A comment under a video landed with an edge that felt honest: If you aren’t aware of your own suffering, you have no business in spirituality.
It’s a big statement. Maybe too big—until you look at what happens when spirituality isn’t rooted in dukkha. It turns into image. Belonging. Rules. Promises. A better story. Something the ego can wear.
This teaching is about the mechanism underneath all of that: how the mind hides experience from itself, how we justify and dissociate, and how that same mechanism both creates suffering and conceals it.
And then the pivot: when suffering is finally felt and owned, it doesn’t just become the reason you seek. It becomes the doorway—sometimes the entire path.
A Comment Worth Making a Video About
I saw a comment under one of my videos that I thought was so good, I just had to make a video about it.
The comment was essentially:
“I don’t think anybody who has no experience of their own suffering, or is not aware of their own suffering, has any business in spirituality.”
Of course, it’s a very broad statement. Very general.
And I try not to make super generalized statements like this because everybody’s different. Things happen for people in very different ways.
I have had people tell me when they got interested in spirituality, it was more out of curiosity than suffering. They didn’t feel suffering.
I get that. I don’t want to invalidate anyone’s experience.
But when I dig a little deeper with someone like that, what I find is that they actually were suffering. They just weren’t fully aware of it.
The Ingenious Mind: Hiding Your Experience From Yourself
I’ve talked about this many times, but there’s something about the human mind that’s ingenious at hiding our own experience from us.
It sounds absurd.
Years ago in a philosophy class, there was a contemporary philosopher who made an argument that you can’t lie to yourself. That it’s logically impossible.
The logic is straightforward: if you’re the one lying, and you’re the one hiding the lie, where do you hide it such that you can’t find it? You’re the one hiding it.
It sounds like a logical absurdity.
And it turns out: you can lie to yourself. It happens all the time. You can hide all kinds of shit from yourself.
And this isn’t just an academic curiosity.
I think it’s the source of serious violence.
Fascination With Atrocity—and the Mechanism Beneath It
When we see people commit incredible atrocities, we marvel: how is this possible?
There’s a human fascination with this.
Currently, I think a lot of the most popular podcasts are murder podcasts—true crime drama. There’s one called My Favorite Murder and all this. I don’t know. I always think that’s a little cringe—capitalizing other people’s misery.
And at the same time, I understand it. We’re fascinated by it.
There’s something compelling about how a human who otherwise seems normally functioning can do horrible things.
There’s something interesting about it. It makes us a little scared.
That’s a bit of an aside, but it points to something real: the way the mind can dissociate from impact.
How Humans Do Horrible Things
Look at extreme atrocities and you ask: how does this happen?
How did guards at Nazi concentration camps get to the point where they could ritualistically murder people?
There are answers. Alcohol. They had to intoxicate them at first.
Fear: if you’re afraid someone will shoot you if you don’t shoot that person, then you shoot that person. This is how child soldiers get indoctrinated.
Gangs do this. Cartels do this. They teach people to torture because if you don’t do it, you’re the one who gets tortured.
Indoctrination through fear.
So humans do horrible things to themselves and to each other.
But even outside the most extreme examples, the mere fact that any of us can do this should give anyone pause. It should lead to sobriety.
Because the ability to dissociate from impact is the same mechanism that causes suffering—and the same mechanism that hides suffering from us.
Justification Isn’t Causal—It’s Dissociation
Part of how we do this is we justify.
We justify our actions and behaviors, and we hide the impact from ourselves.
The mind makes an excuse and says: “Well, I’m doing this because of this and this and this.”
It sounds causal—“I did this because of that.”
But that’s not what the reason is doing.
A justification is causing you to dissociate. It’s helping you not actually feel. It puts you in your head so you don’t have to feel the impact of what you’re doing—harming somebody, harming an animal, harming yourself.
This is a separation the human psyche can get into—the human mind, the human heart even.
And again, I’m talking about extreme examples, but the ability itself is the point.
How We Hide Trauma and Tell “Good Family” Stories
This same mechanism allows people to say:
“I don’t suffer. I feel great.”
It allows people to say:
“Oh no, I grew up in a great family. My family was awesome. I had a really close family.”
And then on closer inspection:
“Well, there was some abuse, and Dad did drink, and he’d hit Mom sometimes. But we were a good family otherwise. We were tight.”
“And yeah, a couple of us had drug problems after we grew up. And yeah, broken relationships repetitively. But no, we’re a good family.”
We justify so much.
We tell ourselves stories that make us feel better—or we think they make us feel better.
Maybe it’s social currency: convincing others we’re okay.
But really these are dissociative statements. They help us not feel what’s actually happening.
