Self-Inquiry with Javier Gómez Rodríguez, October 26, 2025

We began by reading the entry in The Book of Life for July 26, entitled “Follow the Movement of Suffering”. This text had been excerpted from Chapter 7: On Suffering, in the Questions and Answers section of The First and Last Freedom, pp. 168-171.

The longer excerpt referred to the case of someone suffering because they lost their son or daughter in whom they had placed all their hopes. This sudden loss is felt as an acute disturbance at the physical and psychological levels, and this is what we call suffering, which we try to avoid by resorting to various escapes like work, drink and belief.

This sense of the shock of death hitting close to home was recognized by everyone. K would normally associate it with psychological attachment and identification, which implied self-interest, which meant that the resulting suffering was a form of self-pity, for it was on account of our loss and not because of the other person that we were pained. But K had also acknowledged on occasion that the shock of death was not all due to such psychological attachments but to the very organic sense of the close involvement of the people concerned in each other’s lives. This added a layer of subtlety to the question of suffering because we were now required to distinguish between these two elements in the pain of separation and death.

In his investigation, K was not interested in finding the reason or cause of suffering but in following its movement. According to K, only when there is no separate observer can we follow the movement of suffering, which following reveals that we projected on the other person the hope of succeeding where we had failed. Or we depended on him or her to cover up our misery and loneliness. What we are sorry about is not the other but that we are left empty and alone.

Again, this kind of description was easily recognized, but it did raise a number of questions, as the real shock of loss is easily confused with the selfish motivations behind our self-pity. To see that we are being self-centered in such a situation might not be so easily perceived through the emotional fog. That we project our fulfilment on others or that we use them to escape from ourselves might not be that easy to see either, but it is essential that we see it if we are to understand the true meaning of sorrow and pain.

We say we suffer on account of something external, such as losing someone, not having money, etc. But the suffering comes from our personal investment in these things, not from the things themselves. What we suffer from is the loss of our attachment to these things, which attachment is indeed our own self-projection.  If this is correct, we suffer as long as this false separation between the observer and the observed exists. This very separation is the nature of the self, I or me. When that separation ends, the me also ends and then there is no-one who suffers. This is K’s basic approach, which would indicate that suffering is the nature of the self as attachment and duality. When duality and attachment go, the word sorrow has no meaning.

But for that we have to dare to remain with sorrow without moving an inch from it. Have we ever tried it? Are we even willing to contemplate such a thing?

This subject proved to be so interesting that the meeting went on for a bit longer than usual.

Javier Gómez Rodríguez