Do share your suffering, but only with the right person || Acharya Prashant, with DU (2023)

Question (Q): Hello Sir, my question is about the sharing of pain and suffering. I have been listening to Osho recently, where he propagated that we should not share our pain and suffering to others, since the world is already full of pain and suffering. So, he advises that we should keep our pain and suffering to ourselves. But, the mental health experts advises us to never keep our grief to ourselves, and in fact seek help of the experts. So, I want to know what is your opinion on this?

Acharya Prashant(AP): Suffering is a fact of life. Speak about it to someone who can help you overcome it. If you express your condition randomly at unwisely chosen places, your condition will only aggravate. You cannot hide your disease, at the same time it is pointless to keep talking of your disease to random unqualified people. Find out a doctor, display and discuss your disease.

There can be no absolute answer on this. Should one never display his suffering? If you would never display your suffering, how would you possibly get rid of it? Should I always keep singing of, rather crying of my suffering? What's the point in that? How does that help you?

Q: Sir, Osho said that if you are sharing your grief with others, you are equivalent to beggars who in order to gain some money, show their cripple-ness to other people. So, if someone is showing his grief and suffering to others, isn't he in a way doing the same thing?

AP: If one person is displaying his crippled state to another person, is it always that the relationship between the two will be of the beggar and the master? Think of it. You find a crippled person or a troubled person displaying his body or his troubles to some other person, now can you say with 100% surety that one of them is a beggar and the other a master or someone? Could not the relationship between them be of the patient and the doctor?

Q: Yes it can be.

AP: So obviously, tom-tomming your suffering to gain attention or sympathy is quite pathetic—you are trying to sell your wretched condition to gain some benefits; nobody can endorse that. Equally, are you qualified to be your own doctor? If you will keep your disease to yourself, will it get healed on its own? So, it's not a question of should I talk about it to others or not. The real question should be, to whom should I talk about my suffering? That's the question of vivek or discretion.

Talk about your suffering only to the right person, and talk about it only with the right intention. The right intention is not to get mileage out of your crippled condition; the right intention is to talk about your condition so that you may get rid of your condition. Though, what we love is a shoulder to cry on. Nobody would please you as much as somebody who is available to commiserate with you. “Oh! I am a victim, the entire universe has been torturing me.” And then you find one man you can expose your dirty soul to, and that one man will become your god.

Without realising that first of all you have been living in lies—suffering itself is a lie, you have been living in lies; you have been very shrewdly cultivating an internal narrative of victimhood. The fact is you have been an exploiter. By no stretch of imagination can you be called a victim, you are a de facto exploiter. Think of it. But you want to maintain the narrative of the poor victim. Who will tell you all these things if you don't talk about your suffering to anybody?

Even if you keep your suffering to yourself, one thing is certain—you believe that your suffering is real, right? You might not have told about it to some other person, but there is one person you have spoken about it to. Which person? Yourself. To yourself you have been speaking about your suffering, right? And the assumption has been that the suffering is legit; the suffering is real. So, don't talk about your suffering to anybody, keep it to your own chest and keep believing that your suffering is real. Is that a desired condition? “Oh! I don't talk about my pain to anybody, but I keep it here (chest)—in the locker, safe as a diamond.” It's trash that you are keeping to yourself. But because you are keeping it to yourself, there would be nobody to tell you that you have stored trash in your chest.

So, talking about it is important, and talking about it only to the right person is important. Gossiping about your cultivated suffering is not the way out. If you are not to tell about your suffering to anybody, what did people come to Osho for?

Q: Yes Sir, that is exactly what was my point. Thank you so much Sir for the answer.

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