Suffering in the World

Questions: The suffering in the world can feel overwhelming: what can I do to help? How can I feel joyful when others are suffering?

Thank you for listening. More talks and courses with Sananda and Christopher at www.heaven-on-earth.co.uk.

Transcript

Welcome, this is Sananda. Suffering, as you know, is in your experience part of what it is to be human. You may have a feeling that it isn't a necessary part or that it shouldn't be a necessary part, but so far, unless you are very exceptional, pain has been, suffering has been, part of your life. And certainly when you look around the world at this time, you can witness (even if things are going well for you) others suffering a great deal. What is suffering really? One way of thinking about it or describing it is: disconnection. So, for example, if you experience discomfort or pain in your body, you can look within and you may be able to establish some causes and those causes are going to be, at the physical level, systems within your body, not being entirely in harmony with each other, not fully communicating with each other, something having gone out of alignment, a line of communication having broken, something like that. 

01:47

We might then suggest - not requiring this to be an absolute truth, but just as a way of considering all of this - that if separation causes suffering, then oneness brings about joy. And certainly it's useful to suggest, simply for your consideration, that as you move to a greater sense of oneness, both internally feeling at one with all you find yourself to be and externally feeling at one with the world in which you take your existence, then that movement towards oneness is going to be productive of joy. Another way of considering what joy is, is to think of it again very simply as your life experiencing the joy of being alive: life feeling alive. So consciousness comes into this recipe, a life conscious of itself. 

03:11

And therefore one might argue, and there's value in this argument, that any retreat from joy is also going to be a retreat from a full consciousness that you're capable of, that in some way the life you are has lost sight, however minimally, of the life that it is. In this way we can consider joy to be a fundamental, even perhaps the fundamental characteristic of life, as a mood music. Joy itself exists on a spectrum, and so you might move up from joy to bliss and from bliss to something that perhaps you could use the word ecstasy for and so on. You find that joyfulness passing into the experience of oneness; in other words, life coming to know that it is, not just this life that is you, wonderful though that is, but actually all life. 

04:32

Suffering matters to you. As physical beings it's part of the gift of your physical body to offer you the experience of suffering, so that actually you steer away from it. If you bang your thumb accidentally with a hammer, the body says ‘mm, you’re probably not going to want to do that again. I'll attempt to steer you away from such misuse of the tool’. So in that sense, also we can say that suffering is a valuable contribution to your experience of being human. Yes, there's been a breakdown of communication. The hand with the hammer in it fell out of perfect communication with the hand whose thumb was hit, but there is that redeeming experience, you might say, that indicator that there's been a breakdown of communication that you experience as pain. 

05:37

So there is a mechanism at work here that you seek to use to your own advantage, for your own wellbeing, both as physical beings but also more broadly. And yet, you can probably recognise in yourself and certainly see this in others, there can be a tendency to not really take on those messages that pain give you; to find yourself in some strange addictive loop returning to a pain that you've experienced before - some part of you setting up that situation as if the lesson that the pain offered you in the first instance wasn't quite enough, that something within you needs to go back to revisit that pain, to say, ‘hang on, there’s something more I haven't understood yet. I need to create that experience of pain again or yet again because I'm still learning from it’. 

06:55

And after all, one may argue very valuably, very appropriately, that such a set of experiences do indeed have their own value. You do not need to criticise yourself if you're not instantly able to take on board totally the message of a particular pain or a particular experience of suffering, but need in some way to bring it back into your life in order to understand more fully what drew you to have that first experience. And this has certainly been very strongly characteristic of your reality that there has been a tendency to revisit suffering, some lurking feeling that you're not quite finished with it. 

07:44

We could think of an experience involving many people around the world at this time, and of course at many other times: the experience of war, people deliberately setting out to kill each other. And you can stand back from that and say, ‘This is foolish. This is not really going to help. All of that pain is not going to bring about the desired results.’ You can say to yourself as you stand back, ‘If you want peace, then probably killing people is not a very good way of setting about it.’ And yet you can witness this happening. You yourself may be able to rise above it or as I say, stand back from it, but you see it as a cycle of behaviour, paradoxically alive and well in your world. 

