To eliminate suffering you have to eliminate the causes of suffering. If you resolve one instance of suffering without dealing with its causes, another situation will arise that will bring more suffering. You can’t eliminate suffering in one situation and expect it to disappear from all situations. The difficulties will simply change form. Suffering persists as long as the underlying causes continue to be there. – Diamond Heart Book Five: Inexhaustible Mystery, ch. 4
n time you realize that as long as you live according to any ideal, as long as you try to actualize any ideal, there is suffering. And you learn this through the process of suffering more than anything else. If you suffer deeply and with understanding, you will mature, you’ll be a ripe human being. A ripe human being is a human being who feels deeply that at the deepest level there is happiness and harmony, but who knows at the same time, that desiring happiness and harmony cuts him off from reality. Because he is mature and he knows this principle, he stops desiring. A mature human being knows that he wants happiness more than anything else, and he also knows that by wanting it, he will not get it; so he acts accordingly. Another person might know these things, but not be mature enough to act accordingly. Being mature means that your knowledge allows you to actually stop pursuing your fantasies. But it takes a lot of disappointments to allow that to happen. – Diamond Heart Book Three: Being and the Meaning of Life, ch. 6
If reality feels painful to us or if we experience it as negative, these perceptions are layered over it, extrinsic to it, incidental to it, and are therefore transitory rather than abiding. They are the veils of reactivity, of the mind distorting what we see and experience. Suffering, then, is nothing but reality experienced through our subjectivity. When a person is not perceiving the Holy Ideas, he or she is experiencing some degree of suffering. From the perspective of someone who is seeing objectively, that suffering is just in the person’s mind, but as far as that person is concerned, the suffering is very real. So the one seeing objectively will naturally have compassion and a desire to help, not by alleviating the suffering, but by helping the other see correctly, because when we see correctly, our suffering disappears. Even physical pain becomes less painful if you are perceiving Holy Love, which means being in a state of bliss, because the psychological suffering that contributes so profoundly to the pain is gone. It is possible to realize Holy Love so completely that nothing can make it disappear. – Facets of Unity: The Enneagram of Holy Ideas, ch.17
Essence protects itself with dragons, they say. And the dragon of pain is the one we encounter at the mouth of the cave. We usually see only the surface appearance of reality, so most of us cannot imagine that consciously entering into our suffering can reveal something wonderful. – Karen Johnson, The Jeweled Path: The Biography of the Diamond Approach to Inner Realization, Ch. 18
There is a beauty to the human being who experiences his or her suffering without indulging, and getting lost in it. Truth sometimes leads to the elimination of suffering, but it can also lead to pain. Whichever results, if the student allows the perspective of love and appreciation for reality, for truth—aware that it brings joy or pain—a feeling of deep intimacy within will result. You could be intimate with yourself, which is satisfying and fulfilling regardless of whether the outcome of the problem results in pain or pleasure. – A. H. Almaas, Diamond Heart Book Four: Indestructible Innocence