Bliss and Pain
A deeply spiritual person, meaning a person ruled more by
the eternal part of them than their body, has learned to feel bliss or joy
simultaneously with pain, sometimes in tremendous amounts. They understand the
temporary dual nature of their condition – an eternal part clothed in a
temporary part – and they live from that paradigm. They feel pain the same as
the rest of us, they just don’t suffer because of it. This is because they have
trained themselves to not create a “poor me” story around pain. They know the
eternal “me” does NOT suffer; only the body/mind suffers when a story creates emotion around a painful event or circumstance. This is the lesson
of the great teachers over time. Jesus said that when we are fasting we should
not appear to others that we are fasting. This wise counsel disables our
flighty egos in two ways. First, it disallows ego to feed off others' opinions
of us. Others don’t see the “pain of the fast” on our faces so they can’t say
how wonderful we are for doing it. Secondly, it discourages a story behind our
fast because it is less satisfying to the ego to create one around it when there is no one
else to support it. Victor Frankl learned this lesson in a
brutal concentration camp. The Buddha knew it, as did the self-immolated
Buddhist monks protesting the Vietnam War. Every mystic, sage and shaman the world over
has known it as well. The lesson is this: “Pain
is inevitable. Suffering is optional.”
-- Eric Marley
April 2015
No comments:
Post a Comment