The Dark Forest

You can’t remove suffering because suffering isn’t what you think it is

Dark Forest by Ivan Shishkin (1980)

You’re roaming a dark forest. You do not know how you’ve got here, where you’re going, and what is here anyway? But you do know you feel threatened. You do not know by what exactly, which is why the threat feels so powerful.

You feel hungry eyes gazing at you from out between the vegetation. But you never dare to look at them directly out of fear that eye contact will make them pounce.

Most of the time, there’s only low-grade anxiety. But at times, fear and paranoia mount, and you run. You run and run, and the forest doesn’t end.

And then, from exhaustion, you collapse. You can no longer avoid the urge to face the bush — might as well see the entity that will tear you apart. So you look, and there’s nothing there — no beasts, just forest.

Huh, strange.

This is what happens when you deconstruct your experience: the scary specters move from periphery to center so you can have a proper look. This is how the formless entities of your mind are exposed. Fear, desire, and all their offspring only have a grip on you when you don’t look, when they remain vague shadow dwellers.

Get them out of the shadows and into the flashlight of your awareness, and what do we have?

The monster was only a bunch of squirrels stacked on top of each other.

Desire, for example, isn’t this strange, oppressive force blackmailing you into dissatisfaction. It doesn’t demand that you react in specific ways for lacking something. Without the interpretations, it’s only sensations/feelings.

Any form of psycho-emotional suffering only seems intimidating if you refuse to face it directly. Suffering might seem to have a certain texture — constricting, sharp, heavy, etc. — but the closer you look, the more the texture softens until you notice something surprising: it’s all the same stuff — we may call it energy.

Running through the dark forest, trying to flee from imagined monsters, is what we do when we try to get rid of suffering.

But now that we’ve seen that what we think is causing the suffering isn’t so bad when we spotlight it, we can see where the suffering really lies: in the act of trying to remove (or get away from) suffering.

If you insist on removing a monster that isn’t there (it’s only a stack of squirrels), how can you ever accomplish the task? How can you do something that isn’t there to be done?

You’ll keep imagining monsters until you accept that the only one haunting you is yourself.

Pain is the immediate, non-conceptual experience. Suffering is emotional investment in the psychological overlay.

In other words, as many wise folks have pointed out, pain is unavoidable, suffering is an illusion. Yes, it doesn’t seem like an illusion, but the point of an illusion is to convince you 100%. If it weren’t perfectly convincing, no one would struggle with it.

Let’s say you’re watching a horror movie. Big budget. High quality. Very believable. Disbelief suspended. Throughout the movie, the tension builds. Soon we’ll see the evil antagonist — any moment now. But instead of a convincing evil entity inspiring fear and terror, we have a silly, poorly made, and completely unconvincing fiend that looks like it was illustrated with MS Paint. The tension’s gone, and the disbelief is unsuspended.

Totally real scene from The Conjuring (2013)

The horror movies of our lives are well-made. And everyone’s too busy being scared shitless to have a proper look.

When you do look, for a moment, like in a movie, your disbelief is unsuspended. You see that you’re afraid of your own imagination. Your mind might protest and claim there’s good reason for being afraid, which is exactly how it keeps the self-created suffering alive.

A fruitful line of inquiry is to question the narrative of “me” and “my experience.” With sincerity, it doesn’t need to take long to see that “me” and “my experience” aren’t two separate things. Experience isn’t happening to anyone; the me we commonly interpret as the experiencer is part of experience — a thought-feeling amalgamation.

Seeing this reveals that there’s no fixed subject (me) and object (experience) here — there’s only experiencing.

Thus, the habit of fighting with yourself relaxes. Perhaps not all at once, but surely.

But don’t believe this because it sounds good. Think things through until you see the limit of thinking. And then notice what can be noticed without it.

Ultimately, this isn’t a mental exercise. Yes, it offers the mind something to chew on, but the point of eating a meal isn’t the chewing.

We can see that the experiences associated with the most pain are different from our interpretations of them. And we can see that pain turns into suffering when we mistake interpretations for raw experience.

Then all the suffering you struggle with looks quite different, and it’s evident that it comes with being entangled in a self-perpetuating loop of thoughts and emotions.

We’re used to jumping into the loop and trying to delete it from inside. But being inside the loop results in cross-eyed vision, and cross-eyed vision has you pressing the multiply button instead of the delete button.

This is the tricky part. And it’s tricky because the solution is too simple.

We’re back in the forest, and you’re at a crossroad. The left path is wide open and unfamiliar; the right path is the familiar dark path that loops you back around, past the scary (imagined) monsters. Because you’ve taken the right path many, many times, you know what happens when you do — you’ll try to outrun the beasts, until you reach the crossroad again.

This is your 134,986th try, my dear traveler. Will you take it again?

The familiar thoughts and emotions seem so enticing, like you should engage with them. They’ve fed on so much attention, they seem like defining parts of you, like the major themes you’re supposed to resolve.

You feel at the mercy of this. But really, it depends on you.

You’ve tried wrestling with your thoughts and emotions, haven’t you? How has that been working out for you?

You’ve been circling the same patterns over and over. Having your attention caught up in those patterns isn’t resolving them, but keeping them in place.

Here’s what I’ve come to realize: there’s a never-ending supply of imagined forest monsters. As long as you believe you need to outrun them, you’ll keep running. This is because you think you’re the one running from beasts, while you’re actually the one supplying them.

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