08:48

And yet as humanity, although it may not seem like that right now, you are moving away from this collectively, and you'll find this more over the coming decades. There is, and it may be more gradual than you would like, a recognition that inflicting pain upon others doesn't really bring about the resolutions that were the motivating power for that infliction of pain. Or to put this another way, to be rather more blunt about it, you can find that there is an increasing recognition that what is claimed as the purpose behind the infliction of pain on others, or indeed upon yourself, is not really the real reason, that something else is going on. I and many others suggest that it's much more simple than that, that if someone inflicts pain upon another, no matter how noble the cause they claim, the real reason for them inflicting pain on another is that that's what they want to do. Behind and within that reason there can of course be, as I referenced earlier, a desire within the being to understand more about this action that they're finding themselves drawn into repeating, so that ultimately they can desist. And so it is characteristic of the earth plane, as it has been for a long time, that it's remarkably easy to get caught in these cycles of repeating patterns of behaviour. 

10:41

That then brings us to respond a little bit more directly to the questions asked. The suffering in the world can indeed sometimes feel overwhelming, but it is not. There is no need for you to be overwhelmed by it. One way forward, one way helping you to that place of realising that you do not need to be overwhelmed, even if the suffering around you is great, is to appreciate that you are not powerless. Much of the sense of overwhelm comes from a belief that you are powerless. If others are struggling with suffering of a particular kind, especially a particular kind that is a repeating pattern, but really more broadly right across the board with all suffering that you witness within yourself or within another, the knowledge that you do not need to yourself be caught in a pattern of repeating behaviour, that if you are suffering yourself, that you have within you the power to in some way or other ameliorate that experience. At this stage of your existence you may not be able to cancel out the suffering entirely, but you can certainly change your relationship to it. 

12:18

In other words, anything that gives you an awareness that first of all you are not powerless, and secondly, even if this is only an internal experience, you can adjust your relationship to the suffering you yourself are experiencing or that you are witnessing in another; and furthermore that your own internal relationship with yourself, with your thoughts, with your feelings does not stop at the edge of your body - it flows outwards into the world, your own inner world is not sealed, it is not limited by the boundary of your physical body - when you think loving thoughts, when you feel compassion for the suffering of others, that is not an empty gesture. It is not you shouting into the void. No, all life is connected. You are connected with all living beings. When you experience compassion, that compassion is available to all life or, to put it another way, when you experience feelings of compassion for the suffering of others, you're holding that energy in your awareness and you're helping to make that energy more present on Earth. It is entirely the choice of every individual in the world, whether they accept and receive and drink in that energy, but you are offering it. 

13:59

You do not require others to feel compassion for each other or for you, but you're offering the opportunity. Understand that it is no fault of yours that you cannot fix all the troubles in the world. It is not given to do that, it is not your role, it's not your purpose. As a consciousness, you, humanity, came into the world in billions of individual bodies deliberately. It's a mode of being, of course, that is widely used, not just on Earth and not just by humans or beings of your kind. But nevertheless understand that there is a profound purpose behind this working out of all of the possibilities that life offers: that in this particular reality, by creating a fairly convincing illusion that you are a separate being from everybody else, you set up the possibility for a great deal of suffering until the realisation comes that you are not separate from everyone else. That the injury you afflict upon another, you are also inflicting upon yourself. And as that becomes more and more evident to you, so hopefully it becomes more easy for you to feel compassion for yourself and for all life. And in that experience of compassion, there is a movement towards oneness. And in that movement towards oneness, the breakdown of connections or communications that led to the suffering in the first place are at least a little bit and perhaps a lot healed. 

15:54

So then we come onto the consideration of how it is possible for you to feel joyful when others are suffering. And of course it isn't always easy. You care. You care about what happens in your world. You care about what happens to your world. And it is easy, there’s a strong temptation, to feel that the right and proper way to respond to the suffering of others is to join them in that suffering. To a degree, the energy of compassion permits you to do that, but not through direct suffering yourself. That kind of resonance just amplifies the presence of suffering in your world. Compassion does it differently. Compassion is able to witness with profound love what is happening for another, and to recognise that you are not ultimately separate from what is happening to that other. 

17:00

But in that process there is also the experience of being fundamentally in the joyful place that is life recognising life, life being life. And so you can learn, you are learning more and more to allow yourself to be in the continuous state of joyfulness, quite simply because you're alive and you know you're alive. And from that place of joyfulness to be able to witness whatever is happening for others and knowing that you staying with that sense of joy, of aliveness, is your surest way of connecting with the oneness of all life. And that in connecting with the oneness of all life, you are offering, not insisting, but you are offering reconnection, the reconnection that brings about the healing of suffering. Maybe not instantly, but it brings it about. Therefore, and for sure this is not always the easiest thing to do, but focusing upon a continuous joyfulness that is your life being alive, focusing upon it, that is to say, just recognising it, listening, not actually being distracted by the cries of others, not ignoring them, but coming to the place from which you can be most powerfully helpful. 

