If you’re like everyone I know, this covid-19 crisis has made you feel like that guy holding his head in that Edvard Munch painting that everyone used to have prints of on their dorm room walls. But what if we could extract some incredible benefit from our suffering? What if our misery contained, hidden within it, a diamond the size of a Buick? Here’s what I’m thinking.

Traditional spiritual wisdom has always taught that, before we will engage a spiritual practice in a deep way, we have to face the pain inherent in conditional life – meaning unAwakened life. We have to be penetrated by the truth that egoic life – life lived as the mythic, separate, subjective “me” – is a kind of hell. 

That’s why the Buddha’s First Noble Truth is: Life is suffering. The ancient sages taught that we have to really get that, before we’ll do any more than tinker with spiritual practice. (Contemporary popular spirituality doesn’t talk much about this, because we Westerners tend not to like this message. Total buzzkill. We’re more into living happily ever after, and the whole “we can have it all” and “the world is our oyster” thing.)

Ordinary life is suffering for a lot of reasons. But one notable one is mortality. In speaking about the body, Adi Da once said: 

“It’s going to die. That’s all there is to it. It’s not only going to die, it has the potential for unbelievable suffering, and will inevitably experience all kinds of varieties of suffering, and is now suffering, lollipop or not! You’re suffering just feeling that you are alive here, in this time-bomb lump of flesh, this exploding shit-machine, that’s going to drop dead at any moment now. What a terrible situation.”

I used to love it when Adi Da (or other Spiritual Masters) talked like this. “Yeah,” I’d snarl in my gloomy black Levis, black motorcycle boots, and black leather jacket, “preach it, brother man,” like I was right there on the same page. In fact, I had simply adopted a stance, a pose. My “confrontation of death” was nothing but a fashion choice. I had an image of myself as a hard-edged, punk rock type, who was all about facing harsh truths, with a Johnny Rotten (or at least a Billy Idol) sneer curling my lip.

Then, in early 2011, the traumatic memories from my childhood (raging alcoholic father etc.) erupted into my awareness and ruined my life for several years. In the process, I was disabused of many of my favorite illusions – including the adorable notion that I had in any way, shape, or form, faced the truth of my own mortality (never mind that I’d faced the potential for mind-bending suffering that can happen before we die). 

Here was one clue that I had not faced these hard truths: my spiritual practice was a total snooze fest. Here’s Adi Da again:

“People…are all kinds of dummied up by the doctrines of the world, the mummery language of ordinary living, the TV mind. They actually are deluded by it. 

It is ceaselessly amazing to Me that people become occupied and actually diverted by the purposes of ordinary living. They just do not understand where they are, what their actual situation is. They are not sensitive to it. If they were, they would be on fire with the disposition to realize [the Divine], to be free of that binding illusion that is consoling them in every moment with something that could disappear in a fraction of a second.”

Hmmm.  You say they’d be on fire with the disposition to realize the Divine, huh? Yeah, that did not describe my disposition well. Not much evidence of the whole “on fire” thing. I was too busy chasing Bruce Lee-ish indestructibility through martial art, obsessing about when Joss Whedon would have a new TV show, and fretting about whatever was going on in my therapy that week.

When my dad was not exploding in alcoholic rages, he talked a lot about how “God made the world,” and, therefore, the world was holy and beautiful. For proof you needed look no further than glowing sunsets, azure seascapes, majestic mountains, the perfection of snowflakes, and googly baby smiles, basically the images you see on inspirational posters near the water cooler in middle-management offices.

No word from him on how the holy, beautiful, God-made world also included the Holocaust, the child sex-slave industry, the tsunami in East Asia in 2004 that murdered 225,000 people, Pol Pot’s regime killing nearly 2 million people, the 5,000 children per day who starve to death before they ever get to see a single azure seascape and so forth. I know this because, when I was about sixteen, I asked him. He said, “I don’t pretend to understand the mysteries of God’s plan.” 

