when spirit pretends

What is suffering? Why do we suffer? The answer is simple, but difficult to hear. Suffering is spirit insisting on being aware of itself. We suffer because, as spirit, we are tired of pretending we aren't spirit.

How do we pretend we aren't spirit? The question might be restated as follows: how don't we? It seems that pretending we aren't spirit is most of what we do. The whole world is a great theater in which spirit is pretending not to be itself, and generally believing the charade. This can even be true in spiritual matters. As soon as you think you are a "someone" more than you remember you are spirit, the pretending begins.

But nobody really likes the pretending. There is tremendous attachment to it, but the attachment gives rise to every sorrow, heartache, and difficult emotion in your life. And eventually you have to get sick of those. That is, notice them. They happen so you'll notice them. They are all forms of suffering and they serve to get your attention.

Your attention. Whose attention? Who are you? Are you really the person who is lost in the suffering? That's what the suffering eventually makes clear: that you aren't. That it's been a big mistake all along to consider yourself that person, any person. That prior to your "personhood" there is something more basic and essential, and that something is the real you, and has been all along. You were mistaken not to realize it.

In other words, sufficient suffering serves to disrupt you from your identification with your outer form, which is not your most essential self. Go ahead and disagree with me and observe the recurrence of suffering in your life. It won't go away. You can bury it under pills, distract yourself from it with a frantic lifestyle, and talk your mind into countless airtight dismissals of the facts, but they don't go away, not forever, not for very long at all.

Why wait? Why wait anymore? Haven't you waited enough? Once you hear the truth about your suffering, don't you want to release yourself from it? Simply admit to yourself what you've known all along. Admit you are spirit and always have been. Admit you are pretending not to be. Admit it now and repeatedly.

Or go on suffering.