The Deeper Pattern Beneath Human Suffering
By Dr. Scott Zarcinas | Author, Doctor, Spiritual Guide
In this article:
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Why human suffering persists despite progress in science, medicine, and technology
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How forgetfulness of our natural state creates individual and collective suffering
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The role of misidentification and interference in shaping human behaviour
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Why suffering often continues through denial, attachment, or identity
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What quietly changes when clarity returns and interference begins to loosen
Forgetting Our Natural State of Being
Human history carries a long record of pain.
Despite extraordinary advances in medicine, science, and technology, suffering remains woven into everyday life. Disease has been treated, machines perfected, systems optimised — yet anxiety, conflict, exploitation, and despair persist.
We have learned how to extend life, but not how to rest within it. We have learned how to build faster, stronger, smarter — but not how to live more wisely.
Around the world, hunger and displacement continue. Violence repeats itself across generations. Women are harmed. Children die from causes long since understood and preventable. Mental distress has become widespread, addiction commonplace, and loneliness quietly endemic.
At the same time, the planet itself bears the cost of our restlessness. Forests thin. Oceans empty. Resources are consumed faster than they can renew.
From the outside, it can appear as though humanity has failed, as though this is simply the best we can do.
But that conclusion rests on a misunderstanding.
What we are witnessing is not a failure of intelligence, effort, or compassion. It is a failure of orientation.
The Underlying Interference
The deeper pattern beneath human suffering is not malice or incompetence. It is forgetfulness.
Not forgetfulness of information or knowledge, but forgetfulness of being.
When individuals and cultures lose touch with their natural state — their inherent wholeness, worth, and inner stability — behaviour becomes compensatory. We seek externally what has been obscured internally. Power replaces presence. Control replaces trust. Identity collapses into roles, wounds, and narratives.
From this misalignment, suffering proliferates — not because people are bad, but because they are disconnected from what steadies them.
This forgetfulness expresses itself in many forms:
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denial of inner distress
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attachment to victim identities
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resistance to change
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fear of releasing familiar pain
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clinging to suffering as a sense of self
Pain becomes familiar. Identity forms around it. Letting go feels like loss.
Why Suffering Persists
One of the most subtle ways suffering persists is through denial. Not denial of facts, but denial of inner weight.
People often minimise their own distress by comparison:
• “Others have it worse.”
• “There’s nothing really wrong with me.”
• “I should just cope.”
But suffering does not disappear when it is ignored. It simply becomes quieter and heavier.
Acknowledging inner weight is not weakness. It is clarity.
Yet even when suffering is recognised, release can feel threatening. For some, pain has become structure. For others, it has become meaning. For many, it has become identity.
When suffering is tightly bound to who someone believes they are, relief can feel like erasure rather than freedom.
And erasure feels like death.
What Actually Changes Things
Human suffering does not resolve through force, pressure, or moral insistence.
It resolves when interference loosens.
When attention turns inward — not to fix, but to notice — something begins to soften. When false identities are seen clearly, they lose their grip. When effort relaxes, deeper intelligence re-emerges.
This isn’t willpower in the conventional sense. It’s willingness to see.
Compassion, in this light, is not an action but a recognition. Loving-kindness is not something imposed; it arises naturally when interference recedes.
The moment identity returns to its source, behaviour reorganises on its own.
The Quiet Hope
There is a path out of collective suffering, but it does not begin with fixing the world.
It begins with remembering what has never been lost.
As individuals return to their natural state — whole, grounded, unfragmented — the weight they were carrying releases. From that release, clarity follows. From clarity, different choices emerge. From different choices, different systems gradually form.
This is not dramatic. It is not fast. And it does not look heroic.
But it is real.
Humanity does not need to become something new. It needs to stop carrying what does not belong.
When that happens — individually, repeatedly, en masse — the world begins to change not by force, but by coherence.
And that has always been our only way through.
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