Brooding, resenting, blaming, regretting—all are forms of unconscious suffering; each and all serve to strengthen the false notion that our negative state is caused by a condition outside of us. These dark shadows that always trail behind unwanted moments serve a distinct purpose. Their job is to create, and then support, the impression that we have just been made into a victim of circumstance.
Once we embrace this false perception, the pain of not wanting things to be as they are gains the upper hand; as our resistance grows, so does our spiritual blindness. Before long, it’s almost impossible to see the truth of our actual condition, which is exactly what the false self set out to achieve. This lower nature lives, literally, to keep us from seeing that our experience of life is a reflection of our present level of consciousness.
Suffering over any false perception is worse than useless. First, it strengthens the illusion that forces exist greater than our divine right to transform them into something useful for the development our soul. But this same level of unconscious suffering supports another false conclusion: that we have no choice but to surrender ourselves to what it tells us is true about ourselves. And that’s where the timeless idea of conscious suffering comes into play.
To suffer consciously is to act in a whole new way when faced with the appearance of any unwanted moment: instead of mechanically resisting the situation, along with the painful sense of self that appears with it, we take another path—we choose to be consciously passive to these negative states that are actively blaming or judging. In this way, rather than being made into the unwitting instrument of these dark radiations, it is we who act by bringing the light of awareness into and upon them.
This new action of being quietly passive to painful thoughts and feelings is conscious suffering. In its abidance, one dies to the nature of what is falsely active by aligning oneself with the true action of a living light that changes whatever is brought into its healing wholeness.
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