It is in our innate nature to avoid suffering and to optimize for pleasure, especially prolonged pleasure. Today, it almost feels strange and worrisome when someone laughs wholeheartedly in the face of adversity. In a world that equates pain with damage, joy in adversity looks almost abnormal, and they may even be (mis)diagnosed with some mental illness.
The more you eat neem leaves, though initially bitter, at some point even the neem leaves will taste sweet. But have you ever seen someone reach a stage where they can truly claim it is sweet? Only a few can. Only a few know the secret.
Did Adi Shankaracharya show any bitterness about illness? Did Ramakrishna Paramahamsa ever lose his playfulness despite the body suffering from throat cancer? Did Bhadrachala Ramadasu give up his devotion to Lord Rama when he was tortured for years? Did people forget Vishnu under the tyranny of Hiranyakashipu?
No! They sailed that ship of samsara, the ship of suffering. Today, people just take a sip from the cup of suffering and decide to walk on the opposite side of dharma and end their lives, or end the life of the person causing their suffering. I hardly see anyone around me reflecting upon suffering. They would rather drown themselves in intoxication than bravely see through the whole ordeal, let alone think about it at all.
They did not try to escape suffering. They stayed with it long enough to see through it. Like the two birds in the Mundaka Upanishad, the lower bird tastes the fruits of life until sorrow forces it to look upward. In that turning, it discovers the Self, ever-blissful. Until the bitterness is borne, the sweetness of vairagya is not revealed.
What was hurting Ramadasu more ? The prison and the torture, or his longing for Rama? What must have been going on in his mind when he cried in anguish, yet still sang, “Nanu rakshimpakunnanu rakshakulu evarinka Ramachandra?” There was suffering, and yet there was surrendering. What a profound pairing of words. I often feel that the English language may not adequately capture the depth of what these things truly mean, the intertwining of suffering and surrendering. Perhaps this is the open secret after all, surrendering to the Lord, whether in suffering or in pleasure, is Sharanagati. Maybe I do not know enough to say that with certainty, but that is how it feels to me at this point in life.
As the Dhurjati`s says in Sri Kalahastisvra Satakam:
Maybe the sweetness of neem is not in the leaf. It is in the one who has stopped resisting its bitterness.
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