You Can Listen To Compassion’s Caress While Reading
(This music can be found on “Compassion’s Caress” Music CD on the Music for You page)
The Alchemy of Suffering
****
“Whether Joy and Laughter or Pain and Tears, remember:
This too will Pass.”
True Reality (not that culturally fabricated to provide humans with a sense of reality) is the Oneness-of-all (not the divisions produced in societies), and Power of Love (again, not what is culturally defined, but what is found in solitude – as odd as that may seem. Only in solitude will you discover the Love beyond what humans can find through relationships.) Discovering and integrating the Oneness-of-all and the Power of Love is ever Reachable and Eternal,” When you have expanded your sense of reality, you have greater perception when going through personal suffering:
Take Suffering into Acceptance
with the Intent to Survive
as well as Learn All You Can.
This Will Bring You a Strength
Acquired No Other Way.
Pheo Rose
If You Have Not Known Despair and Suffering,
You Have A Part of Your Being Still Unknown
When racked by suffering there is little motivation to do much, be with other people, or even see what is beautiful and good. Despair and suffering are, perhaps, the most painful places in life; and this is why Replenish Vitality provides this section. Suffering may lead you to take this journey to the vitality of holistic integration. But when racked and in immense need, you deserve support and care. Perhaps the following may help you.
When suffering, there is often a feeling of emotional numbness, and dimmed interest. All the distractions and entertainment human culture provides no longer have appeal. Rather than letting this depress you more, look to what is now available to you. In the stillness of this, if you open to your experience, you may see some of the greatest inner depths of human existence.
For here, when the world’s attractions are ebbed, and the glitter and bright lights of human culture are obscured, accessing the depths of solitude and coming much closer to your true self is greatly enhanced. The sense of nothingness is a precious door opening to greater truths, deeper reality.
But to access these greater truths and deeper reality faith is required. “Faith” is a word most associated with religions, but really points to a leap of consciousness, in which a person realizes that there is a greater reality that cannot be seen, heard, tasted, or touched — belief in that which is unseen. (There is an immense vulnerability if you listen to others. The only path is within yourself. For at best, others can support you in/to the solitude; at worst, others’ lies that they can lead you to those greater depths, requires keen discernment [See Discernment in the program The Land of Being]) With the even initial knowledge through a monetary flash of faith a strength comes which helps you not only survive the nothingness:
Nascent Faith
Touching unending expansiveness – even just for a second.
Accepting for a moment – the inconceivable is.
Shedding despair’s torment “Is this all there really is?”;
Our Vision of Existence, after all, only an illusion.
“I believe” utters the astounded voice.
Presence enveloping all loneliness,
Catching the heart’s beat.
Our Vision of love, after all, but a dim reflection.
“You do Exist” utters my astounded voice.
Do not extinguish the flash of hope,
Hold this glimpse of clarity rare,
Buffer taunts of inward doubt.
Fleeting the destiny in that breath,
Of one who lets go.
Eternal the destiny in that breath,
Of one who tenaciously perseveres.
Pheo Rose 1992
Nascent – the state from which development can occur
These moments, when not dismissed, provide priceless knowledge and a unique peace. Faith leads to what many refer to as “living water” in a parched desert of being/living. Here is a poem pointing the way:
The Living Water of Faith
Barrenness is a dust swirling around the dryness of my being.
Aloneness hangs like scorching rags.
A thirst, worse than this desert, haunts me.
Glare hits my eyes, I can no longer see.
Need unmet immobilizes.
I no longer follow the commonly trod trail.
In the stillness of being broken,
I hear a voice I know, but have never heard.
“Come, I will give you living water,
Never will you thirst this deeper thirst.”
I reach for this in the nothingness, almost blind.
Barrenness still has its way with me,
The dust too swirls to parch my mouth.
Aloneness seems to have no other call.
But thirst haunts me not,
And for this I give praise and thanks.
Those trying to drink a reflection will ever thirst.
Pheo Rose 1981
Without faith there is a lure to the many unconscious and subtle forms of self-destruction (a loss of self-care, cheating, thievery, use of drugs, addictions etc.). The harm done to yourself can last much longer than the suffering. Those forms of self-destruction are shadows to the light of faith, through which life is seen in a greater totality.
Think and plan your way of good self-care and survival. Learn true love of yourself when you feel absolutely alone. See that mortality is a form of energy that changes, but that the ultimate energy of existence is never lost. See this time as stillness in which greater truths can be gained, rather than a loss of everything precious. You may only be able to understand these words once you have intentionally entered solitude (a quietness of being content to be alone with yourself).
Remember you alone are the guard and protector of yourself. You alone, can access the Love that is; a Love that is a reality, not a feeling about someone or something. Embrace the goodness you are, because you are of this Love, and this Love is inseparable from you no matter what.
That Love, personified in a myriad of names such as Yahweh, God, Allah, does not plan or desire your pain and suffering. But this Love will give you what no other can. This Love gives you a Presence that enlivens an inner strength, and a perspective that embraces all you suffer. If you can do nothing else, simply hold words like: “Love, I am struggling and sinking in this, please help me.” If you can feel comfortable enough to call on God, never let go of God or your plea for God’s help. (You can use another name, but the essence is that this is a personal being, not a generalized notion). Love is eternal; and God (or another name) is that personal Being with whom you share an intimate relationship.
If you are not comfortable with the word “God” (people and religions have caused much distortion in many ways and times), then find a word that works for you. One in which you can feel held and protected, as well as holds what you have lost, and gives you the strength and determination to survive. Provide for quiet times in intentional ways, while allowing the care of others to balance what you need. (Again, discern and choose wisely those you let tend you, and how.) But, keeping reaching for that personal relationship with that which you have given a name for because your soul seeks the Oneness of this relationship.
To end for now, here are some quotes written by those who have known suffering:
“The deeper the sorrow, the less tongue is used.”
The Talmud
“There is no way to depth of life and richness of spirit by shunning hard experiences. The very discovery of the nearness of God, of the sustaining power of God’s Love, of the sufficiency of God’s Grace, has come to all people in all ages through pain, suffering, and loss.”
Rufus Jones
“As faith and hope without love are only sounding brass and tinkling cymbals,
so all the gladness in the world in which no sorrow is mingled is only sounding brass and tinkling cymbals.”
Soren Kierkegarrd
“There is no remembrance more blessed, and nothing more blessed to remember, than suffering overcome in solidarity with God; this is the mystery of suffering.”
Soren Kierkegarrd.
What we have to do is see as deep as we can into the truth of things; not to invent paradises of thought and sheltered gardens,
from which grief and suffering shall tear us (away from) vulnerable and protesting. But (let us) gaze into the heart of God,
and then follow as faithfully as we can the imperative voice that speaks within the soul.
Arthur Christopher Benson
The great religious conceptions which haunt the imaginations of civilized humanity are scenes of (suffering’s) solitariness:
Prometheus chained to his rock, Mahomet brooding in the desert, the meditations of the Buddha, the solitary man on the cross.
It belongs to the depth of the religious spirit to have felt forsaken, even by God.
Alfred North Whitehead