18:48

We hold a vision - and by we I mean countless beings of light who are focusing upon the earth plane and this planet - we hold a vision of more and more of you coming to be in that state of a natural joyfulness, holding those frequencies which are so powerful, so beautiful, so rich, holding those frequencies and holding those frequencies, not by some magic, not by some hard work effort, but simply by knowing in the moment that you are alive. And as more and more do that, what happens is that more and more come into the present. If you look at the sources of suffering in the world - this may not be an absolute truth - but so often what you will find is the suffering is about memories of the past or fears of the future. Indeed, in a certain way, you can say that suffering is never in the present moment. 

20:06

If you consider, for example, a simple kind of accident that you might've had at one time or another in your life where you've cut your finger. If you look back, you're probably going to find that in the moment of cutting your finger, there wasn't pain, there wasn't suffering, plenty of suffering afterwards, but in that moment, it's not actually there. Now, here I'm sketching in a recipe that's not necessarily easy to follow. The recipe, then, is to be totally in the now and to leave all suffering in the places where it actually belongs: past or some imagined future. But to be fully present, totally present, not having energy spread out across past and future, that’s a process, that's a journey of growing. So never be hard on yourself if right now, you haven't quite got that. And so in a more ordinary way of talking about these things, of course suffering is here in the world, in your present. You can turn on your TV screen and see it every day, even if it's not directly there in your own life, your own neighbourhood. And your compassion may be such that you grieve for the suffering of others. 

21:47

And what I'm saying here is that to be joyful and to be grieving are not automatically contradictory, that you can feel that joyfulness of being alive and in that feeling of joyfulness, of being alive, to feel immense love, compassion, caring for another. And in that feeling, because you're a physical being, there may, for example, be tears. So this is not a recipe that I'm presenting to you for some lofty place where you are not moved by the experience of others. No, it's something more subtle. It is an encouragement to know that of course you're going to be removed by what others experience, but that it doesn't have to move you out of the place of joy. You are a powerful presence in the world. Be comfortable with that. Your feelings, your thoughts make a difference in the world. 

23:21

One of the most powerful ways you can alleviate suffering in the world is through unconditional love. And of course when you see another suffering, for most of you, most of the time that unconditional love just is there, so naturally: you see a child suffering in another part of the world on your TV screen, and you want to hold that child in your arms. But then consider the one who hurt the child. How are you doing with that? Can you feel compassion, unconditional love for that one as well? If you can, you're doing something powerful in the world. If you look into the hearts of those who set about causing the most suffering, either deliberately or incidentally through a kind of carelessness, you'll find people who've become separate from themselves, who've lost touch with that joy of being alive, who've become instead, some sort of juggernaut of mechanisms, reactions to the world, belief systems that entrap them. 

24:49

And if you're able to see that being for who he or she truly is, perhaps for example, looking at the child within that perpetrator, that one who harms, so often you will find a frightened child, someone who's hurting dreadfully, someone perhaps who felt very judged. And if you are judging that person, you're just adding to the suffering that they have.  And you're human, there might be a part of you that says, ‘Well, serve him her, right. They had it coming.’ And that's okay. Let that energy go. But come to a place where you’re able to see that even the people who do or seem to do the worst things in the world, they're not separate from you. They're part of human consciousness too. 

25:53

And if you can (you don't need to force yourself), step back a little, take a look, using whatever way works for you - I've suggested one, finding the child within - feel compassion for this individual who's become separated from his or her humanity, his or her beingness, and has become trapped in a kind of machine. That makes a difference. It'll carry on making a difference over the coming decades. You're moving into a time of profound change. Some of that change will be rapid. You have a part to play in that, whether you're here in this physical life, whether you've moved on. Each one of you hearing these words will still have a relationship with the earth plane, a commitment to assisting the Earth in this process of rapid evolution. And any time, even for the smallest fraction of a second, that you are able to feel unconditional love or compassion for everybody, no matter who they are, no matter what they've done, no matter what their history, no matter what their beliefs, everyone, then you're bringing not only healing to the earth, but you're helping to bring about connections - that’s part of the healing - but those connections then offer you as humanity the opportunity to fulfil what we might describe as your destiny, that is to say, to build something more than the sum of all those who make up humanity, all those billions of individuals. That's when you come to discover who you are as humans. And so any tiny contribution that you make is not tiny. It's large and valuable, and you matter and your joy matters. Your internal sense of joy at being alive is a huge contribution to the earth plane. 

Good, thank you for listening.