiritual systems have been made solely to escape suffering. So it's better to take control and understand suffering for what it is than getting lost in ideologies inspired by escaping suffering. 

[DefinitelyNotARobot]

2 hours ago, Bobby_2021 said:

nothing is being put on a pedestal.

I was merely talking about the wording of the question, not the question itself.