Sadness and suffering are states of mind. States of mind are in flux. They are like fireflies in that they go on and off. Sadness and suffering and other emotions are flighty things, yet you latch on to them. I tell you that they do not exist.
Understandably, they exist for you. They even envelop you, and you hug them. Perhaps you think that wayward emotions are dues you have to pay for non-sadness and non-suffering. We can say you have specialized in sadness and suffering so that one day you may graduate from them.
Beloveds, there is sadness, and there is suffering because of supportive reasons you have for them. You believe in them very well, and you believe in their causes. If you did not believe in cause and effect, you might not have so much faith in sadness and suffering.
Suffering is something you take on. This or that happens, and therefore you suffer. This or that happens or doesn't happen, and you feel vanquished. You feel trumped. You feel at a loss. You feel bewildered. You feel saddened because life in the world is life in the world.
If you can believe in suffering, you can let go of the belief in suffering.
Believe in treasure more than you believe in hurt. Believe in love and never mind suffering. You may have felt that life offers a steady stream of suffering. You may believe that there is really no let-up to it. You believe in the immutability of the past. You believe in the immutability of suffering as the field of life. There does not have to be war for you to believe that life is a battlefield.
You believe in win and lose, win and lose. You believe in getting out unscathed, but only for a while. The dagger of scathe hangs over you. You have the inalienable right to happiness, yet you may feel you can only have stolen moments of happiness. You may be sure you lack freedom, and yet you have the freedom to cause yourself suffering because you believe in plus and minus and vestiges of time. You believe in the permanence of temporary time when you could be believing in other things.
What if life is not a dusty road ahead of you? What if you are walking on a straight golden path? Only there are billboards along the way revealed like movies that you become engrossed in. You tend to believe in the movies more than the golden path you are on. You are above the world, beloveds. Movies come and go, and you are forever. You certainly have felt trammeled, yet you are incapable of being trammeled. You play a game with yourself. The game has already been decided. You won it long ago.
You have held on to appointment and disappointment as if they were your life. Your life is something else. You wear a film over your eyes that make it so easy for you to see the dark and forget about the light which is uppermost. How busy you have been, how involved you have been in the dark, and so you have only blinked at the light. Perhaps the light is too dazzling for you to look at. Your trust in dark has been so strong that you have hardly taken in the light. The light is infallible, yet you have designed an outlook that says the opposite, that says darkness is inevitable, and light is uncertain. You persist in a debit column.
In the debit column, you have death, and you have loss, and you hold them high in front of you as your mainstays, as it were, when they do not exist. Yet death and loss exist for you, and you believe in them mightily. You put them before you as if they were the High King. The High King is love, beloveds. Love is the Ace you hold. Hold it high. There is nothing else.