Anam Cara

Unconscious Suffering

Below the surface in the night-side of your inner world, there is suffering happening. Given that suffering usually causes pain, it sounds strange to suggest that you might actually be suffering without knowing it. Yet there seems to be something in this idea the more one thinks about it. There is a vast area of the human soul that is totally unknown to us. Let us not equate it simply with the subconscious. This holds us too firmly within the idiom of psychoanalysis. In that unknown region, many things happen of which you are afforded no glimpse. It is probable that quite a lot of suffering happens there that never ascends to the surface of your mind. Quietly in the night of our souls, everyone suffers. This suffering can be quietly at work, refining, tempering, and balancing your presence here in the world. Patiently it turns the charred icon of your falsity into the luminous icon of real presence.

Perhaps this perspective can open a little window into the dark mystery of how children suffer. There is the awful reality of children who are suffering horribly in the world through abuse, poverty, and wars. Yet there is also the fact that in some way all children suffer. Behind the playful world of every child there is some unconscious darkness deciphering itself and working itself through. Every child carries even in its innocence some of the burden of the pain of the world. This is akin to the unknown suffering in which every adult also participates. Something in the very nature of suffering loves the darkness of the unknown and hurts us and lessens us even without our being fully conscious of it.