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Life is difficult

This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths. It is a great truth because once we truly see this truth, we transcend it. Once we truly know that life is difficult — once we truly understand and accept it — then life is no longer difficult. Because once it is accepted, the fact that life is difficult no longer matters.

Most do not fully see this truth that life is difficult. Instead they moan more or less incessantly, noisily or subtly, about the enormity of their problems, their burdens, and their difficulties as if life were generally easy, as if life should be easy.

I know about this moaning because I have done my share.

Life is a series of problems. Do we want to moan about them or solve them? Discipline is the basic set of tools we require to solve life's problems. Without discipline we can solve nothing. With only some discipline we can solve only some problems. With total discipline we can solve all problems.

What makes life difficult is that the process of confronting and solving problems is a painful one. Problems, depending upon their nature, evoke in us frustration or grief or sadness or loneliness or guilt or regret or anger or fear or anxiety or anguish or despair. These are uncomfortable feelings, often very uncomfortable, often as painful as any kind of physical pain, sometimes equaling the very worst kind of physical pain.

Indeed, it is because of the pain that events or conflicts engender in us all that we call them problems. And since life poses an endless series of problems, life is always difficult and is full of pain as well as joy. Yet it is in this whole process of meeting and solving problems that life has its meaning.

Problems are the cutting edge that distinguishes between success and failure. Problems call forth our courage and our wisdom; indeed, they create our courage and our wisdom. It is only because of problems that we grow mentally and spiritually.

When we desire to encourage the growth of the human spirit, we challenge and encourage the human capacity to solve problems, just as in school we deliberately set problems for our children to solve. It is through the pain of confronting and resolving problems that we learn.

It is for this reason that wise people learn not to dread but actually to welcome problems and actually to welcome the pain of problems. Most of us are not so wise. Fearing the pain involved, almost all of us, to a greater or lesser degree, attempt to avoid problems. We procrastinate, hoping that they will go away.

We ignore them, forget them, pretend they do not exist. We even take drugs to assist us in ignoring them, so that by deadening ourselves to the pain we can forget the problems that cause the pain. We attempt to skirt around problems rather than meet them head on. We attempt to get out of them rather than suffer through them.

This tendency to avoid problems and the emotional suffering inherent in them is the primary basis of all human mental illness. Since most of us have this tendency to a greater or lesser degree, most of us are mentally ill to a greater or lesser degree, lacking complete mental health.

Some of us will go to quite extraordinary lengths to avoid our problems and the suffering they cause, proceeding far afield from all that is clearly good and sensible in order to try to find an easy way out, building the most elaborate fantasies in which to live, sometimes to the total exclusion of reality.

But the substitute itself ultimately becomes more painful than the legitimate suffering it was designed to avoid. The neurosis itself becomes the biggest problem. True to form, many will then attempt to avoid this pain and this problem in turn, building layer upon layer of neurosis.

Fortunately, however, some possess the courage to face their neuroses and begin — usually with the help of psychotherapy — to learn how to experience legitimate suffering. In any case, when we avoid the legitimate suffering that results from dealing with problems, we also avoid the growth that problems demand from us.

It is for this reason that in chronic mental illness we stop growing, we become stuck. And without healing, the human spirit begins to shrivel.

What are these tools, these techniques of suffering, these means of experiencing the pain of problems constructively that I call discipline? There are four: delaying of gratification, acceptance of responsibility, dedication to truth, and balancing.

Fear and Do it

"Life moves on, whether we act as cowards or heroes. Life has no other discipline to impose, if we would but realize it, than to accept life unquestioningly. Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, evil may become a source of beauty, joy, and strength, if faced with an open mind. Every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision recognize it as such."      

Henry Miller

Fear breeds luck of experience, luck of experience breeds ignorance, ignorance breeds more fear. It is a vicious circle.

When we begin to feel fear, we look around for something to fear. Considering all there is to look at (the media, the environment, our body, our memory, our imagination), we have little trouble finding something. Thus, the fear grows - our perception of the world darkens and it becomes an increasingly terrible place.

Eventually, we start avoiding all things and thoughts that even might produce fear, or that might produce the fear of fear. It is one of the great jokes of existence. When people take the courage to journey into the center of their fear, they find - nothing. It was only many layers of fear, being afraid of itself.

Put another way, fear is interest paid on a debt you may not owe.

We are all, right now, living the life of our own choosing. This choice, of course, is not a single, monumental choice. No. the choices we're talking about here are made daily, hourly, moment by moment. 

