Why suffering is the price of liberation
Without suffering, there is no wisdom. Without wisdom, there is no liberation.
The nature of ignorance
We are all born into ignorance, unable to discriminate between real and unreal. We spend most of our lives not knowing this truth.
The veil of ignorance prevents us from seeing our enslavement to this world of death and rebirth.
Occasionally, we see beams of light shining through the veil. But unless we’re encouraged by others or forced to by our suffering, we never explore the light. We prefer not knowing what’s on the other side. We’re comfortable in our worldliness.
But here’s what everyone misses: Ignorance is not just an absence of knowledge—it is an active, self-replicating force that chains us to darkness. It doesn’t merely blind us, it seduces us to remain in the cave.
Yet if we want to find meaning, we must tear the veil of ignorance. We must see the shadows for what they are - unreal, illusions - and we must climb out of the cave toward the light of wisdom.
We have to ask ourselves: How many times have we repeated this cycle of death and rebirth because we refuse to cut this veil? Have we been here before with the same opportunity to awaken from this illusion and failed to do so? Probably.
How tired our souls must be.
We continually subject ourselves to this restless existence through willful ignorance. The painful truth is that most people don’t rebel against ignorance because they are idiots but rather because they’ve been seduced by worldliness.
We are the half-hearted creatures C.S. Lewis - the Christian theologian - speaks of, satisfied with “making mud pies in a slum because [we] cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at sea”.
Adi Shankara, the Indian philosopher, writes:
What deludes a man like an intoxicating drink? Attachment to the objects of the senses.
In our drunken state, reality is blurry. We exchange pleasure for happiness, indulgence for meaning, and distraction for peace.
Without true happiness, meaning, and peace, life is no different than death. In a real sense, it’s much worse than death. At least with death, there is an end. But a life without happiness, meaning and peace is an endless turmoil of anxiety.
So we tell ourselves lies: “I don’t have time to think about right and wrong while I’m building my legacy”. Or “I know the organization I work for is harming people and society, but I’m turning a blind eye because I like my salary.”
We prefer ignorance over wisdom.
Our ego likes to feel superior, like the Greek gods who toyed with mortals, and deluded into a false sense of happiness.
Bu Shankara warns us:
Deluded by his ignorance, a man mistakes one thing for another. Lack of discernment will cause a man to think that a snake is a piece of rope.
The role of suffering
Without suffering, there is no wisdom. Without wisdom, there is no liberation.
Wisdom is the sword that cuts the veil of ignorance. And suffering is its blade.
The fear, however, for many of us is that suffering will destroy us.
But here’s the paradox: you must die before being born again.
True suffering will destroy our ego - the transient self we attach our names, our last names, our achievements, and our status - has a beginning and is finite.
Yet in its infantile nature, or perhaps because of it, it is the self-appointed guardian of the veil of ignorance. It guards this illusion with his life.
Shankara writes this about the ego:
Man’s life of bondage to the world of birth and death has many causes. The root of them all is the ego, the first begotten child of ignorance.
Yet we feed our egos with lies, greed, and lust. We willingly serve at the altar of money, power, fame, and immorality by telling ourselves. Our continual lust for all vanity perpetuates our blindness to the truth.
But those who have suffered and confronted their pain, without judgement, without self-pity, without blaming others, will realize their suffering was the greatest gift from above.
A gift they would never trade because their suffering was the beginning of their enlightenment.
The wisest people were not those who avoided suffering. No, they were the ones who embraced the pain, the sorrow, the heartbreak, and emerged transformed.
If you seek freedom, you must suffer not from your delusional attachments to worldliness, but from detaching yourself from worldliness.
The path to wisdom
Just as hell is nowhere but here, so too heaven is nowhere but here. Heaven begins when wisdom is found.
But here’s what most people don’t realize: The greatest obstacle to wisdom isn’t lack of knowledge but it’s our unwillingness to suffer virtuously.
Wisdom cuts through ignorance. To attain wisdom, we must endure suffering, great or small. It is the price we must pay for our liberation.
It’s why Desert Hermits like St. Anthony committed themselves to intense ascetic practices. These practices assisted the monastics in their mission to reject all worldliness. How else could you behold the Eternal and Beautiful while at the same time in love with the transient and vain glory of this world?
Serving vanity plunges you into the hellfire of samsara - the cycle of death and rebirth. Serving Beauty ushers you into theosis - entering into the Divine life.
Man cannot serve two masters. Either he will love one and hate the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. Shankara reveals to us:
What causes the bondage of worldly desires? Thirst to enjoy these objects.
Shankara’s point is that we deceive ourselves by conflating the unreal with the real, lies with truth. In this world of illusion, we spend our lives garnering praise, chasing status, and winning accolades to build up our fragile egos. We gossip, lie, cheat, fight, destroy, and hate.
So we must awaken from illusion.
Here’s the harsh truth: Awakening is not gentle. It is violent. It is jihad. it is the tearing of the veil, the annihilation of the transient self.
We must be baptised through suffering into the cold, deep waters of wisdom to shock us out of our sleep. Only then is our transient self annihilated.
To break free, we must begin detaching ourselves from this transient world. And this process is filled with pain. We must first sever the guard’s head from its body. Then approach the gigantic veil and begin ripping it apart.
Hell is not some place out there in a different realm, but right here, right now where you stand.
It is the restless karma of rebirth. It is the endless turmoil of anxiety. To live in this ignorance without ever awakening is hell.
But to awaken and to tear the veil through wisdom is heaven.
Most people live their entire lives asleep, unaware that they are prisoners of their own illusion inside the cave of darkness.
But now that you see it, what will you do? The path is before you. The blade of suffering is in your hands.
Will you tear the veil?
Peace,
IJ Makan
Lewis, C. S. The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses. HarperOne, 2001.
Shankara, Adi. The Crest-Jewel of Discrimination. Translated by Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood, Vedanta Press, 1947.
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