Ram Dass, near the end of his life, asks the question that undoes the whole difficulty.
“In a way, there is a process in which suffering requires you to die into it, or to give up your image of yourself. When you say, ‘I can’t bear it’ — who is that?”
— Ram Dass, on suffering as grace
When you say, ‘I can’t bear it’ — who is that?
This is the shortest reading of the course, and the one the other four were for. Ram Dass spent his last years, after a stroke, teaching that suffering was not the obstacle to awakening but, for most people, the door. The line is easy to misread as either cruelty or spiritual bypassing. It is neither. He is not saying the unbearable thing is bearable. He is asking, very gently, who exactly is reporting that it is not.
And that is the second course, returned. I can’t bear it. Who is that? It is the self the second course could not locate, speaking up in the one moment it is most convincing. Ram Dass does not tell it to stop. He asks it its name. Read this last, with the Beatitudes and the grain of wheat and Kali still in the room, and notice that the arithmetic was never subtract yourself. It was find out who is doing the sums.
The next time today you say “I can’t,” ask, quietly, who is that.
Five readings on the one sum every tradition arrives at. It is not a happy course and it was not written to be. But notice what it did not say. It did not say you are nothing. It did not say suffering is good. It said that the self which reports the loss is the same self that the second course could not find, and that when it is asked its name, something in the difficulty shifts.
The next course is about what happens after that shift, the moment the wall you did not know was a wall thins out and you see through it. It is one of the first courses written, when this site was small, and it belongs here, after the arithmetic, because that is where it happens.