Author: Christopher Davis

Last time, I wrote about how suffering arises for us. I made the distinction between pain, a biological process, and suffering, which requires living in language. “Suffering” is a strong word. Sometimes it is easy to see that we are suffering: something acute has happened and we believe that life will never get better. But much of the time, I think we do not realize we are suffering. It is the background in which we live. It is “just how life feels.” I have found that recognizing suffering for what it is, is a powerful step for getting free of it.

My standard for suffering is anytime I am not experiencing life as an opportunity. Consider that standard: in the course of a day, how often does life not show up as an opportunity for you? If you find yourself saying that is a ridiculous standard, I invite you to consider that you are suffering more than you realize.

I have been playing with a taxonomy of suffering for a while. I have experimented with a variety of distinctions, but I keep coming back to four basic moods of suffering. I call them moods in the sense that the German philosopher Heidegger used the term: a mood opens the world to me in a certain way. The mood I am in colors all aspects of my experience. We can understand ourselves as always being in a mood, so the point is not to be free of our moods: it is to be free of our suffering moods.

My taxonomy identifies four basic moods of suffering: fear, guilt, resentment, and resignation. These are names of large classes, each which would include variations. We can embody more than one of these moods, but I generally find one is dominant for an individual, at least for a period of life. I will give a brief explanation of each class here, including noting some of the variations.

The Moods of Suffering

Fear: a mood in which we look to the future with dread. To be afraid means to be living with the belief that I am likely not up to the challenges ahead. For many, the mood would be more recognizable as anxiety. Another variation would be self-doubt. Fear and its varieties take away the joy of life. Children in a loving environment have little fear. They encounter life in the moods of wonder and play. Everything is something to be discovered and the best way to discover it is to play with it. Fear is the opposite: that which is unknown is potentially threatening and play disappears to be replaced by a sense of dread.

Guilt: this category contains the moods oriented to the past with regret for what one has done or who one believes oneself to be. Shame and self-loathing are variations. These all involve a core belief about one’s own unworthiness. In a mood of guilt, people’s thoughts regularly punish themselves for their past deeds and who they believe they really are.

Resentment: this class of moods involves negative assessments of others, which help define who we consider our self to be. In this mood, we see others as having acted against us or having gained unfair advantage over us. Variations include jealousy and envy. Though the assessments appear directed at another, they are ultimately assessments about our self. In resenting, I make myself a victim. Envy and jealousy position me as incomplete because I lack what another has. Anger is a frequent emotion tied to these moods.

Resignation: This class of moods are based on the belief that I do not matter and cannot affect anything meaningfully. Apathy is a variation: nothing matters. They are the moods of self-negation. A milder, more common version is the mood of overwhelm. They may all appear to be about an outside situation, but at their root, is an assessment about our own inability to affect the outside situation. Often these moods feel like depression.

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A mood creates the space in which we experience life, creating our feelings about situations and even influencing what we believe to be true. In a resentful mood, for example, we are more likely to believe another is intentionally acting against us. Because the mood gives rise to how life shows up, it is very difficult to see. Our suffering comes to be understood as the way life feels and how it is. Suffering becomes our everyday experience.

When I am suffering, the first step is to recognize that I am suffering. The recognition changes my perspective from being blindly immersed in the mood to being aware that I am possessed by a negative mood. The recognition by itself rarely shifts the mood completely, but it does give me compassion for myself and reminds me not to take my thinking too seriously. I have found being aware of these classes of negative moods helpful for recognizing my own suffering.

My next pieces will focus on both the wonderful moods in which we can live, and how to transition from these to those.

Life includes pain—if you slam the door on your finger, you get to experience that directly. We share pain with the other animals. But as human beings, we also live in language. Language gives us a rich world of objects, institutions, actions, and identities. It gives us a past and a future. And it gives us stories about ourselves, others, and our situation. Living in stories gives rise to something uniquely human (so far as we know), which I refer to as suffering.

Suffering results from believing certain kinds of stories or thoughts, mainly those based on strong assessments or judgments, such as:

I must do it perfectly.

I’m not smart enough to get this.

I have nothing to contribute.

Life is hard.

I’ll never get a break.

I made terrible mistakes in my past.

I’m too old to learn something new.

Nothing makes any difference.

The game is rigged in someone else’s favor.

Those kinds of people are bad.

