look on the bright side of life
Vic Shayne
author
13 Pillars of Enlightenment: How to realize your true nature and end suffering
In his movie Annie Hall, Woody Allen said, “I feel that life is divided into the horrible and the miserable. That's the two categories. The horrible are like, I don't know, terminal cases, you know, and blind people, crippled. I don't know how they get through life. It's amazing to me. And the miserable is everyone else. So you should be thankful that you're miserable, because that's very lucky, to be miserable.”
Is life really horrible and miserable? Yes, it is. But wait!! It’s also wonderful and marvelous.
The mind tends to have a very difficult time reconciling the fact that good, bad, love, fear, and hate can all coexist in the same place and in the same moment. Each one of us is made up of such a perplexing mixture of emotions and tendencies, but we do not accept the whole of it. Instead, we choose to acknowledge the best and reject the worst, as if the worst is not also part of us.
sages can be downers
A number of enlightened teachers have expressed ideas about reality that can be taken as cause for depression, anxiety, and hopelessness. Perhaps this was not their intention, but surely this has often been the result of their words for too many people. Some, such as Nisargadatta, have suggested that the body is no more than a disgusting piece of food waiting to return to the earth and be devoured. “We are all food bodies,” he said. A beautiful nose, suggested Siddharameshwar, is actually no more than “a tube of mucus,” the eyes are “the repositories of discharge,” the face is “a spittoon of saliva for a mouth,” and the arms and legs “are crooked branches of a tree…” Not a pleasant picture.
The Buddha clearly said in his First Noble Truth that life is suffering, which is sometimes translated to mean that life is sorrowful. Why didn’t he say that life is also happiness? After all, he was supposedly enlightened and the myth of enlightenment suggests that such sages walk around in a perpetual state of bliss. What makes the Buddha’s message so confusing? It’s because his statement is only half the truth. The whole truth is that life is suffering AND happiness, as well as everything in between.
I am sure our revered enlightened sages would argue that if we are to be realistic then we can see what a playground for violence and suffering this world has always been. The animal kingdom is full of violence, yet parents and school teachers pretend that dinosaurs are cute, colorful, and happy animals that were fun to be around. Raccoons, bears, and tigers are adorable and cuddly, unless of course they are eating their young or tearing another animal to pieces at feeding time. And inside our bodies at this very moment there is a war to the death between cells and microorganisms. Right now, passing through our minds are destructive, sad thoughts that we are ashamed to admit we have.
a sobering reality
To see the world as it actually is can be quite sobering and overwhelming to the mind, especially when it has difficulty handing stress and conflict. For some reason, in a great many people at least, there is a tendency to focus on the negative instead of the positive. And even fewer embrace life as a whole movement of life, realizing that it is unchangeable, unstoppable, and indifferent to our feelings and opinions. And then there are the very few among us who recognize themselves to be indistinguishable from this totality of movement.
to ignore or accept
We can find the horrible if we want, because it’s everywhere. Mass murders are as common in the United States these days as school graduations. And more people have been killed in wars in the 20th Century than in any other era in human history. Such violence is a reflection of conflicted minds that are focused on hurt, loneliness, greed, anger, pain, loss, fear, and so on.
Should we turn our back on this reality and pretend that gun violence, abuse, starvation, slavery, and racism are not worth looking at? Not at all. But if we focus only on gun violence, global catastrophes, starving children, flesh-eating disease, and Putin’s unprovoked slaughter of Ukrainians, then our entire life is consumed by sorrow. And with this narrow focus we are ignoring the good that life has to offer. Why, then, is there a tendency to be mired in the negative?
Our entire culture and society, as well as religion and other institutions, are stacked against us, trying to push us in a certain direction. All of them teach that we need to reject and punish the bad and reward the good. The bad is rejected without looking at it. The so-called negative aspect of life and thought is stuffed down, marginalized, shamed, and vilified. It is not dealt with in any helpful manner, as an integral part of what we are.
We can be consumed by, and consume, sorrow most of the days of our lives, but is this what we want? And will this get us any closer to our goal of knowing what we are beyond such things?
choosing between suffering and happiness
Life — consciousness —is the totality of all there is, all of our experiences, thoughts, urges, and relationships that present both suffering and happiness. No doubt it is suffering that leads us to look deeper at life and what we have to do with it; it is the supreme catalyst. A happy, contented person is far less likely to enquire into what he truly is beyond a body navigating through an uncertain world. When you suffer and have a problem you are moved to figure things out. When you are happy you don’t want to look at the sadness.
why not try to be happy?
Is it wrong to bask in your happiness? Not at all. However, trying to be happy is another story.
If you try to be happy or search for happiness then this is a sign that you are not happy. Think about it. And when a person seeks to make another suffer it is because the former is not happy. What to do?
When we recognize that we are both happiness and suffering, there is no need to search or try to find happiness, because it is right here, right now. There is no choice to be made, there is only observation of what already exists. If you can truly see this then you will see the folly in trying to be happy, looking for a way to escape your suffering, and using a lot of effort to find something that has always been present. To escape your sorrow is to escape from yourself, which is not possible.
When you embrace the totality of life and all the emotions that make up the consciousness in which the body dwells then you can readily see the beauty in people, nature, animals, and events in your life. Happiness is right here, just see it wherever you are, even in the midst of tragedy. This is not an intellectual idea that denies you your right to be sad or suffer; it is a truth that can only be seen with a clear mind.
