If suffering is inherent in human existence, so is happiness. Undoubtedly, the fact that we have created a culture of suffering seems extraordinarily mysterious. The decompensation between the levels of suffering and happiness is accentuated throughout history. The amount of suffering endured in our times saturate all imaginable levels of resistance. We must recognize that social systems include in their structure the greatest options for suffering. Social systems, in most countries in the East and the West, are sustained on the presupposition of high levels of suffering; suffering caused by the systems of work and exploitation, by the warmongering mindset, by social discrimination, by the habits of torture in all power microsystems, by the diseases of civilization. These and other forms of social suffering create “the tragic sentiment of life”, which Miguel de Unamuno talks about. It is a philosophical conviction that existence has in its essence a tragic element.
Fatality, as a mythical entity, has not disappeared from the bottom of our culture. From the Greek tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, through Dante's Divine Comedy and Shakespeare's dramas, to the writers of our time, all describe human existence as a never-won battle against fatality and suffering. Sören Kierkegaard, with his treaty of despair (The Sickness unto Death?); Sartre and Camus, in their numerous works of existentialist literature and theater; contemporary Jewish poets, such as Albrecht Hauchofer, Hans Eric Nossack, Paul Celan, Günther Grass, who transmitted to the world the holocaust of the Jews during the period of fascism in Germany; Kafka, Antonin Artaud and Le Clezio, denouncing the hell of our time, are only some of the top reporters of this culture of suffering. Freud, in “The Malaise of Culture” (Civilisation and Its Discontents), explains that for the simple fact of living in this civilization, human beings will feel unwell. Arthur Jores registers 1,500 illnesses generated exclusively by our life styles. In addition, the icons of the East and the West allude to suffering. The Buddha postulates a serenity with the deadening of desires and emotions to escape suffering and, in the West, our religious symbol is the crucified.
We would have to follow the trail of the geniuses who sought the lost plot of happiness and found it in the Songs of Bilitis, in some poems by Garcilaso, in Hallelujah from Handel's Messiah, in Bach´s Cantatas, in the majority of the works of Vivaldi and Corelli; in Botticelli's paintings, in Leonardo da Vinci's The Virgin of the Rocks, in Khajuraho's tantric sculptures; in Tagore's poems about the interiority of happiness, in Katherine Mansfield´s short story Happiness (PJ: Bliss??) about brief and subtle daily joys; in some of George Harrison's compositions, in Hawaiian songs and dances.
Undoubtedly, the artistic weight of our culture falls through the side of pain. Even those who knew the essence of joy, like Bach, were deep in suffering, but already looking for solutions of plenitude, as in St John Passion or in this little musical piece “Come, Sweet Death”. Beethoven shows the sweetness of pain in his Appassionata and in the Razumovsky string quartets. The hippie movement innocently sought happiness in a sordid world, only to be soon contaminated and destroyed by the system and by drug addiction.
I believe that the evolution of our species will be marked by an essential modification of the structures that generate suffering, to be replaced by those that generate happiness. Biodanza proposes to introduce this variable, modifying the social microsystems, in order to reestablish the original connection between movement and happiness, movement and joy, movement and love. If we focus on the spirit of life, we can be sure that happiness is an intrinsic condition of existence, even because it has different qualities from the lived-experience of suffering.
Suffering has a slow temporality; happiness is fleeting. Suffering activates afferent pathways that make the body heavy; happiness makes the body light, agile and epiphanic.
Human suffering is like Janus. It has two faces. We can speak of a path that goes from suffering to plenitude and, with the same certainty, we can describe a path from suffering to destruction.
Suffering is a natural component of existence and we could say that life acquires its uniqueness in the way of elaborating suffering. The most frequent source of suffering is, paradoxically, love. And this fact is not far from the fear that many have to commit themselves affectionately. We would say that affective repression has its deepest origin in a metaphysical terror and not so much in cultural causes.
The immediate effects of suffering are
- Self-devaluation, with the consequent loss of identity.
- Tendency to pathological regression and a decline in all functions. Fear of life and tendency to immobility.
- Destructive and self-destructive impulses. Fantasies of revenge and suicide.
- Resignation, that is, taking on evil as a fatality against which we are powerless.
The set of these four components has a profound influence on all levels of behaviour. A wounded person has a dreadful force that makes him or her dangerous to self and others.
Suffering has immediate effects on neurovegetative balance, in the sense of blocking the beta-adrenergic mechanisms and the immune system, by triggering states of immunosuppression. This explains the appearance of certain psychosomatic illnesses caused by suffering, the emergence of virogen-type infections and the frequent manifestation of neoplasms. What we affirm does not in any way mean that cancer is produced by suffering, but it can be triggered by that. Our observations with mastectomized patients demonstrated, in most cases, that the cancer emerged between the 2nd and 3rd month after the loss or abandonment of a loved one. Investigations by M. Asken, L. Baibi, F. Dumbar, S.J. Kowai, O.M. Perrin and I.R. Pierce and others confirmed these observations.
The path from suffering to plenitude is different.
- After a first stage of inner weeping and feeling of dismay, individuals feel some relief from their anguish. They turn inward, gathering all their energies, with which they reinforce their identity.
- Creative violence. Hostility and anger are directed toward constructive and creative purposes.
- Activity. Instead of becoming paralyzed, they redouble their efforts at work.
- Rebelliousness in the face of difficulties. From the deep feeling of failure, they draw the strength to reach a state of plenitude.