In my college days I was so lonely I decided to get a rabbit at the mall. I did not take proper care of it and it lived a short life. I didn’t know a lot of things at this time: I didn’t know my actions can have very negative consequences, I didn’t know how to take care of a rabbit, and perhaps most importantly I didn’t know how much suffering I would live with as an aftermath of this ignorance.
But this is all from my perspective. It’s actually quite a selfish reflection, if you think about it: All of the above are things I’ve been telling people as a lesson on suffering and ignorance but did I ever wonder how much pain and suffering the rabbit had to endure? In my small studio room as it was anxiously roaming around in its cage, what went through its mind?
I remember growing up in Busan, South Korea where the neighborhood boys would take the wings off of flies and flicking them off with their fingers. It was a casual way for them to deal with the boredom of daily life but what did the fly have to suffer as a consequence of their leisure? I had my fair share of troubles with my parents, and I found happiness regardless of what they do or don’t do. But luckily for me my mom occasionally apologizes to me, saying she didn’t know how much her actions would hurt me.
I remember bullies being dragged across the classroom by their ear, as the teacher got the report of schoolyard violence. In their rage the teachers would force the bully to apologize to the victim and the bully would say, “I didn’t know it would hurt you that much”. The Nuremberg Defense got its namesake from well, the Nuremberg trials but as a Korean I’ve heard it a lot from history books when we discuss Japan and its colonization of Korea. There are Japanese soldiers who continued killing and torturing civilians because they simply didn’t know the war had ended.
I’m obviously building up to some kind of a point here: ignorance sometimes has a really really steep cost. Ignorance can lead to suffering and suffering leads to desperation; a human after a certain point will do anything it can to relieve suffering from itself, even if it may come at the expense of other lives. Other times ignorance can directly lead to the suffering of another.
But what is it that we need to know, what is it that we need to be enlightened of to remove ourselves from this pain? What did I need to know when I was lonely? What did my mom need to know when she was raising me, what did the bullies need to know, what did the soldiers of World War II need to know?
What did ICE need to know before shooting Renee and Alex?
This isn’t just a story of particularly bad people. It’s simple to think that way because we’re used to history being painted in a black and white picture. But all these people we vilify, they were once just… People. So in that sense, what is it that you need to know today? Such that when you know this, you prevent pain and suffering from your own and other people’s lives?
I needed to know that a rabbit won’t fundamentally solve my loneliness, I was just transferring my emotions to the rabbit. My mom needed to know she was projecting her pain to me. The bullies needed to know as much as it feels good to punch and kick people, they’re just transferring their pain to the next target. The soldiers needed to know that their bullets are inspiring the next generation of hatred that their offspring will need to endure.
But why do we need to continue playing this game of hot potato? Because our pain exists in the first place. Then what do we do to prevent the pain in the first place? And what do we do when we ALREADY have pain from the past, and unless there’s a time machine we can’t do anything about that?
The dharma of the Buddha, or in plain English: the truthful reality that people realize to become free of suffering, has always been within my reach since I was a child. But it took me 30+ years to arrive at it. Freedom from suffering isn’t something that’s only available to spiritual people who practice from day 0 of their lives. It’s not postdated freedom from suffering, it’s retroactive and transcends time; with the realization of the dharma there is no suffering.
The existence of the dharma and my invitation to you is a bit of a spoiler. It is the final destination of suffering, where it comes to die. But as I wrote in this writing everybody looks for ways to relieve their suffering and it may be quite a while until you arrive at the dharma. Sometimes we hurt ourselves and others in the process and the biggest painful regret I held in my heart is that I did not learn the dharma sooner. If only I had known how to prevent the suffering of myself and another life…
But having this past is not a reason to suffer. I have verified that with myself. I cannot let the rabbit’s life pass in vain. I get called a lot of things on the internet and people look at me with a skeptical eye when I say I’m a life coach. That is not a deterrent for me because I am not doing this for validation or anyone’s approval. I am doing right by the rabbit, I am cutting off future pain from lives by reducing the amount of suffering in the world starting with mine.
Learn the mechanism of suffering and add more peace and happiness to this world instead of the other way around. Should you have resources you can study, that’s great. But I know how difficult it is to center yourself in your study with a world full of distractions. Utilize me, take advantage of me to find happiness without changing anything else in your life. The time to start the conversation is now, before any more suffering comes in.
Billy Seol
July Life Coach
julylifecoach.com
