何苦受苦?——赛斯谈“受苦”（之三）

何苦受苦?——赛斯谈“受苦”（之一）

何苦受苦?——赛斯谈“受苦”（之二）

我觉得有时候人们好像期待我将人生的状况合理化，当然，任何这种合理化都是不必要的。

你们的信念将许多关于人类心理的知识隔绝在外——不然的话，那些知识将是完全可得的，可以用来回答许多关于为何受苦的提问。

说真的，其它问题还更难回答。不过，男人和女人生来就对所有的觉受和所有可能的生活经历充满好奇。他们渴望各种各样的经验。他们的好奇心并不局限于赏心悦目之事或平凡单调之事。

男人和女人们生来就有一种去超越限制的欲望——去“探索从未有人去过的地方”——我相信这是一个著名电视节目导语的盗版。人们生来就有一种戏剧感，一种对刺激的需要。生命本身就是刺激。最安静的情绪也倚靠在壮观的分子活动的推力上。

当你们长大成人时，忘记了很多你们十分自然的倾向、感受及内在的幻想，因为这些与你们被教导相信自己所是的那种人、那类经验以及人类形象不符。结果，你们生命中的许多事件，原本是那些感受的自然延伸，却显得陌生起来，似与你们最深的愿望相违背，或像是被外在的力量或捣乱的潜意识强加于你的。

儿童的思想为了解人类的天性提供了极佳的线索，但许多成年人并不记得任何童年的思想，除非那些思想符合或看似符合他们对童年的信念。

孩子们玩被杀的游戏。他们试图想象死亡是什么样子。他们想象自己像“蛋头先生”一样从墙上掉下来，或摔断脖子会是什么样子。他们想象悲剧性的角色，就像想象成年人可能赞同的角色一样，充满了创造性的放纵。他们用“意愿”使自己生病来逃避困境，又用意愿让自己好起来——对此他们常常相当清楚。

（译注：蛋头先生是《鹅妈妈童谣》里的著名角色，童谣中这样唱：蛋头先生墙上坐，蛋头先生跌下墙，所有国王的马和士兵，都没办法把他拼回去。）

他们很快就学会忘记了自己在这种插曲里的角色。所以后来，当成年人发现自己生病时，他们不仅忘记了是自己一开始引起了那个病，而且很不幸的，也忘记了如何用意愿让自己康复。

如我所说，有各种各样的痛苦，而我在以一种非常笼统的方式开始这个讨论，在书的定期口授之间，我也会不时继续这个讨论。尤其在过去的时代，人们清算自己，把灰抹在头发上，用铁链抽打自己，或挨饿，或做其它的自我惩罚。换言之，他们为了宗教的缘故受苦，而这习俗至今也尚未完全消弭。他们不仅相信受苦对灵魂有好处——附带一句，这种说法可以是真的，也可以是假的，我稍后会再加以说明——但他们也了解另外一件事：身体只能承受这么多的痛苦，然后它就会释放掉意识。所以，他们希望达成宗教的狂喜。

宗教的狂喜并不需要身体上的痛苦作为刺激，而这样一个方法在总体上不利于宗教上的了解。不过，这些插曲代表了一种方法，人类用这种方法主动寻求痛苦，作为达到另一个目的的手段。说这种活动是不自然的并不切题，因为它存在于自然的架构之内。

纪律（discipline）是应用痛苦的一种形式，纪律通常就是这样被运用的。人们没有被教导去了解他们对自身经验的了不起的胃口。一个小孩很自然地会对痛苦感到好奇，想要知道它是什么，想要看见它——通过这样做，他学会去避免他不想要的苦，去帮助别人避免他们不想要的苦，更重要的，去了解情感与觉受的各种层次，那本就是他的传承。作为一个成年人，如果他了解这一点，他就不会给别人施加痛苦，因为他会让自己感受到自己情感的真实性。

如果你否认自己情感的直接经验，却通过苛刻的纪律（discipline）去压抑情感，那么，你就能非常轻易地伤害别人，因为你把自己麻木的情感状态投射到他们身上——正如在纳粹集中营里，人们遵守命令，折磨别人——而你首先通过麻木自己对痛的敏感度，压抑你自己的情感，你才能做出那样的事。

人对痛的易感性帮助他同情别人，因而有助于他更积极地减轻社会中存在的各种不必要的痛苦。

我还有一点要说明：每个人的痛苦经验也记录在我们称为“世界之心”的那个东西上。造成痛苦的每个失败、失望或未解决的问题，都成了世界经验的一部分：这个或那个方式是行不通的，这个或那个方式已经被试过了，但结果很糟糕。所以，通过那种方式，当根据那些数据作出了调整时，甚至受苦的弱点或失败也会得到解决，或更确切地说，得到弥补。

就此而言，每个人过着他自己的私人生活，却也在为全人类而活。每个人都从一个独特的角度尝试新的挑战、新的情境及新的成就，为他自己，也为全人类。

I feel sometimes as if I am expected to justify life's conditions, when of course they do not need any such justification.

