何苦受苦?——赛斯谈“受苦”（之一）

数世纪以来，罗马天主教会的结构将西方文明维系在一起，并赋予其意义和准则。那些意义和准则流经整个社会，并成为所有知识、商业、医学、科学等既定模式的基础。

教会对实相的看法是公认的。有个事实我再怎么强调都不为过：那个时代的信念构建了人类个体的生活，以至于个人生活最私密的事件都被如此这般地诠释，当然国家大事、动植物现象也是一样。世界的观点是由教会指定的一种宗教观，教会的话同时也是真理和事实。

疾病被默默忍受，它是上帝赐予以净化灵魂、洁净身体、惩罚罪人的，或者仅仅为了教人安分守己，不犯骄傲之罪。那么，上帝赐予的苦难被认为是一个生命事实，也是一个宗教真理。

其它一些文明则相信，疾病是由恶魔或邪灵派来的，世界充满了善灵和邪灵，它们无影无形，与自然本身的元素混合在一起，而人类必须小心行事，以免冒犯那些较危险或爱捣乱的存有。在人类历史上有各种各样的咒文，旨在安抚人类相信在事实上以及宗教真理中切实存在的邪灵。

看着那些信念结构耸耸肩膀，讶异于人类对实相的扭曲观点，那是很容易的。然而，对疾病的整个科学观也几乎一样的扭曲。它是同样费力地酝酿出来，并且“鬼话”连篇的。其确凿性几乎与上帝以疾病为惩罚，或疾病是捣乱的恶魔赠予的不受欢迎的礼物这两个“事实”没什么两样。

中世纪的教士能画出人体各部位的图示，用来说明沉溺于哪些罪会得哪些病。逻辑的头脑一度觉得那些图示颇令人信服，而身体某些部位罹患某些疾病的病人，会承认犯过所涉及的种种罪。那整个的信念结构在其内部是合理的。由于父亲的罪，一个人可能天生畸形或多病。

现在，科学的架构，说穿了也一样的无知，虽然在那架构内，事实似乎往往也证明了自己。比如说病毒的存在。你们的信念变成了不证自明的实相，而在讨论人类的痛苦时，不可能不把这一点考虑在内。理念是代代相传的——而这些理念是你们所有实相的载体，包括其中的喜悦和痛苦。可是，科学根本就是个很差劲的治疗者。教会的概念至少赋予了苦难一种高贵：苦难的确来自上帝——或许是份不受欢迎的礼物——但毕竟是由一位坚定的父亲，为了孩子自身的好处而给予的惩罚。

当然，科学将事实与宗教真理分开了。在一个偶然形成的宇宙里，适者生存成为良好行为的主要法则，疾病变成了一种针对物种本身的犯罪。疾病意味着你不适合，由此带来了种种以前没有认真问过的问题。例如，那些“基因较差”的人有没有权利生育？

疾病被认为像暴风雨一样袭来，是个人几乎无法反抗的客观力量的结果。弗洛伊德关于令人讨厌的无意识之“新”观念更导致了新的困境，因为当时——现在也一样——人们普遍相信，作为婴儿期经验的结果，潜意识或无意识很可能会破坏有意识人格的最佳利益，将之诱骗到疾病和灾难里。

在某种意义上，这概念以心理的魔鬼取代了形而上的魔鬼。如果生命本身被科学视为没有真正的意义，那么当然，受苦也必然被视为是无意义的。就一个人的出生、人生际遇及死亡而言，个体变成了偶然性的受害者。疾病变成了与“个人存在的看似无意义性”最直接的遭遇。

你通过思想影响身体的结构。如果你相信遗传，遗传本身就会变成你生命中一个强烈的暗示因素，并在体内促发你相信一直都在那儿的明确疾病。直到最后，你们的科学仪器揭示了那“出了错的机制”或不论什么，就有了所有人都能看见的证据。

显然有些状况用你们的话说是遗传的，它们几乎在出生后就立即表现出来了，但与你们相信是遗传性的疾病——许多癌症、心脏问题、关节炎或类风湿性疾病相比，其数量是非常有限的。而许多遗传性疾病的情况，通过应用我们有一天肯定会谈到的其它精神性方法，可以得到改善。

痛苦有许多种，正如喜悦有许多种一样，而我无法给你一个简单的答案。作为人类这种生物，你接受生命的条件，再从这些条件里创造你的生活经验。你出生在信念的系统里，就像你出生在实质的世纪里一样，你本就有以种种方式去诠释生活经验的自由。痛苦的意义、性质、高贵或耻辱，将按照你的信念系统来诠释。我希望一边讲，一边展现一幅实相的图景，把痛苦置于适当的视角中。但这是最难涵盖的一个主题，因为它最深刻地触及了你们对自己、对人类的希望，也触及了你们对自己、对人类的恐惧。

"Earth is a nice place, but I wouldn't want to live there." A twist on an old quote, I believe?but the fact is, you are physical creatures because you do like to live on earth, you do like the conditions, you do enjoy overall the particular kind of challenge and the particular kind of perception, knowledge and understanding that the earthly environment provides. That environment, in your terms, certainly includes suffering. If joy has always been one of the characteristics of earth experience, so has suffering, and the subject will be covered in this book. 

