endless possibility of suffering (hell)

I think humans experience the endlessness of suffering in their experience of, and desire for, beauty. If I ask the question: how much suffering (in degree and in duration) must one bear or avoid (in actuality and as a desired possibility) in order for one to experience beauty/goodness/wholesomeness, one can say that every actual and desired experience of beauty is only as deep/real and lasting as the depth and duration of the loss/suffering/emptiness/lack it overcomes…as soon as any experience of beauty in any degree ceases to be a respite or refuge from some loss, it is emptied of its meaning and appears as a kind of deception to the human mind (the kind of thought that says ‘what are you so happy/at peace about? its just an ordinary thing and you have no real reason really to feel safe from loss of what seems (deceptively) pleasing to you’)..at the heart of the soul’s ability to perceive beauty meaningfully and truthfully then, there is and should be, in the world that i live in as the kind of mind/creature i am, a perpetual and unending possibility of lack of beauty and a terrible emptiness…this emptiness regularly makes it presence felt (or rather someone makes us feel this emptiness) in those moments when our sense of beauty has lost awareness of that emptiness and we try to, to lean on the language of the Quran, live in an eternal paradise without being aware of an eternal hell…our inability to sustain a perfect and unwavering happiness/awareness of beauty (as much as some part of our soul yearns, analytically/spiritually for such an unwavering, stable, non-dual, sufferingless experience of happiness) without experiencing lack thereof indicates the reality of an unending lack/absence of beauty/life…it is how I witness that hell exists and it is ever-ready and ever-there to annihilate all that the soul finds beautiful and beloved…it is this hell that enables the soul to find something meaningfully beautiful and to yearn, endlessly (as endlessly as the hell that threatens it) for evermore beauty/life for everymore longer.

Published by Faraz Sheikh

Faraz Sheikh