Unextinguished Agony
I do not say this lightly. I know suffering intensely and personally.
Three decades ago I fell into a physical, mental, emotional and spiritual void created by a devastating unrecognised neurological disease that tore me from life as any normal person knows it and there I have remained, housebound, separate, invisible, neglected, negated, harmed unintentionally by the ignorant, ordinary actions of all and sundry.
From these tortured days of existence, I have toiled, moment by moment, in untreatable, interminable pain and never-ending continual paralyses, to live in a state of love and entered into the depths of myself through meditation, prayer and contemplation, when possible, to try to live a life of meaning and beauty despite the agony.
What is health you ask? What is life? What is suffering? Can they all have depth, truth, beauty at their core? In answer to health and life, you can immediately say yes, but to suffering, how can beauty reside there and grow, even flourish?
To answer, I must enter deep into my own fragmented mind and body to seek and hope to find what resides within.
My starting point is profound disability, transient mental emptiness and extreme never ending pain. My body, my mind, my life have been broken on every level for almost thirty years now.
What do I learn from here? Each moment of knowledge has to be dug out from the landscape of my suffering mind and body and grasped before it disappears in a further wave of mind-blanking deterioration.
How can I survive in this unextinguished agony that no treatment resolves?
I find that to live in a deeper spiritual way, in the essence of my being, is the only way I can cope and find meaning. It is the essence of my survival and more than this, it is everything to me.
Facades and falseness must fall away in this desert. There is no room for dishonesty or superficiality. All that is left, is me, in agonised, screaming silence. And deeper still my truth, my love, my being, my breath, my spirit, my connection with God, that sustains, strengthens, hones each pain-cracked moment into a perfect expression of being, can still be found.
Trapped inside my poorly functioning body I am forced to plummet then to grow, as never before, as I become aware of uncharted depths of insight in my effort to heal, to love, to forgive, to understand, to reclaim life. Life though must take on a new hue and a different meaning to persist. I have to adjust, to acclimatise, to see myself from a wider view.
Surprisingly, I find that inside I am still me, in all my fullness, huge, vast, compassionate, creative, pure, beautiful, perfect. I have no boundary. I can reach out and feel the whole universe groaning, crying, laughing, even screaming with me.
When no movement is possible and pain seeks to overwhelm and obliterate me, there is a necessity to seek for a hidden depth of peace, not normally experienced, wide and vast in its breadth and beauty.
Where no thought is possible there is an indescribably fluffy, soft, almost gentle inner calm in the emptiness of words and the void where memory should be. A peace beyond knowing permeates everything in the core of my being, even when the outside is burning up in agony without relent.
Here, you find that you are more than you thought, more than you knew, more than you ever were, although from the outside it might seem like the opposite, that you are so much less or almost entirely gone.
Here wisdom enters.
Truth arises.
Knowledge becomes.
Love unfurls.
Healing begins.
Awareness is.
Yet you will only know this when your life has become seemingly, inescapably small and crushed, diminished from sight, nothing to most people, seemingly of little worth or value from a worldly view.
The physical, emotional, cognitive losses will be profound and yet….
You are challenged to grow, to recognise yourself and to love all that is. This is the true meaning of flourish. A space where you can reach out to everything, without going anywhere, you can shine like the stars, in a sea of seemingly empty nothingness, for your beauty arises from the ashes and life itself is both wondrous and precious beyond words, just as you are.
However, you cannot deny the desolation and destruction of suffering, the fear, the terrible torment and the seemingly unquenchable annihilation. You have to step outside of yourself, somehow, to even begin to cope or dare to bear the unbearable. You have to face death and still find peace and hope. It is a strange, eerie, unnatural balance, a paradox of extremes.
It is perhaps only those who have not suffered endlessly who might ask or assume that suffering is always a way to flourish and grow, a key to the door of understanding and wholeness. Yes it can be, yes it may be, yet it can also lead to devastation and extremity of bleakness beyond words or statement of feeling. It leads to isolation, separation, acute loneliness of experience and a desolation that may not always be possible to return from. Each moment can either be one where you fall and that falling is dreadful in its depth and speed and destination. It can also lead to transfigurative moments that are way beyond, between, within, the pain of existence and help you to step lightly between fractured seconds of unquantifiable distress.
It is almost an insult to ask, in those moments, if to suffer is to flourish? It can only be framed so lightly by those who do not know its reality and its ever present determination to destroy or those who have not suffered without relief in literally unending pain or despaired at the profound hopelessness of a situation that truly has no answers.
You can ask, can goodness come out of the most horrific suffering and the answer would be yes, but you cannot ask if suffering is intrinsically good, implying that it is the only way or the best way or even an acceptable way to flourish, for it is to deny the desperation that only one who indescribably suffers may feel; to long to get well from an incurable disease that has no path to health or to yearn to be restored to an irretrievable relationship stolen by death or to want be part of the normal, natural world that is never going to be possible, no matter what you think or do. The answer must always to my mind be no.
Suffering for suffering sake is not and can never be good. Neither can self-imposed suffering that actually has a way out, even if it is a difficult one, ever deliver the same level of knowledge and understanding.
Suffering out of necessity, however, where no other direction is open, carves a path built on the labor of tormented seconds, mindless minutes, horrible hours, destructive days, yearning years, deadly decades, lost life times…and it is here that you can truly grow in wisdom, knowledge, discernment, truth and find a love and compassion for yourself and others that may never have been sought or discovered without it.
What a high price to pay to find your own inner truth and beauty.