Your beliefs close you off from much otherwise quite-available knowledge concerning man's psychology—knowledge that would serve to answer many questions usually asked about the reasons for suffering. 

Other questions, it is true, are more difficult to answer. Men and women are born, however, with curiosity about all sensations, and about all possible life experiences. They are thirsty for experience of all  kinds. Their curiosity is not limited to the pretty or the mundane.

Men and women are born with a desire to push beyond the limits— to, in quotes: "explore where no man has ever gone before"—a bastard version of the introduction [to a famous television program], I believe. Men and women are born with a sense of drama, a need of excitement. Life itself is excitement. The quietest mood rides the thrust of spectacular molecular activity.

You forget many of your quite natural inclinations, feelings, and inner fantasies as you mature into adults, because they do not fit into the picture of the kind of people, or experience, or species you have been taught to believe you are. As a result, many of the events of your lives that are the natural extensions of those feelings appear alien , against your deepest wishes, or thrust upon you, either by outside agencies or by a mischievous subconscious.

The thoughts of children give excellent clues as to mankind's nature, but many adults do not remember any childhood thoughts except those that fit, or seem to fit, in with their beliefs about childhood.

Children play at getting killed. They try to imagine what death is  like. They imagine what it would be like to fall from a wall like Humpty-Dumpty, or to break their necks. They imagine tragic roles with as much creative abandon as they imagine roles of which adults might approve. They are often quite aware of "willing" themselves sick to get out of difficult situations—and of willing themselves well again.

They quickly learn to forget their parts in such episodes, so that later, when as adults they find themselves ill they not only forget that they caused the illness to begin with, but unfortunately they forget how to will themselves well again.

As I said, there are all ranges of suffering, and I am beginning this discussion, which I will continue now and then in between regular book dictation, in a very general manner. In times past in particular, though the custom is not dead, men purged themselves, wore ashes and beat themselves with chains, or went hungry or otherwise deprived themselves. They suffered, in other words, for religion's sake. It was not just that they believed suffering was good for  the soul—a statement which can or cannot be true, incidentally, and I will go into that later—but they understood something else: The body will only take so much suffering when it releases consciousness. So they hoped to achieve religious ecstasy.

Religious ecstasy does not need physical suffering as a stimulus, and such a means in the overall will work against religious understanding. Those episodes, however, represent one of the ways in which man can actively seek suffering as a means to another end, and it is beside the point to say that such activity is not natural, since it exists within nature's framework.

Discipline is a form of applied suffering, as discipline  is usually used. People are not taught to understand the great dimensions of their own capacity for experience. It is natural for a child to be curious about suffering, to want to know what it is, to see it—and by doing so he or she learns to avoid the suffering he does not want, to help others avoid suffering that they do not want, and to understand, more importantly, the gradations of emotion and sensation that are his  heritage. [As an adult] he will not inflict pain upon others if he understands this, for he will allow himself to feel the validity of his own emotions.

If you deny yourself the direct experience of your own emotions, but muffle them, say, through too-strict discipline, then you can hurt others much more easily, for you project your deadened emotional state upon them—as in the Nazi war camps men followed orders, torturing other people—and you do that first of all by deadening your own sensitivity to pain, and by repressing your emotions.

Man's vulnerability to pain helps him sympathize with others, and therefore helps him to more actively alleviate whatever unnecessary causes of pain exist in society.

I have but one more point to make: Each  person's experience of a painful nature is also registered on the part of what we will call the world's mind. Each, say, failure, or disappointment, or unresolved problem that results in suffering, becomes a part of the world's experience: This way or that way does not work, or this way or that way has been tried, with poor results. So in that way even weaknesses or failures of suffering are resolved, or rather redeemed as adjustments are made in the light of those data.

In that regard, each person lives his or her life privately, and yet for  all of humanity. Each person tries out new challenges, new circumstances, new achievements from a unique viewpoint, for himself or herself, and for the entire mass of humanity as well.

自讨苦吃为哪般？