Why do we suffer?

Acharya Prashant
3 min readJul 14, 2020

The priest is suffering, Christ didn’t suffer.

You can crucify him, kill him, shred him.

He won’t suffer.

It’s simple — There’s nothing left to suffer.

Of course there would be lot of pain, extreme pain but that inner suffering, that simply cannot happen. It’s almost like a technical thing — How do you kill a man inside a house, if the man is no more inside the house?

The house is there, the man has vanished. Now, you can keep burning the house or crucifying the house, the man won’t suffer. That’s the thing with the innocent one the man within the house is the guilty ego, the house is the body and the mind complex. The house well you can do anything with it, you can raise it to ground, you can hack it down, whatever. But there is nobody inside the house now left to suffer, therefore there can be no suffering. But that, you see, is a one in a million case, so no point discussing it. It behooves us to rather discuss our own condition than to speculate about the inner state of a Christ. So we will suffer.

The question now is not why do we suffer, the question now is — Now, that we do suffer what do we do with our suffering? That’s a more relevant and useful question. We do suffer, what do we do with our suffering?

You can either let your suffering become a stumbling block in the way of your liberation or you could let your suffering energize you towards your liberation. It depends on you, it’s a conscious choice you have to make. Most people let their suffering de-energize them, stop them, engage them, limit them and then there are others who work even more, who get resolved even more, exactly because they suffer. They let their suffering be their fuel. The more they suffer, the more they know that they love liberation, that they love joy, they don’t shy away from suffering.

A point comes when they actually start inviting suffering, they say, “Come! I want to see what remains of you. I want to see how much power you still hold over me. I’m not running away from you, you’re within me. I want you to reveal yourself to me. I want you to do your worst to me. I want to see whether I can survive you. And if I can survive you. I’m going past you and if I remain scared of you then you remain happily sitting within me. I don’t…