Posted on With Gangaji: "What do you learn from suffering?"

Learning itself was always my source of suffering, because I could never find all the answers. Eventually finding myself on a spiritual journey, through endless inquiry,
I found that I must face the final question. The final question (for me) is the one with no answer*, and arriving at it countless thousands of times through inquiry, my mind finally surrendered and gave up to the unknowable. Before that, the unknown was a source of suffering - until I experienced it directly, finding its the safest place to be. The greatest source of my own suffering, the inner critic-judger, evaporated, and with that comes the knowing that nothing is ever missing, or ever out of place. Well, we talk about these things for years because they are hard to put into words, and I finally see how impossible it is to put a realization of truth into a paragraph! And, I have to add words about the heart as it is only my experience of the open heart that vanishes the inner critic (a form of "ego" you might say) and keeps me in the experience of connectedness to everything in my awareness. This heart is also what shows me that suffering is over, but wait...that leads to another realization. "My" suffering is over, but not that of others. This hurts in a new way, and brings tears when I think about all of the pain being experienced by living beings, but it brings a new learning. This is the learning that goes on in the present moment, from the experience of everything as changing and re-created constantly. Now that my individual suffering is over, I'm never not learning. It's as though someone is holding down the refresh button to the entire Universe.
*"who am I" is the common inquiry that leads to the final question, but I needed to ask many others as well: what is my purpose, where am I from, eventually finding even that "is the sky blue?" has no final answer. It was uncomfortable but worth it! Amazingly, being in the unknown at all times feels truly free. Joel Weddington 4-16-13