Maybe it’s the impact of our actions. Maybe it’s the impact of others’ actions on us.
How do we hide our own trauma from ourselves? How do we hide our own abuse from ourselves?
This dividing ability of the mind is not only a source of suffering. It’s the convenient mechanism through which we don’t even realize we’re suffering at all.
If You Don’t Know You’re Suffering, What Is Spirituality For?
So back to the statement: if you’re not aware of your own suffering, you have no business in spirituality.
Here’s how I track that.
Otherwise, what are you doing with spirituality?
Are you treating it like God is a big Santa Claus in the sky who’s going to grant your wishes?
So you pray for what you want and think you’re going to get it?
You pray so your football team wins?
Is that spirituality?
Or: “I follow a set of rules so I can get into heaven, because it’s about me getting into heaven.”
“I’ll be good so I can get something out of it.”
Not realizing underneath all of that is suffering.
Not realizing you’re suffering here.
And I think institutional religion can be used for exactly the opposite reason than true spirituality.
Spirituality is how to wake you up out of the dream.
Religion can give you a dream that’s functional in some way—practical, not always for you, maybe more practical for the institution.
Tithing. Supporting the institution. Elevating priests. All the things that lead to fraud and harm and abuse.
So you’re given a “better” story—better in quotes.
It may serve the institution. It may serve the priests. It may serve the community.
But what it doesn’t do is let you address that gnawing feeling that something’s wrong, that something’s not right.
Why do you have to dissociate and pray to a god in the future so you can get something in the future?
Why do you need those promises?
Because you’re suffering here.
Because something does not feel fundamentally okay here.
So if you’re not in touch with that suffering, spirituality or religion turns into something it was not meant to be.
It turns into more ego.
The ego is the ultimate opportunist.
The collective ego causes violence, division, crime. It’s culpable for every crime ever committed—this collective pain body, this ego.
That will be running the show until you’re in touch with your own suffering—your own dukkha, your own unsatisfactoriness.
Am I Putting Too Sharp an Edge on It?
Am I putting too sharp an edge on it? I don’t think I am.
You may be partially in touch with suffering. Intermittently. Vaguely.
And that can start to tune you in to what’s offered through direct paths like Zen Buddhism, Advaita Vedanta, Dzogchen, Mahamudra—direct path approaches—or non-traditional approaches like Pragmatic Dharma, or what I’m calling awakening.
You start to dial in through resonance with: something’s off.
Not in a spiritual way. In a you way.
In your own experience, something feels off.
Life has been unsatisfying, even if you’ve been telling yourself it’s satisfying, or telling everyone else it’s satisfying.
Some part of you feels like you’re suffering, crying out for help, and you can’t find it.
Even the therapist hasn’t helped. Even the priest hasn’t helped. Even pop spirituality hasn’t helped. Meditation, all of it.
Something still needs to be addressed that’s crying out: “Look here. Look here.”
But everything out there, including religion, says: “Don’t look there. Don’t go there.”
I’m the one telling you: go there. Go there. Go right into that suffering.
That is the whole point.
That is the point. That is the path. That is the fruition.
Samsara Is Nirvana: Why Suffering Isn’t an Accident
In Buddhism they have this beautiful term that essentially says suffering—dukkha—is liberation, nirvana.
Samsara is nirvana.
So suffering is not just the path. It’s the fruition.
It’s okay that you suffer, even though it feels not okay, even though it feels horrible.
And I’m not just telling you to accept it. I’m not telling you to say “this feels good” when it doesn’t.
That’s not the answer.
My point is: the fact that suffering is there is okay. It’s more than okay.
That is the beginning of the spiritual path. The beginning of spiritual unfoldment—true spiritual unfoldment.
Anguish is the match that lights up enlightenment.
That’s what we’re talking about.
The Portal: The Way Out Is In
We’re talking about kensho, awakening, for you—which isn’t anything you can think about. The term doesn’t mean anything, really.
It points to a possibility for you. That’s what matters.
And that possibility is that suffering is a portal.
Conventionally speaking, what I’m really getting at is: you don’t have to suffer in the way you’re suffering.
However, the way out is in.
You have to go through the suffering because it’s like a portal. It’s saying: “Look here.”
It’s saying: “Check out. See what’s here.”
Once you start to see what’s there, it becomes a lens. It points you deeper—deeper into yourself, deeper into inquiry about the nature of your experience of self, identity, thoughts.
That’s what this is about.
That’s true spirituality.
So yeah, this comment was accurate.
I don’t care what people do—get involved in spirituality for whatever reason you want—but it doesn’t start to unfold, the path doesn’t reveal itself, until you recognize your own suffering.
Which requires honesty. Vulnerability. Authenticity.