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19: Voluntary suffering and unnecessary suffering

 Voluntary suffering does not mean wearing a hair shirt or self-flagellation. It means not kicking against the goads.

Things are what they are. What we wish to change we can try to change. What we can’t change we must learn to accept. But to complain about what we can’t change is just a waste of energy, and creates additional turmoil inside us which is rightly called unnecessary suffering.

Complaining is a negative emotion, resentment is another. In modern parlance it is ‘could-have, would-have, should-have.’ It is weakness. If you could have but didn’t, let it go. Start from where you are. The present moment dissolves the idiocies of the past, not so as to repair them, but so as to avoid repeating them.

Always consider your aim—what do you want to happen? What will happen if you express what you feel—will things be better or worse? Will it matter a year from now? Ouspensky claimed that there is nothing noble, beautiful or strong in negative emotions.

There is a nobility and strength in swallowing suffering. If you must complain at all, complain once only. The Stoics see this as part of equanimity. Despite the suffering, it is a place of calm and inward confidence.

It is perhaps easier to bear difficulty if we believe that somehow by doing so it will help our spiritual awakening. But if we let drop away the unproven apparatus of belief we can see that it makes sense not to have unnecessary suffering right now. Ouspensky was asked what you get for giving up your unnecessary suffering. He replied, “the absence of [unnecessary] suffering.”

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