Suffering

*From my old Friendster Blog site written on Dec 16, 2006.

From this blog onwards, I might be writing a lot about the human psychology (hopefully I have the time). Thanks to Dr Paul, a psychologist in Denver, I learned tonnes of great new and profound thoughts excellently explaining how our psychology works. I'm gonna start with 'Suffering'.

Ask ourselves; What is suffering?

According to Dr Paul, suffering is "burning emotional energy on the uncontrollables". Without knowing it, we human beings have a resource which is even more valuable than time itself - and that is our emotional energy. It is stored inside our minds, and we could actually efficiently control how we budget the usage of this scarce resource, given that we know how.

Now, what are the uncontrollables? These are actually the things that we do not control. We have zero percent of control over these things. The weather, history, the past, the future, the economy, how others behave or what other people think of us all are included in the so-called 'uncontrollables'. It is beyond reach and any effort to even try to control these will have you ending up with the short end of the stick. But the great thing is, we actually have 100% power on what's within our control..

Assuming that both notions of 'emotional energy' and 'the uncontrollables' are well understood, i suppose at this point we shouldn't have much trouble grasping the idea of "burning emotional energy on the uncontrollables". Thus, suffering is simply the action of using your emotional energy and spending it over the things that you have no power on.

Dr Paul also suggested that everytime we use the word 'should', then we most likely are doing the act of suffering. Lines like "that clerk shouldn't have done that to me" or "it's too hot, it should be colder outside" are examples of suffering.

I think this might be easier if there are examples. So, here are some useful ones. Notice how we will start being whiny and complaining about how unpleasant the weather is, or how disrespectful this friend of ours was. The same goes when we're on the road cursing the wreckless drivers or motorcyclists who just have no idea of how dangerous they're being or how they lack the on-road manners they're showing. Another example might be how we overly-regret of how we were wasting time and not studying before (at the moment we're already holding that C-grade paper). So, yeah, regret and jealousy are also part of suffering. But notice, everytime we do this, did it change anything?

You're right, NO...

So, what should we do now?

It's easy. Practice catching ourselves doing this and slap ourselves whenever we do it. Yeah, slap yourself. Start differentiating the things that we control and let go of the ones that we do not. Worrying too much about what's gonna happen is just a waste of time and emotional energy. Act on whatever that you control. Use every single thing that we actually do have control on. Studying and putting your best effort before that final exam is what you control, and how the results will turn out is something that we just have to let go. Just realize that the things which you don't control will never change no matter how long you put your thoughts on it or how long you cry over it. Stop wasting your emotional energy. You'll even find yourself wasting time after you've become all stressed out. Don't be stressful because of the things that you don't control. Being stressful just drains out your emotional energy. Just move on to the next thing. Repair your conditions. Focus on NOW. Live on the present day, and forget about the past or stop worrying about the future.

Plan on your future and learn lessons from the past, though. But never ever hold yourself on to it.

In a nutshell, this is just one of the things we should learn to apply in our daily lives in order for all of us to grow up. Good luck guys.

Cheers,
Izzat Nizam