In Defence of Suffering

Newsflash: I am a Bahá’í. This wouldn’t be a surprise to anyone who isn’t on this blog for the first time. As a Bahá’í, I often — read: almost always — feel compelled to write about Baha’i stuff. It’s part of the deal. The last two posts were almost pure Bahá’í, save for some pop culture references sprinkled in. I bet more than a few of you have stopped reading primarily for this reason. Possibly among other reasons. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to separate things I want to write about from Bahá’í writings and concepts, but I also don’t want to overload my already lengthy and good-will-testing posts with opaque and tangental quotes littered with thous and thees and verilys.

Also, an observation I have made: Bahá’ís seem to be most effective when they work stealthily. This is understandable, as it would probably freak many people out if they fully knew what Bahá’ís had planned for the world (its not bad, I promise… in fact it is really great!). Nonetheless, people are suspicious, often with good reason, about religion, and about people who want to fundamentally change the world, so it is what it is.

One example of how to popularise spiritual concepts in a universal way is the Virtues Project, and particularly their Virtues Cards (I just got some, they are great for initiating elevated conversations with minimal effort and preparation). They are a Bahá’í-inspired initiative, however the content does not make this obviously apparent: in fact you have to dig fairly deep to actually work this connection out. The cards pretty much exemplify the practice of Bahá’í teaching by stealth: drawing on spiritual connects from the Bahá’í Writings, but expressing and explaining them using tangible and relatable examples from other religions and secular schools of thought. Actually, a lot of them are quite New-Agey — perhaps best indicated given one of the creators of the Project was invited on Oprah to talk about it.

This is, ideally, how I would like to write: to explore concepts that are close to universal, but seamlessly weave in Bahá’í-ness, even by stealth if appropriate. Case in point: this post, which I have been trying to work out how to write for while, where I basically want to explore the concept suffering. That’s a tough sell.

There are choice quotes everywhere, religious or otherwise. Here is one from the Bahá’í Writings by Abdu’l-Bahá:

“Men who suffer not, attain no perfection. The plant most pruned by the gardeners is that one which, when the summer comes, will have the most beautiful blossoms and the most abundant fruit.”

Look, it’s a lovely quote. It gives solace to everyone who has a firm belief in the existence of God/some overarching spiritual order that the sufferings they endure are for a purpose. But what good are these quotes to people without this faith, where any promised payoff is so far out of sight as to be irrelevant? I would suggest few, possible no, people undergoing acute experiences of suffering need another person to tell them about the spiritual virtues of suffering. They just want it to end; in many cases they just want to survive it. The role of everyone else is to help them survive it until it ends. Something that I have become acutely aware of is that if taking a ‘Bahá’í’ or similar long-game spiritual approach only serves to alienate this relationship, and our ability to play this role, then it is self-evidently unhelpful. It may even be the last thing that is needed.

So, then, to explore the concept of suffering by Bahá’í stealth — even if saying what I just said makes the whole premise largely redundant.

 

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On one of my first drives to Esperance, when I was first realising how good an opportunity it was to get into audiobooks, I listened to ‘The Secret’, a bestselling book (and ultra-cringe movie, it is on Netflix if you are so interested) from a bit over 10 years ago. It is a seamless blend of spirituality, pseudoscience, self-improvement and wealth creation, with the focus on wealth creation, and is impressive in its ability to de-contextualise quotations from famous people for its own purposes. If that sounded like dubious praise, you are correct — it is at once both inspiring and nauseating.

It identifies a common thread throughout religions, high societies and great thinkers of the power of self-belief and positive thought. The identification of this underlying spiritual and unifying force in the world — the Law of Attraction — is spritely followed by an explanation of how to manipulate and hotwire this force for your own personal gain. You see, by understanding and utilising The Secret^tm, we have the power, through our own thoughts, to attract anything into our lives that we desire. The examples used of what you might achieve with these powers do not include raising a loving family, contribute to a harmonious local community or creating a more peaceful and sustainable world. They do include how to get more cheques in the mail (one of the guest experts really loves getting cheques in the mail), that fast car, that holiday, that house, that wife to die for (direct quote). The central chapter of the book deals with making money. The cause through which you make the money is largely irrelevant, dealt with in passing with a few examples, and simply a means for your own personal end of being wealthy. It is blatantly lacking in any value system that extends beyond wealth and the self. It is thus wholly, fundamentally, depressingly a product of America capitalism, exceptionalism and individualism, and presumably why it sold as well as it did.

It’s a shame they took it in this direction, because there are many parallels with the spiritual philosophy at the heart of The Secret with other more outward looking forms of faith: for example, the notion of prayer lying at the heart of our actions; that those we give generously will receive back a greater amount; that the attitude in which you give — that is, with love and gratitude — is crucial. Like the Virtues Project, it was even on Oprah. It is, in contrast, an epic fail of spirituality by stealth.

 

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I’m not done with The Secret yet; there is much more I would like to discuss, and probably will at some stage (I think I’ve said that before). For example: did you know that anything that makes us feel good, we should do? Anything. Pearls of wisdom from leading life experts include that if we want to eat that salami sandwich, and it makes us happy, we should do it. This is complemented by the well-thought-out and not remotely problematic and dangerous words of Joseph Campbell: “Follow your bliss”. Perhaps they should have also been consistent and transparent enough to advocate for heroin and unprotected sex as well?