The bottom-line question: Do we indulge our heart, or cater to our fear? Do we pursue what we want, or do we do what's comfortable?

For the most part, most people often choose comfort - the familiar, the time-honored, the well-worn but well-known. After a lifetime of choosing between comfort and risk, we are left with the life we currently have. And it was all of our own choosing.

Often, what we really want is hidden beneath what we've settled for. When we know we can have what we want- that the comfort zone is under control - we can remember what it is we truly want.

The comfort zone is our personal area of thoughts and actions within which we feel comfortable; it's all the things we've done (or thought) often enough to feel comfortable doing (or thinking). Anything we've haven't done lies outside the parameters of the comfort zone. When we do (or think) these things (basically, anything new) we feel uncomfortable. 

How do we feel? We probably feel some tinges of fear; guilt, unworthiness, hurt feelings and/anger - the feelings we lump into the general category of uncomfortable. After feeling uncomfortable long enough , we tend to give up. Some people gave up before they even began.

Fear, guilt, unworthiness, hurt feelings and anger are, of course, emotions. Emotion is energy in motion We take our energy and put it in motion; sometimes it's joy, sometimes it's pain, sometimes it's pleasure, sometimes it's pride - whatever the emotion, the energy that's in motion is what we put in motion.

People often want to "get rid of" a "negative" emotion - fear, say, or unworthiness - before attempting something new. That's the same thing as saying, "I want to get rid of some of my energy."

The difficulty lies in a fundamental misperception of the so-called " limiting" emotions. The limitation is not in the emotions themselves, but in the way we've programmed to perceive these emotions. It is a matter of understanding their true use and function - and remembering that the energy pushing up and the energy pushing down is our energy.

Imagine if all the energy of fear, guilt, unworthiness, hurt feelings and anger were available to help us to achieve anything we wanted. Well, they are.

You'll note that when you move past your comfort zone you find adventure, excitement, satisfaction and the answer to some questions you may never have known to ask before.

Witness and Thrive

Confucius had a scientific mind; he was not much of a mystic, he had a very pragmatic, earthbound mind. He was the first behaviorist the world has known, very logical. And it seems perfectly right - he says, "First I will have a sip, and then I will say what I think." He takes a sip and he says, "Buddha is right - life is misery."

Lao Tzu takes all the three glasses and he says, "Unless one drinks totally, how can one say anything?" And Lao Tzu says, " He drinks all the three glasses and starts dancing!

Buddha and Confucius ask him, "Are you not going to say anything?" And Lao Tzu says, "This is what I am saying - my dance and my song are speaking for me." Unless you taste totally, you cannot say. And when you taste totally, you still cannot say because what you know is such that no words are adequate.

Buddha is on one extreme, Confucius is in the middle.
Lao Tzu has drunk all the three glasses - the one that was brought for Buddha, the one that was brought for Confucius, and the one that was brought for him. He has drunk them all; he has lived life in its three-dimensionality.

My own approach is that of Lao Tzu. Live life in all possible ways; don't choose one thing against the other, and don't try to be in the middle.
Don't try to balance yourself - balance is not something that can be cultivated. Balance is something that comes out of experiencing all the dimensions of life.

Balance is something that happens; it is not something that can be brought about through your efforts.

If you bring it through your efforts it will be false, forced. And you will remain tense, you will not be relaxed, because how can a person who is trying to remain balanced in the middle be relaxed? You will always be afraid that if you relax you may start moving to the left or to the right. You are bound to remain uptight, and to be uptight is to miss the whole opportunity, the whole gift of life.

Don't be uptight. Don't live life according to principles. Live life in its totality, drink life in its totality!

Yes, sometimes it tastes bitter - so what? That taste of bitterness will make you capable of tasting its sweetness. You will be able to appreciate the sweetness only if you have tasted its bitterness. One who knows not how to cry will not know how to laugh, either. One who cannot enjoy a deep laughter, a belly laugh, that person's tears will be crocodile tears. They cannot be true, they cannot be authentic.

I don't teach the middle way, I teach the total way. Then a balance comes of its own accord, and then that balance has tremendous beauty and grace. You have not forced it, it has simply come.

By moving gracefully to the left, to the right, in the middle, slowly a balance comes to you because you remain so unidentified. When sadness comes, you know it will pass, and when happiness comes you know that will pass, too. Nothing remains; everything passes by. The only thing that always abides is your witnessing. That witnessing brings balance. That witnessing is balance. "

Excerpt from "The Book of Understanding" by OSHO.

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