Buddhism preaches a gospel of the cessation of pain. And its techniques, including meditation, contemplation, and letting go have a lot of value. And there are many other philosophical and psychological systems that are also focused on freeing your mind from the pain and burdens of the world, our guilt and fear and sadness. They weigh on us, they twist our psyches, they steal our happiness. So we look for ways to steal it back.
What those psychologists miss, I think, is that the pain isn’t only in your mind. That, of course, is a major point of disagreement between many typical Eastern and opposing Western philosophies. Suffering and division and sickness is fundamentally illusory, the result of incorrect perspective, in systems like Buddhism. Fix your perspective, and you’ll fix yourself and your world.
For many Western perspectives, the problems are out there. We want to solve them and defeat them. We have a progressive rather than a cyclical view of the universe. The pain and burdens and diseases are challenges to be conquered. But so often, we find that we cannot fix our problems, and even worse, we lose our capacity to even effectively try to do so because of their effect upon our psyches. We’re so aware of our problems and failings, so enslaved to them, that we can’t escape them. And considering that there seems no end to the problems and suffering we face, and there is a limit to our ability to understand or solve it or emotionally bear it, we often collapse.
So I see the power of the argument the Buddha makes. The pain is destructive. You need to free your mind from it. Where things go wrong, though, in my opinion, is what you should do next. I think the Western philosophies have some good points too. It’s not enough to free your mind of pain. I don’t buy that the suffering is only in here, an illusion of perspective. The whole point of freeing your mind from your pain is so you can return to it. So you can do the surgery that needs doing without being rendered helpless by the pain of the wound.
We need our pain so we can detect our wounds. Mere anasthetic may make our life more pleasant by providing the illusion of health and yes, the burden of truly knowing and feeling the suffering of your sickness is overwhelming. But without both, you’ll never be truly healthy and happy.
This is why the Christian gospel goes all in on sin and grace. Both together, not separately. Because the burden of sin is so great, you need to free yourself from it. But if you don’t use your freedom to return to it, you’ll never really be free of it. The pain of guilt is there to drive us to seek grace. The peace of grace is there to help us deal with our guilt. The two paths are a necessary pair, complete only when they find one another undiluted, and when we embrace the power of both to drive us to better things.
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