The standard view of suffering is that, well, it’s bad and that anyone who knows that it’s bad would want it to end. The Dalai Lama puts the standard view well when he states, “Nobody wants to suffer, and everyone wants to be happy.”

The lila view of suffering, as I’ll call it here, turns the standard view on its head. It states that someone may not want to be done with suffering because he enjoys the part he plays in the role called–for example–“the tormented soul.” (Didn’t Blanche DuBois delight in playing the part of the melodramatically-rendered helpless one?)

While someone may not enjoy the actual suffering he experiences in a particular situation (your aunt doesn’t literally enjoy that about which she complains), she may verily delight in playing the role of the jilted, disgruntled, put-upon one. Wow, what fun!

I think such a view helps to account for why people, who say that they are suffering and, indeed, who even say that they wish to be free of it, rarely seek to go beyond it. Take the analogy with a great actor: a great actor loves to play a complex role; he may not love the character’s particular vices or propensities, but he delights in the challenge of playing such a part. His delight is of a second order, not of a first order. 

According to the lila view of suffering, first-order suffering may be placed in the context of a second-order sticky misidentification with the role of the one who is suffering such that the delight in the role or part is what matters–and so not the attempt to go, or keen interest in going beyond one’s dukkha.

I think this view is right. Francis Lucille, a contemporary teaching of Advaita Vedanta, has said: “The separate self delights in the sense of separation.” And that delight, fascination, or captivation with that part seems to veil the interest or longing to discover what one really is.

Until, indeed, all parts become stale and old, crusty and dull; until all the fun, when properly understood, is slowly drained away. Then the longing for Liberation (moksha) comes on the scene, and the keen interest in the nature of the Self blooms in all its glory.