Pain for the world

To be conscious in our world today is to be aware of vast suffering and unprecedented peril. Even the words—fear, anger, sorrow—are inadequate to convey the feelings we experience, for these connote emotions long familiar to our species.

In the Buddhist tradition there is a model of the saint, the hero or heroine is called a "bodhisattva", and in the Lotus Sutra it is said that the key distinguishing feature of the bodhisattva is that she or he is able to hear, able to open the heart to pain. Everything in the dominant consumer culture from which we come tells us not to do that. We are told to avoid pain, the pain can shatter us, and here we are sitting together, we are voluntarily come together to open our hearts to the suffering of our people, our planet people. In the Lotus Sutra it says the bodhisattva is able to hear the music of the spheres, able to understand the language of the birds, choirs of angels. And by that same token, and indeed, it is because the bodhisattva is able to hear the cries of anguish and distress in the deepest levels of hell. See the Ashoka course Bodhisattvas of Compassion

The feelings that assail us now cannot be equated with ancient dreads of mortality and "the heartache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to." Their source lies less in concerns for the personal self than in apprehensions of collective suffering—of what happens to our own and other species, to the legacy of our ancestors, to unborn generations, and to the living body of Earth.

What we are dealing with here is akin to the original meaning of compassion: "suffering with." It is the distress we feel on behalf of the larger whole of which we are a part. It is the pain of the world itself, experienced in each of us.

No one is exempt from that pain, any more than one could exist 
alone and self-sufficient in empty space. We are not closed off from the 
world, but integral components of it, like cells in a larger body. When that
 body is traumatized, we sense that trauma, too. When it falters and sickens, we feel its pain, whether we pay attention to it or not.

That pain is the price of consciousness in a threatened and suffering world. It is not only natural, it is an absolutely necessary component of our collective healing. As in all organisms, pain has a purpose: it is a warning signal, designed to trigger remedial action.

The problem, therefore, lies not with our pain for the world, but in our repression of it. Our efforts to dodge or dull it surrender us to futility.