Endure the Worst Hardships to Become the Lowest of the Low: Suffering Has No Meaning
One. Suffering Has No Meaning Whatsoever
If suffering had meaning, Africa should be the most prosperous and powerful place on earth.
Look at those elite secondary schools: the High School Affiliated to Renmin University, the High School Affiliated to Tsinghua University, Fudan High School, Hangzhou Foreign Languages School, Shenzhen Middle School, Chengdu No. 7 High School, and so on. Look at those elite universities: Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, MIT. Look at the rich lists. How many of those people have lives of grinding hardship? It is simply fate.
Suffering flows toward those who can endure it.
The stupidest people are those who insist on suffering when there is no need. The worst are those who insist on creating suffering where there is none.
Two. Glorifying Suffering Is Wrong
Glorifying suffering is a technique of rule used in India and in China’s feudal dynasties, among two peoples who have endured suffering for the longest. Hinduism glorifies suffering most of all, making those at the bottom willing to suffer and submit to Brahmin rule. China became prosperous and powerful because people rebelled, made revolution, and took up arms rather than accept suffering.
Singing the praises of suffering is wrong.
People at the top feel uneasy about their enormous wealth and power, so they promote the idea of innate genius and tell people that they, too, have suffered.
People with NPD constantly recount their suffering only to awaken maternal feelings, sympathy, and a willingness to give way in those around them.
Many parents with NPD have children not for the children’s happiness, but simply to share the burden of their own suffering. Naturally, they have to keep glorifying and affirming that suffering.
Three. Suffering Does Not Make People; People Make Something of Suffering
Only those whose personalities have reserves of strength can digest and transform suffering into something higher. Those without those reserves are swallowed by it.
Those who can endure hardship are people who have known comfort and been nourished by love. Su Shi endured hardship with serenity, ease, and elegance, winning admiration for a thousand years. But look at his childhood and adolescence: how happy and loving a family Su Xun, Lady Cheng, Su Shi, and Su Zhe were.
A robust personality can endure hardship, just as a robust body can endure hunger.
Love makes people strong. Suffering makes people weak.
Four. Suffering Destroys People
It depletes one’s spark, wears down one’s spirit, destroys one’s resolve, and damages one’s vital energy.
It leaves people consumed by inner conflict, psychologically unwell, depressed, dejected, and lost in obsession.
Those in psychiatric hospitals and those who jump into wells are not people who have had too much happiness, but people who have had too much suffering.
Five. Suffering and Guilt
The psychological mechanisms behind ordinary people’s willingness to suffer are feelings of inferiority and guilt.
When parents argue, a child feels frightened and insecure, and believes that they are not good enough, that they are guilty. They want to become very good, very strong, and very lovable so they can save their parents. This is a basic feature of human psychology, a fundamental source of inferiority and conceit.
Through these psychological mechanisms, a person’s ego keeps repeating suffering and bringing hardship upon itself. Take, for example, women who repeatedly get involved with awful men.
Six. I Have Already Suffered Too Much
How many complex, convoluted, endlessly varied forms of suffering I have been through.
If one insists that the world is fair, that suffering and atonement balance each other out—
I have already suffered too much. If we are talking about atonement, I have atoned for the sins of several lifetimes, past and future. I feel no guilt whatsoever, and I want no more suffering. Suffering can stop for a while now.
I deserve every good thing. People who have suffered less than I have deserve them, and so do I.