For many centuries the structure of the Roman Catholic church held Western civilization together, and gave it its meanings and its precepts. Those meanings and precepts flowed through the entire society, and served as the basis for all of the established modes of knowledge, commerce, medicine, science, and so forth.

The church's view of reality was the accepted one. I cannot stress too  thoroughly the fact that the beliefs of those times structured individual  human living, so that the most private events of personal lives were  interpreted to mean thus and so, as were of course the events of nations,  plants, and animals. The world's view was a religious one, specified by  the church, and its word was truth and fact at the same time.

Illness was suffered, was sent by God to purge the soul, to cleanse  the body, to punish the sinner, or simply to teach man his place by  keeping him from the sins of pride. Suffering sent by God was  considered a fact of life, then, and a religious truth as well.

Some other civilizations have believed that illness was sent by demons or evil spirits, and that the world was full of  good and bad spirits, invisible, intermixed with the elements of nature  itself, and that man had to walk a careful line lest he upset the more  dangerous or mischievous of those entities. In man's history there have  been all kinds of incantations, meant to mollify the evil spirits that man  believed were real in fact and in religious truth.

It is easy enough to look at those belief structures and shrug your  shoulders, wondering at man's distorted views of reality. The entire scientific view of illness, however, is quite as distorted. It is as laboriously conceived and inter-wound with  "nonsense." It is about as factual as the "fact" that God sends illness as punishment, or that illness is the unwanted gift of mischievous demons.

Churchmen of the Middle Ages could draw diagrams of  various portions of the human body that were afflicted as the result of  indulging in particular sins. Logical minds at one time found those  diagrams quite convincing, and patients with certain afflictions in  certain areas of the body would confess to having committed the  various sins that were involved. The entire structure of beliefs made  sense within itself. A man might be born deformed or sickly because of  the sins of his father.

The scientific framework is basically, now, just as senseless, though within it the facts often seem to prove themselves out, also. There are viruses, for example. Your beliefs become self-evident realities. It would be impossible to discuss human suffering without taking that into consideration. Ideas are transmitted from generation to generation?and those ideas are the carriers of all of your reality, its joys and its agonies. Science, however, is all in all a poor  healer. The church's concepts at least gave suffering a kind of dignity: It  did (underlined) come from God?an unwelcome gift, perhaps?but  after all it was punishment handed out from a firm father for a child's  own good.

Science disconnected fact from religious truth, of course. In a universe formed by chance, with the survival of the fittest as the main rule of good behavior, illness became a kind of crime against a species itself. It meant you were unfit, and hence brought about all kinds of questions not seriously asked before. Did those "genetically inferior," for example, have the right to reproduce?

Illness was thought to come like a storm, the result of physical forces against which the individual had little recourse. The "new" Freudian ideas of the unsavory unconscious led further to a new dilemma, for it was then as it is now widely believed that as the result of experiences in infancy the subconscious, or unconscious, might very well sabotage the best interests of the conscious personality,  and trick it into illness and disaster.

In a way, that concept puts a psychological devil in place of the metaphysical one. If life itself is seen scientifically as having no real meaning, then suffering, of course, must also be seen as meaningless. The individual becomes a victim of chance insofar as his birth, the events of his life, and his death are concerned. Illness becomes his most direct encounter with the seeming meaninglessness of personal existence.

You affect the structure of your body through your thoughts. If you believe in heredity, heredity itself becomes a strong suggestive factor in your life, and can help bring about the precise malady in the body that you believed was there all along, until finally your scientific  instruments uncover the "faulty mechanism," or whatever, and there is  the evidence for all to see.

There are obviously some conditions that in your  terms are inherited, showing themselves almost instantly after birth, but  these are of a very limited number in proportion to those diseases you  believe are hereditary?many cancers, heart problems, arthritic or  rheumatoid disorders. And in many cases of inherited difficulties,  changes could be effected for the better, through the utilization of other  mental methods that we will certainly get to someday.

There are as many kinds of suffering as there are kinds of joy, and there is no one simple answer that can be given. As human creatures you accept the conditions of life. You create from those conditions the experiences of your days. You are born into belief systems as you are born into physical centuries, and part of the entire picture is the  freedom of interpreting the experiences of life in multitudinous  fashions. The meaning, nature, dignity or shame of  suffering will be interpreted according to your systems of belief. I hope  to give you along the way a picture of reality that puts suffering in its  proper perspective, but it is a most difficult subject to cover because it  touches most deeply upon your hopes for yourselves and for mankind,  and your fears for yourselves and for mankind.

——摘译自《梦、进化与价值完成》

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