September 14, 2012
Do We Really Learn from Suffering?
As Andrew begins his tour of India today (September 14th – 23rd), check out the third installment of his recent interview with Speaking Tree, one of India’s largest spiritual publications:
Question: Without darkness, we cannot appreciate light. So do you think we need some negativity in our lives so we can enjoy positivity?
Answer: I sure hope not! It’s often said that people learn from suffering, which is the experience of fear, pain, anxiety, and confusion. After teaching for over 26 years and meeting thousands of people from all over the world, I don’t think that this is actually true.
Some people do learn a lot about the meaning of life as a result of intense suffering, but most don’t. As a matter of fact, very few people actually learn anything all that profound from the experience of being human. Only those individuals who are really paying attention, only those who deeply want to know what it means to exist, will learn from their experience.
It is only when we get to that point in our own journeys where we realize we’ve been sleep walking most of our lives that we will start to pay much deeper attention. And it will then be obvious to us that if we do pay attention, we’ll be constantly learning from all of our experience, not just from moments of darkness and depression.
You can follow Andrew’s journey to India, September 14th-23rd, by clicking here to see his full schedule.
Image: © hikrcn – Fotolia.com
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Andrew Cohen is a spiritual teacher, cultural visionary, founder of EnlightenNext, and the author of 
Your words about how most people usually don’t learn from suffering is proof, to me, that true Love is all that is real. The rest is, to me, like a strange kind of adventure that humans take – away from the Heart of God
and those adventures are meaningless, for the heart of God is at the crux of
all that matters most in this world.
Yes, but in my own experience, suffering is definitely a wake up call for the awareness you’re talking about. It’s easy to be caught in complacency when things are going along comfortably. When that reality gets shattered, often by “undesirable” (to the ego, anyway) occurences, then awareness is often the outcome. That is, suffering can be a definite catalyst for greater awareness, me thinks.