Suffering and Spirituality
-- A Process of Awakening

by Gregory Allen Butler

Last night I attended a reading group. The group reading focused on suffering and spirituality, or more specifically, the role of suffering in the process of spiritual awakening. It seems that suffering is often the precursor to entering the spiritual path.

One person said that when she worked as a director of a cancer clinic, she would hear patients say how they wished they had gotten their cancer years earlier, such was their renewed sense of aliveness. Each moment of life had become that precious to them. When her friends would ask if her work as a group leader for cancer patients was depressing she would say no. It enriched her life to see the increased happiness of the patients. There were no more neurotic moments in their lives. Life became real.

I find it amazing that cancer patients would be grateful for cancer. But what they were really grateful for is what the crisis, in the form of cancer, precipitated -- a revolutionary change in their outlook on life. There is nothing like an illness to strip away the false values that we hide ourselves in and that some even become addicted to. Things once thought important suddenly no longer are.

One of the things that happens to many people in the course of an intense illness is that they are no longer concerned with the bells and whistles of life, but more with the nuts and bolts. In intense suffering, they no longer live in their heads. They become deeply attuned to the body, and in so doing, they live life fully in the present moment.

What happens to these people is that they begin to experience their bodies with a keener sense of awareness, feeling the energy that vibrates in it and sustains it. With this awareness they discover that this energy is their formless nature, consciousness, spirit, and wholeness. It can’t be experienced from the mind, but only by bringing awareness into the body. And awareness breeds deeper awareness, and with this deeper awareness comes the bliss of the inner life.

Eckhart Tolle, in his book, The Power of Now, says in this way the body acts as a portal into the realm of formlessness. And when we have, deep within us, the experience that our eternal nature is formless, something that doesn’t decay or die, we feel a new sense of aliveness. All religions point to this, and many of us have faith in that. But direct experience gives a deeper conviction than mere faith can achieve.

When I had the biggest illness of my life, the suffering was intense. But once the pain was under control, I was able to experience a far greater joy than I had ever experienced, and that joy came from an inner awakening. In fact, one day I was taking a walk in one of the hospital hallways and a priest whom I had never seen before, noticed my smile and said, "If you don’t get that smile off your face, they’ll transfer you to the psychiatric ward."

And now that I think about it, my smiling had a bit off craziness to it. I had lost just about everything in my life. My father had just died, my band had just broken up, my girlfriend had just left me, I had no money, and my plan to play in the United States Air Force band was nixed because of my health status. On top of that, the prognosis for my future health wasn’t good as my illness was termed chronic. My weight was down to 90 pounds and there wasn’t a whole lot I was allowed to eat.

So why was I smiling? I was smiling due to the bliss that came from an inner awakening. I was smiling because those things no longer mattered. They were no longer attachments; they were severed. I was free.

I quoted Rumi yesterday in my post entitled "Ten Consciousness Raising Quotations." The quote is worth repeating: Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.

That is the role suffering plays in the awakening of the inner life. It not only finds the barriers within you, it crushes them.

You could compare a serious illness to a nightmare. One of the things a nightmare frequently does that a normal dream doesn’t, is that it awakens you. When dreams are pleasant, we don’t want to be awakened. But when we have a nightmare, we frequently wake up, breathing rapidly, thankful that it was only a bad dream. A serious illness seems to play that same role.

Therefore, if you or someone you know is going through intense suffering, realize that it’s an opportunity for the inner life to blossom. Even if death is on the horizon, it’s an opportunity to discover the infinity of spirit and consciousness. It's as if suffering and spirituality are the opposite sides of the same coin.

People forget that behind the clouds is the healing light of the sun, waiting for the perfect moment to break through, just like all the major events in life that occur perfectly on time. And though it might not seem like it, the clouds are just a passing, shadowy spectacle. The sun is always there, even when you can’t see it.

Yesterday at the library I volunteer at from time to time, I ran into an acquaintance whose face was black and blue. I asked her about it. She said she was running, trying to get home before a storm hit, and she fell. She looked really battered. I told her I was sorry that it happened to her. She said, "It had to happen. I needed something to slow me down."

So accidents and illnesses can be your guides. When you are out of balance, moving too fast, and going in too many directions, away from your true purpose, you might experience what I did, or my acquaintance did, or those cancer patients who told the group leader referred to earlier how they wished they had their illness years earlier. You too might then say to yourself, "It had to happen."

That is the relationship of suffering and spirituality.