I replied, “God’s plan includes hundreds of thousands of children being sold into sex slavery? Well, that is mysterious. God sounds like a full-on, hockey-goalie-mask-wearing psychopath.” Well, I didn’t actually say that. But words to that effect. To which he said,

“Well, you’re just talking about the question of evil, and I leave that question to the theologians.” 

Adi Da makes it clear that, weirdly enough, to allow oneself to be shattered by the suffering inherent in egoic life – like Siddhartha or Milarepa – does not have to lead to despair.

“Disillusionment with psycho-physical existence is not the same thing as despair. Disillusionment is the beginning of Wisdom. It gives integrity, one-pointedness to the Way. What you achieve or develop is never going to make any difference, one way or another, even at any stage of life. It is all still an exercise by a mortal…

This should tell you that – basically, fundamentally, heart-deep – an offer has been made to you here that you cannot refuse. You can surrender – and that’s that! [Adi Da laughs.] If you really examine it, that is the position you are in. It is not despair that this observation calls for – not if it is entered into as profound ‘consideration’. Despair is merely a reaction.

You are not in charge. Therefore, you must surrender to That Which Is.”

The suffering of ordinary egoic life, if we dare to become exquisitely sensitive to it, can catapult us into our spiritual practice with profound wholeheartedness. Because, according to all the sages – including Adi Da – Transcendence of the separate ego-self is the only freedom from our suffering. That Transcendence is the discovery that you are not now and have never been the mortal meat-body. That Transcendence is God Realization, Enlightenment, Awakening. And, for the Awakened person, life is not suffering. On the contrary, Adi Da says that, for the Enlightened being…

“Existence is a vast Happiness. Life is not suffering. Life is Happiness. Existence is Happiness. It is pristine Beauty–Absolute, Self-Radiant, Self Existing, never diminished. Yet you believe something else about it. You are superimposing a belief on this vast display of light, a belief you must outgrow…”

The authentic Enlightened person knows that:

“The Great One Is your Very being. You inhere in the Love-Blissful, Forceful Being of the Starry God—the Mystery, the Person of Love. This is your Situation and your Destiny.”

“The Great One has Magnified Itself in the form of sexual beings, human beings, sexless beings, Earth-‘world’, form and fruit and wood and wall and space and star and sky and cloud and tree and life and death. The same Great One takes on all these forms—completely Indifferent, completely Free, completely Happy in all these excesses. This Is all the Great One. The Great One creates nothing. The Great One Is everything! What a Paradox! What a Mystery! What a Magnificent God!

“This is My Message to you: How Magnificant is this obscene, absurd, ridiculous, paradoxical Being That Is everyone.”

Takeaway

So you see where I’m going with this. What if, instead of just waiting for the epic shittiness of this covid-19 crisis to end, we used the epic shittiness of it as a big, epically shitty goad to practice?

In my case, for example, what if I related to my sudden unemployment, and my sudden lack of my beloved coffee shops, and the missing of my friends, and the wash of weird, ambient despair and dread that sometimes comes over me as I write in the mornings, and my freaked-outedness about all the crazy conspiracy theories, and my simultaneous freaked-outedness about the frenzied demonization of anything that looks like a conspiracy theory, which seems almost as pernicious as the crazy conspiracy theories themselves…what if I let all of that act as a cosmic public service announcement: Yo, ego-life is always and inherently about epic shittiness – this pandemic has just sensitized some of us to it a little more. 

In other words, why not allow our suffering, whatever forms it takes, to hurl us into moment-to-moment communion with the luminous field of love that always surrounds us and lives us and breathes us…but that we can’t fully notice, won’t fully notice, until we really, really want to, like way more than we want anything else? Imagine how much better we can be of use. And, at the same time, happy.

By the way, yes, hopefully positive disillusionment inspires us to throw ourselves more passionately into our spiritual practices. Plus, maybe another thing it can inspire one to do is to subscribe to this blog. Just saying.