Sorry. I’m being a bit of a dick. To clarify: there is nothing wrong with looking after yourself, and there is nothing wrong with doing things that make you happy in moderation. The secret of The Secret has I’m sure been exactly what many people have needed at a particular challenging time in their life — but hopefully only before largely discarding it to remain associated with that particular time of their life. So I’m not hating on self-care, but more questioning it as a coherent and all-encompassing framework to navigate life in a spiritual and altruistic way.

Because there are a lot of assumptions buried deep in the worldview of The Secret which I think are deeply problematic and dangerous to the extent that they should be taken seriously. For example, its conception of sacrifice. On face value it seems fine: yes we should give and be grateful in our giving — to this we agree. But in this case, the recipient of the giving and what happens to them is largely irrelevant. We give for the sole reason to receive more back than we originally give. This is surely the height of spiritual cynicism, especially with what comes next: we should never give to the extent that it becomes a sacrifice, because this will inevitably lead to regret and resentment towards those to which we have given. I actually had to pull over and take a screenshot of the time this played, to go back to make sure I had got it right (halfway through Chapter 6 in case you were wondering).

I disagree with this, obviously, not just because my religion tells me to, and because I just wrote a whole post advocating for sacrifice as virtue. I think it exposes a fundamentally confused understanding of human nature: that on one hand we have such nobility and divinity within us that every decision we make is the right one, that we have such power that we can manifest anything we want into our lives, but yet we are so shallow and self-interested that we cannot take on the burden of improving someone else’s life at our own expense. However, I can see why it is tempting. It’s easy, and who hasn’t at some stage wished that life would just be a bit easier. At some stage, in case it is exactly what you were waiting for, I will try to put together a fully-thought-out Baha’i-stealth rebuttal of this worldview.

In the meantime, what I feel like I can do more convincingly is put an argument up against another aspect of the worldview of The Secret: that fundamentally we live in a world where suffering has no place. Most of the experts in the book and movie underwent acute suffering before they found The Secret. So, to be honest, it’s again not hard to see why they arrived at this conclusion: if we truly can choose any path in front of us, and every path is right, then why would you deliberately keep choosing one that leads to suffering? If you are suffering, it is your fault, because you have the power to change it. The path to anything you want in life is joyous — any trace of hardship is a sign that you are going about it wrong. And perhaps most depressingly: if there are people around us causing us suffering, happiness is as simple as removing them from our lives. This is the final destination of the fully realised world of The Secret — the spiritual equivalent of capitalism, where the happier get happier and the suffering suffer more — and why it needs to be challenged.

 

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So, how to argue for the necessity of suffering?

Everyone suffers, at some time in their lives, to some extent. That at least makes it a topic worthy of exploration and greater understanding. So talking about this certainly isn’t a cry for help, or addressed to anyone in particular. From the outside, some people seem destined to suffer, in this world at least, more than others. I certainly feel that way about my life compared to others. The only real acute suffering I have ever experienced has been Meniere’s Disease (which I wrote about here and here — plug), and which the worst touchwood seems to be behind me. But, really, who knows. There may be no more pointless a practice than attempting to compare suffering between people, whether individuals or groups.

We need to understand suffering because suffering has to ultimately be for a reason. Life shouldn’t be just suffering for its own sake. But I also don’t think life should be free of suffering: it isn’t something that was a product of our unawakened selves that can just be discarded, i.e. The Secret.

Linking suffering to sacrifice is one way to find this meaning. Sacrifice in the most cynical sense, as expressed in The Secret, frames sacrifice as simply a test of faith: faith in an underlying spiritual order that those who give will benefit in return. So, basically it is an intellectual test, or one of knowledge. But suffering changes the examination altogether: a test of character to see if you can prove this faith by withstanding whatever hardships are required to receive the payoff. But even this still comes down to having faith, which, if you remember, was the problem to begin with.

Here is another perspective on suffering, which I find incredibly helpful, from the book Prescription for Living by Rúhíyyih Khánum, formerly Mary Maxwell. She suggests that there are two types of suffering: non-essential and essential, or coincidental and purposeful. The first is the one we work to eliminate from the world: that caused by curable diseases, by social inequality, by a lack of education. The second is the type that ‘chastens us’. This is where we re-insert the quote about the plant that has been pruned having the most beautiful blossoms. This is an interesting dichotomy, as it suggests that even in a perfect society, the nature of humanity and being human would still entail a degree of suffering to exist. People would still get sick and be injured, would still be unable to live the life they truly desire, would still get their hearts broken.

My alternative (but not mutually exclusive) dichotomy of sacrifice would be this: we have suffering that we don’t understand, and suffering that we do understand. Taking the first, this form of suffering is the hardest, because it has no decipherable purpose. It is suffering for suffering’s sake. This is the type of suffering that just needs to be survived, until either it goes away or we gain the perspective to see its purpose. Then it becomes the second type of suffering, the type that we undertake perhaps not willingly, but with an understanding that it is linked to a necessary sacrifice that we have accepted to undertake.

I’m not sure if it can ever be fully eliminated, but the suffering that we at least want to reduce is the suffering that cannot be understood, because it is this suffering — caused by forces that operate beyond our comprehension — that can lead to someone passing this burden on to others, or even to find it so overwhelming that they cannot bare it any longer. Hence, this suffering actually becomes essential, because experiencing and surviving it is what allows us to undertake, negotiate, survive, maybe thrive and perhaps even be grateful for suffering with understanding.

Basically, anything seems like a mercy compared to suffering without understanding, and we are always grateful to receive mercies. Perhaps we can actually better understand sacrifice as a virtue in this context: to suffer for the purpose of helping those suffering without a purpose.