Alchemizing Suffering

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One of my friends has been suffering deeply.

This suffering thing, the horror, seems always to be close at hand, as the First Noble Truth.

The first inkling, the first clue, that I can remember in my own life that suffering could be alchemized, lead turned to gold, was when one of my teachers, a chemist, once said in an offhand way that “The only problem that does you any real good is the one you can't solve!”

The next clue I got was in studying The Sutra of the Lotus of the Wonderful Law wherein one encounters the lovely Lotus Flower growing from the muck at the bottom of the pond.

Then there was Solzhenitsyn's writing in “The Gulag Archipelago” that there is this secret that defeat in war does you more good than victory. His sentence was short, small, but for some reason it really stuck. He also describes in there how he wanted so badly to get a certain outside job at the labor camp, prayed for it, thinking it would enable him to survive, but someone else got the job – who quickly died from the resulting exposure to cold. He marvels at how often in his life it happened that getting what he wanted turned out to be disaster and not getting what he wanted turned out best.

St. John of the Cross goes over and over and over it again in “The Dark Night of the Soul,” saying how indispensable annihilation is for us. I spent a lot of time with that book over the years.

Oh, and then the “Alchemists” and “Alchemy” – even the Incomparable Newton himself spent a lot of time on that. Old Newton was something else. Frances Yates once told me that Newton was far more interested in angels than in physics.

All this is very humiliating to me. What the hell do I know?! One could read such things forever and still suffer like a pig. A quote from Nietszche – the rogue – now comes to mind: “Man does not strive for pleasure; only the Englishman does.”

But it does creep up on me in time, if I am patient, that things work out better than I could have imagined, as I was saying in my recent post, It Gets Better, Better than Before.