The Soul of Suffering and the Human Condition

In his important text, After Prophecy, Tom Cheetham makes this extraordinary statement, “We are all idolators. One reason for this is that being human is the most difficult task there is” (24). He then goes on to build a case for this statement that rings true for our actual lived experience (sometimes our own individual personal experience, and certainly the lived experience of millions of human beings across this planet who struggle simply to survive). Closer to home, he says that “even a privileged life is full of confusion, pain, and suffering,” and that the lives of many of us are marked by unimaginable agonies. Why is this so? The answer, he says, is our strange disorientation.

The difficult task that we have is to exist along the horizontal axis without losing our way, but the fact is that we easily become disoriented. The word “orient” has a double meaning, of course. Obviously one is “East,”—the Orient (and is a noun), but the other has to do with direction and is a verb that indicates how we stand in and perceive the world (as when we say, “I got lost in that city, but was able to reorient myself.”). Suppose then, that spiritually speaking our inner orientation is designed to be toward the true “East” of our own being—the Source of Light, and without that inner sense of direction we become lost and confused.

Wisdom teaching makes this absolutely clear, the horizontal axis is a very confusing (dis-orienting) environment, and therefore it is a difficult task to live along it as a human being—perhaps the most difficult task there ever was. Think of it, here we are, and we are being asked to undertake this great difficulty. What makes it even more difficult is that the world around us is so insistent that this is the most important reality, if not the only reality. We wake up every day with its power surging all around us—offering us attractions, duties, privileges, and comforts that are all consuming. But the life we often experience is still full of pain, suffering, confusion and chaos. Cheetham explains,

The world is complicated in ways we can only dimly comprehended. Our best intentions cannot guarantee the consequences of our acts. It is so easy to become confused, disheartened, angry, and despairing, to feel abandoned, exiled, and homeless. It is easy to lose faith, to become at best an agnostic, at worst, a nihilist—and so then to become the poor, the maimed, the blind, and the lame.

It is obvious, then, that the only answer can be some kind of inner reorientation. I want to examine this process further in the next series of posts.