End Suffering on Sullenness

by Richard Wooldridge

     Have you always gotten what you wanted in life? Did things always go your way? Of course not. So as a little boy or girl you watched your parents or someone else in the family or a friend of the family and you simply mimicked the way in which they handled things in their life. Almost everyone without exception pouted or became sullen and resentful when denied their own way.
     We have unconscious demands. We expect to be treated in a certain way. If this doesn’t happen, we get mad or pout or get surly. The dictionary defines sullen as resentfully silent or glum. If we’re honest everyone has done this or has experienced a negative reaction when something doesn’t go our way. We get dejected.
     It’s simply a bad habit we’ve picked up as we were growing up. If we’ll study ourselves and others carefully over time, we’ll begin to see these are just mechanical habits we’ve acquired. We were not intended to feel bad or to suffer. God didn’t do this to us, it’s something we learned as a way to deal with life on this earth. If we can start to see clearly that this is not who we really are and we were not intended to be tormented by dark states, we can actually put an end to this nonsense.
     I recently observed a young couple having a disagreement. She was crying about something and he was trying to explain something to her. So she eventually stormed off in one direction and he went in the opposite direction. It took about 5 minutes before she came back forlornly calling his name in hopes that he wouldn’t leave her and that all would be well in their little fiefdom.
     Because I appeared on the scene it threw a monkey wrench into the equation. They were supposed to be a loving couple but there they were arguing with each another, which exposed them as being something other than the nice, loving people they were pretending to be. That young couple did not know they do not have to be contentious or argumentative toward one another.  Unfortunately, they will more than likely continue to get into arguments because they haven’t seen through the lie yet.
     Human beings have been duped into believing that suffering is necessary. This is very hard for the ordinary person to grasp. We’re convinced that suffering is a necessary part of life. A relationship must be a struggle. Things need to be worked out. It’s all a gigantic lie. Vernon Howard puts it this way, “The self you suffer over does not exist. But this is something we all must work hard to understand for ourselves.”
     If we begin to see through the hoax that’s been played on us, we can receive higher help to go beyond being sullen or falling into any other negative state which we’ve wrongly taken as being real. If we truly want a different kind of a life we can have it.