suffering

The Three Doors to Wisdom: Silence, Humility and Suffering

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Lantern beside a mossy stone path through an autumn forest pond

The path to wisdom, I have found, asks three things of us: silence, humility and suffering. Deepak Chopra arrives at the same three in his new book, Awakening in the Final Chapter, where wisdom is one of six qualities he sees deepening in life’s later years. Silence makes room to listen, humility reminds us there is always more to understand, and suffering, if we let it teach us, shows us something of ourselves (Chopra, 2026).

1. Silence

Not the absence of sound, but the willingness to stop the inner commentary of opinions, judgments and plans. Meditation trains exactly this: returning, again and again, to the still point beneath the chatter (Kabat-Zinn, 1994). In that stillness a luminous receptivity opens, and we begin to hear what the busy mind would miss.

2. Humility

Not performed modesty, but the honest recognition that the unknown vastly exceeds the known and every perspective is partial. The Vedantic neti, neti (“not this, not this”) warns us never to mistake a concept for the reality it points to (Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 2.3.6). The map is not the territory (Korzybski, 1933); the finger pointing at the moon is not the moon.

The Tamil poet Avvaiyar put it more simply still:

கற்றது கைம்மண் அளவு, கல்லாதது உலகளவு

Kattrathu kaimman alavu, kallathathu ulagalavu

What we have learned is a handful of sand; what we have yet to learn is the size of the world.

3. Suffering

Not because pain is noble in itself; it is not. But loss, failure, illness and betrayal, if we don’t harden against them, can crack the persona and show us what is real.

Viktor Frankl, writing after the concentration camps, observed that when we can no longer change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves (Frankl, 1946). Modern psychology has given this a name: post-traumatic growth, the positive change many people report after profound struggle (Tedeschi & Calhoun, 2004).

Suffering teaches us, at a level deeper than the intellect, that we are more than our circumstances, and more than our stories about our circumstances.

Three doors, one house

Silence lets us hear, humility lets us admit we have not yet understood, and suffering, met with an open heart, breaks the shell that keeps both out. Wisdom is less something we acquire than something we make room for.

References

  • Chopra, D. (2026). Awakening in the Final Chapter: Aging with Grace, Love, and Freedom. Deepak Chopra LLC.
  • Kabat-Zinn, J. (1994). Wherever You Go, There You Are. Hyperion.
  • Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, trans. P. Olivelle (1996). Upaniṣads. Oxford World’s Classics.
  • Korzybski, A. (1933). Science and Sanity. Institute of General Semantics.
  • Frankl, V. E. (1946/2006). Man’s Search for Meaning. Beacon Press.
  • Tedeschi, R. G., & Calhoun, L. G. (2004). Posttraumatic growth: Conceptual foundations and empirical evidence. Psychological Inquiry, 15(1), 1–18.
  • Avvaiyar. Kattrathu kaimman alavu, kallathathu ulagalavu. Traditional Tamil verse attributed to the poet Avvaiyar; English translation by the author.

–One Tusk supported by Claude

Listen with Compassion

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“Deep listening, compassionate listening is not listening with the purpose of analyzing or even uncovering what has happened in the past. You listen first of all in order to give the other person relief, a chance to speak out, to feel that someone finally understands him or her. Deep listening is the kind of listening that helps us to keep compassion alive while the other speaks, which may be for half an hour or forty-five minutes. Continue reading →

The Art of Transforming Suffering

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Releasing the Arrow
by Thich Nhat Hanh from No Mud, No Lotus: The Art of Transforming Suffering

There is a Buddhist teaching found in the Sallatha Sutta, known as The Arrow. It says if an arrow hits you, you will feel pain in that part of your body where the arrow hit; and then if a second arrow comes and strikes exactly at the same spot, the pain will not be only double, it will become at least ten times more intense.

The unwelcome things that sometimes happen in life—being rejected, losing a valuable object, failing a test, getting injured in an accident—are analogous to the first arrow. They cause some pain. The second arrow, fired by our own selves, is our reaction, our storyline, and our anxiety. All these things magnify the suffering. Many times, the ultimate disaster we’re ruminating upon hasn’t even happened. We may worry, for example, that we have cancer and that we’re going to die soon. We don’t know, and our fear of the unknown makes the pain grow even bigger.

The second arrow may take the form of judgment (“how could I have been so stupid?”), fear (“what if the pain doesn’t go away?”), or anger (“I hate that I’m in pain. I don’t deserve this!”). We can quickly conjure up a hell realm of negativity in our minds that multiplies the stress of the actual event, by ten times or even more. Part of the art of suffering well is learning not to magnify our pain by getting carried away in fear, anger, and despair. We build and maintain our energy reserves to handle the big sufferings; the little sufferings we can let go.

 

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Pain is inevitable – suffering is optional

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6 Ways to Decrease Your Suffering

“The world is full of suffering. It is also full of overcoming it.” ~Helen Keller

You’ve probably heard the saying “Pain is inevitable; suffering is optional.”

For a many years, I didn’t understand how pain and suffering were different from each other. They seemed inextricably wrapped up together, and I took it for granted that one was the inevitable consequence of the other.

However, as I have grown to understand my own capacity to create happiness, I noticed something interesting about the nature of my suffering.

As I reflect back on painful episodes in my life, I can recall losing people who were dear to me. I remember abrupt changes in jobs, housing, and other opportunities that I believed were the basis of my happiness.

In each of those experiences the immediate visceral pain was searing, like a hot knife cutting through my heart. Then afterwards came grief, an emotional response to loss that arose quite naturally.

But closely on the heels of physical pain and emotional grief comes something else, something that I create in my own mind even though it feels quite real. That something else is “suffering.”

As a friend of mine once said, this is like putting butter on top of whipped cream. Suffering is the “extra” that our mind adds to an already painful situation.

It is at this very point, when your mind starts to fiddle with the pain and grief, that you have the possibility of doing things differently.

If you’re in the midst of great pain right now, it might help to know that the old saying really is true: While the pain can’t be avoided—it’s the price of being a human with a heart—there are ways we can reduce this kind of self-generated suffering.

Over the years, thanks to the guidance of wise friends as well as my own meditation practice, I’ve developed six tactics that have been helpful in reducing this type of suffering. I hope you’ll find them beneficial too. Continue reading →