The Purpose of Suffering

The purpose of suffering is to refine your understanding of what you are.

Suffering is only here to point you away from believing anything that's not true about yourself so you can discover more of what you actually are. Suffering is the most powerful pointer directing you towards discovering what is actually you.

The end of suffering is recognizing that this is suffering's job and that there is no higher purpose that you have than knowing what you are better.

With this distinction, you are always knowing yourself better no matter what happens. What used to be experienced as suffering can now become gratitude for the guidance towards you knowing what you are more. When you suffer it means you have an outdated view or perspective of what you are. When you suffer, you no longer ask "why me?' you begin to ask "what is this showing me I actually am?"

What we all want more than any thing (whether we've realized it consciously or not) is to know what we are beyond suffering: to know the me that doesn't suffer.

Everything we do in life is to find the me that doesn't suffer. If we are still suffering, it just means we haven't found it yet and the suffering is trying to help us find it.

A very common misconception is that we have to "build" a me that doesn't suffer by arranging and maintaining our circumstances in a way that allows us to avoid suffering. As we all discover sooner or later, this doesn't work for very long because even if you do manage to arrange your circumstances in a way you think will allow you to avoid suffering, you soon discover you are afraid of those circumstances changing because you have labeled the circumstances as the cause of you not suffering and it is then that you discover you have not found the me that doesn't suffer.

You discover that there is no way to "build" a me that doesn't suffer through any arrangement of circumstances and you can then begin to notice that all your circumstances, the ones you want and the ones you don't, are all here to help you find the me that is not effected by circumstances and there is no amount of arranging your circumstances that could ever change that.

You then realize that trying to change your circumstances to help you avoid suffering is at best slowing you down from finding the me that doesn't suffer and you notice you can allow and embrace everything that happens with the gratitude of knowing it is helping you with your most important mission: knowing the me that doesn't suffer.

You relabel suffering as something you want along with every other experience and this alone creates the end of suffering. Anytime you suffer, you simply notice "all this means is I'm not what I'm thinking I am in this situation" and you can let that idea of yourself go.