And we can imagine many others. When we believe these kinds of judgments, we suffer. The suffering can take various forms based on the judgment: anxiety, resignation, resentment, and guilt are common suffering moods. For example, believing “I must do it perfectly” gives rise to anxiety. Believing “the game is rigged in someone else’s favor” gives rise to resentment. When we are taken by one of these moods, we stop experiencing life as an opportunity. Everything, even otherwise positive circumstances, shows up inside the negative mood.

What all of these moods share is the belief that our current story—our judgment or perspective—is true or accurate. A story is always an invention in language. Much of the time, we forget this fact and fall into believing that our stories capture the truth. They do not. The truth is beyond capture. Stories capture a perspective—one among many. A story that leaves us suffering is not valuable. There may be some value to distill from it, but that requires getting free of the general belief that it is true and looking more carefully at it. If we can see beyond our story, we can release the mood.

Moreover, as we recognize how our beliefs that our stories are true trap us, we become freer and freer of suffering. Being free of suffering does not mean adopting a Pollyannaish view of the world. To the contrary, it means being able to make clearer assessments of situations without being inhibited by our own suffering. It turns out that our suffering is a tremendous waste of energy. It reduces our effectiveness and our ability to have an impact. We serve others by reducing our own suffering.

In subsequent blogs, I will explore how we can do that.

A friend recommended a very interesting novel that proposed an interesting conception of time travel. The classic paradox of time travel is that someone traveling to the past might alter the conditions that lead to the present (indeed, I would say it is not a matter of “might” but a matter of “would,” given the interconnectedness of all things), thereby potentially canceling out their existence or the conditions that allowed them to time travel. The currently popular alternative is to say that their travel to the past is really the creation of an alternative line of reality—the line of reality from which they came continues without them ever having entered its past, while the line of reality they have created unfolds differently from the original one from the moment of their arrival.

This novel posited a third possibility: we can travel forward or backward, and everything shifts to accommodate the changes created while still maintaining the conditions that allowed for the time travel to take place. The analogy offered was of a piece of string on a table. If pressure is applied to cause a bend in the string at one location, the rest of the string adapts to accommodate the bend, but the string retains its unity. I liked the conception, even if I do not see time travel as a possibility. And it raised a question for me: can the present change the past?

We have no trouble seeing that events in the present affect the future.  Could it be that present events can also affect the past? If we add in observers and meaning-makers, it appears to be plausible. And in the spooky aspects of quantum theory, there are some events at the sub-atomic level that might validate the claim. So how does it happen?

First, as we let go of our belief that our memory records true accounts, the past becomes less solid. A memory is an experience generated in the present by our nervous system, which has been shaped by everything to which it has been exposed before. Therefore, the memory is not a recording, but a new invention, shaped by previous experiences, but some of those may have had nothing to do with what is now being “recalled.” Research has shown, for example, that people incorporate scenes they have seen in movies into their experiences. So, if I appreciate that my memory is erroneous, from the point of view of recording objective facts, then I become open to the “facts” (what I believed to be the facts) of the past changing.

Second, the past is always understood and interpreted in the present. We can change our view of past events—how we understand them and what meaning we give them—even if the known facts have not changed. In terms of our experience, meaning is more important than facts—meaning is how the facts matter to us. Most of us experience this kind of change regularly. Sometimes we see it as a matter of correcting a previous misunderstanding about someone. Other times, we gain a new framework for understanding what has come before. In these cases, the present has reached back and altered the past.

There is a third way in which the present changes the past. Right now, you are reading these words. And now, your past includes that you read those words. Your past has changed. The events of right now become part of our past, thereby altering it.

Who we are includes our past. If our past changes, we change. If I want to change my identity, even to myself, I have to create a different past, which means doing different things now so that my past includes them. If I want to know myself as someone who exercises, I have to exercise in the present to create a past that validates that identity. I change who I am by changing my past, which I can do now.

So, yes, the present can change the past. Without even looking for quantum spookiness, we have found three ways in which it does:

• The “facts” that we believe to be true can change, especially those based on our memories.
• Our interpretation of the meaning of past events can change.
• Our actions in the present are always creating our past, thereby changing it.

What does it mean? The past is less real than it usually appears. We are far less trapped by our past than we often believe. Is 2016 locked in stone as we turn toward a new year? No, not really. Happy New Year, all.